sputnik

And, bring on the hearing aid, please!

2010-08-10T12:03:00.004-05:00

My inability to understand popular song lyrics is getting worse, to the great amusement of my sons, who can understand anything, including obscure mispronounced rap. Not only do I literally not understand the "enunciation" (if one can properly call it that), but I also do not understand the slang, culture, context--it might as well be beamed down from outer space by aliens.

Lately we (the boys and I) have fallen madly in love with the Seattle band Fleet Foxes. We started with the legendary "Mykonos," and then started snooping around on Rhapsody for the rest of their songs. We also found a fantastic video, a claymation by the lead singer's elder brother. The song is called "White Winter Hymnal," and we have had many discussions about what its possible meanings are/are not. Some of our ideas about meaning are grisly--or perhaps it doesn't mean anything and it's just an exercise in vocal beauty. For such a tiny lyric (the same thing three times and it's over), it's a hauntingly beautiful song with the usual unbelievable harmonies for which Fleet Foxes are known:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQRS40OKNE

Anyway, the first time I heard the song, I of course MISheard it and was more confused than ever, to the boys' great delight. They LOVE it when I make linguistic mistakes and lord it over me with glee. I thought the lines were

The eye was following The eye was following The eye was following . . . (etc.)
The pack of SWALLOWS in their coats
With scarves of red tied 'round their throats
To keep their little heads
From falling in the snow . . .

'Tis a puzzlement, no? I said, "Why would a pack of swallows be wearing scarves? Why would the scarves keep their little heads from falling in the snow? And, swallows are migratory and show up at Mission San Juan Capistrano on March 19th; why would they be flying over the snow in the first place?"

Tyke cracked up, and said, "NO, MOM! It's 'I was following the/I was following the/I was following . . . The pack all swallowed in their coats/With scarves of red tied 'round their throats/To keep their little heads/From falling the snow.' Gees, Mom, you are so STUPID sometimes!"

I still don't understand why red scarves would keep anybody's head from falling in the snow, unless it's a gang-related costume, and unless the Michael referenced later is not part of the correct gang. I have also considered that it was about dogsled teams, but that doesn't really seem to pan out, either. However, the part I find grisly is

And I turned 'round and there you go
And Michael you would fall
And turn the white snow red as strawberries in summertime

Sounds like bleeding out to me. Yeccchhh! But I still love the song and the video, meaning or no.

Dic-tion-ar-y

2010-08-03T11:04:00.005-05:00

"Dictionary" is a word my children, 18 and 13, do not recognize as part of their generation's extremely limited lexicon.

I do not understand people who don't use books. My answer to all their questions is always, "Go LOOK IT UP!" We have a huge home library for all uses. And they have been well-trained by me and by their teachers how to use a dictionary. I have a dictionary--many, actually--a whole shelf of them--and always have one by my side. Today's dictionary-by-my-side is the Oxford American (language guide edition), but if someone asks a question I can look it up anywhere in the house, even in the OED, faster than they can find it on the web.

I'm always running over to the boys with dictionary in hand. "Look it up," I suggest, helping with the helpy book. "Nahhhh, that's all right. I'll just go to yourdictionary.com" (and get a brief and not thoroughly explanatory definition, with probably no etymology or language of origin or history).

I suppose what really bothers me the most is not their unwillingness to look something up in a book, but their unwillingness to look up ANYTHING. There's just no intellectual curiosity going on. This is ridiculous in a household where both parents are total chronic bookworms, always reading, always asking questions, always trying to learn something new and doing it all with JOY. We have set the stage and are playing the roles all the time, but we have no audience!

Thing #1 spends all his time composing music on his electronic pianos and the computer, or ruining the guest room by building makeshift recording studios and nailing my favorite blankets to the walls. He never reads anything but IM or Facebook.

Thing #2, at this moment, a regional and national champion swimmer, is Mr. Social Butterfly (hahaha; butterfly, get it?). He is multitasking: addictively texting ALL DAY with multiple girls at once on his phone, eating a whole huge bag of tortilla chips, looking at millions of pictures of himself and the team members that other swimmers have posted on their Facebook accounts, smoothing his curly swimmer hair, looking at Narcissus through the webcam, and listening to Rhapsody streaming music with earphones.

Yesterday, while on the phone texting, of course, he was planning a first date to the movies with a girl who has been a slow burn for the past year or so. I was going to drive him, but not stay, since he was nervous enough and he's a good kid who does not need a chaperone. So as he's texting this girl, he is trying to type the word "chaperone" and asks me how to spell it. (The masculine is "chaperon" and the feminine is "chaperone" and we were talking about a mom coming along.) So I told him how to spell it and he typed it into the phone. THE PHONE'S DICTIONARY did not verify "chaperone," so he concluded that I DID NOT KNOW HOW TO SPELL.

Look it up, a$$hole! Then the inevitable: "How can I look it up if I don't know how to spell it?"

GAAAAHHHHHH

Bad Hair Day

2010-05-11T10:08:00.006-05:00

Admittedly, my haircut and color are easily four months past their "use-by" date. Even when it was at its best, my hair took on other people's personalities and appearances while I was sleeping.

It's an odd bit of family history that, after 15 generations on both sides (even, more amazingly, in my DH's family too) in what is now the United States, absolutely everyone in the line having come from England since the Norman invasion (and we know who they were because we have the documentation), the one darn rogue Irishman who slipped in somewhere along the line often expresses himself in my hair. I can look at pictures of daddy and my ginger grandpa and his 13 siblings and his pioneer mother, Granny, and see the same stubborn waves in exactly the same stubborn places. It's weird, as if I'm not myself--I'm THEM. There's a peculiar huge, unconquerable wave on one side in front. Nothing squelches it.

Even with a new cut, I wake up and look in the mirror before brushing my hair to see who I am starting out as today. Frequently it's John F. Kennedy. Other days it's Conan O'Brien. (See? The Irish never die.) But in response to the Kennedys and O'Briens, it's not Irish but Anglo-American eyes that are smiling.

I'm not at all horrified when I skip countries and go to Scotland, and I see Rod Stewart in the mirror. I could so use that energy! And wish I could play soccer. And some mornings I go home to England and am just plain Mick Jagger. Not bad! Goes well with my wrinkles and smile, but alas, not my bank account. I'm pretty sure I couldn't handle the touring, even at my not-so-alarming age, either.

Well, now it's grown out. I've had some surprises as it extended itself. An amusing one was Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd.

But my very somnolent Academy Award best was this morning--I loved it so much I went around for hours without brushing my hair--Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?!

Cannibalism and Self-Destruction Ads

2010-03-11T11:49:00.009-05:00

I'm getting weirder in my older age and considering going back to complete vegetarianism. My subject today is not a new trend--it's been around for a long time--but it just really annoys me, and I notice a couple of ads circulating right now that especially get my goat. GOAT! Get it?

Saturday Night Live has, for ages, done various parodies of restaurants that specialize in selling meals such as, say, chicken, or rabbit, or pork, and they've made fake ads in which the persuasive ad "character" is the animal that is on the menu. Those are kind of funny in a disturbing way. But the real commercials that currently bother me are about a cereal family, a child in a play portraying a sandwich, a talking chicken, and a fish.

First, the cereal family. They are a brand of shredded wheat squares. The parents are large squares; the children are little squares. The ad depicts the cereal family at home, with a traditional dad in his easy chair after work and the little kid square putting on the dad's big shoes. The gist is that the kid square thinks he "has big shoes to fill" if he's going to be like his dad. But the dad tells junior that he need not get as big as his parental unit. In fact, kid square is just the right size to be eaten by human kids! Such cheery news! Here's a dad pimping out his own son for human consumption! This is just so . . . not right.

Second is the school play with the sandwich. Child is dressed in a sesame-seed bun as a sloppy joe, the contents of which come from a can. The purpose of the ad is to convince consumers that this brand of pre-made sloppy joe contains "a full serving of vegetables." The bun-portraying kid taunts other vegetables on stage, namely the corn, for being a grain and not a vegetable. Do give me a break. To add insult, the second scene of the ad shows the kid's family at the dinner table with the kid still in costume eating sloppy joes. So, the kid is eating herself for dinner. That's so . . . not right!

Third, the chicken--not a costume chicken, but a real chicken--is apparently lobbying her famous-name, mega-poultry-company CEO for unhealthy food. He talks about how all their chickens only get the best feed. Then he upbraids the hen, "And no candy, Gladys," and she clucks sadly, "Uh-oh." She stars in an ad for people to eat her. Darnit. This is what she has to look forward to, and she doesn't even get to indulge herself in a little candy? Not fair! Find the peanut M & Ms and pig out, Gladys. Go for it before the guillotine gets you!

Finally, the fish. it's one of those artificial taxidermied singing plaques.

. In everyday life, I have a morbid fascination for those awful fake singing fish. If I had a really obscure basement that hadn't been renovated into a nice walk-out suite, I might actually have such a plaque, because I get guilty and shameful pleasure out of the kind of kitsch that just makes you say, "Huh?" Or "That is SO TACKY!" It's morbid fascination for the hopelessly unwanted and non-artistic. This is why I own a bunch of silly animal figures that started with a white-elephant party when I was a child. My first idiotic animal was a ceramic dish in the form of a turtle rolling around on its back with a lid made of its plastron and a way too-long tail that curled up over its tummy and its insanely smiling head curling up to stare at the tail--it just looked WRONG, and so it was hilarious. I don't even tell people I enjoy these kitschy things; friends just sense it in me and give me embarrassing stupid animal gifts. My kitchen is filled with them. I even have a braless mermaid and a wooden trout hanging in the window. And then there's e-Claire, the cast-iron cow, whom I found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Cam the Ram, her cast-iron counterpart, whom I use to hold open cookbooks. And Curtis, my furry buffalo statue, a gift from my husband who knows I had a childhood fear of bison. One of my dear friends calls my unnatural interest "whimsy," and brought me a solid glass turtle paperweight from Finland whom she appropriately named "Finn." He greets people in the entry hall.

