Bad Alice

Falling Backward

2011-09-28T20:45:00.000-05:00

Please stop me. I have grandiose ideas of decking out the house for autumn – gourds,pumpkins, wheat, corn, maybe a festive wreath of colorful foliage. This is what happenswhen I consume too much Martha Stewart, Real Simple and Better Homes & Gardens.I imagine cute little tin buckets wrapped with burlap ribbon and filled with gold andburgundy flowers. The reality is a faded, rumpled plaid tablecloth decorated with a fewdrips of candle wax. Little pumpkins and other such decorative items end up sprawledover the surface and buried under mail and the paper detritus the girls shed daily.

I love autumn, though. I have fond memories of childhood autumns, which is kind of oddbecause in South Georgia autumn isn’t a very colorful season. Leaves go brown and falloff – none of the lovely reds, yellows and oranges you see further north. But autumn waswhen school began (and end to the incredibly hot, oppressive, boring summer), and thestate fair brought its diesel-soaked excitement to town, and Halloween – well what kiddoesn’t like Halloween?Autumn here is so much prettier.

In previous years we made a few attempts at someregional activities. Apple picking was something of a bust. Turns out that you can’t justpick apples; you have to pay an entry fee to the orchard, which is a-bustlin with cloggers,food vendors, petting zoos, “museums” (some rusty farm implements in a ramshackleold building), kiddie events, and very long lines to the one restroom. My kids declaredthe curly fried potatoes a success but weren’t much interested in the actual apple pickingprocess. Another year we went to a corn maze. That was my bright idea. Since when didhayrides mean perching uncomfortably on some bales behind a noisy tractor, breathingin diesel fumes? Although we had a map, we had some problems navigating the maze.Firecracker gave out and had to be carried, and Dear Husband started wheezing. Naturedoes that to him.

Fall is also the time when every school and church has some sort of festival. I inevitablyforget when they are. There are also school fundraisers, which is why I’m getting thoseissues of Martha Stewart. You know, I found a recipe in one of them for blueberry icepops that – I kid you not – called for you to steep white pine needles in hot water. PINENEEDLES, folks. That lady is sick.

Anyway, I now know the true joy of the season – the fall television premiers.

Caching Out

2011-09-12T21:01:00.000-05:00

This weekend we decided to try something new. I blame the wine from the night before. Dear Husband and I had heard about this cool international venture called "geocaching," and it sounded so much like a big Easter egg hunt that we had to try it. I should mention right here that no jelly beans are involved, which sort of makes it not as good as an Easter egg hunt to me.

Anyway, if you have never heard of geocaching, here's what happens. Someone puts a log bog and some doohickies in a cannister or lockbox or box disguised as a log and hides it. They record the coordinates and post the location on this big bulletin board at geocaching.com, with a few hints. Then people go looking for it, navigating with a GP, and if they find it they put their name in the log book, trade something in the box for something they have, and put the cache back the way they found it for future geocachers. See, it's a sort of international scavenger hunt.

So we thought, "Wow, this is neat! What a great family activity!"

The first cache was at a pharmacy right around the corner from us. All the comments mentioned what an easy find it was - a park and grab - perfect for a first time. Well, we wandered around the parking lot for an hour poking at the grass verges, peeking through the fence, trying to avoid looking like miscreants. Firecracker and I bought candy. It went like this for several more caches. We spent a long time staring in disbelief at a lamp post in front of a church. By the fourth stop DramaQueen had written up a sign and stuck it to the window - "I hate geocaching." We persevered and finally found a tupperware box near a bookstore. Rather DramaQueen fell upon it with a crow of triumph. By that time we didn't really care who saw us. If people wondered why we were dragging a plastic box out from under the shrubbery, they refrained from asking.

I gather that geocaching is particularly popular along hiking paths and such, part of getting out in nature and so forth. Given that the girls think nature should be thoroughly washed and everything "icky" removed from it, I'm not sure they will go for that. They might do it if they could wear gloves and a hazmat suit. I myself felt a bit woozy when I turned over a piece of wood and ants pured out across the grass.

I wonder if anyone has ever found a corpse doing this? I'm waiting for geocaching to turn up on CSI. If it hasn't already.

See that little red line peeking out? Yeah, well we didn't see anything like that.

I went couponing and all I got was this lousy bottle of Old Spice

2011-08-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

Have you ever read an article or seen a news broadcast on women who do extreme couponing - you know, the ones who take $300 worth of groceries through the checkout and it ends up costing only $3? I realize that for some people coupons are the only way they make ends meet, but I have a fantasy about the uber couponer. She files her coupons by category and expiration date, buys multiple copies of the newspaper for the coupon inserts, always matches manufacturer coupons with store coupons and sales, and often buys additional coupons off eBay or similar sites. She spends any number of hours a week working on her coupons; meanwhile she is homeschooling her kids, growing an organic garden with ladybugs to control pests, upcyling castoffs into ingenious crafts, refinishing that $2 chest of drawers she found at a garage sale, sewing curtains, scrapbooking, running a profitable blog, and cleaning and decluttering her house by zone while still maintaining a stock of gallon milk jugs and empty shoe boxes for craft projects.

My first thought when seeing these jubilant women waltzing out of the grocery store paying no more than I would for a cup of coffee is that they cannot possibly be buying produce. How often do you see coupons and deep discounts for produce? They must have a cart full of tater tots, Velveeta and canned green beans. But then I think, of course they aren’t buying produce; they have an organic garden. They’re digging up potatoes from their garden, canning tomatoes and crock potting their way to financial victory.

Thing is, I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. But I’m lucky to get out of a grocery store paying less than $165 a week, WITH coupons. Gluten free products cost a fortune rarely mitigated by coupon offers ($6 for 4 bagels or a small loaf of bread; up to $9 for a packaged mix). I recently put together the items for a flour blend, a not particularly complex one, and I believe the ingredients totaled around $25. I imagine in weight it was nowhere near equal to a 5lb bag of regular flour. And that was economical, because I was making the blend myself instead of buying a mix. No wonder some GF folks grind their own grains. I’m surprised they don’t have a rice paddy in their backyard.

Anyway, we keep our consumption of prepared gluten free stuff to a minimum, but there is still the expensive assortment of in-season fruit and veg, the free-range chicken and grass fed beef (I mean, have you seen what happens on Food Inc? the regular meats are incubators for salmonella and e-coli). And then we get to the sticking point - I so rarely see coupons for any product that I use. Most of the coupons are for foods I can’t or wouldn't eat (Sunny-D? Seriously? I might as well give them soda). And my word, the number of coupons for toothpaste, air freshener and makeup just astounds me. I go to various couponing sites, and they just make me tired. I’m particularly flummoxed by Walgreens;, which requires an elaborate system of purchases in order to get register coupons (I've seen sites that go through this in detail). It’s so complex that I've never even bothered to try it. And there’s nothing more dangerous than the Kroger “But 10 and get $5 off.” You will go insane tracking the stupid items, trying to make sure that your group of 10 has more lower-priced items than higher priced items, but not getting more than the 10, because then you’re just a pawn in their game, but you won’t be taken in, oh no, you will beat this! You will emerge waving your $5 gift card in victory! Cue maniacal laughter.

And I will still end up paying at least $165 worth of groceries.

I'm Back and Better than Ever

2011-08-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

Oh, hello there! It’s been a while. Hope all is well. Things are great here – I just haven’t shored up enough time in one place to actually pin something to the wall here. I started a long, rambling account of our excellent trip to Los Angeles, but the post was getting overstuffed, like a bit unwieldy sofa, so I stopped, and then I got sidetracked.

Here’s the summary: Great weather. The girls went to the circus and Firecracker got a stuffed elephant she named Julia.

DramaQueen and Firecracker at the circus with Popop

And they got to see two of their uncles.

The ride up to this point was harrowing.

That's the girls with Uncle J as close as you can get to the Hollywood sign. J drove us up in his Bronco. The passenger door didn't open from the outside, and I almost dislocated my back getting in and out. I felt about 80. Which is how old the road was, judging from its condition. You'd think with millionaires living in the Hollywood Hills that the roads wouldn't look like rural Alabama circa 1932.

Uncle D, who's pretty much still a kid himself.

I saw my BFF from college, who is going backward in age instead of forward, like Benjamin Button. He has lots of fun stories about the celebrities he meets, none of which I dare repeat. He's a writer, and we eagerly awaiting seeing one of his works hit the screen someday, at which point we'll hit him up for drinks. DramaQueen was a tad disappointed that he hasn't met Selena Gomez. Steve likes to use his friends' names for characters in his screenplays. I was rather touched to find my name attached to a transvestite.


My awesome friend Steve and Dear Husband. In a parking garage. We're classy like that.

Went toUniversal Studios, where I managed to feel ill on the damn trolley tour. I hate projected movement. And giant 3-D apes. I was happy to spend time with Firecracker in the Curious George Water Playground and nurse my incipient nausea while DramaQueen and Dear Husband dealt with the Simpsons Ride.

Visited the La Brea tarpits.

Here is where the pictures of the La Brea tarpits are supposed to go, but I can't find them. Imagine glistening pits of sticky black liquid. Then imagine the paleontologists having to dig around in it. The area smells like a newly paved road.

Saw the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA (DramaQueen insisted), which did not smell at all.

This was the photo op spot. No pictures inside.

The exhibit was awesome. Uncle D and Uncle J were also there, and Uncle D and Firecracker went to the kids' area and painted. Since I had somehow once again managed to get glutined (Baja Fresh - I blame you), I spent a lot of time monitoring my position in relation to the bathrooms and trying not to look as if someone had just stabbed me in the stomach.

Went sailing, which I thought would terrify me but which I enjoyed oh so much. We saw sea lions sunning on a buoy and dolphins doing their dolphin thing. We had a captain from Munich who let Dear Husband help steer. I took Dramamine ahead of time, because of the glutined within and inch of my life thing (I somehow got glutined three times during a week-long vacation, and the effects linger for a very long time) and stayed out of the hold, which seems to move a lot more than it needs to.

Dear Husband and Firecracker set course.

DramaQueen takes her turn.

This was our captain. He's German and although he told us his name several times I never was clear about it.

And now, well school has started, and it has been very exciting. This is DramaQueen’s first year in middle school, with the novelty of a locker and changing classes. Firecracker is in fourth grade, and she is not at all happy about the amount of homework she has, since it seriously cuts into her time at Webkinz World. The start of a new school year always smells like hope and endless possibility to me. There’s always the chance that I’ll finally put 12 years’ worth of photos in albums this year, keep the laundry off the sofa, and remember to put air in my tires.

And what have y'all been doing?

Perturbation

2011-06-30T17:42:00.000-05:00

I am experiencing waves of anxiety, the kind that make me dither over every decision, however small. Everything seems to take such monumental effort, and my will is weak and whiney. I can't even stand to hear myself think.

I want to sink my claws into everyone I love and make sure we all stay safe. There’s too much illness and uncertainty. Someone very dear at my workplace has advanced cancer. Dear Husband has some mysterious digestive ailment and the testing for that is before us. Blood work apparently revealed significant inflammation, and startling words such as “Crohn’s Disease” have been mentioned. More blood work and an endoscopy next week. Meanwhile everything he eats seems to hurt him. And what can I do about it? Damn all.

I myself wish I could just give up eating altogether. I’m taking acid blockers, but I still often feel queasy. And for some reason, despite the fact that I’ve found gluten free bread that pretty much tastes like bread, it disturbs me. I can never finish it. It makes me think of trying to eat mushrooms. I can, sort of, if they are in a stew or over steak, but I can’t shake the knowledge that they are fungus. That’s so gross. Why would I want to eat fungus? And somehow this gluten free bread evokes the same hesitation. It’s ersatz bread. I KNOW what it truly is. I feel like I took the red pill and I can never unknow its true properties.

Firecracker is, well, Firecracker. Everything goes well and then something strange comes out of left field, like her extreme reaction to ant and mosquito bites. I feel like I need to wrap her up just to get to the car. And by extreme, well you should have seen the enormous blisters the ants created. She looked like she had bubonic plague. Tomorrow it’s a trip to the orthodontist. That’s sounds so minor, just the usual stuff kids go through. Except everything the orthodontist says makes my stomach knot. Her palate is too small, so she will have to have an expander, which basically forces the soft bone apart (ye gads, it sounds so awful), but it needs to be done quite soon to avoid an overbite. Her teeth are all over the place. She almost looks like she has two rows, that's how crowded they are. She also has gum hyperplasia (too much gum tissue), probably from years of seizure meds, so the orthodontist tells us she will need periodontal surgery to remove some of the excess tissue. Yep, there's that knot tightening. Firecracker does not deal well with pain and discomfort. She used to, but I think she depleted all her reserves. Now needles provoke temper tantrums and crying jags, and she focuses on every scrape and cut, examining it every few minutes, asking the same questions over and over about why and when and how it will get better.

DramaQueen is, as always, healthy, thank you God, but she has my eyes, poor girl. She has to have a physical soon and the thought of having blood drawn panics her. Seems when I was a kid I was getting shots all the time, and I don't even remember the first time I had blood drawn. It just was what it was, a moment of ouch and over. Somehow DramaQueen is all, well, dramatic about it.

I have more doctor appointments I need to schedule, the endless rounds of keeping on top of my health issues. I feel like a ticking time bomb. Somewhere a rogue cell is waiting. I feel old. I don’t get enough sleep. I don’t get ~~enough~~ any exercise. Mortality is giving me the beady eye. And all I want to do is lie down.

The Monday Report - Angels and Insects Edition

2011-06-27T19:07:00.000-05:00

If I don't come up with some sort of weekly feature, I'll never write on this blog with any regularity. I'm all over the place in my subject matter. I'm all over the place generally. So I've decided to bounce in on Monday with a report of all the interesting and important stuff I do over the weekend.

Here's the weekend recap.

Buckets of rain with lots of thunder and lightening - very thrilling. I am always slightly uneasy that a gigantic ball of hail will crash through our bathroom skylight and our house will be invaded by wasps before we get it fixed.
I thought about calling some people I should call, and then I didn't. I plan to do the same thing next weekend.
Finished reading the awesome A Madness of Angels, which I plan to write about at some point. I'm in love with the protagonist, who is resurrected two years after his death to find that he is sharing his brain with blue electric angels.
Had to take Firecracker to the doctor on Saturday for some nasty-looking mosquito bites. Abby is very sensitive to mosquito bites, which usually swell up to the size of her fist and turn red.
No sooner did we step out of the car with a bottle of antibiotic than a bunch of ants swarmed over Firecracker's foot, inflicting multiple bites. Abby is even more sensitive to ant bites, so we had to go to the doctor again on Sunday, this time for steroids to bring down the swelling. She now looks like a medieval plague victim.
Firecracker is not very happy.
When Firecracker is injured or sick, we are all treated to a minute-by-minute account of every ache and pain. And I do mean minute by minute.
Why do insects target Abby? DramaQueen can go an entire summer without any sort of bite.
I hate summer in Georgia.
Sunday night was the True Blood season premier, hurrah. This season I'm rooting for vampire Eric, who gave the best ever public service announcement (wish I could post the whole thing, but there's a bit of it at the beginning).

I'm doing fine going gluten free, except that bread is very expensive, with a loaf having maybe 10 slices at about $5 a loaf, making it more expensive oz by oz than some illicit drugs. I'm not sure that's entirely true, but I'm not going to research it.
There are parts of our backyard I know nothing about. We spend absolutely no time there. See comment above about summer and ants. I would be perfectly happy with no yard at all. If I want grass I can go to the park.
We are in the process of killing two plants. I had the genius idea of the girls going on a field trip to a nursery and getting plants. One is impatiens - Abby remembers the name because, as she says, "I'm impatient." Liz got something she said is called a "David something". I imagine they're annuals and slated to die anyway.
Dear Husband is, I hope, bringing home a treat.
Oh, and here's another treat.

Game On, Swords Out, Heads Off

2011-06-25T11:19:00.000-05:00

Beautiful sets are part of the appeal of the series.

Every summer we get HBO so we can watch True Blood. This year we happened to get it a bit early, so I thought I would check out Game of Thrones. I'd never heard of the books, since fantasy epics have not generally been part of my literary diet. I am not apt to pick up a book set in another world where the characters have weird names like Cl'ad or M'rn. But there was so much buzz about this show that I had to check it out.

Tyrion should have his own series.

Daenerys deserves a dragon.

First I will say that HBO has created a remarkable series. Even the opening credits are gorgeous. The set design and costuming work well in creating mood and place. The cast is good to excellent. At first I found the story intriguing, but after a while I'm like, meh. I've read reviews praising the moral complexity of the characters. Um, yeah, right. Oh, she is fiercely loyal to her family; too bad she kills people. That's what is meant by "complex" I guess. The bad 'uns are pretty much bad to the bone and the good 'uns are, from what I can tell, en route to being corrupted or killed. I like Eddard's feisty daughter Arya and Tyrian, the dwarf, who has been given the best lines (and Richard Dinklage, a marvelous actor, obviously relishes his role). I'm also fascinated by the character Daenerys, daughter of the assassinated former king, now in exile, who starts out as a fragile, ethereal victim but becomes increasingly kick-ass. But most of the characters are annoying, willfully blind or downright vicious. The only really stand-up guy, Eddard Stark, screws everything up because he can't outmaneuver all the other power players. Here's a piece of advice, you shouldn't tell the queen that you know her deep, dark secret after the king, your only ally in the court, is dead, particularly not after your wife has kidnapped her brother. Also, when your crazy-ass wife kidnaps a member of the queen's family based on questionable evidence from a third-party and puts him on trial at the crazy-ass family headquarters, you should not be supportive. This is a good time to play the "I'm so sorry but my wife is unhinged with grief" card. Just sayin'.

Working girls in training.

Since HBO can, they dump as much blood and brutality as possible into every episode. Within the first few minutes of episode 1 I was treated to a scene of hacked up corpses arranged is some sort of mysterious symbol (at this point I don't really care what it means or who did it) and in every episode since I've had to close my eyes at various points to avoid having some new horror seared into my psyche. Most recently a scene took place while an animal is being butchered and skinned, which I'm sure conveyed the utter coldness of the Lannister patriarch, but I could have got that with less squishiness, thank you very much. And it being HBO there's lots of gratuitous sex. Seriously, is there ever a really sound narrative reason for an explicit sex scene? Oh, puhlease. No, there isn't. I don't get, for instance, why a scene of two women practicing "the business" is dramatically necessary. While the whore training was in session, the brothel owner was busy telling his life story to one of the "trainees," who turned out to be very good at multi-tasking. I suspect he may have alluded to something important in that little talk. Or not. In any case, I gather the character of the prostitute Ros was written specifically for the TV show, because, you know, an epic without whores is kind of like popcorn without butter and salt.

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

You must have to find Machiavellian politics and strategy much more interesting than I do to really enjoy this series. Or you have to really enjoy stories in which family loyalty trumps morality and humanity nine-tenths of the time. Not filial affection, mind you, just cold-hearted, unthinking, brutal loyalty.

So, next season, I might give Game of Thrones a miss. Except now they have dragons.

The new gluten-free me

2011-06-14T21:59:00.001-05:00

I guess it’s time for me to finally post about this monumental change in my life. It started a month or so ago when my doctor discovered that I was anemic. He sent me to a gastroenterologist to make sure I didn’t have Something Nasty. The Gastro Doc, with the rather charming but disorienting name Dimple, ordered a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. She looked at my iron levels and said, “You must feel like you want to hit someone.” I’m telling you that so you can give me credit for not, in fact, hitting anyone.

I’ll spare the details of these procedures, except to say that magnesium citrate is a baffling concoction that is fizzy, salty and sour all at the same time. I felt like I was drinking a weird Asian beverage. I also never want to see Gatorade or Jell-o again. On the positive side, I love the little cocktail they gave me to put me under. It has the beauty of a narcotic without the hurling afterwards.

My colonoscopy was fine, but the endoscopy revealed some things I wasn’t aware of. Like having acute gastritis, for one. I hadn’t really noticed until they told me. I also had blunted villi, and since Dear Husband has had his own problems, I knew what that likely meant, and indeed the blood tests confirmed that I do in fact have celiac.

I’ll break here for a public service announcement: Celiac is an autoimmune disease that damages the villi of the small intestine and interferes with the absorption of nutrients. It is estimated that 1 out of 133 people have it, and less than 3% of those are actually diagnosed. If you have any digestive issues that have been written off as IBS (like Dear Husband’s were), or if you have any autoimmune disease (my GI said she automatically tests anyone with a thyroid condition), I encourage you to beat some sense into your doctor and get the Celiac Blood Panel.

Strangely, I didn’t have any serious digestive complaints. At least nothing I didn’t brush off as simple indigestion, or a bug, or my period. Dear Husband says that I was always having problems, but they were not the bent-over-in-misery-never-leaving-the-house-again variety. I feel supremely lucky, because I’ve read stories of people who were miserable for 10 even 20 years before they were diagnosed. On the other hand, having no powerful symptoms imbues the experience with a haze of unreality.

The treatment is simple - never eat wheat, rye or barley again, or any product derived from them (such as malt). I’m used to looking for this stuff because of Dear Husband. And I’m lucky that I don’t have multiple food allergies. There are people who can’t eat corn, or milk, or potatoes on top of having to avoid gluten.

But, you know what, most gluten free baked goods totally blow, and they are very, very expensive. I’m going to have to figure out baking my own stuff (which involves strange flour mixes and something called xanthum gum that costs $11 for a bag the size of an oatmeal packet). In practice I approach all gluten free goodies with distrust and suspicion. For God’s sake, people are baking with bean flour! Bean flour! In cookies! In bread! That’s just what a I want, a lovely garbanzo bean cookie. Make that a vegan, nut free, rice free, corn free, soy free, agave syrup sweetened garbanzo bean cookie. And then there’s the gritty, mouthful of beach sand experience of eating anything baked with rice flour. I just tried using the new gluten free Bisquick to make biscuits, which I’ve actually heard some poor demented folk praise, and I wondered if this was, in truth, food or Evil masquerading as a comestible.

At the moment I’m tired of thinking about food, what to stock, what’s safe, whether I should risk purchasing this $7 loaf of gluten free bread, what the hell I’m going to pack in my lunch, and I’m wondering if I could just live off Corn Chex for a while. Thankfully, ice cream (many kinds, anyway) and jellybeans are gluten free.

Random Facts about Firecracker

2011-06-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

Now Firecracker gets her turn. Here are random facts about the cutest little 9 year old evah.

1. Is very affectionate and cuddly.
2. Loves our cats, Cheeto and Dorito, thoroughly and vigorously.
3. If she ever accidentally hurts them, she writes them notes of apology. She also draws pictures for them.
4. She never cared for baby dolls or Barbie dolls, but she's very attached to her huge family of stuffed animals.
5. Has a sweet-tooth. Heck, she has a mouth full of 'em.
6. Likes playing with toy cars and plans to buy a toy car wash.
7. Has beautiful caramel-colored hair with natural highlights. In the summer it looks as if she's been to the salon.
8. Has an incredible belly laugh. She sounds like she's vibrating.
9. For some reason really, really likes The Mentalist better than all other shows.
10. Likes to draw.
11. Does math for fun. You should have seen how excited she was that her teacher gave her a workbook for the summer.
12. Has problems with language processing and reading comprehension, but she likes going to the library and checking out lots of books. She particularly likes books about animals and encyclopedias. When she was little she use to make me check out all the Bing Bunny books at one time. Bing Bunny is awesome, by the way.
13. Once she starts playing, she becomes obsessed with the Wii, particularly the Sword Play game in Wii Resort.
14. Has a volatile temper, hence her nickname.
15. Calls meringues "merangutangs" and J.C. Penny "jennypenny."

16. Hates ants and bees. She was once stung by dozens of fire-ants, which resulted in an infection. Now she is highly suspicious of the lawn.
17. Has a hard time giving things up, even stuff she no longer plays with or uses. She therefore has a lot of Pokemon cards and Sillybandz.
18. Unlike DramaQueen, she prefers to spend her money rather than save it.
19. Has been bugging me for weeks to open this bloody Soda Pop making kit that Dear Husband got the kids for the summer.
20. Likes rocks. I used to come home and find all the rocks from the yard, and the neighbors' yards, in our living room or drying on the floor in the kitchen. I still find rocks in the washing machine from when she squirrels them away in her pockets.
21. Has Tuberous Sclerosis, which means she has benign growths in her brain that affect her memory and cognition and cause seizures (well controlled, happily).
22. She used to be so used to medical procedures that she barely flinched getting her blood drawn. Last time we all got flu shots, two of us had to hold her down. She ran out the building into the parking lot screaming and we had to keep our distance while her fury abated.
23. Still mourns the loss of Wormy, a worm some idiot at a summer camp put in a cup of dirt for her to take home. What were they thinking? After we convinced her to let Wormy go so he could get on with his wormy life, she cried for weeks. Sometimes she still randomly moans, "I miss Wormy!"
24. Is terrified of thunderstorms.
25. Says she talks to God when she's angry, and he tells her when she needs to apologize.
26. We told her she was a chatterbox. She later asked what made her a "cheesebox."
27. Loves the songs Rolling in the Deep by Adele and Defying Gravity sung by the cast of Glee.
28. Thinks Goldilocks was extremely rude and can barely contain her outrage when she reads the story. She feels very sorry for the poor baby bear.
29. Does not like any fruits or vegetables. Now and then we can persuade her to gnaw on a baby carrot.
30. Prefers playing with boys.

