O Mighty Crisis

2010-01-07T18:07:00.001-06:00

"Fear Not Bold Colors"

During my early years, I shared a room with my sister. According to the dates on the photos, it would appear I was about two when Kirsten and I moved into our shared room. I'm also told we went to Disneyland when I was two, making that a very busy Year of Unremembered Wonders.

Here we are, christening the new girls' bedroom by whacking at it with our bums: Kirsten, Jocelyn, and big brother Geoff, on whom I spent a great deal of my first 18 years leaning (family lore has it, when I came home from the hospital--drove myself, incidentally--he took a gander at me and announced, "That's MY baby." 'Twas ever so).

Amazingly, that balalalika hanging ominously over my pig-tailed head never did crash down in the middle of the night. Look at it there: how did I escape without a scar on my forehead? What's more, when I look at this photo, I still can feel that lined bedspread. It had the texture of a particularly tough burlap bag. Let's all take a moment to praise the development of synthetic fibers, 'k? I bow before you, Empress Fleece. I kowtow in front of your throne, King Micro-fiber. I like to think, though, that sleeping under such a scratchy bedspread started my toughening process.

Indeed, I'm certain that bedspread is why, today, I can eat spicy curries, bite off even the bloodiest of hangnails, and remain tearless while I watching GLEE (except whenever those scrappy misfits sing "Don't Stop Believin'"...and, oh yea, when the visiting deaf choir sings and signs "Imagine"). [grudging disclosure: I just watched the Gaullaudet choir again, singing that song, and even though I know it's patronizing treacle, I'm wiping my eyes with the edge of a pillowcase]

Sharing that room (and, later, another down the hall) with my sister clearly had its benefits: I got tough; I hung with me sis; and consolidating two kids into one room made the house seem bigger.

But at some point, my sister reached an age where she needed her own space. The collateral damage of that decision was me at loose ends, hanging around the house, wondering where I was to sleep. On the hearth? In Mumsie's jewelry drawer?

Or how about this one? I slept in one end of the rec room in the basement. It was my choice. Ready to make the move from Upstairs to Downstairs (where the cool orange carpet and hip wood paneling lived), I willingly joined my brother, who'd been a bottom feeder for some time. He had a real bedroom in the basement, and my family helped me join him under the lower-level's artifical lighting by cobbling together a "wall" made out of a screen and a big armoire. We cordoned off the end of the rec room, threw a waterbed into the space, and dubbed it functional.

I LOVED that "room." For one thing, getting my own space also meant I got my own clock radio. And with a clock radio, I was able to participate in the subculture known as People Who Dial and Redial the Local Station Called 'KBear' in an Effort to Win Free Black Sabbath Tickets. Fleshing out that fun was the fact that my new bedroom featured a full-length mirror, which nicely reflected my many acts of Twirling In Nightgown.

Despite the beauty of claiming my twelve feet of rec room, a greater future beckoned.

'Cause my brother had a real bedroom in the basement--like with doors and a built-in desk.

And, barring any unforeseen prison time, he would be going to college...

...leaving me at home for three years before I headed off to college--three years spent in yet another new bedroom, one previously called Geoff's Room but which quickly morphed into Jocelyn's Suite of Sweetness.
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Sigh. Looking upon my Suite, I find it hard to believe HGTV hasn't hired me to be one of its decorating experts. Too rarely on The Stagers do we see clusters of half-deflated balloons hung at window level, thus drawing the eye upwards and reminding potential buyers to "see the light." Too rarely on Real Estate Intervention do we see collages of Hall & Oates, Rush, and Journey assembled to convey a "these bodacious boys would love you if they met you" selling point.

And so my high school years were spent in the Suite. I sat on the stool and used hot rollers. I opened and closed the curtains featuring basketball and football players striving to score (at least the room saw some action). I pinned dried corsages on the bulletin board. I sang to "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," marching around and waving an invisible flag at crowds of fans who echoed my every lyric. I accepted an invitation to Prom, and shut up already that he was gay. I smashed a rogue scorpion with a clog (Montanans ain't no pussies).

After a few years, I filled out college applications there, too. Ultimately, I left the Suite behind. My parents sold the house. Everybody grew up.

Of course, the bedrooms in the basement still exist inside my skull. My younger self still occasionally visits the orange carpet, still stops in to straighten the stuffed Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, still remembers the wheeee of sharing the waterbed with friends during sleepovers, still pings with feeling more social and lonely in that room than she's ever been since.

Those rooms of my own bred in me comfort and courage: to call and twirl and claim and decorate and open and pin and march and smash. They showed me how to take my own room with me, inside me, wherever I go.

Now, thirty years later, I am fortunate. I am able to give the same to my daughter.

For the last decade, she has shared spaces with parents and brother; of late, however, it's become clear she's ready to have a door to close.

If we are willing to knock and wait, she comes to us, in her time, of her own accord.

Her new room is the only one in the house with no radiator and, thus, no heat. She claims she's used to it and doesn't mind the cold. Right there is an attitude that will help her soldier through middle school.

Paint cans and IKEA held all the bright colors she craved.

Although she can't peer enough at herself these days, Girl opted for a desk rather than the vanity with full-length mirror that used to reflect my twirls. Because she likes papers and pens, her feeling was that a desk would serve her better.

This is her reading nook, a space I could wriggle into...but then, Winnie-the-Poo-like, would have to remain in for weeks, until I shrunk enough to pop out.

As much as she likes papers and pens, she also likes bags and fuzzy carpets.

Stored way up high, in a place called Heaven, are her American Girl dolls.

She wanted polka dots all over her walls, but we talked her into hanging dottish fabric instead.

The only thing better than a journal and a ballpoint is a map. Hanging this depiction of a WWII town on the wall gave her mind new roads to travel.

Perched on her warm comforter, new Ipod nearby, she clicks two pens,

ready to write her own stories.

Private, hardy, bright, organized, cozy, compromising,

the heroine discovers herself.

2010-01-04T22:03:00.007-06:00

"No Jive Turkey"

When I was in elementary school, sometimes I'd score a rare, coveted invite to Shauna Bergendahl's house across the street. She was about five years older than I and had perfect blonde feathered hair, the kind of Farrahed coif that shot her to a position as Head Majorette and a spot in the Homecoming royalty court.

With neighborhood kids flocking around her Obvious Cool, Shauna enjoyed a built-in audience, but usually we subdivision regulars were kept in the peanut gallery, out on her driveway, under the basketball hoop.

(Here you see the Bergendahl's house from my family's perspective; my brother weathered adolescence by shooting hoops and turning his back to the glory that lurked behind him.)

There, under their hoop, we could admire her dad's red convertible and her tanned skin, along with her ability to hold forth while twirling a baton and doing the splits.

I can count on one hand the number of times I made it over the threshold of her split-level rambler.

On one of those occasions, a couple of us ended up in the basement with Shauna, a dark, paneled place with slightly-fetid carpet--a rec room that created the necessary atmospheric tension for playing Ouija Board and getting scared out of our wits.

That day, The Board spit out prediction after prediction for our futures. So confidently did the planchette float around The Board during our suburban seance that I dared not ask it the big questions, such as "When will I die?"

If I knew when I would die, that would affect my every choice from that moment on, and I just wasn't ready to have fear of death inhibit my desire to buy the new Tiger Beat featuring Leif Garrett on the cover.

Thus, I settled for weighty questions that were still full of promise. Most notably, I asked The Board, "Who am I going to marry?"

Slowly, glacially, the planchette began to move. My patience strained, I rubbed my mood ring hand frantically up and down my Jordache jeans, trying to keep my Board Hand light and free of persuasion. Under my breath, though, I whispered the mantra of: "Please let it be Andy Gibb. Please let it be Andy Gibb. Please let it be Andy Gibb."

"T," the planchette spit out.

"Tom Selleck?" I screamed. "I'm going to marry Tom Selleck? He's okay on The Rockford Files and everything, but he's sooo old! I might as well marry James Garner!"

Continuing to move easily, of its own accord, the planchette then hovered over "O."

"T-O..??? Holy zippered jumpsuit! It IS Tom Selleck! I am going to marry an old guy. What's worse, he's kind of a loser; I mean, he was on The Dating Game twice and didn't even get picked. Once his run on The Rockford Files is over, his career is going to be kaput--and, what, then I'm going to have to get a job as a nurse or a secretary or something and support the whole family? I am so not diggin' this bogus action."

Important sidenote: sixth graders in Montana did TOO use the word "kaput" in the 1970s.

Undistracted by my breathless commentary, the planchette kept moving, this time indicating the letter "N."

"T-O-N? Oh, I hope you mean that -N, Ouja Board. I hope you didn't mean -M there. I hope you mean I'm going to marry a T-O-N of fun and chest hair--and by that I mean a lifetime of 'shadow dancing' with Andy Gibb!"

Continuing its winding path around the board, the planchette came to a stop on the letter "Y."

"Wait a spelling minute: T-O-N-Y. Tony? I'm going to marry a Tony? I'm going to marry Tony Danza of television's Taxi fame? Really? Wowzer."

At that point, awed by the scope of my future and the fact that I'd one day need to cook for an Italian and our five kids when my current diet mostly consisted of Twinkies and Tang, I stopped. Removed my hand from the planchette. Looked up and Shauna and the others.

"Can you guys believe it? I'm going to marry a guy named Tony, which pretty much means Tony Danza." Sitting there, dazed, I hardly noticed the planchette beginning to move again.

Over the course of six more minutes of agony, the planchette spelled out clarifying details. My Tony would have black hair.

Like Mr. Danza.

But. My Tony would have a M-O-U-S-T-A-C-H-E.

Whaaaa? As my future splintered around me, I registered "moustache" and "not Tony Danza then" in the same nanosecond. Were there other Tony's on the planet? If so, did any of them have moustaches and look like they could love a suggestible redhead?

After that day in Shauna's basement, I felt a new kind of power. Not only did I have a vision of the man I needed to look for, I had a name. Even better, I could skateboard through life's vagaries with the knowledge that they were temporary, that my true destination hadn't been reached until I lay in the arms of a moustachioed Tony.

Don't tell my blonde, clean-shaven Norwegianish non-Tony of a husband this, though.

He's laboring under the impression that our gig is a lasting one.

I, however, still feel certain there's a fuzzy upper lip and a huge bowl of penne in my future. Knowing my Tony as I think I do, I'll bet the engagement ring will be buried in the red sauce.

Maybe, for consolation, my current-but-one-day-ex husband can hook up with Shauna Bergendahl at my wedding to Tony. Her tan shoulders will look great in a strapless gown as she shimmies to "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" and hollers tipsily at our reception, "You and Tony are so boss, Jocelyn! It's almost like 'He's the Boss', eh?" (which makes no sense, Shauna, since that joke only really applies if I actually had ended up marrying Tony Danza, which I didn't; praise The Virgin Mary for his Gillette razor).

Then she'll throw up her baton and her dinner, give us a flash of Spanx as she does a high kick, and land with a thud in the splits and a puddle of Sautéed Sirloin Tips with Bordelaise.

I know for a fact that's how it'll go. I just asked my Ouija Board,

and my hands were barely even touching the planchette as it spelled out that answer.

2010-01-01T00:38:00.015-06:00

"My Top Ten List of Things That Had the Potential to Be 10/10's This Year but Were, in Their Actualization, Mere 7/10's...and If That Concept Doesn't Hurt Your Head Just a Wee Bit, Then I Have Failed in My Mission and Need to Label This Post's Conceit a 7/10 and Add It to the List"

Balls are dropping, and I don't mean geezerly Larry King's.

There's also a sparkly one in Times Square that's making a slow descent. People are drinking jaw-dropping amounts of alcohol and wearing pointy hats and acting as though hands moving on a clock can signify change, all of which sounds like my last birthday party, to tell you the truth.

However: Yawn. End of a year. Start of a new one.

To mark the passage of time, everyone's putting out Top Ten lists, attempting to prove something actually happened besides that Brittany Murphy not eating enough and causing her ticker to seize up while it made a wheezing noise that sounded suspiciously like "haaaammmbburrrger...for the love of Fuddruckers, give me a haaaaammmbburrrger."

There are "Top Ten Movies of the Year," "Top Ten Books of the Year," "Top Ten Most Interesting People of the Year," and, in my world, "Top Ten Things of 2009 That Had the Potential to Hit a 10/10 but Failed Just Enough to Rate an Average."

Here, then, is my list of stuff that was fine in 2009 but, with the addition of a little slap and tickle, could have been better:

1) Farrah Fawcett's last visit with her son, Redman O'Neal, should have been a moving moment of good-byes and mother-son tenderness. It coulda been a 10/10 heartwringer. However, Mom was in a lot of pain, distracted by imminent death and the sounds of her bodily organs shutting down. It could have been a 10, but -3 for Ryan not bringing some of his heroin from jail to that visit. Have some compassion, you felon, and give a motha one last high;

2) The Lost City of Z by David Grann has been getting attention as an amazing thriller and tale of adventure--one of the top ten books of the year. I was, hence, pretty jazzed to read it, as I'm nothing if not a complete whore for a rousing "ooh, this doesn't bode well" exploration book (although my preferred sub-genre is polar expeditions that result in cannibalism). Completely ready to toss a 10/10 at Gann's story of British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett's passionate attempts to find the mythical Lost City of Z in the Amazon rainforest--and feeling quite upbeat, from the first mention of under-skin maggots, about its ability to score a top rating--I felt bereft when, midway through, the story started spinning its wheels like a jeep beached on a muddy rut in the middle of the rainy season. Fawcett, like so many of his ilk, is monomaniacal, egotistical, and thoughtless. After about the third time he plunges into the forest with nothing but scorn for his suffering compatriots, leaving his wife and kids back in England, penniless, I began thinking, "Listen, Percy. I work in academia. I know your type. The technical term for you 'uns, in the Latin, is Jerkis Buttwipeus." Further plaguing the book is the fact that the author, David Grann, attempts to weave his own HIGH-larious foibles in the Amazon into the story of Fawcett in several "look at what a modern doofus I am" chapters, and before I knew it... -3 for a faux-journalistic book in which the author attempts to cast himself as a character and in which the characters themselves need significantly more maggots coming out their nostrils to hold my interest;

3) I also have to issue a loud "Feh" for 2009 in regards to light movies whose purpose was sheer escapism. You know the movies I mean: their only redemption is that they make us laugh and forget the reek of our armpits and the stack of dishes on the kitchen counter. Historical examples of 10/10 "good dumb" movies would be Elf and Legally Blonde. After such movies, viewers want to yell at the screen, "Thank you, silly movie, for taking me to a different place without actually making me think or care. That was a damn relief, compared to everyday life!!!" However, recent dumb movies are failing to amuse me even one "I hardly remember I have papers to grade" whit. Tropic of Thunder (watched after its DVD release) was the most egregious disappointment, with its arrested-juvenile/male/violence-as-the-basis-for-all-humor story, but The Hangover and even the promising 500 Days of Summer also left me with a feeling I rarely get, one called "I'm smarter than this shit." -3 for Tom Cruise's lame cameo in Tropic being ballyhooed as a comedic revelation.