Anyway, as usual I digress beyond recognition. Back to our ad's scaly friend, the fish. He sings, "Give me that fillet of fish! Give me back that fish!" And he's singing about the contents of his own body, which has been put into a sandwich. Eeeewwwww! He's wagging his fish tale while the guys who bought him in a sandwich are eating him on camera! That's . . . not right!

Mandates

2010-03-03T14:38:00.005-05:00

Not of the congressional kind, but of the offspring kind. Demands. I have probably already written up on this here blog my Raggedy Ann Theory. Everyone in this family sees me as a tool, not a person. I'm Raggedy Ann sitting stupidly on a shelf until somebody needs me and throws me around, and I'd better be available 24/7 and never argue against their preposterous wants and better drop everything else to instantly and magically fly to meet their needs.

The week before Christmas, Thing #1, the Elder, who is going to conservatory next year (maybe, if hell freezes over), phones me from his first school (goes to two, long story), and gives me a LIST of things to do. I have 15 minutes to do them all and still drive to the school! Yeah, right!:

Bring $20 to the door of the school so he can order a slew more transcripts.
Be there at no later than 12:45.
Put money in his online lunch account because he ate everything up yesterday and just found out there's a zero balance.
Bring him a hot lunch because the cafeteria won't let him have anything right now.
Bring seven postage stamps of the postcard denomination for the transcript office.
Give him a ride to the other school in the city to make it on time for afternoon class.

RIGHT NOW! No "Please" or anything. Heaven forbid.

So like the idjit I am, I jump into Whirling Dervish mode, find $20, and replenish the lunch account while leftover pasta is sizzling in the microwave. Then I speed to the post office, because, wouldn't you know it, we have no postcard stamps and I am NOT going to give him seven precious Forever stamps for some dumbbell postcards.

I zap over to the post office, which is mobbed with people sending last-minute Christmas gifts, and stand in line biting my nails up to the elbows waiting for those postcard stamps. Then I run back across town to the school, with the "hot lunch" getting colder every minute.

Kid takes the $20 and the stamps. Comes back to the car with the entire book of stamps and stuffs them in the door handle. I give him a "what the . . . ?" look. I hand him the lunch and fork and napkin, and he says, "Turns out they let me have a lunch." That's when it hits me: my car is small, and my arm is LONG and strong . . .

He is a teenage piggert, so he decides to inhale the pasta anyway. We get stuck in lunch-hour traffic on the way into the city, and he's cussing because I am going to make him late! You see where the BLAME lies? It's my fault!

When I drop him at the door of the Academy, he has forgotten his ID badge which opens the security door, and he has left the stamps sitting in the car-door handle.

I drive off.

"Eh?"

2010-03-02T13:36:00.024-05:00

St. Lucy, Martyr

Warning: This post will, ultimately, be about song lyrics and a saint, however off-kilter the rambling intro might be. And, this is not the kind of "Eh?" people refer to as Canadian, speaking of the recent Vancouver Olympics, which I am heartily glad are over. I have no use for ice fornicating (Robin Williams calls it something else) or maybe I should call it ice pornicating, but I love speed skating, half-pipe, and skiing. Other than that, I can't stand it. I mean, girls, cover up your waggy little fannies with real clothing and quit dragging your ponytails on the rink [you're too old for a ponytail, by the way!] and quit simulating orgasms in public [perhaps I should have dropped the L and said "in pubic"?] , and quit crying the disgusting glitter off your eyes like a baby if you don't get a gold! Wash out the industrial-strength hairspray and have real hair! JEEZ!

Which digression randomly brings me full circle to my thesis: my "Eh?" is the Old Person kind of "Eh?" The kind old people used to say when they couldn't understand what they thought they heard, or perhaps they heard nothing because they were too stubborn to wear a hearing aid. It's the kind my great-grandfather used to say at the Sunday dinner table, peppered alternately with, "Suuuuurrre." "Suuuuurre" always meant that he sure hadn't caught what we'd said and could he have another slice of rhubarb pie please, Gramma Flo.

As I get older, I admit that as my body diminishes I grow less tolerant of general foolishness: bad driving, buckwild crazy parents allowing their children to run like bulls at Pamplona in large public places such as warehouse discount stores, "journalists" working for such esteemed publications as the WSJ who cannot distinguish between the words "gads" and "scads" when context says they clearly mean "scads" (and by the way why are such colloquialisms showing up in the WSJ? I will tell you why--they have almost certainly fired all my colleagues, the copy editors, and no longer even have dedicated beat reporters but use random remote quickie stringers who have no clue about their location, audience, OR content.)

Retreating now from the rant about my beloved newspaper industry, I also have no tolerance for women in really noisy clicky high heels; I want to stick my leg out and trip them. In addition, I can't stand people who whistle aimlessly and improvisationally and cannot carry a tune to save their lives; this holds for people at home as well as those in public. And the people at home know who they are and are regularly admonished to STOP IT! I want to smack my hand over their lips and take them down. That is just the beginning. Clearly, there's not room on the entire Internet for my list of peeves and grievances.

Lately, what really gets my goat is not being able to understand the lyrics of the music my younger son, the champion swimmer, likes. I hope with all the maximum iPodding his ears don't wind up looking like Michael Phelps's, although he is eating almost an actual pig in a blanket and three gallons of--coffee--ice cream--every day. (See Saturday Night Live on Hulu episode with Michael Phelps--v. funny to a swim mom.) Also, regularly, he says, "Mom, listen to this awesome song!" And I listen, but I don't hear and comprehend anything. I don't understand the lyrics AT ALL. I might hear and understand, in my own way, the words of the lyrics, but I don't know what they mean in the context of the songs.

He listens to more and more pop and rap and I just don't get it. I ask him to translate. And I still wind up saying, "Eh?" Recently, he started playing a pop, not rap song that he and I really like. Not terribly new. Very dancy. It's called "Replay." The artist is Iyaz, and the music is poppy/Caribbean. It opens with, "Shorty's like a melody in my head." Tyke was streaming the song from Rhapsody way across the open family room, and I was trying to listen, but all I could pay attention to was what I could NOT understand. So I said, "Wait, Tyke, did he just say '/Like my eyeballs stuck on a plate?'" My son nearly sprayed his ginger ale all over the monitor. "Mom, you are an R-tard!" And I was laughing, too, because just when I said it I did realize that not only was I an R-tard in his eyes, but also that I had made a completely subliminal reference to artistic representations of Saint Lucy, and my son did not get it because he knows nothing about saints or art history, and I thought that was hilarious right back at him. I was laughing more because he did not understand my allusion than because I hadn't understood the lyrics.

I guess this may be a generational thing, but so be it. So I asked him to play the song again, and he said, "Mom, it's 'like my iPod's stuck on REPLAY! Not 'my eyeballs stuck on a plate!'" In truth, these are the lyrics:

"Shorty's like a melody in my head/that I can't keep out, I be singin' like/

Na-na-na-na every day/Like my iPod's stuck on REPLAY [echo replay]"

I stood corrected, but now every time he plays the song we deliberately sing it "Like my eyeballs stuck on a plate!"

But my mishearing doesn't stop there. Another line from the song I did not understand sounded to me like, "I'm afraid of a pork chop." So, again I said, "Tyke, tell me he did not just say 'I'm afraid of a pork chop'!" And he said, "Mom, what is WRONG WITH YOU?"

"That girl--like somethin' on a poster . . ./some other line/That girl she's the gun to my holster . . ."

It may be neither here nor there, but furthermore I take umbrage at the metaphor of the girl being the "gun to the holster." Because, I think if you consider the image you will concur that the boy is probably the gun to the girl's holster, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

And another stupid ad

2009-10-07T11:14:00.005-05:00

Some time ago I posted about a particular pregnancy test that seemed to me completely inappropriate. I don't think pregnancy tests themselves are inappropriate--in fact, until finishing menopause (hooray!) I found them pretty handy. But this same company now has an ad, narrated inexplicably by a man (why does he get more credibility than a woman who would be the expert and marketing target?) which claims, "One out of four women can misread a pregnancy test."

First, stop the fear mongering. Of course they don't. They're terrified of the answer either way, so 100% of them are certainly jittery but not too dumb to figure out the result. You'd be surprised how that hightened awareness can focus one's mind on making sure she understands the results of a pregnancy test.

Second, hell's bells. What kind of idiotic spawn are we turning out if one quarter of women are so stupid that they can't read a plus sign for positive or a minus sign as a negative? Duh? They have to have whole words to explain it to them? If they can't read a single sign, how can they read a whole word?

If this claim is true--and I don't think it is--I suspect rampant illiterate texting and IMing, combined with ignoring reading and any other sort of homework, may be a contributor.

Next they'll come up with a test that talks to you after you pee on it ("Yes, you are pregnant!" "No, you are not pregnant!"), because the manufacturers assume that the women are so challenged they can't read at all.

Seafood

2009-09-17T17:39:00.004-05:00

Gosh.

Another dumb ad.

Sorry, but I can't help it.

This one is for a national seafood chain that starts with "red." You know what it is.

The announcer says the name of the chain, then says, "where the shrimp are endless!"

Well, I hope so; if I'm paying that kind of money for a meal, I hope they're shelling the shrimp and taking the tails off.

Where I Was 9/11

2009-09-11T08:05:00.004-05:00

It's that anniversary again.

I'll never forget the shame I felt, and still feel, about taking things so for granted.

At the time, we lived in upstate New York. That crystal-clear, beautiful morning, I did not go in to work because we had made an appointment with a bathroom remodeling company. The tv and radio were both off, since I reveled in spending any free morning time practicing recorder and piano. The bath designer was supposed to show up at 11:00, so I whiled away the time and paid a few snail-mail bills, feeling a little lonely because the kids were at school and I was curious about what was happening at work. I missed my team and my work writing and webmastering, and thought about my neighbor across the street, wondering what she was doing.

