LaurieWrites

Shit MY dad says.

I'm going on a long car trip in two days (to two beaches! Two!) so I figured it would be a good idea to actually figure out if my car would make it after a year of relative neglect. I am currently, as in right this minute, being completely overcharged for service due to the random turnings-on of two lights on my dashboard, and tomorrow I need to get tires.

My mother: Hold on, I'll ask Daddy where the best place is to get tires.

Me: I know where I'm going to get tires.

My mother: Daddy knows the best place to get tires.

Me: Okay, all right, okay. {Sighs, puts on shoes}

My mother: Oh, haha, he said go to Weshittires.com

Me: We shit tires.

My mother: Haha, yes, weshittires.com. But he was grinning when he said it. That's not really a place. The real place is Tires Plus.

Stones revisited

(I want to make this italic but I don't so I'll go parenthetical, bear with me. I got nothin today because I'm a bit pressed for time and mental space, but I've been thinking about this post a lot, maybe because of Virginia Woolf showing up a lot in my life this week and maybe because of other things. It's old. I'm going to link it if you want to see it in its natural habitat but I'm also going to copy and paste it because I'm obsessive-compulsive. If I had to name my top five things I've ever written, I think this would be pretty high on the list, and since I seem to have a lot of new people about I thought it'd be nice to share. It holds up in my heart, too. If you've known me for any span of time you've likely heard me say that life is a circle, which I do indeed believe. It's a Big Head Todd song, one I carry with me all the time. Things curve away, they come back to me. They're here and gone and then something else is instead.

And somehow this all fits together in my head.

This is from, let's see, April 2, 2007...and written in the Milestone Germantown Borders. I spent a lot of time there during a particular chapter.)

I'm sitting in the bookstore trying to grab ahold of the words before they leave me. The game club of Maryland is gathered here, and the bookish men and women at the  table next to me are playing a card name whose name I can't remember, even though I recognize it on sight. I once sat across the table from someone and learned to play it myself, wondering why I was there when it made no sense to be, beyond the fact that I have a tendency to put myself in risky places when I stubbornly and often stupidly feel it's worth it.

Names dance across my screen - words and facts and possibilities that I'm trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid to do it. Sometimes I don't think I can, that I'll just let the waves of the next thing wash over me until I'm that half mile down the beach that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and didn't emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can't imagine that no one saw, but maybe that's just because someone has usually been watching me - not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I've never been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you'd believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers where it's warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset. When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China - a concept we'd been taught as children digging holes for sand castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I'd never do it, knowing as sure as I sat there that later that day I'd be getting in a car and heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it, I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible shift in the air around the people close to them when people did things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when they succeeded? There had to be, I thought - at least a palpitation or a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

Woolf wrote to her husband in her suicide note, "You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good," one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. "You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be." They didn't find her for 21 days, after which he buried her under a tree in their garden, a last act of being in every way all that anyone could be.

It is a gift to be that way for people, and it's not easy at all. I see it in the people I love, who take care of each other. I see it as they try to figure out what the deal is here for themselves. And I know firsthand that it's hard and often impossible to be entirely patient, and beyond that to be incredibly good, and to still be honest, and to keep your sanity all at once.

I'm not sure how I went tonight from watching tables full of people having a perfectly good time playing a variety of card games whose names I can't remember to thinking about Virginia Woolf walking into the water, or myself sitting by it, for that matter, with the wind kicked up so hard that I couldn't hold the pages down to write what was in my troubled heart. That day was years ago and most things related to it I've tried mostly to forget in the ongoing reinvention of my 30s, in my determination not to let the too-important past be my entire prologue, and maybe to even surprise myself with a renewed capacity for joy. Details - that sunset, my shoes, the bay in the wind from a second-floor balcony - have come back as I've sat here escaping the things that are important now, today. My rivers, and increasingly the ocean they spill into, are figurative. I'm signed on for the duration here, and although there aren't enough storm metaphors in existence to fully express how that's gone, or might yet go, the rocks are on the shoreline, long since removed from my pockets. There's no room for them in there, with all the spare change and lipstick.

I wish that someone had run into Virginia on her way to the river, like so many someones have run into me, and a glance or a word had pierced her resolve to emancipate her husband from a situation he'd have dealt with gladly, most likely, into her old age. I wonder what something would have brought her out of the darkness. Her story has always nagged at me, is one of the pieces of evidence that sometimes things don't work out, seems a waste. The thought of purposefully drowning scares me sitting here - going under, losing breath, weighted.