Some Facts about DramaQueen

2011-06-01T11:39:00.000-05:00

Since I did a blog post about Dear Husband, I thought I would get a kick out of doing them for the girls as well. So here are some random facts about my 11 yr old daughter DramaQueen.

1. When she got to the part in The Deathly Hallows where Harry Potter is walking to his death, she lay prostrate in the hallway weeping and made me tell her if it was going to turn out okay.

DramaQueen as the Queen of Hearts, with her BFF

2. Enjoys acting, obviously.

3. Is a serious bookworm.

4. Has a dry sense of humor.

5. Still thinks boys are beneath notice when they aren't outright annoying.

6. Loves Glee.

Nikola Tesla, sans fangs.

7. Also loves the TV Series Sanctuary. Her favorite character is the vampire Nikola Tesla. Boys are beneath notice but the fully grown specimen displays wit, charm and sound personal hygiene. Thus it begins.

8. Thinks my favorite musician (Owen Pallett) sounds like "a cat strumming on a banjo."

9. Does not like math or science.

10. Is a saver. She pays for all her own presents for friends and family. She also hoards her Halloween candy, which usually lasts until Christmas, at least, if she can keep it hidden from me.

11. Is okay with peanut butter sandwiches but hates jelly.

12. Wishes nature was indoors and not so dirty.

13. Likes roller skating.

14. Favorite outfit is skinny jeans (they must be skinny and they cannot have any fussy embroidery or such) and a cami with a t-shirt over it (the cami must have lacy trim that peeks out from under the hem of the t-shirt), and black converse (colorful ones are just a bit too much for her).

15. Received a Presidential Award for Academic Excellence this year (She pointed out immediately that there was no way Obama could have actually signed all those certificates). She did not get the award in PE. Shocker.

16. Loves Los Angeles, and visiting her grandparents there is one of the highlights of the year for her.

17. Thinks of herself as "the healthy one in the family."

18. Likes the websites Wonderopolis and Cute Overload, but can't figure out what I find to do on a computer for hours on end.

19. At her birthday party, she and her friends sat in a circle playing a game -- and texting each other. Yes, they texted each other while they were in the same room.

20. Prefers the cake to the frosting.

21. Likes rainy days because they make her feel cozy.

22. Was so horrified when she saw Dear Husband smoking a cigar (which he does maybe maybe once every 5 years) that he promised to never do it again.

23. Has a pretty messy room. Clean clothes tend to sit in a pile on her desk chair until she needs them, and she usually has a collection of water glasses near her bed. Dirty clothes pile up beside the hamper in the bathroom. She isn't quite able to commit to putting them in the dirty clothes or to wearing them again.

24. Has to sleep with the fan on, even in the winter, with just a sheet over her, which she pulls up over her head with a small opening for breathing. There must be two pillow stacked on her left side and a two or three stuffed animals on her right side.

25. Is not a morning person. Duh. Genes on both sides are against that.

26. Her favorite character in Little Women is Beth, which surprised me. I always thought Beth was a bit too good to be true and preferred Jo, but DramaQueen likes Beth's selfless nature.

27. Just "graduated" from elementary school and is *gulp* going to middle school in the fall.

28. Is very protective of Firecracker. Most of the time. When Firecracker hasn't gotten on her last nerve

29. Is easily frustrated, at which point she throws herself on the floor and proclaims the destruction of all her hope and happiness by a firestorm of failure.

30. Won't go to sleep unless her closet door is closed.

Because Dear Husband says I never post about him.

2011-05-21T08:53:00.000-05:00

Dear Husband complains that I never post anything about him but instead spend to much time writing about cute actors. He feels slighted. But I don't know how to write something that doesn't simply sing his praises or get all mushy, so without more ado, here are 25 random facts about Dear Husband:

He can't eat gluten, something he found out in the last few years.
He went from being an Orthodox Christian and Sean Hannity-listening political conservative to a liberal NPR-listening Emergent Christian in the space of a year. I'm still freaked out. Pleased but freaked out.
He loves Swedish Fish and he misses being able to eat Twizzlers (which have wheat in them).
His favorite painter is Chagall.
He's Jewish but converted to Christianity when he was 13, causing much tension in his family.
Is far more creative and romantic than I am. Once he had a taxi pick me up to take me to a secret location, a friends house as it turned out, where he had javascript:void(0)prepared a gourmet meal and a slideshow about our life together. Another time he took us to the mall and told me that we each had 20 minutes and 20 dollars to find the perfect anniversary gift.
His grandfather was the Head of Production at Paramount Studios in the early 60s and then set up his own production company. Dear Husband is the only person I know whose birth was announced in Variety.
Loves watching basketball and his favorite team is the Lakers.
Grew up playing tennis, but he never watches it on TV nor seems interested in playing it again.
Would switch teams for Matthew Goode.

Well, who wouldn't?

He loves the TV show Sanctuary, primarily because of Amanda Tapping.
Prefers listening to books to reading them.
Likes nonfiction more than fiction and thinks my love of sci fi and fantasy is a little silly.
He's the fun parent.
He gets nervous when I drive.
Used to be an Assembly of God pastor. This was before I met him. Yeah, he spoke in tongues and all that.
My mother adored him and peppered him with questions about Judaism.
Was transformed from a spendthrift to a fiscally responsible person via Dave Ramsey. This single change resulted in a much more mature and thoughtful person.
Likes reading poetry with me.
Is so not handy. He doesn't mow the grass or fix things around the house. We are both completely clueless about gardening and lawn care and usually kill plants.
Does most of the housecleaning out of desperation.
Is getting a degree in instructional design. My understanding of this area is vague, but it sounds cool.

A whisker basket

Always says "whisker" when he means "wicker." This is one of the first things that endeared him to me.
Loves electronic gadgets. His smart phone is an extension of himself.

There is no one I would rather spend time with. Well, I had to get a bit mushy, didn't I?

Hanging Out in the Subtext, Where It's Cool and Shady

2011-05-20T07:11:00.000-05:00


When not demon hunting, Sam and Dean moonlight at Abercrombie & Fitch

I love Supernatural. You see it's almost time for the season finale and I’m a little giddy with anticipation. And anxiety, because every now and then instead of a pocketful of wonderful you get a scrap of used hankie. But I love love love paranormal stuff that is kinda scary but not enough to make me sleep with the light on. Supernatural has great characters. The hunky monster hunting brothers Dean and Sam Winchester. Bobby, the ornery mentor/father figure/buddy fellow hunter (he says things like “idgit” - how can you not like that?) Castiel, the angel who rebelled and threw in his lot with humankind. Wraiths, demons, vampires, angels, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Lucifer - what a guest list!. At its best the writing is snappy, with dialogue that makes you laugh with delight. Spiritual matters, needless to say, are frequently touched upon: Where is God and is he on our side? How do you combat evil? How do you handle the evil in yourself? Themes such as the value of family and friendship, trust and betrayal, courage and sacrifice figure prominently. Usually the show doesn't take itself too seriously. It’s just a big kettle of wonderful.

But really, the best part? It’s so gay. It’s a big gay party every week. Unlike Glee or Modern Family there are no actual gay characters, but it's still really gay in a sly wink and nudge kind of way.

Fanfiction is a heartening proletariat genre - people take possession of the stories they love and rework them, elaborating on what interests them. Slash fiction, which pairs popular same-sex characters, is a big ol' online playground. There are forums and places to post rather embarrassing stories, and places to park even more embarrassing art. There are a lot of people out there making up gay story lines for the characters of Supernatural, ready to pounce on any look, gesture or dialogue that seems suspect.

You might think that a major mainstream TV show would be a bit freaked out and pretty much ignore all these fans teasing out the strands of gay in their creation. But naw, they're down with it. I mean, the writers aren’t going to let the characters hook up in the story, this being the subtext and not the actual plot, but the writers and cast seem to get a kick out of their fan’s obsessive enthusiasm and deliberately invoke it. In Supernatural, for instance, Dean and Sam are also characters in a comic book series (written by a prophet, no less; yeah this show frequently goes meta). In one episode Sam and Dean end up at a fan convention devoted to their fictional characters where they are surprised and a bit flustered to hear a panel announced on “The Homoerotic Subtext of Supernatural.” And all the fangirls go “Squeee!”

Castiel and Dean share a moment

Besides the fans who pair the brothers themselves in a subgenre called "Wincest" (um, yeah, not reeeally in tune with that), there are those who favor Dean and the angel Castiel (damn right, too). I don’t know what the writers originally intended, but they’ve obviously decided to go with the flow of sentiment, helpfully including double-entendres and pointed banter between the two of them, and somehow Dean and Castiel exchange the longest gazes in history, and Dean always, always looks at Castiel’s lips. It’s a little weird, actually, and I always wonder if the actor playing Dean is completely aware of it. In any case, there's enough chemistry between the actors to be super swoony.

Here's a fine example of a slash video by a Dean/Castiel (Destiel) fan.This person has combed the cannon for those suggestive moments, massaged the story with some rather clever editing, and given an appropriate soundtrack ("Halo" was another song favored by Destiel enthusiasts). Note the little part at the end where the actor playing Dean (Jensen Ackles) explicitly (or maybe I should say "suggestively") gives a nod to the mad Destiel fantasists. I just had to show this even though it gives you a glimpse of how much time I waste on nonsense.

The demon Crowley claims a soul.

Oh, and there’s a demon named Crowley who removes souls via lip-lock. So if you want to make a deal with the devil, you get to exchange spit. I’m a wee bit surprised that Supernatural showed this in action, but I guess it was ok’d because no hot men were involved. In fact, there’s a bit of an eww factor.

Of course Dean and Castiel are never, ever going to get together on screen. Dean did romance a female angel at one point, so we know angels can get their freak on. But Dean is a real guy's guy, who would never in a million years consider the possibility of being gay. He's all about the ladies. And that's the point, of course, that's the fun. The writers of Supernatural didn't start out writing about an angel and human in love, but somehow with the dialogue and the chemistry between the actors, that story bleeds through the existing one, and then the fans hijacked the story, and because of the Internet, they have a rather surprising amount of influence.

Angels are completely baffled by ties.

I read somewhere (yeah, I'm not going to win any awards for source references) that women write the majority of slash fanfiction. Probably somewhere there’s a treatise on why this is the case. I think women get a kick out of breaking the heteronormative narrative through the story lines of the men, the ones put in charge of the plot. In Supernatural the women tend to be demon superbitches. It's a hunter's world. Well, you think you’re in control? Hah! you don’t even know you have the hots for each other.

Found here, somewhere: http://onetouchspark.livejournal.com/

So you go, girls (and everyone else writing this stuff). Subvert the dominant paradigm.

Future Residents of Darkest Hell

2011-04-28T19:12:00.000-05:00

Dear Future Resident of Darkest Hell,

We noticed you recently decided to ignore every obvious truth of the Bible and turn your back on God. We're disappointed in you, of course, but we'd be lying if we said we didn't see it coming. It was, after all, established before the foundation of the world. God is receiving glory for your failure even as we type, so we're getting over it pretty quickly. We realize this might be hard for you to hear, but we'd like to remind it you it's your own fault for not having faith. As a consolation, we'd like to offer you this 10% off coupon for Christian McJerk's new book 24 Ways I Already Know You're Wrong and 13 More I Plan to Infer as We Go.

You're welcome.

Deep blessings,
The Real Christians.

- David from The Screaming Kettle, guest post at Alise...Write

Until now I haven't gathered the energy to comment on the controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s book Love Wins. What do I know about these knotty theological arguments, anyway? I haven’t read the book, either, which hasn't stopped anyone else. I imagine I’ll read it at some point, when it gets to my library. I won’t run out and buy it because I never run out and buy anything and because I read Velvet Elvis, which reminded me of Chinese food - enormously tasty going down but my stomach was empty an hour later. But I just like the fact that Rob Bell exists and makes lovely videos and is so earnest and passionate and wears such interesting spectacles. Also, I have an unexamined and immediate preference for the people evangelicals call heretics. When I think of protestant evangelicals I tend to imagine Roundheads charging into cathedrals to break the stained glass. Cromwell and Calvin make my skin crawl.

Back to Bell, who is accused of believing that everyone goes to heaven, leaving hell a vast and empty place, with nary a soul to roast. I don’t know if that is actually the case. Maybe he doesn’t say that at all. But it’s beyond me why evangelicals have such an affection for hell. They seem to think that Christendom falls apart if people aren’t properly terrified. Why it bothers Calvinists I do not know, given that whether or not you want to be saved is all up to God - you don’t really have any say in the matter and in fact can’t resist if God entices you into his lair. But you still have to have hell, which to my mind introduces a profound level of existential despair, as those who have not been ineluctably seduced get to contemplate their future in Satan’s hot tub. Some people argue that people can’t choose heaven or hell because free will is an illusion. Others say that you can’t have heaven without hell because there IS free will. And some people seem to think that you can choose but one of the options isn’t the traditional hell but something more like an eternal waiting room with bad coffee, no donuts and the TV permanently tuned to FOX news.

(Now, if you may be wondering what “free will” is and isn’t. Do we really have any freedom or are we enmeshed in so much culturally and biologically determined stuff that freedom is an illusion? There is a theory called “post-structuralism” that examines the fine points in excruciating detail. It made my head hurt but I'm sure some might enjoy it.)

Now, here's a few words from someone who has actually read the book. You can read Adam Ellis's whole post over at Jesus Needs New PR. It's full of awesome and this part made me laugh:

To begin, let’s look at two things that shouldn’t be surprises, but (based on the more angry reviews I’ve read) apparently are:
Rob Bell is not a Calvinist (“New”, “Neo”, or otherwise). He doesn’t write like one. He doesn’t adhere to exclusively Calvinist doctrine. He doesn’t see the terms “non-Calvinist” and “Christian” as mutually exclusive.
Rob Bell writes almost exactly like he talks. And that means there will be…
…words
and half-sentences…
….laid-out unconventionally….
…throughout
…the
book…

(Note: I suspect that the popular phrase "full of awesome" is already limp and tired, but I like it so much.)

Where was I going with this? I think I got sidetracked by free will and my deep-seated antipathy to Calvinism. Speaking of which: John Piper. He’s notorious for his brush-off tweet "Farewell Rob Bell." Whatever that means. Perhaps he didn't mean it to sound like the ultimate in condescension and smug self-righteousness that it appears on first, second, third and I imagine 20th glance. I can’t claim to know a lot about Piper. I read one book, assigned at my workplace, about The Passion of Christ, which was meant to tie in to the movie. Boring book. Really really boring. Boooooring. Same old same old. You can count on a Calvinist to say that they’re digging deep into the scripture and discovering treasure when they’re really just dusting off the same old dented relic. I swear they’ve been chewing the same piece of food for years and they still haven’t digested it.

I’m glad Rob Bell got up the noses of the righteous. It doesn’t matter to me if it was a calculated marketing move, or if he’s presenting a not very original idea. I gather Origen got there first, but who the hell (ha ha) has heard of Origen? Here are the evangelicals pretty much claiming that you have to believe in hell or you aren’t Christian. Calvinists particularly like to hedge salvation with caveats, until you end up with a long list of stuff you have to believe if you are a "true" Christian.

I'm really on a tear about Calvinists, aren't I? It's just that I am familiar with the truth of that very funny letter at the top of the page; it could have been mailed to me. I feel bristly. Must be heresy taking root.

Road Trip

2011-04-19T21:29:00.000-05:00

The following was created using Storify. If you have problems reading it here, you should be able to go to http://storify.com/2tired2move/charleston and see it there.

Dr. Who Does Shakespeare

2011-03-31T22:21:00.000-05:00

Note: the following is really just an excuse to show lots of photos of David Tennant.

ooo, shiney.

Perhaps it’s kind of geeky, but I’ve always liked Shakespeare. Well, pretty much always. I think I was unmoved by Romeo and Juliet when I first read it in junior high. I thought kids who killed themselves for love were super annoying. But sometime in high school we got this amazing new thing called cable TV, and it had this great arts channel (soon replaced by MTV) that broadcast a film version of a stage production of Hamlet, with Hamlet played by Ian McKellen. Oh. My. God. I watched it every time I could catch it (these being the years before home recording). Because of that single production, I never really experienced difficulty with the language. It wasn’t that I understood all the idioms and odd expressions of that time and place, but I got it, I was inside it.

Recently DramaQueen was studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream in school, and I began to feel that strange motherly compulsion to inject as much culture as possible into my offspring with the lest outlay of cash. Yea TV. So I went searching for free, streaming Shakespeare.

Dr. Who and Captain Picard share a moment.

Words.

It takes a bigger man than you to play on my pipe.

Imagine my delight when I ran across an RSC production of Hamlet on PBS. Hot. Dog. You can’t get anymore Shakespearey than the RSC. Then, much to my amazement, I found that Hamlet was played by the 12th incarnation of Dr. Who, and Claudius by Captain Picard. It was a pop-culture/high-culture bonanza! And no one was wearing a doublet. All the sets and costumes were contemporary, the surfaces sleek and reflective, surveillance cameras everywhere (it is a play with a lot of spying and snooping). And, my word, David Tennant owned Hamlet. I can’t say enough about his performance, and the other actors were exceptionally good as well. Every time a famous soliloquy approached, I wondered how he could possibly breathe new life into such familiar words, and each time I was mightily impressed.

For example, here is the first soliloquey:

And the Am I a Coward bit:

And here is one of my favorite humorous moments with silly old Polonius:

Thing is, I now have this urge to watch Dr. Who.

Brideshead Regurgitated

2011-03-20T18:40:00.000-05:00

Hell to the No.

When the Brideshead Revisited movie came out, I told myself that I would never watch it. From what I could tell of how the writers had reshaped the script, it seemed like a horror. The BBC miniseries was one of the glorious discoveries of my youth, and I’ve read the book countless times, so I was going to be tough to win over.

Sometimes snap judgements are right on target. Man, did they ever botch it. It was impossible for me to see the movie with fresh eyes, because in every shot I glimpsed the ghost of the original BBC miniseries, and the ghost had a lot more flesh on it. To succeed the film should have made me forget the first series with a fresh vision.

Much Better

For those who don’t know the story, it goes like this: Charles Ryder, a disillusioned WWII Army captain, finds himself stationed at Brideshead estate, forcing him to think back on his youth at Oxford, where he met and befriended the beautiful and doomed Lord Sebastian Flyte and became embroiled in a family drama spanning decades. An aspiring artist, Charles finds inspiration in Sebastian’s family home, the very place were Sebastian feels most unhappy. What begins as a jubilant friendship quickly disintegrates as Sebastian spirals into alcoholic depression. Charles sets out on his own, much later meeting up with Sebastian’s sister, Julia. Both married, they begin a passionate love affair. Running throughout the story is the theme of religious faith, primarily Catholicism, which Charles at first rejects but later (it is implied) embraces.

What someone unfamiliar with the book could take from the new movie, I have no idea. The two halves were folded back in on themselves and stitched together to save time. In the novel and miniseries, Charles and Julia do not at first cross paths very often and they don’t pay much attention to each other. This movie turns the relationship into a love triangle, which transforms the friendship between Charles and Sebastian into a sordid little cliche. Other elements that are important in the novel and series are given a perfunctory mention and then the plot chugs along. Urgh. Consider:

Why does Sebastian drink?
Brideshead BBC: Sebastian drinks because he’s an alcoholic with suffocating, manipulative mother who keeps him on a short leash and stokes him regularly with religious guilt.
Brideshead movie: Sebastian drinks because his boyfriend wants to sleep with his sister.

Who is Aloysius?
Brideshead BBC: Aloysius is Sebastian’s teddy bear, both an affectation that endears him to his Oxford classmates and a symbol of his dangerous desire to cling to childhood. Aloysius is the name of a Catholic saint who watches over youth.
Brideshead the movie: Huh? Oh, he’s that teddy bear you see mabye twice. His name is Aloysius?

Who is Anthony Blanche?
Brideshead BBC: Anthony is the flamboyant Tiresias figure in the novel, appearing periodically to deliver enigmatic warnings to Charles about the Flyte family. Turns out he is right about most things.
Brideshead movie: Where is the old bugger? He’s around here somewhere. Ooops, missed him.

Jeremy Irons, the original Charles Ryder

I could go on. The movie is a long exercise in missing the point. The movie doesn’t shy away from faith, but it doesn’t do the theme any favors, either. There are rosaries and religious pictures, and sometimes the gang chat vaguely about being heathens or atheists. It has all the heft of a bag of feathers. The role of art as a secular religion is nowhere to be found. Charles just starts sketching a bit, but that’s sort of lost in the headlong rush to tie up the loose ends that barely had time to flap about in the breeze in the first place. You arrive at the big deathbed conversion scene wondering what all the kerfuffle is about.

Has Charles been changed by any of this? Who knows - but he doesn’t snuff out the eternal flame in the chapel. Whoa.

Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder

When it comes to casting, you can’t could beat the original, though there are some notable actors in the new version, including Emma Thompson and Albus Dumbledore - I mean, Michael Gambon.

Matthew Goode makes a decent Charles Ryder. He even has some of Jeremy Irons’ mellifluous tones, but since this version has almost no voice-over narration, you don’t get to enjoy that.


Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte.

Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte

Ben Whishaw vs. Anthony Andrews. Oh, there’s no question here that Andrews wins. Whitshaw looks like he has consumption, and though that might be realistic for advanced alcoholism, Sebastian is supposed to be beautiful.

The start of it all.

So, how did I come to watch this mess that I knew from the start would be a disaster and that I never ever intended to watch? Well, it’s because SOMEONE has a crush on Matthew Goode. And it isn’t me.

Dopey Dopamine

2011-03-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

I’ve been patiently waiting for my mood to shift a bit, and a horrid sort of aimlessness has settled over me. Options appear to my eyes with the same dull hues, nothing bright and obvious and appealing. I read to keep my mind occupied rather than circling like a vulture.

I was really hoping that the thyroid pills I’ve been prescribed would kick ennui’s butt. I'm always hoping there will be an a-ha moment that puts everything right

My therapist says I should cut myself some slack. Motivation is a gnawing problem for people with ADD. I’m low energy and that’s just a fact of my nature. I should rejoice that I’m functional. I have my kids and husband and they’re important to me. I think of my mom: her kids and family were important to her, too, but she still went around saying, “I just don’t know what to do with my life.” She was saying that in her 70s. Drove me mad. I used to think, Hell, by this time you’ve done what you were going to do with your life – suck it up. But it’s an awful feeling, that sense of directionless motion. You don’t feel like you’re the master of your own ship, or whatever that stupid expression is. I end up reacting to events, dithering over decisions. I feel foggy and uncertain. I’ve known from a young age that structure is essential if I’m to get anything done at all, and that I am incapable of creating that structure myself. I’ve needed schools and jobs to divide up my day, deadlines to force me to focus. The moment I try to set up any sort of routine for myself, I’m doomed. Set goals? Who’s going to hold me to it, after all? Myself? Hah. And routines are not foolproof. There are days when, for example, after years and years of putting out medicine for Firecracker to take, every morning at the same time, I forget it entirely. And you know what? The next day I’ll be more likely to forget it again. It’s as if the habit were unraveling. I finally set up automatic reminders to pop up on my phone. That’s not foolproof, either, because those sorts of things tend to become just so much white noise. The only thing I can be certain I won’t forget is to brush my teeth. I have immediate sensory feedback if that isn’t done.

Did you know that there’s a connection between dopamine and motivation? Low dopamine, low motivation. I take medications in an attempt to counter what I can only think is a full-out dopamine drought. Sometimes it works sort of okay, at least for a while. But then I just have to leave the boring behind and do something I like. Tedium is my enemy. And unfortunately this often happens in the middle of a work day. It’s almost guaranteed to happen when it’s time to deal with household chores. This is not just the afternoon slump. A few wisps of mist float through, and then the full-on fog of dreamy inattention. There are no rewards great enough to tempt me, so I rely on fear. I need a job, and I need to keep Dear Husband’s ire at bay. Some people think that the contentment and peacefulness of a clean house or a job well done would be reward enough, but no way. I have no work ethic. Never cared about working my way to the top of the dung heap. Left to myself I’d never do anything. I guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t born into wealth.

