O Mighty Crisis

2010-02-17T19:01:00.001-06:00

"Doldrums Antidotes"

1) Antidote #1: Get a good night’s sleep, which is exactly what I did the night of my previous post; when I woke up nine hours later, cobwebs had cleared, and a song--not a dirge--beat in my heart. This, in turn, meant I had to spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen that afternoon pretending to be a member of George Clinton’s band and/or part of Agnes de Mille’s dance troupe. The two groups actually have significant areas of overlap. Remember, for instance, when Ms. de Mille staged her “Get Up into Yo’ Funk” program shortly before her death? Some still speculate it actually led to her death, what with the steady expansion and contraction of her ribcage in sync with the lyric of “tear the roof off the mother.” Few things will more assuredly bring on a stroke.

2) Antidote #2: Appreciate that my daughter and her friends’ favorite activity, during playdates and sleepovers, is to toot and pluck together in raggle-taggle musical ensembles. Since they all attend the local music magnet school, they were able to take up a non-piano instrument this year, in 4th grade.

Girl represents the orchestra, and her pals, seen here, bring on the brass and winds. It is nearly impossible for audience members to remain seated when these girls pull out the stops on their “Good King Wenceslas.” Even better is when I get to wave my lighter in the air during “We Will Rock You.” (sidenote: the school district issued an announcement this week that, starting next fall, the city’s magnet schools will be demagnetized, cutting out music, science, environmental, and language foci at various elementary schools; as part of this, non-neighborhood children whose families have elected to send them to particular magnet schools will no longer be given bussing…all of which means, since we rely on bussing to get our kids to their magnet school, that it’s hella good we’re going away next year; it gives us time to hammer out a new schooling plan for our kids, which may very well be that we start an illegal Quaker/Buddhist class in our basement with a curriculum that emphasizes quiet, peace, and cessation of suffering. Imagine the quiet hum that will constitute “recess.” Anyhow, my point here is that I can only use 4th-graders-who-come-to-our-house-and-play-music as a Doldrum Antidote if I practice active denial of next year’s realities…so keep coming over and firming up your embouchure, and make sure you don’t vote for a Republican governor when you grow up).

3) Antidote #3: Go get passport photos taken

(My children are very, very small, aren’t they? Relative to their pin heads, I am a towering figure of authority. Actually, I just can’t be bothered to figure out how to save their pictures as larger files. I mean, I’ve got dance and blunt-rolling classes in the kitchen with Ms. de Mille and Mr. Clinton in five minutes, so it boils down to priorities). What perked me up most in the whole passport photo adventure this week was Paco’s attitude; he gets really annoyed with photographers telling him to smile and, in particular, to show his teeth. The fact that he’s in first grade and already has a pretty vehement stance against making posed situations feel even more artificial pleases me no end. In fact, the more he looks like a model for American Gothic in his photos, the happier I get. My secret hope is that his next passport photo will feature him flipping off the photographer.

Renewing our passports is the first step to upcoming journeys, necessary before we launch into the visa process, which gets pretty entangled when travelers want to go live for a long stretch in a country without seeking employment. It will take some doing to prove to Skeptical Visa People that we don’t want to leech off the economy but, rather, will contribute heftily to their wine and chocolate industry profits. Incidentally, and purposely cryptically, I will say only that we do seem to have something like a plan in place for next year (sort of nailed down; sort of loose), in terms of where we’ll go and who will live in our house…but I’m hoping to have a few more things firmed up before disclosing details. Just for fun, we can play a guessing game, though. It looks—fingers crossed--like we’ll be in a place where English is not the primary language of use, on an island, near an active volcano. Anyone?

4) Antidote #4: Hop on an airplane to a warmer, sunnier place, which is exactly what Mein Groom and I are doing from Wednesday-Sunday (as in, right now!) of this week. You may recall back in October that my sister flew me to Denver to help her organize her stuff and watch cable tv. Ripping a page out of that FranklinCovey Planner, my college friend Shannon (and her helpful mother) bought both me and Groomy tickets to visit her in Austin, Texas, to do the same. Apparently Shannon still has the dress she wore to our college graduation nearly 21 years ago; it doesn’t fit, nor has she worn it since. A little warning to Shannon: Jocelyn doesn’t think you need that dress anymore; she’s aiming to put some space between you and that dress. Keep the memory. Ditch the dress. Plus, Shannon? Let’s get those Christmas decorations put away—and in a big old labeled tub while we’re at it. Then let’s have margaritas and an entree with the word “carne” in it. Because I’m pretty sure “carne” can cure any case of February blues.

There you go. Thanks to sleep, Agnes and George, musical ensembles, the inherent promise of a passport, and the beautiful gift of a junket,

I’m back.

2010-02-15T00:53:00.001-06:00

"Each Day So Long It Feels Like a Month"

"Is the phrase 'Slough of Despond' from Harry Potter or what?" I holler to my husband, who is folding laundry four feet away.

We both half-wonder why I'm hollering, what with him standing right there and all. But, then again, it's been that kind of day.

A hollaback-at-your-knickers-folding-husband kind of day.

In that moment, I was, actually, as much moaning as hollering. I was mollering--making wounded noises like a beaver with its foot caught in a trap, considering gnawing off the source of its angst and lurching towards three-legged freedom within the dark cave of a dam.

"I don't even know what you mean when you say these words 'Slough of Despond'," my avowed responded, balling up a pair of socks. "What are you talking about?"

"There's this phrase 'Slough of Despond' that's running through my head, and I was sure you'd know where it's from. However, I guess we're lucky you have a handsome mug...because your brain certainly isn't paying the rent. So 'Slough of Despond' isn't a Harry Potter reference? Like you'd know, pretty boy. Well, hell. Who coined it, then, if not La Rowling?" I yodeled over mountain-spring-scented heaps of clothing.

"Why do you even ever act like I'd know what you're talking about? You're hardly the most sensical redhead on the block," the delight of my life tossed back.

"Okay, so it would seem I'm making shit up again. I've got to hit the Google and input 'Slough of Despond.' Hand to heaven, I wouldn't know a single thing without the Google these days. Today alone, I've turned to it to find out how many seasons of Project Runway there have been, how many flavors of lip smackers there are in existence, what the name of that ski-jumping Swiss guy is, what alternative therapies to chemo are, what contingencies my car insurance covers, and which Scandanavian town my family members are named after." With that, I trotted to the keyboard and input "Slough of Despond."

Turns out neither the eponymous Harry Potter nor his namesaked Swiss ski jumper had anything to do with it--but, rather, it's a turn of phrase from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a tale that moralizes the weight of sins and guilt.

Frick.

As usual, Google has spat out head-turning information, but ultimately my cast has gone awry. You see, when, over a mound of clean underpants, I badgered my husband, I was searching for a phrase that could express how boggy I've felt this past week. Here I thought I'd been mired down in the Slough of Despond.

However, my issues have little to do with guilt or sin. My issues are more of a seasonal, desolate, Februarian nature. They're more about feeling trapped and choking in a brume of quiet despair.

With the Slough paved over, I have to try elsewhere to find an idea that captures feelings of being backed into a tight corner and ready to start clawing.

Scritch. Scritch. Scratch.

Perhaps the sensation is more resonant with Victorian women and hysteria. That must be why I've been repeatedly recalling, this past week, my first reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" back in high school, an experience that took place on the second floor of Billings West High School, a moment when I sat up straighter and thought, "My bangs may not be as pouffy as I'd like today, and the strap of my overalls keeps falling down in only a limp approximation of Come On Eileen, but that's somehow irrelevant in the face of this poor Victorian woman's powerlessness and culturally-induced insanity. What the hell, poor locked-up protagonist lady: let me stretch out a quivering fingertip alongside you and trace the winding pattern of the lines in silent communion."

Indeed, something about this late winter month--coupled with the kids having a week off from school, topped by Paco having had a fever (two weeks ago), a double ear infection (last week), and then waking up with another fever yesterday (on his tenth day of a ten-day course of antibiotics)--creates in me a soul-sucking feeling of desperation. Doldrums, if you will.

Queerly, essential to this cloying sensation of "I beseech thee for just one small sanity-saving grace, my monarch Victoria" is an overlay of "but, truly, even as I struggle to catch a full breath, aren't I lucky?-- for at least I have a corset and some of that new-fangled indoor plumbing"; that is to say, without certainty that my life is somehow profoundly fortunate, I wouldn't have the leisure to wail about every pip of internal strife.