The people sit around me and play cards, moving pieces methodically around on boards, deep in thought, talking excessively about trading imaginary gold and building kingdoms. Greek gods are somehow involved at one table as well. One man's voice has a pitch so low it dominates the room, an incessant droning of rules and strategy. I'm going back to the word arranging, to researching the facts, trying to make them mesh with my intuition and my common sense, to discard the idea of stopping the droning man and having him ask his shamans and mages in khakis and oxford shirts to check their runes and make a best guess about this actual human life.

Names dance across my screen - words and facts and possibilities that I'm trying to file alphabetically under what makes sense, whittling them down into a decision that lets me sleep at night, even if I have to sell my car or walk strange city streets alone and mostly unafraid to do it. Sometimes I don't think I can, that I'll just let the waves of the next thing wash over me until I'm that half mile down the beach that you float before you even realize it, when all of a sudden the familiar umbrella and your people are specks down the shore, waving you back if you choose to pay attention.

When Virginia Woolf walked into the water of the River Ourse and didn't emerge, the stones weighing down her pockets, I can't imagine that no one saw, but maybe that's just because someone has usually been watching me - not known to be a strong swimmer. Still, I've never been truly afraid of the ocean, and can spend more time than you'd believe floating on my back, finding the mellow spot past the breakers where it's warm, going up and over the tiny waves, chasing the sun on the tops of my legs and my chest and my face.

On that same odd trip to the beach when a truly very sweet man and I played that card game, I took a photograph of an exceptional sunset. When I finally made it to the sand the next day, I was alone. It was cold out, walking into the water out of the question, except dipping my toes in to say I touched the ocean, a personal ritual regardless of the season or temperature. I sat on the sand with a notebook on that cold March day, and there was no one around for a good distance. It occurred to me that at that moment, temperature aside, I could walk into the water and just not stop, nothing on the other side but China - a concept we'd been taught as children digging holes for sand castles. We ignored the barrier of Europe and Africa beyond the Atlantic, even the idea of the Far East as ephemeral as air then.

I remember writing this idea of immersion down that day, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, knowing I'd never do it, knowing as sure as I sat there that later that day I'd be getting in a car and heading home, gazing out the window and wishing things different, but far away from this idea and the ocean itself. Still when I thought it, I wondered if, miles or just yards away as it happened that people who cared about me were, would they feel it? Was there an imperceptible shift in the air around the people close to them when people did things like walk into rivers not intending to emerge? Especially when they succeeded? There had to be, I thought - at least a palpitation or a whisper of an itch. But maybe not.

Woolf wrote to her husband in her suicide note, "You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good," one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. "You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be." They didn't find her for 21 days, after which he buried her under a tree in their garden, a last act of being in every way all that anyone could be.

It is a gift to be that way for people, and it's not easy at all. I see it in the people I love, who take care of each other. I see it as they try to figure out what the deal is here for themselves. And I know firsthand that it's hard and often impossible to be entirely patient, and beyond that to be incredibly good, and to still be honest, and to keep your sanity all at once.

I'm not sure how I went tonight from watching tables full of people having a perfectly good time playing a variety of card games whose names I can't remember to thinking about Virginia Woolf walking into the water, or myself sitting by it, for that matter, with the wind kicked up so hard that I couldn't hold the pages down to write what was in my troubled heart. That day was years ago and most things related to it I've tried mostly to forget in the ongoing reinvention of my 30s, in my determination not to let the too-important past be my entire prologue, and maybe to even surprise myself with a renewed capacity for joy. Details - that sunset, my shoes, the bay in the wind from a second-floor balcony - have come back as I've sat here escaping the things that are important now, today. My rivers, and increasingly the ocean they spill into, are figurative. I'm signed on for the duration here, and although there aren't enough storm metaphors in existence to fully express how that's gone, or might yet go, the rocks are on the shoreline, long since removed from my pockets. There's no room for them in there, with all the spare change and lipstick.

I wish that someone had run into Virginia on her way to the river, like so many someones have run into me, and a glance or a word had pierced her resolve to emancipate her husband from a situation he'd have dealt with gladly, most likely, into her old age. I wonder what something would have brought her out of the darkness. Her story has always nagged at me, is one of the pieces of evidence that sometimes things don't work out, seems a waste. The thought of purposefully drowning scares me sitting here - going under, losing breath, weighted.

The people sit around me and play cards, moving pieces methodically around on boards, deep in thought, talking excessively about trading imaginary gold and building kingdoms. Greek gods are somehow involved at one table as well. One man's voice has a pitch so low it dominates the room, an incessant droning of rules and strategy. I'm going back to the word arranging, to researching the facts, trying to make them mesh with my intuition and my common sense, to discard the idea of stopping the droning man and having him ask his shamans and mages in khakis and oxford shirts to check their runes and make a best guess about this actual human life.

