I'm weary of this topic that gets resurrected every couple of years, possibly with every new Congress come to think of it.
The webs that government weaves never cease to confound me, this among them. I suppose this was some kind of quid pro quo: keep the drinking age at 21 and we won't impose any additional fees on your highway system. Then again, I don't think the government is half as confusing as the brain trust behind the Amethyst Initiative.
Attached is a link to my Daily Caller column. Would love to hear what you think.
PS If you haven't been to the blog for a while, I hope you'll settle in and look around for a bit. Thanks for visiting.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Neither pure, nor wise, nor good. But I'm trying.
One of the simplest joys in my life takes place once a week, on Sunday mornings, at my kitchen table: while I read the papers and drink coffee, I listen to a Sunday morning concert, featuring my three sons. Because they have been singers and have belonged to a number of ensembles and choruses over the past eight years, we’ve collected many hours of gorgeous choral music concerts. And because they have been among the soloists featured in those groups from time to time, I’m able to lose myself for a few minutes in one of their lovely tenor voices as I relive a particular performance.
I was jolted into present day this morning as I listened. Maybe because it’s February and maybe because we’re coming up on Valentine’s Day, I lingered over one particular song this morning. It was the gorgeous melody and lyrics of “Make Our Garden Grow,” the finale of Candide, a musical by Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim. Confession: Shortly after I outgrew the “everyone gets a card from everyone else” boxes found in my grade school classrooms each year, Valentine’s Day became one of my least favorite days of the year. An annual forced moment to celebrate love – even if it occurs during years of blissful romance - has never felt right to me.
The question I find myself contemplating this year is how Voltaire (and Bernstein, Wilbur and Sondheim), got it so right yet could be so confounding. And how they were able to pose the day-to-day situation that surrounds love and life so poetically. In “Make Our Garden Grow,” we hear Candide and Cunegonde share their thoughts about the future, and how they can build it together. Here are the lyrics.
CANDIDE: You've been a fool and so have I, but come and be my wife.
And let us try, before we die, to make some sense of life.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...and make our garden grow.
CUNEGONDE: I thought the world was sugar cake for so our master said.
But, now I'll teach my hands to bake our loaf of daily bread.
CANDIDE AND CUNEGONDE: We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...and make our garden grow.
CANDIDE, CUNEGONDE, MAXIMILLIAN, PAQUETTE, OLD LADY, DR. PANGLOSS
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please
Those Edens can't be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees are grown in solid ground.
ENSEMBLE (a cappella)
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!
The idea of doing “the best we know” is what intrigues me. We may all sincerely pledge to do this and that’s terrific. But what if the best we know isn’t enough? What makes one couple endure and another move apart, even when they may face identical circumstances? Maybe one couple knows more than the other.
I think a wedding or a public commitment to each other is the one particular point in time when a couple pledges, before they die, to make some sense of life. If you think about it, all the ballads aside, people build a life together in an effort to do exactly that: to make some sense of life, and prop each other up while they do.
But here’s the thing: sometimes life doesn’t make a lot of sense, even when it should. You do everything “right,” you follow the “rules,” and still, you find yourself wondering where and how you stepped off (or were pushed off) the “sensible” path somewhere along the line and are baffled by the situations you face and what to do next.
Maybe that’s precisely where the pledge to do ‘the best you know’ kicks in. It could be that sometimes the only thing you can agree on is that life makes little sense – but you hang on together and try to figure it out. Maybe you decide to do the best you know…for as long as you can.
On balance, though, I suppose it’s a good thing when the initial excitement of a relationship wanes and daily life emerges to take its place. I suppose that when a couple realizes that the world isn’t only a sugar cake; when they realize it takes work every day to make a life together, a life that’s about as exotic and fanciful as a loaf of bread, they’ve embraced a realistic view of their future.
The pragmatic, practical side of my nature relates strongly to this message. Does that make me cold? After all, almost anyone would agree that dreams and fantasies do not a strong foundation make. Solid ground gives everything a better start, right?
Hmmm. I’m not sure about that, anymore. Solid implies something that’s trustworthy, reliable and safe. But maybe “solid ground” is over-rated. Maybe it’s just way to label something that’s little more than a rigid, unmoving, cold, hard surface. Maybe the sweetest flowers (and children? And marriages?) come from the softest, most pliable soil instead.
What does that mean about the rest of the lyrics? If dreamers dream “what worlds they please,” can they really not be found?
Despite everything I just wrote above, the part of me that’s relentlessly romantic hopes they can be. Because when I choose sentiment over logic, I don’t want to live without imagining the worlds we please. How bleak an outlook we might have without the dreamers among us, willing to share their hope.
Tiger moms aside, we encourage dreams in our children; we used to nurture them in ourselves, too. Dreams of a life, a marriage, a partnership that would make our gardens grow. I think as we grow older, we tuck our own dreams further and further away. We get too busy: building a house and chopping wood and not spending much time at all on “what worlds we please.” I also think that the difference between people who pursue their dreams and people who don’t is that the first group never quite tucks them completely out of sight. Maybe they evolve, maybe they get re-imagined as the years pass and circumstances change but they never really lose sight of them.
I may have overlooked the most important phrase of the lyrics. “We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good.” Thank God. I’m thrilled to accept that description, and by extension, that definition of some of the decisions I’ve made in life. Sometimes – sure. I suppose there may have been moments during my life when any one of those words could be ascribed to something I said or did. Few and far between no doubt but even very occasionally, I’ll take it. But as a rule, when it comes to the big things: no, sorry. There are simply too many variables in just about any choice I made that make the answer complicated.
The trouble is that sometimes the right choice at twenty isn’t the right choice at thirty-five. Or the right one at 35 no longer works at 52. What does that imply about me? Selfishness? Egocentricity? That everything is relative; that decisions are pragmatic at best and should never be considered final?
I don’t know.
I’m over-thinking again, I get it. Maybe the lyrics will save me from myself and my confusion about just about everything these days if I let them. Maybe the best that can be said is that no matter the outcome, no matter how it’s perceived, no matter how it feels or looks or appears to be, the simple truth of life is that we try to do the best we know. And make our garden grow.
I was jolted into present day this morning as I listened. Maybe because it’s February and maybe because we’re coming up on Valentine’s Day, I lingered over one particular song this morning. It was the gorgeous melody and lyrics of “Make Our Garden Grow,” the finale of Candide, a musical by Leonard Bernstein, Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim. Confession: Shortly after I outgrew the “everyone gets a card from everyone else” boxes found in my grade school classrooms each year, Valentine’s Day became one of my least favorite days of the year. An annual forced moment to celebrate love – even if it occurs during years of blissful romance - has never felt right to me.
The question I find myself contemplating this year is how Voltaire (and Bernstein, Wilbur and Sondheim), got it so right yet could be so confounding. And how they were able to pose the day-to-day situation that surrounds love and life so poetically. In “Make Our Garden Grow,” we hear Candide and Cunegonde share their thoughts about the future, and how they can build it together. Here are the lyrics.
CANDIDE: You've been a fool and so have I, but come and be my wife.
And let us try, before we die, to make some sense of life.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...and make our garden grow.
CUNEGONDE: I thought the world was sugar cake for so our master said.
But, now I'll teach my hands to bake our loaf of daily bread.
CANDIDE AND CUNEGONDE: We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...and make our garden grow.
CANDIDE, CUNEGONDE, MAXIMILLIAN, PAQUETTE, OLD LADY, DR. PANGLOSS
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please
Those Edens can't be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees are grown in solid ground.
ENSEMBLE (a cappella)
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!
The idea of doing “the best we know” is what intrigues me. We may all sincerely pledge to do this and that’s terrific. But what if the best we know isn’t enough? What makes one couple endure and another move apart, even when they may face identical circumstances? Maybe one couple knows more than the other.
I think a wedding or a public commitment to each other is the one particular point in time when a couple pledges, before they die, to make some sense of life. If you think about it, all the ballads aside, people build a life together in an effort to do exactly that: to make some sense of life, and prop each other up while they do.
But here’s the thing: sometimes life doesn’t make a lot of sense, even when it should. You do everything “right,” you follow the “rules,” and still, you find yourself wondering where and how you stepped off (or were pushed off) the “sensible” path somewhere along the line and are baffled by the situations you face and what to do next.
Maybe that’s precisely where the pledge to do ‘the best you know’ kicks in. It could be that sometimes the only thing you can agree on is that life makes little sense – but you hang on together and try to figure it out. Maybe you decide to do the best you know…for as long as you can.
On balance, though, I suppose it’s a good thing when the initial excitement of a relationship wanes and daily life emerges to take its place. I suppose that when a couple realizes that the world isn’t only a sugar cake; when they realize it takes work every day to make a life together, a life that’s about as exotic and fanciful as a loaf of bread, they’ve embraced a realistic view of their future.
The pragmatic, practical side of my nature relates strongly to this message. Does that make me cold? After all, almost anyone would agree that dreams and fantasies do not a strong foundation make. Solid ground gives everything a better start, right?
Hmmm. I’m not sure about that, anymore. Solid implies something that’s trustworthy, reliable and safe. But maybe “solid ground” is over-rated. Maybe it’s just way to label something that’s little more than a rigid, unmoving, cold, hard surface. Maybe the sweetest flowers (and children? And marriages?) come from the softest, most pliable soil instead.
What does that mean about the rest of the lyrics? If dreamers dream “what worlds they please,” can they really not be found?
Despite everything I just wrote above, the part of me that’s relentlessly romantic hopes they can be. Because when I choose sentiment over logic, I don’t want to live without imagining the worlds we please. How bleak an outlook we might have without the dreamers among us, willing to share their hope.
Tiger moms aside, we encourage dreams in our children; we used to nurture them in ourselves, too. Dreams of a life, a marriage, a partnership that would make our gardens grow. I think as we grow older, we tuck our own dreams further and further away. We get too busy: building a house and chopping wood and not spending much time at all on “what worlds we please.” I also think that the difference between people who pursue their dreams and people who don’t is that the first group never quite tucks them completely out of sight. Maybe they evolve, maybe they get re-imagined as the years pass and circumstances change but they never really lose sight of them.
I may have overlooked the most important phrase of the lyrics. “We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good.” Thank God. I’m thrilled to accept that description, and by extension, that definition of some of the decisions I’ve made in life. Sometimes – sure. I suppose there may have been moments during my life when any one of those words could be ascribed to something I said or did. Few and far between no doubt but even very occasionally, I’ll take it. But as a rule, when it comes to the big things: no, sorry. There are simply too many variables in just about any choice I made that make the answer complicated.
The trouble is that sometimes the right choice at twenty isn’t the right choice at thirty-five. Or the right one at 35 no longer works at 52. What does that imply about me? Selfishness? Egocentricity? That everything is relative; that decisions are pragmatic at best and should never be considered final?
I don’t know.
I’m over-thinking again, I get it. Maybe the lyrics will save me from myself and my confusion about just about everything these days if I let them. Maybe the best that can be said is that no matter the outcome, no matter how it’s perceived, no matter how it feels or looks or appears to be, the simple truth of life is that we try to do the best we know. And make our garden grow.
Monday, January 31, 2011
The little runner who could. Or couldn't. We'll find out soon enough.
Okay. That’s 37.1 down; 413.9 to go.
Almost inexplicably, I’ve become a runner. Let me rephrase that: I'm not a “real” runner because I log nearly all my miles on a treadmill, and I’ve never run a road race, and I’ve never considered myself even remotely athletic. Ask anyone who knows me: I’m not. Not by the longest shot.
But last year, I started worrying about my health. I weighed more than I ever had without being pregnant – maybe even without being pregnant. (I never put on more than twenty pounds or so with my pregnancies, even when I was carrying twins.) I worried about my sugar and my blood pressure. This was no good and just because I was getting older, I didn’t have to get fatter, did I? If I kept going at this rate, I’d be ten pounds heavier every ten years. No thanks.
So last spring, I started a diet. I’ve been on it ever since and have lost about thirty pounds. (I can't believe I had to lose thirty pounds but I did. That's what happens when you tell yourself things like, "I just need to lose maybe 10 or 12 pounds." Except you really need to lose much, much more.) Not to say I don’t indulge once in a while in truly decadent food but much more often, I consider and am aware of what I eat.
Last spring, I also started walking on our treadmill, and then walking and running a tiny bit, and then running slowly for a little tiny bit of time and then running faster and longer. And now I’m running a 5k a few times a week in under thirty minutes.
That’s not amazing or anything – I get that - but for someone like me, it’s very nearly miraculous. Who knew? If you’re someone who has been running for twenty years, you’re thinking a combination of “this is barely worth noting,” and “what took you so long?”
You're right but even with my very delayed start, I like the energy it seems to give me. I even like challenge it still presents every single time I get started. I like that I’ve been able to pull some of my favorite clothing out of my closet, clothing that I tell myself I've been “resting” for a couple of years.
It’s never easy but it is satisfying on some level. I sometimes have a few days go by and worry that this is the beginning of the end and I won’t run another step for months. That hasn’t happened in the past eight months but still, it could. It might. It really might.
But I have few illusions about this. I don’t ever expect to run a race of any kind because that’s not what running is about for me. It’s about blood pressure and cholesterol and being grateful for the healthy body I’ve been given.
Here’s how I’ve been able to keep going. Even when I really want to quit, I break my time down into tiny bits and convince myself to stick with it. “My God, you can do anything for another two minutes, can’t you?” “Okay, another 8/10th’s of a mile. You can do 8/10th’s of a mile, right?” “You’ve run for 26 minutes. Four more? Four more? I think so….” And it seems to keep me going.
But even that gets tedious. So when the new year started, I thought about what could possibly keep me going all year. What could I track in a bigger way to keep me slogging through, week after week?
I decided to run to Toronto, on paper anyway. That means over the course of the year, I’ll need to run 450 miles. Or, since I’m nothing if not anal about numbers, that means I need to cover 37.5 miles a month. And as you could see at the start of this post, I’m not too far off my mark.
The bad news is we’ve done something that has to be almost unprecedented in our home. We’ve owned two treadmills in the past twenty-five years or so and after years of on and off use, we wore out the first one. Over the weekend, we wore out the second. It's under warranty and we're getting it fixed but who could imagine that? How often does Sears get a call to fix a treadmill, much less two calls from the same household?
So I need to get my miles in elsewhere. Not impossible but not nearly as easy as wandering into my basement a couple of nights a week. Especially when it’s a pretty miserable winter. When it’s not snowing or sleeting outside, it’s seven degrees. That’s super.
Maybe this little note to myself – and you - will help keep me on track. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll get as far as the greater Scranton area and find myself figuratively hanging around there for months on end as I lounge on the sofa. Or I’ll get in a good hundred miles, take a break, and still have 345 miles to go on November 30. For now, I’m looking at the next month, and another 37.5 miles.
Which is about 9.4 miles a week.
Or about 1.34 miles a day.
Or 2.34 miles, four times a week.
I can do that, right? For another 48 weeks or so?
I guess we’ll find out.
Almost inexplicably, I’ve become a runner. Let me rephrase that: I'm not a “real” runner because I log nearly all my miles on a treadmill, and I’ve never run a road race, and I’ve never considered myself even remotely athletic. Ask anyone who knows me: I’m not. Not by the longest shot.
But last year, I started worrying about my health. I weighed more than I ever had without being pregnant – maybe even without being pregnant. (I never put on more than twenty pounds or so with my pregnancies, even when I was carrying twins.) I worried about my sugar and my blood pressure. This was no good and just because I was getting older, I didn’t have to get fatter, did I? If I kept going at this rate, I’d be ten pounds heavier every ten years. No thanks.
So last spring, I started a diet. I’ve been on it ever since and have lost about thirty pounds. (I can't believe I had to lose thirty pounds but I did. That's what happens when you tell yourself things like, "I just need to lose maybe 10 or 12 pounds." Except you really need to lose much, much more.) Not to say I don’t indulge once in a while in truly decadent food but much more often, I consider and am aware of what I eat.
Last spring, I also started walking on our treadmill, and then walking and running a tiny bit, and then running slowly for a little tiny bit of time and then running faster and longer. And now I’m running a 5k a few times a week in under thirty minutes.
That’s not amazing or anything – I get that - but for someone like me, it’s very nearly miraculous. Who knew? If you’re someone who has been running for twenty years, you’re thinking a combination of “this is barely worth noting,” and “what took you so long?”
You're right but even with my very delayed start, I like the energy it seems to give me. I even like challenge it still presents every single time I get started. I like that I’ve been able to pull some of my favorite clothing out of my closet, clothing that I tell myself I've been “resting” for a couple of years.
It’s never easy but it is satisfying on some level. I sometimes have a few days go by and worry that this is the beginning of the end and I won’t run another step for months. That hasn’t happened in the past eight months but still, it could. It might. It really might.
But I have few illusions about this. I don’t ever expect to run a race of any kind because that’s not what running is about for me. It’s about blood pressure and cholesterol and being grateful for the healthy body I’ve been given.
Here’s how I’ve been able to keep going. Even when I really want to quit, I break my time down into tiny bits and convince myself to stick with it. “My God, you can do anything for another two minutes, can’t you?” “Okay, another 8/10th’s of a mile. You can do 8/10th’s of a mile, right?” “You’ve run for 26 minutes. Four more? Four more? I think so….” And it seems to keep me going.
But even that gets tedious. So when the new year started, I thought about what could possibly keep me going all year. What could I track in a bigger way to keep me slogging through, week after week?
I decided to run to Toronto, on paper anyway. That means over the course of the year, I’ll need to run 450 miles. Or, since I’m nothing if not anal about numbers, that means I need to cover 37.5 miles a month. And as you could see at the start of this post, I’m not too far off my mark.
The bad news is we’ve done something that has to be almost unprecedented in our home. We’ve owned two treadmills in the past twenty-five years or so and after years of on and off use, we wore out the first one. Over the weekend, we wore out the second. It's under warranty and we're getting it fixed but who could imagine that? How often does Sears get a call to fix a treadmill, much less two calls from the same household?
So I need to get my miles in elsewhere. Not impossible but not nearly as easy as wandering into my basement a couple of nights a week. Especially when it’s a pretty miserable winter. When it’s not snowing or sleeting outside, it’s seven degrees. That’s super.