It sure makes me feel out of sync with cultural expectations. All these books on Get It Done, how to be an entrepreneur, how to get ahead, little tricks and bits and bobs on productivity. Seth Godin. Just visiting his website makes me tired. Do I care if I’m the linchpin? Hell no. (By the way, why are there all these blogs and books about leadership? What about books on being an astute and useful follower, assistant, or whatever?) Ambition, goals, productivity – I can understand these intellectually, but my physical self has no understanding at all. They are a foreign substance I keep trying to ingest and integrate and my system keeps pushing them out as foreign bodies.

You know, I was just on Seth Godin’s blog, and he mentioned the characteristics of losers. And I thought, No one wants to be a loser, but someone always is.

Which brings me to the last episode of Glee, with the fabulous song Loser Like Me, which expresses a sense of optimism I don’t feel.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

2011-03-09T20:04:00.000-05:00

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

“The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built n a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.

Or, as Mom used to say: it’s a box.”

I picked out this book because of the title. How could I resist? I happened across reviews of it here and there, nice buzzy happy reviews. It seemed to be much in demand. I was on a waiting list at the library so long that I almost forgot about it. In fact, when I finally got notice that it was available, I was really into reading a clockwork man.

From the start Charles Yu’s writing filled me with delight. Charles (who is also the narrator), is a time machine repairman. The book is written as a manual, interlaced with the narrator’s personal story. Yu creates elaborate technological and pseudotechnological constructs, real physics mixed with fantasy. And lest that sound drearily dull, the story is well padded with humor, from the holographic dog rescued from a space western to Phil, the dispatcher, a Windows program who thinks he is a real person with a wife and children. I think of Douglass Adams meets Italo Calvino, with a bit of Ecco thrown in.

You probably can guess from the title as well as that excerpt from the opening pages, that this is metafiction. Metaphysical metafiction. It’s so self-referential I’m surprised it’s still book-shaped. If you reduced the story to plot, it is about the narrator’s search for his missing father, a brilliant but defeated scientist. Together they had worked on a prototype time machine, one that never quite came together. Every memory is laced with regret and loss. In the course of his search, the narrator ends up stuck in a time loop after shooting his future self, who hands him a book, telling him that the answer is in it, in the book we are reading and which the present/future narrator is writing.

The theme of the story is memory, our very own personal time travel machine. We travel forward and backward at the same time. Also, the book is itself a time travel device, a little box transporting both reader and author from present to past to future. But more importantly, the story focuses on the potential danger of memory, how it can become a trap, an endless, obsessive loop.

Geeky

2011-03-02T22:35:00.000-05:00

Fallen but not far enough

2011-02-17T23:07:00.000-05:00

Angels are the new vampires, you know, or maybe it’s zombies that are the new vampires. I’m waiting for the first angel/zombie amalgam to appear on bookstore shelves any day. If it hasn’t already. I can’t keep up.

I love reading YA novels. There’s something so fresh and hopeful about them.

Course sometimes they completely screw it up.

I recently got hold of the novel Fallen, by Lauren Kate. Thought I would check out this new angel obsession. Ye Gods. I know matters are falling apart when I start skidding down the slope, hopping over huge chunks of text, annoyed as all get out but unable to stop because, dammit, surely there’s a payoff here somewhere.

I liked the set up. Luce is a suspected arsonist (or something - her first kiss apparently incinerated her boyfriend) who lands in a reform boarding school in Savannah. I like that touch - Savannah. Luce mentions the humidity now and then to remind you where you are. In case you forget, there being no other indication of locale. So Luce, who also sees menacing dark shadows everywhere, is lonely and lost for all of two minutes at the new school when she spies the incredibly gorgeous and strangely familiar Daniel. Immediately she is captivated, drawn to him. He flips her off. It’s so adorable. Then there’s Cam, the sweetly attentive, equally gorgeous boy she’s drawn to but not quite so much. You know something’s wrong with him because he takes Luce on a picnic and a snake shows up. Later he gives her a pendant with a snake on it and takes her to a bar called Styx. Luce is completely dense when it comes to symbolism.

Besides being dumb as a sack of rocks, Luce is beyond annoying. She’s just so mysteriously drawn to Daniel. So so so so drawn. She can’t stop thinking about it, staring at him, having strange dreams about him. Her brain is always churning with Daniel. And what’s Daniel got to show for himself? Well, we know he’s an angel. Luce is too dumb to figure that out for ¾ of the book. Still, let’s see, when he’s not pushing her away with strange, cryptic warnings and comments, he’s kinda polite and friendly. This goes on for freakin ever. And not much else. Shadows come and go. You never really find out why the hell Luce can see them, or why she incinerated her boyfriend, but oh well, it’s probably in the sequel. Various stuff happens la la la, her parents visit, la la, a friend helps her research Daniel, la la la, the library catches on fire (I was hopeful there for a moment, but nah) and there are lots more scary swirly inky shadows everywhere! Daniel kisses her and is really taken aback that she doesn't explode, because he was totally expecting her to, quite literally, blow up. That's what an awesome kisser he is. And, oh, Daniel’s a fallen angel and Cam is too, and well, so are a number of students (what the hell is this school’s admission policy, anyway?), and there’s a big battle with locusts and fireflies or something but we don’t know why exactly, except they seem to be fighting over Luce but they can’t tell her why because it might explode her wittle brain. But as long as Luce can rest in Daniel’s arms, lost in his violet eyes, with his beautiful wings wrapped around her, what’s a little chaos, death and destruction?

And no, there’s no payoff.

Quietly hiding out until spring

2011-02-08T22:10:00.000-05:00

February is really a draggy month, trailing the ragged bits of winter behind it while the stores begin to put up their spring and summer displays. Valentine's Day must have been invented to infuse some warmth and color into the dun February skies.

Well, that's my mood, anyway. Bored. Restless. Bored.

So, I read a book. In this instance, The City and the City by China Mieville. I admit that I first picked it up based solely on the author's exotic name. I mean, who names their son China? It turns out he looks very cutting edge - bald, intense stare, lots of earrings, reminding me, in fact, of the anesthesiologist I had when delivering DramaQueen. He had earrings up and down both ears. Some people might have felt alarm, but I immediately relaxed, knowing I was in good hands. He was, indeed, an expert at placing an epidural, as I discovered years later delivering Firecracker, when no one could quite get it right and it had to be placed several times. But back to China. The City and The City is one of those books that gets praised as being wildly imaginative. I'm beginning to think that Wildly Imaginative is its on genre. The two cities in the title are kind of like West Berlin and East Berlin if they were layered on top of each other - this street is East Berlin, that one is West, and this one is sort of interlaced, and all the inhabitants of East Berlin had trained themselves to "unsee" the inhabitants of West Berlin, and vice-versa. To not "unsee" is a criminal offense called "breaching." I continue to be amazed at how cleverly the author has constructed this very strange world. In one of the cities a young woman is murdered, and the investigation begins to wander into the dens and lairs of various political cells that want to unify the two countries, or that violently oppose all cooperation, or that believe there is a third country hiding in the cracks. Dark forces at play. Conspiracies. I very much enjoyed it.

And I watched a movie - Dorian Gray, with the amazing Colin Firth as Dorian's manipulative mentor and the fetching Ben Barnes (incredibly beautiful, jaw-dropping, eye-popping drop-dead, transcendentally gorgeous) as Dorian. There's nothing like a good old selling-my-soul-to-the-devil story. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray when I was in high school. I remember feeling slightly disappointed. I had rather hoped, from Wilde's notoriety, that the book would be rather more saucy than it was. The debauchery was vague, to my mind, as I had not yet been instructed in reading a subtext. I wasn't sure exactly what he was up to, besides being a bit of a slut. The movie is much more forthcoming. He knocks up a girl then heartlessly dumps her, visits brothels, makes conquests of all the women in society, drinks a lot, smokes opium, travels the world engaging in some truly alarming and violent sexual escapades, seduces a friend then murders him and dumps him in the river. Dorian remains beautiful while his portrait bears the scars of his corruption and depravity. At first he thinks this is a pretty sweet deal. The painting's transformation is quite amazing, with maggots crawling out of it, and some sort of effluvia, and I swear mushrooms or something growing on the back. And it groans. Dorian keeps it locked up in his attic, visiting it now and then to view the progress of his degradation. I'm not sure where he thought all this was heading, but that's human nature, always thinking your bad behavior is safely tucked away in a creaky, drafty old room, securely locked. And for most of the film he's okay with watching his soul rot away. The end seems to hint at the possibility of redemption, but if I remember correctly there is none in the book.

That's what I've been up to. It's all very dull.

Unease

2011-01-28T21:43:00.000-05:00

wind shakes the bony trees
rattles my heart
blue sky powdered white
ethereal fabric of day
one hand casts a net of light
another drags a veil of shade

Cubicle

2011-01-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

These papers smell of futility,
layer upon layer of sediment.
My back feels watched, vulnerable.
Walls enclose but don't protect..
The doom-riddled sky
has shut its door,
as I shut my eyes.

Morning Ablution

2011-01-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

shower spray
hope fresh,
clean as soap
before thoughts
crash over me
pulling me
out to sea

Grace

2011-01-18T14:39:00.000-05:00

The cat dips one paw into the cup of water and licks it daintily, thoroughly. When she has her fill, she sashays along the table edge, reaches front paws onto the the chair arm, then stretches, haunches lifted, before landing softly on the cushion.

Catnap

2011-01-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

the cat lay
in a blissful stupor
when my 8 year old
hugged it around the middle
hauling it onto her lap
pressing her face into
its neck fur
soft and pliable, the cat
resigned itself to affection
for a time

Sleep

2011-01-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

thoughts float
sluggishly
in the still air
fatigue circles
then curls
and settles
drowsy, heavy weight
of slow breath

Snow

2011-01-09T23:15:00.002-05:00

snow carries
so much hush
a gentle
maternal touch
as if earth said
quiet, please
I can't hear
myself think.

Wind

2011-01-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

Wind pushes the traffic lights
up and down
like kids on swings.
How will we know when to stop?

Reflection

2011-01-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

The building opposite
so flat, dull, dun colored
made for utility not beauty,
except its many windows
are pools of still water
suspended like banners
giving back the sky
and her clouds
and the bare branches reaching

Life in a Northern Town

2010-12-30T15:05:00.001-05:00

I recently became ~~obsessed~~ enthralled with the BBC production North & South. I read the book before watching it, and I think they did a splendid job bringing it to the screen. The book, interesting as it is, could get a bit, well, Victorian at times. You know, when the author starts going on about religious feeling or the fine points of the heroine's emotional state, or someone is dying from a mysterious disease and you never know what, but they are long-suffering and so on. Actually, Gaskell isn't treacly the way Dickens can be, but sometimes you wish there were a little less circumlocution. Screenwriters have to cut to the chase and keep the plot moving.

The plot, in a nutshell, is that Margaret Hale and her family move from southern to northern England and experience culture shock. The North is dark, dirty, industrial, ruled by factory owners who seem more interested in profit than their workers. Workers are growing agitated. Margaret's father is tutoring one of the mill owners, Mr. Thornton. At first Margaret and Mr. Thornton are at odds with each other, but of course that changes. And it being a Victorian novel written by a woman, events unfold in a way that lands the heroine with all the money and power, able to act as an independent agent, while the hero has lost everything. Ah, romance. I love the Victorian era. The Industrial Revolution changes the landscape entirely - from the actual physical topography to the social, economic, and class structure. It's the boom before the bust, though of course it was always a bust for the children working in factories and those dying from breathing in cotton dust.

Besides finding the leads very pretty to look at (and oh my are they), I think the cinematography is general is beautiful, and the soundtrack is gorgeous. I love the way the main melody changes over the course of the series. Also, they did something to the heroine's makeup that is completely un-Victorian, but it makes her glow.

There's a scene at the end of the first episode that made a particular impression on me. Margaret is expressing her despair at living in this harsh Northern mill town, "I believe I've seen hell. It's white. It's snow white." Then we are inside a Victorian cotton mill, cotton fluff floating through the air like snow. And the music, oh it's just perfect.

Isn't that beautiful?

reverb10: Action

2010-12-13T15:02:00.000-05:00

Prompt: Action. When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen. What's your next step? (Author: Scott Belsky)

Just for that I plan to go back to bed.

You know, I looked up this Scott Belsky, and low and behold he’s one of these corporate consultants who have some system for encouraging “creative professionals.” It’s all very Fast Company. I’m sure he has an impressive portfolio. I’m sure he has found ways to strengthen ties with clients and spur creative collaboration at all the fast companies he’s dealt with. No doubt there are seminars, workbooks, audio books, think tanks and for all I know desk calendars. He’s really leveraged his talent. He’s made an investment. The lingo of corporate America hearing the ka-ching of profits to be made from its creative geniuses is so icky I want to take a bath.

Prompts like this make it seem that everyone is training to climb Mt. Everest, or dreaming about someday opening that bed and breakfast, or coming up with that new prototype. I don’t know – what do you all dream about? I don’t have a Big Dream. I don’t even have little dreams. I have doctor’s appointments I need to make to take care of my health. I have everyday things that must get done to keep matters moving forward. I have work. I have family life. I have leisure time in which I like to read or write or watch TV. My time is given over to these basic, daily things. I don’t want to publish a book. I don’t want to make my blog lucrative. I don’t want to have a Martha Stewart house. I have no plans to run a marathon. I don’t even want to take up a new hobby.

That is what I need to do: stop scrabbling because the world tells me to scrabble, to achieve, to do, to make something of myself. I just want to wait and see. To let myself be empty sometimes.

reverb10: Wisdom

2010-12-10T12:33:00.000-05:00

Prompt: Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out? via reverb10

I have a bad habit. I tend to let decisions get made rather than make decisions. I hesitate between alternatives. I do research. I falter. Time makes the decision by default, and it seems so much more clear-cut that way.

This haphazard approach means that I often don’t remember decisions, because they evaporate. Of course I make all sorts of decisions on a daily basis. Usually I decide to read rather than do the laundry – that sort of thing. Sometimes the decision to wake up feels monumental. All these little daily decisions nibble at my brain, and I’m quite exhausted.

So I can’t point to any particularly wise decision I made this year. These prompts are beginning to make me feel inadequate.

#reverb10: Party

2010-12-09T17:14:00.000-05:00

Prompt: Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

You have to be joking. I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever connect with these prompts. I am so not a party person. I usually feel out of place, shy, strained and overwhelmed. There is nothing less likely to “rock my socks off” than a party. I much prefer one-on-one conversations, so at social events I tend to glom onto the few people I know well, spiraling into panic if they make any move to leave. Trying to hold conversations with strangers drains me like nothing else. The only times I haven’t felt completely overwhelmed at a party I’ve been either high or drunk, and that was way back in my college days. The two most memorable parties I’ve ever attended date back to then as well. RuPaul showed up at one of them, way back before anyone who knew who he was. He was completely lit and collapsed on a sofa, clutching my friend’s hand and chanting, “My name means Indian soil.” The other was a New Years Eve party in Edinburgh, Scotland, memorable namely because it was so awful I had a temper tantrum. That party was the basis for this bit f writing I posted long ago.

What rocks my socks off? Solitude and a good book. A long conversation with a friend. Sleeping in.

.

#reverb10 - Beautifully Different

2010-12-08T21:18:00.000-05:00

Prompt: Beautifully different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different - you'll find they're what make you beautiful.

I used to dwell on what made me different. When I was in my teens it was a torment, then it became a point of pride, and then I realized it was mostly an illusion.

Different from whom or what? Is there a standard I should reference? I guarantee that whatever traits, talents, neuroses, or idiosyncrasies I were to list, there will be someone out there with the same ones.

I think we insist too much on the importance of our amazing and incredible specialness, our precious uniqueness.

#reverb10: Wonder, Let Go, Make

2010-12-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

Wonder

Prompt: Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

Did you know that a sense of wonder doesn’t relieve depression? I used to think that I didn’t have my attitude of gratitude, or enough curiosity or a cultivated sense of wonder, and that whole idea is crap. My girls are a constant source of wonder. Watching their personalities develop, enjoying their funny and profound comments, just reflecting on their origins as a few cells in my womb, all that is amazing. If I have any illusions that it will make me feel any better, I’m doomed.

Let Go

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

And that is one thing I have to keep letting go, the idea that good things will make me feel better, that trying to be more mindful, for example, will lift depression. It won’t. Struggling too hard is part of my problem. Do you remember the Devil’s Snare in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? The more you struggle the tighter it holds.

I also had to let go my father, and with him what feels like my final ties to childhood. My memories seem more tenuous, tethered to nothing. Only a small, small portion of his life remains as stories, some that he recorded and some that my brothers and I tell each other. I’ve now let him and my mother go, and as much as possible, my regrets that my children will never know them as more than shadowy memories, theirs and my own.

Make

Prompt: Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

The last thing I made was a pan of fudge for work. I looked for the easiest recipe I could find, one that wouldn’t require a candy thermometer or dropping bits of goo into cold water to read the signs. I used butter, milk chocolate chips, and sweetened condensed milk. I don’t know if it’s good – it sounds rather bland and mind-bogglingly sweet. But I had to make something for work to go round a lot of people. I did it with bad grace.

What do I need to make in the next year? There is an ongoing need to clear time for writing. Writing for fun. Dear Husband gets aggravated that I don’t find a way to write for money, and that always grates on me, as if writing is only valuable if it earns its way, if it manifests itself as a book with and advance and royalties and, dare I say, an audience. I’m happy with a very small audience. For years I made do with the audience of myself. Writing for me is a pleasure, but not a frivolous one. Also, I finally need to put 10 years of photos into albums and print out 5 years of photos that exist only in the ether right now. That is something I can give to my children, a map of memories.

Festival of the Light-headed

2010-12-05T17:28:00.000-05:00

I have to say a few words about our Chanukah party last night, because it was a treat for me. I never found time to do yesterday's #reverb10 prompt because we were so busy cleaning and decorating, and I never did finish my cup of coffee. I'll pause and say a big thank you to Trader Joe's, who supplied the latkes. I made latkes by hand once. That's why I opted to buy them this time.

Our neighbors came over, and the family of one of DramaQueen's friends, my friend The Baking Queen, and my old high school friend JPq, who I've decided is an honorary uncle because he makes the girls giggle so much, which is a particularly uncle-ish thing to do.

Dear Husband, who can't help being a teacher, provided instruction in the history of Chanukah, how to light the menorah, and the tradition behind the dreidel. I was eying my hot-out-of-the oven latkes. But all went well. We have two menorahs, one for the kids, so DramaQueen lit that one while I did the grown-up one. My latkes were still nice and warm. The Chanukah miracle this year was that Firecracker liked the latkes. I think she ate two. Dear Husband played dreidel with the kids, and I heard lots of squealing.

But what particular captured my imagination was JPq's description of themed trees. He has one for each room (I would love to see this), and he has a group of friends who have an informal contest for the best themed tree. I heard about a sea-themed tree made from real coral, and a Poseidon Adventure tree (suspended upside down from the ceiling). But best of all, he told me that one of his friends had created a Brideshead Revisited tree! Doesn't that sound awesome? He hung model vintage cars and frames with photos of the characters (from the original miniseries, mind you). I want a Brideshead Revisited Tree. Besides those ornaments, there would be teddy bears, champaigne bottles, a gondola, a wheelchair, a hunting horn, a horse (if possible with someone riding to hounds), something Oxonion, a fountain, a ship and an eternal flame.

What JPq suggested for me is a Sherlock Holmes Tree. Oh, I think that would be splendid! I would have to include both the traditional and modern Sherlock. A magnifying glass (of course), a violin, a pipe, a Persian slipper, a cell phone (pink, if possible), a Ferris wheel (from the current London skyline, which features in the Sherlock opening credits), a microscope, a gun, framed photos of the absolutely adorable contemporary Sherlock and Watson, and what else? Could I find a deer-stalker ornament? Or perhaps a real one as a tree-topper? A syringe, for the famous 7% solution of cocaine the traditional Holmes indulged in? I would have to create a 221B door. A gas street lamp. A cab and a bottle of pills (both from a Study in Pink). What else do you think?

Needless to say, the rest of the family were decidedly unenthusiastic about a Brideshead or Sherlock Christmas tree. In fact, I think there were audible groans. DramaQueen liked one of JPq's other ideas, though, to build a fireplace mantle around a plasma TV tuned to the Yule channel. I think I saw Dear Husband giving JPq the beady eye by that point in the evening.

Moment

2010-12-03T16:40:00.002-05:00

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

On my second day of doing this, I discover that what writing prompts prompt in me is surly irritation. What do you mean, a moment in which I felt most alive? That’s the sort of question that just bugs the crap out of me. This year was flat, flat like a slashed tire. The moments I remember I remember not because I felt most alive, whatever the hell that means, but because I was nettled by creeping anxiety and dread. Creeping anxiety feels like mud dripping down your back– there’s no sense of aliveness in that.

One Word

2010-12-02T22:48:00.000-05:00

December 1 – One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)

I've decided to try participating in #reverb10, an annual event to reflect on the past year and consider what happens next. Each day a writing prompt like the one above is posted.

The first word that springs to mind to describe 2010 is "loss." I lost my father this year. Now both my parents are dead and I feel unmoored and unsafe. I had to once again undergo biopsies. That is becoming a regular event, an annual reminder that I can always lose the left breast as well. And of course I think about mortality. I've lost enthusiasm, spirit, joy, energy.

The word I would like to see emblazoned across 2011 is "inspiration." I need some.

Thanksgiving and Loss

2010-11-29T20:00:00.000-05:00

I was really into the holidays last year. I don’t know why, but my mood was high. Right now I feel as dreary as the grubby grey sky outside my window.

We spent Thanksgiving in Phoenix with Dear Husband’s family. I was really looking forward to seeing Phoenix again. As it turned out, I felt rather ill much of the time. My head ached and my energy dragged. The girls had a great time, as there were kids their age to play with and uncles and grandparents to dote on them. One evening I heard the girls calling “grandpa” and a terrible sense of loss crushed me. “Grandpa” is Dear Husband’s father. Their other grandpa is dead, only vaguely remembered really. He won’t see DramaQueen and Firecracker come of age. My mother died before Firecracker was thought of, and DramaQueen doesn’t remember her at all.

I asked one of my brothers, the one who lived closest to my father, to stay with us at Christmas so that he wouldn’t be alone. My family is so odd. My brothers are tight. They are close in age and far older than me, off on their own by the time I was born. My mom was the one who kept everyone connected. She remembered the birthdays. She told me what was up with my brothers and told them what was up with me. Because, simply, they don’t think about me. At least, not very often. You could argue that I haven’t made much effort to stay in touch (true enough), but you can also say that they haven’t made much effort, either. One of my brothers lives not much more than 30 minutes from me and I never see him. The last time I did (at our dad’s funeral) he told me amusing stories about his friend’s two year old. I thought, “You have nieces, actual nieces. We’ve been living here for 6 years and they’ve been bloody adorable and amusing the whole time.”

And so it was, that I found myself surrounded by my husband’s family, and felt the loss of my own.

Now that's some damn good water

2010-11-17T14:14:00.000-05:00

Well bust my buttons, but I ran across an ad campaign today that was very, ah, intriguing. It's for Perrier. I can imagine after a while it becomes difficult to effectively promote bottled water. It's a bit of a luxury item (at least Perrier thinks it is) but, heh, water - how basic can you get? Enter the advertising firm Ogilvy.

I'm not well-versed in burlesque, so I had to Google Dita Von Teese. Never stop learning - that's my motto.

If you are inclined, you can visit the Perrier Mansion and have a look around. Several times.

The very definition of a come-hither look.

Is this sexist? Do I care? Will I be more likely to buy Perrier? Doubtful, but I am tempted to get a veil.

“Is that a British Army Browning L9A1 in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

2010-11-10T20:00:00.003-05:00

"I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high functioning sociopath. Do your research." - Sherlock

I. Want. That. Coat.

I recently saw the last episode of the BBC Sherlock series, and I am so full of delight that it naturally spills over into boring everyone to death with my enthusiasm. Sometimes you encounter a work of art (I guess some folks would not call a TV show a work of art, but I will) and it makes you all giddy and happy and astounded at the immense creativity of everyone involved. It reminds me that when I was younger I would sometimes literally tremble while reading a particularly wonderful book or watching a movie that had entranced me. Tremble. I don’t do that so much anymore, and perhaps it’s a shame. But I still get a rush from such encounters, and boy did I get a rush watching Sherlock.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to catch the series, you can still view it on PBS Masterpiece - just go here. Sherlock has been re-imagined into the 21st century. He was already making use of forensics in the Victorian era, and now he has at his disposal more sophisticated forensic analysis and access to the latest technology. John Watson is back from the war in Afghanistan, assigned by his shrink to blog about his traumatic experience, but his real problem is sheer boredom. They meet and immediately begin to weave that wonderful symbiotic bond that is so quintessentially Holmes and Watson.