Eleven o'clock came and went, with no one showing up to look at the bathrooms. By 11:30 or so, with no bathroom people, I became incensed about their cheeky lateness, and by noon I was steaming mad. Not only that, but I had called the remodeling company three or four times to find out what was keeping them, and no one had answered. There was no receptionist. I left messages, but no one called back. This company was the most vaunted remodeler in the region, and I couldn't understand how they could have such a good reputation and not answer the phone during business hours on a work day.

Standing in the silence in the kitchen, it occurred to me that I could call work and just hear how things were going. I reached my team leader, thinking I could ask him a couple of questions. But before I could say anything, he greeted me with a bizarre level of incredulity. "Why are you so calm? Don't you know about it? Don't you know what happened?" He was always a calm and affable guy, and his stridency was quite out of character, and scared me. Then he told me about the towers. After swearing a few oaths, I immediately turned on the tv, hung up the phone, and stopped thinking about the remodelers entirely.

Because of the overwhelming with this event, I never did reschedule the bathroom visit, and never got any bathrooms remodeled. Which is just as well. Because a few months later, our company went through unprecedented massive layoffs, and although I wasn't laid off, I had to leave my job because my DH was let go. We'd have had to move immediately after fixing things up the way we wanted them anyway.

That's what I was doing eight years ago. Relatively speaking, remodeling seems ridiculously trivial. Even though we moved far away and now have a different house that desperately needs updating, I'm still remodeling-averse. It would be disruptive and depressing enough on its own terms, but with the added dimension, the thought is just traumatic. STILL.

Yes, as many of my friends tell me, I have a problem getting on with things. But this one can't be forgotten.

Lysdexia

2009-09-08T14:01:00.003-05:00

DH and I have been discussing getting a new bed. He has a long history of back problems and introduced me to futons 20 years ago. I was skeptical, but quickly came to appreciate a futon, and that's what we've used as a mattress ever since. I can't even sleep on a conventional mattress anymore, and after too many hospital nights on a mock tempurpedic, have rejected memory foam as well. We have an antique bed frame but, because it was only a full size and we needed a queen, I came up with a bizarre design whereby we could build a platform out of our old futon frame and rig it so that it would lie flat instead of folding. He and his dad nailed it together, mounted it on the frame, and voila! We tossed a queen futon on top and it was golden. But that was more than 12 years ago.

So elder kid heard me talking about the frustration of going out mattress shopping. And suddenly he made an astounding confession about something he'd been harboring for about 13 years. He said, "Mom, did you say 'futon'?" And I said, "Yes, we're going to replace our saggy lumpy one." Then he said, "You know what? When I was really little, and you said the word 'futon,' I always got it mixed up with 'tofu.' And in my mind, I thought they were the same thing, and that somehow your bed was made out of, I don't know, dried up tofu. But it never occurred to me that that wasn't okay. I mean, maybe they could recycle tofu as a futon. It's soft and foamy. And the bed was comfortable. So I was good with it." Well. I guess my jaw dropped for a minute.

This is the same kid who thought (at age two) that TOFU was "toe food," and he would eat it and watch his feet to see if they grew. He's simply tofu-challenged; that's all there is to it.

Yeah, buddy. tofu/futon. Almost an anagram! And to think I never knew this was rolling around in his head. But, as usual, I don't think I want to know much about what else is rolling around in there.

Throwing The Book At 'Em

2009-09-08T08:26:00.006-05:00

Well, Blogger is misbehaving today and won't let me put this photo where I want it. So please bear with me. I already wrote the text and there is a particular place I wanted to put the photo, but all for naught. Furthermore, all the line spacing is weird, and I can't seem to do anything about that, either. It's doubling, tripling, or doing nothing randomly. My apologies.

I've had the most curious "argument" with family members lately. The argument makes no sense, because it is about a completely subjective, personal preference. I keep being told my preference is WRONG. If I know perfectly well what I prefer, how can I be wrong? It's my taste, my opinion, it makes sense to me, and I'm sticking with it. FOREVER.

The problem is, I maintain that I love physical books. LOVE THEM. Always have, always will. Especially vintage or antiquarian books. Despite my best efforts at teaching my kids to use books, however, they have steadfastly resisted the book adoration. In our common room, on a desk conveniently positioned next to their computer, I set up a reference book area. Who uses it? Exclusively ME, for my editing work. The boys would always rather eat a bag of nails than do the taxing, tedious work of cracking a dictionary or The Chicago Manual of Style or The MLA Handbook or Roget's Thesaurus or Garner's Modern American Usage. Even their foreign language dictionaries languish. You'd think their very arms would fall off if they lifted one. It annoys them to no end that when they ask me a reference question I can always find the answer in a book anywhere in the house faster than they can Google it, or, more's the pity, than they can refer to that second-rate hodgepodge of misinformation or missing information, Wikipedia. Why can't they just type it in and get an easy, canned answer and not endure the pleasure of actual thought and discovery?

Several worries assail me. First, their growing up in an age of not valuing books retards their skills. Even if they know how to spell a word, they will not use the proper process to look it up. This freaks me out. How could you be "taught" how to look things up in a dictionary since you were four years old and STILL not be able to demonstrate it at age 12? And, an aside--it scares the heck out of me whenever I enter homes (kids' friends' homes, relatives' homes) wherein there is no evidence of books. No bookcases anywhere. How can people live like that?

I learned to read when I was three. You'll see me practicing for this momentous event in the photo.

What I find funny about this picture is that I'm holding Mother Goose upside down. And that is how I first learned to read--upside down and backwards. I remember sitting across the little built-in kitchen table from my mom when she was reading the morning newspaper (in our house at the time, it was The Los Angeles Times). And I started reading the big headlines. I read them upside down and right-to left, but I'm a lefty, so that makes some sense. I remember saying, "Mommy, what is a Budd-hist?" She was kind of shocked.

A book is a wonderful thing to take to bed, to while away your time while waiting for a kid's activity, to take to an indulgent breakfast alone, even sometimes to a soak in the tub. These kids are almost devoid of these experiences. Volunteering to use books in any of those ways would not occur to them, and that's what makes me sad. They don't think of books as their forever companions. Now, we have always, always made it a point to read to them almost ad nauseam and they are required to read before bed every night. So they do know about reading in bed, but they don't go happily rushing into it without reminders. We have demonstrated the example all their lives. Somehow the deep cultivation has not set genuine roots.

And then there's the "argument" about electronic readers such as the Kindle. I am unanimously overruled by family on this subject. I do not want to use an electronic reader. Just because the technology happens to exist, must I be obliged to use it? I say a resounding "No!" I want the comforting aesthetic experience of creamy paper, deckle or gilded edges, leather or cloth covers and real dust jackets with author bios on them. More than often it's a paperback, but I don't care. I don't care if a book is heavy or if I have to shine a light on it. I don't want a book that shines at me in a nondescript neutral font. I want to examine colophons and end papers such as those in the Everyman's Library series ("Everyman, I will go with thee/& be thy guide/in thy most need to be by thy side"). I want to keep finding the endearing back pages that say something like, "This book is set in 12-point Monotone Bimbo, with chapter headings in Basketball Overextended, both faces designed by the legendary Adolf Pfupfl and characterized by noble, full-bodied proportions with complex, slightly fruity serifs."

Most important to me is the fact that I can riffle through the pages at will instead of having to scroll. My mind remembers pages in a photographic way; I can almost always remember whether a particular passage was verso or recto, and how far down the page it was. I love the visceral experience of flipping back and forth and always finding what I'm looking for. On a continuous scroll device, I won't find it, and will just want to throw the thing. (Trust me; I know I would!) If the device were able to project on the wall or ceiling and I were in the bath, it might have some merit. But otherwise, no.

So maybe it's cool that you can carry a whole library with you at one time. I won't argue that point. But I don't feel a genuine need for that, either. It might have been useful, though, when I was in college and grad school and running feverishly from place to place. Or, maybe if you can bookmark it, useful for teaching notable passages in class. But, still. You can do that by bringing a book to class with relevant pages flagged. However, you can't hook it up to a projector. So maybe in this sense I'm losing the fight.

Yes, books have a way of causing an irritating level of clutter. I admit to having them everywhere, and they require dusting or vacuuming, and they're always migrating from one case to another. I no sooner get them all organized where they fit than I have to go through them and try to reorganize. I'm always making wrenching decisions about which books I must purge in order to take on new ones. I always have one or two discard bags going. I have piles all over the place. Right now, on the end table, I'm delving late at night into: an ancient copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (a re-dip--read it when it first came out); an absolutely tattered two-generation paperback of Great Expectations; two volumes of excellent poetry by Kay Ryan; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; and the short-story collection Homeland by Barbara Kingsolver (another long-term re-dip).

I'm heartened when I see my book piles. Seeing them directly as physical objects, I feel as though I'm looking at friends. They are me in some way. As a kid, I used to climb trees with a book and sit up there all afternoon while spying on the neighborhood. Serendipity! In sixth or seventh grade I read The Hobbit in a tree. After that, most of Ian Fleming's James Bond series (you know, light summer reading). I don't want to take an expensive electronic reader up a tree or into the bathtub where an innocent fumble could electrocute me. If you drop a book from a tree, it will probably be just fine and won't explode or get a cracked screen. And you can dry out a book.

So flog me. I love books!

Why My Feet Hurt

2009-09-04T11:19:00.002-05:00

Finally! Thanks to Burlington Coat Factory, now I understand WHY have painful bone spurs in both heels! No more Causal Sandals for me, buddy.

I also have a great photo of a huge lime-green aisle sign from CVS pharmacy that says, "Warts & Lice," but I can't seem to get it off my cell phone and onto the computer. I like to walk down that aisle and see if anyone's horrified.

Silly Snippets, More Dumb Ads

2009-08-28T16:43:00.009-05:00

1) Just saw an unintentionally funny quick clip news ad on our local NBC tv. The marketers' INTENTION was to get viewers to capture news on video and send it in to them as front-liners so that then the station can chase the story.