Maybe this little note to myself – and you - will help keep me on track. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll get as far as the greater Scranton area and find myself figuratively hanging around there for months on end as I lounge on the sofa. Or I’ll get in a good hundred miles, take a break, and still have 345 miles to go on November 30. For now, I’m looking at the next month, and another 37.5 miles.
Which is about 9.4 miles a week.
Or about 1.34 miles a day.
Or 2.34 miles, four times a week.
I can do that, right? For another 48 weeks or so?
I guess we’ll find out.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Love: It might not be all you need, but it’s almost all you need.
Amy Chua has ruffled a lot of maternal feathers over the last few weeks. She is a Yale Law School Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a book that chronicles her experience as a mother of two daughters. Her twist? Her Chinese heritage and how it had an impact on the choices she made as she raised her children.
Without belaboring this, she tells story after story about how the Chinese perspective on raising children differs from that of the “Western” moms and dads. If you haven’t seen her interviews or read any articles, here are a couple of quick statistics and a few excerpts to give you a flavor of her view:
Almost 70% of Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.”
0% of Chinese mothers agreed.
Most Chinese mothers believe their children can be “the best” students.
They believe “academic achievement reflects successful parenting.”
They believe unsuccessful students were the offspring of parents who “were not doing their job.”
Chinese parents spend about 10 times as long as Western parents drilling their children on academics.
There’s plenty more but that’s enough to tell you that Chua takes an approach that assumes a couple of things raising children:
Instead of focusing on and worrying about a child’s self-esteem and fragile ego, she claims that Chinese parents “assume strength, not fragility” in their children and “as a result, they behave differently.”
She believes her children owe her everything. She’s done her part at making them a success; they must spend the rest of their lives acknowledging that and “repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.”
Chinese parents like Chua believe that “they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences.”
I have no idea if she’s onto something here or if she’s a nut job who has browbeaten her daughters into submission on the road to her definition of “success” and quelled any dreams they may have had that didn’t quite mesh with her idea of what is valuable. Among those ideas: earning a grade lower than an A [ever, in any subject], being the number one student in every subject other than gym and drama, learning only piano and violin [no other instrument, ever], not being part of the school play and watching no television and playing no video games. Ever. Many typical childhood activities seem pointless and intrusive in Chua’s view, sleepovers, camp, and play dates among them.
Look, the village that many claim it takes to raise children notwithstanding, every parent on the planet has at least some autonomy when it comes to their children. We’re all, hmmmm, quirky and crazy in all kinds of ways and all of us come up with some strange ideas along the way as our children arrive and make us into instant parents. With little more to go on than instinct, the endless and well-meaning advice from people I mostly ignored, and a combination of Drs. Brazelton (since dismissed) and Spock (less so), and a dose of Rosemond good sense plus Quindlin pragmatism and brilliance, I tried my best to help the boys go through challenging life stages and then move onto young adulthood.
I might not agree with Chua and so what? I’m not raising her children and she’s not raising mine. And absolutely, I think she’s extreme and possibly borderline abusive but I don’t have her heritage. I didn’t grow up with parents who very likely modeled that kind of “practice, practice, practice, practice, practice until you attain excellence” behavior for her.
She admits to calling her daughter “garbage” as a result of her disrespectful behavior. She claims bad academic news [which is the rarest of occasions] would be met with “a screaming, hair-tearing explosion.” The Chinese solution to sub-standard performance “is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” When her daughter, Lulu (age 7), was unable to learn a piano piece, she drilled her relentlessly, threatened to give away toys, and then threatened “no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years” and told her to stop being “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” (Surprise! Lulu learned the piece perfectly. Quite a victory, yes? And well worth the effort to perform perfectly at a children’s piano recital, right?)
But here’s the thing: in one way, and one way only, I envy Chua. I envy her certainty. If nothing else, she has complete confidence in her choices as a mother. She doesn’t appear to have spent so much as half a minute wondering if her choices are correct, or healthy, or harmful or bats- -t crazy.
While I don’t agree with her, the idea of being so secure, so absolute about the choices you make with your children and how you ultimately raise them appeals to me on some level.
Maybe this is erupting in me because my oldest child just turned twenty-one. By almost all standards, and certainly in the Western world, he is an adult. And as we drove to Philadelphia to take him out for dinner and celebrate his landmark birthday, I kept thinking: how did this happen? How did he get to be 21? What did I forget to do, to tell him, to teach him, to warn him about? (What didn’t I forget, more likely.) What did I do too often, to seldom? What did I do very, very badly?
I’m certain Chua has never had a moment like this. I’m also certain she’d consider me a slacker beyond all hope and label my children “failures.”
And this is where I have my absolute certainty. That would be exactly where she is entirely wrong. I’ll readily admit to breaking many of her “rules” for raising “successful” kids. And in exchange for that choice, I had experiences with my sons that I wouldn’t trade for a lifetime high honor rolls, perfect recitals and valedictory speeches. Experiences I’ll remember until the day I die because they are just that amazing; just that loving; just that – shall I say it? – perfect.
Somehow, when I look at it that way, even with my questions unanswered and still troubling, and when on a very bad day, the moments of ‘growing up’ sadness and discomfort loom large in my memory, I’m not longer unsure about what a “successful” parent is.
Without belaboring this, she tells story after story about how the Chinese perspective on raising children differs from that of the “Western” moms and dads. If you haven’t seen her interviews or read any articles, here are a couple of quick statistics and a few excerpts to give you a flavor of her view:
Almost 70% of Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.”
0% of Chinese mothers agreed.
Most Chinese mothers believe their children can be “the best” students.
They believe “academic achievement reflects successful parenting.”
They believe unsuccessful students were the offspring of parents who “were not doing their job.”
Chinese parents spend about 10 times as long as Western parents drilling their children on academics.
There’s plenty more but that’s enough to tell you that Chua takes an approach that assumes a couple of things raising children:
Instead of focusing on and worrying about a child’s self-esteem and fragile ego, she claims that Chinese parents “assume strength, not fragility” in their children and “as a result, they behave differently.”
She believes her children owe her everything. She’s done her part at making them a success; they must spend the rest of their lives acknowledging that and “repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.”
Chinese parents like Chua believe that “they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences.”
I have no idea if she’s onto something here or if she’s a nut job who has browbeaten her daughters into submission on the road to her definition of “success” and quelled any dreams they may have had that didn’t quite mesh with her idea of what is valuable. Among those ideas: earning a grade lower than an A [ever, in any subject], being the number one student in every subject other than gym and drama, learning only piano and violin [no other instrument, ever], not being part of the school play and watching no television and playing no video games. Ever. Many typical childhood activities seem pointless and intrusive in Chua’s view, sleepovers, camp, and play dates among them.
Look, the village that many claim it takes to raise children notwithstanding, every parent on the planet has at least some autonomy when it comes to their children. We’re all, hmmmm, quirky and crazy in all kinds of ways and all of us come up with some strange ideas along the way as our children arrive and make us into instant parents. With little more to go on than instinct, the endless and well-meaning advice from people I mostly ignored, and a combination of Drs. Brazelton (since dismissed) and Spock (less so), and a dose of Rosemond good sense plus Quindlin pragmatism and brilliance, I tried my best to help the boys go through challenging life stages and then move onto young adulthood.
I might not agree with Chua and so what? I’m not raising her children and she’s not raising mine. And absolutely, I think she’s extreme and possibly borderline abusive but I don’t have her heritage. I didn’t grow up with parents who very likely modeled that kind of “practice, practice, practice, practice, practice until you attain excellence” behavior for her.
She admits to calling her daughter “garbage” as a result of her disrespectful behavior. She claims bad academic news [which is the rarest of occasions] would be met with “a screaming, hair-tearing explosion.” The Chinese solution to sub-standard performance “is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” When her daughter, Lulu (age 7), was unable to learn a piano piece, she drilled her relentlessly, threatened to give away toys, and then threatened “no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years” and told her to stop being “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” (Surprise! Lulu learned the piece perfectly. Quite a victory, yes? And well worth the effort to perform perfectly at a children’s piano recital, right?)
But here’s the thing: in one way, and one way only, I envy Chua. I envy her certainty. If nothing else, she has complete confidence in her choices as a mother. She doesn’t appear to have spent so much as half a minute wondering if her choices are correct, or healthy, or harmful or bats- -t crazy.
While I don’t agree with her, the idea of being so secure, so absolute about the choices you make with your children and how you ultimately raise them appeals to me on some level.
Maybe this is erupting in me because my oldest child just turned twenty-one. By almost all standards, and certainly in the Western world, he is an adult. And as we drove to Philadelphia to take him out for dinner and celebrate his landmark birthday, I kept thinking: how did this happen? How did he get to be 21? What did I forget to do, to tell him, to teach him, to warn him about? (What didn’t I forget, more likely.) What did I do too often, to seldom? What did I do very, very badly?
I’m certain Chua has never had a moment like this. I’m also certain she’d consider me a slacker beyond all hope and label my children “failures.”
And this is where I have my absolute certainty. That would be exactly where she is entirely wrong. I’ll readily admit to breaking many of her “rules” for raising “successful” kids. And in exchange for that choice, I had experiences with my sons that I wouldn’t trade for a lifetime high honor rolls, perfect recitals and valedictory speeches. Experiences I’ll remember until the day I die because they are just that amazing; just that loving; just that – shall I say it? – perfect.
Somehow, when I look at it that way, even with my questions unanswered and still troubling, and when on a very bad day, the moments of ‘growing up’ sadness and discomfort loom large in my memory, I’m not longer unsure about what a “successful” parent is.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Amazing where just three miles will take you.
In the spirit of “who would have expected THAT could happen?” I give you the following observation, that occurred to me, as most interesting ideas do, while I was logging in my 3 miles this morning on the treadmill.
The always watchable Groundhog Day was on a channel that appears to be the "All Groundhog Day Almost All of the Time Channel" and I stopped on it for a while. It was the party scene, where Phil Conners bestows a wedding gift on the newlyweds, Fred and Debbie Kaiser: tickets to Wrestlemania. They are overjoyed and thank Phil for keeping them together even though Debbie had expressed some doubts about the wedding.
As I hit the 1.2 mile mark and flipped though channels, I skipped the MAX channels since we don’t subscribe to that service. I noticed the always compelling Revolutionary Road was playing at some point today, and thought about one of the most interesting characters in it: John Givings. That guy was crazier than a fruit bat (thank you, Urban Dictionary) but you couldn't take your eyes off him during his brief, memorable scenes.
Which started me thinking about Boardwalk Empire, the biggest series HBO has introduced in years. Packed with characters we can’t decide whether we love or despise, Federal Agent Nelson Van Alden may well be crazier than a fish with t--s. (I LOVE U.D.!) He’s disturbing in so many ways and yet you have to feel compassion for him. At least I do.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand: who would have expected that Fred Kaiser would one day become Nelson Van Alden? Michael Shannon, playing a very minor role in 1993 in Groundhog Day, built a career, as many actors do, year after year, in theater after theater, in film after film, and nearly twenty years after his first Internet Movie Database credit, stars in one of cable television’s marquee shows of the season.
2. something miles ....
Which brings me to this, really. It’s a new year. Every January I kind of get into this “measurement” frame of mind and wonder if I’ve reached the place I imagined I would a year earlier; how many opportunities I may have missed over the past twelve months. How many I took that came my way. What brought me some joy; what didn't. As my lovely, brilliant friend Cindy asks: what to take with me and what to leave behind?
I used to take comfort in the fact that my zodiac sign indicated that I would achieve success “later in life” – but I’m getting there so hurry up already! - although now I can’t even count on that anymore since apparently I have a new sign. For God’s sake: if you can’t count on your astrological sign to help frame your life, what can you count on??! [Kidding – I have no interest in nor do I follow astrology.]
From there, I leap to a “what is success?” question and try to remind myself that in so many ways my life is blessed. So many ways.
So okay – I don’t have a syndication deal. I have – on a very good day – about one thousand people reading this blog and a bunch of people sharing columns through Facebook or email. I'm sincerely and deeply grateful for every bit of it and encouraged to continue doing whatever this is. Many of the people who contact me are lovely folks who take a moment to write to tell me how ill-informed, miserable and misogynistic I am. I prefer to think of myself as incrankulous (feeling incredulity and cranky simultaneously.)
Others are much more straightforward: "You're an idiot." Still others are kind and help me believe I’m not the last person on earth who looks askance at the world around us and wonders what the ---- happened.
The instant gratification that’s now standard has killed the work ethic - and the excellence - that used to be required for success. It takes a You Tube moment to get you a voice over deal for your golden voice. It apparently takes a national campaign for the second highest political office on this country to get your own travel show on a cable channel. It takes an MTV show about young people living at the shore to get you a book deal and allow you to create your “brand.” It takes a Twitter feed to share your father’s ideas on a regular basis to publish a book of them and develop a television show.
Here’s the thing. I’m not saying these people shouldn’t have “worked it” and come out of their fifteen minutes with the deals they have. I don’t support them but others do and whatever. I won’t buy Snookie’s book but she’ll sell plenty without my twenty bucks. I don’t watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska but plenty of people do. God bless.
But I am troubled by this: work hard, do it by the rules, try your best, strive for excellence, keep honing your skills, put yourself out there regularly in front of the right people, make connections, keep building your portfolio – that’s all so retro, isn’t it? So pointless. I have a feeling every single one of these ideas is going to make its way out of our lexicon.
I think about the voiceover / broadcasting professional who didn’t get the job because Ted Williams did. ( I appreciate that Williams turned his life around and respect that enormously. Achieving sobriety is awe-inspiring to me. I'm just wondering why, in his 2 + years of sobriety - he wasn't applying for jobs, and possibly working at a small station to start to rebuild his career. Why stand at the roadside hoping for a break? I guess that's another way to go with the job search.)
I think about the travel journalists who have educated themselves about the wilderness but don't even get an interview when Discovery produces a show about Alaska and needs a host.
I despair for the writer who has a fabulous manuscript languishing in an editor’s office because she doesn’t have a national cable show to back it up. For the hilarious writer who can’t get an appointment with an agent because he has only 10,000 Twitter followers.
And then there is someone like Susan Boyle. Like the others, she came out of nowhere and is now an international sensation but I give her this: at least she pursued her dream, albeit through a television talent show. The truth is, she knew she would never achieve success taking a conventional route. She was too old, too fat and too dowdy. She took a chance, and put herself out there in front of one of the more ruthless judges on the planet, and that’s what sets her apart for me.
But if You Tube, unsuccessful political campaigns, Twitter feeds and cable television are singularly shaping our national conversation and serving as the threshold for our culture, for our entertainment, and for our enlightenment, we’ve set the bar very low indeed. I get it: The people who produce the books and shows and commercials want success - NOW - and they're going to make the deals that get them headlines and money or, ideally, both. Calling them "risk averse" is putting it too mildly.
Honestly, is it me this time? Am I the only one who feels this way???
God knows. But all this to say: I salute Michael Shannon on his career and the long build that has resulted in his "overnight" success. I thank him for reminding me that hard work, tenacity, and talent sometimes – just sometimes – trump hype and headlines.
And that’ll do it. 3.1 miles.
The always watchable Groundhog Day was on a channel that appears to be the "All Groundhog Day Almost All of the Time Channel" and I stopped on it for a while. It was the party scene, where Phil Conners bestows a wedding gift on the newlyweds, Fred and Debbie Kaiser: tickets to Wrestlemania. They are overjoyed and thank Phil for keeping them together even though Debbie had expressed some doubts about the wedding.
As I hit the 1.2 mile mark and flipped though channels, I skipped the MAX channels since we don’t subscribe to that service. I noticed the always compelling Revolutionary Road was playing at some point today, and thought about one of the most interesting characters in it: John Givings. That guy was crazier than a fruit bat (thank you, Urban Dictionary) but you couldn't take your eyes off him during his brief, memorable scenes.
Which started me thinking about Boardwalk Empire, the biggest series HBO has introduced in years. Packed with characters we can’t decide whether we love or despise, Federal Agent Nelson Van Alden may well be crazier than a fish with t--s. (I LOVE U.D.!) He’s disturbing in so many ways and yet you have to feel compassion for him. At least I do.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand: who would have expected that Fred Kaiser would one day become Nelson Van Alden? Michael Shannon, playing a very minor role in 1993 in Groundhog Day, built a career, as many actors do, year after year, in theater after theater, in film after film, and nearly twenty years after his first Internet Movie Database credit, stars in one of cable television’s marquee shows of the season.
2. something miles ....
Which brings me to this, really. It’s a new year. Every January I kind of get into this “measurement” frame of mind and wonder if I’ve reached the place I imagined I would a year earlier; how many opportunities I may have missed over the past twelve months. How many I took that came my way. What brought me some joy; what didn't. As my lovely, brilliant friend Cindy asks: what to take with me and what to leave behind?
I used to take comfort in the fact that my zodiac sign indicated that I would achieve success “later in life” – but I’m getting there so hurry up already! - although now I can’t even count on that anymore since apparently I have a new sign. For God’s sake: if you can’t count on your astrological sign to help frame your life, what can you count on??! [Kidding – I have no interest in nor do I follow astrology.]
From there, I leap to a “what is success?” question and try to remind myself that in so many ways my life is blessed. So many ways.
So okay – I don’t have a syndication deal. I have – on a very good day – about one thousand people reading this blog and a bunch of people sharing columns through Facebook or email. I'm sincerely and deeply grateful for every bit of it and encouraged to continue doing whatever this is. Many of the people who contact me are lovely folks who take a moment to write to tell me how ill-informed, miserable and misogynistic I am. I prefer to think of myself as incrankulous (feeling incredulity and cranky simultaneously.)
Others are much more straightforward: "You're an idiot." Still others are kind and help me believe I’m not the last person on earth who looks askance at the world around us and wonders what the ---- happened.