4) Michael Jackson's This Is It tour ended up dramatically disappointing fans. Seriously, I got to the venue, and the place was dark and empty, which kind of put a damper on the show, at least until I started amusing myself by krumping to the beat of the silence. -3, This Is It tour, for poor t-shirt sales;

5) Sadly, I have to award a shrug of the shoulders to a certain pair of jeans that I purchased excitedly in 2009. You see, in making them, Manufacturing Company used a highly-sophisticated and sought-after stretch denim which, in turn, allowed me to purchase a size smaller than usual--a fact that, because I am a lush female with shaky self-esteem, makes the case for 10/10:

Added bonus points (+2) for fun zippers and nifty accessorizing belt. Woefully, -5 for the fact that whenever I wear them, no matter how upright my posture and unflinching my eye contact, no matter how much I whizz the zippers and flick my fingers against the belt studs, I still look like I bought jeans a size too small;

6) Much of 2009 was devoted to remodeling our kitchen; the project was carried out by 10/10 talents who turned a dated box of a room into a warm and welcoming heart of the home. As we use the room, though, we can't ignore the fact that it's as high as it is wide, which means I spend a fair amount of my day on the step stool, craning for the kettle corn and cashews. It is, quite simply, a tall room. And even though I'm 5' 7" and not afraid to jump, height and audacity are no way to get a bowl of soup into a microwave located six feet up. Here's my view when I warm up curried squash:

+2 for the slick stainless steel exterior; but -2 because my shrimpy kids, even standing on each other's shoulders, can't microwave me a hot toddy, and -3 for having to get on my tippy toes just to tap the "popcorn" button.

7) How fitting that #7 on the list is a 7/10! Ours is a game-playing family, and generally I delight in the shelves and shelves of board games that cover the paint peeling off the walls. Anytime I go to a new place or store (read: The Bookies in Denver!), I grab a handful of new games, pay shipping costs to get them to the frozen tundra of Minnesota, and eagerly anticipate ripping into them. Such was the case with the 10 DAYS in the USA game:

In the abstract, this game should perfectly satisfy my social studies-oriented/travel-loving nine-year-old Girl. The object of the game is to be the first to cobble together a trip from one coast of Our Fair Republic to the other, using train, car, airplane, and foot travel. Girl likes it fine, but since she doesn't sleep with the box under her pillow, and since there are no mule trains to get a player across the arid Southwest, -3.

8) Although Missouri is one of the places Where They Keep The Humidity, it does offer up a great many 10/10 experiences, such as The City Museum in St. Louis. A +1 bonus goes to the humidity, in fact, for the verdant foliage it creates across much of the state: trees and bushes so high and thick that a Northernish, boreal-based family quivers at the prospect of camping amongst their complexity. +2 for the family having packed both a tent and a knobbly blue ball. +7 for discovering a relatively-secluded state park, empty of drunken riff-raff (outside ourselves).

-5 for the unforeseen presence of garbage trucks emptying dumpsters mere yards from our tent at 6 a.m. -5 more for the fact that the night before the garbage trucks came, I'd done this thing I do when we're car camping, a habit loosely titled "Jocelyn Is a Night Owl and So, When the Rest of the Family Goes to Sleep at a Reasonable Hour, She Sits in the Mini-Van and Reads for Hours with Her Headlamp Because, Friends, That's What She Calls 'Getting Back to Nature'." On the night in question, I'd been reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and, even though I was really tired by about 1:30 a.m., I was at the part where I found out about--spoiler alert!--the serial killer guy, and he had The Girl and her dragon tattoo caught his basement dungeon, and I was all creeped out and couldn't even exit the mini-van to pee, which I really needed to do, much less to climb into the tent with my sleeping family, even though I was a tidge hysterical about the fact that they were ripe for serial killing themselves, laying there defenselessly in their bags, all soft and snoring, and I also was certain that the flashing light I kept getting blinded by was the serial killer coming down the road with his axe, even though I realized sheepishly each time it happened that it was just the reflection of my headlamp in the side-view mirror and not an axe blade, and so, well, ultimately I just had to keep reading because I couldn't move and was maybe crying a little and shrieking inside, and then the book finally ended, and I decided I would just want to be slaughtered with my family if that was what it was coming down to, so I climbed out of the mini-van, peed near a particularly verdant clump of trees, didn't die one tiny bit, and then was woken up 3.5 hours later by those damn garbage trucks which, mercifully, weren't taking our corpses out of the dumpsters and so, em, I think you can see why camping in Missouri is only a 7/10 at best.

9) Some people's vision is 20/20, which can be reduced to 10/10, but my whack vision is more of a 7/10 with reduction and correction. 2009 marked the year I made the leap to bifocals, a process that wasn't all that sobering, seeing as I was put in bifocals first at the age of 7, back when people had party lines and held their babies on their laps when they drove to California. Indeed, I greeted bifocals as welcome, especially if they made it easier for me to read by my headlamp during camping trips. At home, where everything is stainless steel and full of games and studded belts, I generally use an Itty Bitty Book Light clamped to the tome of choice, all the better to illuminate so-so stories of British explorers with, my dears.

BUT. This time around, in adulthood, I have found bifocals a bit difficult to adjust to, often causing bouts of vertigo when I'm out for my Walkies, little episodes of "Whoa, John Boy, where's Mary Ellen gotten off to?" wherein I feel like the earth is surging and receding beneath my feet. For several months, I became convinced I was having blood sugar issues and was taking after my dad and grandma who developed Type II Diabetes late in life. "If only I could eat a banana," I'd muse, "I'm sure I could find Mary Ellen."

Then I realized my blood sugar only seemed to dip when I would look downwards while out for a walk and that I was Type II Diabetes-free when looking straight ahead or even when looking up really high into the microwave. Effing bifocals and their insidious mind games.

Compounding the mock diabetes has been the "not great, just fine"-ness of the Itty Bitty Book Light, which makes my already-strained vision work harder than it wants to.

With the ho-hum Itty Bitty Book Light in hand, I'd never find that damn Mary Ellen. Then, what's more, the bulbs on the Itty Bitty started blowing out with regularity, which meant I kept having to walk to the hardware store to buy a replacement, and sometimes it would take me a few days to find the time to make the vertigo-imbued walk, which then meant I had no book light for a couple of days, and so I'd have to read at night next to my prone husband using my headlamp, and can you say "Serial killer flashback?"

So -6 for bifocals that make me woozy and for crappily-made book lights that lead to flashbacks, but +3 for my recent willingness to toss the Itty Bitty and replace it with the triple LED Mighty Bright, a clip-on book lamp so intense that, when I turn it on, my sleeping husband dreams that UFO's are landing outside our house.

10) Finally, the potential of my student, Tiffany, whom many of you met in a previous vlog, isn't lighting a fire in me. To tell you true, despite Fear of Wrinkles, Tiffany is actually a good-hearted, motivated student, and I think we all know she has glorious hair--so her future should be a 10/10. When I was able to steer her away from topics on religion (what with her being a curious combination of charismatic, apostolic, and fundamentalist) and politics (she refers to Obama as "the anti-hope," a position I'd certainly allow her to defend, but when pressed as to why she holds this sentiment, her response is a rather drawn-out, "Ummmm...because....he's....ummmm??"), Tiffany wrote some solid essays. That noted, I do have to give her future a -3 when I take into account this chortle-inducing admission on her final exam: "Working the cash register at Subway is the most stressful job in the world because I was taught wrong in first grade or something and so I can't tell the difference between nickels and dimes."
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There you have it: the best "coulda been betters" of 2009. I'm actually grateful that so much was so very just all right. In contrast to the 7/10's, the periodic 10/10 experience stands out in stark relief.

Without 7/10's populating my days, I wouldn't be so aware of how excellent Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is; I wouldn't marvel at how outstanding my husband's Thai curry is; I wouldn't take thirty seconds each time I use our new bathroom to stare at the gorgeous black-and-white hex tile flooring.

Perhaps most importantly, if I weren't surrounded by "average," I wouldn't be able to appreciate the undeniable quality of the people who populate my life:

friends like Colleen, who sent me an amazing boxed set of 1970's punk for Christmas;

family like my sister-in-law Erin and new brother-in-law Ben, who walked, just the two of them, out into a field on the Solstice and held their own personal wedding;

readers like all of you, who leave comments that heal something in me that was ripped open in junior high.

Thus, as the balls descend (this time I do mean Larry King's), I am thankful to all the 7's,

for without them, I'd live year after year, decade after decade,

blind to the 10's.

2009-12-28T02:28:00.000-06:00

"Dear Rival Gang Leader Tom Logan: If You Ever Try to Take Over My High School Fortress-City, I Will Lob a Molotov Cocktail at You, Which Will Be My Only Recourse Since It's Not Like I Can Go Tell My Mom, What With That Virus Wiping Out Everyone Over the Age of 12 and All"

When I was a kid, I read this one book.

Oh, all right, Sherlock Hemlock: I read about 4,000 books.

Approximately 3,800 of those reading experiences have fallen into the crevasse carved into my brain that night in college when I drank too much Jagermeister. Fortunately, I still carry the imprint of the other 200 books (only 93 of which were written by that cranky Laura Ingalls Wilder and her enabler daughter Rose).

To this day, I adore the Betsy/Tacy/Tib series and wish I could take to my bed with "the grippe" and a pompadour. To this day, I remember the heft of The Velveteen Rabbit, and I particularly like that my memory of the story stalls out when the rabbit is tossed into the fire and doesn't extend to the arrival of that improbable Nursery Magic Fairy who turns shabby toys into real bunnies after all!!!! To this day, I remember clutching Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret to my already-increasing bust with disbelief and then hiding its horny older sister, Forever, under the covers as I whipped through its illicit pages (characters had the sex in it, and they weren't even married to other people yet).

I'm currently reliving my childhood reading of Island of the Blue Dolphins, as I lead the girls in my daughter's class in discussion of it each week. Mostly, the girls' book club is gratifying to me because I'm, like, so sure I would have had astute things to contribute to the discussion in 4th grade, such as "Wow. I would never kill a cormorant, just to make a skirt. That's so harsh. Why doesn't she just make a decorative shawl out of otter pelts and have it double as a mini-skirt when she goes out clubbing in that scary Black Cave of That Ancestors that has all those creepy skeletons in it?"

Even more strongly, I remember laying under the desk that held my Billy Joel-laden turntable while reading The Good Earth. Then again. Then 16 more times. Interspersed between readings of Pearl S. Buck were readings of Gone With The Wind. Then again. Then 26 more times.

And that was fifth grade.

Sometime around fifth grade, I also read a book that still haunts my imagination: The Girl Who Owned a City, by O.T. Nelson. Researching it now, I learn that the book contains the tenets of Ayn Rand's theories of Objectivism (explained by the Wikipoodle as: "the advocacy of reason, individualism, the market economy and the failure of government coercion," a definition I supply for those of you who never read The Fountainhead in high school and therefore never acted all pretentious and pompous for about four months afterwards--and then there's the part the Wikipoodle doesn't cough up: despite the fact that such poseurs didn't really understand everything Howard Roark was so moody about, they remained certain that they'd stumbled across the sole intelligent creed ever put to paper, yet even as they held themselves above the ignorant masses and scoffed at the plebes' ignorance, they pronounced the author's name "Ann" instead of "Ein"). Interestingly, I never picked up on the Objectivism in The Girl Who Owned a City, probably because I was 10 and am kind of dim and had never heard of it and was too distracted by the notion of a virus that killed all the adults in the world (But where did their corpses go, I ask you, O.T. Nelson? Where did their corpses go?).

Even without detecting the underlying political message of the book, I was transported by its premise. Indeed, all the adults have died. Fortunately, even in their absence, electrical power plants continue to work (So, um, readers who work at power plants? Maybe quit, 'cause, clearly, you don't really do much). Despite there being light, the kids of the world, especially in the neighborhood of one 10-year-old named Lisa, quickly turn to gangs and warfare and fighting over food. Lisa emerges as a "leader"--if "didactic dictator" is your definition of leadership, although I suppose unreasonable and selfish are instrumental traits to success in a post-apocalyptic society, so if you see a bomb falling, run real fast to the nearest Trump Tower and yell "Take me to The Donald!"

Anyhow, eventually Lisa takes her gang, whom we readers are rooting for (Well played, O.T. Well played), and builds a Kingdom of Happiness in the local high school. She turns the place into a fortress, and they start growing their own food, and then the rival gang leader shoots her in the arm, and then the whole thing ends on an uplifting note, with the implication that Lisa will lead her minions to safe and productive lives under her watch.

Until she turns 12, I suppose.

Then the Kingdom of Happiness is going to need a new leader. And they won't even be able to bury or burn or eat Lisa's corpse, what with there not being one. At least they can not find her corpse with the aid of fully-powered 100-watt bulbs, though.

And here's the thing, and I'm sorry to get honest and straightforward on you at this late point: this post is actually just supposed to tell you about my amazing Christmas Eve, except when I sat down to type, I realized the amazingness of my Christmas Eve needed the preamble of a backstory about how I read books as a kid and this one book in particular.

So now you know enough to understand why, when I laced up my hiking boots during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve and stepped outside for Walkies in the darkness,

I felt like Lisa.

Except with boobies and a mommy.

The clacking world had gone still and silent--hunkering down, staying off the slippery roads, opening presents with family, watching Charlie Brown. I stepped off the porch and was immediately enveloped by the sensation of being the only person left alive on the planet.

I waded through the drifts and slush, feeling my heels rub against the stiffness of my boots, my glasses fogging with drops of precipitation. Obscured vision closed me even more inside myself, inside a place where it was quiet. Peaceful.

I walked for an hour:

No car lights dilated my pupils. No tires splashed past me. No dog walkers grunted hello.

Christmas decorations sparkled on every block. There wasn't a corpse in sight.

And I was all alone, smiling, humming, owning my city of solitude.

2009-12-23T23:51:00.001-06:00

"Postage-Free But Heartfelt"

Dear Inhabitants of the Interwebs, You Slimy, Three-Eyed Beasts:

At this reading, may you be sipping on something mulled, wearing something fuzzy, and not hating those around you. What's more: may you have protein in your belly and a carb in your heart.

I offer up to you the following holiday greetings with a shrug of my shoulders and a simple, "Hell, Jethro. It's what I got."

This year, our family mailed out the card below, an image created when the members of Groom's digital painting class were assigned to illustrate the various verses of The Night Before Christmas; Groom's required stanza was the "On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer and Vixen. On Tootie, on Blair, on Natalie and Mrs. G" blurpie. So he staged a bunch of our Playmobil figures, took photos, and then used the photos as a basis for his painting. I haven't even asked him, as we don't talk much, but I assume he got an "A," which, clearly, seems strong enough basis for a holiday greeting. Christmas is nothing if not all about staging and pixels.

In previous decades, I used to crank out a massive letter to accompany the card, but now that I have this blog in which to blather, doing such a thing seems redundant. If anyone cares, he/she can check in twice a week here and find out who's broken a bone or gone bowling. Hence, we went, in the text on the back of the Santa card, for a straightforward listing of what actually mattered in our year, and that would be the favorite words our eyes intook.

While the previous image and note went out to a hundred of our closest friends (plus four acquaintances about whom we remain ambivalent), the next image is for you alone, O Gracious Denizen of the Interwebs. To celebrate an impending blizzard and the fact that I'm intending, in the next few days, to make a Tres Leches cake for the first time, I asked His Groomitude to create a new Pyramid Man for me (see this, this, and this for the backstory). The result is a Groom/Paco collaboration, the best gift I can imagine:

My wishes for you over the next wad of days, Gentle Reader, are that you--

Savor life.
Revel in the good stuff.
Rest your yappin' dogs.
Find peace in your head.