These last few days, laced too tightly, I am gasping for air. Nothing is wrong, per se, but every hour feels like three. I'm tired of all of us being in the house all the time, trying to figure out what to have for the next meal, folding yet another damn load of laundry, filling and emptying the dishwasher. Certainly, I've tried to mix it up. I've taught Girl to play Mastermind and Chinese Checkers. We've had friends sleep over. We've watched Olympics. Groom has framed some pictures. I went to Pilates and yoga and then I swam and ran and skiied. I've played four simultaneous Scrabble games on Facebook (most noteworthy play of the week took place in a three-way game: I had just the right letters for "menage," and that's just good old-fashioned Midwestern Protestant irony). I've read 420 messages in online classes, graded 75 activities, and told students how sorry I am that their a) mothers died; b) computers died; c) cars died; d) enthusiasm for the class died.

Nevertheless.

I feel like I'm swimming through grey fog, staring at my family and thinking, "It's 1 p.m. Whatever can we do to get to 5 p.m.?"

Yesterday, we enjoyed brief respite from the fog when we dragged the kids to a neighborhood park. At first, the kids had to sit and stare sullenly into space. That's why we have kids, right? So they can give us reflections of ourselves?

Because Girl is a champ, she got out on the ice (first time in two years!) and took some turns. She only complained every seventeen seconds about her ankles hurting. But then she'd get back up and go around again.

After shadowing her for about five minutes, I looked up. Nice clouds.

Then I looked at Paco, who'd gotten over his Crabbies long enough to start mining for ice crystals and burying the plastic bowling pins we'd brought along (even in a funk, I know how to pack for my kid). Hey, nice clouds above him, too.

Paco excavated a fossil from a previous ice age.

After excavating, every good archaeologist needs to take a moment to peer into The Pin.

He saw deep into the past, far into the future, and his vision told him...

...that it had been February for some time, and it would be February for quite some time yet, and the hours would continue to tick slowly by,

except for this one, which, thanks to skates and clouds and bowling pins,

actually did feel like only one instead of three.

2010-02-10T13:01:00.000-06:00

"Lots of Landmines; No Metal Detector: Part the Last"

A few years ago, I tuned in to a documentary about life in the Alaskan bush, where there are no roads, no stores, no schools. In particular, I was impressed with a 16-year-old girl who lived in the bush with her parents; in one memorable scene, she loaded up her sled, hitched up her dogs, and waved goodbye to Mom and Dad as she pulled away from their log home, off to check her trapping lines. She'd be back in three weeks, give or take.

The purity and freedom enjoyed by that family no doubt had their costs, but in the moment of watching that girl, I could only marvel, "Wow. Really?"

Then there was the time, probably eight years ago, at a toddler playgroup in a local community center, when I witnessed a fabulous single mother urging her ten-year-old son to help out a woman who'd come in, availed herself of the "free" shelf of donated household items, and scored a mattress; watching the woman try to wrestle the mattress out the door, the single mother advised her semi-disinclined son that he should help the woman carry it out and heave it onto her car "because it's the right thing to do, Tyler." Impressed, I tucked that phrase away for future use (ruefully musing that its future use entailed renaming my toddler daughter “Tyler”).

These are the scenarios that informed my parenting ideals: 1) Teens covet fur; 2) Mattresses can be gotten for free.

Oh, all right. The parenting lessons I took from these scenarios were more along the lines of “be brave enough to let children head towards Capricious World and trust that they won’t fall through the ice” and “children should learn that the best motivation is intrinsic.”

While I still give these ideals total props (as the kids used to say in 2002)--and I’m all about shoving my wee ‘uns out the front door and locking it in the interest of advancing Ideal #1--I have to say Ideal #2 is harder, especially because the culture around us is designed to reward kids extrinsically for every minor achievement (kids who make it through a teeth cleaning at the dentist without pitching a wobbly are given a bag of gifties on the way out; my daughter’s class collected money for the Red Cross in Haiti and, in acknowledgment of their efforts, were then thrown a pizza and rootbeer float party). I don’t excuse myself from this flawed system, mind you. In fact, I fit quite organically into a deeply-flawed culture, what with being that way myself. I use toys and food as payment for good behavior; in fact, within the last year, I’ve stood next to Paco and offered him a quarter to try just one bite of a food not on his Approved List of Vittles. It went really well.

He tried the stir fry, spit it out, announced “I hate it,” and took the quarter up to his money jar.

The idea of paying kids to do what they should is pretty pervasive, in fact. The other week, report cards came out.

Report card day was when I first started on this series of four posts about how letting kids rub shoulders with that wench, World, causes an erosion of ideals (which, for the purposes of retaining any self respect, I’m calling “compromise”).

Here’s how report card day played out:

Having just finished leading a 4th grade book club session, I ran down the hall and picked up Paco from his classroom. As he and I then loitered outside the 4th grade classroom, waiting for Girl to be released, I chatted with another mother, whose 4th grade son was yanking on her arm, pestering her about what exactly on his report card could be called an “A.” Yes, the kids are given letter grades, so it shouldn’t be hard to discern (although if he couldn’t recognize an “A” when he saw it, odds are there wouldn’t be any on his report); however, only core subjects are given letter grades. All other subjects, such as music and physical education (etc.) are given marks like “at grade level,” “above grade level,” “satisfactory,” “needs improvement.” This last grouping of marks was the ground upon which 4th grade Arm Yanker Boy was launching his attack. He negotiated, “At grade level means it’s an ‘A’ because it means I’m just where I should be.” Countering, his mom maintained, “No, an ‘A’ would be more like above grade level.” Tightening down the manipulation, Arm Yanker tried, “But at grade level starts with an ‘A,’ so it would count as an ‘A.’” Sighing exasperatedly, his mom said, “Just wait until tonight, and you and your dad can figure it out.” Then she turned to me and explained, “His dad told him he could have $10 for each ‘A’ he earns.”

The Jocelyn response at this juncture was “BWAAHH??” Calling upon my poker face, I simply replied, “Well, I always got a buck per ‘A’ when I was growing up, so I suppose with changes in the value of the dollar…”

Unrelenting, Arm Yanker kept hammering away at his mother, asking, cajoling, repackaging, until I thought, “Okay, Girl, come on out of your classroom. Mommy isn’t allowed to twist the earlobes of young boys, so she needs to go now.”

Moments later, Girl came out, grabbed her belongings from her locker, and walked out to the parking lot with us, excitedly reporting that she’d just been given her report card and couldn’t wait to open it in the car. When she did, the news was good: straight A’s in all academic subjects, with the small oh-shucks of a B+ in art (as she explained, “That makes sense; I’m not very good at drawing”). Rightly, she was glowing with self pride.

A few hours later, she and I went over to a neighbor’s house to drop something off.

As we stood there, chatting, the subject of report cards came up, for their household that evening was being plagued by—get this—a 4th grade boy (theirs) who was yammering, hammering, negotiating, cajoling, and marketing his report card, trying to sell it as a document containing straight A’s.

…because his dad had offered him $100 for getting straight A's, rationalizing, “Well, that’s what my dad gave me when I was growing up, if I got straight A’s.” And, as Cajoling Boy kept telling his beleaguered mother while dad was off at work, “I really want that $100!”

The rub was that his report card featured letters that come a little later in the alphabet than A. Apparently, his mom was supposed to help will them into A’s before Dad got home. Mostly, Mom was willing herself towards a cocktail before Dad got home.

Standing in their foyer, witnessing the grades drama, our daughter, she of straight A’s (beceptin' Art), looked bemused. Nonplussed. A little taken aback.

A few minutes later, as we walked home, she announced that she couldn’t imagine getting $100 for good grades, wondering, with a delightful lack of imagination, "What would I do with $100?" Simultaneously, she marveled that there are kids who get handed $100 by their parents.

Friends, this was my moment to affirm her thinking. I trotted out a long-shelved phrase and, in agreeing with her that getting good grades** is its own reward, I told her kids should try hard in school because “it’s the right thing to do.”

Lest you think that moment of moral superiority lasted or that I’m going to give you an inspirational tale of How to Raise Children—

remember, I’m a bit of a contradictory piece of work.

Thus, a moment after counseling my daughter that her best effort was inherently its own reward, I also mentioned, “You know, when I was growing up, I got a dollar for every ‘A’.”

Extending that idea—because some part of me felt the impulse to give my daughter something for pleasing her teacher (you can shake hands with My Crazy right about now; be sure to hit the hand sanitizer afterwards, though)—I told Girl, “If we gave you the same, about a dollar per ‘A,’ that would be roughly the cost of a new book, and I will never object to buying you a book, so if you’d feel left out not getting something for your good results, I'll buy you a book.”

Her response indicated that her A’s may have been, in fact, aptly rewarded:

"Or shoes?" she asked.