The actors playing Sherlock and Watson OWNED those roles. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is brilliant, abrasive, manipulative, socially oblivious one moment and calculating the next, sometimes predatory and a bit scary. (As an aside, the moment he walked on screen, Dear Husband exclaimed, “He’s cute!” That’s the first time he’s ever beaten me to the punch in that regard. He is very cute, with his floppy, curly dark hair. Cumberbatch is not what I would call conventionally handsome, but he looks smashing). Freeman’s Watson is just adorable. And by adorable I mean hot. Really hot. You might not think so at first, but, um, give it time. He has such an expressive face, such wonderful comedic presence. He makes it believable that an average self-respecting man would put up with a sociopath like Sherlock. He’s never overshadowed. Best. Watson. Ever. And Moriarty – well, I think I watched him with my jaw hanging open. Not everyone liked the actor’s take on him, but I thought it was original and definitely frightening. What some found over the top, I found eerie and creepy. It seemed clear that Moriarty’s performance was deliberately pitched to freak out everyone. Usually he takes pains to blend in, but in revealing himself to Sherlock he unleashes all his mockery and venom.

Everyone thinks the other guy's the hot one.

Why do you think Sherlock Holmes remains such a favorite character? I know I’m not the first to ask that question. I’ve never read much on the subject, and I’m sure there’s lots of speculation. Perhaps he was just one of the first detectives, and the detective genre has never fallen out of favor, lucky for Doyle. Among the Victorians, detectives must have stood as an example of the scientific method – science seemed to alternately enthrall and horrify them. The worship of reason remains strongly embedded in Western culture, so Holmes remains fresh and contemporary, and therefore so amenable to being transferred to the 21st century, as the writers have done in Sherlock.

And Sherlock, why is he so appealing? He’s not very nice. He’s cold and aloof. He’s often condescending and unappreciative. Cases are puzzles; he’s oblivious to the human element. He uses everyone around him. What exactly keeps him from jumping the wall and becoming a Moriarty isn’t really clear. A good English upbringing? A whim? The Sherlock series highlights the similarities between the two – Moriarty is Sherlock’s doppelganger. Both are brilliant, cold, calculating, and manipulative and both harbor an abhorrence of boredom and a craving for distraction, mental challenges, and a worthy opponent. A police officer warns Watson that she wouldn’t be surprised if Sherlock one day showed up as the criminal rather than the detective. There but for the grace of Watson goes Sherlock. Sherlock is the mind and Watson is the heart and moral center. Pure, cold science is made fit (or at least tolerable) for civilization, harnessed for good rather than evil.

There has been some speculation around the Sherlock series that Watson and Sherlock are gay, because everyone seems to speculate about such matters these days. Have we ever lived in a time more focused on gayness? Who is, who isn’t, how can you tell, is it good, is it bad, what do they do in bed and can we watch? Maybe it’s the final frontier. The writers and actors have stated that Watson and Holmes aren’t a couple, although in a contemporary setting the characters surrounding them would be bound to speculate or assume, so that is written in. Cumberbatch has called the relationship a bromance, which is as good a description as any, I suppose. As you watch, though, you’ll find the writers are pretty damn playful. When a restaurant owner mistakes Watson for Holmes’s date, Watson tries to correct him and Sherlock … does nothing. Maybe he doesn’t care enough to correct the mistake. Maybe it amuses him. Maybe he rather likes it. Maybe he didn’t even notice. Moriarty, in contrast, is deliberately campy – “Is that a British Army Browning L9A1 in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?” His snaky flirtation is a goad, as if he were saying: Admit it, Sherlock, you find my villainy irresistibly attractive. Resistance is futile; I will seduce you to the dark side. Mwaahaahaa.

For my part, looking back to the original stories, I’ve always thought that Holmes was in love with Watson, within his limited understanding of love. Watson seemed to regard Holmes with something like hero worship and feel a responsibility to take care of him. Whatever. It doesn’t matter, because the Internet is littered with fanfic shipping Sherlock and Watson. The people have spoken and taken matters into their own hands. I can’t read fan fiction; it makes me feel squirmy. Some things really don’t need to be spelled out. Subtext, folks, learn to appreciate it.

And really, friendship is a big enough challenge for Sherlock. It’s lovely to see that develop in the series. At one point, in response to Watson’s criticism, Sherlock says, “You’re disappointed in me…Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist, and if they did I wouldn’t be one of them.” The ending of the last episode is particularly sweet, when Sherlock struggles to express his admiration for Watson’s heroic actions. I think Sherlock is so used to thinking of himself as a sociopath that he is rather surprised to find himself caring about anyone. And alarmed. After all, it will be used against him, as Moriarty insinuates.

Jim Moriarty: "I will burn the heart out of you."
Sherlock: "I have been reliably informed that I don't have one."
Jim Moriarty: "Oh, but we both know that's not quite true."

Sherlock, your gun is so big!

We’ve been left on a cliff-hanger. Well, of course Sherlock and Watson have to survive, but still. Is this the Reichenbach Falls? So soon? In fact, the final scene was so excellent– the resolution withheld in a moment of supreme tension – you almost want to preserve it forever. Almost. I wish I could link to just that final scene, but I can’t. It might spoil your fun, anyway. If you insist, you can go here to play the Great Game episode and select the last scene in the scrolling menu below the main screen to experience the full awesomeness.

ooooo, I found out how to embed this portion of the video. Thank you PBS:

Watch the full episode. See more Masterpiece.

A final comment: that coat Sherlock is wearing – I want one.

Zombies and Faeries and Not Enough Candy (for me)

2010-11-08T14:29:00.000-05:00

Our neighborhood sucks at Halloween. We never stay at home handing out candy. Not many people come by, and I always worry that the ones who do could be planning a home invasion. The street by our house is spooky, but not playfully seasonally spooky. I would not be surprised to come home one day to find the entire street closed off by police cars. On the surface our area looks fine. I’ve just never felt like scratching the surface.

So we go to other neighborhoods to trick or treat. A mere few blocks away is a neighborhood where people actually know each other. They even have their own Facebook page. DramaQueen’s best friend ArtistChild lives there, so we weaseled our way into the community trick or treat caravan. ArtistChild’s family have lived in the neighborhood for 11 years and seem to know everyone. We’ve lived in our neighborhood for 3 years and know the neighbors to the right and left. The others seem to live in an alternate reality and have figured out how to teleport in and out of their houses, because we never see them. We got election fliers addressed to at least 5 different people who have lived at our address – we are a neighborhood of transients and hermits.

There's nothing like a home-cooked meal

DramaQueen was a zombie housewife this year. We put her hair in curlers and tied a “bloody” bandage around here hair. She wore an apron splattered with more fake blood and carried a skillet with a bloody brain. That brain was a piece of inspired work, I can tell you. At first I planned to use a cauliflower, but I discovered that cauliflower is friggin heavy. So I found some white playdoh and crafted a very nice brain. I cherish these few moments of ingenuity and accomplishment. We covered her face and arms in sickly grey and black makeup and added more blood. She was fabulous.

FireCracker, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with scary costumes. She was even nervous around her zombie sister. FireCracker was a faery (not a fairy, which is the boring US version). We made use of DramaQueen’s old drama costumes and added some sparkly wings. The wings ended up being larger than Firecracker and were something of a hazard all night, particularly on stairs, where they tended to wonk other kids who were trying to leave.

Not many faeries wear such sporty shoes

ArtistChild went as a Goth, wearing a costume that looked like something I wore back in college. It’s sad when you can find part of your past for sale at Party City.

In the past we’ve usually gone to these planned neighborhoods with all the houses close together and little handkerchief front lawns. You could cover a lot of candy territory very quickly. This year I hadn’t counted on walking a half acre just to get to the door. It seemed annoyingly inefficient.

As the night wore on the teenagers came out. I know some people are really annoyed by trick or treating teenagers. I don’t see why, as long as they are actually in costume and aren’t being jerks. Some of them girls were a little, ah, robust for their costumes, but they seemed to be having fun.

This year the girls made us swear oaths not to touch their candy without them being present. They think we’re sneaky thieves, which we are. Now we’re grumpy reformed thieves. And this year DramaQueen traded her peanut candies, which I usually can count on getting, with ArtistChild. I had to make do with Almond Joys, which I guess no one wants.

Diorama Dramarama

2010-10-29T16:05:00.002-05:00

There’s a law that every school child must create a diorama at some point. It’s as necessary a rite of passage as the volcano belching baking soda and vinegar lava. Somehow I never did either of those. I spent a lot of time diagramming sentences instead. You see where that got me.

DramaQueen’s language arts teacher likes creative book reports. Last year we had to create a cereal box with a prize inside, a diorama and a puppet show. We will no doubt have the same lineup again this year. I say “we” because we all know that these sorts of projects are never lone ventures. In fact, the end result can tell you a lot about the child’s mother.

For example, DramaQueen has a friend whose mother is an artist. ArtistChild’s puppet theater actually looked like a puppet theater, with real fabric curtains. ArtistChild is also busy converting her old dollhouse into a fairy dwelling, complete with moss on the roof and little ladders made from twigs, in case the fairies need to climb instead of fly. I didn’t look, but I suspect there may be a tea set made from acorns. I’m not sure which would surprise me more, the second coming of Christ or DramaQueen creating a fairy cottage.

You see, DramaQueen is a lot like me in some ways. I am not a crafty or artistic person. The scrapbooking section of Michaels awakens in me feelings of insecurity and despair. When I was a child a scrapbook was a hodgepodge of stuff you liked stuck on with Elmer’s, in a ratty book with non-archival Manila paper. Now you can select hundreds of types of paper, ribbons, notions, decorative hole punches, stickers, and special pens. You can buy something called a Cricut that costs several hundred dollars just so you can, well, do something fancy that I don’t understand. It’s all acid free and archival quality, so after the nuclear fallout, the visiting aliens will find a thriving colony of cockroaches scuttling over a fine collection of scrapbooks.

So I feel a certain amount of dread when one of these projects looms on the horizon. This most recent one was for the book Things Unseen. DramaQueen decided to do a bathroom scene, when the protagonist first discovers he’s invisible.

Did you get that? – Invisible. Hold that thought.

In the good old days, you made stuff for a diorama. My first stop was the Internet, to see how one might go about making a set of bathroom furnishings. I discovered one site where a person (I assume a person, but I wouldn’t be surprised by an alien) had constructed a toilet from an empty soap box, the neck of a drinkable yoghurt bottle, and some doodad they found at Lowe’s. I was immediately struck by three things: (1) we don’t use bar soap; (2) we don’t drink yoghurt; (3) that person made a special trip to Lowe’s to look for just the right doodad to make a toilet lid.

Riiiiiiight, I thought, and off we went to Toys R Us to price toy bathrooms. Thirteen dollars saved my sanity, and Firecracker will inherit the bathroom so that her stuffed monkey can use the facilities.

Some might think that’s cheating. Well, bite me. We were going to need all our latent creative skill to build an invisible person.

Just so we didn’t completely neglect the handmade touch, I printed out dollhouse wall paper and tiles. God, I love the Internet. Wait, I suppose that’s not really very hand-made, either. Bite me. Oh, I said that already.

Inspiration hit me when we took the bathroom furniture out of the box, the box with the clear plastic viewing window. Ha – take that crafty people! We traced a vaguely boyish shape onto the plastic and – voila – we had an invisible boy. By “we” I mean “me”; DramaQueen was busy writing a summary, a character study and a book review – you know, the part of the project that actually demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of the book.

As I said, these projects tell you a lot about the student’s mom. I’m lazy. I believe saving time and frustration is money well-spent. I think shortcuts are essential for focusing on the central issue, and the central issue here is learning about a book and not how to papier mache a toilet. Finally, at some point I usually luck into a creative solution to a problem. Someone else’s problem, that is.

This morning DramaQueen carefully packed up her diorama and took it to school. I hope we get an “A.”

Spooky

2010-10-19T20:02:00.000-05:00

The other night Dear Husband and I were watching a show and conversing when he said, “Oh, will I be seeing a picture of him on your blog soon?” And, you know, that annoyed me just the teensiest bit, and so I’ve decided it’s about time for another edition of Extraordinarily Hot Men. Or man, in the case. After all, Dear Husband has been known to reflect on the attractions of Ms. Meagan Fox. I. feel justified. And Megan Fox – seriously? I was kind of hoping for more originality from him. Men can be very predicable. On the other hand, he thinks Zachary Quinto would be worth switching teams for, so I give him points for that.

Onward. We were watching MI5 (Spooks in the UK), the sort of show I would normally enjoy, but for some reason I had not been able to keep up with the twisty plotlines. And then one day I perked up. “That’s Guy of Guisbane,” I said. “Huh?” said Dear Husband. “He was in Robin Hood.” Dear Husband feels none of the simple pleasure I experience when I make connections. I am as delighted as the toddler who finds two shapes that both fit through the same slot on the sorting box.

So, this is Richard Armitage, who can hit a lot of notes on the scale of Dark and Brooding. I’m a big fan of Dark and Brooding when it’s done well. When it’s done badly you end up with Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, petulant and powder-faced. In Robin Hood Armitage played the bad guy. You could tell right away that he was the bad guy because he wore a lot of leather, and hence he creaked ominously whenever he moved.

I love a man in a high starched collar

He also appeared in North and South, which I have not yet found time to watch. The novel is on my ereader, and I’m really trying to get through it. Elizabeth Gaskell is not, in my opinion, the most congenial writer. Sometimes I’ll run across some bit of infelicitous verbiage and go “Ack!” She was very popular in her lifetime, I think. Maybe she was the Nora Roberts of her day. That’s not the best analogy, but Nora Roberts is one of the few popular women novelists I’ve actually read. But novels with infelicitous turns of phrase can still make excellent film and TV, because the script writers can chop out everything but the dialogue and everyone gets to wear period clothing and carry on romances in that very restrained and sexy way so common to period dramas, culminating with the all important screen kiss, which looks fairly anachronistic to me. Seriously, I sometimes wonder if anyone ever actually french kissed back then, before they married. Maybe even after they married. Did they even get to kiss at all? From what I’ve read courting couples were so closely monitored that they spent most of their time in drawing rooms while great aunt Gertrude darned socks, with possibly a peck under the kissing ball at Christmas. Unless you were lower class. Then I think you got to hump in alleyways after a few swigs of gin.

In any case, from what I’ve seen of stills and such from North and South, Richard Armitage can totally rock a high collar and sideburns. There aren’t many men you can say that about. He looks spectacularly elegant, as if he were born in a waistcoat. Those were the days when men thought grooming and attire went beyond a pair of flip flops and an old T-shirt.

In MI5 Armitage plays a good guy, at least on the episodes I’ve seen. When you least expect it, someone else turns out to be a double agent or a mole, which gives the writers free reign to tart up a character when they get bored, I guess. From the constant stream of assassinations, bombs and chemical weapons, I get the impression that the only thing keeping Britain from complete annihilation is MI5. Never a slow day. There isn’t a lot of eye candy on MI5. Everyone looks a bit clipped and pinched or faded and paunchy. And then there’s Armitage in all his brooding glory.

I thought of including a fanvid from the great shopping mall of fanvids, YouTube (How do people find the time to concoct these things?). Then I thought, that’s so giddy teenage fangirl - have some dignity. Then I thought, feck, who am I kidding?

Happy Belated Coming Out Day

2010-10-13T20:58:00.000-05:00

So I was sitting at work feeling down and eating popcorn when I thought, “Monday was National Coming Out Day. I should have at least acknowledged it on my blog.” Not that I’ve acknowledged it any year previously. I don’t imagine anyone who reads my blog has the slightest issue with homosexuality, so it wasn’t as if I’m offering a public service announcement. But there have been all those recent suicides as a result of bullying and those videos about how it gets better (which I think is a good all-purpose message for high schoolers in general).

I think, on the one hand, of how much more open society is about homosexuality than when I was a teen, and on the other hand how much more pervasive and violent bullying is among kids. As the openness has increased, the nasty vitriol of the opposition has increased. I witnessed plenty of name calling and taunting in high school, but if anyone was getting beat up or lived in terror of physical harm, I didn’t know about it. Not that a constant barrage of verbal abuse doesn't work its own damage. Of course I knew gay kids. Or, rather, I knew and didn’t know, because I had my own shit to deal with first and foremost, and what other people were up to definitely took a back seat to my own drama.

My parents partook of the general cultural homophobia. So my mom was gently homophobic (“What a shame!” would be her response) and my dad more vehemently so (“They recruit kids. They do disgusting things.”). From some comments my mom made (not always the most reliable source, my mom) I gather that my dad had been pretty concerned about one of my eldest brother’s friendships. That would have been back in the 50s, so I can imagine that didn’t go well. For whatever reason, their opinions did not rub off on me. I simply did not understand why anyone would be uptight about it. It seemed such an odd point of contention. I never at any point bought the religious arguments against it. This is one of those areas where I simply cannot see the opposition’s point of view, for that point of view has wreaked such devastation. If God himself came down and told me homosexuality was wrong, I would say, “What is WRONG with YOU?” Not that I was any sort of outspoken activist as a teen – I pretty much avoided speaking about anything, much less anything controversial.

I wonder what the gay kids at my school really went through. Maybe I didn’t know the half of it. Maybe the name calling was just the littlest part of what really happened. What would I have done if I’d fallen in love with a girl then? I don’t know. Such a possibility never even occurred to me, although I wasn’t exactly okay with heterosexual relations, either. I know I definitely would not have been out and proud. It would have been one more secret, like my depression and cutting.

I work for an organization that believes homosexuality is wrong. I’ve made a sort of pact with the devil, I guess, to keep employment, telling myself that it’s just one tiny aspect of the overall picture, not their main focus. I’m used to hiding what I think, about more than just this issue. I have my own closet, I guess. There’s a confession. I’m complicit.

For anyone who doesn’t know about the Trevor Project, here is a link. It’s a suicide hotline for LGBTQ (Q for questioning) teens.

Chris Colfer for The Trevor Project - It Gets Better from The Trevor Project on Vimeo.

I Can't Stop Feeling This Feeling I've Got

2010-10-09T19:05:00.024-05:00

Hi everyone, time for musical association. This is being done imperfectly because although these videos say they allow sharing on Blogger, the moment you try to put them into a post, you get an "embedding disabled" message. That sucks, folks. Are you listening Parlaphone and Mercury? It sucks a big one. So, you may see an image, but you'll have to go over to YouTube to actually watch it. Because, you know, that makes such a big fucking difference somehow. *shakes fist at idiotic music labels*

Ahem.

It began with this tune by Razorlight tapping itself out in my head. Sounds like England to me. England has a bright, happy melody. I first heard this song in a British soap opera, and it stuck like a burr, perhaps because the storyline is about making a decision of the heart. Even though it isn’t that old, the song makes me think of the England of Summer 1989, when I lived there for a few months. Gainsborough clouds, pints of lager, lots of cigarettes. Love. First love. Exuberant, ebullient, gossamer.

When I was in England that summer, I bought a print of Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallot. I love the Pre-Raphaelites, that strange nostalgic, opiate tinged Victorian extravaganza, and this video looks like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. Also, you might have noticed that I love Alice in Wonderland.

Thinking about Florence reminded me of another artist I had heard of and meant to investigate: Bat for Lashes. Why that name, I wonder? Florence and Bat both have a flair for the dramatic that I appreciate. And they’re pretty. I would totally stutter and blush if either said anything to me. I’m such a school girl.

So that's it, folks. Go buy their music, attend their concerts, fantasize about them naked. Maybe not that. It's up to you.

Elementary, my very very very dear Watson

2010-10-06T20:49:00.001-05:00

I haven’t been nearly sociable enough lately. That’s pretty much the way I am in person, too, always the wall flower. I’m more sociable online than off. I don’t tend to talk at length in person, as I do here. Here I can ramble on without any interruptions. One-sided conversations really suit me. Aren’t you lucky?

So, let me begin. I saw Sherlock Holmes the other night, the one with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. Thank you, Redbox, for cheap entertainment. When I first saw the trailer for this I was horrified. Honestly, Robert Downey Jr? Puhlease. And what was all this jumping and fighting and general Indiana Jonesish folderal? Who was this wise-cracking, tattered creature and where was the severe, cold detective? Oh, desecration!

But you know what? It was awesome.

What I had at first dismissed as a cheap attempt to transform Holmes into an action hero I finally decided was an astute interpretation that aligned very well with the fictional character. Sherlock Holmes was a boxer with an interest in the martial arts. Boxing is brutal, and you have to be very strong, muscular and aggressive. Portrayals of SH have usually focused on his mental prowess, but he would have to be a very physically fit and powerful man. I was used to thinking of him as purely cerebral, and in those old illustrations he seemed so gentlemanly. I imagined him as rather calm. That’s really off base if you consider that he liked to shoot bullets into his wall when he was bored, and he was shooting up cocaine (I didn’t notice any direct mention of cocaine in the movie, but he was definitely high a couple of times). As a young reader, I didn’t really know about the effects of cocaine. I found out later -- SH would have most likely talked non-stop and been climbing up with walls with energy. So I was willing to accept Downey’s more exuberant SH, particularly as the writers left him with his brain intact. Of course I had to reconcile myself to Downey’s overwhelming American-ness. His accent bothered Dear Husband. I didn’t really notice. Either his accent was very good or it wasn’t there at all and I simple accepted the default American one, or I was too busy admiring how rather fine he looked both in and out of clothes. He wasn’t very arrogant though.. He was almost cuddly. SH was not cuddly. In my memories of the story, Watson came across as something of a hero-worshiping amateur and sometimes bumbler. In the movie he is far more astute and skilled at forensics and detection, and he's a top-notch fighter. Even Lestrade shows some unexpected skill, which seems out of character. I was a little disappointed in Irene Adler. Who wants a softer, gentler Irene, anyway? She needs to contact her inner bitch.

The plot was rather silly, but heavens, why not Scooby Doo goes Victorian? It was perfect - like one of the penny dreadfuls. Victorians loved that paranormal stuff. Doyle became a great enthusiast of séances and spiritualism, and a number of stories were about seemingly supernatural events that concluded with rational explanations. The explanation was nearly as loopy as the fiction, but, well, you got to see some really good explosions and top-notch fights, concluding with a fantastic scrap on top of a bridge, and the bad guy is punished and justice prevails, hurrah. I half expected the villain to say, “And I would have gotten away with it except for those pesky kids!” Great choice of villain, too. I didn’t know Victorian clothes could make someone look so much like a snake.

The directors and writers seemed to enjoy queering the relationship. I gather Downey mentioned something to that effect in an interview and caused all sorts of squeeing. I thought his Holmes was most definitely in love with Watson, and Watson seemed rather domesticated. (Sure Holmes is fond of Irene and Watson has a fiancé, but there seemed to be a time when British men bonked each other until it became inconvenient. Then they got married and ran for Parliament, producing more heirs to fill Eton and carry on the bonking.) Holmes and Watson bicker like a married couple, and Holmes is testy and irritable because Watson is getting married and moving out of their shared digs, and he does what he can to sabotage the relationship.

Ah, Victorian bromance.

Everyone knows from the trailer the scene with Downey handcuffed naked to a bed with a pillow over his privates, telling the chambermaid where to find the key. Funny, yes, in a broad way. Very broad. The film was peppered with slyer innuendos and low-key sexual banter aimed at Watson. When, for instance they are all about to be sliced open by a band saw, and Holmes unbuckles Watson’s belt, chiding him to not get excited. It goes by so quickly (I mean, hey, band saw approaching) it likely barely registered with the audience. Or when Watson and his fiance find Holmes hanging from the rafters, demonstrating how the villain survived his execution. “Please, Watson, my tongue is going, soon I will be of no use to you at all.”

SHERLOCK HOLMES: It's a Band Saw. Watch more top selected videos about: Sherlock Holmes (2009 film), Rachel McAdams

I remember when reading the stories how happy I was when Holmes finally revealed an emotional attachment to Watson. Watson was pretty much floored himself. I didn’t like the idea that SH might just like having someone stupid around to make him look even more brilliant. I know Doyle wrote Holmes as an asexual Babbage machine, but an asexual hero is rather dull, so as a young girl I reimagined him as having untold passionate depths. Why not have him in love with his best friend? Oh, and by the way, both Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law look mm mm good. Who knew Jude Law could rock a stache?

Soon another Sherlock is coming to PBS, a retelling of the stories in a contemporary setting. From the preview Holmes seems appropriately acerbic and arrogant, sort of like Gregory House (who was himself based on Sherlock) but with even fewer social skills. I’ve heard good things about it, and I find it difficult not to like an actor with a name like Benedict Cumberbatch. I had to look that up, by the way, because I can never remember his name. Camberbatch, Bandercatch, Bandercrutch - and I can guarantee that tomorrow I will once again have misplaced all the syllables. I keep thinking of cummerbunds.

Ah, yet another post with no nutritional value. Just candy.

Flippant Friday: theology, pretty boys and, yes, more vampires

2010-09-17T15:37:00.000-05:00

What would happen if I tried to write something on here every day? Would there be a point? I don’t know, but I feel an edgy twisty sort of urge to write something today, and you, dear readers, benefit.

