Dailyish Musings: March 2008 Archives

You know those times when people go through the drive through, put hot coffee between their legs and drive onto the freeway? Then they cut you off and slam on the brakes because they misjudged the speed of the cars ahead of them and their coffee spills all over their crotch and it's hot so they sue McDonald's? And you shake your head and wonder why people are so screwed up?

This would be why. (Thanks Lovage)

Despite appearances, which clearly suggest I am a woman, I have many, many slovenly characteristics that if viewed in the absence of my long curly hair, would suggest that I am actually a man. Firstly, my handwriting is abysmally atrocious and there is not a hint of exaggeration in that statement. If you were to read a paragraph I'd written out by hand... well, you couldn't, but pretending you could, the first thing you would think is that I must be about seventy years old and recovering from a stroke. Since more men than women have strokes, and more men than women actually survive their stroke if they do have them, you might conclude that I was a seventy year old male.

The second dubious characteristic is my serious aversion to housework. Not that ladies the world over love to Q-tip around the faucets or anything, but seriously. If I were to run with my strongest emotion when it came to housework, I'd get a sex change to become a guy and find myself a neat freak wife.

And the final male attribute I'll admit to, is my total lack of photo albums. Yes, I am a mother. In fact, I was even a stay-at-home mom for my daughter's first FOUR YEARS and I have never, ever taken up scrap booking! Kyna is now fast approaching six and I still haven't printed out photos of any of her birthdays (including that life altering first one). I have a few scattered piles of pictures that friends have given me stashed behind the bookcase or in a desk drawer, forlorn and forgotten, but that's it.  

At this point in my life I'll never in a thousand years improve my handwriting, and never in a kajillion years will I begin to like housework, so I figure I had better tackle the photo album issue to secure my position as the Mom in this house. To this end, my good friend Lisa and I have rented an ocean front condo (woohoo!) for the weekend and will be dragging along the necessary trimmings and trappings to create life long memories that will sit and collect dust until we need to drag them out to embarrass our kids when they bring home their first date. With Kyna's blatant infatuation with Harry Potter and by extension all boys with glasses, I'm glad I'm getting started now, because that first date could be tomorrow.

So when Chris went away to do that large study in Pennsylvania he was so smitten by the little experimental subjects he, over the phone and Without Discussing It With His Wife First, told Kyna she could get a pair of mice. As would any red blooded almost six year old, she held him to it and we have now been proud owners of two Mus musculi for three days.

Behold Cheddar:

I would like to acknowledge two recent gifts of music for Kyna that I've totally gotten into.  The most recent was from our friends Mona & Terry and was Electric Storyland by The Sippy Cups, whose fabulous CD artwork gives you a good impression of what the music is like, full-on 60's and 70's rock, heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd and the Ramones, except it's about jellyfish and peas.

My book club, outdoing ourselves and barely even starting our assigned novel until the day of, met on Saturday to discuss our ideas about hermaphrodites and Greek culture free from the cluttering interference of the author's opinions. It was enormously successful since we all managed to fully discuss our own perceptions about the issues at hand, which is really what we wanted to do anyway. We left excited and interested, now that we'd fully voiced our own opinions, to read what Jeffrey Eugenides had to say about the sexes and Greek immigrants in his Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex.

I have now completely finished Middlesex and believe that my preconceived impressions of those who choose to dwell in the middle of things are far more detailed and complex than Jeffrey's protagonist, hermaphrodite Calliope/Cal. The characters in Middlesex are vivid, three dimensional, walking talking beings; all except for Calliope/Cal. Calliope becomes Cal in a fraction of a heartbeat when fourteen-year-old Calliope learns that she is genetically a male, with hermaphroditic genitalia, raised as a female. Telling no one of her discovery she runs away from her parents and the specialists and by the time she makes it cross-country to San Francisco Calliope exists as Cal.  She finds work briefly in a sex club as the main attraction, until police raid the club and she calls her family and returns home. Then the book ends.

There is no in-depth exploration of what it may be like to spend your life straddling the divide, crossing over from one sex to the other, which from the few people I have met, both going from female to male and vice versa, is a long period of integration with a great deal of introspection and self reflection. There is the usual writerly attention to topic and various divided populations are depicted in the book, the Detroit race riots of '67, the plight of the immigrant trying to assimilate into a new homeland, and the cliquey nature of middle schools. While all of these subplots accurately depict real situations, I felt that the promise inherent in the title, a deeper exploration of the murkier middle ground was not fully fleshed out. Perhaps Cal's lack of depth is due to the fact that he is the narrator and we rarely enter the girl Calliope except through her omniscient older male half, or perhaps it is because the author floundered a bit and doesn't really know what it would be like to dwell in the middle of the sexes.