2009-12-17T23:28:00.013-06:00

"Although I Felt the Freak in Many Other Ways, There Was This Month in Seventh Grade When We Did Track in P.E. Class, and As It Turned Out, I Was Pretty Good at Standing Broad Jump and the 100-Yard Dash. Whenever I Feel Down, I Remember Out-Jumping and Out-Running All Those Cute Little Things Who Had Boyfriends, and Suddenly I'm Humming Again, Which Indicates That My Happiness Stems from a Place of 'In-Your-Face, Bitches'"

A few weeks ago, my sister sent me a book.

I think she's making up for all those years in childhood when she insisted a "slap fight" was actually a "fun game" as she pinned me down and proved her superiority at fun games. Plus, once, she took my Bass ballet flats and threw them across the room at me (how Bush in Baghdad 2008 of her!). As sisters do, we were occasionally awful to each other; however, she was the first--and for a long time, the only--person in my life with whom conflict felt comfortable. We could fight like reality show bimbos clawing each other to win the Rock of Love...yet our battles somehow felt safe. Even though she threw things at my head, she wasn't going anywhere.

That noted, I still like to think she owes me. While she doesn't feel that way at all--from her point of view, she had to protect her space from a marauding wisenheimer of a ginger-haired douchnozzle--she is, as an adult, generous to a fault. Hell, there's a Darth Vader costume under our Christmas tree from her right now, and we don't even run with the Sith. She's just equipping us for future possibilities. Currently, we have an Anikin. But in twenty years, if Count Dooku takes him on, our Anikin may have need of a Darth costume to help cover his missing limb and scarred face, and all we'll have to do is clamber down to the basement and dredge it out of the costume trunk, thanks to her foresight. Yea, my sister is a regular Nostradamian benefactor, like "What if, down the line, light turns to dark, and you need to dress the part? Just in case, I should send something!"

In addition to providing for Paco's potential future, she has satisfied my present by sending a book. It could being recompense for hurled shoes, but it also may be an apology for her insistence in 1981 on watching Ryan's Hope when the clearly-superior General Hospital aired during the same hour. Middle school was wrenching enough, without the added drama of jousting over the dial. I mean, seriously, at an age where my armpits were getting hairy and my glasses frames ever more enormous, the least she could have done is let me eyeball Luke and Laura in peace.

Ssssssweet Car-o-line, but those platters ate up half my face.

Her apology came under the title The Geography of Bliss. Written by Eric Weiner, an NPR foreign correspondent, the book is one of those conceit-driven nonfiction tomes that is easily packaged and promoted for sale to customers who "actually only came in for one of those Gingerbread lattes." Despite its being a conceit-driven nonfiction tome that is easily packaged and promoted, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Never let it be said I'm anything less than easy.

The premise is that Weiner, an avowed curmudgeon, travels the world and tries to find where happiness lives--basically, he explores a variety of countries and attempts to determine who on the planet is happiest and why.

Okay, timeout.

1) Weiner never comes across as the grouch he claims to be; in fact, I'd go so far as to assert that he rather likes traveling around the world, talking to people. While he may be a man who feels down sometimes, who tends towards negativity on occasion, he's no Sith. Thus, the conceit of the book ("life-hating writer travels the globe and maps joy") feels manufactured;

2) Hello? What is happiness? I'd argue that since it's his book, Weiner can define the concept however he wants, but, repeatedly, he finds the idea of happiness so relative, so individual, so unquantifiable, that he can't even set down a baseline from which to work. As a result, the book is more about exploring what passes for happiness in various regions than discovering who wins the gold in the Happiness Olympics, and so I need to take a moment to holler, "Listen, Gomer, if you're going to take my sister's money for this book, you sure as hell better pony up with a concrete answer by the time I'm done reading. If you don't end with a firm conclusion like 'Incontrovertible happiness is to be found in Nasinu, Fiji,' I'm going poke out the eyeballs of Amazon.com with a pair of really long chopsticks";

3) Despite the basics of the book being contrived and slippery, it's an interesting read, and not only because Weiner gets really stoned in Amsterdam. There's also the fact that Bhutan, as a nation, has a GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness) quotient, as declared by the king--and, frankly, the very fact that a king can declare such a thing ups Jocelyn's Cheer Meter Reading to the level of WOW!. Here and there, when the author is particularly sardonic, my Meter Readings have even escalated to Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ya Big Weiner.

So gracias for this book, Dear Sister. It's the perfect end-of-semester read: I can attack it in chunks; it makes me smile; it is intelligent without taxing my toasted brain overmuch; and if you ever come at me with a pair of ballet flats again, I can throw this paperback volume at you, and I will aim for your head.

Should I have piqued your interest (or perhaps I've piqued your pique), and you find your own Cheer Meter Readings plummeting because you don't have Weiner's book nearby, here is a taste of one of the early sections, during which our intrepid explorer spends time in the Netherlands (learning to say "I'll have seconds on the hash brownies, please" in Dutch). At one point, he visits a Happiness Science Center, which, at first, I thought was the official name for Wavy Gravy's LSD lab, but, as it turns out, the Happiness Center is a place where people who call themselves real scientists try to figure out the variables of an upbeat state of mind.

Heading the lab is researcher Ruut Veenhoven (like I don't want to have another kid, just so I can use that name), who has a compiled a database of findings (which Weiner characterizes as "alternately obvious and counterintuitive"). So take the test, Gentle Reader. According to one Dutch guy with an awesome name, are you happier than most?

Veenhoven has found that:

Extroverts are happier than introverts
optimists are happier than pessimists
married people are happier than singles
...though people with children are no happier than childless couples
Republicans are happier than Democrats
people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not
people with college degrees are happier than those without (at the very least, they are more smug)
...though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA
people with an active sex life are happier than those without
women and men are equally happy
...though women have a wider emotional range
having an affair will make you happy but will not compensate for the massive loss of happiness that you will incur when your spouse finds out and leaves you
people are least happy when they're commuting to work
busy people are happier than those with too little to do
wealthy people are happier than poor ones, but only slightly

According to this list, I'm about 3/7ths happy, which is odd because I really am feeling more 6/7ths-ish today. Perhaps if I align myself with the values of Newt Gingrich, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Jeff Miller, Ed Schrock, Strom Thurmond, Randall Terry, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Joe Scarborough, Jimmy Swaggart and--oh, fer Christ, do you really want me to type them all out? It promises to take weeks--I could become an affair-having Republican and increase my happiness fraction. Provided I manage to hide my infidelity from my spouse (Groom: stop reading two sentences ago, please), my happiness levels should soar.

After looking at Veenhoven's data, Weiner notes, "Social scientists have a hard time un-raveling what they call 'reverse causality' and what the rest of us call the chicken-and-egg problem. For instance, healthy people are happier than unhappy ones; or is it that happy people tend to be healthier? Married people are happy; or maybe happy people are more likely to get married? It's tough to say. Reverse causality is the hobgoblin that makes mischief in many a research project."

I take his point. At this very minute, for example, I'm unsure if I'm happy because I'm eating a salad...or if the salad chose me because I was already a happy person.

Um, huh?

I think I need to keep reading.

2009-12-14T12:21:00.001-06:00

"You Should See What I Do With Lincoln Logs"

2009-12-10T15:42:00.003-06:00

"I Promise You At Least Five Parenthetical Asides in This Post; Bonus Points If You Count More"

There is a fortuitous convergence at the end of the semester:

Gasping for air from beneath a heap of research papers, I claw one hand out from under essays about childhood obesity, bacteria-phobia, the death of newspapers, and the upsurge in wind farms,

and that hand, calloused and gnarled, flops around blindly (what with having no eyeballs)

until it encounters my husband's faintly-whiskered cheek (because he's 99% Nordic Boy Wonder and 1% newborn mouse, faint whiskering is the most he can achieve).

The flopping, stroking hand is expressing appreciation. Were it in a bad mood, it would slap and flip off and plumb for ear wax.

But no.

Flopping, stroking hand loves Groom (and may very well express that sentiment more fully, after dark).

For, just as Flopping Hand is cramping from clutching the grading pen and wiping away tears of disappointment,

Groom has finished out his semester and has work to show for it.

Translation: I ain't be gottin' much time right now, but, because my husband took some art classes all term and made pretty pictures, I can hitch my blog to his star and post them here.

At the end of last Spring term, I went on at some length in a video about his work, but this time I'll be more brief (somewhat unattractively, your collective "whew" registers even here, miles and miles away). Groom took Painting I this semester and marveled at how long it takes to turn out a good piece, largely because one has to wait for the paint to dry before adding the next bit. Paint and wait; paint and wait; paint and wait. He also completed Art History, an online class that fully demonstrated any possible pitfall of online education (typed this mortified online instructor who canNOT believe the poor quality of "instruction" she has sometimes viewed over her husband's shoulder in the last year, O Holy Mothers of Slackers Who Still Collect Pay Cheques). Fortunately, he had the textbook, read the thing and, therefore, edjamicated himself. Lastly, he took Digital Painting and Drawing, a course that fully demonstrated the possible strengths of online education. In fact, he learned the software and techniques so well that many onlookers can't appreciate the hours upon hours of work he put into each piece.

However, as a kind and astute audience, I feel certain y'all will be just the right folks to see that talent can distinguish itself, even in digitized art. You are also the right crew to fathom how cool it is to have random pictures floating around the house when one is casting about for a picture to adorn, say, one's anniversary invitation:

As you can see, Groom's response to an assignment early in the term gave us fodder for our invite. While everyone enjoyed the image, some lost their breath upon reading the text. An astonishing number of people got all nervous and had to blurt out, "That business about 4 affairs? Really??? What happened? Is there something we should know?"

Yea. 'Cause when people are throwing a huge party for their 10th anniversary, and they are the most soppily in love couple you know, and they have evidenced in the past a sense of humor that tends to skid sideways,

generally the backstory is a whole lot of adultery that screams out for publicity.

Knowing there was some consternation in the ranks after we sent out our invitation, we prepared an answer to use during the party:

"Yes, Guido/Carla/Father O'McFlanniganahan, there have been 4 affairs. Neither of us had them alone. We always had them together, as we enjoy opening the marriage to the magic of a third. So, uh, the first affair was with Miss Silvia, our espresso maker. The second was with Tina Fey. We took turns licking the make-up off her face. The third was with late night television's Craig Ferguson; he brought puppets. And the fourth was with Omar from THE WIRE. Now, with that mystery cleared up, what did you think of the squash on the card?"

After the 85 wonderful guests (only 3 of whom remain bewildered--and hopeful--to this day with regards to the infidelity) trooped out after our party, Groom was ready for a little quiet time during which he could refocus on his art assignments. This past week, he spent hours and hours and then an hour plus 14 more minutes working on this (my favorite thing he's ever done):

Based on photos of the ice packs that jumble the shoreline of Lake Superior each winter, this was his final project for Digital Drawing and Painting.

This picture does for me what Groom himself does. It alters my heartbeat.

But here's the thing: he posted it to the online class, in the discussions area, amongst all the other messages containing digital paintings and drawings of unicorns, Captain Hook, and guitars sporting angel wings...and no one commented on it.

Later that night, Himself admitted to feeling a little hurt, as he'd been excited about what he'd created and hoping for feedback. But nothing.

The next day, he asked his instructor about it, and her take was that he had created an image that appears photographic. Everyone thinks he uploaded a photo and then clicked a few buttons on the computer, and voila (or, as my students write it, "Viola!").

Eventually, a couple of classmates did comment, ho-hum "that's neat" responses. Despite that, he feels proud of what he did, especially because he knows he opened a blank canvas on the screen, took the digital "brush" in hand, and drew, filling the blank white with just the right shadings of grey and charcoal to transport viewers to a cold February day on the shore of the world's largest surface of fresh water.

That's what real art does: it transports us, makes us catch our breath (sometimes with shock; sometimes with awe).

In this case, the art provides my cramped, flopping hand with a frigid respite,
a soothing patch of ice upon which to rest and recooperate

before I force my attentions back to the next essay on the stack.

(the end)

(except P.S.: at the art show on campus this week, Groom received bids on two of his pieces, one of them the squash from our invitation and one of them an oil painting. We's rich! We's rich! Daddy sold his squash so Mamma could get her some Grillz!)

2009-12-07T13:44:00.001-06:00

"Recipe for a Headache"

My life policy of Don't Get Harried is inviolate.

Also, I lie a lot, especially on Mondays, when zipping around and feeling always eight minutes behind is the norm, and my life policy is brutally, repeatedly violated.

The policy of Don't Get Harried is predicated by the fact that doing lots isn't part of my self-definition. For me, racing around from commitment to commitment doesn't give life a sense of worth or purpose; on the contrary, it leaves me with a feeling that I've missed life's purpose altogether.

Honestly, I have no idea what life's purpose actually is, but intuition tells me it has something to do with sitting very still, pulling air into my lungs slowly, and staring at something the wind is blowing around.

Hey, if you take that description, plop a bag of Old Dutch bbq chips down next to me in the scenario, scatter about a few Little Debbie snack cakes, then suddenly I'm not so much seeking purpose as stoned.

Stupefied or meditating, either way I find myself sitting in a place, feeling a moment, being there. It feels right.

Contrast a relaxed Old Dutch day with my Mondays of late, and you'll be screaming for a toke of the Mary Jane. For some reason, even though I don't have classes on campus on Mondays, the start of the week has become crazy-mad-rip-roaring busy--as in, the day takes place in chunks of 24 minutes in 40 different places, and then the sun plummets, extinguishing exhaustedly.

Normally, this is just how it is. It just is. Last week, though, Monday took on an added pressure: it was my husband's birthday. And since he is the finest of souls, and his birthday last year was particularly The Suck (being born right after Thanksgiving means you're usually in a mini-van with crabby children, driving home up a grey highway, on your birthday; the highlight is stopping at the Chug 'N Munch for wasabi almonds), I had vowed it would be better this year.

Specifically, because he never got a Birthday Treat last year, he would get something this year. I would figure out the details of that when the time came. Like, on his birthday.

Thus, last Monday, the Gourmet cookbook and I had a date. Since Groom had no preference about his treat (high maintenance, that one is), I leafed through, looking for a recipe entitled "What Jocelyn Would Like to Have But Which She Can Pawn Off as Being For Her Husband."

Clearly, chocolate and profiteroles were in our near future.

The choice made, I scanned the list of ingredients, went through the kitchen cabinets and was able to whoop, "Yee-haw! We have sugar! This thing has legs!!" Then I wrote the rest of the ingredients down onto a shopping list and sent Groom off to buy his own damn heavy and ice creams.

What I realized, as the day went on, was that the Gourmet recipe was incredibly unrealistic. As if a person--on a Monday--can just take out the ingredients, stand in front of the stove, and make profiteroles and hot fudge.

Recipe, O Recipe, where is the section that has the cook crawling around on all fours in her basement pantry, spending 24 minutes trying to find the missing pastry bag?

Recipe, O Recipe, you mention 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, but why do you not mention 6 loads of laundry?

Recipe, O Recipe, why do you not mention the 24 minutes the cook will need to spend pulling together materials for the Girls' Book Club she's leading each week in her daughter's 4th grade class?
Why, O Short-Sighted Recipe, do you not list "24 minutes of driving to the elementary school" or "31 minutes of deconstructing the plot of Island of the Blue Dolphins with 12 girls" as necessary ingredients to your hot fudge? Why do you not acknowledge the emotional energy the cook will have to expend in explaining to a group of preadolescent girls that sometimes, as in the book, members of our families will die (albeit not at the hands of otter-pelt-hunting Aleuts)?