The instant gratification that’s now standard has killed the work ethic - and the excellence - that used to be required for success. It takes a You Tube moment to get you a voice over deal for your golden voice. It apparently takes a national campaign for the second highest political office on this country to get your own travel show on a cable channel. It takes an MTV show about young people living at the shore to get you a book deal and allow you to create your “brand.” It takes a Twitter feed to share your father’s ideas on a regular basis to publish a book of them and develop a television show.
Here’s the thing. I’m not saying these people shouldn’t have “worked it” and come out of their fifteen minutes with the deals they have. I don’t support them but others do and whatever. I won’t buy Snookie’s book but she’ll sell plenty without my twenty bucks. I don’t watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska but plenty of people do. God bless.
But I am troubled by this: work hard, do it by the rules, try your best, strive for excellence, keep honing your skills, put yourself out there regularly in front of the right people, make connections, keep building your portfolio – that’s all so retro, isn’t it? So pointless. I have a feeling every single one of these ideas is going to make its way out of our lexicon.
I think about the voiceover / broadcasting professional who didn’t get the job because Ted Williams did. ( I appreciate that Williams turned his life around and respect that enormously. Achieving sobriety is awe-inspiring to me. I'm just wondering why, in his 2 + years of sobriety - he wasn't applying for jobs, and possibly working at a small station to start to rebuild his career. Why stand at the roadside hoping for a break? I guess that's another way to go with the job search.)
I think about the travel journalists who have educated themselves about the wilderness but don't even get an interview when Discovery produces a show about Alaska and needs a host.
I despair for the writer who has a fabulous manuscript languishing in an editor’s office because she doesn’t have a national cable show to back it up. For the hilarious writer who can’t get an appointment with an agent because he has only 10,000 Twitter followers.
And then there is someone like Susan Boyle. Like the others, she came out of nowhere and is now an international sensation but I give her this: at least she pursued her dream, albeit through a television talent show. The truth is, she knew she would never achieve success taking a conventional route. She was too old, too fat and too dowdy. She took a chance, and put herself out there in front of one of the more ruthless judges on the planet, and that’s what sets her apart for me.
But if You Tube, unsuccessful political campaigns, Twitter feeds and cable television are singularly shaping our national conversation and serving as the threshold for our culture, for our entertainment, and for our enlightenment, we’ve set the bar very low indeed. I get it: The people who produce the books and shows and commercials want success - NOW - and they're going to make the deals that get them headlines and money or, ideally, both. Calling them "risk averse" is putting it too mildly.
Honestly, is it me this time? Am I the only one who feels this way???
God knows. But all this to say: I salute Michael Shannon on his career and the long build that has resulted in his "overnight" success. I thank him for reminding me that hard work, tenacity, and talent sometimes – just sometimes – trump hype and headlines.
And that’ll do it. 3.1 miles.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Why skilled translators – and a good copyeditor – are worth the money.
Clarifying note: I left my new book at home, and had already read the magazines I bought in the terminal, and done some work on my laptop. Hence, the following:
I know I shouldn’t admit this but I RARELY read advertorials in magazines. You know, those pages designed to look like articles that are really ads. I say rarely because once in a while I am interested – at least somewhat – in the content but they always look like a “cheat” to me and somehow less worthy of my attention.
However, they often do contain reasonable, useful information for the right reader. Who am I to judge? In an effort to broaden my horizons and stop being so rigid, I read one on my flight last week, in the same issue I read in December. (Note to Continental: refresh your magazines!!)
It was enlightening. Turns out, I’ve been missing out on a lot of entertaining reading by skipping these pages. I offer the following excerpts for your reading pleasure, all punctuation and sentence (?) construction intact from the printed page:
Modern medical science now regards aging as a disease that is treatable and preventable and that “aging” , the disease, is actually acompilation of various diseases and pathologies, from everything, like a rise in blood glucose and pressure to diabetes, skin wrinkling and so on.
Review your comma splice rules and try this:
The next big breakthrough was to come in 1997 when a group of doctors and scientists, developed an all-natural source product which would cause your own natural HGH to be released again and do all the remarkable things it did for you in your 20’s. Now available to every adult for about the price of a coffee and donut a day.
Or this:
GHR is truly a revolutionary paradigm shift in medicine, and, like any modern leap frog advance, many others will be left in the dust holding their limited, or useless drugs and remedies.
Or this! I'm so sorry.
It is now thought that HGH is so comprehensive in its healing and regenerative powers that it is today, where the computer industry was twenty years ago, that it will displace so many prescription and non-prescription drugs and health remedies that it is staggering to think of.
Finally, my favorite passage (italics my own): It scares you! It scolds the government! It makes a compelling offer! Offers a case study! It's ridiculous!
If you want to stay on top of your game, physically and mentally as you age, this product is a boon, especially for the highly skilled professionals who have made large investments in their education, and experience. Also with the failure of Congress to honor our seniors with pharmaceutical coverage policy, it’s more important than ever to take pro-active steps to safeguard your health. Continued use of GHR will make a radical difference in your health, HGH is particularly helpful to the elderly, who, given a choice, would rather stay independent in their home, strong, healthy and alert enough to manage their own affairs, exercise and stay involved in their communities. Frank, age 85, walks two miles a day, plays golf, belongs to a dance club for seniors, had a girlfriend again and doesn’t need Viagra, passed his drivers test and is hardly ever home when we call – GHR delivers.
“..had a girlfriend again?” Had her? Is she gone? Did she not take HGH or GHR?
Okay, okay, okay. I know. I’m being very hard on the “reverse aging miracle” that is found in HGH or GHR or whatever they’re calling it. I am overlooking the “doctor recommended,” “all natural formula” being offered by Global Health Products. Who am I to judge? After all, it claims it can relieve symptoms of Asthma, Angina, Chronic Fatigue, Constipation, Lower back pain and Sciatica, Cataracts and Macular Degeneration, Menopause, Fibromyalgia, Regular and Diabetic Neuropathy, Hepatitis, helps Kidney Dialysis and Heart and Stroke recovery. It also reverses baldness and color restored. Improves sleep and emotional stability. Heightens five senses awareness. Increases skin thickness. What doesn’t it do????
It’s finally available to me: “..just in time for the aging Baby Boomers and everyone else from age 30 to 90 who doesn’t want to age rapidly but rather stay young, beautiful and healthy all of the time.”
“All of the time.” I ask you: if you’ve made it to age 90, do you want to stop aging rapidly? Do you want instead to stay young and beautiful ‘all of the time?’ And if you’re 30, are you concerned that you’re not staying ‘young, beautiful and healthy all of the time?’
And not for nothing, what if you’re, let’s say, 51, and you’re not beautiful? Does this make you beautiful? I’m guessing most of us need some help if I read this passage correctly: “Like a picked flower cut from the source, we gradually wilt physically and mentally and become vulnerable to a host of degenerative diseases, that we simply weren’t susceptible to in our early adult years.” Good God. Now I’m really depressed.
And by the way, they offer a guarantee. “..we are so confident of the difference GHR can make in your life we offer a 100% refund on unopened containers.” But how do you know if it works if you don’t open any ….oh, forget it. I want to try it. Just need to know if I can afford it…let me check. Okay. They offer an 877 number, a website …and NO PRICE. Anywhere on the page. I have no idea if this is $9.99 plus Shipping and Handling or $39.95 or $299.95 a month.
I know it probably costs no more than $9,999 / year (asides my own): “Growth Hormone first synthesized in 1985 under the Reagan Orphan drug act, to treat dwarfism (dwarfism??), was quickly recognized to stop aging in its tracks and reverse it to a remarkable degree. Since then, only the lucky (lucky??) and rich have had access to it at the cost of $10,000 US per year.
Oh, by the way: “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.”
I can only guess the following: many of the passengers on a plane are tired, cranky, business people who spend at least part of every flight re-evaluating their lives and trying to figure out how being on a plane and traveling to God knows where is what they imagined they’d be doing at this point of their lives. Or maybe that’s just me – I admit it. At some point in every trip, whether it’s on the plane, or in the rental car driving to another hotel, I think: “Really? This is what you were born to do?” And then I get lost – invariably – and get crankier because I missed the turn to What’s It Hotel just outside You Never Heard of It, Texas, Not Near Anything Remotely Fun, Florida or someplace equally diverting.
Maybe it’s the recirculated air in the plane that helps us believe these kinds of offers could be valid.
It was amusing, nonetheless and I'm not one to turn down amusement of any kind. Now I’m going to read these ads on every flight.
I know I shouldn’t admit this but I RARELY read advertorials in magazines. You know, those pages designed to look like articles that are really ads. I say rarely because once in a while I am interested – at least somewhat – in the content but they always look like a “cheat” to me and somehow less worthy of my attention.
However, they often do contain reasonable, useful information for the right reader. Who am I to judge? In an effort to broaden my horizons and stop being so rigid, I read one on my flight last week, in the same issue I read in December. (Note to Continental: refresh your magazines!!)
It was enlightening. Turns out, I’ve been missing out on a lot of entertaining reading by skipping these pages. I offer the following excerpts for your reading pleasure, all punctuation and sentence (?) construction intact from the printed page:
Modern medical science now regards aging as a disease that is treatable and preventable and that “aging” , the disease, is actually acompilation of various diseases and pathologies, from everything, like a rise in blood glucose and pressure to diabetes, skin wrinkling and so on.
Review your comma splice rules and try this:
The next big breakthrough was to come in 1997 when a group of doctors and scientists, developed an all-natural source product which would cause your own natural HGH to be released again and do all the remarkable things it did for you in your 20’s. Now available to every adult for about the price of a coffee and donut a day.
Or this:
GHR is truly a revolutionary paradigm shift in medicine, and, like any modern leap frog advance, many others will be left in the dust holding their limited, or useless drugs and remedies.
Or this! I'm so sorry.
It is now thought that HGH is so comprehensive in its healing and regenerative powers that it is today, where the computer industry was twenty years ago, that it will displace so many prescription and non-prescription drugs and health remedies that it is staggering to think of.
Finally, my favorite passage (italics my own): It scares you! It scolds the government! It makes a compelling offer! Offers a case study! It's ridiculous!
If you want to stay on top of your game, physically and mentally as you age, this product is a boon, especially for the highly skilled professionals who have made large investments in their education, and experience. Also with the failure of Congress to honor our seniors with pharmaceutical coverage policy, it’s more important than ever to take pro-active steps to safeguard your health. Continued use of GHR will make a radical difference in your health, HGH is particularly helpful to the elderly, who, given a choice, would rather stay independent in their home, strong, healthy and alert enough to manage their own affairs, exercise and stay involved in their communities. Frank, age 85, walks two miles a day, plays golf, belongs to a dance club for seniors, had a girlfriend again and doesn’t need Viagra, passed his drivers test and is hardly ever home when we call – GHR delivers.
“..had a girlfriend again?” Had her? Is she gone? Did she not take HGH or GHR?
Okay, okay, okay. I know. I’m being very hard on the “reverse aging miracle” that is found in HGH or GHR or whatever they’re calling it. I am overlooking the “doctor recommended,” “all natural formula” being offered by Global Health Products. Who am I to judge? After all, it claims it can relieve symptoms of Asthma, Angina, Chronic Fatigue, Constipation, Lower back pain and Sciatica, Cataracts and Macular Degeneration, Menopause, Fibromyalgia, Regular and Diabetic Neuropathy, Hepatitis, helps Kidney Dialysis and Heart and Stroke recovery. It also reverses baldness and color restored. Improves sleep and emotional stability. Heightens five senses awareness. Increases skin thickness. What doesn’t it do????
It’s finally available to me: “..just in time for the aging Baby Boomers and everyone else from age 30 to 90 who doesn’t want to age rapidly but rather stay young, beautiful and healthy all of the time.”
“All of the time.” I ask you: if you’ve made it to age 90, do you want to stop aging rapidly? Do you want instead to stay young and beautiful ‘all of the time?’ And if you’re 30, are you concerned that you’re not staying ‘young, beautiful and healthy all of the time?’
And not for nothing, what if you’re, let’s say, 51, and you’re not beautiful? Does this make you beautiful? I’m guessing most of us need some help if I read this passage correctly: “Like a picked flower cut from the source, we gradually wilt physically and mentally and become vulnerable to a host of degenerative diseases, that we simply weren’t susceptible to in our early adult years.” Good God. Now I’m really depressed.
And by the way, they offer a guarantee. “..we are so confident of the difference GHR can make in your life we offer a 100% refund on unopened containers.” But how do you know if it works if you don’t open any ….oh, forget it. I want to try it. Just need to know if I can afford it…let me check. Okay. They offer an 877 number, a website …and NO PRICE. Anywhere on the page. I have no idea if this is $9.99 plus Shipping and Handling or $39.95 or $299.95 a month.
I know it probably costs no more than $9,999 / year (asides my own): “Growth Hormone first synthesized in 1985 under the Reagan Orphan drug act, to treat dwarfism (dwarfism??), was quickly recognized to stop aging in its tracks and reverse it to a remarkable degree. Since then, only the lucky (lucky??) and rich have had access to it at the cost of $10,000 US per year.
Oh, by the way: “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.”
I can only guess the following: many of the passengers on a plane are tired, cranky, business people who spend at least part of every flight re-evaluating their lives and trying to figure out how being on a plane and traveling to God knows where is what they imagined they’d be doing at this point of their lives. Or maybe that’s just me – I admit it. At some point in every trip, whether it’s on the plane, or in the rental car driving to another hotel, I think: “Really? This is what you were born to do?” And then I get lost – invariably – and get crankier because I missed the turn to What’s It Hotel just outside You Never Heard of It, Texas, Not Near Anything Remotely Fun, Florida or someplace equally diverting.
Maybe it’s the recirculated air in the plane that helps us believe these kinds of offers could be valid.
It was amusing, nonetheless and I'm not one to turn down amusement of any kind. Now I’m going to read these ads on every flight.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
New year , anachronistic calendar. Now that's progress.
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a harmless enough sounding website titled See Jane Work. The premise of supplying women with useful, attractive tools to manage our busy lives is inoffensive enough. Nothing wrong with a little stylish organization, I thought.
Then I wondered if I could find something like it called See John Work, a website developed to accomplish the same thing for men. You won’t be surprised to hear that it doesn’t exist. I did find websites called 'Office Depot' or 'Staples.' They sell similar kinds of stuff – but only to men I guess. We’ve come a long way, baby.
I didn’t really mind the See Jane Work website, or even the idea of it, until I came across my favorite thing: calendars for women, with an example already filled in so one could more easily grasp the concept of how one is supposed to utilize such a mysterious tool. This one was particularly disheartening, but not in the usual way. Sure, it had the usual notations I find maddening: in this case, our fictitious super mom of three had no less than six activities in one week scheduled for her own pleasure, including lunch and dinner dates, coffee catch-ups, a party, an exercise class and a walk with a friend. She also noted that she had to “order pizza” on Friday evening and “go grocery shopping” on Sunday.
Whew! Isn’t that the truth! I, too, find it’s so hard to remember stuff like that unless I write it in my calendar.
I want the kind of life – I swear to God I want to at least try it – where you are so ridiculously rigid or so blatantly not busy that you have the time to write ‘order pizza’ or ‘go grocery shopping’ on your calendar.
But that’s not the worst of it. Jump onto See Jane Work and you can buy a copy of something called the Mom Agenda. The agenda gives you room for multiple kids or commitments so you can schedule your week something like this one, from the sample pages: swimming class that conflicts with tumbling class that conflicts with soccer that conflicts with you baking brownies or cupcakes or attending enrichment puppet-making class, whatever that is. Somewhere along the line you can also write yourself this quick note, “don’t forget cello.” I studied the example weekly planner very carefully, and I couldn’t find cello lessons scheduled for anyone during this busy week. Maybe our super Mom is doing her Nero impersonation, if you will, and playing while her calendar (and her sanity) burns.
My very favorite notation on the Mom Agenda was this one that our stylish, organized Mom wrote to herself about picking up her daughter: “4:20 – pick up Jenna.”
4:20? 4:20??? Are you kidding me? What did she do before she became a mother, launch the space shuttle? My kids were lucky if I knew the right day to pick them up, let alone the right hour. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad but I admit to driving them to places they didn’t need to be on days they didn’t need to be there for appointments they didn’t have.
I know what you’re saying. If I had used a planner like the Mom Agenda, I’d never goof that stuff up again. Well, you’d be wrong about that. I guarantee you I’d write it down on the wrong day.
You won’t be surprised to learn I discovered this whole bit of nonsense though another website: Alpha Mom. Yes, of course I checked. There is no website titled Alpha Dad.
While I was shopping for Christmas gifts, I stood in awe of the calendars on display in Barnes and Noble. More of this mom-madness. Ready? Here’s a sample of what I found: Mom’s Plan It (Plan it – get it?), Do-It-All Mom, More Time Moms, Mom’s Family Calendar and Mom’s Home Planet. All told, there were nine calendars designed specifically for Moms, one family calendar, one for teens, and one for college students.
There were ZERO calendars developed for Dads. ZERO.
You know why? Because the idea of a calendar that works very well for a woman vs. a calendar that works for men is ridiculous. Also because men understand that they don’t need a specific “man” calendar to schedule appointments or reminders about events. They would simply never support an industry as specious one that publishes “guy” calendars. The calendars men use have nothing to do with family, or noting soccer practice or school events or music lessons or buying groceries or ordering pizza. The only calendars I’ve ever seen men buy have women on them. There you go. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models. That’s a guy calendar.
Okay. I know men buy other calendars. Let’s just leave it at this: men use calendars as organizational tools and invest nothing more and nothing less into them. They don’t imagine they could ever validate them as men, or as fathers or as professionals. How very sensible.
It’s 2011. Thirty-nine short years ago, Ms. Magazine hit newsstands and put a printed stamp of legitimacy on the nascent women’s movement in this country. And just thirty-nine years later, I’m standing in Barnes and Noble facing a wall of “women are still more needy and less secure about themselves and their roles in life than men” calendars. We marched for this?
My question is: Why do some women still feel compelled to prove something amazing and marvelous about themselves to every other woman on the planet, in this case, something that usually involves uber-organization and efficiency, all wrapped up in the latest style?