Fallen Princesses: Art Imitates Real Life

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel,any remaining illusions I had of charmed lives for princesses did too. I was a teenaged Anglophile, one of the millions who woke up extra early to watch her wedding day on tv, and felt real sadness - whether I should have or not - in the years after as that initial fairy tale story crumbled.

There it was. Princesses - at least one,anyway - marry people who don't love them all that much, or at least not enough to cut ties with his ex-girlfriend. She gets an eating disorder and never quite gets over her parents' divorce. She goes through a series of bad relationships and then ends up unthinkably dead in a traffic tunnel. And this when it seems, only just seems, that she might be beyond the worst part of the learning curve.

I'm tempted to sugar-coat this as some kind of life lesson but I fail miserably at that, which may be why Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses photo series remains very much on my mind, a week after I saw it for the first time on the JPG Magazine site.


Even Cinderella's coach breaks down in a sketchy neighborhood. All images brilliantly shot by and courtesy of Dina Goldstein.

Goldstein takes princesses - the Disney versions, this time - and depicts what may have happened after the closing credits. Cinderella's hitching because she got drunk in a dive bar. Snow White looks miserable with a house full of children. And in the ones that hurt me to look at the most, Rapunzel holds her wig of long braids during chemotherapy, and Belle lies on an operating table during a plastic surgery procedure.

As a strictly in-the-moment shooter who knows and chooses not to take on the work that goes into studio photography, I'm impressed with Goldstein's work on a technical level and also of any use of photography to intentionally comment on larger issues. It's one of its most important uses, I think.. In Goldstein's words on JPGMag.com:

As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

Now, despite what any Facebook quiz would have me think, I am not any kind of Disney princess, unless upcoming releases include Princess Who Swears-a-lot, or @Laurie of Twitterlandia. I grew up in the generation after the classics were released - Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella, and they really didn't work for me. I was honestly freaked out even at an early age by the recurring theme of women needing to pass out for indeterminate periods of time in order for things to get better. No thank you. I was way into 101 Dalmations and Mary Poppins, stuff like that, and if anything really scarred me for life it was Bambi.

Real life has not been princessy either. Issues, I have issues. Externally, weight gain, a congenital facial scar, eyeglasses, unfortunate spiral perms. Internally, a crazy penchant for overanalysis and an occasional attitude problem. You name it, I got it. For more appropriate pop culture references, I was Winona Ryder in Heathers, minus the Christian Slater killer boyfriend, or Janeane Garofalo to my best friend's Uma Thurman in the Truth About Cats and Dogs. I maybe passed out sometimes, but there was no guy standing over me at the end crying. (And if there was, he needed money for the tab.)

Now that's just a cheap parenthetical joke. But the truth is, I've been jealous of women whose lives have appeared to be more charmed, more princessy than mine, at least aesthetically. I've thought that real-life girls who were popular, and pretty, and consistently boyfriended, were better off than me.

That's the truth. Sometimes I thought it because they strongly insinuated it, or because social interactions made me feel that way. Or maybe I thought it because of music videos, or movies with impossibly happy endings that looked nothing like my life (or to be honest, anyone's I knew, but we all kind of live in our own head until jarred out of it.) Even last night, watching a rerun of The Office at the gym, I was all, "Look how cute Jim is. Where's MY Jim? Pam's life is AWESOME. I'll just keep doing this here elliptical exercise for thousands more hours and some day, my Jim will come up to me in the parking lot with Dwight who will hand me things to photocopy!"

I said there were issues, right, just so we're clear? Now, I know and you know that Pam is not real, and in most cases I would not indeed like to be a paper company receptionist in Scranton, Pa., (unless Jon Krasinski really did work there, oh my word) but this is what happens to my brain while watching closed-captioned sitcoms while exercising. I have no real desire to fly around with a guy on a magic carpet Jasmine-style, or dance with talking tea cups and butter dishes waiting for a beast to transform in some creepy castle. I would not have argued, however, if Lloyd Dobler showed up in the Malibu. Alas, the person I mistook for him showed up in a trashed Jetta for which he paid $1 and moved into an undergraduate dorm five years later at an advanced age, leaving me behind with a stack of books about letting go Buddhist style and an assortment of irrational behaviors.