Unfortunately for the moral of this tale, which has suddenly hit the skids, I'm all about irrational thinking, saying one thing and then doing another, subsequently making my husband splutter ("I never got anything for good grades because I didn't need to get anything for good grades")--oh, and I’m also all about capitalizing on the commonalities that will link my girl and me in the next few years, understanding that she is a year and a half away from middle school, Age of Appearances, and therefore I can make the case that laying a good foundation of shoes is, on some level, setting her up for middle school success, and—oh, yes, this too!--understanding that I'm thirty years away from middle school and still not over the power of shoes to make any bad situation feel just one grunt better, I said, "Yea, shoes would work for me."

Hence, it would seem that trying to do well isn't its own reward in our household, but, rather, trying to do well is best acknowledged by a new pair of fluffy Ugg-type slippers (which is what 4th grade girls at her school are wearing with their jeans).

The truth is that there are about ten more paragraphs to the shoe segment of this story, and if I wrote them out, you'd see me striking a deal with Girl that I will give her $6 towards a pair of the special slippers, but she has to pay the rest…and that she can’t tell her brother, as he is the original negotiator/cajoler for external rewards, but he doesn’t get letter grades yet in 1st grade, and so she just has to tell him she’s buying the slippers for herself…and then she doesn’t keep her mouth shut…and then Paco comes to me and asks what he gets for being above grade level on his report card…and then I tell Girl she’s not getting any money from me now because she blabbed…and then she cries and apologizes…and then two days pass…and then I recant and tell her I’ll pitch in some money after all…and so we go to about ten stores and finally find a pair on clearance for $9…which causes me to think the Girl can just cover such a cheap cost all on her own…and so, as of this writing, she has her slippers and paid for them herself, and since she’s so over the moon about them, it hasn’t occurred to her to say, “Hey, Mom, were you going to pay me back $6 for the slippers, since I got six ‘A’s?”

All of this causes me to note that Sir Walter Scott actually had no idea of how knotted “a tangled web” could get, and he really should just come to my house around report card time if he ever decides, from the grave, to revise “Marmion.”

Ultimately, I admit that I, the parent who started out with ideals, was the Agent of Tangling in this situation. Mostly, though, I'm impressed that we made it through report card week without me presenting my parental talk entitled “And Whenever You Feel Bad in Life, There Is No Solace Like Eating Ice Cream Straight Out of the Carton.”

--------------------------

**As someone who is in the business of awarding grades, I’m well aware of how inaccurate a reflection of skill and ability a letter can be. That, combined with the pressures public schools feel due to No Child Left Behind and other systems of accountability (my sense is that teachers give the lowest possible grade in the fall and give the highest possible grade in the spring, to illustrate improvement), pretty much makes me roll my eyes at grades. Grades are like Paris Hilton: all for show, with not much wrapped up inside.

2010-02-05T00:01:00.001-06:00

"Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: Part the Third"

With each successive child, it becomes harder to keep World at bay. The door that cracked open with Child #1 gets shoved even wider with Child #2, Child #3, and so on, until the barrier is blasted off its hinges to expose an entire startled-looking family licking Cheeto gunk off their fingers. The humbling that comes from giving way and giving in due to sheer fatigue and overwhelmage is an excellent lesson for all parents, but especially for crunchy types who may have fallen, unawares, into moral righteousness. More than anything, parenthood demonstrates how little control we actually have. It's also a great lesson in the subtleties of Nature vs. Nurture. Before having kids, I might have argued that nurture can overcome anything innate. I also would have maintained that gender differences are largely culturally imposed.

After having kids, I went back, ripped those pages out of my diary, crumpled them up, and gave them to my peaceably-raised son to use as bombs. Yes, much can be affected through environment--but holy Ted Bundy, some programming is just in us from the get go. That lesson was driven home dramatically for me, indeed, when I gave birth to a male.

The girl child had been a kid of talk and cooperation and playing store. The issue of weapons as toys, which so often distresses pacifistic clog wearers, never even came up. She just wanted to have tea parties with her dollies. Then Paco hopped out of me and asked for a flame thrower.

It is true that two years after having Paco, we overheard him explaining to his 4-year-old sister what the word "gun" meant. She was baffled. "What do you mean: 'gun'?" Drawing upon a yard full of sticks and lungs full of "bang-bangs," he demonstrated. He even showed her the options for how to fall down after being hit by a blast: injured (which requires moaning) or dead (which requires breath holding and no scratching of the nostrils, no matter how itchy they get).

See, Paco knew about guns because we allowed him to be around other kids, and his brain paid attention to parts of their play to which his sister had remained oblivious. In another of its clever sideways tactics, Sly World also sidles up through "community," something all Birkenstockers value highly. As it turns out, we have an amazing community in our neighborhood, with sharing of food, music, clothes, and playdates. Having embraced our community, which features 4 boys just older than Paco, we also embraced play that revolves around guns...and two options of how to fall down (Moan or Hold Breath, No Nostrils). Further, having embraced playdates at each others' houses, we also have had to accept that most homes have televisions on all day long; thus, our children go over to play but come home talking of Sponge Bob and Bionicles and commercials and gaming systems. To keep our kids away from screens, from play involving mock violence, would mean isolating ourselves and cutting off potential friendships. Plus, if something is taboo, it becomes shiny and golden. To neutralize the long-term appeal that would come from making something off-limits, we just step back and let it blow through.

Willingly, we compromise our values. Bring it on. Then we can eventually watch it head for the horizon.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of how we can't cook up our own version of World and stick it on a carefully-proofread menu occurred when we--get this--wanted to expose our kids to, cough cough, the world. Three years ago, we planned a three-week trip to Guatemala, where my sister was living and teaching. This would be their chance to feel like the minority, to see poverty, to not understand the language, ~~not to mention Mommy and Daddy's chance to bring home a suitcase of gorgeous textiles and huge discs of chocolate~~.

In preparation for the trip, we had to get passports for the kids, which involved going to a government office, taking a number, and waiting in line for some time.

Guess what government offices do to help "entertain" children in the office? Hint: it's on par with the government feeding the nation's children mozzerella sticks as part of a "nutritious" school lunch.

The government office kindly provided a television in the corner for waiting children to watch.

On the television, that day we waited in line for passports,

were

The Teletubbies.

Upon which,

HELLO,

my children (ages 3.5 and 6) had never before laid their eyes.

Which,

HELLO,

kind of had been one of my three remaining points of pride when it came to parenting.

But there they were: Laa-Laa, Dipsy, Po, and Tinky Winky. Nonverbal. Vapid. Round. Illogical. Toddlers on acid, really.

Girl easily ignored the images on the tv, as she's never been keyed visually. But Paco?

Couldn't believe that it was Christmas and his birthday and Easter and Halloween all at once--because seeing those funny guys there on the screen just about arrested his heart with joy.

Yelping, I scrambled to cover his eyes and throw my coat over the television. Sure, we could do blue raspberry ICEES. We could live with the occasional mini-hot dog. We could engage in games that involved severing limbs with imaginary lasers.

But. this. was. unacceptable.

Scrambling towards kid and tv, I tripped, maimed a granny who had merely hoped to renew her driver's license, jammed my car keys into a teenager's buttocks (best time he had all day), screeched wildly, and failed to reach my son in time.

By the time I'd hurdled the coffee table, Paco was a goner. His heart belonged to The Tubbies.

For several months afterwards, everything was "Tubby, Tubby, Tubby," which, at first, made me come running, but quickly I learned he was referring to his friends from the passport office. He wanted Teletubby sheets on his bed. He wanted a Teletubby plate to eat off of. He wanted books, puzzles, games of The Tubbies.

Rather than resist in any outright way, we just made sure The Teletubbies mysteriously never aired on our television. Once, our neighbor gave him a Teletubby cup she found at a garage sale. I tripped her on her way out the door.

To Paco's face, we remained neutral, not wanting to spark his interest with resistance.

However, behind his back, as my previously-whip-smart preschooler slowed his motions and turned and clapped in the living room, pretending to be a big yellow doofus named Laa-Laa,

I tended to some overdue business.

Fixing a stink eye on her and baring my claws,

I chopped Bitchy World in the Adam's apple,

roundhoused her behind the knees,

and, leaping on her crumpled form with great alacrity,

pinned her throat to the floor and held her there as I put my mouth to her sweaty ear and muttered sinisterly,

"Not this one, World. Not. this. time. This time, I win. You might think you own him, with your fancy high-fructose corn syrup and your head-turning Xboxes, but I'm here to say you've stepped over the line. There will be NO TELETUBBIES on my watch."

Then I moved in closer and pulled a Mike Tyson on her deceptively dainty ear lobe,

delighting in turning the tables as I

left my mark on her.

2010-02-02T16:22:00.004-06:00

"Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: Part the Second"

If that bitch, World, isn't open to negotiating with parents and insists on staring down the well-intentioned sleep deprived, hands on its Costco-shopping, NASCAR-jacket-wearing, Miley-Cyrus-twitching hips,

then maybe the compromises have to take place elsewhere.