But the graphics text and voice-over on the ad was, "See it! Shoot it! Send it!" They have NO idea what they just said . . . too funny.

Well, maybe they should be careful what they ask for!

You ought to do that with the next snake or rabid coon you kill. I had more deer on my property eating lilies and groundcover today. Had I had time and the deer not been so quick, I'd have dragged my archery kit out of the attic and taken aim at what I saw, then sent it to them all wrapped up in a big box with a nice ribbon. As for the news station, won't they be surprised what people send to them? They'll have a whole new set of stories to tell!

2) Elder kid, who will return to school Monday after having barely finished his summer AP homework by the skin of his teeth (and not very deeply), has spent much of the week with girlfriend at her beach cottage. He's been in the sun and in boats, in water and sand. He is, effectively, braindead. We had a complicated family weekend and Dad and Tyke were going to a separate beach gathering in the next town over from where elder kid was staying. But girlfriend's family were not scheduled to come back this week because girlfriend goes to a different school and doesn't start as early as Monday. So we had to set up logistics for Dad and Tyke to swing by and pick up elder on their way back.

That was a long preamble to what I'm planning to say: I had to have several phone conversations with elder. But he was so touched by the sun and salt or perhaps chemicals in Long Island Sound that he could not speak a single coherent sentence. Every time we talked, he hung up without saying goodbye, and just left me hanging on a logical cliff. Each time I was stranded, thinking, "Did we communicate anything there?" It was exactly like the Saturday Night Live "revolutionary" character on the Weekend Update segment who wears a jacket from the Army/Navy surplus and tries to argue against newspaper headlines, but never has anything to say. Elder's typical side of the "conversation" was:

Elder kid: They. Like. You know. So they're not. I mean. (five minute pause, during which I'm waiting for more information, or should I say any information at all)(sentence starts up again after I've forgotten what he already DIDN'T say in the first half . . . ) So, coming back, no, uh. Like. I think. So. Can you. I mean. [people are talking animatedly in the background, and he's listening to them, not me] I start to say something, and he immediately starts talking right over me.

Me: Elder, will you stop talking over me and listen to what I have to say, please???!!

Elder: Uh, oh. Yeah. But.

Me: Go away and think. Call me back when you can express what you think you need in a complete sentence! [click]

3) Tyke, having just finished a grueling week of USAA swim clinics, seems to have been affected by the chlorine (this is not the first time). He's lounging around on the comfy chair. We were watching some show on tv whereon the actress Calista Flockhart was a guest. I said, "Tyke. Do you know who that woman in the turquoise dress is?" He said, "No." Then I went on to explain that she is a long-time partner of Harrison Ford.

Tyke looked at me, and then his expression turned to pain and consternation. He said, "Wait! That's impossible! He's like, way DEAD, isn't he?"

At first, I thought to myself, "Oh, because he's so young, he just thinks Harrison Ford is dead because relatively speaking, he's an old guy."

Then Tyke said, "But, Mom, the guy invented the automobile assembly line a bazillion years ago! How could he still be alive?"

Of course I cracked up. I said, "Tyke! I didn't say HENRY Ford! Don't you know who Harrison Ford is?"

He said, "Uhhhh . . . no."

"The guy in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Presumed Innocent, and Witness."

Then he started laughing and said, "Oh, yeah! But, he is kinda old, though."

4) There's a new dumb ad. Not sure how new it is, actually; I generally tune these things out. I don't buy or use many "beauty" products except my same old shampoo, conditioner, MAC foundation, eyeliner, the fabulous Revlon Colorstay Overtime, and a single coat of Orly nail lacquer (I've used the same stuff for years, though I do toss out and refresh it from time to time).

ANYHOO, this ad is for some company (couldn't determine what it is, and wouldn't hawk it anyway) for an "EYE ROLLER." Its purpose is to tighten up the wrinkly skin around your eyes. PREPOSTEROUS! I am perfectly capable of rolling my eyes without an implement, thank you!

5) Then, finally, this, which has nothing to do with anything else I said, but which fills me with absolute wonder and admiration and happiness nevertheless--SWING it, Temptations! I haven't learned how to embed a video, haven't had time or inclination to learn it until now. Sorry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4GniJYzGa8

Balls of Fire

2009-07-14T10:54:00.005-05:00

Baseball! After half a century on earth, I, the artist and bookish writer/editor, finally got bitten by the baseball bug. It's largely because I was not competent enough to understand what was going on in Tyke's games, and now that he's outgrowing Tykedom he's deeply involved in travel ball, which forces me to be involved--we have to drive all over the state and I am stuck. So I had DH give me a crash course and I started watching the big leagues. And that's when the trouble started . . .

I was formerly a vague Yankees fan, only because that's the team Tyke liked. I just sided with him because he was my kid. But now, I've been watching the Yankees and the Red Sox. I live in a place that's between Yankees territory and Red Sox territory, and the loyalties around here are fierce and opinionated. People get downright confrontational. I always just thought, what the heck do I care?

It seems I'm rapidly going over to the Dark Side. The other night I caught myself recognizinig players not by their faces or what the announcers said, but by their NUMBERS. And I whoop and holler as if I'm in Fenway Park watching them pick it off the Green Monster. Help me. I'm officially a goner. And even worse, I've betrayed my Tyke, and he's disgusted with me.

In other news, I was listening to the announcers' banter, and collected a few phrases that gave me pause. As a newcomer to the game, rules, and terms, these gobsmacked me and I laughed myself off the sofa. No one else was here at the time to straighten me out and give me definitions--apparently these are things people say, but I didn't know what they meant.

"That ball's got hair on it!" Whuuuttttt? That just sounded wrong to me.
"It looked like a can of corn when he hit it." What the heck does he mean? Oh, I guess I can sort of see that in the pitch.
"With that first piece of cheese, they're hackin'." Mouse bait.
"You know I love gas." I don't even want to go there.

Now I have an even better reason to like baseball--listening to the jargon.

And, it ain't over till Big Papi says it's over!

Anagrams!

2009-07-07T15:18:00.004-05:00

I had a moment to party. A friend sent me a funny anagram e-mail, and then I got to thinking--and that's when the trouble started.

I took my first and last names (which are not what I'm professionally known as--I always use my middle name) and tried this anagram generator. The results were predictably hilarious.

http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/

My name came out:

Herald Tuna!
Adrenal Hut
Hauled Rant
Death Lunar (so good for a character in Star Wars or something similar)
Hated Lunar
A Hated Runt

and my personal favorite,

Ardent Hula!

Reprise: Dumb Ads

2009-06-17T11:39:00.005-05:00

My old bugbear is back. I just can't shake these things. While they may stick in my mind, they're completely ineffective as marketing tools. But perhaps I'm just an unusually discriminating, tough market.

First, I should again freely admit that I watch too much TV. But I do like it, especially since the advent of DVRs.

Second, there's a new smackdown child smarting off to parents in an ad. This is where our kids get a lot of ideas (ideas that don't fly in our house any more than pigs with wings). SMACK! DOWN! Last time it was the child who would consume nothing but liquid nutritional supplement. This time the winner is the fish-stick girl. She's no older than three, but she harangues her mother about feeding her "minced fish." She rolls her eyes and snottily corrects her mother (help me?) by saying something like, "Do you seriously think I'm gonna eat minced fish?" Or, "Did you ever try eating minced fish?" Mom looks crestfallen and afraid, and immediately produces something else. Instantly. The child rules her world. Are you effing kidding me? Then the child says something like, "That's more like it. Crunchy and tasty." As usual, I won't name the brand because I don't want to give it any credit in my column inches. But, mind, this is a three-year-old child and the items on her plate are no bigger than her little finger and almost entirely breading. To parody another, ancient ad, "Where's the fish?" Reminds me of the joke, "Mommy, mommy, I don't like little brother!" And Mommy says, "Shut up, Susie, and eat what's on your plate!"

Third, the "royal" fast-food joint has gone way too far with the Halloween mask character. They are paying an actor under there, but they have to add a molded plastic face? And they have a huge adult in costume riding around on a pocket bike? What's the intended audience? I am waiting for this chain to go bankrupt from bad advertising. The day can't be far away.

Fourth, another repeat offender: Charmin (R). Please, Mr. Whipple, come back to life! I'm not sure if I reported this particular "episode" earlier, but the bears are back from their nasty, water-fouling, urgent potty romp on the beach, and this time the baby bear requires help from parent bear with the toilet paper again. This time it's not about using too much paper. Oh, no. It's about the lint on the child's rear end. I think the parent chases the child to vacuum the lint (can't exactly remember), butt what I noticed was that lint was ABOVE the child's tail, not below it. That is not a vacuuming problem. And just between us, I don't carry a DustBuster or corded vacuum when I'm in the woods.

On the same subject, there's another--the bear family go driving into the woods. Is that environmentally sound? They stop the car, pile out and, you know, do what bears do in the woods. I just can't stand this campaign.

Fifth, and another SMACK! DOWN! is the screaming guy who does laundry detergent ads. Some random weird guy thinking it's okay for him to enter my family room and yell. Every time he comes on, everyone in the whole house starts screaming. "Mom! Why is this guy screaming?" And I reply, "Kids, I DON'T KNOW WHY THIS GUY IS SCREAMING!" Even so, I will avoid any such product like the plague. I will never, ever try it.

However, on the other side of the coin, there are some current ads I really like.

I love the PBS ad in which a frustrated composer is sitting at his piano, trying to write something, and looks out the window to see birds on wires that form the treble clef. He writes the notes as the birds are configured, and comes up with the PBS theme.

I like the series with the PC guy and the Apple guy.

An ad for a carpet-cleaning company shows a little boy upbraiding his Bassett hound for making a mess on the floor, lecturing him that he's not going to take the blame again.

I think the Windex birds are hilarious, leading the homeowner to smack himself into glass doors. Of course, this would not be funny in the least if it were real, but it's pretty amusing when you think of it as birds conspiring vengeance on humans for having clean windows. I must say that with people, at our house, such a thing would never happen. The windows are WAYYYY too dirty for anyone not to notice a barrier. We don't have any sliding doors, either; and because the house is on a hill, the big windows are almost three stories up--so people are pretty careful near them. Our house is in the woods, and despite the dirty windows, birds regularly kill themselves on windows too often, and it's very disturbing.