Recipe, O Recipe, why do you fail to mention the post-Book Club dash to first grade, wherein the cook will grab her 6-year-old, drive him 24 minutes to the Martial Arts studio, and--with no whisk in hand--help him strip in the backseat of a Toyota Camry and change into his karate kit?

Dear Recipe, you also neglect to mention the late afternoon latte the cook will need to make, after she whizzes home from the karate studio. By the time she has made her espresso, transferred the laundry, and found a saucepan, it's time to go pick up Paco. Amazingly, during class, he's managed to stain his uniform (with what??? blood???), entailing a double trip through the wash and the application of a bleach pen. Where is "bleach pen" on your list of ingredients, Ressy-pee-pee?

O Negligent Recipe, you also fizzle in the Homework Section of the baking, overlooking the fact that the chef's daughter might have been asked, for Social Studies, to make a timeline (complete with photos) of the seven Biggest Events of Her Life. Due the next day.

As it turns out, Dear, Blindered Recipe, 4th graders aren't completely certain what the Biggest Events of Their Lives have been. Fortunately, cooks who are chopping 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate are able to multi-task and suggest things like, "How about when you learned to ride a two-wheeler?" and light the burner simultaneously.

Speaking of simultaneously, O Recipe of Restricted Focus, you fail to lay out the moments when the cook will make her lunch for the next day, pack her gym bag, and ready her work satchel. Why do you not mention "ready work satchel" in your list of instructions, Small-Visioned Recipe?

Moreover, as your cook peels carrots that appear nowhere on your list of ingredients, she also muses that you underestimated the amount of homework 4th grade teachers like to give on Mondays. Dumb Recipe, you haven't done the math.

Specifically, Challenged Recipe, you have not allotted for the fact that a boy named Benito dropped a pocketful of change along a maze-like path, and my daughter--some sort of good Samaritan on a two-wheeler--needs to help him recollect it all, adding up his potential loss along the way.

Speaking of being lost, did I add the vanilla yet to you, Precious Recipe? I'm no longer certain, but assuage my feelings of confusion with the knowledge that Benito has regained his lost change and now has enough to go buy wasabi almonds at the Chug 'N Munch.

Oh, and Benito? When you're done, feel free to toss your wrapper into the trash. While the chocolate melts for the hot fudge sauce, I'm emptying garbage cans from around the house and compiling the recycling for its Tuesday pick-up.

The baking soda only went missing for a few minutes during the Recycling Phase of you, O Recipe.

Ultimately, once my salad was made, and Benito had a full tummy, and the karate uniform was again pristine,

Hot Fudge was born.

The labor had been long and difficult, but the fudge was dark;

the pastries were puffy.

Ultimately, it all came together like a dream. Groom felt properly honored, and we all needed napkins.

Of course, the real celebrating began after we'd put you to bed, Loyal Recipe,

and we took considerably less than 24 minutes to suck down your Urban Cousin: Surly Darkness, an imperial stout without compare.

When it hit our bellies, we sat

still

pulling the air into our lungs slowly

gazing out the window into the night

watching things blow in the wind.

2009-12-03T18:25:00.007-06:00

"Juicy Fruit"

Scroogey McSkinTheReindeer here.

It's that time of the year again. Sumpin' about jolly and holly.

Not this grouch's vibe. Nor is Kill The Turkeys day.

In trying to put a finger on why the holidays make me want to carve a cave into the side of Wal-Mart using my bare hands and then climb inside toting a headlamp, a Scrabble board, and a machete before rolling an SUV in front of the opening, I can come up with a few reasons:

--it's the end of the semester, which means it's all I can do to peel students off the walls and grade their lackluster work (why can't they pour all that adrenaline into their writing?); by this time next week, when cultural pressures are smashing me into an undecorated pine tree, telling me to crank out some homemade gifts, and urging me to create a sense of tradition that will one day inspire nostalgia in my children, I'll be facing a whole new stack of 100 essays that need grading before the next stack comes in the following week. I tell you: before I started the college teaching gig, it never had occurred to me that the end of the semester makes teachers completely whack, just as it does students;

--I already want to add three additional hours to each day, just so I can sit down more and read or write or talk to someone. The time crunch makes me NOT want to spend hours using Scotch tape and wrapping paper to "hide" presents when I know that same paper and tape will be ripped off in 5 seconds flat and crumpled into a ball that I later have to retrieve in its wadded form from under the couch. A week after that, I'll still be scraping tape remnants out of the carpet. Three weeks after that, I'll be crawling around the floor, picking up pine needles. Four weeks after that, I'll carry the damn ornaments back down to the basement. Sometimes people have mentioned that I don't really seem to make phone calls. Let's thank Christmas for that;

--Any of the time or money that is put into holiday efforts--from shopping to washing up after a big meal to laundering the dirty table cloth--would feel better spent on a family trip somewhere, preferably a trip that sees me looking at art, running on a trail, and reading;

--I realize now, more and more, that I never much enjoyed holidays as a kid. Something there was always hollow. Flat. Contrived. (kind of like my parents' marriage, which took thirty more years to come clean!).

Clearly, I am a holiday pisser of the highest order.

What became again apparent to me last week, however, was this:

I can't blame my dislike of the holidays on family. While some dread get togethers because of tensions, fighting, drinking, passive/aggressive-ing,

I have lucked out. Because my husband's family lives in our state, and none of my family immediate members does, we see my in-laws the most. And they are awesome. Seriously, if you offered me a thousand bucks to come up with a single complaint about my mother-in-law, I'd have to congratulate you on your good fortune at keeping that thousand bucks in your tight little wallet.

My husband's parents, sister and her partner, grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins all live in the same town. To a number, they are the best people I've ever known.

They are so engaged and attentive and deliberate and thoughtful that I almost feel bad about wanting to go scratch out my Wal-Mart cave. In fact, I'm so near to feeling bad about it that I'd be glad to write them a card detailing my regrets as I squat there in Ye Olde Wal-Mart cave, if only the postal service would grant me a zip code and thereby allow me the return address required on mailings.

What I would tell them is this: if all the fuss and bother would go away, and only they were left behind, that would feel like a celebration, and no one would have to do dishes for an hour afterwards.

This photo sums up perfectly how killer In-Law Family is:

That's Ben, my sister-in-law's partner. They have an organic farm, which supplies kale and beets to locals in the form of CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares, supplies the co-op in town with cabbages and squash, supplies the residential colleges with tomatoes and spinach. In this photo, Ben (who's also a trained yoga instructor) is doing a headstand amongst the seedlings in their hoop house.

I could stop right there, as I'm certain you have already grasped how un-hate-able this family is.

'Cause a headstand in a hoop house is my idea of a party trick (much better than the time when I tried sticking a little pinch of chew between my cheek and gum while having cocktails and then swallowed a gullet-full of the Skoal and had to go puke in the lilacs. I'm a whole different kind of charmer than Headstanding Ben).

In case your jury is still out, I next submit this photo, in which my father-in-law pushes Paco on a swing they made out in the woods. Like his mother, Paco can be a little crabby sometimes...but never on a homemade swing in the woods with Grandpa pushing him.

Maybe I need a holiday swing in the woods, and then I'd be able to hesh up.

But wait: I've got more evidence of this Crew of In-Laws' excellence. Last week, a couple of days after Thanksgiving, Ben and Erin (my sister-in-law) hauled their cider press from the farm out to my in-laws' house, so we could pitch together our Northern apples with their Southern-er apples and make cider.

Cider pressing is a process of control and violence, and seeing those apples get decimated whittled the edges off my sulkies.

Even when Paco doesn't have an ear infection, he likes a Pajama Day. But for SURE he needs to go commando and sport an elastic waistband when he's running a fever. And for SURE pajamas are required when he gets to crank fruit into pulp (although one does worry about going commando around the masher; Boy Bits could flop in by mistake). Alternate cranking uniform: a vigorously polka-dotted hat.

Bye-bye, crabbies (both the apples and my mood).

Paco and Girl, rockin' the juice.

The man in the hairy sweater is Groom. I look at this photo and think, "GAWD, I canNOT even believe I have a crush on a man in a hairy sweater." Then I remember I brought him that hairy sweater from Iceland, a trip that took place in midsummer, during 24-hours of light, which consequently messed up my biological clock and resulted--surprise!--in the girl in the polka-dot hat. So hell yea, he should wear that sweater. Without it, I'd still be a virgin.

Or whatever.

The Result of My Trip to Iceland and the Pajama Kid have taken to making up choreographed dances that they can trot out at any moment. I appreciate this a great deal, as Groom has always maintained that musicals are silly because people don't just randomly break into song and dance in the real world.

In. your. face. Groom. Lighten up and sing "I Feel Pretty" already. Give us a twirl.

Ultimately, crabbies turn to mash turn to pulp turn to juice

and the press lets loose its bladder.

Rallying in the face of such incontinence, I concede that holidays have their moments. As far as what my children will take into the future with them when they wax nostalgic, I can only hope their memories include the phrase,

"Remember the year we drank apple pee?"

2009-11-30T11:18:00.006-06:00

"Husband as Muse"

A few weeks ago, I danced over to Jazz's blog and enjoyed a welcome surprise: her post that day had been hand-written. It startled me how much I liked seeing her handwriting and not just her typing; it reminded me of the individual behind the blog; it gave me a glimpse into her Herishness.

Hence, I've co-opted that idea, as you can see below (click on the image to enlarge it--and then zoom in even more!). While my handwriting has never been stellar, it has seen a marked degeneration in the last two decades, as I've graded thousands of student essays. As well, I wrote the page below as we drove 70 mph on the highway last night, after dark, heading home from a holiday weekend away. All that in mind, you can still accuse me of being illegible, and I'll have to nod in agreement.

2009-11-26T13:38:00.002-06:00

"Ridding the Planet of the Scourge That Is Breathing and Upright Turkeys"

Sometimes I get all ranty on my students. This happens, in particular, when they kvetch about having to take classes "that don't have anything to do with what I'm going into"--although, were they at the keyboard, that sentiment would read more like "taht dont have any thing to with WHat im goin in to."

Whenever they act all put out at having to take a range of classes, at having to study things they have no interest in, at wasting their time in classes like history, political science, and psychology when they just want to be nurses,

I have to clench my slapping hands firmly to my sides.

Every now and then, if I'm able to temper my reaction, I attempt thought correction (which is the agenda of every leftist Ivory Towered college professor, according to the Fox Newsian segment of the population). Calming my voice, I venture a, "You know, I viewed every class I ever took as an opportunity more than a burden. I always really try to remember that education, in any setting, on any subject, for any reason, is to be treasured. Specifically, if you are lucky enough to be in college, you shouldn't start complaining that you are asked to take college classes. Of course, all of this is hard to see when you're in the midst of it, so let me put it in more practical terms. Studies show that most people end up changing careers 5-7 times in their working lives. Thus, it is in your best interest to get the broadest base of education possible, so that you leave college equipped to take on any possible type of job that might put itself in front of you in the next 35 years. Certainly, you need very specific classes to become a nurse/phlebotomist/massage therapist/auto mechanic/firefighter. But what happens when your body gives out, or the economy becomes bad, and suddenly you are face with a change in career? What if you've only ever had phlebotomy-related classes? How are you going to sell books/dig graves/start a company/substitute teach/manage an office? More than knowing how to draw blood for the rest of your life, you need to know how to talk to people, how to communicate, how to think critically, how to analyze possibilities and pitfalls. See, the whole point here, with this college gig, is to lay down a foundation that can support you through all of life's vagaries."

And then I slap them.

With very small, gentle, invisible hands.

Here's the thing, though: while I believe all of the above rant quite vehemently these days, the truth is that when I was a college student, I could get all pissy about classes, too. In my defense, I will note I went to a liberal arts college, so the entire nature of my degree was broadly foundational. Moreover, it wasn't that I was averse to the information in the classes I was required to take; it was that my brain was too busy processing Long Island Iced Teas to be up to the task of calculatin' and hypothesizin'.

As a result, I still did my best to avoid classes in the maths and sciences--them mean classes that could hurt me.

However, the college hinged its degree awarding upon my having completed a variety of classes from all disciplines, so eventually, I had to sign up for numbers and theories and stuff, which seemed a shame when I still had Jane Austen to read.

Fortunately, I wasn't alone in my recoil from hardcore math and science; in fact, I was in such good company that the college had been forced to create and offer watered-down versions of some classes in these disciplines. I took Math 10 one semester...we connected dots and made stars and stuff, and at some point, we may have added up all our dots and stars, which, since we got to use our fingers, was a breeze, so long as the answer never exceeded ten. Hey! Math was fun!

Fulfilling the science requirement was infinitely more taxing. I thought I had it sussed when I discovered a class nicknamed "Physics for Poets" existed. Hell, yea, methunk. I could dig a class where "torque" and "vector" were part of the iambic pentameter making up a sonnet. So great was my excitement, I bought pencils, friends. I bought pencils.

But. Hmmm. How to put it?

One time John McEnroe hollered at a line judge that he was "the pits of the world." I would like to assert here that Nikola Tesla might have been a line judge. 'Cause physics was the pits of the world.

Now, I already knew physics blew the shutters right off my weathered Queen Anne of a brain. In high school, fast tracked in all subjects, I had taken honors physics. My teacher then had served as an artillery sergeant in Korea. As I sat in his classroom, holding my head in my hands, stifling a wail, he would march up and down the aisles, whacking desks and hollering about how only dummies couldn't get this stuff. Clearly a dummy, I started going in before school to have him work through the problems with me. It never helped. I remained a cringing, cowering mass of confusion. But he did smile once when I make a joke about my having "zero capacitance," so I called it a victory.

Woefully, the college physics experience bore out my college experience. While the professor was a good man, he lived on Planet Throbbing Brain, unaware that we peons down in the mines, attempting to extract his brilliance, were gasping for air.

Full disclosure requires that I also admit I took the class Pass/Fail, so all I needed was a "D" to get through. At first, I aimed for my "D" by skipping lots of classes, which did the trick quite neatly.

But then we had the first test, and its return marked the single time in my academic career that I held and beheld the letter "F."

Muttering a word that started with "F," I realized I had to start cranking, start going to class, start attending study groups, start reading the text book.

And I did. Even still, I was profoundly bewildered and lost. Fortunately, I became just enough less lost to randomly encounter a path labeled "D," and I made it through the class--a little closer to an ulcer, a little less buoyant, a little less certain I was a fan of this "take a wide range of classes" concept.

Leaving me faintly nauseous and listing slightly to the right, college physics was the worst experience of my educational life.

Until I took Statistics.

But I'm not telling that story here. It's only twenty years in the past, and I'm just not ready yet.

The upshot of my story is this: it's Thanksgiving time; I don't like holidays; and at some point someone will probably ask me what I'm grateful for this year. Since my attitude is bad, it's best to have an answer prepared. A prepared answer will get me off the hook, and, with words pre-packaged, ready to trip off my tongue, I can sidestep the family strife that would ensue from me hollering, "None of your damn business!" or "How come you never ask me this in April? Or September?"

So here's what I've got, in the off chance we all end up going 'round the table and forcing out statements of gratitude:

"I'm really, really thankful I'll never again have to take a college physics class. Now stuff that in your turkey and gobble it."