Like within the well-intentioned sleep deprived.

Certainly, new parents have a few blissful months--even years--in which their personal values dominate, in which they can shape their child's life into an approximation of an ideal.

For example, after My Unmentionables first squozed out our Girl, we took great care with her diet. Breastfeeding made that job easy (if plugged ducts and mastitis qualify as "easy"), but then, eventually, she needed solids. Naturally, we went naturally. Didn't she love her organic beets?! Didn't she reach for her pureed spinach and smooshed-up pears?! Didn't she smear locally-grown and home-prepared peas all over her rosy cheeks?! And didn't we assert our desire for her to get the best-possible start in life by keeping all processed sugar away from her for the first 16 months?

On her first birthday, her cake was sugarless, pineapple, and upside down. Diabetics asked for the recipe!

Making careful, informed decisions in the first years would lay down a foundation for lifelong health. Remembering our own childhoods of frozen Zingers in the freezer and "hot dog casserole" for dinner, we vowed to model better eating behaviors.

Our intention, in fact, was to keep processed sugars (and nearly all processed foods) away from her until, well, The Time of Forever...or middle school, whichever came first.

But then there was this road trip from Minnesota to California, during which toddler Girl and Groom drove the first stint by themselves, camping along the way, while I remained behind and finished teaching a summer session. A few days before I was to fly to Denver and meet them midway, Groom called to check in and tell me about their day on the road.

To his credit, he was laughing at himself.

Turns out, western Nebraska gets swelteringly hot in June. If one is camping, there is little relief from the heat, and if one isn't a fan of air-conditioning in the car, then the hot never abates.

And when the hot never abates, the soul becomes weak. It's a Hell issue.

When the soul stops at a gas station in a tiny Nebraskan burg where the asphalt is mushy underfoot from the heat, the soul might spot a Very Special Machine of Delights when it goes inside to pay. This machine is the home of a hallowed beverage christened ICEE. The very name cools down a sweating soul at least three degrees.

That day, Groom's soul marched right up to the ICEE machine and pulled a big ole blue raspberry (a flavor that, um, does TOO exist in nature) slushy for himself. Girl, in his arms, couldn't believe the magic pouring into the cup. "Me! Me! Me dwink!"

Eyeing her damp hair and flushed cheeks, Groom gave an "it's only fair" shrug and pulled Girl her own cup of Soul Coolant.

This situation is called "going from 0 to 120"--from having never had a granule of sugar pass her lips to sucking on a blue raspberry ICEE slushy, all in the space of two minutes.

While that moment, that act, opened the door to sugar ("Why, hello, Sugar," drawled the butler), we did still use restraint and aimed for that elusive thing called "moderation." However, we were no longer committed to a hasty exit from any situation where a beaming chef carried out a platter of cupcakes. That ability to shrug and say, "What the heck; it's only a cupcake" allowed us to relax, to enjoy, to remain a part of gatherings.

What we discovered is that it's not so much denial and avoidance of World's temptations that leads to good parenting. In fact, I get a little annoyed by the idea of "good" parenting; we're all just people, doing what we can. At our house, we've tried to assuage our hippie instincts by overtly talking about temptations and discussing when they're worth it and when they're not. We had ample opportunity to practice our skills at this when Girl began school.

Starting kindergarten, Girl was tremendously excited that every child was invited to the cafeteria for a free breakfast. When you're five, and only when you're five, a cafeteria beckons as something sparkly and glamorous. Because Girl is reserved, and because she has to eye glamour for a bit before stroking it, she took awhile before trying the free breakfast. But one day. One day. She did.

The experience proved startling, for the first time she got up the courage to head into the cafeteria instead of the classroom, she had to stand for a few minutes, surveying the options, wondering where the real food was. You see, her only choices, thanks to the crazy corporate machinations that fuel federal sponsorship of school meals, were sugared cereals, which she'd never seen before, and fruit in a heavy-syrup-laden cup; looking for plain Cheerios or even a banana, she was bewildered. She was--and let's all love her here--disappointed.

So she never again availed herself of the free breakfast buffet offered by Seductive World; mostly, as she's continued through elementary school, she's been aware of the poor food choices in the lunches, too, and has opted to bring her lunch from home. Lest we do too much of a happy dance, though, 4th grade is signaling a shift in what guides her choices. Nowadays, she wants to eat the provided lunch about half the time; not only has she decided she likes the cafeteria's nachos and chicken patties, but she also knows that she can only sit by her friends, who generally choose hot lunch, if she, too, has hot lunch. If she brings a lunch from home, she has to stand in line and sit with the other brown baggers. At any age where friends are everything, she has to decide between eating healthily or hanging out with people who make her feel good.

That's like me having to decide if I want to meet Jon Stewart at the micro-brewery for gossip and an oatmeal stout, or if I want to meet Pat Robinson on a park bench to share a zucchini.

At some point, it's hard to quantify what's "bad for you" and what's "good for you" because nothing Harpie World trots in front of us is that simple, a fact which, consequently, calls into play entire subsets of values (i.e., I'd rather eat and spew crap with a great person than eat great food with a f***tard, which, apparently, reveals I honor a certain kind of humanity above a strict adherence to purity of eats...and then all that gets stirred up by World even more with her Nasty Stick, and eventually I have to lay down on the couch for awhile and put a dishcloth over my eyes).

Thus, it's all a continuum that ranges from "ideal" to "compromise" to "trade-off," and mostly, if the kids are still breathing at the end of the day, if they've smiled at some point during it, if they've asked even a single question, if they've managed to demonstrate a thought of kindness (even if it's picking up a toddler's dropped McNugget and setting it back into her french fry-festooned high chair tray),

then we parents have satisfied all that matters.
--------------------------------------------

Hell, yea, there's more coming.

2010-01-30T01:37:00.000-06:00

"Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: The First of Several on This Topic"

When a child is born, the parent enters into a decades-long negotiation with the world. The script for this give-and-take reads:

Parent, puffing out chest: "Surrounded by a loving village of friends and family, my child will never question that she is loved."

World, yawning: "Fiddlesticks."

Parent, still confident: "I will provide steadiness and an open heart and opportunities, and they will help to form my child's character."

World, dashing off a quick text to Mars: "Hogwash."

Parent, bristling and speaking in clipped syllables: "I love to ski, read, and walk in the woods. Therefore, because I will model positive experiences with these things, my child will also love them."

World, gazing into the mirror and fluffing its bangs: "Suck it."

Parent, absently running a hand across a well-thumbed copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting: "If I lay down a good foundation in the home, my child will be prepared to take on all of life's challenges."

World, ordering a Large Pepperoni, Extra Cheese: "Up in ya."

Hmmm. Upon review, it would seem World isn't ceding much at all--not even feigning consideration of the parent's agenda. Rather, World enters the negotiations wearing ear plugs, bound and determined to hum "la-la-la" and do whatever the hell it wants to, even in the face of the very best intentions.

World can be a serious bitch.

As I've watched and experienced this interplay over the last ten years, since having kids, I've noticed that the room gets particularly tension filled when Parent is also...um...how to put it? Crunchy. Does that work? Is there a term for modern-day lefty/boho/hippie types (besides "Alicia Silverstone")?

No matter what you call us (er, "them"), there are parents--mostly white, mostly well educated, mostly Dems--who greet much of the world with tolerance and compassion. We--sorry! "They"--buy fair trade and embrace whole grains and present their friends with donation gifts of "one cow, good for milking, which will transform the lives of a needy family in Ghana." At their best, we/they live thoughtfully and deliberately and hope to be agents of change.

There are flaws in the profile, though. For example, while such people buy Christmas ornaments made by "a women's cooperative in Nicaragua," they are less comfortable supporting the cottage industries that transform the lives of their own nation's poor--i.e., rapper 50 Cent's G-Unit clothing line. Even more, at least in my community, while Loving Whitey Libs are largely anti-consumerist, they're also incredible gear heads; you better believe the bleedingest hearts top their $20,000 Subarus with $700 Thule cargo boxes to help carry their $300 Karhu skis.