However, the author is a brilliant and skilled writer and the three generations of the Stephanades family are painstakingly and lovingly built. One almost suspects that the book is semi-autobiographical and that these characters have lived in very similar versions within Jeffrey's real life existence.

Speaking of real life, I got caught out using the word 'hermaphrodite' in front of Kyna, who naturally wanted to know what it could possibly mean. I explained that some people were born with the genitalia of both sexes and often felt compelled to fully identify with being either a man or a woman and had to choose. I even went further, since we'd already opened the can of worms, to explain that sometimes people felt like they were born into the wrong body, that even though they looked like a girl or a boy they always felt they should have been born the other.  There was a growing excitement in Kyna as I explained that we could now (to some extent, I glossed some details here) change them over to be the sex of their choice through surgery. Now she was beside herself and very carefully she asked, "Can people be surgically made into animals?"
    "Ah, no," I said. "Why do you ask?"
    "Because I really, really want to be a cat!" she exclaimed, tears welling up over her crushed desire. "Then I could fit under the living room chairs."

So then I had to face the fact that maybe fourteen isn't that far from six in the grand scheme of a life, and the extent of fourteen year old Calliope's introspection and adjustment process may very well have been brief. If the only thing she needed to address was her attraction to girls, then maybe a half heart beat of introspection is sufficiently long enough to decide to be a man after all. I mean if Kyna's greatest desire is to be a cat so that she can fit under the furniture like the kittens, maybe we all have a tendency to pick the strongest (and not always the most logical) emotion and run with it. Now that I think about it, I know I do.

As I've mentioned before Chris has a heavy duty work schedule and trying to fit in family activities has become trickier. My latest brain wave was to try and actually play a board game together as a family, without the use of Skype, on Wednesday evenings. Chris' travel schedule is higgledepiggledy and he only has Tuesdays and Wednesdays available. Tuesday is when I go to my yoga class to receive my weekly life saving transfusion of energy so I can continue to hear about Harry Potter for eight hours a day, a million days a week and not lock myself in the car with a tinfoil hat. Hmm... I hadn't thought of that... I may have to try that out. Tinfoil just might be impervious to repeated Harry Potter trivia, such as: was I aware that Harry had a younger sister? And that she was actually a cheetah?

But I digress, after suggesting that we create some family game time, Chris came up with one of his brilliant suggestions (he'd actually heard another family talking about it on NPR, but given his anti-fantasy proclivities I'm giving him full points for this one), that we start a family Dungeons and Dragons game. At first I sort of choked, the two times I had played when I was a teenager vividly coming back to me. The first game was interrupted by our real life characters discovering the liquor cabinet and the second ended up with my friend and I teaching our fourteen-year-old selves how to drive her parents car at two a.m. on the Island highway. But the more I let the idea sink in, the more I felt it was truly viable, nay, a stroke of genius. Kyna has an amazing tolerance of monsters and wizards and all things magical, her imagination is astounding and there is nothing she likes better than to be told a story, especially if she is in it.  

Chris, who wasn't thrilled with The Hobbit and never bothered with The Lord of the Rings, the man who slept soundly through all of Peter Jackson's marvelous visuals, somehow latched onto D&D as the perfect vehicle for some quality family time. So today I did some research into what we needed then Kyna and I visited the neighborhood bookstore. Trying very hard not to feel totally absurd I found the role-playing section, thankfully without having to ask anyone, and calmly bought The Dungeon Master's Guide. Kyna was less calm. In fact, she loudly discussed what we were looking for all through the store. "IS IT 'DRAGONS AND DUNGEONS' OR 'DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS'? CAN WE PLAY DRAGONS AND DUNGEONS ON MONDAYS INSTEAD? I REALLY DON'T LIKE WEDNESDAYS. WHERE IS THE & ON THIS COVER? DOES IT SAY DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS OR DUNGEONS & DRAGONS? I'M CARRYING THE DUNGEONS & DRAGONS BOOK!"

I think I'll order the dice online.  