2009-11-23T13:13:00.001-06:00

"Sweet Like Sugar"

I haven't seen the Spiderman, Iron Man, or Batman movies of recent years.

I don't applaud politicians who promise to change our lives.

I don't get all weepy over photos of my grandmother sitting in a big leather chair, doing her tatting.

I sometimes think members of the military are in it for the job--you know, so their families can eat--more than to sacrifice themselves defending their particular country's version of "values of freedom."

You see, I'm not much given to hero worship.

In fact, I chafe at the easy manner in which the word "hero" is thrown around, at the craving people have to laud something, no matter how vapid, at the compulsion to exhalt the world by slapping onto it such a label. People are people; sometimes they shine; sometimes they drain. We are all of us just us'ns, and to try to sort everyone onto tiers is exhausting, purposeless.

Flawed and full of smells, we are just us, we people.

That noted, I have to admit that often this is more of a principle than a reality for me. I do admire some others. I do look down on certain schmoes. I do vaunt others.

...but my rankings are not on a scale of heroic. That feels too cinematic and contrived. That feels like a one-armed Matt Damon on a zip line, whizzing through a jungle to retrieve a secret code before the bomb explodes in a lair where Cameron Diaz is being held by agitated guerillas. To tell you true, I'm equally put off by the Readers' Digestian notion of "everyday heroes"--those people who saved puppies and started foundations and knitted mittens. Misread me not: they have done good things. However, I don't think it's too much to ask that all people attempt, in their own ways, to be their best selves, to do the things they think they can in the world. If we keep the bar set at the point of Reasonable Expectations for Humanity, then these everyday heroes are actually just doing what they should be. Comedian Chris Rock has a riff on this idea wherein he rails at talk show audiences that clap wildly for any African-American man who sits on stage and announces proudly, "I work for my kids. We throw the ball around on weekends." Because expectatations have slid so low, the audience and the man greet his announcement with praise, with a feeling of "What a hero!" Chris Rock is quick to holler, however, "Don't. applaud. that. man. for. doing. exactly. what. he's. supposed. to. be. doing. Don't treat him like he saved the planet because he managed to show up."

At best, Us Good 'Uns display a certain integrity or follow the ordinates on a particular moral compass (which, notably for me, don't have to align with traditional views of "moral"; a person can be an admirable degenerate, so long as he or she is true to an impulse that remains essentially benign). At worst, the Us Bad 'Uns bring to life a desire to hurt weaker, smaller, younger, softer.

Everything in between is just people being us.

Therefore, as you have probably seen coming, I get particular gratification out of bumping into something special, someone who stops me short and makes me inhale sharply.

Surprise me, Sailor.

To wit:

In the midst of a stretch of trying days--and not in any overt way, wherein I feel granted the right to collapse and weep on the duvet, clutching Kleenex to clavicle, but more in an ongoing, grinding way where I try not to carve the words "Help me" into the living room wall with a bloody whisk--I have found soppy comfort in a thing. In the midst of a week when I rushed forward when I should have held steady, when I lost several nights' sleep with an agitated boychild, when I wonder if the family isn't maybe being slowly offed by a carbon monixide leak (or why else do we all feel this way?),

I touched a good thing.

And if I ever forget to slow down and touch a good thing, may they box me up and put the casket on the pyre. Better yet: bypass the casket.

The good thing was a she, young and blue-eyed, with a charming bit of a lisp. She helped me refind a sense of possibility during a weekend where everything was dark and negative, a weekend when I was ready to go out and buy a VW van just so I could drive off into the sunset in it, cranking Neil Young and savoring the melancholy of dusk.

This girl is nine; she wants to be an actress; she likes to catch tadpoles; she is my daughter's good friend; she has Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. Mostly, she's just a white kid growing up in a middle class family in the Midwest. She has seen High School Musical the requisite number of times.

While she's been in Girl's circle of friends for the last few years, and we've had her over for playdates and birthday parties, we'd never ventured with her into the larger commitment known as Preadolescent Sleepover. Because, er, you know, it's a little intimidating to be the adult in charge of someone who could potentially die if you're not paying attention.

However, now that Friend A is nine, nearing an age where a certain amount of self-care is a valid expectation, we decided to extend the invitation, something which, gratifyingly, was greeted with shrieks and hugs and statements that she had never been so excited in her whole life, about anything. It probably helped that we were also offering up pizza and a ride ON THE CITY BUS downtown to watch the yearly Christmas parade with us, before the actual sleeping over even commenced. Not only had Friend A never ridden on a city bus, she had never been to a live parade before. There was quivering.

Seriously, you can't help liking her a little bit already, can you?

When her mother (in a separate post, I could probably make a case for this woman--with four kids, an out-of-town husband, an oldest daughter down with daily migraines, unable to get an appointment at the Mayo Clinic due to villainous paperwork--as heroic) dropped her off, they gave me the training I would need: I met the meter and the whole kit used for bolus doses; I met the pocketful of carmel rice cakes; I met the Ziploc baggie of glucose tabs (most effective and dramatic in the case of plummeting numbers); I heard her numbers ("she's been at over 300 this week...running high because she's so excited for this sleepover...but today she has a new site for her pump and new insulin, so she's evening out...call anytime...anytime"); I was told the schedule for blood tests (after dinner, right at bedtime, two or three hours after bedtime, and then we'd see). My head spinning a little, we were ready to chow and dig for bus fare.

So Friend A had a piece of pizza, got really big eyes during the bus ride (especially when a man in a wheelchair got on, and the huge mechanical ramp unfolded, and then the bus driver had to clip in his chair five different ways), and danced and jumped during the parade. At one point, when people on a float had tossed out candy, and all the other kids were unwrapping their suckers, Friend A turned to me, holding up a small mint, and asked, "Can I have this? It's less than one carb, so I won't need to dose." Jokingly, as I told her yes, I said, "Honey, I sooo don't have a grip on all this stuff; I have to believe anything you tell me." Her immediate, vehement response was, "I. take. it. very. seriously."

At that moment, it was all I could do not to hug the very breaf out of her body.

A few hours later, home, watching a movie, snacking, readying for bed, she checked her blood levels ("two-two-two," she told me), called her mom, dosed herself, and ran, giggling, up the stairs. As I tucked her in, I admitted to her that I was nervous to come in and wake her up in a few hours: "First off, we have a household policy never to wake a sleeping child, but also, since you're not my kid, and you're not used to me in the night, I worry that you're going to be scared when you wake up and think, 'Hey, whose big face is hovering above me?'"

Friend A nodded and admitted, "I'm probably going to be mad at you, actually. Because I'm tired, I'm pretty mean when I get woken up for a night time check."

"Hohboy," I sighed back at her. "Well, how about this: if you're really crabby when I wake you up, I'm going to start telling you things like how I'll buy you a pony in the morning and then we'll go get you some new roller blades and $500 worth of clothes at the mall, and then we'll go to the waterpark, if only you're nice to me?"

Having a complete bead on me, knowing I'm full of malarkey, Friend A grinned and said, "Deal."

Thus, once the rustling sounds in the girls' room ceased, the waiting began. Despite being outrageously tired from Paco's recent nights of no sleep, I decided to stay up and noodle around for a few hours instead of going to bed and then having to drag my own cranky self out of it a few hours later. 'Cause when you have to promise to buy yourself a pony, it doesn't feel special at all.

At almost one a.m., I crept in, ready for battle. Juggling her meter and kit, a tupperware full of rice cakes, and a bag of glucose tablets, I prepared to stroke her hair until her angry eyes opened.

However, Friend A, keyed up by the unfamiliar situation, woke immediately; she sat up, shivering, and rubbed her eyes. "Okay, honey, here's your stuff."

With unimaginable efficiency, she stabbed her finger, failed to draw blood, lanced it again, squeezed, put the resultant drop onto the slide, inserted it into the meter, licked her bleeding finger, and waited for the number.

A big 63 popped up.

Even I knew "low" when I saw it; only the next day did I look up the technical definition of "hypoglycemic." Immediately, Friend A said, "I have to eat something" and cracked into the rice cakes. Silent except for the crunching, we sat in the dark. "Now I need a tablet, too," she announced, and continued chewing.

When she was done, I asked, "Hey, girlie? That was kind of a low number. Do you think I should check you again in a few hours?"

And here's where she got me forever. The soft, sleepy, clinically-efficient nine-year-old in a sleeping bag responded, "I don't know. Maybe you should call my mom."

Certainly, the mom-to-mom phone call at 1 a.m. is no one's favorite duty. Fortunately, Friend A's mother is worthy of such a daughter and snapped to attention quickly. "Yes, that's low. She needs to eat." She did. "She needs to eat more. Do you have a granola bar? If you can get a granola bar into her, she'll be fine 'til morning. Was she really crabby with you? She gets like that when she's really low; her brain isn't firing right, you know. "

Yes, I had a granola bar. No, she hadn't been the slightest bit crabby. Oh, holy Richard Simmons, but her brain had been firing just fine.

We decided that, in the middle of the night, when you're nine and hypoglycemic, it's sometimes best to hear from Mom that you need to eat more. After a quick phone conversation and goodbye, Friend A and I sat again in the darkness, listening to her munch.

After the last swallow, she plopped back down onto her pillow and cashed out. Moments later, head plopped onto my own pillow, I took a few minutes to consider

how there is something heroic--something that qualifies as "above and beyond"--in a kid who lives stoically with chronic illness,

how jaw-dropping it is to see matter-of-factness in a little person who doesn't get to take her body for granted,

how much I respect that she doesn't inveigh against her blood, her pancreas, or the fact that her innards have a notion to defeat her,

how resolute she will have to be for the rest of her life--even during her college years, when she moves away from home, when everyone around her is engaged in a season of purposeful neglect of schedules and health and accountability--to even have a rest of her life,

how she gets to be her own best hero,

how I no longer needed a VW van at sunset

because I had a date to go buy a pony at sunrise.

2009-11-19T16:48:00.000-06:00

"And People Say Kids Don't Pick Up After Themselves"

With the friendliest of intentions, one of our neighbors handed us a stack of magazines the other week.

They were very good magazines, but the realities of life mean it would be three years before we would ever actually read them. Clearly, while some of them could be donated to the rack at the gym, many of them just needed to go to recycling.

As I made a stack of Get Rid of These Magazines, a curious little face popped up from under the counter. Holy hell, but that startled me! What was it? A monkey loose from the zoo? A Killer Bee? A Tse-Tse fly? An airborne blood pathogen? A magical sprite?

Yes, a sprite. Of sorts. Which I realized only after I took out my handy-dandy fly swatter/monkey catcher kit and starting whacking wildly at the curious face.

"MOOOOOOM! Stooopppp! You're hitting me," the face hollered.

What. the.

When had monkeys learned to holler? Evolution is so cool.

It was Paco. Sensing an opportunity, he had crawled into the room and been watching me mutter and stack and start heaving magazines into the recycling bin.

"Could I have a couple of those?" he asked.

"Do you have matches?" I countered.

An innocent "no" came my way.

No dummy, I then asked, "Do you have a Bic lighter?"

"You mean one of those clicky things that makes a flame?" the innocent voice queried. "No, I don't have one of those."

"Do you have gasoline or a scythe or low-level explosives?" I needed to confirm.

"Not right now," he conceded. "But I do have scissors. Can I use scissors?"

Yes. Scissors fall under The Parental Umbrella of Approved Tools to Use In Conjunction with Newsprint, Recipe Cards, and Magazines.

Quickly, however, the boy realized that, compared to the claws that grow naturally on the ends of his fingers, scissors are clunky and ineffective.

Bare-handed, he tore the stuff apart.

Then, after he shredded it beyond repair (and as a boyfriend once did to my heart), the boy--curiously--felt the need to cradle the remnants for a brief period.

A quiet moment to consider the damage...

...and then--Hand to Heave and Martha Stewart!--an unaccountable need to clean up struck.

Seriously. What 6-year-old boy wants to tidy up? (not coincidentally, did you happen to read a previous post about this kid called "My Fine, Gay Son"?)

Reassuringly, midway through the clean-up, Paco realized he was actually a trash compactor, one that used its head.

...and its feet. High-end trash compactors have feet these days, you see.

Spic and span. Tidy and tight.

But what to do with the bag of scraps?

Sighing in defeat, I handed over the Bic lighter.

2009-11-17T15:14:00.004-06:00

"Still At It"

Since I have stacks of papers this week--both revisions and new essays--I'm going to continue to milk the anniversary in this post.

Here are a couple of videos wherein I babble about our weekend. The first video has ice and gives you a spin of the kitchen.

This next video has a picture booklet and a quilt. Buckle up:

2009-11-13T14:49:00.001-06:00

"Bestill"

My dad was the person who taught me to be comfortable with silence. We could get in the car and drive for twenty minutes without a word being spoken. While his and my mother's relationship ultimately cracked under the weight of that silence, for me, the daughter, his quiet felt benign, reassuring, a safe place to be.

Even more, when he did speak, his words carried weight. A handful of my favorite memories, in fact, center around moments when he engaged in verbal expression. One time, after I'd won a forensics tournament out of town, returning from the meet late at night, I left my trophy on the dining room table. By the time I woke up later that day, my dad had left me a note, telling me he was so proud, he was "busting his buttons." Another time, after I'd behaved badly, he sat across from my hungover self and told me he was "deeply disappointed." Many years later, during the night when a bat flew into my house, and I had a fairly apeshit "I'm all alone, and the bat is trying to kill me" meltdown for three hours in my bathroom, I managed to grab my phone (with the bat only gnawing off one of my fingers above the knuckle as I reached for the receiver) and call my parents, over a thousand miles away. When I sobbed and sobbed that a killer beast was out there, and all I had were tampons for friends and nail files for weapons, my dad, casting about, counseled, "What you need to do is try to reach way down inside yourself now and find something you don't think you have. Dig deep, and you'll find something you need." He was right. We hung up, and I dug deep, finding inside myself the numbers 911, which I punched into the phone with great bravery.

Perhaps my fondest conversation with my dad occurred about a decade before his death. Chatting on the phone, we stumbled across the subject of my sister and me and our many differences. Trying to qualify the nature of the differences, my dad remarked that my sister took after his side of the family, where a certain dourness and pessimism sometimes manifested itself. “She reminds me of myself,” he noted, continuing, “and you don’t. You’re more, well, effervescent.”

There it was: one of those moments we hope for with our parents, those moments when they give us a word, an adjective, a feeling of being seen, and it signifies everything. It signifies that our parents see us as separate, as differentiated beings, that they have thought about us, that they have taken stock of us, that we are far enough away from them that the space has cleared everyone’s vision. Because such words, such adjectives, are born from the lifelong process of symbiosis to independence, they have power. Plus, anytime someone describes me to myself, I believe him.

It wasn’t even so much that I wanted to think of myself as “effervescent”—-although it was a welcome label—-but rather, it was more that I wanted to think of my dad thinking of me that way. Sometimes, from then on, I effervesced just for him.

It surprised me, then, to learn—-repeatedly--that a pipping personality didn’t reap greater rewards, in the larger scope of the world. Certainly, I didn’t expect to be voted into office on the Effervescence Platform, nor did I expect the medical field to approach me, asking me to donate to the Effervescence Transfusion Bank. But I did think being smiley and liking sunshine might have snagged me a boyfriend.

Fer damn crap smeared on a thrice-read Jane Austen novel.

Oh, all right.