This morning while I was working on a really dull updating project, I listened to Peter Rollins being interviewed by Rob Bell. I love Peter Rollins. He’s my favorite theologian, primarily because he’s the only theologian I’ve almost read. Actually, I’ve also almost read McLaren, but you see Rollins has an Irish accent. Everyone should talk about God with an Irish accent. I love English accents, but theology just sounds softer and more approachable with a brogue.

In general I avoid reading theology and philosophy because my brain is already fully occupied pondering such things as what’s going to happen to Sookie Stackhouse and her vampire friends next. This would be a good point at which to insert a completely unnecessary picture of Alexander Skarsgard, because that’s how my brain works, skittering across the superficial.

What Peter says about doubt resonates deeply with me, and it’s also really irritating, because resonating carries a frisson of being on the verge of an answer, but of course there aren’t answers. It’s the same tickly feeling you get from reading a koan. I also think that any time I ever want to experience true conviction of sin, I only need to listen to him talk about how we reveal our true selves in our material existence. My inner world has never felt more phony. Hell, here’s a photo of Pete, too.

I’ve also been “reading” (note those quotes – reading nonfiction involves a lot of skimming and skipping back and forth between chapters) The Upside of Irrationality. So far I’ve learned that people mate roughly within their own range of attractiveness – 10s with 10s (for example, Alexander Skarsgard and Kate Bosworth, Peter Rollins and God), 4s with 4s and so on. Since everyone prefers 10s, those of us in the lower ranges have to reprioritize the traits we look for in a mate, you know, like booting “sense of humor” up over “six-pack abs.” I found this mildly depressing.

In other news, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the film Let Me In. The book is awesome and creepy. I saw the Swedish version of the film (Let the Right One In), which was probably great, but we somehow got hold of a dubbed version, so we had to listen to bad American voice talent, which really distracted me from the brutality, blood and anatomical anomalies. Here’s the trailer for the new American version.

And there you have today's edition. Now I need to locate some fair-trade coffee and a community.

You're Such a Sisyphus

2010-09-16T14:04:00.000-05:00

Some days everything comes to a screeching halt and I wonder, “What am I doing? This is so not what I need.” I have no idea what I need. Well, “no idea” is perhaps too strong. I know that I need some sort of change. I need some sort of change yet I don’t have the energy to make one. I don’t know what change to make, exactly. There is a disconnect between my heart and my work that I put up with for various reasons, good reasons. I’m more real here than in the real world, where I play dress-up.

Dear Husband sometimes hints that I should find a way to make a living writing. Only thing is, I don’t enjoy the sorts of careers that writers have. I don’t want to be a journalist or a novel writer or write marketing copy or greeting cards. I don’t want to start showing up at open mikes or writers groups. I suppose if I had lived in a previous century, I would have been an epistolary writer, one of those correspondents who wrote amusing and interesting letters to entertain friends. Ephemeral, or by some trick of fate bound and preserved for dusty researches. Blogging seems to be an open letter to whomever happens by. You know, Emily Dickenson would have made an excellent blogger. She could have stayed holed up in her Amherst home and written oddly punctuated posts.

I can’t help but think that somehow I missed the point, that I failed in dedication to the craft, that I lacked nerve, though I have thought that my nerve would not have failed had I known in what direction to point myself. We all need a foundation of meaning to support our actions. I’ve always been amazed at and envious of people who had goals and plans and were able to embrace them as if they mattered. I say “as if” because my perception is always undergirded with a profound sense of futility. I am aware of it even in moments of happiness. I live “as if” – as if there were some reason we are born and die, some purpose to raising a family, some purpose to all the many pleasures we pursue. Some people turn to God for meaning. Our purpose is to glorify God. That just baffles me. Why would there be a God whose be-all and end-all was to be glorified? That sounds so profoundly anemic I can’t wrap my head around it. Why on earth would that be a satisfying endeavor?

I am not alone, of course. On the other hand, I know many people who have never experienced this. They’ve known deep despair and grief, sure, but not this . . . blankness.

I feel a great kinship with the writer of Ecclesiastes, up until he starts prattling on about serving God, which sounds as half-hearted and joyless as his lines of existential despair. There you are, then; we either keep muddling along or we kill ourselves. I’ve known people who chose the latter. But I like this world, I like all the beauty of the earth and other people, and it would take a huge blow to make me consider leaving early.

I have the existentialist belief that we create meaning in the face of chaos. I’m not very good at it. It’s just so exhausting. Camus was so spot on. Everyday – actually, moment by moment – I’m rolling a rock up a hill. Then it rolls back down and I start over. The existentialists thought that was sort of heroic, maybe because they were all crazy Frenchmen. They get drunk on ideas, even the depressing ones.

Blood and Apples

2010-09-13T18:38:00.000-05:00

We went apple picking this weekend. At least that was our intention. We ended up at an orchard / playground / store hybrid with a bouncing pillow for the kids, a pig race, a petting zoo, cow milking, clogging demonstrations, a really bad singer and lots of fried food.

The petting zoo was the perfect setting for highlighting our girls’ urban tastes. Other kids were letting goats eat out of their hands. The baby goats freaked out Firecracker, who didn’t want them jumping on her. DramaQueen got some feed and then dumped it on the ground (“I don’t want goat saliva on my hands!). They spent most of their time cuddling some new kittens.

We went through a moonshine “museum” – basically a random collection of items that remain a mystery, but which are somehow involved in producing moonshine. This was a “bring your own information” museum. The displays gradually transitioned to various tableaux from the old-timey days. Many items I remembered seeing in my grandparents’ house – old flat irons, a foot pedaled Singer sewing machine, a butter churn. The girls evinced zero curiosity about any of it, as they were eager to find the “giant slide” which turned out to be not so particularly giant after all, and not very slide-y either. When the bungee jump turned out to be $7, and we refused to pay up, DramaQueen gave into general disillusionment.

I was going to suggest ears of corn to eat, until I saw the flies happily dancing over them. I saw some people walking around with turkey legs, and I wondered about the possibility of food poisoning. We finally settled on eating some deep-fried spiral potatoes (which went some way to cheering up DramaQueen) while watching a clogging demonstration. Why do cloggers wear such ridiculous looking outfits? 70 year old women in super-short crinoline skirts and big hair bows – it’s just too easy to ridicule. I gather lots of professional clogging troupes wear more graceful skirts, so maybe it’s peculiar to the backwoods or something. Seriously, these skirts were so short and so stiff with crinoline underskirts it was if the dancers were wearing calico UFOs around their waists. And then one of the younger groups did a routine to a Kate Perry song. Watching cloggers do their thing to the lyrics “you PMS like a girl, I should know” dressed in frilly hillbilly skirts added a surreal touch to the day.

The whole time I had a headache that would not go away. We wandered in the orchard looking for Cameo apples (just behind the weather station, a sign directed, although what exactly a weather station was supposed to look like, I don’t know, and we never found them). We did find apples we had never heard of before - “Arkansas Black” - and inquired at a booth about its flavor – “I don’t know. I don’t eat apples.” Huh.

We came home with apples we mostly found in the orchard store. And, small victory, we got out of there without having to use the port-a-potties.

Happily, my headache was gone in time for (sudden change of topic ahead) the season finale of True Blood, which was strangely bloodless. Literally and figuratively. The supporting characters were as annoying as gnats buzzing around but not getting anywhere. Terry is crying because he’s so durn happy (and I’m watching in disbelief as minute after minute ticks by while Sam and Terry actually pursue a conversation about this). Crystal’s a white-trash panther and an idiot. Jason is left charge of a trashy, inbred bit of wereland. Lafayette is freaking out. Jesus is a brujo (well, duh). Sam is poised to shoot his idiot thieving brother. Hoyt’s mom buys a gun. Tara bobs her hair and heads out of town. Whatev. On the main stage, the King of Mississippi looks like a sack of cinders. He's kind of…ruffly. I could really have done without the extra crispy makeup, but the camera lingers over every charred flake. On a positive note, we are now rid of the urn of gooey vampire remains of the King’s former lover. Sookie pours Talbot down the garbage disposal, flipping the switch with a little psycho giggle. That seemed out of character, but perhaps she was just as tired of looking at it as I was. I mean, really, a clear urn for vampire guts is just tacky.

Eric is all vengeful yet noble, then noble and forgiving, then vengeful again, and then buried in wet cement, and then not buried but really mad, then dusty grey but still looking hot on Sookie’s front porch where he finally tells her what he could just as well have told her many episodes back and for unknown reasons didn’t, that Bill is a bad bad boy. So bad you almost forget that Eric staked the King’s lover while having sex with him (and I would really think twice about staking a vampire in that situation, because the mess is TREMENDOUS). Even badder than in the books. So far in the books Bill has not tried to bury Eric in the foundations of a building or kill the Queen of Louisiana because he has “nothing left to lose”. In the books he’s busy creating a database of vampires. Yes, a database. In response to Sookie’s rejection he begins dating a real estate agent. Yeah, I guess I can see why the script writers decided to go a different direction with his character.

The finale ended with Sookie disappearing into faeryland, at which point all the air went out of the tires. Woaa, she’s in a perfectly safe place surrounded by creatures who intend only good for her. I’m biting my nails, I tell you. I would be rather cranky if it weren’t for all 6 ft 4 inches of Eric Northman, who is, as was heralded with all the subtlety of a bullhorn, being set up to learn forgiveness in Season 4, no doubt while being naked quite a bit.

from www.ericandsookie.com

The better, the good, and the somewhat less than optimal

2010-09-08T12:01:00.000-05:00

First off, my biopsy came back just fine. For this news I should be doing a dance and feeling all sorts of happy, but instead I’m kinda like, “meh.” I’m that wore out.

The surgery itself went fine, except that it took four determined sticks to get an IV into me. I’m very grateful for the numbing medicine the inject beforehand, but really there’s not much that can take away the sensation of an inanimate object rubbing against the small bones in your hand. My hand is now an ugly mottled yellow/blue. But whatever they gave me to take away my anxiety also took away my consciousness. Usually they try to keep you alert enough to help them out in the surgery by scooching onto the operating table, but I don’t remember anything. I did dream something fairly peculiar, of lying under those big surgery lamps, watching nurses tote around crocheted afghans and doilies. Then I felt myself wash up on the shores of consciousness with an oxygen canula poking my nose and a muddled Winnie-the-Pooh feeling about me. Although I had to be perky enough to get into our car, I don’t really recall anything else about the day, despite the fact that I was out of surgery and on my way by noon. They aren’t kidding when they say that anaesthesiologists put some sort of amnesiac in your tank. But by the next day I was alert enough to go with Dear Husband to JCP and buy a new comforter set, which was very…comforting.

Speaking of Dear Husband, we recently celebrated our wedding anniversary. Dear Husband has a knack for thinking up thoughtful, creative gifts. Did anyone see that Modern Family episode in which Clair racks her brain to come up with a completely lame present after her husband presents her with a sweet and original series of gifts? Well, that’s me all over. I haven’t yet brought home the guitarist from Spandau Ballet, but it’s the sort of desperate leap I might take.

Dear Husband vanished after a number of mysterious trips, letting me know that a taxi would arrive to take me to my secret destination. The taxi ride was something of an event unto itself, as I found myself with the Chattiest Taxi Drive in History. He told me (and he told me quite a lot in the mere 15 minutes he transported me) that he spent part of every month driving in New York City. I was rather surprised that a New Yorker had not yet murdered him just to get him to shut up. New Yorkers aren’t all that chatty. He also managed to get me to tell him about our two girls (“Maybe you could try for a boy tonight.” – I kid you not, he actually said that) and my 4 brothers and their marital status. Of the unmarried one he said, “Are you sure he isn’t gay?” “I see the place!” I chirped, as we nearly passed by a house I recognized. Dear Husband had arranged for a romantic meal at our friend’s house (she happens to be a caterer). She made the side dishes and dessert, Dear Husband made the main dish – lamb chops in balsamic glaze. The dining room was set with the good china (not our good china, since we don’t have any, but my friend’s good china) and candles. There was a vase of pink roses and pink and lavender balloons. Dear Husband also had his laptop set up, as he had created a special slideshow for us. My friend and her husband vanished to a movie and we had the place to ourselves. The best part of the evening, better even than the lamp chop and pencil-thin asparagus, was the fact that Dear Husband and I got each other the exact same greeting card. It doesn’t sound so funny put like that, but we couldn’t stop laughing. Dear Husband had also devised a game for us. On the table was a treasure chest with a giant ruby-red gemstone nestled among smaller gems (DramaQueen helped with this) and chocolate coins, and little slips of paper. We took turns drawing the slips and answering the questions printed on them. I ate a lot of chocolate coins.

What did I get Dear Husband? Some gluten-free licorice. Which he had asked for. See? – lame. I added an iTunes card to show that I am capable of some independent thought. Then I ate some more chocolate coins.

This Labor Day weekend (while recovering from that operation), we had a cookout with some neighbors and friends. This involved a lot of cleaning. Many items are now missing, because they were put away, and they are not accustomed to being put away. I would like to know why there is always at least one basket of stuff that refuses to yield to any organizational scheme whatsoever. This is where various cords and mysterious hardware items end up, along with papers that seem to need something but we aren’t sure what, and anyway we don’t have a filing system because we still haven’t cleared out that old one stuffed with items from 2002. On the plus side, somehow or other I located both the missing wheels off the bottom dishwasher rack. Until then I would locate one and think, “Okay, now I know where that one is when the other one shows up.” And so it went for months for at least 2 years. I cannot tell you the sense of vindication and triumph I felt reattaching those two wheels. “Look!” I crowed, demonstrating the ability to close the dishwasher door without having to kick the bottom rack into place. Dear Husband, I think, is still not sure what I was talking about or how our life has changed for the better.

Besides finding lost things and losing things we haven’t yet noticed are now lost, I discovered that my keepsake box is missing. That’s where I keep old letters from my mom and hand-made cards from the girls. It used to be under the bed. At least that’s where it was 3 years ago when we lived in an apartment. It is now either still in an unpacked box in the garage (unlikely) or was put in the wrong place when we unpacked. The only right place in under our bed, because the strain of remembering it in any other place is an unnecessary burden.

Back to Labor Day weekend. I have this observation: If you plunk down 100+ dollars on an inflatable bouncy party house, and the kids spend all morning nagging you about when it will arrive, when it is finally set up all the children will mysteriously rediscover a board game they haven’t played in months. I crawled into the bouncy house at one point, until it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be bouncing a mere 3 days after surgery. So I lay down. Then the girls had the idea to have a sleepover at someone else’s house, which meant Dear Husband and I could go out for mojitos (for me) and dirty martinis (for him). I really wanted to go to Toys R Us, which struck me as a really great destination after a couple of mojitos, but dear Husband was not convinced. He did share his olives, though.

I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that I’m not particularly excited to be back at work. I’m feeling sludgy. I also feel as if every month contains at least 4 doctor appointments (in addition to the doctor appointments I have to put off or reschedule to make room for the newer, more pressing doctor appointments) plus at least one school event I can’t ignore (a school skate night on a Thursday? Really?). My dad’s things are still to be dealt with sometime in the future. A thread of sadness winds its way through most days. There are two school fundraisers and two picture days (prepaid – the jerks), then Halloween costumes, and we haven’t even started saving for Christmas. I have an intense craving to stay at home and putter about, like, permanently.

See how far afield I’ve wandered? I’m tired and melancholy and uncomfortable.

The Silver Cord

2010-08-25T11:53:00.000-05:00

Then man goes to his eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.
Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
or the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
or the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
- Ecclesiastes 12: 5-7

A long time ago Dad had emailed me a lot of stories from his childhood. Dear Husband bound them in a booklet and we put out copies for folks to take. Turned out to be very popular. Even the funeral director read it. Of course, he’s probably somehow related to us. It’s one of those sorts of places. You can’t fling a cat without hitting some kinfolk. I was never too into my kin, so I was pretty much clueless about family members and how they are related to each other. I always look a bit vague at family events.

Why at a funeral do people feel the need to comment favorably on the visage of a dead embalmed person? The man in the coffin bore only the faintest resemblance to my dad. He looked a bit like my grandfather, actually, if my grandfather had been worked up for Madame Toussaud’s. At least no one said anything about him looking peaceful. There were two pastors, one from the church he went to with his current wife and one he attended with my mom. You can’t always depend on pastors to forgo an altar call, even at a funeral, so I thought they restrained themselves nicely.

As an aside, my brother told me that just before my dad went on the respirator, he took off his mask (keep in mind that he was struggling to breathe, so he thought what he was about to say was of some importance) and said, “Larry, don’t ever get mixed up in the Church of Christ. They’re a bunch of nuts, and they’re all bipolar.” That was so completely my Dad. I can hear his voice saying it. He had very little tolerance for churches that white-knuckle their doctrines. The Church of Christ doesn’t allow instruments to be played in church. My dad thought that was the stupidest thing ever. I’m not sure what else he objected to. I’m not that familiar with the denomination, but this particular church seemed to focus on rules and doctrine rather than Grace, and that probably affronted my Baptist leaning dad. So Dad wasn’t particularly fond of his second wife’s choice of church, which is why we called in his former pastor to share the funeral service.

Dad had a military send off. There was a military funeral. Dad was in the Navy, the Army, the Navy and Army reserves and the National Guard reserves. Turns out he was the youngest Chief Petty Officer in the Navy during WWII. Didn’t know that. He was retired by the time I was born, so I didn’t know much about his military career. After hearing relatives talk about it last week, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was a Storm Trooper. There was a 21 gun salute – or something like – and two vets to fold the flag and one whippersnapper to play Taps. This being the rural South, the officers looked ramshackle and unwell, as if they might spend their spare time cooking meth, and one was shaking so much I was seriously worried that the flag would slip from his hands. His partner appeared equally concerned and seemed to telegraph instruction through some secret eye communication. But the shaky man was very careful and meticulous, and we all sat their mentally encouraging him, “You can do it! Just a bit more.” The whole time – a very quiet, reverent stretch of time I might add - Firecracker kept asking in a loud whisper, “Mom, why is he shaking?”

There were a lot of people at the funeral because dad loved to socialize. He didn’t get to do that so much with my social-phobic mom, so I think he particularly enjoyed getting out and meeting people in his later years. And although he didn’t much care for the church, he made friends there. He was that sort of guy – affable and good-humored. Almost every day he and his wife went out to eat at a particular diner, and everyone knew them, and everyone knew they could find him there if they wanted a chat.

This being a Southern funeral, the church ladies laid out enough food to send us all into a diabetic coma. And, this being a Southern funeral, they wrapped up the copious leftovers and sent them home with our family, where they were stuffed into no less than two refrigerators. Grief never seems to prevent anyone from eating in the South, and you haven’t properly showed someone you care without a casserole or pie in hand.

One thing brought home to me during this sad event was the utter disparity in my and my brother’s upbringings. They were close in age and ran about as a pack. The youngest is 16 years older than me, so I grew up pretty much as an only child, my brothers having all gone off to college and their adult lives. The stories they told abut their childhood adventures made me wonder how they survived. They also had a completely different experience living with my father. He and I had a troubled relationship that grew out of the frequent and often virulent fighting between my parents. I saw behavior that I loathed in both of them, but ultimately I found my mother more sympathetic than my father. It wasn’t until my mom’s last few years that I began to appreciate his good qualities, such as loyalty, integrity, and a sly sense of humor. My brothers never experienced that anger toward my dad, or my mom for that matter, despite the fact that she had to be institutionalized twice and they witnessed her more extreme expressions of mental illness. Maybe it’s because my brothers had each other. Maybe that’s why they roamed around where they were unsupervised and pulled pranks and got up to mischief. It’s not that they emerged undamaged – the legacy of dysfunction is quite evident – but they never seemed to hold it against my parents. And, after all, they grew up in the 40s and 50s when there were different expectations for parent-child relationships. My parents were strict with them but also hands off because they were boys, whereas they were beyond lenient with me but were also more protective.

Now I have lost both my parents. It makes me feel unanchored. That little corner of Alabama on Miracle Dr is now just a building full of stuff, its contents to be distributed among us, the center gone. As Dear Husband said, people live on through the stories you tell. I often think that may be the only afterlife there is.

Rest in Peace, Dad

2010-08-19T07:58:00.000-05:00

My father, Charles K. Akins, died yesterday at 6:45 pm. My brother who was with him said he went peacefully within minutes after the doctors pulled the respirator. He died after a long battle with pneumonia, complicated by acute interstitial lung disease (probably as a result of exposure to asbestos). He was 89 years old.

This is one of the last photos of him, from his 89th birthday party in April.

I am traveling to Alabama today, and Dear Husband and the girls will join me this weekend for the funeral.

And we're off

2010-08-12T13:26:00.000-05:00

School began this week. Every year it comes earlier – some districts have year-round school, and we may be headed that way. I love the start of school. Not because it gets the kids off my back, though. After all, they’ve been in a day camp all summer, so there isn’t much difference, except that I don’t have to monitor homework. No, I love the start of school for a number of reasons:

The end of the disgusting hot, muggy, inhumane summer is just around the corner.
Fall – fall is nearly here! Red and orange leaves! Nippy air! Halloween! Fall festivals!
The stores are full of school supplies, and I love school supplies. I like to see the wide variety of notebooks and pens. I like the smell of paper and pencils. These are the tools of learning, fresh and unused, full of potential. I want to breathe deeply among the binders and pencil-top erasers.
I can dress the girls in cute new clothes. I love shopping with them – so much easier than shopping for myself. The clothes in my section are dull and shapeless, boring and frumpy. Their clothes are bright, cheerful and playful. I dread the day the girls enter their teens and start fussing over clothes.
I love the structure of school. Now when I get home there is a regular order to the evening – school work, dinner, chores, bed-time. Well, it’s supposed to work like that.
The change in routine fills my head with impossible goals. I’ll get more organized – all I need is a hole punch, a binder, and $200 dollars worth of storage boxes. I’ll start that exercise program. I’ll cook more. I’ll finally put all our photos in albums. We’ll paint the house! We’ll take daytrips every weekend and spend more time at art galleries and theaters. I’ll reduce our grocery bill by clipping coupons! None of this will happen, but the ideas are bright and shiny and exhilarating.

Recently I was flipping through the latest Woman’s Day. Yeah, I get Woman’s Day. I’m a bit sheepish about it because it seems somehow – I don’t know – déclassé. If Real Simple is Talbots, then Woman’s Day is Wal-Mart. But this is what I do with our few skymiles – get magazines I would never pay for. Anyway, I ran across an article by Jennifer Weiner that expressed my feelings about fall so perfectly. You can read it here: http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Get-a-Fresh-Start-This-Fall.html It’s very short. Everything in Woman’s Day is short. Do any magazines let articles go on for pages anymore? Maybe the New Yorker. I could never finish anything in there. Yeah, if I had to choose between the New Yorker and Woman’s Day, I would definitely choose the latter. The New Yorker doesn’t have recipes that I can clip and ignore.

I plan to recap our LA vacation in the next post, because it was so much fun. Now, if I could only start that vacation scrapbook…

I'm Back

2010-08-02T12:09:00.002-05:00

We’re home from LA but too frazzled to do more than note that:

1. Great time
2. School starts next week
3. It sucks to be back at work
4. Our house looks dingy
5. Dad is doing somewhat better, last report

Need to Get Away

2010-07-21T10:36:00.000-05:00

I haven’t felt much like blogging because:

My dad is in the hospital. He’s been there for weeks, battling pneumonia that just won’t go away. He’s on oxygen and forbidden from moving around (he doesn’t have enough breath for any exertion at all). We went to visit him last weekend. He was happy to see the girls, of course, but he slept a lot and the mask made communication nearly impossible.
Meanwhile, we are to go on vacation this Saturday for a week. I’m worried that he will take a turn for the worst while I’m away. Or before, for that matter. The girls have been looking forward to this for months. Last year I had to abort a trip to LA because my nephew died. Dear Husband and the girls will go without me, and that will be a great disappointment to them. And of course I want a vacation, too. But I want to be there if my dad needs me.
I have to have an excisional biopsy. What the stereotactic biopsy revealed is benign, but it can’t be left and watched because it will inevitably transform into cancerous cells. So, another excisional biopsy it is. And there’s always the possibility that the tissue recovered in this will show ductal carcinoma, in which case I will have to seriously consider another mastectomy. Given my history I don’t think I would feel safe with a lumpectomy or something less radical. Sigh. In any case, I will be revisiting tomoxifen. The oncologist wasn’t all that keen on it, because it offers either no or slim benefits for ductal carcinoma (studies are mixed), which has a low recurrence. But if it does recur… Double sigh. On the positive, I guess I would have a matching and gravity resistant set.
Summer. I hate living in a sauna. I loathe being outdoors for even a few minutes while the hot wet blanket of air closes around me. I hate the sticky vegetation and persistent wasps. I hate garbage ripening in the heat. I hate the sickly smell of cut grass. I hate climbing into my car and gasping while I wait for the air conditioner to kick in. Summer in Georgia is utterly disgusting.