And, okay, sometimes there's a certain moral self-righteousness that crops up in the Crunchies (for more of this, SEE: The Extreme Right). Finally, when it comes to Crunchies having a baby--and I tell you this as someone well acquainted with Tree Huggery and all its related lentil eating--there are some pretty uniform values in place. To delineate just a few:

ideally, labor and delivery will occur at home; bonus points for water births
there will be a 5-10 page birth plan handed over to those assisting with the delivery; should this plan ultimately end up in the hands of hospital staff, the laboring mother will be privy to laughter echoing down the hall, from the nurses' station, if she is able to hear anything over the sounds of her own animalistic grunting
the labor and delivery will be "natural," and any mother-to-be worth her uterus will soldier through without medication
the mother will nurse for a minimum of one year, preferably two or three
all babyfood will be homemade
the baby will benefit from the close contact provided by a sling
cloth diapers will be used, lest there be no planet left for him/her to inherit
co-sleeping is not only safe and easy, it creates a family bond
exposure to technology and screens will be virtually non-existent
toys will be wooden, not plastic

This list could continue ad nauseum, of course. My personal Mommy-Crunch-O-Meter score on the previous items hovers somewhere around 4, but that's a rough calculation, as I did some things with Kid #1 that I didn't with Kid #2, and Kid #2 was the beneficiary of a few things we hadn't known about with Kid #1. Let's round my score to a 4.16489.

I nursed both kids as long as it worked; we used cloth diapers with Girl (there was a service in town, so every Monday morning the dirties went away, and a new bag--a plastic one!!!--of cleans dropped with a plop); we used a sling with Paco, which, as I recall, allowed me to wash four dishes one day when he was a month old; we co-slept like crazy, in the hopes of getting even 20 minutes of sleep, but it was hardly an instrument of family bonding, as Groom had to to sleep in a different bed, given the limitations of our full-sized mattress; and, em, I would have loved a water birth, but only if a team of epidural-wielding, Speedo-wearing doctors were in the tub with me.

What I've learned, since achieving that initial 4.16489, is how complicated every values decision becomes as the child's life continues...and how that controlling bitch, World, becomes increasingly adept at interferring. So long as it was just the three of us, then the four of us, dancing around the living room to Joni Mitchell, we remained on the Path of Liberal Righteousness.

Well, except when Girl was colicky for three months, and the only thing that preserved anyone's sanity was our nightly watching of "Blind Date" with host Roger Lodge, a program whose jejune highjinks I still thank for being the sole bright spot in a very dark time.

But when we weren't watching crap tv on Volume 72, we, assuredly, pureed sweet potatoes and talked birdwatching.

Then the colic receded, the baby grew up, we had another, they found friendships, we enrolled them in activities, they went off to school...and before we knew it,

they were citizens of Writhing, Delightful, Unpredictable, Bitchy World--affected by values we hadn't orchestrated.

------------------------------------------
More anon.

2010-01-26T16:12:00.000-06:00

"The Cookies Turned Out Pretty Well, by the Way"

'Twas holiday time.

There, in a quiet, domestic scene, I baked molasses cookies, and my husband folded sheets of paper into gift boxes that would hold the treats.

The Ipod shuffled, and a new song, low and mellow, poured into the kitchen: "I search myself and everyone/To see where we went wrong..."

"AHHHH, CRACK-ADDICTED MOTHER OF KEE-RIST," I screeched, tailoring my curse to the season. "How come I hate Sarah McLachlan so much at this minute? If I holler the words 'shut up,' do you think she will? And also, as long as I'm at it, I thought I liked Sarah McLachlan. I mean, who the hell do you think bought this CD originally? It wasn't Great Aunt Ethel, that's for sure. I can admit it: I was possessed of McLachlan Fever in my twenties. She was breathy; she was earnest. But right now, I find I am passionately annoyed by her breathy earnestness here in the kitchen. Would my good friend Debbie Harry from Blondie please shuffle up to Sarah, there inside the Ipod, and bitch slap some sense into her Lilith Fair self?"

In his mild way, Groom chimed in, "This song is a bit like opening a time capsule to the '90s."

Energized from the scorching heat of his condemnation, I blustered, "GAWWD. Doesn't she lead with her uterus, though? It's all whine, drop an egg, moan, pat an ovary..."

"Yes," His Groomishness agreed, safely, "her vibe doesn't suit our here and now. She seems dated."

Dated. That was right. To my surprise, Sarah McLachlan's pretty, dulcet 1990's tones seemed like they'd benefit from a tour of duty in Iraq, if they hoped to find a place in the '10s. Without some broadening, well, her work seems like something whose time has passed.

Interestingly, later that same night, when I was out for a run, I listened to a podcast wherein television critic David Bianculli was interviewed about his new book on The Smothers Brothers, Dangerously Funny. As he recapped the careers of Tom and Dick Smothers, particularly their too-soon-cancelled program The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Bianculli took me back in time, back through the McLachlan '90s, past the Leona Helmsley '80s, before the Bruce Jenner '70s, to the late 1960's. Just a niblet back then, I do remember watching The Smothers Brothers. I liked the banjo.

Bianculli's interview gave me the broader context of this anti-authoritarian, groundbreaking program that sought out fresh talent, fought with the network, confounded censors, and provided a solidly anti-war message. In an era where sex, drugs, religion, and politics were hugely topical yet still avoided on public broadcasts, Tom and Dick Smothers set their focus firmly upon challenging existing mores. Because of its willingness to be provocative, to be rebellious, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was cancelled in a swirl of controversy. In many ways, the story of this show is the story of the 1960's.

But for me, listening to the podcast that night, the trajectory of The Smothers Brothers is still relevant. Unlike that breathy McLachlan in her floaty dresses, Tom and Dick's work continues to hold my interest--as Bianculli notes, they continue to have an impact on “today’s TV troublemakers and iconoclasts.” Maybe I'm just an individual who is disposed towards appreciating agitators and subversion. Maybe, though, the principles that guided The Smothers Brothers remain fresh even today, in a time of corruption and destruction. I'm going to argue they're still relevant because their example was to question, challenge, push for change.

And that never goes out of style.

-------------------------------
How about you? Have you been struck by things that suddenly seem passe or unnecessary...or surprisingly appurtenant to the moment?

Outside of the McLachlan/Smothers experiences, I've also recently realized I'm pretty much over clementines this year, preferring instead good, old-fashioned oranges or--the new kid on my butcher block--Cara Caras. 2010 is SOOOO Cara Cara.

But not Irene Cara.

She's out there, on her own.

2010-01-22T00:20:00.001-06:00

"Protests Quashed"

For once and all, I'm surrendering.

I don't hate poetry after all.

The issue in my early years seems to have been the wrong poetry applied to the wrong brain. Now that I'm flailing through Older Years, I keep bumping into precisely the right stuff.

Finally, I get it.

Poetry says stuff differently enough that we understand it more betterer.

For my particular taste, the poems that work are simple and straightforward--but with a little rub in them.

Poet Louis Jenkins, who has lived in Duluth the last 30-odd years, writes just such lines. If you have any income to dispose towards a volume of verse, I'd recommend you seek his out.

He writes "prose poems," paragraphs and anecdotes that are denuded of all the "things that insist that the reader should be having a poetical experience,” as he puts it. In short, his style releases readers from labor and hands them moments of knowing, of cynicism, of wryness.

I also really like that, noting poetry's inability to earn great income, the 67-year-old, long-married Jenkins says he continues to write and publish for the "fame and glory...and the chicks."

Take a moment to give this guy his due, would you?

-------------------------------
"First Snow"

By dusk the snow is already partially melted. There are dark patches where the grass shows through, like islands in the sea seen from an airplane. Which one is home? The one I left as a child? They all seem the same now. What became of my parents? What about all those things I started and never finished? What were they? As we get older we become more alone. The man and his wife share this gift. It is their breakfast: coffee and silence, morning sunlight. They make love or they quarrel. They move through the day, she on the black squares, he on the white. At night they sit by fire, he reading his book, she knitting. The fire is agitated. The wind hoots in the chimney like a child blowing in a bottle, happily.
----------------------------------
"A Quiet Place"

I have come to understand my love for you. I came to you like a man, world-weary, looking for a quiet place. The gas station and grocery store, the church, the abandoned school, a few old houses, the river with its cool shady spots . . . . good fishing. How I've longed for a place like this! As soon as I got here I knew I'd found it. Tomorrow the set production and camera crews arrive. We can begin filming on Monday: the story of a man looking for a quiet place.
------------------------------------
"Uncle Axel"

In the box of old photos there's one of a young man with a moustache wearing a long coat, circa 1890. The photo is labeled "Uncle Karl" on the back. That would be your mother's granduncle, who came from Sweden, a missionary, and was killed by Indians in North Dakota, your great-granduncle.

The young man in the photo is looking away from the camera, slightly to the left. He has a look of determination, a man of destiny, preparing to bring the faith to the heathen Sioux.

But it isn't Karl. The photo was mislabeled, fifty years ago. It's actually a photo of Uncle Axel, from Norway, your father's uncle, who was a farmer. No one knows that now. No one remembers Axel, or Karl.