Someday – with apologies to Tom Wolfe - I’m going to write a book and call it I Am Renee’s Planner. I’ll discuss the many life stages I’ve weathered – and triumphed over - using nothing but a 99-cent spiral notepad and a leaky pen. Maybe I can sell it on See Jane Work.
Then I wondered if I could find something like it called See John Work, a website developed to accomplish the same thing for men. You won’t be surprised to hear that it doesn’t exist. I did find websites called 'Office Depot' or 'Staples.' They sell similar kinds of stuff – but only to men I guess. We’ve come a long way, baby.
I didn’t really mind the See Jane Work website, or even the idea of it, until I came across my favorite thing: calendars for women, with an example already filled in so one could more easily grasp the concept of how one is supposed to utilize such a mysterious tool. This one was particularly disheartening, but not in the usual way. Sure, it had the usual notations I find maddening: in this case, our fictitious super mom of three had no less than six activities in one week scheduled for her own pleasure, including lunch and dinner dates, coffee catch-ups, a party, an exercise class and a walk with a friend. She also noted that she had to “order pizza” on Friday evening and “go grocery shopping” on Sunday.
Whew! Isn’t that the truth! I, too, find it’s so hard to remember stuff like that unless I write it in my calendar.
I want the kind of life – I swear to God I want to at least try it – where you are so ridiculously rigid or so blatantly not busy that you have the time to write ‘order pizza’ or ‘go grocery shopping’ on your calendar.
But that’s not the worst of it. Jump onto See Jane Work and you can buy a copy of something called the Mom Agenda. The agenda gives you room for multiple kids or commitments so you can schedule your week something like this one, from the sample pages: swimming class that conflicts with tumbling class that conflicts with soccer that conflicts with you baking brownies or cupcakes or attending enrichment puppet-making class, whatever that is. Somewhere along the line you can also write yourself this quick note, “don’t forget cello.” I studied the example weekly planner very carefully, and I couldn’t find cello lessons scheduled for anyone during this busy week. Maybe our super Mom is doing her Nero impersonation, if you will, and playing while her calendar (and her sanity) burns.
My very favorite notation on the Mom Agenda was this one that our stylish, organized Mom wrote to herself about picking up her daughter: “4:20 – pick up Jenna.”
4:20? 4:20??? Are you kidding me? What did she do before she became a mother, launch the space shuttle? My kids were lucky if I knew the right day to pick them up, let alone the right hour. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad but I admit to driving them to places they didn’t need to be on days they didn’t need to be there for appointments they didn’t have.
I know what you’re saying. If I had used a planner like the Mom Agenda, I’d never goof that stuff up again. Well, you’d be wrong about that. I guarantee you I’d write it down on the wrong day.
You won’t be surprised to learn I discovered this whole bit of nonsense though another website: Alpha Mom. Yes, of course I checked. There is no website titled Alpha Dad.
While I was shopping for Christmas gifts, I stood in awe of the calendars on display in Barnes and Noble. More of this mom-madness. Ready? Here’s a sample of what I found: Mom’s Plan It (Plan it – get it?), Do-It-All Mom, More Time Moms, Mom’s Family Calendar and Mom’s Home Planet. All told, there were nine calendars designed specifically for Moms, one family calendar, one for teens, and one for college students.
There were ZERO calendars developed for Dads. ZERO.
You know why? Because the idea of a calendar that works very well for a woman vs. a calendar that works for men is ridiculous. Also because men understand that they don’t need a specific “man” calendar to schedule appointments or reminders about events. They would simply never support an industry as specious one that publishes “guy” calendars. The calendars men use have nothing to do with family, or noting soccer practice or school events or music lessons or buying groceries or ordering pizza. The only calendars I’ve ever seen men buy have women on them. There you go. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models. That’s a guy calendar.
Okay. I know men buy other calendars. Let’s just leave it at this: men use calendars as organizational tools and invest nothing more and nothing less into them. They don’t imagine they could ever validate them as men, or as fathers or as professionals. How very sensible.
It’s 2011. Thirty-nine short years ago, Ms. Magazine hit newsstands and put a printed stamp of legitimacy on the nascent women’s movement in this country. And just thirty-nine years later, I’m standing in Barnes and Noble facing a wall of “women are still more needy and less secure about themselves and their roles in life than men” calendars. We marched for this?
My question is: Why do some women still feel compelled to prove something amazing and marvelous about themselves to every other woman on the planet, in this case, something that usually involves uber-organization and efficiency, all wrapped up in the latest style?
Someday – with apologies to Tom Wolfe - I’m going to write a book and call it I Am Renee’s Planner. I’ll discuss the many life stages I’ve weathered – and triumphed over - using nothing but a 99-cent spiral notepad and a leaky pen. Maybe I can sell it on See Jane Work.
Friday, December 24, 2010
My Christmas list (no shopping required.)
Sometimes I think I’m really two people. One part of me is relentlessly pragmatic, reasonable and logical. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except when it gets in the way of the magic that can be found in everyday life. The confounding counterpart to this is that another part of me is just as relentlessly sentimental, emotional and hopeful.
Here’s an example. I can’t read an email that cries out for help regarding a lost child without immediately hopping onto Snopes.com to check it out. (They’re always fake, by the way.) I also find myself reading emails that contain heartwarming stories of love, fellowship and encouragement; the kind people often send to friends and family with the best intentions. Deep down, I’m glad they include me in their list of those who will enjoy the story; they’re mostly right about that. Yet even as I read it, I think (in my logical way), do I have time for this today? I have sit on mute for back-to-back conference calls! I have to create two more Powerpoints today!! I have to work out a P / L by ten a.m.! God knows I’d rarely seek these things out on my own.
That’s why when I read a holiday story a few days ago, I couldn’t imagine why I stopped on it in the first place. I had little doubt I’d be left wallowing in sappy Christmas schmaltz. Without going into every detail, the story told of a young boy who comes to understand the spirit of Christmas. In an effort to prove that Santa Claus is real, his grandmother gives him ten dollars and drives him to a store, telling him “to buy something for someone who needs it.” After much thought, the boy decides to buy a coat for a classmate who doesn’t have one. (All of these stories paint a picture of someone who is sad, alone and needy or someone dead or dying, along with someone who steps in to help. Sorry; that’s an editorial comment from my reasonable side. In this case, the student in need never joins his class in recess because he doesn’t own a heavy coat. He pretends to have a cough so he has an excuse to stay indoors. )
The young boy chooses a jacket and takes it to the counter to buy it. When the clerk asks if it’s a present, he explains the story of his needy classmate. The clerk smiles as she puts it a bag and wishes him a Merry Christmas.
Your typical Christmas story, right? I probably don’t have to tell you that as the grandmother helps the boy wrap the coat, she removes the little tag and places it in her Bible. They hide the gift outside “Bobby’s” house, knock on the door, then watch him come outside and discover the package. The rest, as they say, is warm Christmas history.
Except it wasn’t. The story ends with the boy recalling that he still remembers the spirit he felt that day. As the author puts it, “Santa Claus was alive and well and we were on this team.” Fifty years later, he still had his grandmother’s Bible, and the Christmas coat’s price tag she tucked into it: $19.95.
The tears that filled my eyes when I read the ending of the story sprang directly from my sentimental side. I loved the quiet notion of sales clerk, seemingly just a bit player, turning out to embody the spirit this boy was seeking.
So where does that leave me, this Christmas Eve? My practical nature has me counting up the cookies I didn’t bake, the cards I haven’t written and the gifts I haven’t wrapped. The logical part of me is already making plans about how this absolutely will not happen again next year. I’m mentally writing a list of the list of things I won’t forget to do earlier next year so help me God.
And where does that leave the softness, the magic, this Christmas Eve? It’s buried, under layers of planners and errands and tasks. It pokes its head up from time to time: when I hear my boys sing Christmas Carols, or watch them decorate cookies and imagine them fifteen years younger, when their cookie icing and sprinkles were simply out of control.
Everything I want to give to those I love can’t be wrapped and placed under a tree. Mostly, I want to help them feel the spirit of Christmas. When our sons grow up, I want them to give in to sentiment, much more than I do. I want them to give up – at least temporarily - on the measurable. I want them to relinquish what’s practical from time to time.
I want them to pay the difference for the jacket.
That’s hope. That’s love. That’s Christmas.
Here’s an example. I can’t read an email that cries out for help regarding a lost child without immediately hopping onto Snopes.com to check it out. (They’re always fake, by the way.) I also find myself reading emails that contain heartwarming stories of love, fellowship and encouragement; the kind people often send to friends and family with the best intentions. Deep down, I’m glad they include me in their list of those who will enjoy the story; they’re mostly right about that. Yet even as I read it, I think (in my logical way), do I have time for this today? I have sit on mute for back-to-back conference calls! I have to create two more Powerpoints today!! I have to work out a P / L by ten a.m.! God knows I’d rarely seek these things out on my own.
That’s why when I read a holiday story a few days ago, I couldn’t imagine why I stopped on it in the first place. I had little doubt I’d be left wallowing in sappy Christmas schmaltz. Without going into every detail, the story told of a young boy who comes to understand the spirit of Christmas. In an effort to prove that Santa Claus is real, his grandmother gives him ten dollars and drives him to a store, telling him “to buy something for someone who needs it.” After much thought, the boy decides to buy a coat for a classmate who doesn’t have one. (All of these stories paint a picture of someone who is sad, alone and needy or someone dead or dying, along with someone who steps in to help. Sorry; that’s an editorial comment from my reasonable side. In this case, the student in need never joins his class in recess because he doesn’t own a heavy coat. He pretends to have a cough so he has an excuse to stay indoors. )
The young boy chooses a jacket and takes it to the counter to buy it. When the clerk asks if it’s a present, he explains the story of his needy classmate. The clerk smiles as she puts it a bag and wishes him a Merry Christmas.
Your typical Christmas story, right? I probably don’t have to tell you that as the grandmother helps the boy wrap the coat, she removes the little tag and places it in her Bible. They hide the gift outside “Bobby’s” house, knock on the door, then watch him come outside and discover the package. The rest, as they say, is warm Christmas history.
Except it wasn’t. The story ends with the boy recalling that he still remembers the spirit he felt that day. As the author puts it, “Santa Claus was alive and well and we were on this team.” Fifty years later, he still had his grandmother’s Bible, and the Christmas coat’s price tag she tucked into it: $19.95.
The tears that filled my eyes when I read the ending of the story sprang directly from my sentimental side. I loved the quiet notion of sales clerk, seemingly just a bit player, turning out to embody the spirit this boy was seeking.
So where does that leave me, this Christmas Eve? My practical nature has me counting up the cookies I didn’t bake, the cards I haven’t written and the gifts I haven’t wrapped. The logical part of me is already making plans about how this absolutely will not happen again next year. I’m mentally writing a list of the list of things I won’t forget to do earlier next year so help me God.
And where does that leave the softness, the magic, this Christmas Eve? It’s buried, under layers of planners and errands and tasks. It pokes its head up from time to time: when I hear my boys sing Christmas Carols, or watch them decorate cookies and imagine them fifteen years younger, when their cookie icing and sprinkles were simply out of control.
Everything I want to give to those I love can’t be wrapped and placed under a tree. Mostly, I want to help them feel the spirit of Christmas. When our sons grow up, I want them to give in to sentiment, much more than I do. I want them to give up – at least temporarily - on the measurable. I want them to relinquish what’s practical from time to time.
I want them to pay the difference for the jacket.
That’s hope. That’s love. That’s Christmas.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Why do I have the feeling I'd be tempted to say: watch this.
With particular thanks to Jen H. and her book group for the inspiration:
You won’t be surprised to hear that I was horrified but also amused to learn the details about some fresh hell called The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition or some such nonsense. I don’t know how long this elf has been wreaking havoc in homes around the world but thank God my boys are young adults. I can practically guarantee you we would have been the family that never had an elf on any shelf on our home. Or we would have been the family with the reluctant mommy dragging an elf out of storage every November and regretting every moment she spent rearranging it for a month.
But my own acceptance or rejection of this is an unanswerable notion, really. I may have bought into this “tradition,” given my sentimentality about Christmas. I still may have regretted it but I may have been right there along with other parents who wanted to add to the magic of the season for their children. Let’s just say I’m assuming everyone is adding to the magic, not trying to traumatize their children, which is all too possible according to some of the reviews I’ve read.
Here’s the idea, in case you aren’t already living through this elf / shelf mania. The book tells the story of this helpful little elf that joins your household – your family must give him a name, by the way - to do nothing more than spy on the children who live there for the express purpose of reporting their behavior back to Santa on a nightly basis. He's Santa’s helper, on the job daily, who sees everyone while they’re sleeping, and watches them when they’re awake. Not to put to fine a Christmas point on it: he knows if you’ve been bad or good. But let’s make this distinction: his message isn’t to be good for goodness sake. No, this spy-elf more or less promises good children that Santa will reward them with every gift on their lists. The bad children will be left with nothing, no doubt.
Talk about behavior modification! Every night, the elf returns to the North Pole to make his report, but he’s right back on the job before day breaks, ready for a new round of noticing every move the kids make. The parents help create the illusion of a globe-trotting elf by carefully placing him in a new spot every day, so it’s clear he’s been away filing his report while the children slept. Upon his return, he settles into a new spot in the house, ready to keep his eye on the kids. Some children apparently just love searching for him each morning.
So let’s summarize this from a child’s point of view: a daily recap to Santa on your every move, and a promise of material rewards for good behavior. Charming. What’s not to like about that?
First, I love that kids seem excited about this little guy. It’s adorable. Little children at Christmas are mostly adorable. Second, well…there is no second.
I think it’s kind of risky for parents to invite a fictional Christmas spy – even a sweet little elf spy - into the home to help keep the children in line. Believe me, they’re not doing themselves any favors. In fact, more than a few reviews I’ve read on websites indicate that once Christmas has come and gone, the resolutions about good behavior last about as long as the dead tree no one has watered since December 21.
I’ve heard first-hand stories this mid-December from parents, strongly indicating that they’ve reached just about at the end of their tether when it comes to moving this cockamamie elf to a new location every day. Do you hide him? Leave him in plain view? Make it easy for kids to reach or position the elf in some inaccessible places? (And I think all the elves are boys, by the way. Which is annoying for some reason but I don't have the energy to wage a battle about that just now.)
Tales abound of parents leaping out of a sound sleep at 3 am because they forgot to move the elf before going to bed. [Moment of recognition: I used to slip tooth fairy money under pillows as I woke my kids up in the morning. Yes, we often – perhaps almost always – forgot to place the silver dollar we gave them under their pillows before we went to bed for the night. I’m positive I’d forget about this ridiculous elf at least four times a week.]
I heard the story of one mother who made the mistake of dangling their elf from a lighting fixture and he was slightly singed as a result. Her children were inconsolable. I can only imagine what cover-up story she told them. Maybe he stood too close to the fireplace in the workshop at the North Pole.
I guarantee you had we owned an elf on the shelf, I would have moved him incrementally from day to day. I’m not certain but I don’t think the rules call for him moving from room to room or floor to ceiling. He would have moved from one side of the sofa to the other, or one side of our bookshelf to another all month long.
So where are we with this? I don’t know. It’s kind of cute but kind of odd. It’s indicative of what we’ve become in a way. It’s not enough to tell our children about Santa Claus, with some kind of benign “he’s keeping an eye on you!!” story. In the good old days, elves made toys, they didn’t spy on children. In the words of the chipper little song that accompanies the book on CD,
"Every year at Christmas Santa sends his elves to watch you
And they go back to tell him who’s been bad and who’s been good!
The elf on the shelf is watching you – what you say, what you do…
The elf on the shelf is watching you each and every Christmas.
The elf on the shelf is watching you each and every Christmas."
Dear God. I wonder if the elf on the shelf would watch me not write out the Christmas cards that have been sitting on our coffee table for two weeks. Watch me hop online and order more gifts that I’m positive will arrive promptly on December 28. He could watch as I have yet to bake even one cookie.
I’d love to hear from parents who have invited this little fellow into their Christmas holidays. I am probably entirely wrong about this and it's delightful and I need to lighten up. Maybe kids love it. Maybe parents love the fantasy as well. God bless.
But it’s still a little creepy.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I was horrified but also amused to learn the details about some fresh hell called The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition or some such nonsense. I don’t know how long this elf has been wreaking havoc in homes around the world but thank God my boys are young adults. I can practically guarantee you we would have been the family that never had an elf on any shelf on our home. Or we would have been the family with the reluctant mommy dragging an elf out of storage every November and regretting every moment she spent rearranging it for a month.
But my own acceptance or rejection of this is an unanswerable notion, really. I may have bought into this “tradition,” given my sentimentality about Christmas. I still may have regretted it but I may have been right there along with other parents who wanted to add to the magic of the season for their children. Let’s just say I’m assuming everyone is adding to the magic, not trying to traumatize their children, which is all too possible according to some of the reviews I’ve read.
Here’s the idea, in case you aren’t already living through this elf / shelf mania. The book tells the story of this helpful little elf that joins your household – your family must give him a name, by the way - to do nothing more than spy on the children who live there for the express purpose of reporting their behavior back to Santa on a nightly basis. He's Santa’s helper, on the job daily, who sees everyone while they’re sleeping, and watches them when they’re awake. Not to put to fine a Christmas point on it: he knows if you’ve been bad or good. But let’s make this distinction: his message isn’t to be good for goodness sake. No, this spy-elf more or less promises good children that Santa will reward them with every gift on their lists. The bad children will be left with nothing, no doubt.
Talk about behavior modification! Every night, the elf returns to the North Pole to make his report, but he’s right back on the job before day breaks, ready for a new round of noticing every move the kids make. The parents help create the illusion of a globe-trotting elf by carefully placing him in a new spot every day, so it’s clear he’s been away filing his report while the children slept. Upon his return, he settles into a new spot in the house, ready to keep his eye on the kids. Some children apparently just love searching for him each morning.
So let’s summarize this from a child’s point of view: a daily recap to Santa on your every move, and a promise of material rewards for good behavior. Charming. What’s not to like about that?
First, I love that kids seem excited about this little guy. It’s adorable. Little children at Christmas are mostly adorable. Second, well…there is no second.