Then there's the Cheerios ad with Steve and his wife. This is one of the most honest, real home-life conversations I've ever seen in an ad. Steve stupidly says, "Are you trying to lose weight?" or "Are you watching your weight?" Wife is deeply offended. She stops eating, and says, "No. Why?" He says, "Nothing. It's just that the box says it has xxx calories." She says something like, "Do you think I need to lose weight?" He replies, "No, it's just the box." Finally she asks, "What else does the box say?" He says, dutifully, "The box says, 'Shut up, Steve.'" The wife beams at him.

Finally, I really enjoy the nerdy Jimmy Dean ads with the sun making breakfast, and the sun helping the moon be full (that's the cutest one), and the sun feeding all the planets so that they all become awesome. They're dopey and cute at the same time. Alas, I do not eat sausage, but the breakfasts look good--like your entire day's calories good!

Wrong Impressions

2009-06-11T08:52:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while, a situtation arises that makes you mistakenly read a book by its cover. I've had this happen with neighbors and clients. You start off on a seemingly karmic wrong foot, and every subsequent encounter between you only intensifies the wrong impression you have of each other. One time we had neighbors who had different ideas about how socially close people should be with their neighbors. We had a very small party exclusively for people DH had hired into a team at work. They were talking company confidential stuff meant for no ears but each other's. The next day, the neighbor lady called me up, crying, and asking why I hated her and hadn't invited them to the party. Whuuuutttt??? On many occasions our children played together, and their children always made my elder son the bad guy or "the devil" because he wasn't a churchgoer. The final straw was when their idiot huge Golden Retriever pup got off their property and was roaming my backyard. I went out to take him home. He thought it was a rollicking game and dodged me for half an hour. By the time I finally corralled him, he had bitten my butt and torn my pants. I went to their door with my hand on his collar, and I looked pretty dishevelled. The neighbor man looked at me horrified, as if I had STOLEN the dog outright from their yard. It never occurred to him that someone in her household had turned off the invisible fence. He regaled me. What the heck was I, brazen hussy, doing with his champion bloodline (but idiot) dog? I politely suggested that the fence was not turned on. And did this neighbor ever thank me? Or replace my pants?

Well, that was a long preamble.

Anyway, the other day I was going to pick up my older kid at the high school. To get there I had to stop at a particular scary intersection that is renowned for causing accidents just because of its design. I was first in line at the very long light to cross the intersection, and noticed an unkempt elderly man on the corner. My wipers swept away a light drizzle. The man had wild, long white hair, a straggly white beard, and was wearing shorts that were too short, a regular tee shirt, and beat up athletic shoes with no socks. He'd topped the ensemble with a deeply wrinkled black trench coat that only a flasher would love--it looked as if it had been balled up under a bed for six months. Furthermore, he looked quite vague and was gazing around the intersection as if in confusion. He did not seem like a homeless person or bag person--just untidy and somewhat disoriented.

I thought, "Oh, great. This guy is going to start walking across the street in front of my car just the second my light turns green! I just know it!" As I said, the light is very long, so I had plenty of time to ponder and get all worked up about hitting him as he crossed. He kept casting his eyes about. And, finally, he did an extraordinary thing. My light was still red, but apparently he had been calculating the timing of every light in the intersection. When he had figured out that no one had a green, he strolled slowly and confidently across that very wide intersection on the diagonal to get to the other corner. He made it in perfect time before my light turned green. Will wonders never cease.

So I had gotten all worked up about a semi-deranged somewhat bag person who I was certain would walk in front of my moving vehicle, only to find out he knew exactly what he was doing. The very next day when I went to pick up elder kid at school again, I saw him again. Only this time he had cut his hair and beard, wore socks, and had put away the trench coat. He crossed straight rather than on the diagonal. And the only outstanding feature of his appearance was a huge walking stick that was definitely not the kind that's carved and polished, but some tree limb considerably taller than he was that he had found in a yard along his walking route.

Consolation for the Pity Party

2009-05-11T11:10:00.002-05:00

Hoo, boy. I guess I went a little overboard in my preceding post about Mother's Day. Things could certainly be a lot worse . . . I just wish they would have a little consideration ONE DAY A YEAR. I truly have not raised them to be inconsiderate slobs.

But right after I finished that post, I remembered this and felt much better after I watched it, because it's so funny.

It's Mr. T honoring mothers in a thoroughly charming rap from way back in the '80's:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFNJLs-Ql0o

Random Mother's Day Musings

2009-05-11T07:36:00.007-05:00

I've kind of run out of stupid things the Tyke says (which is quite unusual). So I have nothing to report there, although I'm sure he'll replenish the supply soon. Actually, that's not true; I do have one! Baseball season has gone into "full swing" as it were, and he is quite an accomplished and obsessed player. He's in a major league that has three ages and he is one of the "elders" this year so the coaches depend on him as a mentor. I'm not proud of the Tyke's smugness about his "elder" status. One of the newest, littlest kids on his team said this weekend, "I played center bench for four innings!" And the snarky Tyke shot back, "Oh, did you play LEFT OUT, too?" That was mean, and certainly does not belong in "a gentlemen's game."

In other news, I had one of my worst Mother's Days ever. Boo-hoo, I am having a little pity party! I myself do not have a mother anymore, so I could not fob off my disappointment on another generation. First off, the boys forgot until at least half way through the day (Tyke) and the big one demonstrated complete oblivion. In fact, the big one decided (without consulting anyone else in the household) that he was going to invite a bunch of boys over to have a band practice. This is a jazz kid. He majors in jazz piano and vocal at his arts academy. He decided to have a ROCK band practice. On my Mother's Day, which I had cleverly envisioned and deeply wished to be a day of specifically designated peace and quiet during which I would blissfully READ while receiving occasional hugs and whisperings of adoration from my offspring. Hah. Dream on.

On the other hand, my DH made me a lovely breakfast. Which is not his job because I am not his mother, but he did it anyway. That was the bright spot . . . it then went downhill . . . First of all, whoever decided that Mother's Day should be Summer Travel Baseball Tryout Day? DUH. Even the madrigal choir director figured out practice should be canceled.

So in troop the boys, who I must admit are a clean, courteous and personable (not to mention genuinely talented) lot. But LOUD. And since they were my guests I was obligated to provide snacks and beverages, which flies directly in the face of my Mother's Day credo: Do Not Lift A Finger for Anyone Else Today. This also one reason I hate previously unannounced invitees. I have no way of being prepared to be a courteous hostess. On a Sunday, I am likely to have few things left in Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, and they are certain not to go together. Such as, say, canned mushrooms and evaporated milk, or niblets corn, chicken broth and popsicles. You would think the popsicles would be okay, but not when one kid is madly drumming, another is pounding piano, and two others are banging away at guitar. The hands are heavily engaged.

Luckily I found a can of frozen lemonade and loads of popcorn.

This is one of my perennial gripes about 1) Mother's Day and 2) my birthday. They will not do anything to help. They will pile up dishes and mess and dirty laundry, etc. but not wash or clean up, because their theory (while misguided and disrespectful, not completely illogical) is that the "special" day only lasts ONE DAY and eventually, if they wait it out, it will not be Mother's Day or my birthday anymore, and then they will be off the hook and I will have to go back to doing it myself just as on regular days. BOO!!!

So the kitchen looks pretty much as though a bomb hit. The empty popcorn bowls and dutch oven full of little burnt kernels and water jug and lemonade pitcher are waiting for me right now, along with the breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes. I am disenchanted and unmotivated and mad and not a little vengeful.

Then what happened? The Tyke and dad escaped all the noise of the band (baseball tryouts), and got back after 5:00. The elder kid SAID his band would only go two hours, but they stayed until 6:00. Then the elder kid suddenly (and I thought suspiciously) asked if he could go to the reservoir. We live in a wooded area where there's a series of reservoirs that are treated as parks and recreation areas. I couldn't really understand this so I told him not to go inside the reservoir, just take the walk up and back. I associate the reservoir with places where people get into trouble or go for walks with friends to scheme or tell secrets. On the other hand, families go there for running, picnics, dog walking. You don't hear about crimes there--but I just don't like it.

This was the Insane Clown Mom Posse coming out of me. I am completely traumatized by the reservoir unless we all go there as a family and are roped or chained together. It has been many years, but in 6th grade big kid "left for school," but actually ran away to the reservoir on a rainy day (scheduled to snow) without adequate outerwear. He stole stuff out of his father's mountaineering pack, including a large knife. He took a book about Daniel Boone, thinking it would tell him everything he needed to know about living in the rough. He took a large amount of cash he had saved from pet-sitting. (Idiot.) He had bought into a local urban legend that a "hermit" lived on the island in the reservoir and he was going to go live a while with the hermit and kill deer to survive. This was, not coincidentally perhaps, the year he was in the musical "Tom Sawyer."

Since then I have refused to let him go to the reservoir alone. He wasn't the frantic mom who had to call school and 911 announcing a missing child, invite a policeman into the house and give a photo and other descriptions, and sit and worry sick. Three hours later the policeman drove him back to the house, with little to say to him other than, "Did you know I'm a certified diver with [local water district]? Why do you think our town needs certified divers at the reservoir?" And kid thought for a split second and said, "Uh . . . because people might get killed or drown at the reservoir?"

And that was that. To his surprise, when he came to the door I was not weeping with gratitude. I was MAD. I wasted no time, gave him a sandwich and took him straight back to school. I said, "You might not have started out your day at school, but there's no reason you can't finish it there." His teaching team thought my "tough love" strategy was brilliant. He didn't try it again.

But that spectre of horror has never left me. So last night I got very upset after he was gone about half an hour, then went hysterical. The Insane Clown came out and begged DH to please, please, drive up and search. The very very minute the car was in front of the house, kid came home. Everyone thought I was absolutely crazy, kid came in, and all was well. Almost.