I did date a guy through my 20’s, and then I truly, madly, deeply dated another guy—-one who left my two liters of effervescence out on the counter with the cap off and made all the bubbles go flat. He de-carbonated me in a way that no one ever had before, not even the boys on the high school bus who moo-ed at my sister and me.

He made my sizzle fizzle.

And then my grandma died, and the doc found a lump in my breast.

I was thirty-one.

Thirty-one wasn’t my favorite year.

Fortunately, I still had girlfriends who called, just when I was pacing the circle of my small kitchen for the 123rd time in an hour, gnawing on my cuticles, and they opened with, “Oh, honey. I just heard. Talk to me.” Even when I would have to set down the phone to grab another handful of Kleenex, they would stay on the line, shouting things like, “From the amount of snot you’re emitting, you do seem well-hydrated. And that’s something, right?” Also, I had family who knew how to circle ‘round gently and never look me straight in my teary eyes. Instead, they gave me food and invited me to participate in the yearly post-hunting butchering of the deer, and they talked at and around me.

Eventually, the molasses movement of seconds turned into minutes finally adding up into hours and days, and then months went by. My grandma was buried; the lump was benign; the former boyfriend had a new girl.

Just after the new year, one of my hunting cousins sent me an email, asking if I’d like to drive North to come visit them and, by the way, if I would be at all interested in letting him serve as my “agent in the field,” romantically.

Flattened, completely without zest or hope, my response was worthy of my father’s side of the family: “Go ahead, if you want to, but I won’t expect anything from it.”

Turns out my cousin already had someone in mind, a 28-year-old guy he worked with in a very small town of about 300. One day, sitting in the office, looking across at this 28-year-old, my cousin started musing, “How’s Guy ever going to find someone in this bohunk town?” A moment later, he thought back to Thanksgiving and the deer butchering and the conversations we’d had, which resulted in, “For that matter, how’s Jocelyn ever going to find someone in the bohunk town she’s living in?”

His head swiveled back and forth, and his thoughts rammed into each other. He approached Guy, who agreed, “Sure, you can be my agent in the field. But this cousin of yours, since she lives more than five hours away, she’d have to really knock my socks off for me to start seeing her.” Fair enough. Next, my cousin approached me.

It was agreed: I’d drive the five hours North and, while visiting my cousin’s family, meet Guy. In the past, imbued with effervescence, I’d greeted any opportunity to meet a potential partner with gusto and a knee-jerk, involuntary planning of our lives together. This time, I didn’t think much of the whole thing.

So we’d see.

That February, over Presidents' Day weekend, I visited. I got to hold my cousin’s baby a lot and watch his 4-year-old ice skate. One afternoon, we swung through the campus where Cousin worked. As we drove away, he said, casually, “Oh, that man back there who was leaning down, talking to people through their car window? The one in the red hat? That was Guy.”

Cousin, perhaps, didn’t understand that such information would have been welcome, say, two minutes earlier. Cousin is a man.

That night, the guy in the red hat strolled into Cousin's house, there for The Meeting, there for dinner. He carried a six-pack of homebrew.

I liked him already.

In short order, I learned that Guy not only wore a red hat and was quite tall. I also learned he really liked making bread, reading the Atlantic Monthly, and running on trails. I learned that he was an anthropology major who'd minored in Environmental Science. I learned that his Desert Island food would be cheese (dropped from a helicopter once a month, to supplement the fish and coconunts he would be living on otherwise); his Desert Island album would be Van Morrison's Moondance; his Desert Island book would be some sort of reference book, all the better if it contained maps.

I learned that, while the idea of him hadn't infused me with bubbles, the reality of him was creating a few tiny pops.

Dinner lasted five hours. As soon as he left, my previously-cool cousin and his wife, who had discreetly retired to the kitchen 8 feet away after dessert, were all nerves. They gave me all of thirty seconds after the door closed behind Guy before yelling, "SO? SO?????"

My response was positive, but guarded. He seemed nice. I would see more of him. If he wanted to.

But all the little broken pieces inside of me weren't quite realigned yet. I wasn't going to put myself forward this time. I couldn't take another dashing.

Fortunately, a few days later, Guy asked my cousin for my email address. It had been mutual. Apparently, his strongest first impression of me was that I had a lot of hair. He thought he "could get lost in it."

What ensued was a modern epistolary courtship. For three weeks, we sent messages back and forth, discovering that writing is an excellent way to get to know someone: the small talk is non-existent; the conversations get to meaty matters right away; there is no body language to read or misread, no annoying laugh to cringe from.

After three weeks, Guy announced he was ready to "jump off the comfortable dock" and into the potentially-frigid waters of face-to-face. Thus, during my Spring Break in March, I headed North again, for our first real date.

As we sat in a dingy bar, having burgers and beers, conversation flowed. Snow fell.

Like 14" of it.

When it came time to take Guy to his house before driving back to my cousin's place, my car got stuck. In the snow. At Guy's house. He didn't seem to mind. His roommates were friendly. I stayed over.

I had no choice.

What I learned in those days of my Spring Break was that Guy liked to listen to me read aloud--and if that's not an activity of the infatuated, I don't know what is. He also proved that he's very good at necking.

And, about three days in, after he'd had a bath one night, Guy came back into his bedroom, where I lounged. "Brrrrrr," he exclaimed. "My feet are cold!"

"Why are they so cold? You just got out of the bath tub," I noted.

"They're freezing because. you. knocked. my. socks. off" was the answer.

Suddenly, right then, right there: there it was. The effervescence was back, the flatness banished.

It was all going to be all right.

Not too long afterward, as I stared very hard at the ceiling, I admitted I had fallen in love. He had the right answer.

By the end of my Spring Break week, five days after our first date, we had talked about what kind of wedding we wanted.

Four months later, one July morning, as I slept on a futon on the floor, he crawled in with a plate of pancakes and a Betsy Bowen woodcut entitled "Fox on a Journey."

And he asked me to marry him.

In quick order, we planned a wedding for the following May.

In even quicker order, like, the night we got engaged, I got pregnant. Three months after that, I had a miscarriage. Four days after that, we found out I'd been carrying twins, and one was still hanging on.

We moved the wedding to that November 13th, not nine months after we first played the Desert Island game over dinner. Guy became Groom right there at the environmental learning center where I'd first not-quite-spotted-him in his red hat. The bleeding from the miscarriage had stopped three days earlier. I sobbed through the vows.

Four months later, Jocelyn and Groom became Jocelyn and Groom and Girl.

All of that wonder unfolded in 1999. Not given to dreaming about the future before then, I have since been granted beauties I couldn't possibly have imagined.

He likes to touch me. He likes me to touch him.
He cooks dinner every night.
He has been our stay-at-home parent since Girl was born.
At promptly 8:00 every night, he brings me a drink.
He is unfazed by my random bursts of tears.
He is whimsical. He is dry. He is perceptive.
He sees that my ability to talk to people is as valuable as his ability to do everything else.
He likes to play cribbage.
He knows how to give me directions that make sense, like "go straight until you see the big rock shaped like Richard Nixon's head."
He takes my ideas and makes them happen.
He just brewed a new batch of beer.

And, like my father, he is gentle. Like my father, he has a thousand-watt smile.

Like my father, he is given to quiet, most comfortable in stillness.

Thus, ten years in to the marriage, we often sit and watch the world flit by

holding hands in companionable silence.

2009-11-11T15:18:00.003-06:00

"Just Jam It All into the Inbox and Yell 'F*** It' A Lot"

There is a National Association of Professional Organizers.

In the Denver area, a professional organizer makes $75/hour.

My sister, overwhelmed and anxious in the face of her stacks of belongings, uses a professional organizer. In fact, she's committed to drawing upon the inheritance from our dad's and grandmother's estates to pay this organizer until the job is done.

The thing about being overwhelmed by stacks of crap is that the feeling doesn't go away easily or for pay, necessarily. At the very least, we might need a great aunt to die in the next few years. See, my sister's garage holds her teaching materials. And she's taught for more than twenty years, at four different grade levels, in four different countries. Plus, she seriously loves her some kiddie lit.

Friends, there are milk crates and shelving units and big plastic tubs in my sister's garage. There is the intention of organization. But it ain't there yet.

In fact, we might need all remaining relations to kick off before Kirsten's garage is entirely inventoried and ordered. It would help if those relations could please get richer before they die.

Despite hiring a personal organizer, my sister has been needing further outside assistance. Cleverly, she did the math (carrying the one) and realized it would be cheaper to fly me to Denver than to pay her organizer for equivalent hours. With the plan that I'd come for a weekend and help her get organized, she bought me a ticket.

Just to double the oomph of the whole thing, though--and a clear sign of her desperation--she also booked her personal organizer for 4 hours one of the mornings of my visit. Even though we all worked with great diligence, I'm not sure my sister got her $500 worth.

And that amount doesn't even figure in the lateral filing cabinet she was instructed to get, nor the new bookshelf I told her she needed. Or the in and outboxes. Or the six new plastic tubs. Or the picture boxes.

Or the graduated metal desktop organizer.

We pretty much had to take a moment in Target and thank our dad for working so hard all his life and having the foresight to set up some paperwork that brought his leavin's to us, after he passed.

One day, Kirsten and I spent some time in the garage, going through her bins of books. She only had every Beverly Cleary book two times over. Ultimately, we got rid of four milk crates of kid books.

She only got a little teary twice during this process. Then she announced it was time to be done. We needed to watch some HGTV shows. We were people who were hunting for houses. Internationally.

The next day, the professional organizer came. She wore camouflage pants, which made me fear and respect her even more than her well-slicked hair did.

Professional Organizer is going through a divorce.

Apparently, some things can't be stored in a box with a lid, no matter how well labeled.

She had a plan for our morning. She and Kirsten set up a filing system for the new lateral filing cabinet, which Kirst and I had spent a few hours putting together the night before.

It helped that Kirsten knew where her three tools (flathead screwdriver, Phillips screwdriver, hammer) were. It also helped that we had a vast repertoire of cusses.

We only broke one of the two drawers during the process.

But you hardly notice the absence of the broken drawer (the glue was still drying), do you? That's what a Vanna White flourish will do for any situation: mask and distract.

The next morning, when the organizer came, the drawer was in place. We appeared, so long as one didn't probe or test the glue, competent.

Then Professional Organizer opened the drawers and noted that they were wrong--that this shelving was made for legal-sized documents, not 8 1/2 x 11" papers.

Kirsten called a handyman. He will come next week and saw some new slots into the drawers, at which time all the bins of newly-filed papers will be put into them. Until then, the whole desk area looks a little undone. A little disorganized.

But the papers are in file folders. And everything is labeled. Almost makes a person think Professional Organizer's marriage could work out after all.

While they worked on papers, I tackled the upstairs closet, which was full of All Kinds of Everything, including a broken cuckoo clock.

Everything came out, and I followed Professional Organizer's three-step process (she went to class for this, incidentally, so the information you're about to read is probably patented and trademarked):

1) Gather together like items (such as all photos) in a heap;

2) Go through and decide what you need to keep and what you need to get rid of;

3) Deposit things you need to keep into a containment system. Get rid of the rest.

I know.

So, after jotting down a few notes on my palm, I did just that. Actually having my sister go through things and get them into a system, however, would take weeks. So I regrouped stuff, asked her a few questions (only one of which made her cry), and made it tub ready. In the future, she should go through the tubs and make further decisions or do more detailed organizing.

That's probably not going to happen. The Amazing Race might be on that day.

There's also a lot of Bejeweled Blitz to play on Facebook.

Here's the final look of the closet, when I was done.

As I worked in the closet room, which houses my sister's books, I realized her book mania was spilling over. Every shelf had stacks of books with no home, stacks that obscured the books behind. I lobbied for a new bookshelf.

Worn down, powerless, amenable, my sister agreed. Two nice young men at Target hefted the thing into the car, sideways, across the front seat. I rode in the back and called Kirsten "Jeeves."

Once home, we had to turn to Flathead, Phillips, and Hammer one more time. We didn't break anything.

Of course, a few pieces went on backwards.

WHAT? The shelf still holds books, no matter how backasswardly it was assembled. Don't get all poncey and superior on me.

The back of the shelf was supposed to be attached with forty screws.

Kirsten decided eight would do.

These guys are just waiting to bust out the flimsy back door of their new home.

There were about ten more stacks, not seen in these photos. They were at Starbucks.

The end result. Please do not comment that there appears to be an unhung clock on the chair. I don't have time to write about how Kirst won't actually put nails in her walls, which leaves all pictures (and clocks) leaning against their intended place. She's lived there 2.5 years. One step at a time, my friends. One step. at. a. time.

Another end result, despite files remaining unfiled, the garage remaining unorganized, and my sister's wallet being seriously deflated,

is that I spent time with one of the two people on the planet who will know me cradle to grave.

We ate teriyaki bowls. She took me to Whole Foods and to its inbred cousin, Sprouts. She smiled tolerantly when I squealed over the quality of the napkins at the Whole Foods gelato counter, napkins that could serve as a night-time diaper on a three-month-old. She shared candy bars with me. She showed me how to use the remote. She burned me six CD's of songs out of her Itunes. She took me two Jazzercise (which is another twelve posts in itself) and to three running trails.

She gave me a big hug at the aiport and asked when she can fly me back out, to help with the garage.

As a result of this whole trip, now I have a friend in Austin, Texas, who's planning to give me a ticket to visit her.

Seems she still has the dress she wore when she graduated from college twenty years ago. It doesn't fit.

Also, her Christmas decorations are already out.

Because they were never put away after last year.

I am delighted by her tousled state of affairs, if it means I get to see her.

And I'm considering--seriously--doing some training and starting a side career as a professional organizer. We could use the money (especially if I precede my sister in death; if I've earned some supplemental income, I'll be able to bequeath her enough to hire Professional Organizer for the twelve hours it would take to go through her stacks of sweatshirts).

Before I can start this new career, though, I'm gonna need some camouflage pants.

2009-11-08T22:08:00.000-06:00

"Hello, PetCo? I'd Like to Cancel My Line of Credit"

When I met him, my husband was a naturalist.

Raise your hand if your first thought, after reading that sentence, went a little something like "Jocelyn's husband was a nudist????"

Now put your hand down, Tinkerbell. You're all alone in front of your computer, after all, which means it's kind of queer to keep sitting there with your handing waving around, as though Mrs. Hwiggens will call on you eventually and let you shout out--wrongly--that "12 x 12 is 142!!!"

Indeed, put down your hand now. Straighten your shoulder pads, and wet down your forelock. Stop trying to learn your times tables (as if you can learn anything new at your age). Come back to the story.

When I met him, my husband was a naturalist. This meant he taught outdoorsy stuff at an environmental education center: white-tailed deer; beaver; water ecology; rock climbing; snowshoeing; the ropes course. Before working at the center an hour and a half north of Duluth, he had worked at a center in the Adirondacks in New York, at Florissant Fossil Beds and Mesa Verde in Colorado, and on a barrier island off of North Carolina. To this day, he has strong memories of each place, of communities of friends; of helping to slaughter a pig; of appearing in National Geographic in his full park ranger gear; of grits.

Interestingly, he is a naturalist who doesn't care for animals ("I like the flora, not the fauna," he explains). Most people greet that bit of information with a gasp, as though it signals a moral failing. In fact, we were at a dinner party some years back when it came out that two of the guests weren't "animal people," and the discussion that ensued over this was only resolved when one of them--the not-my-husband one of them--stated categorically, "It's actually okay for me not to like animals. It's within my rights not to want animals around me everyday. I'm still a good person." She was so clear, so strident, so much the hostess of the party that the hubbub fell silent; thusly chastened, the animal lovers returned to cutting off large bites of their pork loin.