So the kitties can climb really, really well. Up until recently their little claws seemed so tiny, I didn't want to cut them too short and hit that little pink bit that you're not supposed to, so I didn't bother. I think it may be time to have a go though. Because this is what our mornings look like. She climbed the whole way up:

I belong to a writer's association, the San Diego Ink Spot, which in addition to providing workshops and a monthly salon, also hosts a quiet space to write every other Sunday at the association's headquarters, a little loft downtown with tables and chairs and rotating artwork on the walls. It is bright, full of friendly people and the most productive place I've ever sat down to write.  Well at least for the two hours I was there today. Which was my first time.  Writing is a lot like finding a pair of tweezers and deciding to pluck all the hair off your body one by one starting with your eyelashes, or maybe a better description is like having to wade ten thousand miles through thick mud up to your chin. It's a toss up really. If you don't believe me, check out Wikipedia's list of writers who have committed suicide.

Tellingly there are no entries under 'doctors who committed suicide' or 'bus driver suicides', no, this category seems to be unique to the scribes and poets of the world. And just as an aside, in case my therapist happens to be reading this, I promise that this is not a call of distress. I would never contemplate such an act. How could I, when I have all this hair to pluck off my body first?

What I've done to make the process of writing less painful is follow some tips I found in a book. (Writing books about how to be a writer is the way 99% of writers make a living. If you don't believe me visit the 'writing' section at your local bookstore.) The first instruction was to lower your expectations. Bring them on down from amongst the stars. Lower... lower... that's it, keep on going...ok!  Stop! Perfect. Right there where they couldn't possibly clear a speed bump. That's exactly right. Next, the aspiring writer was introduced to the Rule of Nines. This is the fact that nine out of every ten things you write will be absolute crap. Nine out of every ten jokes, nine out of every ten paragraphs, nine out of every ten blog entries... you get the picture. Finally, the hopeful novelist was provided with detailed instructions on the best way to poison that internal editor, how to club them with your laptop, hack them into pieces with all that pristine, razor-edged paper sitting in a clean white pile on your desk, and then how to store the chunks in Ziploc bags in the basement freezer.

Using these helpful hints the neophyte ink slinger is now apparently free to write pages and pages of droning prose until there is at least ten books worth, at which point you are supposed to head on down to the deep freezer, thaw out all the little pieces of your internal critic and empty them into the kitchen sink. As with most negative judgments the pieces will ooze themselves back together like the goo of a squished cockroach, and quicker than you can say 'welcome back' your internal editor will be resurrected and slashing it's way through your magnificent opus until it's reduced it to a really zippy paragraph about how your parents screwed up your life.

I'm thinking of writing my own How To book. I think I'll call it The All Important Tangent and How It Can Save Your Blog.

Today for dinner I made Kyna's least favorite dish, spaghetti with tomato sauce. I even cruelly and intentionally mixed the two together so she couldn't skirt around the sauce and only feed on the pasta.  She spent a good four minutes telling me what a shoddy cook I was and that if she ever caught me doing such a sneaky underhanded thing again she would put me in time-out forever. Eventually she realized that I wasn't paying any attention whatsoever to her rant, and she let her attention wander.  Her eyes fell on a drawing she had done at school. Or rather, five drawings, well, more precisely five individual pages each with a very small flower drawn smack dab in the center.

As she considered these pages she was absently putting food in her mouth and swallowing it, but I judiciously didn't bring that to her attention. Finally, as if coming to a very deep and profound decision she asked, "Can we start to keep all the papers I bring home from school?"

Now let me be clear here, those five scantily clad pages that came home today are on the low side of the daily average. If other children are anything like Kyna, I think we can all stop worrying about the environment right now, because in another year we just won't have one. Isn't that reassuring? No more trying to convince everyone of the impending doom. There won't be any such thing!

"IF," and I stressed that if heavily, "you were to keep them, where should we put them all?" I was thinking of the already overflowing filing boxes where I keep the really good ones that I can't bear to put in the recycling bin.

"The safe." She said with all seriousness.

A couple of years ago a friend who had need of such things gave us her old safe. She was moving into a new house that had a built in affair and no longer needed the old one. I was delighted, but also clueless as to what anyone would actually put in such an exotic piece of furniture. When I asked her about this puzzling conundrum she smiled patiently and told me that it was useful for all sorts of things, documents, stocks, emergency cash, things of that ilk.