Finally people started noticing that I had not set foot near the kitchen, so DH asked what I wanted for dinner. (This never changes year to year--it is always Asian or Indian takeout.) I said I was not in the mood for Indian. I had conveniently set out a menu from our new Japanese place, but it went unnoticed. UNFORTUNATELY our favorite Chinese restaurant, which was right around the corner, got very bad over the past couple of years--so bad we could not tolerate it anymore and quit ordering. Recently it opened up with a new name and new management. We had never bothered to venture in, for obvious reasons. UNFORTUNATELY it was a fast, easy choice, so DH went there (without asking).

Worst "Chinese food" I have EVER eaten. One dish was a seafood thing. I always like shrimp, but this had scallops in it (which I cannot eat, an DH knows this!) and purported to have lobster. I tried the [one tiny piece of] lobster and it was like shoe leather. I found only two shrimp, but this is a family of four. All the rest was icky sauce and scallops. I think there was one pea pod. So I tried the "chicken." One "chicken" dish was upposed to be sesame. It was not. I looked on the receipt and there was an "orange chicken." DH said he did not order orange chicken--that he had ordered General Tso's and sesame. Anyway, whatever it was, it was all nasty. All the chicken sauces tasted like ketchup thinned down with water and rethickened with cornstarch. I could not find any chicken in the chicken. It was all deep-fried batter that was tough and actually unchewable. Hardly any vegetables to be found anywhere, except a few pieces of broccoli. Then there was the eggroll--like dry brown kraft paper. Looked old and perhaps pre-frozen. I had a couple of bites of rice (hard to screw up), and left the table, throwing away what was on my plate.

I really hate to waste food and I know that even though it was bad, it was not cheap. I'm sure I set a bad example for the boys by leaving the table after voicing my disgust, but, honestly, YUCK.

Now it's not Mother's Day anymore. Hark, the dishes await.

Thought Salad

2009-04-27T08:55:00.005-05:00

This post won't taste good, even if you put your favorite dressing on it. I just have a bunch of completely disparate things to toss together. And, just now, EEEK! There's a big ant walking across my keyboard, but that's irrelevant.

Spring is here, or rather, the seasons seem to have skipped straight from winter to summer with barely a visible warning from trees and flowers. Right now it's 84, and reportedly it's planning to be 90 tomorrow. Help me. While the trees still look positively lacy, the weekend was hot enough to make us switch from storm doors and windows to screens, open the windows, run the attic fan, and even break out a small turbo space fan. It was the hottest weekend in recorded history for this region. I hate it. I have no problem with cold. I can always go around the house wearing sweaters and blankets to get warm when the house is 52, but I can't get cool without wearing garments that I consider inappropriate and/or embarrassing, and I sweat like a pig. It is completely out of character for the weather to be hot in April. In fact, it is not unheard of for a surprise little flurry to occur.

Where did this stupid ant come from? Go away, ant. I'm going to have to capture him and put him out. He is putting footprints between the pages of a document I was given by its author, archivist and historian at Old Sturbridge Village, "Mail in 1830s New England." But I digress.

The main evidence of "spring" is that the road termites are out prowling around, weaving madly, cutting everyone else off, and making outrageous left turns starting half a mile from the intersection, thus requiring them to ride up the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic. This includes mentally unstable college girls and huge landscaping trucks with their trailers. Normally, any other time of year, this would simply be an obvious indicator that the license plates read Mass., but now it's just that people are buckwild crazya$ coming out of hibernation.

New word/title coinage: Tyke asks for eggs for breakfast on weekend. Dad is a master at eggs. Dad makes magnificent omelet containing all of Tyke's favorite flavors. Tyke howls for a full 30 minutes, "I don't want an omelet, I want scrambled." He sits at the table and picks. About then, Dad asks if I want some eggs. I say, "Sure, I'd like scrambled!" Dad goes berserk. "You're not helping me out here!" Hint, hint. "Actually, I'd like an OMELET." Then the big kid, G., says, "Who do you think you are, Dad, The Omelettier?"

Insomnia: I finally got two nights of sorta-sleep after four nights of wide-open eyelids. The primary reason was probably my anxiety over G's "final" surgery to remove his cardiac catheter, which took place Wednesday. The insomnia started Tuesday night. Then, Wednesday night, in case he needed help, water, food or meds I slept on the sofa and, for the comfort of the affected part, he stayed in one position on the huge comfy chair/ottoman.

I did get a few short-lived naps. But the cruelest thing is the meta-dreams. What the heck do I mean by "meta-dreams"? This is just evil, and my own head made it up to foist upon me. Here's an example. Wednesday night, as G snored lightly, I finally fell asleep and stayed asleep long enough to start dreaming. In the dream, G has come home from an evening at his girlfriend's house. Her dad has brought them back to our home in the van. As is often the case, I am talking to the congenial dad, and I tell him, "Gosh the last few nights have been murder; I can hardly sleep at all. All I get is a nap and then it's all over." He says, "Really?" Upon which admission I am rendered bolt-upright awake. Now Porky Pig stutters, not actually but metaphorically, "That's all, folks!" I hear every house and tree creak, mouse skitter, bird twitter and vehicle move in a ten-mile radius, see every lightwave and shadow, feel every little pain, my sinuses go berserk and I get a raging case of gas and heartburn that must be properly addressed. I am completely up until I'm supposed to be up, at which point I can hardly get up because I'm so tired.

Here's another one. In Thursday's dream I am in a whole other state of the union (who knows which one it's supposed to be) with a bunch of total strangers and none of my family. It's all adults and no kids. I start out in a gas station but the venue morphs into a very casual tiny Greek diner-type restaurant that has all outdoor tables on a flat lawn in back. People in the restaurant are raving and recommending a particular dish. It is described by them as huge wide noodles wrappped up with something like herbed rice inside (reminiscent of dolmades) with a thick, olive-laden sauce on top. I order it, and it is delivered to the white linen-covered picnic table where I wait. But---aaaaarrgggghh! It doesn't look anything like the item described. It looks like a pile of tiny dry burritos with a drizzle of what should have been green salsa, but which looks more like thick, golden motor oil. There aren't even any utensils or napkins. The sight of it in the dream made me need to throw up. It just shocked me in the dream because it was so unlike the dish described. Too unexpected. Once again, BING! Wide awake with the whole night/morning ahead of me.

We have conifers and Rotarians in our water supply: For the past almost week, our town has been one of ten locally that were identified as receiving "copepods and rotifers" in the water. No live critters have been found, according to the metropolitan water district. Furthermore, these particular strains of organisms are not known to cause illness and are present in almost all fresh water. YET we have been admonished to boil our drinking water "for at least one minute." Why? To beat a dead rotifer? Every day I look for a lift of the "boil order," and every day it's not there. The affected towns are now down to six, but ours is among them. I don't care if I DO boil my water; I don't want to ingest cooked rotifers and copepods, either. Fortunately, before this event I didn't think about the microorganisms in our water. Now I'll never be able to forget them, even if they're dead and known not to be pathogenic.

Friends were cleaning out their attic and found a lot of old books. Since I am a logophile, they gave me one called More Press Boners. It's a book-length list of funny grammar, typographical, spelling and punctuation mistakes made in the publishing media, primarily newspapers. For instance, "Read our new booklet, 'How To Increase Your Word Power, Think Better, Spell Perrectly,'" and "Mother can disassemble the boys at the end of play time and pack the little containers away neatly." (Don't I wish.) What's funniest to me, even more than the gaffes themselves, is the archaic nature of many of the topics and concepts in the book. If my boys were to read it (which they won't because they're lazy), they would find much of it baffling, because they wouldn't understand the context or some of the vocabulary. For example, there's a listing from a television guide: "9:00 p.m. Geo. Gobel show. 9:15 p.m. Geo. Gobel shot." They would never in a million years know who George Gobel was.

This is the other part of the book: The title cracks the boys up. They have another idea about the definition of the word "boner."

And now a note about customer service: I can't remember if I wrote about this months ago (or moths ago as might have been reported in Boners). We rarely dry clean our clothes. We try to buy exclusively washable garments, but there are the seasonal coats and heavy down comforter, and some of my summer linen items. Anyway, I went online to arrange an at-home dry cleaning pickup from the cleaners we usually use, only to discover that the company I had been using had been bought out and replaced by another company. I blithely signed up on their website. Within a few days, the van showed up and the guy collected my bag of cleaning.

Well, darn it, that's when the trouble started.

A couple of days later I got a call from a distressed woman who works for the dry cleaning company (which I will not name because I refuse to give them press). At first I thought something had gone wrong or gotten lost or the order was screwed up or something and this was a courtesy call to straighten it out. But no! This woman explained that she was the representative for a territory and my address was in her territory and that I should not have let blah-blah guy pick up my cleaning. In fact, I should call every time I need cleaning and ask for HER exclusively. Though she did not say as much, I'm guessing they work on commission and the guy who picked up after being alerted via web is her direct competition in this area. She had a whiskey voice and a mafioso manner. She practically made me sign on the dotted line that I would ALWAYS only use her as my pickup and delivery person. I felt summarily harassed. I hung up the phone feeling as if I'd been beaten up by a bully in elementary school.

Then I went to the internet and considered signing up for another company, called Edricks. When I was ready with a new bag I saw the Edricks van coming up the street and waited by the mailbox and waved. The Edricks guy stopped in the middle of the street, took my info and cleaning, was friendly as could be, got my info into their system and had the clothes (much more nicely presented than the other company) back at my door in a couple of days. Even before the items were returned, I got two courtesy calls from the company surveying about the service and confirming my order.

Okay. So, customer-service tip: don't bully customers if you want to keep them. Gees.