If you look closely at the photo it almost appears that the young man is speaking, perhaps muttering "I'm Axel damn it. Quit calling me Karl!"
-------------------------
"Too Much Snow"

Unlike the Eskimos we only have one word for snow but we have a lot of modifiers for that word. There is too much snow, which, unlike rain, does not immediately run off. It falls and stays for months. Someone wished for this snow. Someone got a deal, five cents on the dollar, and spent the entire family fortune. It's the simple solution, it covers everything. We are never satisfied with the arrangement of the snow so we spend hours moving the snow from one place to another. Too much snow. I box it up and send it to family and friends. I send a big box to my cousin in California. I send a small box to my mother. She writes "Don't send so much. I'm all alone now. I'll never be able to use so much." To you I send a single snowflake, beautiful, complex and delicate; different from all the others.
----------------------------------------
"Appointed Rounds"

At first he refused to deliver junk mail because it was stupid, all those deodorant ads, money-making ideas and contests. Then he began to doubt the importance of the other mail he carried. He began to randomly select first class mail for nondelivery. After he had finished his mail route each day he would return home with his handful of letters and put them in the attic. He didn't open them and never even looked at them again. It was as if he were an agent of Fate, capricious and blind. In the several years before he was caught, friends vanished, marriages failed, business deals fell through. Toward the end he became more and more bold, deleting houses, then whole blocks from his route. He began to feel he'd been born in the wrong era. If only he could have been a Pony Express rider galloping into some prairie town with an empty bag, or the runner from Marathon collapsing in the streets of Athens, gasping, "No news."
----------------------------------
"Suitcase"

I keep my clothes in a suitcase at the foot of my bed. I haven't been anywhere and have no plans to go anywhere, but these days you never know, and besides it gives me a focus for my anxiety and for my occasional moments of unfounded excitement and anticipation. Every morning I take out clean socks and underwear, etc. and throw the dirty clothes back in the suitcase. Once a week or so I take the suitcase down to the washer and dryer in the basement and sit around naked waiting for my clean clothes. That's about it. The days pass quickly enough. Once in awhile I see old friends. "You look tired," they say or "Why the long face?" I reply, "Well, you know, it's stressful, living out of a suitcase."
------------------
"Invisible"

There are moments when a person cannot be seen by the human eye. I'm sure you've noticed this. You might be walking down the street or sitting in a chair when someone you know very well, your mother or your best friend, walks past without seeing you. Later they'll say, "Oh, I must have been preoccupied." Not so. At times we are caught in a warp of space or time and, for a moment, vanish. This phenomenon occurs often among children and old people. No one understands exactly how this happens but some people remain invisible for long periods of time. Most of these do so by choice. They have learned to ride the moment, as a surfer rides the long curl of a wave. How exhilarating it is to ride like that, a feeling of triumph to move from room to room unseen, only the slightest breeze in your passing.
--------------------------
"Somersault"

Some children did handsprings or cartwheels. Those of us who were less athletically gifted did what we called somersaults, really a kind of forward roll. Head down in the summer grass, a push with the feet, then the world flipped upside-down and around. Your feet, which had been behind you, now stretched out in front. It was fun and we did it, laughing, again and again. Yet, as fun as it was, most of us, at some point, quit doing somersaults. But only recently, someone at Evening Rest (Managed Care for Seniors) discovered the potential value of somersaults as physical and emotional therapy for the aged, a recapturing of youth, perhaps. Every afternoon, weather permitting, the old people, despite their feeble protests, are led or wheeled onto the lawn, where each is personally and individually aided in the heels-over-head tumble into darkness. When the wind is right you can hear, even at this distance, the crying of those who have fallen and are unable to rise.
------------------
Jocelyn's prose poem, a shout out to Jenkins:

"We Cannot Consider Your Offer at This Time"

I spent two hours today uploading photos. We're hoping to go live somewhere else for a spell, so we've signed up with some home exchange agencies. Selling our lives to others requires photos and many fawning adjectives, packaging the quality of our refrigerator so that Australians or Germans want to come use it. As I clicked the upload button repeatedly, having each attempt fail, a drumming began in my head, one that pounded, "You are very busy thinking about next year when, right now, there is work to do here, now." In response, a different drum beat a tattoo of, "Yes, but when I think of the possibilities of next year, the here and now seem prettier." Then I clicked the button again. I went to yoga and squatted out the tension. Later, after I sent out 45 letters of inquiry, the responses began to trickle in: "I'm sorry...," "...already committed...," "...best of luck..." Reading these over, I went back to doing the work of here, now.

2010-01-18T23:32:00.001-06:00

"Wherein This Becomes the Easiest Place for Me To Show Pictures To Family and Friends; For All Other Readers: I Appreciate Your Forebearance"

What with turning seven and all, Paco had a party the other day.

Paco and Groom made the invitation. The rock monster on the highest ledge represents Paco. He yells, "It me birthday!"

The festivities began with some pinata whacking, which resulted in a tumble of fruit snacks, candy, and Scavenger Hunt clues.

When I saw this photo taken by my husband, I had to holler, "Did you climb up the side of the swingset to snap this? What a vertiginous view!"

Then he informed me that he'd simply stood next to the circle of scrambling kids and shot the photo, and I had to yell some more: "You are a freakish giant, Mr. Lincoln, even without your stovepipe hat. No wonder children fall into a protective heap when they see you coming!"

Once they recovered from the presence of a gargantuan in their midst, and with their first clues in hand, Team Neighborhood Rockstars and Team Birthday Boy set off to peer in the compost heap, the tailpipe of the mini-van, the costume bin, and the washing machine. Ultimately, they discovered stashes of Lego sets.

You see, when considering his party options some weeks before, Paco had quickly realized, "I just want to have friends come over and build with Legos."

Important historical footnote: the last time we hel Paco's party at our house was when he turned three, and we had an open house with about 40 people, mostly stunned mid-winter parents staring blankly at their off-the-walls jumping, cabin-fevered children. For two weeks after the party, we despaired of ever righting the house. Thus, from then on, we've taken the lad's party off-site.

Four years is apparently requisite healing time, though, as Paco's desire to sit and build struck us as tolerable. We estimated what a "venue" party would have cost and decided to put an equal amount towards getting each party attendee this year a Lego set.

As we planned the party further, brainstorms of all sorts of add-on Lego-themed activities swirled, such as playing Drop the Lego in the Jar or Pin the Mini-Figure on the Castle, but Paco was having none of it. He just wanted friends and Legos and building.

We did manage to sneak this cake in on him, though.

Incidentally, although Groom is prodigiously gifted in the kitchen, and he does most things well, he is the first to admit he can't frost a cake. This fact, along with his complete inability to move to music, keep him tolerable.

Oh, and there was one more thing, in addition to building with friends, that the Birthday Bubs wanted. Paco also wanted a tunnel through which food could be served, so that each kid could stand in front of it, watch a bit of abra-cadabra-ing, and then...with a lift of the curtain...

Voila! Mac 'n cheese!

And in one memorably traumatic course, Severed Head!

They built. They ate. They got serious giggles.

Once the all the submarines and wreck raiders had been snapped together, the big Lego brick of a cake came out...

the seven-year-old filled his lungs, fluffed his hair...

...put his lips together and blew.

And then--oddly--an Abe Lincolnish giant came out and did some magic as he cut the cake, serving each blue piece through a tunnel.

One of the kids wasn't aware he was supposed to eat the cake; by mistake, he ate Mr. Lincoln's hand instead.

Considering the assembled crew, however, we felt lucky to have gotten by with only one severed head and one cannibalized hand.

Last time we had Paco's party at the house, an entire grandma went missing.

At the end of Paco's Lego Birthday, therefore, we were able to whistle the best possible wrap-up to any kids' party:

Whew.

2010-01-15T12:22:00.000-06:00

"A Little Song, a Little Dance, a Little Seltzer in Your Pants"

At 7:47 a.m., there is the skitter of an elf hurtling toward the bed.

"I'm coming to give you your cuddles, Mama!"

Usually, Paco's Hug My Mama time lasts for about ten minutes, until I rouse him towards the bathroom to get ready for school--and by "rouse him," I mean zzzzzzzllllllbbbrrrrrr his tummy, talk to him about ninja strategies, contemplate what Fire Type Pokemon he might be, and then pretend to be a locomotive called The Baby Express. Once he's ready to board The Baby Express, I am required to chug to the bathroom, Paco clinging to my torso, as I chant, "Honk honk, choo choo, the Baby Express is comin' throooooouuuuuuuughhh." Moments later, he sits on the toilet while I "do his hair."

The other morning marked a departure from that ritual. Certainly, there was the skitter. But when his soft warmness hit the bed, Paco announced, "I woke up early today, so I read in bed. Boy, did I read some good stuff. I brought one to read to you. It's called Monster Money."