I think it’s kind of risky for parents to invite a fictional Christmas spy – even a sweet little elf spy - into the home to help keep the children in line. Believe me, they’re not doing themselves any favors. In fact, more than a few reviews I’ve read on websites indicate that once Christmas has come and gone, the resolutions about good behavior last about as long as the dead tree no one has watered since December 21.
I’ve heard first-hand stories this mid-December from parents, strongly indicating that they’ve reached just about at the end of their tether when it comes to moving this cockamamie elf to a new location every day. Do you hide him? Leave him in plain view? Make it easy for kids to reach or position the elf in some inaccessible places? (And I think all the elves are boys, by the way. Which is annoying for some reason but I don't have the energy to wage a battle about that just now.)
Tales abound of parents leaping out of a sound sleep at 3 am because they forgot to move the elf before going to bed. [Moment of recognition: I used to slip tooth fairy money under pillows as I woke my kids up in the morning. Yes, we often – perhaps almost always – forgot to place the silver dollar we gave them under their pillows before we went to bed for the night. I’m positive I’d forget about this ridiculous elf at least four times a week.]
I heard the story of one mother who made the mistake of dangling their elf from a lighting fixture and he was slightly singed as a result. Her children were inconsolable. I can only imagine what cover-up story she told them. Maybe he stood too close to the fireplace in the workshop at the North Pole.
I guarantee you had we owned an elf on the shelf, I would have moved him incrementally from day to day. I’m not certain but I don’t think the rules call for him moving from room to room or floor to ceiling. He would have moved from one side of the sofa to the other, or one side of our bookshelf to another all month long.
So where are we with this? I don’t know. It’s kind of cute but kind of odd. It’s indicative of what we’ve become in a way. It’s not enough to tell our children about Santa Claus, with some kind of benign “he’s keeping an eye on you!!” story. In the good old days, elves made toys, they didn’t spy on children. In the words of the chipper little song that accompanies the book on CD,
"Every year at Christmas Santa sends his elves to watch you
And they go back to tell him who’s been bad and who’s been good!
The elf on the shelf is watching you – what you say, what you do…
The elf on the shelf is watching you each and every Christmas.
The elf on the shelf is watching you each and every Christmas."
Dear God. I wonder if the elf on the shelf would watch me not write out the Christmas cards that have been sitting on our coffee table for two weeks. Watch me hop online and order more gifts that I’m positive will arrive promptly on December 28. He could watch as I have yet to bake even one cookie.
I’d love to hear from parents who have invited this little fellow into their Christmas holidays. I am probably entirely wrong about this and it's delightful and I need to lighten up. Maybe kids love it. Maybe parents love the fantasy as well. God bless.
But it’s still a little creepy.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Quite literally, I am missing the point here.
Honest to God, I think we all must have too much money again.
I was reading the Continental magazine on my latest trip and came across an article titled Presents of Mind, that offered the perennial "gift ideas for everyone on your list." The point here was that we need to be creative and give gifts that speak to the recipient's interests or character. Yes, who would dispute that?
I doubted that I'd find any real ideas but hey – it’s already about two weeks until Christmas and I’ve purchased exactly two gifts so maybe I needed a push. Maybe there were ideas here after all.
LEGO Container Truck ($69.99) – nope. Fun - especially since it had functional steering and a motor and a linear actuator - but we’ve been out of the Lego world for years now. I don't know what a linear actuator is, anyway.
An Apple Magic Trackpad ($69), which could be a good idea for someone except I read the description twice and I still don’t know what it does. Plus, the description said it requires OS X 10.6.4 or higher. I don’t know what that means.
Some kind of combination light / speakers things ($599) that delivers different songs to different speakers throughout your home: “ a stand-alone transmitter sends audio wirelessly to an LED bulb, which fits into a recessed light fixture…and because you can send signals to different bulbs, you can pump beats into one room while enveloping another in soothing jazz and yet in another….” Whatever. I haven’t figured out how to turn on our stereo at home and we’ve lived there for about eighteen years. Like the Apple product, this description contained many words and phrases I couldn’t define accurately.
A Bugaboo Bee stroller. Finally, something I understand. I’m not in the market for a stroller but even if I were, I can’t imagine spending $600 on anything even remotely connected to transportation that doesn’t also come with a key.
A pretty overnight weekender bag ($240) – maybe. But I really wanted it for myself when I saw it so I’d buy one and want to keep it. Not good.
A diver’s watch – except it cost almost $5,000. Plus, I don’t really know anyone who dives regularly and frequently enough to warrant a watch. Plus, anyone who would wear this without diving is annoying. Plus, this was available from a high-end, used watch dealer, which makes me worry about the diver I never met who wore it last.
Wait a minute – here we go! A croquet set! Lovely! Fun for everyone!! And a rule book, and a history / tactics book. And a handmade, gold-lined winning post. Wait a minute. Here we don’t go: $1,650.
A Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame jacket ($64.99). Nah.
A coffee table book full of gorgeous dessert photography ($29.95). Could be fun for the right person but I don’t have that person on my list. And if I owned it, I’d want to eat dessert even more often than I already do. Nope.
Ah – here we go, yet another item that doesn’t work for my list. Bark’n’Boot Polar Trex. Extra traction booties of some kind for dogs to wear to protect them from ice, rocks, frozen terrain…and salted sidewalks. They’re $89.95 and I couldn’t tell if that was for a set of four Bark’n’Boots or for just the one. No matter. I’m not buying them for any dog I know. And I don’t care how sturdy they are, I guarantee you our Charlie-dog would have chewed them to bits before sunset on Christmas Day if we had ever tried to affix them to his paws.
This isn’t working. I’ve found nothing for anyone on my list. Most of this stuff is too expensive, anyway. Is there nothing for under twenty bucks? Something perfect and fun and quirky and unique?
Hold on. Here you go. And before you read any further, I swear to you I am not making this up. For just $15, Artisanal Pencil Sharpening (yes, you read that correctly) will choose a standard #2 pencil for you – or send them your own! – and craftsman David Rees will sharpen it by hand “to as fine a point as you have ever seen.” He’ll even bag and send the shavings to you; shavings that were “painstakingly removed from the pencil during the sharpening process.”
And please don’t worry about being misled (Get it?? Mis-led?). They’ll stand behind their excellent work and send you “a certificate that attests to the sharpness of your writing implement.”
“ .”
I’m mostly speechless, here. And not to put too fine a point on this (see what I did there?) … but … what? You send this guy, David, a pencil and $15 and he’ll send it back sharpened by hand? Along with the shavings he took off the ‘writing implement?”
Dear God, we are in danger of dying off as a species if we can’t quite manage, nor are we satisfied with, a pencil that hasn't had its tip crafted and shaped by hand by sending it off to artisanalpencilsharpening.com.
But I’d like to think I’m a glass half full girl. Someone please call the AP and the other wire services. Send press releases to The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times and Kiplinger’s. The recession – long rumored to be over – is truly behind us.
I was reading the Continental magazine on my latest trip and came across an article titled Presents of Mind, that offered the perennial "gift ideas for everyone on your list." The point here was that we need to be creative and give gifts that speak to the recipient's interests or character. Yes, who would dispute that?
I doubted that I'd find any real ideas but hey – it’s already about two weeks until Christmas and I’ve purchased exactly two gifts so maybe I needed a push. Maybe there were ideas here after all.
LEGO Container Truck ($69.99) – nope. Fun - especially since it had functional steering and a motor and a linear actuator - but we’ve been out of the Lego world for years now. I don't know what a linear actuator is, anyway.
An Apple Magic Trackpad ($69), which could be a good idea for someone except I read the description twice and I still don’t know what it does. Plus, the description said it requires OS X 10.6.4 or higher. I don’t know what that means.
Some kind of combination light / speakers things ($599) that delivers different songs to different speakers throughout your home: “ a stand-alone transmitter sends audio wirelessly to an LED bulb, which fits into a recessed light fixture…and because you can send signals to different bulbs, you can pump beats into one room while enveloping another in soothing jazz and yet in another….” Whatever. I haven’t figured out how to turn on our stereo at home and we’ve lived there for about eighteen years. Like the Apple product, this description contained many words and phrases I couldn’t define accurately.
A Bugaboo Bee stroller. Finally, something I understand. I’m not in the market for a stroller but even if I were, I can’t imagine spending $600 on anything even remotely connected to transportation that doesn’t also come with a key.
A pretty overnight weekender bag ($240) – maybe. But I really wanted it for myself when I saw it so I’d buy one and want to keep it. Not good.
A diver’s watch – except it cost almost $5,000. Plus, I don’t really know anyone who dives regularly and frequently enough to warrant a watch. Plus, anyone who would wear this without diving is annoying. Plus, this was available from a high-end, used watch dealer, which makes me worry about the diver I never met who wore it last.
Wait a minute – here we go! A croquet set! Lovely! Fun for everyone!! And a rule book, and a history / tactics book. And a handmade, gold-lined winning post. Wait a minute. Here we don’t go: $1,650.
A Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame jacket ($64.99). Nah.
A coffee table book full of gorgeous dessert photography ($29.95). Could be fun for the right person but I don’t have that person on my list. And if I owned it, I’d want to eat dessert even more often than I already do. Nope.
Ah – here we go, yet another item that doesn’t work for my list. Bark’n’Boot Polar Trex. Extra traction booties of some kind for dogs to wear to protect them from ice, rocks, frozen terrain…and salted sidewalks. They’re $89.95 and I couldn’t tell if that was for a set of four Bark’n’Boots or for just the one. No matter. I’m not buying them for any dog I know. And I don’t care how sturdy they are, I guarantee you our Charlie-dog would have chewed them to bits before sunset on Christmas Day if we had ever tried to affix them to his paws.
This isn’t working. I’ve found nothing for anyone on my list. Most of this stuff is too expensive, anyway. Is there nothing for under twenty bucks? Something perfect and fun and quirky and unique?
Hold on. Here you go. And before you read any further, I swear to you I am not making this up. For just $15, Artisanal Pencil Sharpening (yes, you read that correctly) will choose a standard #2 pencil for you – or send them your own! – and craftsman David Rees will sharpen it by hand “to as fine a point as you have ever seen.” He’ll even bag and send the shavings to you; shavings that were “painstakingly removed from the pencil during the sharpening process.”
And please don’t worry about being misled (Get it?? Mis-led?). They’ll stand behind their excellent work and send you “a certificate that attests to the sharpness of your writing implement.”
“ .”
I’m mostly speechless, here. And not to put too fine a point on this (see what I did there?) … but … what? You send this guy, David, a pencil and $15 and he’ll send it back sharpened by hand? Along with the shavings he took off the ‘writing implement?”
Dear God, we are in danger of dying off as a species if we can’t quite manage, nor are we satisfied with, a pencil that hasn't had its tip crafted and shaped by hand by sending it off to artisanalpencilsharpening.com.
But I’d like to think I’m a glass half full girl. Someone please call the AP and the other wire services. Send press releases to The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times and Kiplinger’s. The recession – long rumored to be over – is truly behind us.
Thursday, December 02, 2010
"Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different was you." Hmmm.
It’s been a week.
That sound you don’t hear is the sound of mothers from coast to coast, sitting amidst the quiet in their homes this evening. They’re walking past doors they slip a chain lock across at the end of the evening, past beds that remain smoothly made in tidy rooms and past towels that hang neatly – for days on end - in the bathroom. They notice the car parked outside, albeit with only half a gallon of gas in the tank. They walk past kitchen cabinets where favorite cereals, snacks and drinks that were on hand just one week ago, are all gone.
They’ve all said a post-Thanksgiving goodbye to sons and daughters who headed back to college following the holiday break. And almost no part of it feels very good.
This is the third year I’ve sent someone back to college after Thanksgiving. In 2008, my oldest son came and went, exhibiting a bit of the “you’re not the boss of me” attitude I’d anticipated from my college freshman but somehow was still not fully prepared to handle. In 2009 and again this year, my second and third sons joined in the fun of arriving home, hovering in and around the family for several days, and then leaping back into what had quickly become their new normal.
So – three rounds of this and you know what? It doesn’t get easier. At least for me it doesn’t.
What became evident to me, this year more than in the past, is that no matter how much you want it to remain safe and familiar, and no matter how hard you try to recreate a moment, you can’t do it. Life continues to evolve and the people in it do, too. Salinger expressed this so much more poetically in ‘Catcher’ when Holden talked about walking through the unchanging exhibits and figures in the Museum of Natural History: “Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. … Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
Well, let me think about this. Our rooms remain the same, with the same picture still leaning against one wall, waiting to be hung properly (it’s been there for eleven months – I’m not joking.) Other photos sit on a table, waiting for the right frames. The rooms remain filled with the papers, books, magazines, notes, flyers, and newspapers. [For years, I’ve believed in the ‘butterfly effect.’ A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and a piece of paper lands on a flat surface in our home.] But even if all that remains unchanged, I feel like we’re all different, in small almost indefinable ways this year.
For example, despite their protests, I used to “wait up” for the boys, dozing on the sofa until I heard the door open and I could hug them all good night. I don’t know why I thought this made a difference to the outcome of any activity on the planet, or why sofa-sleep somehow indicated I was more attentive than bed-sleep. (It didn’t by the way, although no one could convince me of that at the time.)
That has given way to “waiting up” while lying comfortably in bed, and sleeping lightly until I hear their footsteps on the stairs. I’ve told the boys that no matter the hour, I will hear them arrive home. At night, I have the hearing of an Egyptian slit-eared bat. Last week, I heard one, then a second son enter and exit a bathroom, then heard two bedroom doors close. In my mind: “Two? Only two? “ Someone’s missing… Click. A third door. “Ah, there he is.” And then I snuggled under covers and dozed off.
So what does that make me? Less concerned? Less committed to motherhood? Neither of those things. It just proves my point: the setting remains but the people evolve.
But I guess I’m wondering what Holden may have meant by having “certain things” stay the way they are. I don’t really want to stick anything or anyone in a glass case but the idea of preserving the moments I’ve cherished as the boys grew up is tempting. Then I remind myself that this is real life, not a museum of life. The only person I can think of who preserved the past to help him live in the present was Norman Bates, for God’s sake.
Every stage of their lives has been a fascinating journey of discovery as we all found out - incredibly incrementally I might add – who we were. Who we were when we were fighting, or furious. When we were thrilled with our circumstances and laughing uncontrollably. Or when we were bereft and very nearly inconsolable. And who we were for every single hour in between. Every moment left its own little footprint, and each one was a discovery we wouldn’t have made had we been frozen in one spot.
Here’s the thing. I watch my boys – who are really no longer boys, but young adults – and I think, for the nine millionth time – are you okay? I’m wondering if any of the fourteen thousand decisions I made about anything that was super-critically, God-we'd-better-get-this right important while you were growing up – not one of which I can name right now - meant anything in the long run.
At the same time, let me just say: they’re amazing people. All on their own, they’re each one an amazing young man. It’s been my enormous good fortune and blessing to have them in my life for more than twenty years. And in these last few years, as they wander in and out of our home on their way to the future, I keep thinking about another line from Holden’s visit to the museum: “The birds nearest you were all stuffed and hung up on wires, and the ones in the back were just painted on the wall, but they all looked like they were really flying south…”
So yes; I see them but they’re moving further away, on their way to a new destination.
But it’s all good! I’m good! I’m good with that. And I’m bad with that. And thinking: only about two more weeks until winter break.
That sound you don’t hear is the sound of mothers from coast to coast, sitting amidst the quiet in their homes this evening. They’re walking past doors they slip a chain lock across at the end of the evening, past beds that remain smoothly made in tidy rooms and past towels that hang neatly – for days on end - in the bathroom. They notice the car parked outside, albeit with only half a gallon of gas in the tank. They walk past kitchen cabinets where favorite cereals, snacks and drinks that were on hand just one week ago, are all gone.
They’ve all said a post-Thanksgiving goodbye to sons and daughters who headed back to college following the holiday break. And almost no part of it feels very good.
This is the third year I’ve sent someone back to college after Thanksgiving. In 2008, my oldest son came and went, exhibiting a bit of the “you’re not the boss of me” attitude I’d anticipated from my college freshman but somehow was still not fully prepared to handle. In 2009 and again this year, my second and third sons joined in the fun of arriving home, hovering in and around the family for several days, and then leaping back into what had quickly become their new normal.
So – three rounds of this and you know what? It doesn’t get easier. At least for me it doesn’t.
What became evident to me, this year more than in the past, is that no matter how much you want it to remain safe and familiar, and no matter how hard you try to recreate a moment, you can’t do it. Life continues to evolve and the people in it do, too. Salinger expressed this so much more poetically in ‘Catcher’ when Holden talked about walking through the unchanging exhibits and figures in the Museum of Natural History: “Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. … Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
Well, let me think about this. Our rooms remain the same, with the same picture still leaning against one wall, waiting to be hung properly (it’s been there for eleven months – I’m not joking.) Other photos sit on a table, waiting for the right frames. The rooms remain filled with the papers, books, magazines, notes, flyers, and newspapers. [For years, I’ve believed in the ‘butterfly effect.’ A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and a piece of paper lands on a flat surface in our home.] But even if all that remains unchanged, I feel like we’re all different, in small almost indefinable ways this year.
For example, despite their protests, I used to “wait up” for the boys, dozing on the sofa until I heard the door open and I could hug them all good night. I don’t know why I thought this made a difference to the outcome of any activity on the planet, or why sofa-sleep somehow indicated I was more attentive than bed-sleep. (It didn’t by the way, although no one could convince me of that at the time.)
That has given way to “waiting up” while lying comfortably in bed, and sleeping lightly until I hear their footsteps on the stairs. I’ve told the boys that no matter the hour, I will hear them arrive home. At night, I have the hearing of an Egyptian slit-eared bat. Last week, I heard one, then a second son enter and exit a bathroom, then heard two bedroom doors close. In my mind: “Two? Only two? “ Someone’s missing… Click. A third door. “Ah, there he is.” And then I snuggled under covers and dozed off.
So what does that make me? Less concerned? Less committed to motherhood? Neither of those things. It just proves my point: the setting remains but the people evolve.