Two days later when the 800 lb unit arrived looking very much like a bar fridge that had been refurbished to be a tank, and I'd watched the moving guys wrestle it into position beside the washing machine I called Chris over and we took stock of our emergency cash situation. I had $1.20 in my purse and Chris had a whopping $11.86. We pooled our resources and carefully placed our $13.06 emergency fund on the velvet lined inner shelf. To the best of my knowledge it is still there, safe and sound.

Kyna: "I've decided to be nocturnal."

Me: "Oh really?"

Kyna: "Yes. I'm going to have my supper in the morning and then sleep in a dark room all day."

Me: "Is that so?"

Kyna: "And in the evening I will get up and eat breakfast.  After that I'll creep around the house for a while."

Me: "Creep around the house...?"

Kyna: "Yes. So don't be shocked if I don't go to bed when you tell me to tonight."

Me: "Ah, that kind of nocturnal."

So while I will not publicly endorse any of the current political front-runners for President in the November 7th elections, I will say that any one of them will be far better than our current administration. I am also following the primaries of both parties with something verging on obsession and found the recent skirmishes between the two Democratic hopefuls mildly amusing. Specifically the very candid interview Obama's policy advisor, Samantha Power gave to the Scotsman.

Frankly, I found her attack disdainful and dim. If you really want to lob a personal attack at someone at least do it with some flair, let the wit bite, and don't pull your punch.

Samantha Power could use some pointers from our Australian and British allies in this regard. For example, do you think the former British Labour leader Michael Foot was waffling about whether or not he was on or off the record when he called Conservative MP Norman Tebbit a "semi house-trained polecat"?  

Or how about former Labour MP Tony Banks when he accused Margaret Thatcher of acting "with the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor."

He also commented that the former conservative MP Terry Dicks was "living proof that a pig's bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to Parliament."

You can just feel the love.

But they could also sling them back. How about when Dennis Healey likened being verbally attacked by Sir Geoffrey Howe as "like being savaged by a dead sheep."
 
Fairbairn, who had a political career under Thatcher's Conservative party hurled a variety of insults in his time including describing Thatcher's successor, John Major as a "ventriloquist's dummy", and that to call John Major "grey" would be "an insult to porridge."

But the British don't have a monopoly on acerbic wit; the Aussies could nominate Paul Keating, one of the finest insulters in the political sphere that ever existed, based on sheer number of opinions thrown.

For example, he claimed his successor, John Howard, was a "desiccated coconut", and that Howard's deputy; Federal Treasurer Peter Costello was "all tip and no iceberg."

And his thoughts on the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Peacock:
"I am not like the Leader of the Opposition. I did not slither out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot."

He also claimed that a union boss giving him trouble was "like Muammar Quaddafi, but without the ethnic charm."

And about John Hewson, the then leader of the Australian Liberal Party:
"(his performance) is like being flogged with a warm lettuce", and "he's like a shiver waiting for a spine."

John Hewson was also the recipient of what is perhaps the most original personal attack in the history of the universe, and my personal favorite: "He's like an abacus gone feral."
 

With the recent rain, our backyard has become as verdant and lush as the Emerald Isle, covered entirely in a type of clover, except this clover is not like the clover of my childhood, there are no white or purple flowers around which bees happily buzz. Instead, like many desert plants, this softly mounding carpet of shamrock leaves has little yellow flowers whose innocuous nature mutates into a spiky brown Burr Of Terror as soon as you aren't looking. This is a discovery I've just made. All last summer our house could have been called 'Little Korea' because the back yard was more desolate than the demilitarized zone and twice as dangerous. A two-inch deep carpet of insidious burrs covered the entire expanse, as well as the kitties every time they had to use the facilities.  

I was completely at a loss as to where these lethal little mines had come from until Kyna ran outside one clear morning after a recent downpour and exclaimed that we really ought to get a horse for our backyard because we had such a bumper crop of clover going.



And after some close inspection I spied these sharp telltale beginnings of the burrs.


 
Representatives of Little Korea and Kyna are currently in tense negotiations over whether we actually have room for a horse or if we can get a more economical goat instead. A rogue independent proposed a weed-whacker but we've Taken Care Of Him.