In the ensuing three minutes, I was not only assured that monsters are "even funnier than aliens," but I also learned the various ways that I, were I a monster, could come up with a dime so that I'd have enough money to buy a pet from a store that--Praise the Sleestack--only charges ten cents per animal. Turns out, I might just have a dime. But I also could put together two nickels. Potentially--and get this: I could also add together a nickel and five pennies. Alternately, if I'd really scraped under the couch cushions and taken all the random lint trap change off the top of the dryer in the basement, I might have the luck to come up with ten individual pennies. No matter what, my dedication to dime finding would result in a bat, a rat, or a beetle coming home with me to the swamp.

Having wrung every possible dime configuration out of Monster Money, Paco sat silent for a moment before announcing, "Now I'll hug you for awhile...hey, NO, wait: I read an even better book this morning. It's so funny, Mom. You gotta hear it." With that, he launched himself back to his Kid Cave, grabbed the book, and hustled back under the duvet with a "You're gonna laugh A LOT at this one, so maybe you should run to the bathroom before I start."

Seeing that he held Froggy Plays in the Band,

I trusted his wisdom and busted out for a potty break. Upon my return, I had to caution the lad, "You only have about two minutes until we need to get moving, or you're going to miss your bus." Reassuringly, Paco patted my hand and assured me, "Even with pressure, I can read very fast."

About three pages in, I realized that the book would take more than two minutes and that I am totally the mother who will drive her kid to school, if it means he gets to finish a book he's excited about. Plus, it's impossible to shut down Paco's vigorous oral interpretation (his first grade teacher commented during our parent/teacher conference, "When he reads out loud, he's like a storyteller," at which point I hugged on her and, shortly thereafter, asked if she could Baby Express me to the bathroom).

So he read. He gestured. He stopped periodically to make sure I wasn't missing anything, especially the part where Froggy jokes, "I'm on the phone--the SAXaphone!" Towards the end, we had to take a 30 second chuckle break on the page where Froggy gets hit in the head with a baton.

The book done, we raced through Paco's morning ablutions, and he still had time to choke down a chocolate chip pancake and some dill pickles before dashing out to the bus.

With the little nutter off to school, I went back to bed, musing that I couldn't have anything but a shiny, happy day when it had started so auspiciously. As ever, the kid set me up to smile.

He's done that for seven years now. Close readers of this blog might be thinking, "But, Jocelyn, your first grader is six. I hate it when parents are so out of touch with their children that they don't even know how old they are. This example of Negligent, Distracted Mother Jocelyn is exactly why our jails are so full." News for all of y'all huffy close readers: Paco is having a birthday this weekend. He's turning seven.

And since he is the source of at least 55% of the smiles in this household, we're all finding it easy to surf the wave of excitement about this milestone. You see, he owns us.

From the way he reads to me in bed...to the way he makes up "shoot-the-cannon" games with his beloved older sister "De-De"...to the way he sighs ominously towards Groom and announces, "I think we're going to need to make a project today, Dad. Do we have wire and some foamy stuff?"...the lad is our bestest buddy.

What I'm looking forward to in the next few years of elementary school is further blossoming as he develops greater depths of confidence and coping skills, as he makes friendships that reflect back to him a new perspective of himself, as he fine tunes his schtick for more varied audiences. He'll begin the process of separating from us, his greatest fan club, and that's just as it should be. I'll be able to see him better once he's a couple steps away.

Already, he has found an activity that is his and his alone--something that no one in the family has done before him. With every other lesson or sport or activity, someone can say to him, "I used to love swimming lessons when I was a kid" or "When De-De started soccer, she never touched the ball either," but with martial arts, it's his alone.

So is the orange belt he recently earned.

In the next years, he'll continue to earn and learn and carve and shape his own world. He'll become his own self and not just a kid who often wants to crawl back inside me.

No matter how he changes, though, I feel certain he'll always be a serious goof-ass, ready to tussle in the snow:

I predict, too, that when the tussling's done, he'll still have the impulse to drop for a refreshing amuse bouche

...to spit onto his dad's leg.

And when the tussling and amusing and spitting are done at the end of his every future day--wherever he is, whomever he's become--I hope he'll always be buoyed by a feeling that he's not alone.

For always and ever, we're in his corner

and he's in ours--

a vital, sparkling elf

skittering through life.

2010-01-12T16:06:00.007-06:00

"When It Works In My Favor, I Go Biblical"

This week, I've been waiting for news.

It came this afternoon.

Girlfriends (and Furiousball, who is total Honorary Girlfriend): next year I'm going on sabbatical.

For the whole year.

Those of you who read my last post are, no doubt, able to appreciate how welcome and timely this news is.

The truth is that many of the feelings expressed in that previous post are constant, nothing new; they sum up 19 years of teaching community college students. The job is what it is. However, there is also a wearing down over time that happens, an erosion of energies and enthusiasms,

which is exactly why sabbatical was invented by God on the seventh day, when He was just plum tuckered from making waterfalls and zebras and toenails. On that seventh day, Dude jumped back, kissed Himself (or, as my students write, "hisself"), and realized He was tapped out and needed a sit-down.

So then He waved around His staff and created the weekend. After a little more thinking, He conceded that sometimes a longer break can be more fruitful. The concession made, He then created Wikipedia so there would be a place that could describe all of His Multitudinous Works, including the idea of periodic downtime. The Wikipoodle defines sabbatical as

"a rest from work, or a hiatus, often lasting from two months to a year. The concept of sabbatical has a source in shmita, described several places in the Bible (Leviticus 25, for example, where there is a commandment to desist from working the fields in the seventh year). In the strict sense, therefore, sabbatical lasts a year.

The foundational Bible passage for sabbatical concepts is Genesis 2:2-3, in which God rested (literally, "ceased" from his labor) after creating the universe, and it is applied to people (Jew and Gentile, slave and free) and even to beasts of burden in one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8-11, reaffirmed in Deuteronomy 5:12-15)."

This beast of burden, for one, is ready to lay fallow.

Or whatever.

So long as it means I'm not grading Cause/Effect essays for awhile or asking the twelve-seventy-thousandth student to capitalize the word "I."

Seven years ago, right around when Paco was born, I had a one-semester sabbatical; I was stunned upon my return to campus at how re-energized and re-invigorated I actually felt. Mostly, I thought I'd go back to the classroom and be cranky that my clog-dancing free time was over. To my surprise, though, I felt really ready to be back--genuinely pumped up and eager to try new things.

I maintain, therefore, that the concept of the sabbatical has merit and isn't just a way for lazy people to live out their fantasies of lying abed for three months, watching The View while self-corn-rowing their hair.

For this upcoming sabbatical, in fact, I have a four-pronged proposal (approved both by the college president and, as of today, by the state of Minnesota). I'll make some videos to embed into my online classes; I'll attend a whoop-dee-doo conference after which I'll revamp my Short Story class assignments; I'll create a new online literature course (Multicultural Literature!); and I'll, well, I'll play around with some of the posts I've written right here and see if I can get them to relate enough that I can call it a manuscript.

So it's not like my year off will be a Year Off.

But. Freedom from a daily schedule will have one huge side benefit: it will allow our family to travel--ideally, to live abroad for as long as we can afford it. I'm all about yanking the kids from school for a year and either homeschooling on the road or having them attend school in another country. I'm urging Groom into looking at graduate programs in Art in, say, Florence. I'm thinking about signing up with a housing swap agency. I'm not above begging friends and strangers alike if they have friends anywhere on the planet who would like to help welcome an American family as it settles in to their culture.

Basically, now that everything's set, everything's up in the air. That's the excitement and overwhelmage: anything is possible right now.

So hep me, Fair Readers. If you had a year, a family with elementary-aged kids, 80% of your usual pay, and a desire to live abroad, what would you do? How would you choose a place? How would you find a place to live? ~~How much importance would you place on it having cheap wine?~~ How would you know if your family is covered medically in that place? And so on...

Pease, pease, throw me ideas, luvvies, so I can clap at the pretty colors. 'Cause right now I'm lurching around a place that's both a blur and a wheeeeeee!...

2010-01-11T00:18:00.001-06:00

"Blech"

Sometimes I start a blog post, and then it sits as an unpublished draft for months, even years (case in point: the draft post about how I'm not looking forward to the presidential-nominee battle between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama). This lag is probably a good thing, as it reminds me of the importance of letting things gel, of acknowledging that writing can serve different purposes in different moments, and that some composing really is a process with stages, starting with getting ideas and moving into shaping them into something more polished and final. However, in some cases, the draft remains a draft because the simple act of hammering out those ideas satisfied the impulse.