But I guess I’m wondering what Holden may have meant by having “certain things” stay the way they are. I don’t really want to stick anything or anyone in a glass case but the idea of preserving the moments I’ve cherished as the boys grew up is tempting. Then I remind myself that this is real life, not a museum of life. The only person I can think of who preserved the past to help him live in the present was Norman Bates, for God’s sake.
Every stage of their lives has been a fascinating journey of discovery as we all found out - incredibly incrementally I might add – who we were. Who we were when we were fighting, or furious. When we were thrilled with our circumstances and laughing uncontrollably. Or when we were bereft and very nearly inconsolable. And who we were for every single hour in between. Every moment left its own little footprint, and each one was a discovery we wouldn’t have made had we been frozen in one spot.
Here’s the thing. I watch my boys – who are really no longer boys, but young adults – and I think, for the nine millionth time – are you okay? I’m wondering if any of the fourteen thousand decisions I made about anything that was super-critically, God-we'd-better-get-this right important while you were growing up – not one of which I can name right now - meant anything in the long run.
At the same time, let me just say: they’re amazing people. All on their own, they’re each one an amazing young man. It’s been my enormous good fortune and blessing to have them in my life for more than twenty years. And in these last few years, as they wander in and out of our home on their way to the future, I keep thinking about another line from Holden’s visit to the museum: “The birds nearest you were all stuffed and hung up on wires, and the ones in the back were just painted on the wall, but they all looked like they were really flying south…”
So yes; I see them but they’re moving further away, on their way to a new destination.
But it’s all good! I’m good! I’m good with that. And I’m bad with that. And thinking: only about two more weeks until winter break.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
There are two kinds of women on the planet.
This is going to be one of those posts that could get me in trouble. And while I welcome – and cherish – all comments, tonight’s little rant is mostly directed at the women reading this, women who may decide never to stop back here, and never comment, again. But I hope that’s not the case because you often prop me up and keep me from teetering right off the edge. (And for the men who read this, and the men who comment: you are some of my favorite people ever, even if we've never met.)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a theme keep resurfacing in my life and today, a woman I work with synthesized the whole thing in one succinct statement. As we caught each other up on the details of our lives, she explained some of her attitudes and behavior by saying, “You know I’m really gay man inside, right?”
Now, before anyone gets offended, this was in no way a slight to men or women, gay or straight. I knew exactly what she meant. She described herself as someone (in her case, at least partially) driven by testosterone, who is attracted to others mostly driven by testosterone. Put another way, she meant exactly the same thing another friend of mine and I said to each other earlier this week. We were discussing our (admittedly perhaps, harsh) approach to a business challenge and I said something like, “I must have misplaced my estrogen somewhere along the line.” She totally understood what I meant.
Let me sum up here: sometimes I feel like I’m SO not a girl. I don’t understand how women tick, and I don’t mean that in a nasty, catty way. To coin a phrase, some of my best friends are women. It’s just that often, I watch other women, or listen to them, and realize that I’m about seven lifetimes away from doing or saying anything like that. What follows is a partial list of stuff I don’t seem to have a natural affinity toward doing, any inclination to do, or any real interest in pursuing:
Decorations: The one and only time I decorate our home is at Christmastime, and I do have to admit I go a little crazy there. But when my boys were younger, I tried to be a good mom and celebrate holidays in a ‘mother of small children’ kind of way but even I can admit it was half-hearted, if that. (Quarter-hearted?) Suffice it to say I never put out flags of any kinds, or valentine hearts or shamrocks or gourds or turkeys or pilgrims. On or about October 29 each year, I’d unpack a few pumpkins and skeletons from a box tucked away in our storage area and scatter them around. Sometime every spring I’d find some bunnies and eggs, just in time for Easter Sunday. That was it. Absolutely it.
That’s kind of pathetic; you don’t have to tell me that. Put it this way: walk into our house on February 14 and take a good look around. I guarantee you it will look exactly the same if walk in again on July 4.
Thing is: I love to see a beautifully decorated room. I love to walk into someone’s home and see that she’s taken some time to welcome a season or a holiday and has shown it in her surroundings. So what’s with me? How did I not learn this?
Decorations, part 2: sweaters. There are two kinds of women in the world: women who own holiday sweaters and women who don’t. This isn’t a judgment; just an observation. You won’t be surprised to learn I don’t own a holiday sweater of any kind. I don’t know why, exactly. I don’t dislike them, and in fact felt a little out of place NOT wearing one while my boys were younger. Seemed like every woman I ran into at various school events had the season cheerfully displayed on her sweater (some more, err, cheerfully than others but let’s leave that discussion aside for now.)
And yet – never bought one. Never wore one. How did I not learn how to do this? How is this not a natural part of my middle-class American Mom DNA?
Supplies: First aid, snacks, wipes, and various other small miracles women pull out of their purses on a daily basis. I never carried a small bottle of Tylenol, a pack of Band-Aids, tissues, or a small scissors on me to be prepared for possible small emergencies. (Still don’t, to this day.) I never carried a tiny container of goldfish snacks for the boys; I never had a damp washcloth in a Ziploc bag to wipe sticky hands or faces.
I love that some women can reach into their bags and practically stitch up a minor injury or splint a fractured finger on the fly should it be required. They always carry treats, comforting little extras of all kinds and always enough for everyone. Amazing. Admirable. And absolutely foreign to me.
And speaking of their bags, I never quite got that memo, either. I went through a brief purse phase when I was in my twenties, and I sort of outgrew it. Purses haven’t meant much to me since, although I have purse envy quite often. Women always have better, nicer, cooler, more stylish purses than I. And I never really seem to do much about that.
Okay, I think you’re getting the picture here, right?
My point is that given my interactions with the women I mentioned earlier, maybe I’m not such a freak. Maybe there are more of me out there than I think. (Maybe not.) Then again, it’s probably not an accident I would connect with women friends who are simpatico with my point of view.
It could also be that because I’ve been in the workplace for more than thirty years, I’ve lost touch with some of the softer sides of womanhood. The sides that celebrate things like valentine hearts and purses with a million cool little sections to hold dozens of cool little things. The sides that remember that Halloween comes every year at the end of October and any thinking about the costumes the kids would wear to go trick-or-treating should probably take place earlier than the afternoon of October 30.
So is there a conclusion here? Can I really just fall back on my “I blame Gloria” catch-all explanation for everything I find confounding and mildly disturbing about the reality of womanhood these days?
Why yes; yes, I think I can. Somewhere along the line, Gloria and her cohorts planted some kind of seed in at least some of us, a seed that grew into a veritable garden of overcompensating for our gender – as if that were a hindrance - and trying too hard to be “neutral.” At this point in my life, I can’t tell how much of this is me and how much of it is her. And it’s kind of pissing me off to tell you the truth.
But I don’t think I’m entirely a lost cause. I still totally have faith in my shoe-of-the-month club concept, for example. And I have, right now, at least eight kinds of black slacks hanging in my closet because you can never stop shopping for the perfect black slacks. Let’s not even get into my Colin Firth issues.
My real question is: how did I get to be a certain age and still have so many doubts? Are we all kind of faking it – the confidence, the stiff upper lip, the Helen-Reddy-ness of it all? Maybe some of us don’t. I’d love to meet the woman who doesn’t. She would be formidable and fierce and fabulous.
Maybe we all go on ‘girl weekends’ or ‘girl getaways’ and ‘girls night’s out’ or ‘in’ so we can reassure each other that we’re not insane. That taking divergent paths toward womanhood doesn’t mean we’ve traveled on parallel paths that never intersect. Not at all. Sometimes I feel like we’re just a nation of Kate’s and Allie’s, trying to figure out the next steps as we enter the last 30 or 40 years of our lives. And if that’s the case, it feels good to have all kinds of companions along the way.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a theme keep resurfacing in my life and today, a woman I work with synthesized the whole thing in one succinct statement. As we caught each other up on the details of our lives, she explained some of her attitudes and behavior by saying, “You know I’m really gay man inside, right?”
Now, before anyone gets offended, this was in no way a slight to men or women, gay or straight. I knew exactly what she meant. She described herself as someone (in her case, at least partially) driven by testosterone, who is attracted to others mostly driven by testosterone. Put another way, she meant exactly the same thing another friend of mine and I said to each other earlier this week. We were discussing our (admittedly perhaps, harsh) approach to a business challenge and I said something like, “I must have misplaced my estrogen somewhere along the line.” She totally understood what I meant.
Let me sum up here: sometimes I feel like I’m SO not a girl. I don’t understand how women tick, and I don’t mean that in a nasty, catty way. To coin a phrase, some of my best friends are women. It’s just that often, I watch other women, or listen to them, and realize that I’m about seven lifetimes away from doing or saying anything like that. What follows is a partial list of stuff I don’t seem to have a natural affinity toward doing, any inclination to do, or any real interest in pursuing:
Decorations: The one and only time I decorate our home is at Christmastime, and I do have to admit I go a little crazy there. But when my boys were younger, I tried to be a good mom and celebrate holidays in a ‘mother of small children’ kind of way but even I can admit it was half-hearted, if that. (Quarter-hearted?) Suffice it to say I never put out flags of any kinds, or valentine hearts or shamrocks or gourds or turkeys or pilgrims. On or about October 29 each year, I’d unpack a few pumpkins and skeletons from a box tucked away in our storage area and scatter them around. Sometime every spring I’d find some bunnies and eggs, just in time for Easter Sunday. That was it. Absolutely it.
That’s kind of pathetic; you don’t have to tell me that. Put it this way: walk into our house on February 14 and take a good look around. I guarantee you it will look exactly the same if walk in again on July 4.
Thing is: I love to see a beautifully decorated room. I love to walk into someone’s home and see that she’s taken some time to welcome a season or a holiday and has shown it in her surroundings. So what’s with me? How did I not learn this?
Decorations, part 2: sweaters. There are two kinds of women in the world: women who own holiday sweaters and women who don’t. This isn’t a judgment; just an observation. You won’t be surprised to learn I don’t own a holiday sweater of any kind. I don’t know why, exactly. I don’t dislike them, and in fact felt a little out of place NOT wearing one while my boys were younger. Seemed like every woman I ran into at various school events had the season cheerfully displayed on her sweater (some more, err, cheerfully than others but let’s leave that discussion aside for now.)
And yet – never bought one. Never wore one. How did I not learn how to do this? How is this not a natural part of my middle-class American Mom DNA?
Supplies: First aid, snacks, wipes, and various other small miracles women pull out of their purses on a daily basis. I never carried a small bottle of Tylenol, a pack of Band-Aids, tissues, or a small scissors on me to be prepared for possible small emergencies. (Still don’t, to this day.) I never carried a tiny container of goldfish snacks for the boys; I never had a damp washcloth in a Ziploc bag to wipe sticky hands or faces.
I love that some women can reach into their bags and practically stitch up a minor injury or splint a fractured finger on the fly should it be required. They always carry treats, comforting little extras of all kinds and always enough for everyone. Amazing. Admirable. And absolutely foreign to me.
And speaking of their bags, I never quite got that memo, either. I went through a brief purse phase when I was in my twenties, and I sort of outgrew it. Purses haven’t meant much to me since, although I have purse envy quite often. Women always have better, nicer, cooler, more stylish purses than I. And I never really seem to do much about that.
Okay, I think you’re getting the picture here, right?
My point is that given my interactions with the women I mentioned earlier, maybe I’m not such a freak. Maybe there are more of me out there than I think. (Maybe not.) Then again, it’s probably not an accident I would connect with women friends who are simpatico with my point of view.
It could also be that because I’ve been in the workplace for more than thirty years, I’ve lost touch with some of the softer sides of womanhood. The sides that celebrate things like valentine hearts and purses with a million cool little sections to hold dozens of cool little things. The sides that remember that Halloween comes every year at the end of October and any thinking about the costumes the kids would wear to go trick-or-treating should probably take place earlier than the afternoon of October 30.
So is there a conclusion here? Can I really just fall back on my “I blame Gloria” catch-all explanation for everything I find confounding and mildly disturbing about the reality of womanhood these days?
Why yes; yes, I think I can. Somewhere along the line, Gloria and her cohorts planted some kind of seed in at least some of us, a seed that grew into a veritable garden of overcompensating for our gender – as if that were a hindrance - and trying too hard to be “neutral.” At this point in my life, I can’t tell how much of this is me and how much of it is her. And it’s kind of pissing me off to tell you the truth.
But I don’t think I’m entirely a lost cause. I still totally have faith in my shoe-of-the-month club concept, for example. And I have, right now, at least eight kinds of black slacks hanging in my closet because you can never stop shopping for the perfect black slacks. Let’s not even get into my Colin Firth issues.
My real question is: how did I get to be a certain age and still have so many doubts? Are we all kind of faking it – the confidence, the stiff upper lip, the Helen-Reddy-ness of it all? Maybe some of us don’t. I’d love to meet the woman who doesn’t. She would be formidable and fierce and fabulous.
Maybe we all go on ‘girl weekends’ or ‘girl getaways’ and ‘girls night’s out’ or ‘in’ so we can reassure each other that we’re not insane. That taking divergent paths toward womanhood doesn’t mean we’ve traveled on parallel paths that never intersect. Not at all. Sometimes I feel like we’re just a nation of Kate’s and Allie’s, trying to figure out the next steps as we enter the last 30 or 40 years of our lives. And if that’s the case, it feels good to have all kinds of companions along the way.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
No. No one needs one of those, either.
Despite what the last post implies, whenever I’m perplexed about what to buy someone, I usually solve the problem by visiting a bookstore. I ask you: where else can you shop for people on your list who have interests that might range from Harley Davidson to Jacques-Louis David?
Which is why I cannot understand the items you find near the checkout in bookstores. Well, yes I can, from a purely marketing perspective. Like all retailers, booksellers design “cash wrap” displays specifically to appeal to buyers on an impulse level, and entice us to pick up just one more item on our way out the door. We’re already in line, credit card or cash in hand – why not add the little bonsai in a box kit or a startling little journal called “All About Me?”
Impulse is one thing. But from a “what can I buy Aunt Alice this year” perspective, I just don’t get it. Browsing this eclectic display, much less buying anything here, makes no sense to me when the bookstore itself lays the entire universe at our feet.
Sadly, this selection of “gifts you might never ever think about buying someone” isn’t a bookstore-only phenomenon. You can’t navigate any retail establishment this time of year without bouncing off a kiosk packed full of “does anyone really need this” right next to the ”I’m positive no one needs one of those.”
I’d like to go on record here but before I do, let me say this: If you already own one of the items that follow and simply love it to pieces, God bless and enjoy. If you’ve purchased one or more for someone on your list, may they live long and happily with it. The spice of life, and all that. But for me, I’ll know I’ve inexplicably reached the “she’s impossible to buy for” list if I ever receive any of the following:
1. A pillow with the word “dream” stitched across it. Or “love” or “serenity” or “breathe” or “vision.” It’s not that I begrudge these feelings or states of mind, but embroidering it on a pillow doesn’t make it so no matter how much we all channel our inner Julia Roberts. [Yes, I do sometimes wonder where I’ve misplaced my estrogen.]
2. One candle and one bottle of bath oil packaged up as something called “spa in a box.” I’m far from the most worldly, the most cosmopolitan woman on the planet but if this is a spa in a box, I’ve been sadly led astray about the spa experience.
3. And if only because it sets my teeth on edge, I don’t ever want a “pocket ‘brella,” although it might come in handy during the next ‘understorm.’
But far be it from me to suggest you bypass those “great gift ideas!” kiosks you’ll run into over the next few weeks. You never know what gems night be hiding there. Just be aware that some enthusiasts are better served than others. Golfer on your list? You’re all set. Buy a golf business card holder, a snow globe containing a golf ball, a mini-golf bag designed to carry toiletries, a barbecue set where the handles look and feel like golf clubs, a talking pop-up putter cup, golf club bookends, gold ball finder glasses, or a golf picture frame.
For the wine lover on your list, create a gift set with the battery-operated corkscrew (“no more twisting or tugging!!”) and the electronic pocket wine master, so he or she will always select the perfect wine in a restaurant. I’m sorry, I thought that nugget of information was exactly what a wine steward lives to discuss with you. Not every single bit of information in the universe has to be captured in a handheld device, does it? How did something so organic – wine- become so gadget-laden?
Moving beyond the special interest groups, let’s review the annual standards: the ubiquitous lock de-icers, electric windshield scrapers, and electronic tie-spinning racks. All useful enough, I guess, but each one cries out: “You’re so hard to buy for! I finally picked this up after I spent four hours wandering around the store.”
But not one of these are quite as useless as the basketball shot glass game, the mini-helmet display case, or the diaper dude pacifier pouch.
But I suppose it’s true enough that one woman’s lavender aromatherapy is another woman’s sleep sound pillow, so to speak. At this forgiving time of year, I’m trying to remind myself that the magic of the gift-giving season lies in the joy behind the giving, even if that joy comes wrapped as a mounted, singing, plastic bass. So if you know someone who will absolutely cherish the Chihuahua who dances to “Oye Como Va” at the touch of a button, knock yourself out. The smile that morning is what you’ll remember, long after the present disappears in the yard sale next spring.
Which is why I cannot understand the items you find near the checkout in bookstores. Well, yes I can, from a purely marketing perspective. Like all retailers, booksellers design “cash wrap” displays specifically to appeal to buyers on an impulse level, and entice us to pick up just one more item on our way out the door. We’re already in line, credit card or cash in hand – why not add the little bonsai in a box kit or a startling little journal called “All About Me?”
Impulse is one thing. But from a “what can I buy Aunt Alice this year” perspective, I just don’t get it. Browsing this eclectic display, much less buying anything here, makes no sense to me when the bookstore itself lays the entire universe at our feet.
Sadly, this selection of “gifts you might never ever think about buying someone” isn’t a bookstore-only phenomenon. You can’t navigate any retail establishment this time of year without bouncing off a kiosk packed full of “does anyone really need this” right next to the ”I’m positive no one needs one of those.”