Because Groomeo doesn't care particularly for animals, and because I have felt in the last decade that I already have enough small creatures, in the shape of Girl and Paco, to take care of, we haven't had a pet.

Girl, who would be more aptly tagged "Groomie's Girl," is just like her father. Occasionally, she has made a limp gesture at pretending to want a dog, but mostly she's too busy avoiding all animals in the vicinity to finish the thought. Paco has followed her lead, until recently, when he finally expressed a desire to get a pet. His only caveats are that he doesn't want to touch it, clean up after it, or feed it. He would very much like to name it, though.

Paco has learned much at his mama's knee.

At any rate, we tried to feed the boy's need last winter, when we got him a beta fish. You know, Anikin. That fish, with only two balled-up fins and a baleful glare, actually managed to convey anger, misanthropy, and even a feeling of malevolence. I fully anticipated he would leap the tank one night and crawl down someone's throat, just for the joy of choking off an air supply.

It wasn't our saddest day when Anikin hated his way to the Grave That Flushes.

Then we had a quiet few months of relative ease, months when we merely struggled to care for our own curfuddled selves.

On Labor Day, however, we drove up the shore of Lake Superior and hung out with some friends for the afternoon at a place called Gooseberry Falls. There, Paco and a compatriot found some warm pools in the rocks, pools full of tadpoles. Desperately wanting one, but completely unwilling to touch anything slimy (he's the anti-six-year-old boy, you see), Paco tried to cajole his parents into catching one. Better luck came when we gave him an empty tupperware for scooping; he managed to snare one and, in turn, pride himself on being a veritable lion tamer.

Get this: over the ensuing weeks, we didn't kill the thing. I don't know how it happened, but the tadpole didn't die, and when it went through its evolution, we were fascinated. Before September, I thought I'd had a good sense of the whole "and then the little tadpole becomes a mighty frog" process, having seen it in the 1970's in a filmstrip--but the truth is I had no idea. Watching the tadpole get legs and become more frogian everyday was riveting.

Suddenly, though, the transformation was complete. We had a frog, and not just any ordinary hopper but, rather, a tree frog, replete with them space-age type grippy sucker toes and a jet pack. Paco named him Grippo, and we were off, skipping down the path of pet ownership...

which entailed us running around in circles, dithering, "What do we feed a tree frog? What kind of habitat do we need? Who will clean its habitat? Do we need to clean its habitat? Do frogs even poop, or can we ignore it and thereby never have to clean its habitat?"

Fortunately, there were neighborhood experts mere yards away: the family with four boys. They gave us a lesson in catching crickets and loaned us a habitat, and we all settled in to the idea of watching our new pet climb every pencil we stuck into his tank. A tiny piece of me felt--no, not love--but contentment that my children might one day exhibit interest in going to a zoo.

Grippo suckers up the side of his house

The frog mansion...

which all too quickly was returned to the neighbors when Grippo hopped off to the Great Froggy Mansion In the Sky after about three days.

Seems a piece of his tail never fell off when he left the tadpole stage. Takes about three days for remnant tail to mold and toxify its carrier. Takes about two seconds to flush a frog corpse.

Takes about two months for a six-year-old boy to find a replacement pet. Yup, this week Paco has hit upon a solution that satisfies the whole family, from his animal-averse father to his allergic-to-cats sister to his Pilates-loving mother:

His name is Max. He doesn't eat, so there's no food to buy; he doesn't poop, so there's no cleaning up; he likes to play with kids, so we get to hear their giggles; he doesn't bite, so we don't need a muzzle; he doesn't mold, so he won't gradually become glassy-eyed and moss-covered; he is perfect.

Max sleeps at the foot of Paco's bed each night, and every morning the lad rolls his pet into our bedroom. They romp together, and sometimes Paco holds Max on his lap while he eats dinner.

One thing, though:

if he ever pops, Max is going to be a bugger to flush down the toilet.

2009-11-05T23:05:00.003-06:00

"A Guest Post from My Pal Jim Who Grew Up in Wisconsin, Spent Many Years in Minnesota, and Now Lives in Palm Springs"

So, yes, the post below is the latest pinch hitting by my friend, Jim; in past times, he's also written about performing in GREASE and seeing Elizabeth Taylor. In this latest, he considers his move to California a couple of years back. Enjoy his musings, as I jet off to Colorado this weekend to help my sister organize her clutter! (I've been practicing a severe expression as I announce, "You don't need that. You don't need that either. Get rid of that. Take that one to the Goodwill. Burn that.")

My only addition to Jim's post are a few quotes about the phenomenon that is Governor Schwarzenegger's state:

“As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.”--Alison Lurie

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”--Edward Abbey

“Southern California, where the American Dream came too true”--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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"A View From the Porch"

It’s been two years and three months since I arrived in the desert. High time I wrote some thoughts about living here.

I’m sitting on what I’m going to start calling my “Writing Porch.” It’s one of three patios at my apartment. And I’m sitting in the sun, laptop on the table, and the sun is so bright the apple on the other side of the screen is showing through. Do you think I’ll write more if I call it the Writing Porch? Michael Chabon has a writing studio in his back yard. Just sayin’.

I’ve been such a crank lately, bitching over cocktails about everything from problems at work to my dismal love life. (No offense to the two guys who have dated me this month; not talking about you.) I better get some thoughts in about what is good about living in this beautiful area.

For the beauty of it, I will just give you this photograph.

There is little more beautiful than the view of snow from a distance.

(Photo by Tony DiSalvo)

Okay, just took off my shirt. (Take that Michael Chabon.) Yep, it’s warm here in Palm Springs. Eighty-five degrees on November 1st is, let’s just say, insane. In a nice way--not like Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, more like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Puerto Vallarta.

What’s really insane, in the way of ET having a frontal lobotomy against her wishes, is this place in the fracking summer. Alex: “June, July, and August.” Jim: “What are the best three reasons to be a teacher?” Not so much here. Three to four months of heat in the 120 degree range. It’s a dry heat my mother’s aunt! An oven’s an oven, sweeties.

Having lived in extreme cold, though, I can tell you this: extreme heat is more bearable. You can sit still on a hundred-degree day if you’re in the shade and drink a nice shandy. Outside. Then you can go into your air-conditioned apartment and watch Keith Olberman. Can’t do that in the tundra of Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Maine (other places I’ve live) when it’s 30 below. (Okay, you can watch Keith if you have cable, a hot toddy, and a snuggie.)

It’s no use, you northerners, saying how much you like the cold or value the Change of Seasons. You might as well say you enjoy the Change of Life. My stalwart brother even posted on Facebook the other day the opening line to “California Dreamin’”: “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray.” I couldn’t help but reply that he knew where and how he could be safe and warm.

The view from my Writing Porch.

On the other hand is the bitching. A couple of years before I moved here, a friend talked about weekending in Palm Springs. Well, talked is a bit generous. He ranted: “There’s nothing to do there! There’s NOTHING to do there.” And he’s pretty much right. Sure, there’s hiking in the mountains, drinking in the bars. And tennis for those who play. And that Scottish game that takes up all that lovely parkland. But nightlife? Forget it. One museum: good. Movies: good. International Film Festival: two weeks in January.

There’s no one under sixty who is single (see above re: love life). Why even yesterday there was a rather fetching guy my age getting his haircut next to me. “I think he has a partner,” says my Guy with Scissors. Natch.

So we’re saved from boredom by our proximity to Los Angeles and the coast.

But Jeeves! I think my laptop’s overheating.

And did you see those mountains?
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Epilogue: just this week, Jim decided to start his own blog, Long Slow Distance. If you have a minute, please go visit him and his post at their new crib:

http://jimbergsblog.blogspot.com/

2009-11-02T12:40:00.005-06:00

"You Want to Come to Their Potluck"

I noted in my last post that my body is descended from a long line of human couches. I like to think our cushions are covered in the softest of plush upholsteries and that those allowed to fluff our throw pillows are both deserving and grateful.

Below is a literal line-up of my genetic line: three great aunts, plus my grandma, Dorothy (she's second from the right). They all grew up on a ranch in Montana; they all married ranch hands; they all made (make!--two of them are still alive and cooking, albeit with limited sight and fluctuating memory) hella good chocolate cakes and peach pies; they all never shirked a day's work in their lives.

Interestingly, while the La-Z-Boy trait passed on nicely to me, the "work ethic" gene got lost in the bloodline somewhere along the way.

Anyhow, this is the photo that caused my dear galpal, Pammy--herself a bit of an overstuffed chair--to exclaim, "I look at that picture, and all I see are hips and breasts! Oh, honey, you didn't stand a chance, did you?"

Not when it came to breasts and hips, I didn't, no.

But in so many other ways, I did.

2009-10-29T17:20:00.004-05:00

"Skeletal Superiority"

I married up, genetically. Whereas I had lost three grandparents by the age of eight, my husband is nearly thirty-nine and still has three. My last-surviving grandparent died when I was thirty-one; his first-to-pass grandparent died when he was thirty-seven.

What's more, I come from a long line of smooshy, well-hipped, prodigiously-hootered women. Our body type was made to nurse the clan's babies as we slogged across the Plains of Passage, searching out fire and perhaps the odd wheel rolling past. Slow, steady, full of girth and mirth, we'd have hung in there and done the job, collapsing on each other's cushiony bodies at the end of the trudge.

In contrast, not a single person in my husband's family has issues with bodily softness or heft. Their body type would have qualified them to serve as the arrows shot from the first bows, there on the Plains of Passage, when herds of mastodon were spotted. I can picture Groom's great-great-great-great-googolplexed-great grandfather, lean and sharp and stringy, hopping up with great willingness and notching his head into the leather of the bow. After being fired into the heart of a mighty beast, felling it easily with the knife that was his torso, that same great-great-googolplexer would have leapt sprightly out of the bloody corpse, holding its still-beating heart in his hands, and then braised it for the tribe, spooning a tasty Squaw Currant reduction over top just before service.

What's more, my husband has run an ultra-marathon (sometimes 26.2 miles just isn't enough) and has never had a cavity. Me? I once watched a marathon of The Real World on MTV and inserted stuffing into the cavity of a Cornish game hen before snorting the whole bird down sans utensils.

Certainly, I can make a case for myself. I mean, he may be genetically superior, but at least I was canny enough to marry up. Unlike him. Unfortunately, just when I convince myself that there's justice because he is dumm, and I is smart, he goes and figures out the overarching conceit for the New York Times Sunday crossword while I'm still penciling in the easy three-letter answers of "UMA" and "ELO."

In fact, it's best for us not to enter into direct competition, and by that, I mean best for any hope of my continued self-esteem. Case in point: a couple years ago, at Halloween time (BOOOOO!, by the way. Gotcha.), I managed to draw what I considered a pretty impressive skeleton head. Having never taken a studio art course, I gave myself an internal high five--something that is actually very painful and sometimes requires corrective surgery--for my piece.

You are very scared when you look at my art, aren't you? In a good way? Like you think it might be okay after all to give me a black crayon and set me loose to wreak havoc?

When I showed then-four-year-old Paco my work, he, too, was impressed. At long last, I'd won my son's elusive love! We hugged a bit gingerly, still feeling out the boundaries of our new affection, and commenced a search for Scotch tape, so's we could hang my gruesome picture on the front door and scare the gremlins right out of every trick-or-treater who had the gall to knock and beg for sweets. That'd teach the little ragamuffins to try to take my chocolate.

Two hours later, having given up on ever tracking down the Scotch tape, we settled for the masking variety (retrieved from the produce drawer in the fridge) and hung the thing.

Shortly thereafter, Groom came home and was dragged by an excited Paco to the front door. Properly admiring, my husband showered me with compliments and a gentle cascade of kisses that started at my forehead and ended at my well-evolved bosom. Jumping up and down, Paco demanded, "Dad, now it's your turn! You get to draw a skeleton, too, and then we'll have lots of cool decorations!"

Ever game, his Groomishness set to the task and emerged a startlingly-short time later holding his contribution.

The superior bastard.

2009-10-26T13:39:00.007-05:00

"So Here"

I'm not much of a joiner, nor do I really like playing tag. Also, rules chafe.

Thus, I'm not a particularly good candidate for the "meme" challenges and thoughtful awards that litter the blogscape. That noted, when kind fellow bloggers throw an award or a challenge my way, I do appreciate the acknowledgment. I do.

In the last month or so, a few blog-patriots have given me the challenge to list ten things about myself that no one knows. So, okay, it's come up enough that I'll do it; but I ain't passing it on or tagging anyone else. Just write your blog posts, honies, and I'll come read them. If you want to make lists, you should do that. If you don't wanna, then don't. 'K?

Ten Things. Some of them my husband already knows, as he is my central repository for minutiae that require expression. But it's what I got.

1. I just spent eight minutes taking the price tag off a dowel that now runs across the top of a fabric banner, which we will hang in a "dead space" at the bottom of our staircase. As I cursed the price tag glue and twining ('round and 'round the stick it went), I kept thinking to myself, "Here're eight minutes of my life I'll never get back. Here are eight minutes of my life I could have used to fold that basket of laundry. Here are eight minutes of my life I could have used to sniff glue, intead of peeling it."

Constantly filling my eyes with birdies and bright orange, though, may just keep me off the glue during the imminent dark months of winter.

2. Streaming my own variety of "radio stations" over Pandora.com is a great way to find new music or just get a better sense what Those Kids Today are listening to. Although I can input any musical artist at all and then listen to "comparables" for hours, I've been using it to listen to more of The Killers, The Strokes, The Shins, The Ting Tings, and even one article-less group, Kings of Leon.

When I tire of pretending to care what Those Kids Today are listening to, I create a station for an artist I actually like, such as Lucero or Husker Du, and get all rock outy and nostalgia-afied. The other day, I played the They Might Be Giants station for Paco, and while he pipped around to the selections, it was acutally Groom who had to go over and hug the computer, commenting, "This is my favorite station ever."

3. I am outrageously shallow and enjoy diverting my brain with the lives of celebrities. That part of my brain also really likes to go out and shop for boots. Generally, as is also the case with boots, my brain tends to love or hate celebrities. Although I will never know them, nor they me, celebrities cause in me an emotional reaction. I adore Russell Brand; I despise all reality show bimbos who, should their airplane go down over the Atlantic, sport implants that would keep them bobbing in the ocean loooong past when life rightly should have been snuffed out.

Interestingly, here's what I realized last night: I flatline when it comes to Melissa Joan Hart. She engenders in me zero reaction. She is like vanilla pudding served in a clean white porcelain bowl, if you were to leave out both the bowl and the pudding.

4. My left hand smells like laundry detergent right now. Wouldn't this be one hell of a puzzling mystery, if I hadn't been doing laundry? How would the detective who finds my corpse explain the fact that one hand--only one hand--smells of Tide? Maybe I was making pipe bombs and--haHA, Karma lashed out!--one accidentally exploded and killed me.

I guess I'd rather just do laundry and get the hand smell that way. All in all, it's one of the better hand smells. That detective should thank me for not springing a vastly different hand smell on him, in fact.

5. My Girl is growing up, which is part of the reason why I cropped this photo severely. Plus, some of y'all are big preeverts and should take your wanker selves off the Internet and stop looking for pictures of kids, you internally-broken skeezoids.