So I’m a bit draggy these days. Did I mention that school starts August 9? Preparations for that are breathing down my neck.

I really want that vacation, even though vacationing with kids is more like engaging in a strategic exercise than actually relaxing.

In which I briefly discuss being a human pincusion, and how much more fun it is to be alive than dead

2010-07-09T15:48:00.000-05:00

The sky has drifted from blue to gray over the course of the afternoon. I love overcast days and the promise of rain. The greens look greener and the asphalt looks less harsh. No doubt it its still hot and steamy, but at least it appears more bearable – the light isn’t boring into my skin.

Speaking of boring, I had to have another biopsy yesterday, of my left breast. I am always amazed at medical science. They make such extraordinary leaps in technology and yet they cannot design any device for human comfort. Stereotactic biopsies aren’t painful – they shoot you up with lidocaine and then the extraction needle itself continues to inject lidocaine – but the contorted position you must hold for 30 minutes or so is. Perhaps it wasn’t that long. Perhaps it was just the incredible tension in my neck, which I was forced to twist to one side as I lay face down (“Don’t move!”), and the creeping numbness in my right arm, or the fact that the positioning device felt much like an unending mammogram. I greeted the lidocaine with some relief, although after a number of minutes of immobility, I began to imagine the remarkable discomfort had disrupted the flow of time and I was not entirely in the room but was perhaps also inside that computer screen just out of my line of vision. At times like these, doctors and techs display a remarkable serenity and deliberation, as if they are not in the same reality with you, the reality in which you are being compressed with some force into an unnatural state of being. Instead, they are in a world without limits, with an infinite amount of time to adjust, examine, adjust again.

Afterward the tech told me that they inject epinephrine along with the lidocaine. I asked why and she told me that it reduces bleeding. “When we have someone in here who can’t tolerate epinephrine, this whole room is covered in blood by the time we’re done.” I gave myself a little mental pat on the back for my good relationship with epinephrine. I was very grateful that I did not have to stumble out of the room slipping in my own blood.

I’m supposed to have the results in 5 days. I’m not unduly worried, because I simply do not have the energy to worry about it. It has reminded me, however, of how much I like life and this world and how uninterested I am in heaven. Sorry, but I would much rather be with my family than with God, and given that He created us to have fierce ties to other people and our own lives, I don’t think he should expect anything else. Lately I’ve wondered if I have any deep belief in an afterlife. When I was younger I thought it didn’t much matter – once you were dead you had no consciousness with which to be disappointed. It matters while you’re alive, while you’re alive and someone else is dying. You don’t want them erased or even “to live on in your memory.” Really, that latter is pathetic. I don’t want someone in my memory – I want them in the flesh. I find heaven difficult to believe in. I won’t even bother with hell, which is so obviously some sort of sick fantasy dreamed up to satisfy both our bloodlust and our sense of justice.

Besides the obvious desire not to miss watching my children grow up or travel around the world with Dear Husband, I find myself hoping that I don’t die without seeing the final Harry Potter films. And what a shame if I were to miss the next technological advance, or the emergence of the next great actors or writers or artists. Or even the next morning’s coffee. There seems to be so much to look forward to, even when I lag and am weary and depressed.

The wind is growing wilder and the sky is drawing close. I expect to soon see the first dark marks of rain against the pavement. I’m looking forward to watching movies with the family, or perhaps reading a bit, and then sleeping in as much as Firecracker will allow (DramaQueen would sleep until noon).

Make Mine an O+, Please

2010-07-01T09:13:00.008-05:00

Dear Husband and I have been catching up on Season 2 of True Blood. I do love me some vampires, and we’re just a-poppin’ with ‘em these days. I revel in it. Well, I haven't been able to get into The Vampire Diaries. Seems too much like Dawson's Creek with fangs. I think I will have to revisit it because of Ian Somerhalder, who plays bad-boy Damon (and with that name could he be anything but bad?) - he's dark, sexy, snarky and so much more interesting than his goody-two-shoes vamp brother. A goody goody vampire? Seriously? I mean it’s nice to be all noble about not killing people, but you need to at least let your potential menace shine forth.

Now True Blood, it’s crazy-ass Southern culture with fangs, specifically bayou culture with fangs, and that’s just perfect in my opinion. The idea of red-neck vampires is truly scary, and then there are the Southern gentleman vampires and foreign exotic imports to lend a bit of class. Lots of sex and naked people - these vampires are strictly adult content. And they look really, really sexy in a menacing way full of promise. (Well, not the red-neck ones, who look like they hide their coffins in double-wides with tires in the front yard.) Vampires are all about sex, anyway, and the deep dark recesses of the subconscious, your own private bayou, so to speak.

The great thing about these popular genres is the way they mirror the issues and obsessions of the time. While the literary novels are busy being cool and minimalist, or grungy and despairing, or poetic and earnest, the genre writers are down on the streets, not hesitating to be playful and trashy and ephemeral. In True Blood, vampires mirror gays. The vampires have “come out of the coffin,” and are trying their best to integrate into regular society. Meanwhile the completely cuckoo Fellowship of the Sun (a more genteel and better-armed Westboro Baptist Church) is all “God hates fangs” and sharpening stakes after Bible studies. Despite the fact that the vamps are swigging synthetic blood and really putting their all into living in the open and not sucking on unwilling humans (they seem to have enough willing donors to keep them from starving), they are still loathed and feared, when folks aren’t exploiting vampire blood as a recreational drug. People hate them yet profit off them. Yeah, that sounds like the world.

Sometimes these genre entertainments step into the sublime. In the midst of all the delightfully gratuitous sex and fighting off the bad guys, True Blood has its philosophical moments. Lately they’ve been rolling in some Greek mythology, a maenad hosting huge orgies and ripping out folks’ hearts in the hope of calling down Dionysus to devour her (and presumably everyone else). Yet when she talks about mysticism and how our culture roots out any whiff of the ecstatic, she makes perfect sense, even while she’s sauteing a human heart with butter and scallions. Truth and evil mixed up.

And, of course, you can’t have vampires without some reflections on mortality and the soul, evil and redemption. I found this scene of the vampire Godric choosing to meet the sun strangely moving. First there’s the sad parting between him and his "child" (and damn these two are gorgeous), and then there is this dialogue about God between him and the heroine Sookie:

“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re right, how he will punish me?”
“God doesn’t punish - God forgives.”
“I don’t deserve it, but I hope for it.”
“We all do.”

Then he says that in her tears he sees God.

Man, it’s just full of awesome.

And did I mention that these two men are really, really hot. I mean, I would happily lick away those tears of blood. I have a very giving heart.

Musing

2010-06-29T16:04:00.000-05:00

Through my window I can see across the street to the nondescript office building, which, dull as it is, still reflects the trees in its sleek black windows. In the median of the divided road stand a row of bushes with deep red flowers of some sort. They look brushy and tough – not delicate flowers. There are two trees shading my window, thankfully. Sitting in a cubical next to ceiling to floor glass gives you a good view, but you suffer the fluctuation of temperature. Right now those trees are producing a very pleasant deep green shade. I love shade. The clouds are smeared along the horizon but building up to billowing storm clouds further up in the sky. Despite the traffic I can still hear birdsong.

I watch the cars pass and I wonder about the lives of the people inside. Are they boring or interesting? Do they have fond memories of childhood? Are they obnoxious? How many of them are murderers? You see, I figure some of them have to be murderers. When I lived in New York, I liked to go for walks in the evening, just as people were turning on their lights. Because this was New York, I would usually catch glimpses of bookshelves as I walked past. I found that very comforting. You don’t see that here. Suburbs aren’t comforting in that cool, intellectual way. They offer instead a haven without connection: planned communities, cul-de-sacs, community pools, a common belief in keeping your yard well-groomed and your cars washed. You may or may not know your neighbor, but together you present a united front against the messy, obsolete suburban sprawls of earlier years, now revealing their age.

You might think that I don’t like suburbs from what I just said, but that is not the case. We live in an obsolete sprawl, and I would prefer to live in the more polished neighborhoods with fresh sidewalks and shiny black street lamps, the sort of neighborhood where young women roll out the baby strollers in the evenings and the cars have to drive slowly. DramaQueen envies her best friend, who has a huge, beautifully decorated house with a pool. She would much rather go there than have her friend over to our house. I remember feeling the same way as a girl, once I got a glimpse of some of my classmates’ homes. Ours was pokey and dingy with no redeeming features at all. Where there was carpet, I wanted yards of glossy wood. Where there was scrubby grass I wanted a smooth velvety lawn. I wanted to trade up my parents as well, for some who were more sophisticated and younger.

Dear Husband has been feeling sad lately, as he watches DramaQueen become more independent. He feels the relationship shifting as he’s gently nudged out of the center. I don’t feel this so much. Mom’s remain the go-to person by default. Still, I notice the contrast between her and Firecracker. DramaQueen is growing less inclined for goodbye hugs and kisses, happy to spend time away from home with friends, but very protective of Firecracker when they are somewhere together. Firecracker is still intensely affectionate, uneasy without her family, particularly uneasy when her big sister is away. She remains very much a little girl, eager to curl up on my lap for a cuddle.

I was hoping I might stumble upon some concluding thoughts, but I haven’t the time to ponder further if I ever want to actually post this. Make of it what you will.

Thank You God for Air-conditioning

2010-06-14T12:43:00.002-05:00

I haven’t felt much up to blogging, tweeting or hopping onto FB. I’m navigating summer. I’m not a big fan of summer. Well, I am for about a week. Then the full force of a Southern summer begins to hit – sweltering humidity. The air clings to you like Saran Wrap. The burgeoning grass and greenery feel itchy as you walk through them. The trash can ripens. The mosquitoes, ants, flies and unknown flying and crawling entities multiply. The playgrounds sizzle. The pools are crowded. Under no circumstances do I spend any leisure time outdoors in the summer. It’s too miserable.

So this would be a perfect time, you would think, to hop online and poke about. Instead I’ve been downloading free books onto my Sony Reader and watching Roswell Season 3. And of course the girls are free agents in the summer. This weekend Firecracker used her birthday money to purchase Zhou Zhou Pets. These are toy hamsters that whir about their little hamster abodes, chittering to each other in a way I doubt hamsters ever manage. They wheel about the kitchen until they snag in the shag rug in front of the sink, when they begin to sound distressed and I have to rescue them. I thought the cats might chase them, but they seem indifferent, or perhaps too lazy. We also purchased a game called Chess without Stress, which I can tell you really overstates its claims. Firecracker and I began snarling at each other and never did finish a game. I was reminded of why I’ve always avoided chess – I can’t remember the rules from one minute to the next, and strategy bores me. Whatever part of the brain chess is supposed to activate donned flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt and kicked back with a martini years ago.

Go ahead, click above to satisfy your curiosity about this little critters.

Dear Husband is annoyed that I never mention him on here. I’m not sure why. He is a continual source of entertainment. His recent transformation to Emergent still has me rather bemused. I suppose I’m wondering if this is a temporary stop on the line to who knows where, or perhaps back to the original station. He has also developed a great affection for Glee, although that isn’t so unexpected. He has always like the quirky. Though he still doesn’t like Torchwood and refuses to even think about Dr. Who. Still, he’s a good man.

Summer and Broken Bells

2010-06-10T15:27:00.001-05:00

Summer stretches before me straight and flat as a North Dakota highway. I feel pretty much like jumping in the backseat and taking a snooze until the scenery improves. I’ve always had a problem with summer. While the other kids were exuberant about free days of swimming and playing, I was faced with the enforced isolation of Bleak House. Now the countdown to summer stirs vestigial anxiety.

This summer I put the girls in a summer camp at an indoor rock climbing facility. Yesterday DramaQueen showed me how she can belay Firecracker, while Firecracker scooted up the wall like a little monkey. I imagine myself clinging forlornly while someone tries to talk me down. A number of dogs hang about, some of them as large as ponies, I swear. DramaQueen tells me they are assistive dogs trained to help climbers in distress. Firecracker loves them. I stooped to pet one of them and Abby grinned up at me, “He smells like dog.”

I used my birthday money to buy a digital reader. Any purchase over $100 makes me nervous. What if something better comes along? What if I didn’t do enough research? I finally settled on a Sony Daily Edition, but of course I’m still looking it over anxiously. There’s a bit of glare – will that bother me? B&N has better free books – would the Nook be better? But I don’t like the Nook’s interface. Still, you can switch fonts on a Nook. And the Kindle, well, I can’t check out books from the library on a Kindle. And on it goes. Meanwhile I’ve found the places to download books in the public domain, and that makes me very happy. Some of them are out of print and too eccentric to be on a library shelf in our little suburb. And then I found a writer named Cory Doctorow, who releases digital editions of his books for free on the same day as the print editions. I have not yet read any of his works, but I found that he has a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow. Show off.

Now, for some music. One of my current favorite songs:

The Softer Side of Smut

2010-05-19T12:45:00.006-05:00

I ran across this article in Relevant about emotional pornography. That title was an immediate draw, because I thought I knew exactly where the author would be headed, and I was so there. But then I began to read and reflect and look over the comments and realized I am not so much there after all. In the end, I’m not sure the article is even in the ballpark, much less hitting the target (mixed metaphor – so bite me).

First, the author’s eschewal of Glee just gives me the giggles. We aren’t supposed to root for the husband to cheat on his deceitful, manipulative, narcissistic, bat-shit crazy wife? Oh, sorry, my evil sin nature is showing. I’ll have to remember the next time I watch Camelot to avert my eyes from Guinevere and Lancelot. No, perhaps I should just switch the channel, because this evil musical seems to be – gasp – sympathetic to Guinevere’s illicit love! Oh, right, Camelot probably is part of the problem as the article paints it, being about fantasy, shining knights and all.

On the other hand, I do have an aversion to the emotionally turgid movies he alludes to and I’ve even thought of them the same way, as emotional pornography. The Bridges of Madison County, The Notebook, whatever else gets served up as a “chick flick.” Yep, I’d say that a lot of movies and books set up unrealistic expectations about romantic love. However, that’s been going on since the ideal of Courtly Love was all the rage in the Middle Ages. In the 18th and 19th centuries novels came in for a lot of criticism for promoting unrealistic expectations of love and life. Why? Well mostly because the novels were written by women and read by women, those sentimental, mentally unstable, hysterical women. I particularly like this line in the article “many girls never grow out of the idea that one day they will be rescued from reality by some magic and a fictitious prince.” I won’t even go into the irony of a Christian magazine talking about idealizing a magical, fictional prince. Instead I draw your attention to the focus on female delusion, which he tries to elide with an afterthought about men believing they are supposed to be the prince. Uh huh. Hey, is there a pattern here? Something about women – what women read and write and watch? Oh poor muddled women, put down that Twilight book at once. You have no idea the damage you’re doing. (I'm springboarding off the article now, as it nowhere mentions Twilight, although it comes in for plenty of discussion in the comments.)

Everyone points fingers at Stephenie Meyer. Boy do people love to tear apart her writing, her beliefs, her aesthetic – they are fuming that people (uh, teenage girls and their irresponsible moms) read and enjoy the Twilight series. Twilight is responsible for deluding populations of teenage girls into thinking that Edward is the epitome of desirable manhood. They begin to think there’s one right undead guy who will adore them and they’ll wait until they’re married and…oh wait, that sounds a lot like Christianity - God will reveal the right spouse for you and no one will get between the sheets until the honeymoon (and who’s a better undead spouse than Jesus?). So it’s Hollywood, not Christianity that sells THE wedding day? Are you kidding me? Aren’t they selling kids on how sacred sex is? So sacred that it must not happen before the ceremony with the white poofy dress and the tower of cake. Don’t you know that if you have sex before marriage it will be a disappointment? A demeaning experience? A soulless, heartless mockery you will regret the rest of your life? Because sex in marriage is a spiritual event, a holy event. You know the honeymoon has got to be OFF THE HOOK with all that build up. It’s not just a honeymoon, it’s a sacred rite. And marriage? Well, marriage is like the marriage of Christ and His Church.

That’s not unrealistic at all.

Poor Stephenie. Really, all her elements are in keeping with traditional vampire stories – sexual appetite, repression of desire, pursuit and resistance, heroic self-sacrifice, obsession – pretty transgressive stuff really, however you sweeten it - but she’s come in for such criticism. I’m not saying there’s nothing to criticize in her imaginary universe. There’s plenty to make you go “hmm.” But in case you didn’t get it, teenage girls and women in general are incapable of delineating the elements of fantasy fiction from reality. It’s all just one big luscious cake that they gobble down unquestioningly.

I’m a bit snarky there, but in truth, we (men and women both) do not question what we consume nearly enough.

I say let’s skip the novels playing the tropes of Romance and get down to the serious emotional pornography. We’ll start small, with the crap that is Precious Moments, designed to make you go all “awww, isn’t that just the cutest little wipsie bipsie?” Or, how about the “Christmas Shoes” song, carefully crafted to wring tears from the eyes of people who wouldn’t give a crap about a real child with no money, say a Mexican immigrant child with no money standing in the aisle of an Arizona Wal-Mart. Half of every Christian bookstore is full of emotionally rancid merchandise. The targets are so numerous and obvious I won’t bother to name them. They degrade human experience, make it cute or maudlin, easily digested.

Then, we can look at sporting events. Hockey, for example, with an audience salivating as they await the first outbreak of violence. Wrestling. During the Olympics, the endless nattering on about the mishaps, the dreadful mishaps that demolished the chances of X – no Olympic gold this year. All those hopes, dashed. Yummy.

If we want to talk about TV shows, forget about Glee, the show with a tart shell but a soft squishy center. Consider Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a show happy to deliver both graphic sex and enough graphic violence to make you think twice about eating before viewing. Are you thinking this is cynical pandering to a ravenous hunger for everything ugly, brutal and vicious, a blatant manipulation of the connection between violence and sexual arousal. Not at all - it’s authentic. We would be doing viewers a disservice if we toned it down. Those freaks screwed anything that moved, you know, and we do mean anything. And if they castrated their prisoners, by golly we will take one for the home team and let you experience genuine Roman perversion, just like the Romans experienced in the Coliseum! Thank God we didn’t live back then, huh?

Now many good Christians would balk at Spartacus anyway as too lewd. So how about 24 (ever popular among Christians), a show that all but does a tap dance of joy every time Jack Bauer gets the opportunity to torture someone? How many people watch it and consider how it mirrors a culture invested in the idea that it’s okay to torture sometimes – if you need the information, if your country is in danger, if you’re short of time? Jack’s a hero for leaping over those tiresome hurdles like due process and the Geneva Convention that let terrorists run amok. Jack Bauer could kick Edward Cullen’s undead ass.

Wow, our entire culture seems to slurp up a hearty helping of emotional pornography every day. It’s served up by TV and Fox News and, dare I say, church. How adept are we at recognizing it? Do we really look or do we choose our targets rather carefully?

Naw, I suppose the greatest enemy of genuine, realistic human relationships has got to be the Bridges of Madison County.

In the Church of the Great White Noise

2010-04-28T21:14:00.005-05:00

Upon the summit I can see
The one I worshiped as a boy
The Creator, the Great White Noise

Last night Dear Husband and I went to see Owen Pallett (the most wonderful, most mind-blowing musician I have ever seen) in concert. The concert was held in a large ashtray. Or so it seemed. I smoked 2 packs and a cigarette never touched my lips. The large ashtray is a much loved bar/pub/venue called The Earle. The Earle looks just like such a place should look – grubby on the outside, with old concert posters crusting over the building face. It squats like a wino in a little parcel of newly renovated boutiques and shops. Earle had lost its sign, the waitress told me, when the last tornado went through. It sounded as there were no plans to replace it. A rusting bicycle hung from the ceiling for no apparent reason. The food was actually good (except for the French fries, which had the tang of old grease), and the waitress (who had impressive tattoos on both arms) was actually able to absorb the request for gluten free suggestions.

I don’t know why Dear Husband and I still arrive early to these events when no one bothers to show up until at least 20 minutes after the stated start time (which is still 10 minutes or so before the opening band actually starts), and often until the main act is onstage. But there we were, rattling around the empty room with a few other eager beavers. It was dim. It was shabby. It was relatively small. Stickers and posters covered most surfaces. Almost everyone was younger than us and were pretty much indistinguishable from each other. Definitely not the sort of audience that focused on being seen or looking hip, thankfully, as at these events I prefer to scuttle into a corner or pretend that I’m invisible. It became increasingly murky, with not even the scent of a clove cigarette to break the monotony.

Owen Pallett was magnificent. The songs on his most recent album are all backed by an orchestra, so he had to adapt them for a single violin with loop pedal and a guitarist/percussionist. What an incredible job he does with recording and playback, so that the sound is layered. I also really enjoy a musician who knows how to use a microphone without creating that hideous scratchy muffled sound that singers produce because they think they have to hold the mike somewhere near their tonsils, and who changes his distance from the mike when he increases the volume (why on earth don’t all singers do that?). He has a lovely voice, too. Magazines always refer to is as a “music school voice,” whatever that means. What does that mean, anyway? That it is trained rather than natural? Pretty?

There was a peculiar man in the audience. I’m not sure if he was high, or perhaps had been high so many times he was permanently affected, or if he had some unusual motor issue. Sometimes he held his hands in front of him as if he were about to take a dive into an imaginary pool, or perhaps launch into the Sun Salutation. Sometimes he took a shank of hair in each hand and made himself a set of horns. Sometimes he moved his hands to sculpt a cube from the air. And sometimes he shot his left arm straight up, jabbing at the air with his index finger, lowered it and then repeated the movement with his right arm. In the time-honored tradition of city dwellers, everyone studiously ignored him. Early in the show, when Mr. Trippy was particularly frisky, Owen did say, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I wish you’d stop doing that.” I’m not sure if that reined him in or if I just stopped noticing. Now and then I caught a bit of air sculpting. I assume that Owen entered into whatever musical zone he enters and stopped noticing as well.

Isn’t that cute? “I don’t mean to be rude, but…” I love Owen’s stage presence. He always says “Thank you” after each number, which is charming. He’s confident without being cocky about it. If he makes a mistake he acknowledges it with a laugh. He doesn’t try to be showy and seems perfectly comfortable being sort of geeky.

Dear Husband teases me because he thinks I’m besotted with everyone I get obsessed with. Owen has a British schoolboy appeal – very cute - but what I really feel is awe. The angels themselves can’t make more beautiful music. At least that’s how I feel listening to it. And to watch a musician play live, walking the tightrope of performance, leaping into space and then flying away, that’s a holy thing. This smoke-filled cave felt more holy than a church. Churches are filled with schmaltzy, cloying praise songs, three-point sermons and a utilitarian approach to the great mysteries. A true artist lives in the mystery.

Sadly, concerts are as ephemeral as cotton candy, melting quickly into memory. You chase the music and then it slips away with a regretful smile.

Flying

2010-04-24T10:22:00.003-05:00

A small girl is outside on a warm day, a quilt on the grass where she can play with her toys - a phone with moving eyes and an orange receiver, that clicks when you dial a number; a blueberry colored dog that she loves because it is long and filled with small pellets that make it squishy and floppy. Then an airplane passes overhead with a sound that cracks open the sky. The small girl looks up and she feels suddenly that she is floating, that she is no longer quite there, there with the scratchy grass poking at her legs through the quilt, or her mother watching over her through the kitchen window. No longer definitely herself, with her shape that fits into certain clothes, that can hide in the linen cupboard or lie completely flat in the bath if she likes. Her heart, her insides feel funny, not bad funny but the sort of funny she feels when her daddy swings her up over his head, and then back down. She is moving beyond her own body somehow, as if what is inside is pressing gently through, flowing out into that bright sky with the beautiful ribbon of cloud trailing behind the silver plane.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

2010-04-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading a nearly impenetrable article on Lacanian psychoanalysis. You know, for fun. Because I like nothing better than an intellectual challenge, except maybe reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, chocolate, music, sex and…well, I like lots of things more than an intellectual challenge, but while my mind was drifting along it happened to snag on Lacan and by golly I had an elite education that I’m still paying for and I was going to nail this sucker to the wall.

I am not a systematic learner. I skim and dip. I nibble. I can grasp some things quickly but superficially, particularly if I stay with secondary, pre-digested sources. I’m not a deep thinker, but I can be clever. I like shiny things. There’s nothing shinier than a mirror, and Lacan has a mirror. Plus I get to look at myself – my favorite subject.

But fuck it, I don’t understand this stuff. When you desire, you desire the other’s desire, which is their lack (something blah blah about castration). Oh, that should be the Other, not the other. The other is an object and the Other is a subject. I think. If you’re a pervert you deny desire and if you’re a neurotic you flee desire. Something like that. The pervert refuses to desire but torments the other (not the Other) by discovering his desire and refusing to fulfill it. The neurotic just freaks out at the uncertainty of what the Other might desire, and I guess bites his nails and plays Dungeons and Dragons.