I’d like to go on record here but before I do, let me say this: If you already own one of the items that follow and simply love it to pieces, God bless and enjoy. If you’ve purchased one or more for someone on your list, may they live long and happily with it. The spice of life, and all that. But for me, I’ll know I’ve inexplicably reached the “she’s impossible to buy for” list if I ever receive any of the following:
1. A pillow with the word “dream” stitched across it. Or “love” or “serenity” or “breathe” or “vision.” It’s not that I begrudge these feelings or states of mind, but embroidering it on a pillow doesn’t make it so no matter how much we all channel our inner Julia Roberts. [Yes, I do sometimes wonder where I’ve misplaced my estrogen.]
2. One candle and one bottle of bath oil packaged up as something called “spa in a box.” I’m far from the most worldly, the most cosmopolitan woman on the planet but if this is a spa in a box, I’ve been sadly led astray about the spa experience.
3. And if only because it sets my teeth on edge, I don’t ever want a “pocket ‘brella,” although it might come in handy during the next ‘understorm.’
But far be it from me to suggest you bypass those “great gift ideas!” kiosks you’ll run into over the next few weeks. You never know what gems night be hiding there. Just be aware that some enthusiasts are better served than others. Golfer on your list? You’re all set. Buy a golf business card holder, a snow globe containing a golf ball, a mini-golf bag designed to carry toiletries, a barbecue set where the handles look and feel like golf clubs, a talking pop-up putter cup, golf club bookends, gold ball finder glasses, or a golf picture frame.
For the wine lover on your list, create a gift set with the battery-operated corkscrew (“no more twisting or tugging!!”) and the electronic pocket wine master, so he or she will always select the perfect wine in a restaurant. I’m sorry, I thought that nugget of information was exactly what a wine steward lives to discuss with you. Not every single bit of information in the universe has to be captured in a handheld device, does it? How did something so organic – wine- become so gadget-laden?
Moving beyond the special interest groups, let’s review the annual standards: the ubiquitous lock de-icers, electric windshield scrapers, and electronic tie-spinning racks. All useful enough, I guess, but each one cries out: “You’re so hard to buy for! I finally picked this up after I spent four hours wandering around the store.”
But not one of these are quite as useless as the basketball shot glass game, the mini-helmet display case, or the diaper dude pacifier pouch.
But I suppose it’s true enough that one woman’s lavender aromatherapy is another woman’s sleep sound pillow, so to speak. At this forgiving time of year, I’m trying to remind myself that the magic of the gift-giving season lies in the joy behind the giving, even if that joy comes wrapped as a mounted, singing, plastic bass. So if you know someone who will absolutely cherish the Chihuahua who dances to “Oye Como Va” at the touch of a button, knock yourself out. The smile that morning is what you’ll remember, long after the present disappears in the yard sale next spring.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The Christmas Treacle
Nothing like a quick Sunday evening trip to Barnes and Noble to wind me up.
Before I hear from everyone who is ready to accuse me of jealousy and envy, let me stop you right there. I LOVE to read good writing and have nothing but admiration for authors who challenge me or entertain me. How any writer breaks out of the pack of thousands and thousands of titles and finds a following is beyond me (obviously.)
Mostly, I deeply admire and yes, maybe envy, writers who can make me laugh. It’s not that I’m difficult to please. It’s mostly that “writing funny” is pretty difficult and few people do it well.
This post isn’t about any of that. It’s about Christmas. Or more specifically, about Christmas books.
For some reason, this latest trip to the bookstore made it obvious that one of the components of publishing success that has somehow eluded me is using the word “Christmas” in your title, preferably linked with something admirable, lovely, warm, promising or comforting. Amazon.com lists indicates it offers 90,899 books that contain “Christmas” in the title. I offer the following partial list to review:
A Cup of Christmas Tea
The Christmas Box
The Christmas Sweater
The Christmas Shoes (This is of particular note in our house for many reasons. We mock this one relentlessly and without remorse every single year.)
The Christmas Secret
The Christmas Hope
A Christmas Promise
The Christmas Promise
The Christmas Pearl
The Christmas Clock
The Christmas Dog
The Magical Christmas Cat
The Christmas List
The Christmas Cookie Club
A Plain & Simple Christmas
The Christmas Bus
The Christmas Train
Christmas Jars
Christmas Jars Reunion
Subtitles also matter here:
The Christmas Spirit: Memories of Family, Friends and Faith
The Christmas Box Miracle: My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope
The Christmas Sweater: A Picture Book
Had enough yet? Me, too.
Let me clarify one other point here. I adore Christmas. I do. Ask my kids or my husband.
I start listening to Christmas music without apology in November.
I’m the one who arranges our theater evening every year to attend Civic Theater’s production of A Christmas Carol. Over the years, two of my boys have appeared in the show. I watch the movie on television every year, the George C. Scott version. (Don’t even speak to me about any others, including the Alistair Sim version. Not open to debate as far as I’m concerned.) I read the Dickens story.
I find a performance of The Messiah each year.
I bake. I send cards. I decorate. In fact, Christmas is the one and only time of year my house gets any kind of decorative treatment.
I get sentimental about Christmas. There. I said it. But I don’t “get” the ideas behind these kinds of Christmas books. I haven’t read even one of them but I guarantee they all tell a story of love and sacrifice and compassion and humanity and fellowship. A story of a despairing someone meeting a wise someone – and the source of that wisdom can be older (see The Christmas Box) or younger (see The Christmas Shoes), makes no difference – and then learning the “true meaning” just when they need it. The story of how almost anything you can name is a metaphor for Christmas.
Well, I guess not almost anything. Admittedly, I paged through only ten pages of the Amazon list so I barely cracked the 90,000 +, but I’ll bet I won’t find these:
Christmas Turtle
Wrong. That book exists. And guess what? It’s “a heartwarming story that explores the special love a grandmother has for her grandchildren.”
Maybe choosing an object to symbolize the season isn't a good idea. What about using those moments of life that aren’t so darned happy? I’ll bet I won’t find any of them in Christmas books. Wrong again. Pages of titles described less than golden moments around the tree: Oscar’s Lonely Christmas, The Lonely Snowman, Byron the Lonely Christmas Tree, All Alone at Christmas, Oliver All Alone, A Cold Christmas, and Kitten in the Cold. (Several of these had adorable yellow lab puppies on the cover who looked sad.) Dear God! Who buys these? Are you crying yet?
Or how about this? A Stranger for Christmas. Guess what? It’s a “very special story about love, family, and miracles…the true meaning of Christmas… a story to remind us of the values we cherish, the people we love, and the lessons of the holiday season.”
Ugh. I’m about to get Christmas Nauseous. Or Christmas Cranky. I wonder if anyone would buy Christmas Curmudgeon, the story of a woman of a certain age who discovered ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ after she was inundated with cloying, vacuous Christmas books one night in the bookstore. She discovered ‘the lessons of the holiday season’ by resolving to eat more cookies, drink more eggnog and surround herself with people who celebrated the season by never reading books like these.
My day feels more merry and bright already.
Before I hear from everyone who is ready to accuse me of jealousy and envy, let me stop you right there. I LOVE to read good writing and have nothing but admiration for authors who challenge me or entertain me. How any writer breaks out of the pack of thousands and thousands of titles and finds a following is beyond me (obviously.)
Mostly, I deeply admire and yes, maybe envy, writers who can make me laugh. It’s not that I’m difficult to please. It’s mostly that “writing funny” is pretty difficult and few people do it well.
This post isn’t about any of that. It’s about Christmas. Or more specifically, about Christmas books.
For some reason, this latest trip to the bookstore made it obvious that one of the components of publishing success that has somehow eluded me is using the word “Christmas” in your title, preferably linked with something admirable, lovely, warm, promising or comforting. Amazon.com lists indicates it offers 90,899 books that contain “Christmas” in the title. I offer the following partial list to review:
A Cup of Christmas Tea
The Christmas Box
The Christmas Sweater
The Christmas Shoes (This is of particular note in our house for many reasons. We mock this one relentlessly and without remorse every single year.)
The Christmas Secret
The Christmas Hope
A Christmas Promise
The Christmas Promise
The Christmas Pearl
The Christmas Clock
The Christmas Dog
The Magical Christmas Cat
The Christmas List
The Christmas Cookie Club
A Plain & Simple Christmas
The Christmas Bus
The Christmas Train
Christmas Jars
Christmas Jars Reunion
Subtitles also matter here:
The Christmas Spirit: Memories of Family, Friends and Faith
The Christmas Box Miracle: My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope
The Christmas Sweater: A Picture Book
Had enough yet? Me, too.
Let me clarify one other point here. I adore Christmas. I do. Ask my kids or my husband.
I start listening to Christmas music without apology in November.
I’m the one who arranges our theater evening every year to attend Civic Theater’s production of A Christmas Carol. Over the years, two of my boys have appeared in the show. I watch the movie on television every year, the George C. Scott version. (Don’t even speak to me about any others, including the Alistair Sim version. Not open to debate as far as I’m concerned.) I read the Dickens story.
I find a performance of The Messiah each year.
I bake. I send cards. I decorate. In fact, Christmas is the one and only time of year my house gets any kind of decorative treatment.
I get sentimental about Christmas. There. I said it. But I don’t “get” the ideas behind these kinds of Christmas books. I haven’t read even one of them but I guarantee they all tell a story of love and sacrifice and compassion and humanity and fellowship. A story of a despairing someone meeting a wise someone – and the source of that wisdom can be older (see The Christmas Box) or younger (see The Christmas Shoes), makes no difference – and then learning the “true meaning” just when they need it. The story of how almost anything you can name is a metaphor for Christmas.
Well, I guess not almost anything. Admittedly, I paged through only ten pages of the Amazon list so I barely cracked the 90,000 +, but I’ll bet I won’t find these:
Christmas Turtle
Wrong. That book exists. And guess what? It’s “a heartwarming story that explores the special love a grandmother has for her grandchildren.”
Maybe choosing an object to symbolize the season isn't a good idea. What about using those moments of life that aren’t so darned happy? I’ll bet I won’t find any of them in Christmas books. Wrong again. Pages of titles described less than golden moments around the tree: Oscar’s Lonely Christmas, The Lonely Snowman, Byron the Lonely Christmas Tree, All Alone at Christmas, Oliver All Alone, A Cold Christmas, and Kitten in the Cold. (Several of these had adorable yellow lab puppies on the cover who looked sad.) Dear God! Who buys these? Are you crying yet?
Or how about this? A Stranger for Christmas. Guess what? It’s a “very special story about love, family, and miracles…the true meaning of Christmas… a story to remind us of the values we cherish, the people we love, and the lessons of the holiday season.”
Ugh. I’m about to get Christmas Nauseous. Or Christmas Cranky. I wonder if anyone would buy Christmas Curmudgeon, the story of a woman of a certain age who discovered ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ after she was inundated with cloying, vacuous Christmas books one night in the bookstore. She discovered ‘the lessons of the holiday season’ by resolving to eat more cookies, drink more eggnog and surround herself with people who celebrated the season by never reading books like these.
My day feels more merry and bright already.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
5 hours? Try 30 seconds. That's all you'll need to view proof that the "women's movement" was an illusion.
Opening shot: a harried, attractive woman arrives home. She walks in, and closes the front door behind her with her foot. Two young boys who look about ten years old go running by, without acknowledging her, waving toys and making noise. She drops her shoulder bag on to a bench and continues into the home, carrying two packed grocery bags into her kitchen. She’s talking to us about her “2:30 feeling,” as she arrives home after her ‘first job’ to begin her ‘second job,’ presumably with her family.
She enters her spacious, spotless, granite-filled kitchen. At the table sit two other children, more sedate than the high-spirited youngsters who ran through the foyer earlier, children who appear to be either happily working on homework or otherwise quietly occupied. Note: neither of them greets the woman either.
At this point, I’m confused. I can only guess she’s either the hired help everyone feels perfectly comfortable ignoring for some reason or their over-worked, exhausted mother who demands not one thing from them, not even a greeting when she enters the room.
A cautious, responsible woman, she despairs about her stressful, tiring day and then informs us of her recent decision to load up on legal stimulants. She admits that she was “nervous” at first, but her husband reassured her of the efficacy and safety of this miracle drink. She takes two packages out of her grocery bag – his and her, I guess – and as she tells the story of his endorsement, she mimics his yapping mouth and rolls her eyes, as if he couldn’t possibly tell her anything of value about any subject at any time that could be trusted. Her husband – the moron! – this stuff works for him. Somehow, despite his seemingly poor track record for sharing relevant, factual information, she decided to give him a chance and give his suggestion a whirl. It has only a few calories – thank God! She can keep her girlish figure. Zero sugar – again, so she can fit into her skinny jeans easily.
[I’m interrupting this narrative to admit that this is nothing new. Men shown in commercials have been the recipients of derisive comments, mockery and other uncharitable depictions for years. This one is sort of like that but it’s more than that, too. It’s an equal opportunity insult-fest. Read on.]
She walks over to him to deliver his own little set of bottles, presumably to help him overcome his debilitating “2:30 feeling” and…wait a minute! I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. Unlike his wife, he’s not frantic with activity and just trying to make it through his own slump. He’s not vacuuming or changing the oil or raking the yard or cleaning the gutters or doing another load of laundry or starting dinner. He’s on the sofa. Sitting on the sofa quietly, as two boys run amok, as two other kids do homework and as his wife – between her two jobs apparently - carries two full bags of groceries in to the house. There he is – just sitting. And even better: reading a magazine.
She plops down next to him and then admits he was right about one thing: exactly what she needs to drink to get more energy every day. He delivers one line in this marketing masterpiece: “Told you so.”
Is it me? (Don’t answer that.) This makes me insane. I hate that it’s nearly 2011 and we’re subjected to a little commercial tableau featuring a wife/homemaker/working woman, reminiscent of Ms. Helen Reddy circa 1972. I hate that this husband sits around like a king in his castle.
And all this time, I thought AMC’s Madmen was supposed to be a period piece, pointing out the quirks and wrong-headed thinking of a different age. If this commercial is an example of the sales pitches created by ad agencies these days, it turns out not one thing has changed on Madison Avenue in fifty years, except possibly the smoking policies.
She enters her spacious, spotless, granite-filled kitchen. At the table sit two other children, more sedate than the high-spirited youngsters who ran through the foyer earlier, children who appear to be either happily working on homework or otherwise quietly occupied. Note: neither of them greets the woman either.
At this point, I’m confused. I can only guess she’s either the hired help everyone feels perfectly comfortable ignoring for some reason or their over-worked, exhausted mother who demands not one thing from them, not even a greeting when she enters the room.
A cautious, responsible woman, she despairs about her stressful, tiring day and then informs us of her recent decision to load up on legal stimulants. She admits that she was “nervous” at first, but her husband reassured her of the efficacy and safety of this miracle drink. She takes two packages out of her grocery bag – his and her, I guess – and as she tells the story of his endorsement, she mimics his yapping mouth and rolls her eyes, as if he couldn’t possibly tell her anything of value about any subject at any time that could be trusted. Her husband – the moron! – this stuff works for him. Somehow, despite his seemingly poor track record for sharing relevant, factual information, she decided to give him a chance and give his suggestion a whirl. It has only a few calories – thank God! She can keep her girlish figure. Zero sugar – again, so she can fit into her skinny jeans easily.
[I’m interrupting this narrative to admit that this is nothing new. Men shown in commercials have been the recipients of derisive comments, mockery and other uncharitable depictions for years. This one is sort of like that but it’s more than that, too. It’s an equal opportunity insult-fest. Read on.]
She walks over to him to deliver his own little set of bottles, presumably to help him overcome his debilitating “2:30 feeling” and…wait a minute! I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. Unlike his wife, he’s not frantic with activity and just trying to make it through his own slump. He’s not vacuuming or changing the oil or raking the yard or cleaning the gutters or doing another load of laundry or starting dinner. He’s on the sofa. Sitting on the sofa quietly, as two boys run amok, as two other kids do homework and as his wife – between her two jobs apparently - carries two full bags of groceries in to the house. There he is – just sitting. And even better: reading a magazine.
She plops down next to him and then admits he was right about one thing: exactly what she needs to drink to get more energy every day. He delivers one line in this marketing masterpiece: “Told you so.”
Is it me? (Don’t answer that.) This makes me insane. I hate that it’s nearly 2011 and we’re subjected to a little commercial tableau featuring a wife/homemaker/working woman, reminiscent of Ms. Helen Reddy circa 1972. I hate that this husband sits around like a king in his castle.
And all this time, I thought AMC’s Madmen was supposed to be a period piece, pointing out the quirks and wrong-headed thinking of a different age. If this commercial is an example of the sales pitches created by ad agencies these days, it turns out not one thing has changed on Madison Avenue in fifty years, except possibly the smoking policies.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
I dearly wish I could tell you I made this up. Wrong.
Just in time for the midterm elections, I have some news to share. It’s official: the recession is over.
Exhibit A: the placenta teddy bear.
In an amazing display that combines equal parts narcissism and queasiness, new parents can now preserve the awe-inspiring, nourishing, life-giving force from a mother’s womb as a leathery, frightening-looking teddy bear, made entirely from a placenta. It looks kind of like a bear that would lead to night terrors, if you ask me.
I don’t know about you but I have just about had it with the egocentricity of people who have a child, and then proceed to act as if they are the first parents ever on the planet. You’ve been around them, I know you have. They give themselves away by using phrases like “teachable moment.” They read things like Cookie and Brain Child, The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. They worry endlessly about stuff like high-fructose corn syrup and other poison-laden Halloween candy. And now, apparently, they make teddy bears out of a placenta.
It’s exactly what you imagine it to be; in fact, it could be even worse. Let’s take a look at this, shall we?
After delivering your genius-to-be, you lovingly and ceremoniously cut that cord, then save and prepare your placenta for what’s to come. You stretch and “cure” the membranes for a while. [Stop reading right now if you’re anticipating step-by-step instructions with a time frame, a list of curing ingredients and other details from here on out. I was too incredulous to take notes on this.] Then you stuff it with something – God knows what – and sew it up with something else – no idea - and there it is. Arms and legs; a body and a face without eyes that, sure, looks kind of like a bear. The no-eye look is kind of creepy, and that’s saying a lot since this whole thing is a world of creepy to begin with.