Boys will be boys: This is how it is when you have more than one boy-child. Big kid G is returning to school after being out almost all year for cancer treatment. So he's getting up Thursday to have me drive him to his big half-day start-off. He appears on the stairs in boxers, hospital sox (he loves them), and a face covered with shaving cream. He says, quietly, "Mom. Mom." My face is a question mark. He says, "Tyke took my disposable razor and used it to clean the gum off his favorite basketball shorts. So I went in your bathroom looking for the razors and couldn't find one. Would you give me one?" Said shorts are a pet peeve of mine. I've been trying to get rid of them for a year, but Tyke keeps retrieving them. I didn't know about the Heloise "put item in freezer and pick off the gum" trick. It wasn't a big wad of gum at all, but still, gross! I got the new razor for G. Then when Tyke came home I inquired. He admitted shaving the pants. I said, "But did you make a hole in them?" And he said, "Yeah, but they're reversible so they have a liner so it doesn't matter."

Insomniac Journal

2009-04-09T12:58:00.004-05:00

I was going to entitle this "sick thoughts at 4:00 a.m.," but they really aren't sick, just off-kilter, which I typically am.

Most nights when I have insomnia, I just try to burrow deeper in the dark blankies, wear a sleep mask (which is almost always completely light-permeable), hold onto a security pillow and rock a little. The rocking was not original to me, but my DH does it relentlessly and despite the annoyance I glean from his rocking, I sometimes find my own small foot wiggle is rather comforting and sometimes successful as a lulling tool. I definitely don't sleep, but I do achieve a sort of comfortable repose.

Anyway, the other night I had such hopeless sleeplessness that I just decided to throw in the blanket and sit up and turn on a reading light and read a little. But my own thoughts came buzzing in, distracting me from "The Secret Life of Bees." I was thinking about words that for some reason do not look right to me.

teargas (tee-ar-gus?) (tee Argus?) Argosy . . . Wide Sargasso Sea (I am a little sleepy, just not able to go all the way to sleep.

This one has thrown me for a loop ever since I first saw it:

biopic Many people are myopic. Or even cyclopic ("I can hardly believe my eye!"). But "biopic" doesn't look to me anything like what it is. It seems to be an ocular condition that fits just dandy with the other ones. I am always surprised when I see that someone is to star in a biopic, or that a biopic is to be made about some celebrity or historical figure. My mind ALWAYS reads and pronounces it bi-OP-ic. Are you myopic? I'm biopic.

Now, a little more esoteric:

t h e

Ubiquitous, we take it for granted. It sneaks into everything and almost every sentence. But look at it. It's nuts. See it by itself. Pathetic all by its lonesome. What in heck does it have to do with itself? It makes no sense. It is nothing. It doesn't look right; seems spelled wrong. It actually needs a noun to flesh it out and make it real, but then once the noun has come and gone it is just a sad phantom that briefly helped the perfectly self-capable noun get into a sentence. I wonder how many times and how much time in my life I've wasted spending my thoughts, reading eye movement, thoughts or mouth on t h e.

Why do I bother to examine it now? Oh, because I'm supposed to be sleeping. Well, I want to be sleeping! I don't have time for this three-letter anomaly bothering me in the middle of the night. Consider the marvelous concision of our communications if we did not use it. It makes me understand why whole languages dispense with articles. It has no identity and does not seem aware that it should have one. It's just an invisible lackey slinking its way into otherwise perfectly self-sufficient locutions. Why do we fall for it? I don't know. It feels awkward in your mouth, has no roundness or suppleness, and does not roll trippingly off the tongue.

Another hour of unproductive sleeplessness plunders by. I think, what are my favorite sounds? If I had favorite words, what would some of them be, and why?

It turns out that I had asked myself this many times before and the winners keep retaining their stations. I do not particularly like the letter "h" but find a strange consistency in the words I keep holding onto. It's just like hating the number "6," only in numbers "6" keeps never getting into the inner sanctum.

All-tiime favorites, some of which almost require a lithsp:

halcyon
hyacinth
heliotrope
helleborus niger

And suddenly the great ship, the renegade Helleborus Niger, loomed on the horizon, bringing thoughts of threat and horror to the castaways on shore. The anxious onlookers huddled together but soon saw another ship following in swift pursuit from behind: the battledore HMS Cistus Purpureus. (But, no, the Helleborus Niger is just the lowly and rather homely Christmas rose, grown in Greece and used to ward off witches.)

Then there's the mighty dicotyledon. "What color was her jacket?" "Oh, sort of an off-dicotyledon, you know, a little more yellow than chartreuse, a shadow off celadon."

"What was the cause of death?" "The autopsy report makes it clear that it was a rampant 36-hour infection by the dreaded amoebic dicotyledon." Not flesh-eating or anything, but still. Except that a dicotyledon is just a flowering plant with two cotyledons.

Plebeian. I love the order of the vowels. When I was a little kid I had a Persian calico cat who had previously been the red-light-district stray cat of the neighborhood but for some reason after spewing out about eight litters of kittens decided to become a domestic--at our house. She had a wonderful and cheerful personality and was more dog than cat. No matter how far away she was she would come running home when you called her (amazing). She put up with quite a bit of being dressed up as a Glamour Cat (Woolworth pearls, voile, crinoline, etc.) and riding around in carriages and other dumb things little girls do to "bond with" [read humiliate] their pets. I was always making up songs for Calico and one of them involved the word "plebeian" just so I could weave it into the song. It happened that Calico was ONCE plebeian but after she became part of our household she was actually royalty. One time my parents went out and my mother wore her fur stole and instead of hanging it up afterward tossed it on the sofa in the sewing room. In the morning we found Calico purring in the center of it. Plebeian? Certainly Not!

Don McLean has a wonderful song called "On the Amazon," in which preposterous words are deeply misunderstood and used in very funny incorrect contexts. I think one of the lines is, "On the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl!'

Oh, boy, here's part of the song [this is NOT my material; copyright belongs to Don McLean and whichever record company recorded it, and I do not for one minute claim this material is originally mine]:

On the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl.
On the Amazon, the hypodermics howl.
On the Amazon, you’ll hear a scarab scowl and sting
Zodiacs on the wing.

All the stalactites and vicious vertebrae
Hunt the stalagmites, while laryngitis slay
All the parasites that come from Paraguay in spring.
Snarling equinox among the rocks will seize you,
And the Fahrenheit comes out at night to freeze you.
Wild duodenum are lurking in the trees,
And the jungle swarms with green apostrophes!
Oh, the Amazon is calling me.

On the Amazon, the pax vobiscum bite.
On the Amazon, the epiglottis fight.
On the Amazon, the hemispheres at night all slink
Where the agnostics drink.
All the hippodromes that lie concealed in mud
Hunt the metronomes, that live in swamp and flood.
Then the kodachromes come out and drink their blood - poor ginks.
While velocipedes among the weeds will scare you,
And the menopause with hungry jaws ensnares you!
Frenzied adenoids infest the hills and slopes;
Everyone avoids the deadly stethoscopes.
Oh the Amazon is calling,
Yes the Amazon is calling,
Oh, the Amazon is calling me!

One of my favorite songs in the world. I believe I could SLEEP if I were in a jungle swarming with comforting green apostrophes. As long as they were in the right places. Otherwise I'd be up all night editing them. And I'm a bit worried about the pax vobiscum biting.

Then we come to another fabulous word, o-n-o-m-a-t-o-p-o-e-i-a.

Are you asleep yet? I'm not, more's the pity.

I try this:

o n o m a t o p o e i a

Only four consonants to hold this baby together! And it sounds like itself. How delightful. Do I have a vowel obsession? I dunno. Is it diagnosable?

Here it is. I think it has some merit. It might have potential to sail me off with the sandman. The word:

M O N O T O N O U S

Even though I am wearing a black sleep mask, I see its letters as if projected on the ceiling. I chant it silently to myself, slowly: mo-no-to-nous, mo-no-to-nous, mo-no-to-nous . . .

Just by thinking of it and nothing else, I envision myself falling asleep. It is so monotonous, so like itself.

But my body can feel the precise time of morning somehow, which always throws me into insomniac hyperdrive. I first slept at 12:30, first woke at 1:30 and have been up until at least 4:30; that's only a couple of hours before everyone's alarms go on, and if their alarms don't go on I have to jump up and hustle them awake on time to get to school or drive to early jazz band practice . . . two hours isn't much to sleep, but it sure would be precious . . . But if I try to sleep now I'll just worry that I'll sleep through their alarms . . . I have to be awake for them . . . Then I'll have to get up and start calling them down . . .

Every night and morning is like this. No sleep at night but worry. M-O-N-O-T-O-N-O-U-S.

monotonousmonotonousmonotonousmonotonousmonotonous!

But instead of easing shut for, at best, a half-hour nap, my eyelids are banging open like Colonial shutters in a hurricane.

The BEST DARN DAY IN SEVENTEEN YEARS

2009-04-09T11:53:00.012-05:00

WARNING: Theater kid. Performing artist. Loves to make stupid faces. Wish the Jack Nicholson one were here, but I can't find it.

After an exhausting long day of scans, x-rays, blood-draws and appointments that took up most of Monday, April 6, on the morning of April 7 our son G, who just had his seventeenth birthday

WAS DECLARED CANCER-FREE!

!!!!WootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWootWoot!!!!!

We are doing the party dances. We are collapsing in crying, laughing silliness. We are having the ultimate, well-deserved emotional breakdowns that have been waiting in the wings for months.I haven't been able to get on the phone because I just start weeping and babbling uncontrollably.

WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS! (link) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdCrZfTkG1c

Heartfelt thanks to all of you who prayed, helped, drove, called, asked about his welfare, taught and tutored, waited for belated work (his and mine), complimented his hair at various stages, and otherwise supported us and cheered us on. Thanks also for listening to our worries, grousing, and frustration when we had periodic breakdown rants and displayed other inexplicably weird, forgetful, or rude behavior! We apologize.

I hate the traditional "happy face," but actually went out and deliberately got a balloon of one today, and for once I wasn't even being ironic.