I think it’s possible that French philosophers are full of shit, and they would be willing to discuss the metonymy of shit and its role in the current political structure as the shifting location of meaning. Then they would go out and smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink very strong coffee and sleep with undergraduates.

Me, Myself and I

2010-04-09T15:44:00.021-05:00

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so...

~Peter Handke

Besides watching episodes of this fascinating BBC teen drama Skins on Netflix (you'll be glad to know I'm using my time so wisely), I've been slowing turning over various thoughts. My mind is not like a rock tumbler - the stones don't come out polished and shiny. My thoughts are more like the clothes you forgot in the dryer, so wrinkled you need to put them back in the wash.

The wrinkled laundry includes: ambition and desire, artistic production, doubt and longing, God and creativity, God and desire, emotions versus values, and my stupid tooth. I'll get that last out of the way first - I had a root canal and now another tooth hurts. All expressions of deep sympathy are welcome. On the positive: I now have a bottle of Lortab.

I keep thinking about that Insurrection event. I've already mentioned Peter Rollins' take on doubt, which I found incredibly comforting and challenging at the same time. I've been practicing not leaping in to fix negative feelings. You know how therapists will tell you to rewrite the tape or recognize the distortion and rebut it? Well, I'm giving that up. My thoughts and emotions are what they are and if I try to correct them at every turn I'm just getting more enmeshed in myself. So, no beating up doubt with the cudgels of faith. I'm tired of always trying to soothe myself. No wonder my memory is crap - my eyes are pretty firmly fixed on myself.

At one point, he said something along the lines of "I desire your desire." At the moment he was alluding to the human need for approval, love, and admiration, but it made me think of God's desire for us. If we yearn for Him, he must also yearn for us. I guess that's Christianity 101, but it isn't something I get. It's like doubt, which we say is important and understandable but we really just tuck it away with the ugly Christmas present from Aunt Agnes. We act as if God were a frigid, purse-lipped missionary who drops by to say the occasional hello, leave some pamphlets, and check the sheets. Or perhaps as the smug and glib CEO who drops by on a Sunday morning to graciously receive our applause and drop a few inspirational words in our ear in return for dippy praise music. If God wants us, really wants us, that's kind of...weird. Why would He?

Desire, ambition, yearning, creativity. I desire your desire. I am reminded of that interminable book I read many years ago by Deleuze and Guattari, which spoke of desiring machines. I only read it because I had a crush on my lit crit professor. It was over my head, or full of crap, or both - something about production and schizophrenic capitalism. It was very French. But that in turn made me think of a friend who told me she got turned on listening to a lecture about Paul Ricoeur. I guess we all have our kinks. I tried reading Ricoeur and it did nothing for me. Which made me think about the excitement of ideas, because I actually totally get what she means. Why else did I have a crush on my lit crit prof anyway? He wasn't all that cute, but he was a purveyor of interesting ideas. That's why we have celebrities that people obsess about. If you hear music that completely floors you, that breaks open your heart, and there in front of you is the musician, that musician becomes the most desirable person on earth. You would like to be their best friend ever, or have their babies, or just a few hours in a motel, whatever. You think that surely God swept through that person, and maybe He's waiting there for you. Or at least I think like that. I have the urge to yank the divine out of the people I ~~lust after~~ admire.

He also talked about how the stories we tell don't always match up with how we actually are. The way we appear online, but also in person, is highly edited. Of course. Otherwise everyone would hate us. I have one story at work: straightforward creedal Christian, dry sense of humor, something of a scandalous past that I've fully repented. I know the lingo and I can use it. With others I would downplay the Christian part, because I'm way too cool for that. It's just decoration. In general I want people to think I'm witty, intelligent, a good writer, insightful. I'd rather be smart and clever than nice, but I would rather be nice than contradictory. I want everyone to like me. I desire your desire, only that sounds as if I want to sleep with you, which I don't. Well, some of you maybe. I reveal a lot about my weaknesses and foibles on here. But, in fact, I am the definition of "disingenuous." It is, I find, quite easy to deliver over parts of myself; I can transform them in the writing, give them a bit of panache, and it's all about me. I've always been fascinated with me, even when I've loathed my very existence.

Peter mentioned Columbo in connection with making the story told match the events that actually happened. Well, Columbo reminded me of the great film Wings of Desire, in which Peter Falk appears pretty much as his TV persona. There - desire again, the desire of angels to experience being human, which is the desire of humans to experience being human, the suspicion that this world should be heaven, because the leaves turn brilliant colors, and cats sleep in the sun, and there are paintings by Caravaggio and Rothko and poetry by Rumi, John Donne and Mary Oliver and music by Bach and Schoenberg and Owen Pallett. Shiraz and Chardonnay, strong coffee, chocolate chip cookies, romance and love and friendship. Heaven should be that, for everyone.

But the problem is, I'm all talk, and I really have to change that.

The Human Abstract
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Caterpillar and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain

~William Blake

In which Peter Rollins totally rocks, Dear Husband surprises me, and Netflix provides palliative care

2010-04-06T18:56:00.008-05:00

I would like to say that during my blog absence I was pondering the deeper mysteries of life. What actually happened is that we received a CD from Netflix that allows us to download movies via our Wii. I've had a candy box of movies open before me, and I'm taking a bite out of everything. Don't bother watching The Passengers, by the way - totally lame. I am now working my way through the BBC teen drama series Skins.

On a more serious note, Dear Husband and I went to the Atlanta stop of Peter Rollins' Resurrection=Insurrection tour. I like Peter Rollins very much, and I'm still thinking about that event. What I found very profound was his statement that it is in the very midst of experiencing God's absence that God is most present. He used Jesus' "Why have you forsaken me" as an example. He also mentioned that churches don't appreciate doubt - it's all happy clappy affirmation. I wrote down this not quite direct quote: "Church as a desert in your oasis, not an oasis in the desert of your existence." I think this is connected with his statement that "God is the wound that births your yearning." Get rid of the painful yearning and you've pushed God aside. He also described how often we say doubt is important and necessary but in fact we let the institution believe for us. Oh, yeah, direct hit there. Oh, and then he answered complaints that his thinking would lead to denying the resurrection. He said that yes, he denies the resurrection every time he walks by someone who needs help without doing anything. Wow.

A little frustrating to me is the fact that Dear Husband actually cornered him and talked to him at length, whereas I only managed a quick "thanks oh so much I'm an idiot who thinks you are oh so swell and really hot and jeepers you actually gaze into people's eyes when you talk to them which is completely rattling me so I'll be off now." Uh, yeah. I'm a total dork around cute men with Irish accents.

Now, Dear Husband has always been the conservative, orthodox bulwark of our home. We've clashed on many an occasion. I've fussed and fumed about penal substitution and inerrancy and the focus on personal salvation. Well, you think you know someone and then they go and read Brian McLaren. All of a sudden half (or more)of what he has up to this point believed has been overturned and replaced with, well, pretty much what I believe. This is not as comforting as you might think (see above about letting institutions believe on your behalf). I've rather relied on Dear Husband as a foil to my fanciful theological pondering, attacks of doubt and general faithlessness. Now he's gone all emergent and progressive.

Easter itself was not quite as cool as the Rollins event, but the sun shone through the church windows (oh God I am so happy to go to a church that actually has windows), and we rang bells and shook key chains and some of the ladies had fantastical hats like something out of Dr. Suess. But this isn't our church. We don't have a church.

Now, I wonder what's on Netflix...

In which I decide that everything I do is wrong, and most likely will end in disaster

2010-03-22T13:20:00.001-05:00

Oh dear Lord, why do I live my life in a friggin firestorm of anxiety? Today I feel like a fish who’s just found herself washed ashore and the tide going out.

Sample internal conversation:

Me 1: We’re going to lose our jobs and have no money and we’ll be forced to foreclose and live in a cardboard box under the overpass.

Me 2: Deep breath. These are emotions that come and go.

Me 1: What if Dear Husband dies? You know what you’re like – you freeze. Do you even know where your car insurance cards are? See, you’re screwed.

Me 2: Focus on the now.

Me 1: The now totally blows! I’m bored, and my eyes hurt. I need new glasses, and they cost a fortune. My vision’s so bad eventually there will be no glasses strong enough.

Me 2: What?

Me 1: And detached retinas. I’m at a very high risk for detached retinas. And there’s nothing I can do about it! There are no preventative measures!

Me 2: Maybe you should concentrate on finally setting up dental appointments for the girls.

Me 1: And orthodontics. Sure as anything Firecracker will have to get braces. How the hell are we going to afford braces? And they eat too much sugar. The dentist is going to secretly condemn me because I can’t figure out how to floss their teeth or teach them to do it themselves.

Me 2: Perhaps you should read a book over lunch break…

Me 1: Library fines – can you believe I had to pay over $30 in library fines? I’m so irresponsible and disorganized. And my house is impossible. I hate housework. The countertops are sticky. No matter how many times I wipe them, they’re always sticky. And the kitchen table is always piled with papers glued to the surface by pancake syrup. Which I really shouldn’t let the kids eat – real maple syrup has to be better for you, but it’s so expensive (remember the cardboard box). And now the doctor tells me they have to cut back on dairy products, which just reminds me that I’m a bad mother and my kids won’t eat anything because I haven’t, well, done something. I don’t know. Nothing works. They hate everything. They hate things they used to like. We’re going backwards. My kids are going to be fat and have rickets.

Me 2: You need a valium.

Me 1: Yes, I do. But I can’t even afford the medication I take. What if I’m on the wrong medication? Maybe my diagnoses are all wrong. What if I’m not really bipolar and instead managed to bamboozle the doctor because it really seemed that my symptoms fit and nothing else worked and then we threw in ADD but perhaps I’m just really lazy and don’t get enough sleep and both of those are over diagnosed because doctors like to diagnose you with stuff. And I think my mom was bipolar but who knows because she was in an institution in the 50s when they shocked everyone and put them on lithium and they said she was schizophrenic but then how did she get by without any meds at all? None, zilch, zero. And she swung like a pendulum. But I don’t – I’m not that bad, really. I just get depressed over and over. I don’t gamble, I don’t empty the bank account, I don’t stay up all night, I don’t think I can conquer the world (although sometimes I think I can drop the meds because it’s really okay, I’m really okay), and I don’t behave recklessly (unless you count the years of taking whatever drug was handed to me, getting drunk in unsavory situations, cutting myself, and that rather weird episode of unprotected sex with a series of men, which pretty much clinched matters for me because that was totally out of character for someone as generally uptight and painfully timid and anxious as I am, but at the time it just seemed rather free-spirited, and then just really really skeevy), and how do you know if your thoughts are racing if that is just the way they are and have been all your life? What would you compare it with? Doesn’t everyone think like that, with thoughts galloping across the plains? The speed of my thoughts feels normal. A little exhilarating sometimes, when I’m surfing them, but who wants slow thoughts, anyway? That’s the cold depths of depression, when thoughts are stiff-legged and lag behind. But it could just look suspiciously like bipolar, because that’s how I’ve arranged all my memories, now, whereas before they were all arranged for dysthemia and no one, no one, would have considered otherwise. Maybe because I lied a lot. I lie to therapists. I leave out stuff. I rearrange it. I exaggerate or understate. I actually understate a lot. If I’m really really ashamed of something, I never ever admit it, or it takes years, or I honestly don’t think it’s relevant even if it shaped me in some way. Being bisexual, for instance. I don’t mention that. Is it relevant? I don’t know. Maybe I’m not really. I mean, sheesh, I’m married here. Maybe I just hang onto that identity for some unknown reason, because it’s kind of cool to be secretly different even though it has zilch impact on my life now, except that I find it hard to imagine being completely straight. How can you be completely one way or the other? How can you find one gender undesirable? What exactly is that like, anyway?

Me 2: Do you even hear yourself?

Me 1: I hear almost no one else, because I’m totally self-centered and don’t know how not to be, because here I am with myself, keeping myself company, and whatever I do, I’m stuck in here, worrying that I’m not very giving and can’t seem to make friends and I talk a lot about compassion blah blah blah but I never really do anything, unless you count writing to my congressman twice or making donations doing something, and the only thing I’ve ever done at church was work in the nursery sometimes, because I feel really weird trying to do volunteer work, everyone else is so genuine and caring and I’m cold and remote. Trust issues you know, fear of commitment, which is why I don’t make friends. I don’t want anyone to know me, at least not the people I meet now. I’m afraid I’ll be exposed for a fraud and lose my job. And how the hell did I end up working for a denomination that partners with organizations that try to “cure” gay people? WTF? That’s not me. That’s an abomination. But here I am, 100% cynical skeptic working for people who believe in 5 point Calvinism.

Me 2: Are you done yet?

Me 1: Yes, I think so for now, because I have cherry nougats.

School Bus - 1977

2010-03-16T18:53:00.006-05:00

On the way to work today I heard the song "Fly Like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band. In a flash I remembered sitting on a school bus in fifth grade and hearing the song over the bus’s radio, which the driver had obligingly turned up for us. It was the sort of song that made me feel odd, as if I had suddenly acquired a vision of infinite wisdom that I couldn’t communicate. The school bus smelled of warm vinyl bus seats. We were on our way back from a misguided enrichment class put together for the good students. This was the 70s, and even in the backwater I lived in, some loopy educational programs leaked in. I remember making candles, learning to count to 10 in Spanish, and eating churros. Making the candles was great, although mine looked crooked and lumpy. Melted wax has a very comforting smell. If I actually learned anything substantive, I don’t remember it.

Anyway, we were on the bus with 'Fly Like an Eagle" on the radio. Stephen Walker (I still remember his name) was turned around in the seat in front of me, making some sort of withering commentary. He was a skinny kid with long dirty blond hair that he wore in a ponytail. Sometimes I saw him riding his bike to school – one-handed or no-handed, of course. He was the most sarcastic person I had ever known, and I was filled with awe and admiration. I was also rather scared of him, since it was no fun to be the recipient of one of his verbal barbs. I remember an art project in which we made placemats for our family members, decorated with drawings that said something about that person’s life. He took one look at my mom’s placemat, which I recall had a drawing of a vacuum cleaner and cooking pots, and sneered, “I guess your mom doesn’t work.” Of course I knew women weren’t just housewives, but I hadn’t considered what it would be like to have a mom who worked at a job. My mom was pretty much incapable of holding a job. Given that I had already vastly inflated my mom’s housekeeping skills (I had to draw something, after all), I suddenly felt deficient. My mom didn’t work.

I don’t know what became of Stephen Walker. After fifth grade, my mom put me in a private school, to keep me away from the “bad elements” in the local public schools. That was code for “black people,” but also demonstrated a bit of class snobbery. My parents were from a very humble background, but my mom, at least, was determined to impress upon me the importance of taste, intelligence, and keeping the right sort of company. She did this to counter the "trashiness" of my dad's side of the family. Thanks to my mom I don't live in a trailer on the front lawn of my parent's house, with a meth lab, a skoal chewing husband, a shotgun and two grimy children.

I'm Waiting

2010-03-11T16:33:00.001-05:00

I am not the sort of person who lives with stories crowded in her head and characters shouting for attention. I do not. It is not like that inside me. The rooms are quiet, dust motes floating through sunlit air, and I walk them, sometimes bored, sometimes peaceful, and other times I walk an abandoned soot-choked city with no stars. But sometimes I am visited by an unexpected urge to write. I don’t know what about. I have to wait. My soul is looking for some story or image it wants to speak through and is disturbed by the expansive expectations of the first days of spring. Buds are unfolding, the air is softening, but the season is restless. When? it asks, over and over.

Some think that creating channels the divine. It’s the sort of thought you entertain after the fact, or when you are confronted with some extraordinary work of art and your heart gallops away in a fever of love and desire. Surely, surely, surely God has marked this writer or painter or musician, because he or she awakens a longing so strong it can’t be sated by drink or drugs or sex, a longing that goes on and on and feels like a penalty as much as a pleasure. When I create, it doesn’t feel divine. It is like finally finding out how those maddening pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together. The pleasure of discovering and resolving a pattern. Stories may never resolve, but the writing of them does.

And then, so soon after, the craving.

Good Times, Bad Times

2010-03-08T19:41:00.005-05:00

The more you don't write, the more nothing there is to not write about.

I have a new car. And by "new" I mean "used." My Sedona finally stuck out its tongue at me one too many times. I love my new used car. It reminds me of the cute little Neon I drove when I was young.

Firecracker had her yearly brain MRI, which made me feel weepy. But it doesn't change anything, so I'm back to sneaking peeks at this illness from the corner of my eye.

A rather annoying situation at church has developed. Dear Husband was working on a Seder and was feeling that the church was not very supportive and hardly anyone was registering, so he thought he should back out. He was so miserable that I thought it the best course. Well, that resulted in a mean spirited and unprofessional email from one of the staff. As a result he's been feeling pretty wretched, but the response didn't make him feel like sticking around, that's for sure. Now the church wants us to write some sort of letter airing our concerns. Jolly.

The 4000th episode of Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden has come and gone, yet the angst remains. Lucas and Noud are still star-crossed, and I fear I will be stuck in this tangled story line until Christmas. Please note: never undertake a building project alone, at night, in an abandoned sanitarium, with a flashlight the size of a pickling cucumber, and be assured that those odd noises you hear are the sounds of someone sneaking about for an inexplicably long time instead of just jumping out and slitting your throat right away. Finally, keep your bloody cell phone on your person. If you are concerned that there is a possibly dangerous someone lurking, don't think, "Hey, I'll just leave my cell phone here while I go investigate that noise upstairs. Meanwhile, why don't you leave your cell phone next to mine and head off in that direction and look for X, who has not been seen since she wandered off without her cell phone. See ya in a bit."

February 25

2010-02-25T14:41:00.001-05:00

I feel like if I don’t write something soon, everyone will forget I’m here. Including me. Life seems full of holes at the moment, a bit ragged, and rather dull. Slumberous times, but not refreshing. I do things I don’t enjoy. I do things I usually enjoy but don’t enjoy now. I think enjoyment might require more energy than I have at the moment. It’s very difficult to let discomfort simply be, when it feels like a garrote wrapped around my neck. Perhaps I should stop trying to reassure myself. Why do I try to reassure myself? I’m very unconvincing. I live my life trying to pretend that I am not deeply afraid of: being alone, losing the people I love, being friendless, entering depression and never exiting, passing my mental problems along to my children, having no money, having no faith, living with Firecracker’s disease, looking for meaning and finding nothing, trying to create meaning and being stymied. Being me, just me, as in this is all there is – me anxious, floundering. There is no better me, no me with improved synapses and joie de vivre, no me who is more productive and less defective.

When I was younger, I used to think about being a mistake, that I was shoved into this world with some sort of ontological defect that prevented me from holding the world loosely rather than facing it stricken, as if it were coming after me with claws bared. More people than I realized feel this way, which isn’t much comfort, really. We are always busy leaping out of the way of the industrious, the ambitious, and the determined who think us weak and tiresome.

Some days my thoughts are like the sound of footsteps receding down an empty hallway.

The Mysterious JQ

2010-02-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

Someone with the initials JQ has been going through my archives, leaving pleasant comments here and there. But the initials don’t link to a blogger profile.

Who are you, JQ? Do you have a blog somewhere? I appreciate you visiting and taking the time to leave messages. I haven’t left comments in response because I don’t have a decent computer at home for the moment, so I have to squeeze everything in during down times at work.

And in answer to one of your questions, I’ve heard of Ann Sebold, because of The Lovely Bones, but I haven’t read her. I suppose I should…

This Book Could Use a Better Writer

2010-02-18T13:49:00.001-05:00

My Vitamin D levels are very low. My thyroid is a bit wonky. Perhaps that is why I feel so little inclination to do anything at all. I have reached a boring patch in the book, the lackluster part you have to slog through – no skipping ahead in this one – before the story picks up again.

Despite my complete lack of ambition, I have a story in a journal

2010-02-06T11:24:00.005-05:00

To all my bloggy friends who aren't on Twitter or Facebook (these can just ignore this post), I have a story at Blue Print Review called "Coffee." I think I posted it on the blog some time ago, but now it looks all shiny and new. So stop by and have a look, and then look at the other works - it's an interesting issue.

So go have a look, because right now it feels as if I may never write anything again.

Resurrection = Insurrection: in which I prove once again that I'm incapable of serious thought

2010-02-03T19:22:00.008-05:00

I think this floated by in my twitter stream. I don't know much about Peter Rollins, except that he wrote a book called The Orthodox Heretic and a book of parables. I've been on his blog a few times, and thought I was out of my depth. But, you know, it was hard to pass up a teaser like "Resurrection = Insurrection" (the tag line for his blog is "To believe is human; to doubt divine", which makes me want to get hold of his book). So I pressed play.

Resurrection = Insurrection

Great stuff - so much more interesting than the Westminster Catechism.

Now, what do you think my first thought was when I played this?

Do you want to know?

C'mon, guess.

Hit play yourself. You don't have to watch the whole thing (though it would be well worth your time).

*drums fingers*

*whistles*

Well?

My first thought was "Wow, he's hot." Yep. Here's this theologian delivering a really great message about Christ and transformation and my first thought is that he's cute and his accent slays me. My second thought was "Why the hell are they filming him leaning against a wall?" What is it with religious films and funky camera hijinks? I watched a series of videos in which the camera was positioned so that every speaker delivered his message to the air on my left. The director was determined that you were never going to see the speaker head-on. And then of course there are the Nooma videos, which I love but, you know, they have that self-conscious look to them, the "I'm a Christian but I'm not that sort of Christian who decorates with Precious Moments figurines and Thomas Kinkade prints." Which I fully appreciate, don't get me wrong. I'm a snob.

I'm not just a snob; I'm a shallow snob.

But, seriously, what he says about the narrative self and the true self has me thinking. It's a topic I've pondered a lot, particularly since I have one deliberately evasive "good Christian" narrative self for work and another for play and another when I want to appear intellectual (I'm so not spinning that narrative at the moment) and so on. If there is a true self (wow, that sounds really weird to someone raised on postmodernism) I'm not sure who she is. I don't think that I demonstrate love, unless love for my family counts. That seems very insular. I know I'm not participating in a global transformation, important as I think it is. When you get right down to it, I'm self-serving, self-focused, and self-centered, all of which I try to spin into amusing commentary.

Ha! And here's Lent right around the corner...

In the Slough

2010-02-03T13:09:00.001-05:00

I’m still paddling around in the backwaters here, among the Spanish moss and gators. So far I’ve kept all my appendages, if not a balanced mind. I am two people at least. The one who goes to work and does homework with the kids and has this rather comfortable domestic life. Then there’s the one talking now, the doppelganger. She is navigating a swamp, alternately alert to lurking danger and lulled by the lapping of sludgy water against the boat. She’s liable to get eaten, because she is growing very bored.

Doldrums

2010-01-23T19:07:00.000-05:00

Sigh. I am in the doldrums, and not a breath of fresh air to fill my sails. I’m trying to just let depression be what it is, since it is an inescapable part of the rhythm of my life. It won’t be here forever and it can huff and puff but thanks to modern medicine it can’t blow the house down. I hope.

But you know, it’s like having a cold. Yeah you can keep going and you aren’t dangerously ill, but your nose is rubbed raw and your throat hurts, nothing tastes good and you have to breathe through your mouth. It’s annoying, in other words, and gets in the way. Who can create a coherent plan when they’re sneezing and dabbing at their nose all the time? And complaining about it to anyone is about as entertaining as droning on about your cold symptoms.

Still. The symptoms drag at your consciousness all day long. They change the context for your goals and desires. Everything seems an enormous bother.

What is my deepest fear, the one that is always stirring the silt at the bottom of the pond? I think it is to be left alone, with no one, all social connections cut, the loss of every person who has helped define me. The fear of lack of desire. That’s horrible, to find yourself devoid of interest, with only the patterns of duty to keep you moving forward. One of the worst things about depression is the way that pleasure falls away, so that there is no particular reason to do any particular thing, and every decision seems an impossible riddle. I suppose this is why I cultivate my little obsessions, these hooks on which to hang my attention.

Sigh. At least the girls keep me anchored in reality.

Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House

2010-01-14T13:03:00.002-05:00

I survived another birthday sleepover. This year DramaQueen had her sleepover at a hotel, one of Dear Husband’s inspired ideas. Ten year olds are still young enough to find hotels novel, and I didn’t have to clean up before or after. This hotel also had an indoor pool, which went a long way toward tiring the sweet things out.

Ten year old girls can have unbelievably shrill voices. In fact, they were sometimes pitched so high I’m surprised I could still hear them. I thought the sound would have entered that range only people under 20 can hear.