So Chris is away for the week, some big deal study is underway in some obscure research facility, and I must admit that usually it is a huge relief to have the schedule all to myself. I know that no one else is there to rely on, I am responsible for absolutely everything and I can do it all my way. It's brilliant. I get up, knowing that Kyna would happily stay in her pajamas all day if I didn't, and get her dressed, fed, brushed, packed and in the car and off to school a good ten minutes early. It is a calm, straight forward procedure. Which differs drastically from when Chris is actually home to 'help'.

Under those circumstances I'm so concerned about Chris having a chance to fully participate in the raising of his daughter that I ignore the alarm and go back to sleep for half and hour. This is after all, prime time for some getting ready bonding that I would never want to deprive him of.

Interestingly, he fails to recognize this amazing gift and uses this time to sleep as well. And then the whole getting up procedure becomes a rushed resentful affair with everyone sharing in the misery.

You may feel that I should probably get up and help sooner, but I know that if I did, pretty soon it would be de facto my responsibility every day and working my way out of that rut would be a long hard slog. That, and I've just found out that I'm incredibly stubborn. No kidding. I found a website called Colorstrology that matches your personal color for reflection and meditation to your birth date and gives a brief description of what you must be like. My color is Pantone 16-5106, Blue Surf, and this is what I'm like:

"You may seem flexible on the outside but no one can make you do something you don't want to do."

I'm not very superstitious, and never ventured past treating my horoscope as a light amusement, but this assessment is spot on. I never quite thought of it as stubborn, strong and confident were the words I used, but nevertheless it couldn't be truer.

However, as the days tick by, I find that I miss Chris quite a bit, and if I could share a glass of wine after Kyna went to bed and snuggle up to watch a movie with him, I could probably overlook a little morning hell. In fact, maybe I'd even try to get up and help out. Just a tiny little bit.

I am not publicly endorsing any political candidate in sharing this link, however, I do think that living in a country that can contain this type of internal contradiction is brilliant.

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0454699420080305

As I turned out Kyna's light and left the room, her little high voice called out to me in alarm, "I have nothing to hydrate myself with!"

Yes, she actually used that term: hydrate, with that exact phrasing. And as almost always, except when she is judging the distance walked, she was exactly right. I had failed to provide her with a water bottle for the night. I handed her a freshly filled bottle and she thanked me adding, "I wouldn't want to risk becoming dehydrated!"

Definitely not, because then her vocabulary might dry up and she'd have to ask for a drink of water like a normal child.

We have a new grocery store in our neighborhood, Fresh & Easy. Kyna and I actually took one of our shopping bags and walked the mile through the neighborhood to check it out. Which was very pleasant, except the discussion we had to have every three minutes about why we hadn't taken the car.

Finally, as she was giving up all hope of ever reaching our destination and was just telling me what a liar I was about everything I'd ever told her, and that this 'short' walk really was the last straw, we reached the little strip mall and saw the cheery green and yellow storefront. Fresh & Easy is a designer's dream. A consistent packaging theme for almost all items, with a few local favorite brands thrown in to provide interest and consumer choice, concrete floors and white shelving, organization and branding everywhere, all reinforcing the idea of a simple neighborhood grocery spot. A place to wave to your neighbor over the specially packaged tiramisu while your kids, in matching soccer uniforms head for the cookie aisle. This is the grocery store for the organized, mother of two who uses Martha Stewart recipes. In fact, this grocery store was so polished I began to get suspicious. Their marketing was impeccable. In comparison Albertsons and Vons seem over crowded and faceless, the food megaplexes of the grocery world, the corporate overlords, fat and complacent in their monopoly. Other people obviously felt the same way because for a week old store it was pleasantly bustling with Sunday afternoon shoppers.  

Arriving home I found that their attention to detail had not faltered when it came to the Internet, and their website was perfect. Too perfect. It provides detailed information about the local produce, their neighborhood donation program (suggest a local charity and they'll donate a thousand dollars), and a link for the Spanish-speaking soccer moms. This was a super company! Green, locally oriented and cute! Then I dug a bit deeper, a.k.a asked Chris, and lo and behold, his memorization of obscure trivia proved very useful yet again. Fresh & Easy is owned by Tesco, the world's third-largest retailer, behind only Wal-Mart and Carrefour of France (which living in America, I'd never heard of).

Mystery solved.  Vons and Albertsons watch out.

The part that I find amazing is that he never actually swore. I didn't realize that level of frustration could happen without a healthy dose of expletives.  (Thanks Lovage.)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1079049493/bctid1437285837