Would a princess have better luck? I don't know, because I haven't met any. But life proves to me frequently that real life is not charmed really, for anyone. Happiness is fleeting and weird. Princessy people are happy or sad depending, just like average people, whatever that may mean. I know people who I believe to be very attractive who pick themselves apart worse than I ever have, who are not happy with their internal or external selves. Beauty pageant winners are dethroned, while it is considered remarkable that Susan Boyle can sing at all given her physical appearance, and when she opens her mouth the world pats itself on the back for its enlightenment until she gets second place and ends up hospitalized (there's a Disney theme for you.) And you know, while I'm on the uplifting tip: nobody gets out alive.

Like my co-contributing editor and brilliant blogger Rita Arens wrote about the Fallen Princesses, happiness is relative, and hard-won:

In real life, happiness is the time spent being thankful you aren't going through hell anymore. In real life, we don't know happy unless we've been sad, really sad, or really angry, or really sick. Once we've been all of those things, we learn to appreciate moments when nothing is wrong --- and see them as happiness instead of the status quo.

If Rita's right, I should be accompanied by bluebirds 24/7, and even though I'm not currently bursting with joy, what I'm learning to identify as happiness in her terms is simple contentment, best experienced by not comparing other peoples' experiences and circumstances with mine. This may be why I choose not to watch the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

A larger aim of Goldstein's set might be to realize the very obvious and basic truth that is nonetheless easy to miss when you're caught up in bibbity-bobbity-boo and whatnot: I don't decide happy for princesses and their ilk any more than they ought to decide it for me, no matter what the zeitgeist says. And if I think for a minute that anyone is immune to common suffering like disease, addiction, lost love, or body image issues - no matter what slice of princess life we've seen in movies or through the media lens - that misconception is mostly on me.

As another well-known BlogHer, co-founder Lisa Stone wrote on Surfette in response to Rita's post:

Amen. We live, we learn, we grow up, we are thankful, we learn to find our happiness.

Unless, for some reason, we don't.

Other reactions:

A Cup of Jo finds the series "genius and heartbreaking."

Kelly at DesignCrush liked "seeing the flip side of the typical fairytale."

The Queen of the Quarterlife Crisis was "enthralled" by the images.

My friends and I have been saying for years that it's really the fairytales we heard as children that actually fucked us up. These grand illusions of men climbing up a girl's braid to "rescue her" can really give a girl a COMPLEX. Anyhow, the artist here replaces the "happily ever after" with reality that addresses current issues such as war in the middle east, addiction and self-image.

Fourth- Fruit, flowers and...appliances.

As of April 10 I will have been writing in this blog for four years. FOUR YEARS. This is just astounding to me for some reason.

Four year anniversaries call traditionally for fruit and flowers, which are quite nice, and in modern times, for appliances, so if anyone wants to pony up a high-end espresso machine in April? Well, thanks.

This has been an amazing, intense, difficult, depressing, exciting and very, very daily four years. I've had some awesome experiences and some really, really shitty ones. I've been down in some psychic - and one or two literal -holes for part of it and I've felt at times like the scene in front of me was never ever going to change.

Journalism graduate school really hurt this blog. It took the time I had to write and sliced it into less than half, and often times it jockeyed for time and space with other, graded or deadlined writing, and this was the first to go.

I went to an event last week that in positive and negative ways inspired me to try again. At the very least it motivated me to create again, to talk my way into whatever is supposed to come next. So for the next two weeks, I'm going to commit to writing every day. I may post more than once, I'm not sure. I'm going to go back to the beginning and unearth some things. I'm going to dig around in the dirt of why I started this in the first place and see what comes out on the other side.

It's appropriate. The spring equinox just occurred. The season's changing. My travels have stopped for a few weeks. I'm digging into work and teaching and writing and learning again. I'm aware of the need to be mindful and make plans.

So I hope, if you've been around for awhile (thank you) or if you're new, you'll understand what's going on as a process of excavation, and of setting out on a new path, an overdue one I think. Or maybe I'll just kind of recycle old new Facebook memes, because that 25 Things thing, that really had some juice left in it, I think.

#14 I really, really like espresso, and the lattes it produces when milk is involved. Thanks.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

July

It is incredibly hot in my room. My roommate's dog bit me last night because she was laying by the couch and when I went to get up I nudged her with my foot and it woke her up and freaked her out. I hate when dogs and I don't get along, them being one of the rocks I build my church on and all. I just downloaded Alison Moyet's "Alf," a 1984 gem of a record that I loved then because I was already far too uncool to prefer the old Yaz stuff beyond "Don't Go," which really serves as a snapshot of my failures at hipness but overall success at liking something and sticking to it when that seems to makes sense.