Of course, not every girl was a shrieker. We had a fascinating mix of personalities. There was the quiet, reserved girl who seemed to speak easily enough with the others but remained steadfastly polite and distant with me. The there was the girl who refused to stay up past her normal bedtime. It just wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t make a fuss about it. She just rolled out her sleeping bag and got in. I rather admire that self confidence. No one seemed to mind and they even chided each other for disturbing her (Forgotten in moments, of course. I finally sent her to the extra bed in my room). One girl was cute and rather quiet, until she went off like an alarm at mention of the Jonas Brothers and Justin Beiber, which brought forth some extraordinary squeals, and energized her for the rest of the evening. Another girl was perky and wholesome and reminded me of Bailey from the Suite Life On Deck (yes, I watch a lot of Disney) – a sort of iconic Midwestern girl. The final guest was the well-mannered and altogether wonderful BFF. If you could imagine the ideal friend for your daughter, P. would be that. I think I would use the term “well-bred.” I don’t think that’s essential to good character (God, I hope not, or we’re doomed), but it’s a lovely quality to find. Her family is polite and gracious, and it shows in the children, who are also polite and friendly and full of good humor.

We set up our computer to play music. Periodically the shy, reserved girl would call out, “DramaQueen, what song is this?” That would alert DramaQueen that something had gone horribly wrong, and she would race over to the laptop. “That’s my mom’s awful music!” And we would be back on track listening to Selena Gomez and Jordan Sparks.

They spent a lot of time playing a game called MASH, which I remember from my young days as something passed around in a spiral notebook. This version we paid about $10 dollars for, and consisted of a set of wipe-off cards with questions. MASH is a sort of fortune telling game. Even though I remember playing it, I’m pretty hazy on details. I just remember part of the game was listing potential husbands. Since the notebook was passed around, if you made the mistake of listing an actual real-life boy, you had to worry about them getting hold of the notebook. No doubt our version was lame. DramaQueen often looks at me with pity when I describe anything from my childhood. We were so deprived and had funny hair. If you’re dying to know more, you can go here for a full description.

At one point DramaQueen spilled a bunch of pop rocks on the carpet. This immediately galvanized the group, who decided to apply ice and see if they still popped. The experiment was a success and seemed to delight everyone. And here I was worried about party games. I noticed the next morning that all the spilled pop rocks had mysteriously vanished as if they had never existed. This is an example of God’s grace in action.

I brought stencils and gave all the girls tattoos. This was a great success and I recommend it to anyone else planning a birthday party for tweens. Manicures are so yesterday, but make them look like bikers in training and you have a hit. I did say no, however, when one of the girls asked for a tattoo around her bellybutton.

I discovered who was on team Jacob vs team Edward. Most, including DramaQueen, seemed to be on team Jacob. For those of you ~~who’ve been asleep for the past few years~~ not in the know, I’m talking about Twilight. Jacob is the werewolf and Edward is the vampire. This just goes to show that robust, well-muscled boys with long dark hair and no shirt will always win over skinny pasty-faced boys with floppy hair, however romantic. In general, though, DramaQueen’s response to boys is still “ewww!” Dear Husband thinks this is a front for a deeper curiosity. I don’t know. She looks genuinely baffled by the romance thing to me. And she doesn’t understand why anyone in their right mind would want to use their tongues when they kiss. I seem to remember wondering the same thing at 15 after my first kiss, but that’s another story.

I let them watch Star Trek, and in case any of the parents decided to sue me later, I made them close their eyes when Kirk was making out with the green chick. I could have chosen something rated G, but how boring is that? And this gave me the opportunity to ponder Zachary Quinto, who looks mighty fine even with pointy ears. No one made it to the end of the film. They all conked out around midnight. As I said, I was very happy about that swimming pool.

For the grand finale, Dear Husband brought donuts the next morning and the girls floated off with their parents on a sugar high.

A Minor Paradox

2010-01-11T12:42:00.001-05:00

This is one of those days when I feel sure trouble is brewing. I must have a terminal illness. My children are being covertly stalked. A financial crisis of some sort is hiding stealthily in the wings. Something monumentally important has been forgotten, and it will be my fault.

Outside the sun is too bright. This is the time of year when crap happens under the unremittingly clear winter light. And all the memories of crap that has happened at this time of year slinks out of their hidey holes to remind me of the insecurity of all we hold dear.

The other night I dreamed that a crab attacked me. You wouldn’t think that a crab could be so menacing, but it kept coming after me. When I woke I first thought it was a very strange thing to dream about – why a crab? Then I thought of the astrological sign featuring a crab – Cancer.

This makes me think of how much I would prefer to not die. Ever. I like being around. If I have to die, I would like it to be of old age, and not after a punishing dose of chemotherapy, like my mom, or in a nasty auto crash, like my nephew.

I’ve got an investment now. I want to see my grandchildren. I want to see all the medical, scientific, and technological advances that the future will bring. It’s been very exciting so far. Every year brings some advance I’m glad I lived to see, or book, film, or song that I can’t believe the world did without.

I don’t find heaven more appealing than here. I’m lucky that heaven is pretty much here on earth for me, and it’s one of my besetting sins that I don’t make it so for others who know nothing of heaven on earth.

So there you have it. On the one hand I’m weary and pessimistic; on the other I rejoice that the world is turning and I’m still here to enjoy the rotation.

The year that was ... something or other

2010-01-03T20:28:00.004-05:00

I was wondering if I should do one of those "year in review" type posts, and then I realized that I can barely remember last week. I could, of course, just make everything up, but happily I have my blog archives. They catalog the strange waxing and waning of my various fixations.

The Top Overwhelming Obsessions of 2009:

Twitter
Facebook
Supernatural
Misha Collins
Torchwood
Foreign soap operas
Writing (not obsessed enough, really)
Patrick Wolf
Owen Pallett

I don't enter a new year brimful of enthusiasm and resolutions. I enter grudgingly, with suspicion. I'm always a little nervous about what bizarre notion will next take hold, and just as worried that perhaps nothing will ever hold my attention again.

I fear the words are slinking away on their inky feet.

Black Dog, Black Turning Eyes

2009-12-31T00:04:00.004-05:00

Do you remember the fairy tale "The Tinderbox"? I read the story as a child. I had no idea what a Tinderbox was, but I imagined a wooden box full of twigs. In reality it was a box with a flint and some sort of slow-burning material – what they used before they had matches. (I can see some sort of examination of the rise of industrialization that then resulted in "Little Matchstick Girl," also written by Hans Christian Anderson. That is one sad story. When I was 7 or so our ballet recital was "The Little Matchstick Girl." I was an angel who danced around the dying girl. My costume was blue with itchy feathers around the bodice.)

If you don’t know "The Tinderbox," you should go read it, because ol’ Hans was a rather humorous writer, even when talking about lopping off a witch’s head. To summarize, a young soldier meets a witch who asks him to chimmy down into a hollow tree and fetch her tinderbox. While he’s there he’s free to help himself to all the copper, silver and gold coins, which are guarded by three dogs with enormous eyes. When he gets out, he wants to know why the witch is so keen to get an old tinderbox. She’s snippy and he responds by slicing her head off. Those were the days before anger management.

He’s got tons of gold, so he heads off to live large in town, until he’s broke and has to live in a garret (but doesn’t write poetry) and all his friends abandon him. He’s hanging out in the dark and remembers there’s a candle in the tinderbox. He strikes the flint and who should appear but one of the dogs, ready to do his bidding. Of course he sends him out after more gold. Then the story goes on to an unapproachable princess, a narrow escape from death and the destruction of all the pesky people standing in his way. Basically, we have a parable about corporate America.

Or not. Fairytales are wonderfully adaptable. One of my favorite books of poetry is Anne Sexton’s Transformations, reinterpretations of classic fairytales. And then there’s Angela Carter’s sinister The Bloody Chamber. They are chock o' block with sex, despair, brutality, misogyny, injustice, revenge, depravity. Fairy tales are dark and mean. Just tonight Firecracker woke up from a bad dream about getting lost and a witch locking her in a cage. The world of fairy tales is sicker than Saw. Well, I haven’t seen Saw, but you know what I mean.

I had forgotten about "The Tinderbox" until I ran across a Patrick Wolf (yes, I’m on about him again) song of that title. It’s perfectly done – if ever a song sounded like a fairy tale, this is it. His lyrics eventually land on the desire for lasting love and, I think, for some inner spark of vitality. Which is probably why I'm thinking about it. The flint has to be struck over and over.

Merry Merry

2009-12-25T23:20:00.003-05:00

1. We went to a candlelight service at an Episcopal church last night, and it was wonderful.

2. Dear Husband has been reading a book by Ann Rice and he says that after reading her descriptions of growing up Catholic, he gets why I find God in art and why I like liturgical services.

3. I have at least three Starbucks gift cards and a box of Starbucks Via, as well as two gift cards for bookstores. Sigh.

4. The girls each got Nintendo DSi consoles from grandparents. They have the cutest game I have ever seen - Nintendogs - with realistic dogs that you feed and play with. I sounded like I had been hitting the eggnog too much: Awww, that's so cute! Oh, that's just the cutest thing! Oh, look, he's rolling over! Oh, look at them eating!

5. Dear Husband made the most delicious ham I have ever had.

6. The girls and I each got Snuggies.

7. I got little black licorice scottie dogs.

8. The kugel turned out great even though I bought ricotta instead of cottage cheese. I have since found many many recipes from actual Jewish sources using ricotta rather than cottage cheese, so I know I'm not crazy. So there. There are as many variations of kugel as there are of "pasta with sauce." The MIL used rice noodles for Dear Husband, and I couldn't tell the difference. I suppose if you have enough cheese, sour cream and sugar, the noodles just have to sit there and be a bit chewy.

9. DramaQueen is determined to continue believing in Santa Clause. She was glued to NORAD watching his progress, and she decorated cookies, and put out crackers, carrots and water for the reindeer, as well as a message asking for a response. So of course I had to write a letter from Santa. This is the part of Christmas I will mourn passing. Nothing really expresses enchantment so much as a child awaiting Christmas.

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas. I'm always a little sad when it's over and all the ornaments have to be packed away for another year. As I get older I begin to consider the losses that could accumulate in the coming year, the possibility of mortal illness, the pangs at watching my girls get older and wanting to snuggle them before they decide that's childish and they've outgrown all the kisses and cuddles.

I also really dislike New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I always have. There's something about the start of a new year that makes my spirit tired and forlorn. I don't like my birthday, either, not because of growing older but because acknowledging my birth also makes me feel tired and forlorn. I suppose I've never felt very celebratory about being born. Speaking of which, DramaQueen's birthday approaches in January and then Firecracker's in February. Birthday parties mean tracking down nonresponders and fretting that no one will show up and worrying that everyone will be bored. I usually try to opt for venues where someone else runs the show, but I guess I'll be doing it this year, at least for DramaQueen.

Thank the Dear Lord that we are not doing Girl Scouts this year.

Gloria

2009-12-21T17:03:00.005-05:00

Now, THIS is a Christmas Carol. Boy, it beats listening to Casting Crowns choke out O Come All Ye Faithful.

The sound is so beautiful and pure. It makes contemporary worship music sound like a drunken rattling of tin cans.

And perhaps I should next break out my collection of Gregorian Chants.

Sigh. They don't write 'em like that anymore.

Submission

2009-12-10T23:16:00.000-05:00

Failure. Cummulative. Ontological. The details don’t matter. Only this matters. Failure traps my wrists in its cold hands and breathes ice into my mouth. My veins go numb, the blood sluggish. My eyes have fogged over. I am barely here. Then the slow glow of anger catches in my throat. The air vibrates. Imagine your lover brushing his lips across the skin of your inner arm, how it focuses your attention. I feel weak and urgent, the way you feel when you want to be kissed. I am in dissaray, my pulse struggling to find its voice. I have gripped rage hard and his response is swift. The flesh yields to the thin steel blade, and for a moment I’m giddy with relief and the sting of honest pain.

More violins, oh, and a bit of keyboard and orchestra some rain and stuff

2009-12-09T20:55:00.000-05:00

Final Fantasy's new album Heartland is due out in early January. I'm fairly dancing with anticipation. I happened across this amazing video of Owen Pallett performing one of the songs from Heartland with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Damn, it's amazing.

And then I found a much better version of Many Lives 49MP. This song never ceases to thrill me. He makes a mistake at the end, quite charmingly.

Finally, I thought this was great. He's playing in the rain and won't stop until he's finished his song. I think this song is also from the forthcoming album. I heard him play it at the Atlanta concert. I love the refrain "I'm never going to give it to you" - he sang it directly at the audience.

formspring.me

2009-12-09T14:27:00.001-05:00

What 5 people living or dead would you want to have dinner with?

Buster Keaton, Patrick Wolf, Owen Pallett, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo. I'll stick with the famous, as I would like to dine with most of my friends anyway. The list could change at any moment. In fact, it's probably changing this very moment...

Ask me anything

formspring.me

2009-12-09T08:54:00.001-05:00

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/2tired2move

Bendy

2009-12-08T21:45:00.004-05:00

I saw this over at MadPriest's blog:

"Grouping the sexuality of people under the terms gay and straight is a false dichotomy. For a start there are plenty of straight gay people around - if there weren't then there would hardly be a right wing in the Church to fight against.

A true dichotomy would be kinky and straight. Descriptively it is far more accurate and puts people into likeminded groupings (imaginative, creative sexual creatures in one camp - boring killjoys who might as well be dead already as they obviously hate the idea of actually being alive).

From roads to fjords to human beings, things are always far more interesting if they contain kinks, have crinkly edges and are downright bendy."

This made me laugh. He states a truth with such flair and humor. Isn’t this a much better division - the creative sexual creatures and the boring killjoys? I’ve often thought about this division into gay and straight. I've found that both camps want you to be very clear about where you stand. Bisexual is uneasily tolerated as a term for the people who just won’t get off the fence, because of course you should be one way or the other or you’re just kidding yourself.

Human sexuality is amazingly flexible. Whatever your preference, you can always surprise yourself. Unless of course you’ve given up on surprise entirely.

In any case, if Zachary Quinto shows up at my house, I’m not leaving him and Dear Husband alone in the same room. You never know.

Advent

2009-12-06T23:13:00.004-05:00

I’ve been reading posts about Advent and wondering how to think about Christmas. I so dislike that little phrase “Jesus is the reason for the season.” If I am completely honest, I would not like Christmas nearly so much if there were not presents and trees, lights and decorations. Although I don’t like the relentless consumerism and marketing of the holidays, I really like many of the secular aspects of Christmas.

I’m not quite sure how to extract Christ from the sentimentalized narrative of events that I’m not sure even happened. Where I work, the thinking is that if the Virgin birth is not true, then Christianity falls apart. I don't know why. The story of a virgin birth really seems like something patched on later to explain how this man could be completely human and divine at the same time. But it’s a beautiful image – the soul of the world waiting for the divine to enter as one of its own, God binding himself in human flesh out of love for his creation, giving himself to his creation. Despite my prevarication, I don’t really feel hypocritical reciting the creed about Jesus being born of a virgin and that he died and rose again. I think so many things are true that aren’t literally true. Good fiction is true. Good poetry is true. And yet there may not be a single actual event in either. They transcend the literal and ascend to a world of – what? – archetypes? Platonic forms? The Christmas story is beautiful. It’s poetry, it may be fiction, it is a vision of what the world could be if we truly followed the law of love, it speaks of our greatest hope that humanity is good, because Jesus was a man and was good, because he championed the outcasts and afflicted, and we ourselves can nurture that goodness.

Dear Husband is frustrated at my lack of passion for Christ, as he puts it. He considers my sense of not fitting in to be of my own making. I do find it very difficult to engage. He loves our new pastor. I find his messages simplistic. Dear Husband thinks I'm antisocial. It's not that I don't think there are other people like me - I just don't think they're at our church. And, yes, I have my guard up based on what I hear people express. My husband fits comfortably into orthodoxy. He doesn't take issue with anything. When I hear our pastor say that doubt must be met with faith, I feel frustrated. It's like saying that hunger must be met with food, and yet the tables are bare. Dear Husband says I didn't really listen. Oh, but I did. I listened, hoping I would hear something startling. I am always hoping I will hear something that will touch me, stir me, invigorate me.

And that is why I am about to turn once again to a more formal style of worship. This next weekend I plan to visit an Episcopal church. I don't necessarily think that I feel completely comfortable there. I have so little experience with this style of worship. I've been to Episcopal/Anglican churches that were sadly out of touch. But I want to experience a little quiet veneration, a different rhythm, the Eucharist as a rite, ritual prayer. Dear Husband is beginning to think I'm a nonbeliever. In many people's opinion, I would be. Not in my own. I just feel tired.

A Brief Intermission

2009-12-04T10:01:00.000-05:00

This blogging break brought to you by a raging sinus infection and a lack of inspiration. We hope to be back to our regular programming shortly.

Break Out Your Clove Cigarettes

2009-11-24T22:20:00.006-05:00

This past weekend Dear Husband and I went to a concert. Much to my amazement I had discovered a musician before they came to town rather than after. It was like fate was whispering in my ear. Dear Husband went along because he’s a good sport. He and I do not usually share the same taste in music, so I considered this a loving sacrifice on his part. Kudos, sweetie. I owe you a basketball game.

When we drove into the parking lot I saw a young man hovering on the edge, talking into a cell phone. “Isn’t that - I mean, that looks just like him!” Dear Husband replied, “They all look like that.” And, indeed, a lot of young men there did have that sort of school-boyish look, with hair short in the back and floppy in the front. A lot of others looked like they spent their lives in comic book stores. When the show started, Dear Husband said, “Well, I guess that was him.” Oh well, not that I would have interrupted a cell phone call to ask for an autograph. I’m too well-bred.

Floppy Haired Guy was Final Fantasy (or Owen Pallett – they are one and the same). Owen Pallett is a talented violinist. He has done work for Arcade Fire and The Pet Shop Boys and some other people I’m not so familiar with. He’s also played onstage with my other favorite artist Patrick Wolf. His live performances are mesmerizing. In the studio he has a bunch of other musicians to support him. On stage he plays his violin into a loop pedal (ooo, new terminology), then replays and records over THAT, and then does some more (including creating percussion on his violin) and adds THAT to the mix, to create layers and layers of sound. Sometimes he sings into the violin. I was wiggly with amazement.

While he was playing I was almost certain of God's existence.

He wasn't the only act. There was also a singer who came on before him, with the unlikely name of Larkin Grimm. I haven’t found anything online that captures her voice live. It has an elemental force; perhaps she channels it directly from a volcanic fissure. My jaw might have hit the floor a few times. She moved seamlessly from normal singing into a sort of banshee wail. She was … unsettling. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she was a voodoo priestess or the tormented ghost of an Appalachian mountain woman, or, well, just about anything except for a normal, run of the mill, person.

The main band was the Mountain Goats. I guess they’ve been around forever and done a dozen or so records, all of which have some sort of loopy concept. They have the sort of solid fan base of vegetarians and semi-hippie slacker types. Seriously, there was an overabundance of Birkenstocks in the audience and the pervasive scent of clove cigarettes. Their latest album is The Life of the World to Come, and all the songs are based in some way on a piece of scripture. They aren’t a Christian band by any means, but it seems the singer really likes to read the Bible. For fun.
Here is a song from the Mountain Goats called Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace. Not sure what's going on in this song, but it involves tying someone up, and you can't go wrong with that.

Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

2009-11-15T19:17:00.005-05:00

Here's the story: In 19th century England, a young woman, a gypsy and outcast, falls in love with the son of the parish priest. They are forbidden to marry and she dies of a broken heart (i.e. jumps off a cliff, takes poison, or pines away). Very romantic. It seems that Patrick Wolf ran across this story when researching his family background and finding a cross with the name Damaris among his ancestors' graves.

The explanation I've read about the story is a little confusing. I think he means the Anglican Church and not the Catholic Church, since the man was the son of a priest. Catholic priests may have been procreating for centuries, but they didn't usually publicly recognize their children and worry who they married. Also, if she were Catholic and had killed herself or if she were completely outside the faith, she wouldn't have been buried on consecrated ground with the rest of the family. I don't know if Anglicans have consecrated ground. You tell me.

But anyway, who cares. This is such a beautiful song and I think of Heathcliff and Catherine or Tess and what's his name. Different part of England, but it really reminds me of Wuthering Heights - the man crying out for his dead beloved.

Oh yeah, those cookies are HOT

2009-11-13T16:39:00.003-05:00

Well, it’s that time of year – the holidays – when women’s magazines go all out to ~~make you feel like the crappiest housewife/mom in the world~~ provide you with helpful tips and delicious recipes for your Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities.

I think Good Housekeeping has a lot in common with Playboy. We’ve been socialized to look with concupiscence at photographs of a fat turkey with all the sides on a tastefully decorated table. If you are well-off or have a post-graduate degree, you read Martha Stewart or Real Simple. The Proletariat get off on All You. Good Housekeeping is somewhere in between. Interlarded with the articles on How I Survived Cancer and Skin Care Products that Really Work (in Real Simple that would be Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Items and Decorating with Mercury Glass) are images of the Impossible. The Christmas edition of Good Housekeeping features a centerfold of elaborately decorated cutout cookies: snowflakes with royale icing, piping, and blue sugar that has somehow been coerced into sticking only to the piping; bells with silver dragees; candy canes with alternating bands of white frosting and red sugar. James McAvoy in a light dusting of powdered sugar. Oops - mind wandered a bit.

For some reason, the lower down the economic totem pole you go, the odder the projects, until you get confectionery constructed from white cake, fruit rollups, ice-cream cones, licorice laces, flattened gumdrops, rolls of Life Savers and toothpicks. Almost every “seasonal” dessert in All You reminds me of a Girl Scout Swap Meet – ingenuity devoted to the inconsequential.

Many glossy pages will cover holiday decorating and creating family traditions. You know, traditions such as Aunt Hester saying “Well, it’s an expensive gift” when your child does not display the appropriate enthusiasm and gratitude. The annual misbegotten children’s craft involving glitter. The cat throwing up after eating a roll of curly ribbon. Or, the traditional family greeting, “Where the hell is the tape?!”

I’ve found an article that describes how to create a lovely menorah from glass cylinders filled with blue glass pebbles and tapers. Do you know how many tapers you would go through in order to light these every night of Chanukah? Forty-four. Forty-four full-size tapers. You could buy out the entire candle section of your local Krogers.

Then there are the pages of gift suggestions – gifts under $50, gifts under $25 and so forth. Let me go snap up that little red-striped baby onesie so cunningly rolled into the shape of a lollipop - awwwww. This box of clever conversation starters! Nesting Christmas dolls! The newest children’s classic If You Give a Mouse an Assault Rifle! Vintage tampon cases! Stationary made by indigent Malaysian orphans from recycled candy wrappers! And you know, I’m not kidding about those tampon cases. They’re for real.

Meanwhile, the November edition of GQ features a chick with her boobs hanging out. Go figure.

Hey, I wrote something, and so did a bunch of people

2009-11-12T14:03:00.005-05:00

Folks, I've been such a creative little critter.

Click here to read my story Sheol, which is on Metazen. Then look around because there are all sorts of interesting stories and poems there.

A few writers I've been reading lately:

Flawnt: he always writes something intriguing and unsettling.

I Must Be Off, a blog by Christopher Allen. He has adventures and misadventures.

Cat Sitting, by Frank Hinton, the editor of Metazen. This story had me in stitches.

Doodles and Words. By Cyn doesn't post enough. Make her post more.

Mental Music

2009-11-10T22:52:00.004-05:00

I’ve been waking up with songs playing in my head. This is not the usual “I’ve got a song stuck in my head” sort of event. I’ve had that happen of course, sitting at my desk working and really annoyed that the tune of Poker Face keeps playing as background music and trying not to think of Lady GaGa, who makes me feel a little queasy.

I have never woken with a song cycling relentlessly through my head. Particularly not every bloody time I wake up, even if for just a moment in the middle of the night, or in response to a distress call from Firecracker. And it can’t be because I’m playing the same songs over and over. I played U2’s CD over and over for months and had peaceful nights. I ALWAYS play new music over and over. But now my sleep has a soundtrack.

I’m not even a musical person. I can’t play an instrument. I was pathetic at piano. My singing voice is just sad. I have no intuitive feel for music. I have emotional reactions to certain bands and songs, but I couldn’t tell you what key and I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out influences or have the language to describe, well, pretty much anything about a song.

But now I've got my own personal jukebox, all songs by Patrick Wolf. His music is burrowing insistently into my psyche. I'm walking around in a world of blackberries and thickets, doomed romances, mythical characters (Hi Theseus), shape shifters (Hello Vultures), towers, gypsies, bluebells, constellations, and pig farmers (yes, even pig farmers). What would it be like to have all that spring forth from your imagination?

It would be the best.

Hello Kitty Walks to Emmaus

2009-11-08T20:19:00.004-05:00

Dear Husband is on his way back from Walk to Emmaus, so I suspect I won't have any time to post anything substantial. Firecracker in particular is eager to see her daddy again. She's had a few teary moments over the weekend. So if you want something to read, go back to Coffee and Renaissance, if you haven't already.

BTW, it seems Dear Husband was the only guy at the retreat with Hello Kitty bedsheets.

Nope, no post happening here.

2009-11-08T00:11:00.002-05:00

Really.