Anyhow, she's growing up but is clearly in the 'tween years, when the idea of middle school still has mystique. Here's the thing no one knows about me: I just want to keep her in a bubble bath, reading books, through the middle school years. She might emerge pruney and dehydrated, but at least her self-esteem will be fluffy and clean.

6. Because Girl is growing up, and we've had to admit she will one day get moods and boobies and tampons, she's going to have her own room for the first time. We're currently working on shoveling out our guest room so that we can paint it TURQUOISE and ORANGE and YELLOW and maybe RED!!!! With polka-dots!!!!!! Groom has spent hours going through the closet, pulling out papers and running clothes and CDs of unknown origin. The other day, we put safety goggles on Paco, gave him a mallet, and let him bash up a stack of CDs. Now our back yard glitters with silvery shards, and Paco is feeling better about his beloved "Dee-Dee" moving down the hall. His one caveat is that, into perpetuity, he gets to smash things we no longer need. Tomorrow, I'm going to lay out my uterus on the unmown grass and tell him to hack away.

7. Speaking of Paco amusing himself in the back yard, we had one dry day recently, during which he built a veritable Hadrian's Wall of leaves, only declaring it done when it was as tall as he. I regretted his Northern European bloodstock, as the wall took a damn long time. On the positive side, it did keep him from setting fire to stuff for at least an hour.

8. The mornings already are so dark, a state made worse by unrelenting lines of rain in the region, that I fear I will have bedsores by March. This morning, as is his habit, Groom slipped out of bed early, and during the brief moment when I roused, I thought, "What the hell is in his body that makes him wake up and get up? I don't have that thing. If I lived any closer to the Arctic Circle, I'm pretty sure I would spend six months of the year under my duvet." Half an hour later, again as is his habit, Groom brought an armful of sleepy boy into our room and dumped the softness into the bed with me. As the limp lad and I cuddled in for ten more minutes of warmth in the darkness, I realized that I could spend eight months a year under the duvet with the right company.

9. I've never shoplifted.

10. Completely without plan, I recently managed to get all twenty of my fingernails and toenails on different cutting schedules, something I hadn't even known was possible until I did it. After a few months of, "Ooh, this one's a little long; I'll just do a quick snip" followed three days later by "Time to go after that hangnail, and as long as I'm at it, trim down the whole nail" followed four days later by "Hmm, that one's snagging a bit," I ended up with every single nail at a different stage of growth, a state that illustrates better than anything

the tiny insanities
that rule our lives
yet no one knows about

unless we announce them.

2009-10-21T13:55:00.005-05:00

"Goodbye, Fifteen"

Thanks to Frank and Moon Unit Zappa and their “Valley Girl” hit of the ‘80s, I was equipped with adequate attitude and language, at age 15, to convey my scorn for the aged yee-haws who surrounded me: “Oh my God, I am, like, so sure I will ever be 40. Having all those wrinkles would be grody to the max. Flock of Sea Gulls, but I am totally so, like, buggin' at all those old Joan Collinses who think they can still shop at Maurices. Thank WHAM! I’ll never live the barf-o-rama of being a creaky old saggy haggy. I’m stoked to be grooving the rad fad that is Jocelyn at 15.”

Being a teenager was the only way to go, for, like, the rest of of my life. How that plan would play out in the long-term wasn’t completely clear, of course, but I was so busy drinking watery beer and adjusting my Flashdance-inspired sweatshirt rips that it didn’t occur to me I might one day—-if I refrained from driving while I drank watery beer and adjusted Flashdance rips, consequently plunging myself off the side of a darkened road and smack into a light pole—-live to become A Person In Her Twenties, A Person in Her Thirties, and, gag me with a spoon, A Person in Her Forties.

The joke, of course, is on the teens who scorn.

Because they have no idea.

That no forty-something-year-old in her right mind would ever, even if imbued with perimenopausal superpowers that allowed her to create a temporal portal (a sideline activity when she isn’t mainlining chocolate or snorting spilled merlot off an IKEA coffee table) and step back 25 years in time, return to being a teenager.

Let’s all shout now, using the vernacular: “No. fucking. way…would we ever go back to the angst-ridden years when 'good time' meant spending three weeks picking out just the right strapless gown for the Winter Formal that we will attend with our really funny and cute dates who are such awesome dancers that they can keep twirling and bopping through even the entire extended dance remix of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” But, as it turns out, they are all these things because they are gay and we are their beards, but we won’t know that for at least another handful of years, so mostly we spend the wee hours of the night after the Winter Formal snuffling on our waterbeds and staring at our crumpled strapless gowns on the floor while we wonder why our dates didn’t want to kiss us goodnight.”

What's more, outside of how much teenagerdom sucks (except for having knees that don't make ratcheting noises whenever you bend down to pick up the jawbreaker that accidentally dropped out of your mouth onto the orange shag carpet when you were wailing along with Bonnie Tyler to "Total Eclipse of the Heart"; indeed, the "excellent knees" a part of being a teen was sweeeeeeeeeeeet), there are other bonuses to leaving those years behind, other unimaginable riches yet to come. I would never have known, at age 15, what a rollicking time I'd be having in my 40s. I would never have known that the syncopated rhythms of my ratchety, crochety knees would create a whole new soundtrack, this one entitled "K-Tel Hot Ones: Flashes and Lower Lumbar Pains." I would never have known that the fields of dark strings (snapped filaments, they tell me) that float across my vision from time to time would actually transport me into my own personal disco, a place where the ball is always a'spinnin', and the DJ is always playing "Riding on the Metro."

Thus, I send this message back in time, to my bravada-driven teen self who'd never left North America; never tried edamame; never seen the thick and swirling strokes of a Van Gogh up close; never mustered the guts to stand in front of a classroom of 30 bored students; never waded through sixteen weeks of advanced grammar; never passed a human medicine ball out her girl bits; never fallen asleep at night with her hand nesting in the curve of someone else's hip:

Dear Smartass 15-year-old Jocelyn:

You have no idea what you're missing, not being in your 40's. Being 42 is, like, totally gnarly. Back there in high school, you might be learning twenty-seven things a day about Eugene O'Neill and how you're attracted to gay men and how spinning donuts in the high school parking lot never stops being fun and how your unformed heart can splinter without making a sound...but you'll still have twenty-seven things a day to learn, even decades from now, like how to thank the Aztec Gods for polenta and how there's no such thing as "the smartest in the class" when "smart" is undefinable and how the only church worth attending is made up of towering pines and poplars and birches and aspens, where the trail is your pew, and how the concept of a one true love is a fiction yet, somehow, you tripped across a singular person who is amazingly true and, through that, redefined love.

One other thing I've learned, dear Jocelyn Who Starts Each Day Listening to Geddy Lee at High Volume, is that the riches will keep coming, as long as you and I keep the vault open.

In the last year alone, I've taken your interest in old white guy writers--first exhibited when you read all of Eugene O'Neill your sophomore year of high school and, at about the same time, realized Mark Twain made you snort Mr. Pibb through your nose, and then by junior year you were sucking up the entire Rabbit series by John Updike (not quite understanding why Rabbit didn't just go out and have some fun and maybe watch that A-Ha video on MTV)--and I've run with it. Sure, I've also learned that women and writers of all ethnicities can turn out jaw-dropping prose...but...

and don't tell Toni Morrison this because I fear the "Sister, you betray me" bitch slap she could deliver...

of late, I'm coming back to what you first taught me (see how you were the teacher?): old white guys kick ass as writers.

Don't get me wrong, Poodle. You and I will actually read stacks and stacks of romance novels and chick lit before we come back to the white guys. Even more, the truth is that, lots of times, the white guys' books will just be too white. And too guy. And we'll return them to the library unread (sorry, Cormac McCarthy; if it's any solace, you're in good company with Don DeLillo, there on the "re-shelve" cart). Plus, some white guy novelists will just hurt our pretty little head. Fortunately, Thomas Pynchon is reclusive enough that he'll never notice us not seeking him out.

But Updike's still there. He died, you know, but only after a long, prolific career. He'll keep us busy for awhile.

Here's the surprise, though, Punky: there's a guy you've never even heard of, back there in 1983. And he's amazing--kind of like Mike Reno, the lead singer for Loverboy? Remember how you squealed over him when they played in Bozeman and how you aaahhhhed at the way opening act Quarterflash prepped you perfectly for Loverboy's bitchin' show?

Yea, this author is like that, like Quarterflash followed by Loverboy. He's that good.

His name is Philip Roth, and he makes your aging, ratchety-kneed self gasp a little bit with delight when she/you read his novels. Not only is he terribly wry, to the point of being caustic (you have to pay attention to get that; fortunately, your longtime love of Jane Austen will ready you as a reader), but he writes straightforward stories whose effectiveness doesn't rely on cliffhanger-chapters, vampires, or hidden codes. Quite simply, he strings words together and allows that--words, carefully chosen, one following the other--to create his magic.

By the time you're in your 40's, Joceybaby, you're going to respect nothing more than a quiet book that uses lyrical writing to make your insides swoon. You won't need bombs or deaths or laconic cowboys to keep your attention. Hell, with what you've learned from watching Seinfeld, you'll realize you don't even need plot. Just the words.

You probably don't get what I mean, entirely. It would help if you'd stop doodling "I'm so bummed that M*A*S*H* is over forever" on your College Algebra's paper-bag book cover and pay attention.

Try out a snippet of Mr. Roth, just in case you can catch a faint whiff of what you'll love so much when you're all old and creaky. In his novel Goodbye, Columbus, which was published waaaaaaay back in 1959, a college-aged young man who lives in Newark, New Jersey, drives on a humid summer night out of the city and into the suburbs for his first date with a girl whose family has made the jump out of urban life. Here:

Once I'd driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in triangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eight feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin. It was only eight o'clock, and I did not want to be early, so I drove up and down the streets whose names were those of eastern colleges, as though the township, years, ago, when things were named, had planned the destinies of the sons of its citizens. I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of afterlife, and after a while I rolled onto the gravel roads of the small park where Brenda was playing tennis. Inside my glove compartment it was as though the map of The City Streets of Newark had metamorphosed into crickets, for those mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any longer, and the night noises sounded loud as the blood whacking at my temples.

See how it's simple but complex, J-Girl? See how Roth takes us into the heat of the night and the nerves of the young man and his desires to reach not only for this Brenda but also beyond his humble home life? Even better, notice how Roth makes it clear that, ultimately, the suburbs are a sad, closed-off place--perhaps not the right answer for this young man after all?

You don't know it yet, Toots, so sure are you of your health and promise and spark at age 15, but what Philip Roth wrote in 1959 is your story, too. You might be very busy hiding bottles of sloe gin in the yucca plants of Montana, stashing them there for future imbibing,

and you might be calling in repeatedly to the radio station, trying to win tickets to see Billy Joel,

and you might be sniffing your armpits discreetly as you stand by your locker between classes, worried that you're "pitting out,"

but the truth is,

unique as you want to be, your story has already been written. There is a book--damn, there are 16,456 books--out there about wanting to be something more, about wanting to escape the limitations of your beginnings, about yearning for release from an as-yet circumvented sadness, about turning your face outward and taking uncomfortable steps into a humid world.

So read them.

Even when filaments in your eyes start snapping, and you're reading through black floaters,

Even when you have to use two bright lights positioned above the book to see the print clearly,

Even when your back aches a little from being propped in one position too long,

read them.

And then, when you're all read-out, turn off the lights, fluff the pillows, and roll onto your side, fitting your body into the spoon of your husband's. Nestle your hand into the crook of his hip.

So here's what I can tell you, young 'un: although you'll be a saggy haggy at 42, you'll have consumed books, traveled widely, danced madly at 4 a.m., cried through the night, cried in the classroom, cried when your babies came, cried when your mom left your dad, cried when you held your sobbing dad the last time you ever saw him, cried when he died a few months later, mopped your face repeatedly, laughed at Craig Ferguson, held hands with your best friends, learned to say what you think, learned the therapy of plunging your hands into the earth, and learned that you know nothing, which then frees you to accept everything.

In short, my dear stumbling, bubbling, happy-sad teenaged pip:

you'll have reaped what you've sown.

2009-10-17T22:41:00.000-05:00

“The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched”

--Thoreau

For its rich colors, its slanting light, the way the axis of the world exerts its tilt, the feeling of delicious melancholy, the accordion pleating of previous warmth with impending cold, the heartening sense of continued life amongst clear decay,

October is my favorite month.

We jump in piles of leaves and watch raptors migrate South and smell the wood smoke and plan to be ninjas for trick-or-treating--and the whole damn month feels like the last time we will stretch our arms wide, looking up to the sun with awe and reverence, before folding them back across our breasts and lowering our heads, craning downwards to watch for ice.

Plus, in October, there's a final harvest.

Out of all possible metaphors, that of "harvest" snags me best. Planning and cultivating and nurturing and waiting? Listen, I might not be able to find a screwdriver in the basement or hop out of bed happily at 7 a.m., but the components of a harvest? Those, I can do. Thus, the whole cycle that leads to harvest assures me that I have actual life skills, even though I might drop my kids off late for their friends' birthday parties and not really understand where in the house we file our bank statements. Harvest reminds me that some of us are good at the nebulous things. Some of us, like October, are conceptual--yet we still produce a practical yield.

Throughout the summer, we gathered in vegetables as they ripened, but the bulk of our harvest has happened in the last weeks, before the first freeze. And what a payoff, this business of biding your time and then biding it some more, until, finally, almost as a surprise, the windfall arrives. It reminds me of how I finally met, at the age of 31, the man whom I'd marry (just I was beginning to fear my eggs would require harvesting if I ever hoped to have children).

This is the one I plucked from near the footpath in my Garden of Desolation. He stood out as the sole sunflower:

Sunflowers like to chew gum, incidentally.

On a rare, sun-dappled day, our backyard and garden almost look as though they're not strewn with plastic toys, discarded bandaids, and weeds. Good lighting is key.

A few last hallelujahs from the flowers, before they crisp and snap. In two months' time, we will shovel the snow off our deck, onto this spot, and then jump into the heap.

If it only snowed an inch, that's gonna hurt.

A perfect illustration of summer hanging on as fall matures: hollyhock vies with maple. Step back. They'll thumb wrestle next, and leaves will fly.

Before Paco attacked these brussels sprouts plants with a plastic rake, they put on quite a show.

This is my idea of pearls on a string.

Our kids eat these like candy--asking repeatedly for more of the "Bugs Bunny carrots" from our garden. I always answer in an Elmer Fudd voice and tell them what "wascals" they are.

Squash eternally surprise, volunteering both in the garden and the compost...

An emblem of October,
they prove that a slow, gentle basking in the warmth--
a slow cook--
imparts all the hardiness needed
to prosper in the face of impending cold.

2009-10-14T13:36:00.004-05:00

"Forgive Me, Viewer: It Has Been Two Days Since My Last Shower"

...which is the norm, actually, so I don't know why I'm acting all proud here.

At any rate, occasionally I am less greasy than in this video. Let's just pretend I've smeared myself in bacon grease.

Howzabout for the 4th of July, I run around a park, and y'all try to catch me?

UPDATE: Tonight, Carnivore Husband O Mine has been singing Beyonce's "If You Like It, Then You Should've Put a Ring On It" but using the lyric "You will like it if you put a bite of ham on it."