I'm also back from vacation, having survived a 7 hour car ride with my parents and being crammed into the backseat of my father's Cherokee alongside all manner of coolers, grocery bags, crumpled hanging clothes and finally a ridiculous number of towels purchased at a frightening (FRIGHTENING) outlet store somewhere along I-95 in central North Carolina. The place is called JR's, and my mother claims she goes there to buy her perfume for cheaper than Macy's, but really she'd go there anyway. Suffice to say there were Harley grandpas with earrings SMOKING IN THE STORE and also buying Lucky Strikes, unfiltered, because clearly they must only cost 12 million dollars a pack there and not the current 27 million that I notice whenever I blow through the gas station store to buy water or coffee or whatever substance of choice.

Seriously, 6 bucks for a pack of cigarettes, people? I smoked for a long (too long) time and even then, I don't know, I guess I finally quit for serious like 7 years ago, and they must have been like $3.50/4? I literally couldn't afford it, which means it confounds me that people without jobs and bank accounts or fixed addresses seem to have an endless supply of Camels.

Where there's a will there's a way, in George Bush's America. Remember him? I know, right? Barely.

Back to the original point - if you're on 95 anywhere between here and the redneck Riviera, please to stop in JR's. If you're a mental collector of kitsch and weirdness and the occasional sight that kills your soul, you'll thank me. If you're not, just keep on til you hit South of the Border, because that'll do 'er too.

(Pictures of the talking Moses, Jesus and Mary are forthcoming from the Bible books section, and also a shot of the "JUNK FOOD HEAVEN" sign above the snack bar. I did not get one of the "bitching post" sign in the dedicated Harley gear section, but let's just say that there are also leather bustiers and chaps to be had at JR's. Oh yeah.)

Myrtle Beach is still there. I love the ocean. (I capitalized "ocean" at first, because clearly I assign it godlike qualities.) The weather was less than stellar, which was sad, but given that it's poured buckets of rain here every day for a month, I guess it shouldn't be that surprising. I feel myself changing so much that it's really hard to fit into the old familiar construct of my family. There was a time in the back of my father's car on the way back to the condo that I thought I was going to scream or jump out of the car, where I could feel myself...I don't know, molting, shedding skin, popping out of a plastic egg like exploding silly putty. It makes sense, at 37. This is just a really remarkable year of transition and change so far and the way my intuition's talking, it's going to keep going. Whatever. Bring it on. I'm getting used to it, finally.

Now it's back to work for a few days and then on to California, where there will be another beach, I understand, so that helps me get over the pain of the South Carolina rainy days. There's also a $60 admission fee to Sea World out there, so I'm not sure if they're giving away exotic fish to go with it, but again, told I should check it out. I'm going to rent a car and drive down the coast from San Francisco to San Diego, and the thought of that, I have to say, fills me with some kind of weightless elation. I think it'll be really nice.

Before that happens I should probably be more nervous about reading in front of 1,000 people but I'm not. After a long long time of saying no, of being afraid of my own shadow, I'm just doing things, things that scare me, things that I'm neutral about, things that seem to be the next best thing to do. Some of them are falling away, and some are leading to better things and useful things and even things that might eventually put checks in my mailbox and my name on the pages. This is the way, as Rilke said in that quote that's helped me out a lot at various times in my life, you live your way into the answers, kicking, screaming whatever. It just happens.

So I thought just before I fell asleep...

It's such a shame that I can't kiss the back of my own neck.

We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

Writing about music is clearly the procrastination drug of choice this week, as the VH1 background noise continues. Today it's the One-Hit Wonder Countdown.

As a perennial champion of the underdog and the off-the-wall, I love one-hit wonders. And thank you, VH1, because where else is it acceptable to listen to semi-serious commentary about artists like Charlene?
"Charlene was never able to recreate the success she experienced with "I've Never Been To Me." I CANNOT IMAGINE WHY. She took the hand of that preacher man and made love in the sun. Where do you go from there?

Extra points to this show for including Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone and the author of my favorite book of 2007, "Love Is A Mixtape." (READ IT. READ IT. READ IT.)

Rob on Jermaine Stewart's "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off":

"It was a very conservative song for a sadly conservative time. It said, "We can dance and party all night, and drink some cherry wine." So we can stay up all night but we don't have to have sex, we'll just get bombed instead."

I might add to this post if any more words of wisdom cry to be shared.

EDIT: Um, the man who wrote "Funkytown" is the bald, white brother of Paul Shaffer. This is Lipps, Incorporated, with two ps? He now runs a computer graphics company in the Midwest. Wow. (Henry Rollins singing the song just kind of made my day, though.)

EDIT: AGH, Suzy Quatro, "Stumblin' In", Leather Tuscadero! (Trivia: the dude that sang the song with her was in the British band Smokie. I really need a job collating such necessary information for this channel.)