The fairly-unedited freewriting below is just such a draft, a thought vomit that alleviated stress and has sat, untouched, since its inception; after considering if I want to mess around with it any more, I've decided I need to toss it out as it is, just to shed the negative ju-ju in it before the new semester begins.

The backstory here is that I was grading Cause/Effect essays last term, and I came upon a run of particularly illogical, poorly-thought-out papers. Eventually, I snapped, and I took a break from grading to pound out the start of a post--more of a rant--below.

The even backer-story is that I was grading during a week when my sleep was outrageously out of whack. Paco, who is both charged and plagued by imagination, was unable to sleep for about three nights in a row. He'd make it for a few hours but be up by 1, 2, 3, in the morning, crying, out of sorts, scared. Since I can handle consciousness in the dark hours better than Groom, we have a longstanding arrangement that I'll handle things 'til the sun comes up, and then he takes over. The upshot was that Paco and I went through all sorts of machinations to get him back to sleep:

1) Mama will sleep with you (however, that is about the biggest treat he can imagine, and we really get a bang out of each others' company, so lots of times we have to talk and laugh and hug--which ain't sleepin');

2) Let's try reading (when you're actually very tired, though, books are blurry, and even Scaredy Squirrel and Tacky the Penguin flop);

3) Merde. Let's watch a show and see if we can fall asleep on the couch in front of the monitor (this is the most successful approach, although neither of us ever falls asleep on the couch; rather, we just watch three episodes of Pokemon, until even the six-year-old capitulates, "We have to turn this off now. I can't stand it anymore").

So, basically, I'd spent a few endless nights wandering around the house with a softie lad, and, as a result, was feeling both surreal and unhinged during the daylight hours.

Enter the stack of Cause/Effect essays. The math here would read "shoddy papers + wrung out teacher = crabby attempt at a blog post."

Here's the thing, though: after I tapped away at the keyboard that day, venting therapeutically, I went back to grading and encountered some stronger papers. The next day, I went back to the classroom and laughed and enjoyed the students. Plus, I slept straight through one night and found my moorings again.

So I never returned to this post to finish it up. But it has stayed with me. Go ahead and read the in-the-moment brain dump, and then I'll tell you what I think two months later.
--------------------------------------------------

I've been joking with increasing frequency that my husband needs to get a career or we need to open a coffee shop or I need to get a paper route.

Right now, this week, I'm in the midst of feeling more serious about it. Because I'm clearly in Bad Teacher mode.

Evidence? I'm put out with my students.

For being so damn dumb. So frickin' dumb. They're dumb, and I can't get over it.

I'm pretty sure that's not part of the criteria for Teacher of the Year.

I'm also pretty sure I wouldn't get points for wanting to take at least half my students firmly by the shoulders and shake them 'til their hollow heads waggle about.

Now I know I'm supposed to jolly off their poor work and regroup and come up with strategies to motivate and transform them and help to bridge their gaps.

But mostly, I want to throw them all off a bridge and wave as they fall down the gap. I might yell into the crevasse, as they fall, "You know, I'm not sure the United States has it completely right in telling its citizens that everyone has a right to a college education--because that attitude overlooks the fact that not everyone should go to college. Because some of y'all are just too dumb for it."

See what I mean?

I might maybe need to re-career myself,

preferably into a job where I don't have to interact with people.

'Specially them dumb ones.

Actually, more than being put out with the lack of innate intelligence, I'm having a wolly here about the lack of care and effort. Why am I spending more time grading a paper than the student did writing it?

That's the insult I can't get past today.

For I have to think--I HAVE to think--that if the students had put a little effort into their papers, they wouldn't have written such dumb stuff. Right?

If Student E had slowed the frack down when writing her "three reasons why digital photography is popular" essay, she might have realized how idiotic it is to assert that one of the reasons digital photography is popular is that "digital photography is very popular." She might have realized that the cause can't be the effect.

Similarly, Student Z argues that texting has resulted in a new way of communicating. Caught in her body paragraphs by this circular reasoning, she simply spun and spun, never realizing that texting IS a new form of communication and, therefore, the result of it must be something different than itself.

If Student AA had taken more than ten minutes to crank out her paper, she wouldn't have written, "Back in my grandparents [sic] day, they never had anything except public schools. Today we have home schooling [sic] and online school." RIGHT? And if she could have bothered herself to take more than ten minutes to write her paper, I then wouldn't have felt compelled to spend 13 minutes writing out an explanation to her of how "online schools" are often also "public schools" and how back in her grandparents' day (which, based on what I know of the family, was in the 1980s), there also were things called "private schools" AND HOW HOMESCHOOLING ISN'T AN INVENTION OF THE NEW MILLENIUM.

You're getting some small sense of the huff I'm currently having, ja?

And I haven't even copied for you yet this sentence: "The first Death Person in 1995 sends a text message by David Jackson." Read it.

Read it again.

Now, once more.

Did you get it yet?

I never did.

Finally, my husband read it and figured it out: "Death Person" means "deaf person." Apparently the deaf only function in the present tense, however, no matter what year they sent the text.

Can you see how this all might have a cumulative effect on the instructor? When the occasional student writes nonsense, it's goofy. I can laugh. But when every single paper in a stack of 50 has this kind of confuddlement in it,

I get defeated. New to me is the anger, though. Surprisingly, I'm just pissed off. The sun is shining, and I'm inside reading this stuff? Really?

I'm sighing loudly now, as I take the next paper off the stack. It's about the positive effects of exercise. Improves health? Check. Improves self-esteem? Check.

Gives a person something to do?

Mo-fu**er.

I know, on some level, that last point doesn't seem so egregious. However, think about it--and the more you think about it, the more you'll see it's the dumbest of all. An effect of exercise is that it occupies one's time?

How about you put anything into that equation; the end analysis is the same: if a person does something, then he/she has something to do. Exercise is one of a million choices.

For example, if that student took a ballpoint and inserted it, with great force, into his eardrum, that would occupy his time (and if he managed to spear his brain in the process, it would constitute the best use of grey matter he's yet discovered).

Sounds like a perfect exercise to me.

I'm handing out ballpoints in class next time. I'm telling each of them to stick the pen up to an ear.

And shove it.
-------------------------------------

End freewrite. Huzzah to sleep and, resultingly, a more balanced human being.

What didn't end with the venting and sleeping was an underlying sense of being put out. It's taken me some mulling time, but I've figured out that, in the moment, I was angry at the students who didn't put enough thought or time into their work. After time has passed, though, I still have to concede that, even in the clear light of day, I have ongoing frustrations.

For sure, I'm frustrated when students don't put in the time the assignment merits.

On a larger scale, I'm frustrated whenever anyone signs up for something and then doesn't commit to squeezing out the best possible performance or outcome.

And I'm frustrated at dealing with students who don't avail themselves of resources. If a student admits he has never done well at English or that he has never understood punctuation, and then I advise him to go use a tutor at the free on-campus Learning Center or, easier yet, to email his paper to the free online tutor (which will return his paper, marked up with feeback within 24 hours)...but then he doesn't...I. feel. my. last. nerve. warp. into. a. kink.

To wring out the another truth: I am frustrated at the pressure to keep students happy, at an academic culture based on a business model, one in which students are "customers" (and, thereby, "always right"). While I know teaching at the community college means I'm working with a student population that skews towards learning disabilities, mental illness, and hardknock backgrounds, I do also think I have a right to expect them to--again--avail themselves of their resources, such as free counselors, free advisors, free disabilities services. Certainly, I know it takes an amount of self-awareness and wherewithal to get oneself to the resource. I remember well enough my own youth of blithely tripping along my own zigzagging pathway, oblivious to outstretched hands attempting to steer me straighter.

But, you know, the inability and unwillingness of a populace to do its best work has an interesting effect (which, perhaps, I could write about it in my next Cause/Effect essay): it means the standard-bearers have to fight, constantly, to keep the standards from eroding, from wearing downwards to meet the lack of effort. Put more bluntly: I'm tired of having to clap for a pile of crap.

Does this inspire in you a standing ovation?

So that's where I'm at, here, the day the new semester starts. I wrote out how I felt. In doing so, I extricated those feelings enough to take away some of their power--to allow me enough optimism to start the rigamarole all over again. The gut-level anger has stormed out of the house; but a swirl of frustrations still has a seat on the bay-window cushion, where it glares hostilely out at the driveway.

On the bad days, it'll see me hopping in my Camaro and peeling out in reverse, leaving skidmarks in the cul-de-sac, heading for the bar.

On the good days, it'll watch me detailing the dashboard and humming along to Dan Wilson.

Mostly, if things ever get really bad, I hope it'll confiscate my keys and send me to bed for a three-hour nap.

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.
.

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."
---------------------------------------

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.