But sure, it's a bear I guess. The kind a prehistoric toddler may have dragged around the cave while the Neanderthal moms had playgroup together and cured meat/skins in their cave kitchen area, meat and skins not unlike the cured materials used to create the teddy bear their child never puts away in the cave toy box. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here – or behind ourselves, maybe?
I couldn’t tell from the website whether or not 21st century children actually ever play with their placenta bear or not. I suspect not since it was displayed in a glass container. It didn’t look all that sturdy to tell you the truth. Instead, it appeared to be kind of decorative, if by decorative, you mean ‘Silence-of-the-Lambs-basement’ decorative.
I blame the mother, here. I really do. Isn’t it enough that she experienced a healthy pregnancy and delivered a child? I would imagine the existence of the child is proof enough of the miracles her nourishing womb is capable of producing. But no, that’s not enough. She needs her placenta on display, albeit shaped and stuffed, to prove to the world that she and her body nursed a child to life.
I ask you: why else would someone do this? It’s the worst kind of “look at me,look at me, look at me, please” behavior because it’s not even honest. They disguise it as something ostensibly for their child. And the worst part? If this is what they do after just a few weeks or months of motherhood, what will they do after years? Oy. This is just the beginning.
Exhibit A: the placenta teddy bear.
In an amazing display that combines equal parts narcissism and queasiness, new parents can now preserve the awe-inspiring, nourishing, life-giving force from a mother’s womb as a leathery, frightening-looking teddy bear, made entirely from a placenta. It looks kind of like a bear that would lead to night terrors, if you ask me.
I don’t know about you but I have just about had it with the egocentricity of people who have a child, and then proceed to act as if they are the first parents ever on the planet. You’ve been around them, I know you have. They give themselves away by using phrases like “teachable moment.” They read things like Cookie and Brain Child, The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. They worry endlessly about stuff like high-fructose corn syrup and other poison-laden Halloween candy. And now, apparently, they make teddy bears out of a placenta.
It’s exactly what you imagine it to be; in fact, it could be even worse. Let’s take a look at this, shall we?
After delivering your genius-to-be, you lovingly and ceremoniously cut that cord, then save and prepare your placenta for what’s to come. You stretch and “cure” the membranes for a while. [Stop reading right now if you’re anticipating step-by-step instructions with a time frame, a list of curing ingredients and other details from here on out. I was too incredulous to take notes on this.] Then you stuff it with something – God knows what – and sew it up with something else – no idea - and there it is. Arms and legs; a body and a face without eyes that, sure, looks kind of like a bear. The no-eye look is kind of creepy, and that’s saying a lot since this whole thing is a world of creepy to begin with.
But sure, it's a bear I guess. The kind a prehistoric toddler may have dragged around the cave while the Neanderthal moms had playgroup together and cured meat/skins in their cave kitchen area, meat and skins not unlike the cured materials used to create the teddy bear their child never puts away in the cave toy box. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here – or behind ourselves, maybe?
I couldn’t tell from the website whether or not 21st century children actually ever play with their placenta bear or not. I suspect not since it was displayed in a glass container. It didn’t look all that sturdy to tell you the truth. Instead, it appeared to be kind of decorative, if by decorative, you mean ‘Silence-of-the-Lambs-basement’ decorative.
I blame the mother, here. I really do. Isn’t it enough that she experienced a healthy pregnancy and delivered a child? I would imagine the existence of the child is proof enough of the miracles her nourishing womb is capable of producing. But no, that’s not enough. She needs her placenta on display, albeit shaped and stuffed, to prove to the world that she and her body nursed a child to life.
I ask you: why else would someone do this? It’s the worst kind of “look at me,look at me, look at me, please” behavior because it’s not even honest. They disguise it as something ostensibly for their child. And the worst part? If this is what they do after just a few weeks or months of motherhood, what will they do after years? Oy. This is just the beginning.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
I'm a true Capricorn. (A statement that would mean so much more if I believed in astrology.)
Possibly surprising facts that may not be entirely obvious nor entirely congruent about me. I don’t promise this will be cohesive or satisfying. You’ve been warned.
Am I getting more impatient or are people getting dumber?
I hate when people make you stop giving out a phone number because they have to interrupt you to repeat the number after you. You know what I mean. You start with 101 (the area code, since we all now have nineteen phones with 14 different areas codes), and then they jump right in and say, “101”, then you say “202,” (“202” they exclaim, with great concentration), then you try to finish with 33 (“okay, 33”), and you finally conclude this complex algorithm with 44. (“44. So: 101-pause-202-pause-33-pause-44.”) Hate it. It makes me clench my teeth. How is it possible that you can hold no more than three numbers in your head at one time? How?
I’ve found that I can fool people into skipping this moronic routine by giving out phone number like this: 101 (pause) 202 (pause) 3 (pause) 344. That way, I have to endure only two pauses, because very few people will actually take a moment to repeat just one number back to you.
I prefer to think of it as dedication.
I play ENTIRELY too much solitaire online.
I used to play in the early evening, during the years I wrote the weekly newspaper column. As I did this very, very mindless exercise, I would compose the column in my head. I would organize it, think about the pace of it, the structure, the phrases I wanted to use, the parallels, the analogies and how it should begin and end.
All of this was quite unconscious to a large extent – not all of it – but much of it was. It was kind of in the back of my mind, simmering and fermenting and coming to a rolling boil, all while I did something else in the front of my mind. And then when I was ready to let it out, it went from the back of my mind to the keyboard, usually in one continuous session, almost as if I were taking dictation from my head.
It wasn’t done by any means. But it was there. And I could read it and fix it and cut entire paragraphs out of it before I turned it in, usually the first one. I would rarely love the column when it appeared, but it usually didn't make me insane to read it. Once in a while it did, though. When that happened, I would call them "the columns that got away."
But these days, I find myself playing solitaire and composing very little in my head. I seem to be in some kind of “this writing is crap,” “this reads like garbage,” and “this is so uninspiring it’s awesome” mode, which may well be all too true.
Music transcends life.
I LOVE gospel music. I must have been a Baptist in another life, who sung in the choir every week. It’s just so heartfelt and so passionate. It’s so full of hope and honest emotion. The singers seem to put it all out there, which is something I doubt I’ve ever felt comfortable enough to do even once in my life. And there’s a small part of me that regrets it.
You say obsessive; I say scarily, enthusiastically focused.
I can be just a little, just a smidge, just a tad…obsessive. I tend to immerse myself in something that fascinates me at any given moment. When I love a movie, I LOVE it. Same with a TV show. I have been known to watch hours (literally) of Law & Order or In Treatment or Lost.
If I read a non-fiction book I like, I’ll read everything I can about that topic for a while. I’ll discuss it like crazy with people I more or less force to read it just so we can talk about it. Or if I like a novel, I’ll re-read it a bunch of times – I’ll leave it at that (“a bunch”) – and try to find something new that fascinates me. I usually do, too. Somewhere along the line, my re-reads become explorations, mostly about the language or the choices the writer made. I wonder why and I wish I could have him or her over to dinner to chat about it. Until dawn, maybe.
I'm outing myself. Give me credit for that, at least.
I really don’t “get” NPR. I tried for a long time. I really did. But when I stopped listening, it was because I finally realized this: the best way to make a bleak day even bleaker was to listen to NPR. And the last thing I need is to find a way to add more bleakness into my life.
Maybe that makes me a moron. Or at least not nearly as smart as everyone who simply adores NPR. There’s that whole “I’m smarter than you are” aspect of NPR that makes me insane. (This feeling is connected by a dotted line to the contrary streak I have that makes me want o dislike things that almost everyone likes.)
(In)Conclusion
Hmmmm. Does any of this resonate with anyone? Am I simply too mean to live sometimes? I’ll try to think of some more pleasant aspects of my personality to share. That should be interesting.
Am I getting more impatient or are people getting dumber?
I hate when people make you stop giving out a phone number because they have to interrupt you to repeat the number after you. You know what I mean. You start with 101 (the area code, since we all now have nineteen phones with 14 different areas codes), and then they jump right in and say, “101”, then you say “202,” (“202” they exclaim, with great concentration), then you try to finish with 33 (“okay, 33”), and you finally conclude this complex algorithm with 44. (“44. So: 101-pause-202-pause-33-pause-44.”) Hate it. It makes me clench my teeth. How is it possible that you can hold no more than three numbers in your head at one time? How?
I’ve found that I can fool people into skipping this moronic routine by giving out phone number like this: 101 (pause) 202 (pause) 3 (pause) 344. That way, I have to endure only two pauses, because very few people will actually take a moment to repeat just one number back to you.
I prefer to think of it as dedication.
I play ENTIRELY too much solitaire online.
I used to play in the early evening, during the years I wrote the weekly newspaper column. As I did this very, very mindless exercise, I would compose the column in my head. I would organize it, think about the pace of it, the structure, the phrases I wanted to use, the parallels, the analogies and how it should begin and end.
All of this was quite unconscious to a large extent – not all of it – but much of it was. It was kind of in the back of my mind, simmering and fermenting and coming to a rolling boil, all while I did something else in the front of my mind. And then when I was ready to let it out, it went from the back of my mind to the keyboard, usually in one continuous session, almost as if I were taking dictation from my head.
It wasn’t done by any means. But it was there. And I could read it and fix it and cut entire paragraphs out of it before I turned it in, usually the first one. I would rarely love the column when it appeared, but it usually didn't make me insane to read it. Once in a while it did, though. When that happened, I would call them "the columns that got away."
But these days, I find myself playing solitaire and composing very little in my head. I seem to be in some kind of “this writing is crap,” “this reads like garbage,” and “this is so uninspiring it’s awesome” mode, which may well be all too true.
Music transcends life.
I LOVE gospel music. I must have been a Baptist in another life, who sung in the choir every week. It’s just so heartfelt and so passionate. It’s so full of hope and honest emotion. The singers seem to put it all out there, which is something I doubt I’ve ever felt comfortable enough to do even once in my life. And there’s a small part of me that regrets it.
You say obsessive; I say scarily, enthusiastically focused.
I can be just a little, just a smidge, just a tad…obsessive. I tend to immerse myself in something that fascinates me at any given moment. When I love a movie, I LOVE it. Same with a TV show. I have been known to watch hours (literally) of Law & Order or In Treatment or Lost.
If I read a non-fiction book I like, I’ll read everything I can about that topic for a while. I’ll discuss it like crazy with people I more or less force to read it just so we can talk about it. Or if I like a novel, I’ll re-read it a bunch of times – I’ll leave it at that (“a bunch”) – and try to find something new that fascinates me. I usually do, too. Somewhere along the line, my re-reads become explorations, mostly about the language or the choices the writer made. I wonder why and I wish I could have him or her over to dinner to chat about it. Until dawn, maybe.
I'm outing myself. Give me credit for that, at least.
I really don’t “get” NPR. I tried for a long time. I really did. But when I stopped listening, it was because I finally realized this: the best way to make a bleak day even bleaker was to listen to NPR. And the last thing I need is to find a way to add more bleakness into my life.
Maybe that makes me a moron. Or at least not nearly as smart as everyone who simply adores NPR. There’s that whole “I’m smarter than you are” aspect of NPR that makes me insane. (This feeling is connected by a dotted line to the contrary streak I have that makes me want o dislike things that almost everyone likes.)
(In)Conclusion
Hmmmm. Does any of this resonate with anyone? Am I simply too mean to live sometimes? I’ll try to think of some more pleasant aspects of my personality to share. That should be interesting.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
In praise of HBO's 'Darkness,' Bruce and being perennially 19.
“So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore. Show a little faith!
There’s magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re all right. And that’s all right with me.”
I can tell you exactly where those words take me. I’m 19 again. It’s August 18, 1978…just after 2 a.m. outside the recently departed Spectrum. There we stood, first with a crowd of 100 people or so. And as the hour got later, and then later, we dwindled down to a group of maybe 15 or 16. People who were, for that moment in time, our closest friends. Springsteen fans all, gathered by that inconspicuous little door, daring to imagine how the evening might end before we all headed out to our deserted cars in the parking lot.
It was different times, back in ’78. We were different. It was long before we had jobs, husbands, houses or kids. Before our 401(k)s and Visa cards and life insurance. Before the stretch marks and tiny, fine lines; before we patronized colorists and invested in Spanx. Everything about us was 19. We were all about the warm August night and the cold beer in our hands. All about dancing and singing and clutching each other as we paid homage with 20,000 other faithful. That night, we were all about Bruce and the band and the music and the moments he spoke to us from his soul, from the stage.
Janice, Cathy, Leslie and I – all 19 – wondering just what in the world we thought we were doing there. Not quite understanding why we hadn’t simply hit the road and headed for the shore after the concert, which had been the plan from the start. But we’d already invested $8.50 a ticket in this show, plus parking; and already waited this long. Maybe he’d come out and say hello.
I’ll see this forever in my mind. A small window in the door. One of the girls pressing her face against it for what seems like one solid hour. She backs up – and with a small shriek, throws her arms around his neck. And then, just like that, there he was. White T-shirt, jeans, walking toward what had become our intimate little group, asking us what we thought of the show. Bruce. The man we’d all zeroed in on through our binoculars not three hours earlier that night, now, literally, within arm’s reach.
Another clip from my mind: one of the guys had skipped out on his wife to go to the concert with his buddy – the night of his first wedding anniversary for God’s sake. He confessed it all to Bruce who took the beer bottle from the guy’s hand, then wrote a note to her on the label, something like: “Forgive him – he seems like a good guy – Bruce.”
We all came up with scraps of paper and ticket stubs and anything else we had to get an autograph and wouldn’t you know – Bruce had nothing to lean on to sign our scraps. I immediately stepped up – with my binoculars’ case the size of Delaware (’78, remember?) – and held it steady so he could write out his notes to all of us.
Then we all gave him a hug and a kiss – maybe even the guys did that, too – and snapped pictures to prove it. He drove off in a canary yellow Camaro with a smug-looking blonde in the front seat who looked completely bored by the whole thing.
We screamed from Broad Street to Seaside Heights.
Fast–forward several decades. Now wearing our Springsteen T-shirts with the 1978 photos silk-screened across them, we’ve gone on many extended tours with Bruce and the band. At Madison Square Garden in 2000, Janice, Leslie and I staged our own reunion. Fans read the date on our shirts and asked, “Is that you? I was five years old in 1978.”
Les and I have attended many other shows over the years with our husbands, who have no interest at all in hanging out by the loading dock afterwards. Something about Turnpikes or Expressways and backups at the exits…
But you know what? Even as we tramp out to the minivan and try to beat the traffic, we’re all 19 again. But we’re more than that, too. We all hear that screen door slam in our minds. We’re all old enough to understand that should one of us fall behind, the other will wait. We know that lots of times in life, it does feel like you take one step up and two steps back. We’ve learned to live with what we can’t rise above. We’re ready to grow young again.
And that’s all right with us.
There’s magic in the night. You ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re all right. And that’s all right with me.”
I can tell you exactly where those words take me. I’m 19 again. It’s August 18, 1978…just after 2 a.m. outside the recently departed Spectrum. There we stood, first with a crowd of 100 people or so. And as the hour got later, and then later, we dwindled down to a group of maybe 15 or 16. People who were, for that moment in time, our closest friends. Springsteen fans all, gathered by that inconspicuous little door, daring to imagine how the evening might end before we all headed out to our deserted cars in the parking lot.
It was different times, back in ’78. We were different. It was long before we had jobs, husbands, houses or kids. Before our 401(k)s and Visa cards and life insurance. Before the stretch marks and tiny, fine lines; before we patronized colorists and invested in Spanx. Everything about us was 19. We were all about the warm August night and the cold beer in our hands. All about dancing and singing and clutching each other as we paid homage with 20,000 other faithful. That night, we were all about Bruce and the band and the music and the moments he spoke to us from his soul, from the stage.
Janice, Cathy, Leslie and I – all 19 – wondering just what in the world we thought we were doing there. Not quite understanding why we hadn’t simply hit the road and headed for the shore after the concert, which had been the plan from the start. But we’d already invested $8.50 a ticket in this show, plus parking; and already waited this long. Maybe he’d come out and say hello.
I’ll see this forever in my mind. A small window in the door. One of the girls pressing her face against it for what seems like one solid hour. She backs up – and with a small shriek, throws her arms around his neck. And then, just like that, there he was. White T-shirt, jeans, walking toward what had become our intimate little group, asking us what we thought of the show. Bruce. The man we’d all zeroed in on through our binoculars not three hours earlier that night, now, literally, within arm’s reach.
Another clip from my mind: one of the guys had skipped out on his wife to go to the concert with his buddy – the night of his first wedding anniversary for God’s sake. He confessed it all to Bruce who took the beer bottle from the guy’s hand, then wrote a note to her on the label, something like: “Forgive him – he seems like a good guy – Bruce.”
We all came up with scraps of paper and ticket stubs and anything else we had to get an autograph and wouldn’t you know – Bruce had nothing to lean on to sign our scraps. I immediately stepped up – with my binoculars’ case the size of Delaware (’78, remember?) – and held it steady so he could write out his notes to all of us.
Then we all gave him a hug and a kiss – maybe even the guys did that, too – and snapped pictures to prove it. He drove off in a canary yellow Camaro with a smug-looking blonde in the front seat who looked completely bored by the whole thing.
We screamed from Broad Street to Seaside Heights.
Fast–forward several decades. Now wearing our Springsteen T-shirts with the 1978 photos silk-screened across them, we’ve gone on many extended tours with Bruce and the band. At Madison Square Garden in 2000, Janice, Leslie and I staged our own reunion. Fans read the date on our shirts and asked, “Is that you? I was five years old in 1978.”
Les and I have attended many other shows over the years with our husbands, who have no interest at all in hanging out by the loading dock afterwards. Something about Turnpikes or Expressways and backups at the exits…
But you know what? Even as we tramp out to the minivan and try to beat the traffic, we’re all 19 again. But we’re more than that, too. We all hear that screen door slam in our minds. We’re all old enough to understand that should one of us fall behind, the other will wait. We know that lots of times in life, it does feel like you take one step up and two steps back. We’ve learned to live with what we can’t rise above. We’re ready to grow young again.
And that’s all right with us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)