However, did she just say she "kicked the door down" for women in rock 'n roll? Janis who?

EDIT: I can perform "Rapper's Delight" in its entirety.

EDIT: I could be stone cold unconscious and if "Groove Is In the Heart" came on I'd wake up like Lazaraus. "Your groove I do deeply dig." 

DaughterBlogging - Your Own Women's History

Crossposted at BlogHer.

I've been enjoying the Women's History Month coverage on BlogHer.  Maria handled the list of formidable women in politics, while Sarah talked about the greatest female athletes. While they were at it, Leslie covered education, and KPerfetto wrote about the women in music who are - and should be - in the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame.

(If I missed anyone, apologies - half the month hanging out in Vietnam will cause a girl to lose track of her posts.)

Anyway, yes, true, true, women rule in many quarters, all of them arguably bloggable. But when it comes to any woman's history, it really doesn't get off the dime without a woman to (as she may or may not frequently remind you) bring you into this world. No matter how the relationship turns out, we all begin at - and move on from - that beginning

You've heard about Mommy Bloggers, right? Just a little bit? For my last-day contribution here at March's power-woman central, I thought I'd flip that script just a bit and look for some women who are writing about their moms. DaughterBloggers, if you will, with a little bit of gender-bending thrown in for good measure.

The first question is, do you? Write about your mom, that is. A quick scan of my blog shows that I don't, not a whole lot, anyway. I do take a lot of pictures of my mother and those inevitably end up on Flickr, in spite of her concern that "all those people on the internet can see me." And it's not just me, either. There are currently 1,782,529 photos tagged with "mom" on the site.

I don't know why mom stories don't end up on the blog so much. It's not like they're not often quite humorous or even poignant. Maybe I'm just self-involved or too obsessed with writing about caucuses, who knows. When I do mention her, it's often in relating our conversations, which are often entertaining in a "you maybe had to be there" kind of way. I enjoyed a recent chat we had about her thinly veiled attempts at sending me out there into the horrifying singles scene in my town.

Me: Um, did you pretend to be me while you were out last night?
Mom: No.
Me: Are you sure? Because some lady sent me an e-mail - at WORK - telling me how great it was to meet me and sending me a detailed list of singles events in the area.
Mom: Oh, yes. I met her in the bathroom at PGA Tour.
Me: And you gave her my e-mail address why? And pretended to be me why?
Mom: I did NOT pretend to be you. I just TOLD her about you.
Me: Oh wow. Again, why?
Mom: I don't know. She was nice.
Me: And because I so love group activities like apple picking and paintball with people I don't know?
Mom: Well, haha, just delete it. But you never know, it could be fun.
Me: Mom, I've attended two specifically "singles" events when coerced. One was populated by Catholic Star Trek fans, and at the other, my two hot prospects were the George Costanza guy and the old man dressed like a railroad conductor. Pass.

(Please note, if such events have worked for you or your partner is a railroad conductor, this is not a hateful missive. It is simply my view and does not reflect those of the management, including any who may blame the patriarchy.)

Here's another favorite recent conversation.

Mom: I just miss it.

Me: Like Faith Evans misses Biggie.

Mom: Yeah.

Me: Do you know who that is?

Mom: Who?

Me: Right.

Beautiful stuff. The thing is, that as deep and as profound as the relationship can be and inherently is, humor is a big part of it, and conversation even bigger, so that's usually what ends up here. Plus I love the use of dialogue to really crystallize moments, and voila.

I loved this post at the Life and Times of Organic Mama about gifts from her mother.

 

I don’t know if it’s because she lives far way or because she loves how easily point and click sends things wending their way from Amazon’s vast stores to my driveway, but this has lately become a much more obvious trend, certainly during the six months when my father’s precarious health prevented their crossing the US border. By far, the largest components of this kind of giving from my 70 year-old mother are books; if she just read it and liked it, she’ll more often than not buy a copy for my sisters and me. I don’t mind that she does this; it’s endearing, but the best part is that she’ll usually ASK before typing in her credit card numbers. And she’ll listen if what she decides will make my life that much better isn’t something I would use.

Will I do this when my kids are older?

Probably.

PS: While I speak here of the material gifts, I should also credit my mother with my love of words, science fiction, fantasy, interesting patterns in textiles (like socks and scarves), Dutch and other European chocolate, the knowledge of how not murder defenseless growing things in pots, snarkiness in general, how to get straight to the point, and how to be a reasonably good person. And MANY other things.

But she also buys me jackets.

Because, you know, they may come in handy.

Bethany Actually is sorry her mom's leaving after a month-long visit. Nice photos go with this post. 

In a few minutes, we’re leaving to take my mom to the airport in D.C. She’s been here visiting for a month, which would be about three and a half weeks too long for many people to have their mom stay. But not for us! My mom is one of those people who is very easy to be around. We love having her here....When my mom is here visiting, Troy and I try go out on a date at least once a week. Sometimes we go out more often than that, when Annalie asks hopefully, “Mama, are you and Daddy going on a date tonight, so I can have a date with Gramaw? Please?"

Eden Kennedy is back in Colorado visiting and helping to take care of her mother. Her posts about her family's experience - specifically her mother's decilne and need for more care after the death of her husband - are just one of the reasons why this is one of the blogs I've checked in on daily since I knew what a blog was. The photography and Eden's words on the matter are remarkably straightforward and would be helpful for anyone who has walked the walk of adult child caregiving plus adjustment to a parent's aging.

Anyway, I'm out in suburban Denver because my brother, Chris, who lives with my mom and does a large part of her care, sneezed and threw out his back last week -- I can't laugh, I did the same thing once picking up a sock -- so my other brother, Tim, arranged to put Mom in a respite care facility for several days. After some comical delays that involved being pinned between two passive-aggressive frat boys, I arrived late Saturday night, and Sunday I drove over to the old folks' home with Chris to sign Mom out and oversee her transfer into an ambulance for the ride back home.

The ambulance-transfer people were awesome, just real calm and no problem! about everything. It takes a kind of decency I barely knew existed outside of Zen monasteries to deal with cranky, scared, dwindling old people every day. For the record, my mother is not often cranky or scared, she's Just Old, what's known in the gerontology business as being in a "functional decline."

Christy just started a blog in February about meeting her birth mother, and has already been contacted by her.   Her Easter post talked about their plans to meet.

I am sorry I’ve not updated this blog in while. It’s been busy at work and I’ve been in another world to be honest. All is well though.

Donna and I are becoming great friends! It’s been such a trip getting to know her and not to mention - pure joy. How lovely and beautiful to have her in my life.

Donna and I will be meeting next month. We have decided to meet at the beach and just zone out for a few days. It will be so fun to relax and just get to know each other. In May she will be coming here for my birthday and to meet my family.

I feel a little guilty this Easter about not praising God and honoring Lent. My life lately has been all about me and adjusting to knowing Donna. I usually try to give up something. Pray. Reflect. However, lately I’ve just been in a such a good place I have forgotten to be a good Catholic girl. God has given me such an awesome present. I am so thankful.

Monika McGillicuddy wrote this letter to her husband's birth mother.

I wonder if you got to see him and hold him before you gave him away.

It makes me sad thinking that you might not have.

I've held him in my arms, listened to his breathing and comforted him during bad dreams...he hasn't been alone.

I don't know if you're alive, don't know if you have other children, other sons but if you are...I hope that these words reach you somehow.

I want you to know that your son grew up to be a wonderful man. If you're wondering...he is polite, a gentleman, a kind caring guy. Oh don't get me wrong...he's not perfect, far from it at times but I love him and he makes me very happy.

I know that I might not have him today if you had made a different decision that day. I'm not sure if our paths would ever have crossed although I'd like to think they would have, that we're soul mates meant to be together.

I like Belle Melange's story at Gorgeous Mess about the woman she calls her adoptive mom. 

I spoke to my adoptive mother today, from Kibbutz Degania. She’s quite different from me, personality-wise: The epitome of a bleeding heart liberal, she is a firm believer in the power of love to fight terrorists, reiki as the best way to promote physical and spiritual well-being, and similar concepts not frequently espoused in my household. She herself is a numerologist.

New-age shenanigans notwithstanding, she’s very good about giving emotional advice, so during the course of our conversation, I consulted with her on how to address a friend whose boyfriend, I’m fairly certain based on the evidence, intends to break up with her instead of proposing...

 

Carol O'Dell wrote a book I'd like to read about caregiving, in this case specifically for her adoptive mother, who she writes beautifully about in this post. 

Life expands and contracts just like your lungs. Caregiving made my world small in many ways, but it also expanded my thoughts. Caregiving taught me so many things: the resiliency of family, the tenacity of love, how forgiveness is the strongest bond of love, how much more you can endure than you think you can, your ability to juggle, stay on top, reconfigure, mix it up, and fight it out–and how much I want to live and love before I leave this earth.

Another desire is about family–witnessing that part of you goes on, and it’s in part, seeing what I can do, what I’m capable of–it’s creating and recreating in a zillion different ways–biologically, spiritually, artistically, intellectually.

I plan to teach more children how to read and write, hold grandbabies, see the Parthenon and the aurora boralis. I plan to build more schools and hospitals, send a single mother to college–leave a legacy.

Are you half way through?  What drives you? What legacy will you leave?

You may think it’s not, but I promise you, it will. You can’t face death and it not transform you.

 

Liking Lauren's post at Lost In Texas, "My Mom Can Beat Up Your Mom."

 

Not only does she have a tattoo, but she's also currently tied for number one in her NCAA pool--a pool that actually has a $2000 pot! Unfortunately, she made a fatal mistake, calling the tie break at 116. Now some of you might know that I also severely underestimated the tie break (at 108. I know I know, but last year I grossly overestimated it and well jeeze, I'm bad at math), but at least I don't have money riding on it.

BlogHim Bill wrote on the Blog Sheroes Network about his mom's need for a bone marrow transplant and a recent drive the family participated in in their area.

So hopefully tomorrow will be a glorious day where hundreds of people register and my Mom's perfect match will be found. But even if not, the word is getting out a little more and there will be a few more people on the registry.

There are thousands of people looking for the perfect match so they can receive a bone marrow transplant to live. My Mom is just one of those people, as is Emru Townsend. But there are thousands out there, and your bone marrow may be what they need to live.

So please, wherever you are, join the bone marrow donor registry. You may give someone the gift of life. And pass the word along. Thanks.

Finally, some moms want the world to know about their blogging daughters, and vice versa. Are they writing about each other? Check them out and see.

Kathleen Bell points out her daughter Mercy Bell's blog. I like.

Merideth Dodd is a photographer who wants everyone to check out her mom, Debbie Lincoln's, contemporary Western art blog. Really nice.

So that's the deal about some of the bloggers writing about moms right now. Thoughts? Blogs? Please share.

Still grateful for the potty-training (I hear it's kind of a big deal...) Laurie White spares her mother by not blogging about most embarrassing moments at LaurieWrites.

Jazz Hands

My friend Celia asked me to read a poem at the coffeehouse event she threw at her church tonight, and I said I would, so I did. My mom had an emergency appendectomy yesterday, so clearly my wish for the '08 that there be no medical crises in my family or among my friends has already not been heeded and it's only January 16th. She got through it okay and I picked her up from the hospital this morning, and everything seemed stable enough for me to leave the house to be there by 7 tonight.

It was really good, although I haven't read in public for a really long time and I always get so nervous. Going back to the whole "create" goal for the year, though, I'm forcing myself to do some things that aren't my very most favorite. Like reading in public. On a stage. Feeling like one of the football player brothers from The Biggest Loser at this point.

My most beautiful and wonderful friend and colleague TK sang and played his guitar (he is fabulous, really. He could play out if he wanted to on a more regular basis.) and Celia asked me to read a poem in between his songs, so there was just no way I could turn this down. He is one of my favorite people in the whole world, another one who doesn't understand just how talented he is, and I thought that even sharing a stage with him once in my life had to bring some magic to my little world.

Several people from the church participated also, including one man in his 80s who, in what he called his soliloquy on growing older, included his prostate cancer treatment and a line in which he indicated (just BAM, like right out of the blue) that he would never "have an erection or an orgasm again." Al.....righty. What this also means is that if I'm going to be any religion ever again, Unitarian is probably it.

Choosing not to delve that deeply into my own medical or sexual experiences, past, present or future, I read a piece that I wrote for someone I loved, which seemed appropriate given the date and also because I was reading it between songs. I was kind of pleased with it when I wrote it, but it's funny how things you write change in meaning for you over time. I wrote it down on my wordsalad page once, but here it is again.

Jazz Hands

His hands wish for music -
strong and sturdy, beautiful,
willing magic chords out of silent strings.
The groove in his mind, like a session
with Miles at Birdland,
is worlds away from this practice room stool.
"Is it worth it? This hunger? This want?"
I ask, and in a voice like his eyes,
deep as the echoes of jazz,
he says, "Yes,
can't you hear it?"

- April, 2006

Afterwards we all went to Hard Times and it was nice to feel a part of some creative endeavor with people I like. It's been a while, and it's a buzz worth pursuing I think. School just doesn't cut it on that level. Maybe I'll try to write some more poems again. It's been awhile, but if there's one genre in which I fear devolving into mush, it's poetry. I'm just afraid of getting too clinical and journalistic, losing the edge, and that would be sad. Striking the balance is always the most difficult part, isn't it?

And I just still read way, way too fast. Get so nervous.