I got stupid stuff at iParty and made a shambles of an already hopelessly cluttered house. (Did you know, for example, that in the Children's Medical Center latex balloons are banned? I was so accustomed to that that I never even considered latex, but got mylar . . . these experiences stick with you in odd ways.) I got little strings of happy-colored Chinese lanterns and gobs of garlands and crepe paper and paper lanterns that don't seem to fit any of our lights, but who cares?

I dress up Al O. Pecia (his radiation therapy mask/bust) differently every day. In the photo above, he was Scottish, sporting my favorite knitted pillbox hat with a Celtic design.Today he is Truman Capote (will post pic later). He has also been quite gallant as George Gordon, Lord Byron, in Turkish Dress. G says he will put him on his piano, since everyone has a bust of a famous composer on the piano. And, if he gets in a real muddle, Al will double nicely as a pasta strainer. Good ol' Al O. Pecia. G's hair is coming back in like gangbusters, but oddly a lot lighter than before.

Sputnik.

P.S. I sincerely regret leaving out anyone when I sent thank yous, and for some folks I don't have current contact info. If you know someone else who knows G the phenomenal music kid, please share the joy!
Typically abnormal. loads of medical attention was not able to cure this.

Pretending to behave normally. It's just a clever ruse.

How to Cook Frozen Snacks

2009-04-04T14:47:00.002-05:00

Just a short one this time.

Crazy schedules sometimes call for desperate measures. I had a measure a few days ago--I purchased a box of frozen snacks that are supposed to resemble a cross between a sliced bagel and a little pizza bit. I'm deliberately not naming the product because I don't want to give it any press.

I open the box, and, first of all, the snacks were about 1/2 the size they were advertised as. I guess that's not a surprise. I should be fully accustomed to being misled.

It was the box that really got me. The instructions baffled me. These items come arranged in a reflective cardboard "crisping tray." So if you want to heat the snacks to crispy . . . in bold capital letters, do not use crisping tray!

All right. I won't use it. Because it's not for crisping. I give up.

Swim Brain

2009-03-18T13:33:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite, but relatively dull lines is in Twelfth Night, I iii, "I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit." In graduate school, a colleague, knowing I was then entirely vegetarian, gave me a button bearing those words. Well, I am not a great eater of beef. I made the mistake of eating a single tiny bite of corned beef one year ago today and it literally nearly killed me.

My younger son, to whom I still refer as Tyke (his older brother, a jazz musician, calls him T-Bone), is a swimmer part of the year and plays baseball the rest of the year. Swim season just ended and he came home so laden with clanky medals, trophies, pins and ribbons that we will have to start a Wall of Fame right next to the multiple Michael Phelps posters (oh, and the now "commemorative" Kellogg's Corn Flakes cereal boxes which we could sell on eBay) in his room. A few days ago he was looking online and happened to discover that not only had he garnered a bunch of team records this year, but he was also second in the state in one event and third in another. Surprisingly, he has not developed a swelled head about this.

However, I believe he HAS developed some sort of encephalitis or mental problem from spending too much time in the pool. This calls for a new button, which should say, "I am a great inhaler of chlorine, and I believe that does harm to my wit." For here is an exchange between us from the other day:

Me: Why is it still so cold? It's actually somewhat spring-like outside, and I'm never cold, but today I'm really cold.

Tyke: Mom, think about what the badger said.

Me: ??????

Tyke: The gopher.

Me: ???? [staring at him] You mean, the GROUNDHOG?

Tyke: Mom. Whatever. Stop making fun of me.

Hello, and soon (I think) I'll be back

2009-03-16T13:08:00.004-05:00

Dear Friends,

I know you've all given up on me and ever seeing any more posts on this blog. It's been months, and might be a couple more. I might even decide not to come back to it; every day is a new story, and the last months have changed my entire perspective on life. Even though I try to read your blogs and keep up, I am not so good at the formerly loyal and regular commenting. It doesn't mean I'm not reading you when I can. No, I didn't fall off a cliff, but the life situation feels very close to that.

I got overwhelmed last summer, and just when I thought the kids would go back to school and I would have some moments to write and do other independent things that I actually WISH to do, the 16-ton weight fell (not a cartoon one; a real one): my beautiful, talented-jazz musician-composer-vocalist, 16-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer. Not that it's ever a good thing, but there also couldn't have been a worse year for him to go through this--he's a junior in AP courses who also attends a second high school, an arts academy, and has countless rehearsals, performances and competitions, not to mention APs, ACTs, and SATs on the horizon.

With his diagnosis, the rest of the world immediately started to look trivial. Things I would have thought were stupid or funny and certainly would have written about and mocked suddenly didn't rank as worthy of a moment's attention. I already lost both parents to cancer and my father-in-law has been in treatment for nine years. I'm so sick of watching this that I want to take the anti-nausea medicine myself.

So, at the end of last summer, my full-time job became keeping my fabulous kid alive. I have spent countless days and nights in clinics, hospitals, CAT, PET, x-ray, chemo, radiation, pharmacies, incessant driving/traffic, and just plain endless waiting. I spend days scheduling tutors, scheduling treatment, staying home during the tutoring to facilitate, communicating with teachers, and making sure the work gets done even if everyone is tired. I sleep in the family room especially on the nights when he is scared or just wants to sleep in the comfy chair in case he needs help, or we suspect he might get a fever and need to go to emergency.

I schmooze with oncology and nuclear medicine nurses instead of visiting with friends. Nobody hears from me on the phone anymore--I don't know what to say and don't have time anyway. I've heard that there are rumors going on among the parents of my other child's sports teams that I don't exist and I'm just an unsupportive slacker beeutch who doesn't care about her kid. Well, F--- them in capital letters. I have a bigger task than sitting around a swimming pool gabbing or parking my butt on baseball bleachers playing parental one-upmanship gossip games. This is not to say my other child isn't important. Of course he is; but we parents have chosen roles to keep the whole very feeble, creaking machine working.

Sure, fortunately I still have my editing contracting to periodically distract me, and am even going whole-hog on National Poetry Month and Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day this year. When I find small things and a small amount of time to do something that makes me happy, I do, if I can remember to try. A couple of days ago, in celebration of my kid's hair starting to grow back, with his witness I chopped my own horrible witchy hip-length hair off with sewing shears and felt better. It's yet another task to force myself to be happy sometimes. I'd prefer to avoid any more tasks at the moment.

Not all's bad. Because of our bizarre time being artificially together, my son, one of his tutors, a classmate and I have turned an AP US History project from a molehill into a mountain. Maybe some publication potential, but too early to say; like the lymphoma, it's day-by-day change and revelation.

But this time lymphoma WON'T be the terminator. And like the Terminator, the famous hair will be back!

Odds 'n' Ends

2008-06-05T17:55:00.006-05:00

It's the time of year when busy and conflicting kids' schedules, concerts and performances, whirlwind cleaning, debilitating back pain competing with asthma, and a deluge of quick turnaround editing have kept me away from the blog. Most days I just look at the computer and growl at it for wanting something from me.

It's not that I haven't continued to think and collect ideas during this time. Before I forget them all because of the mental fugue that accompanies the "M" word, I'll offer them up in a completely disjointed way today.

Neologisms that occurred to me during a bout of insomnia:

a$holetes
a$holites
a$holaesthetes

A friend of mine offered

(did you forget assholiterians? )

and I countered,

What about "antidisestablisha$$itarians"? Or a butt-lift surgeon--an a$$thetician?

Wheel of Foolishness:

While I was cooking the other night, I didn't get a chance to change the channel to Jim Lehrer's NewsHour before the news I had been watching switched to "Wheel of Fortune." I have wanted to set this "show," along with Pat and Vanna, on fire ever since I first accidentally saw it decades ago. When I so much as hear the theme music, I go ballistic and run for the remote. My hands were mixing up breadcrumbs, so I couldn't flip to Jim (and sometimes Ray Suarez, who in my opinion is a total hottie). So this woman has the following letters:

SUMMER S_ _ _ _ _ LL LEAGUE

and she freaking cannot imagine what the missing letters are! And bless your heart, you will never guess in a million years what she did next. She elected to buy a vowel! I wanted to knock her upside the head. I'd have slapped my own forehead, but my hands were crumby. Mind you, she already has the opportunity to see most of four vowels. If any wheels had been turning inside her numb skull, what was she thinking? Uhhhhhh:

"SUMMER SITSTILL LEAGUE . . . ?!! Did I win?"

Fortunately one of the boys rescued me and changed the channel. Not only do they know how I hate "Wheel of Fortune," but they know that having to be under the same roof with me when it's on is even worse.

Overheard on the sports segment of news when I wasn't looking at the visuals:
"What is WRONG with WANG?????!!" [Raucus laughter issues from boys.]

Dweeb and Dweebier

My Tyke is going through a phase of deep morning sleep that renders him incapable of waking up to his brand new, top-of-the-line, perfectly functional clock radio (with environmental sounds--he likes the frogs). He seems to think that instead of M-O-M, my name is spelled B-U-S. Dad, a former Northwestern U. math professor, decided we should make a nerd grid on the family room white board to chart Tyke's bus-catching success and lack thereof. That's Dweeb #1. Over five weeks we have recorded failure two or three days a week. In our public district that's out of a possible five days, but the trend is statistically even worse when you consider that some weeks, such as Memorial Day week, have Monday holidays.

It's because Tyke can't get out of bed that I have to be up earlier than I normally would so that I can chauffeur in the inevitable event of bus-missage. Believe me, he pays for this. I'm nocturnal and it's a serious understatement to say that do not function effectively as a "morning person." Not only do I typically call him names (Dweeb!) and snarl, I also make him wait for me to get ready. He has to know that I can't simply roll out from under the blanket and directly into the car. I have to wake up and smell coffee first, take asthma meds, instill allergy eye drops, etc. If it makes him late, I let the ladies in the office, one of whom is a friend, know that his unexcused tardy was well deserved and that he earned it himself.

Here come more Dweebs. It's because I had to chauffeur Dweeb Tyke yesterday morning that I was out and about at an unusual hour. As one who detests inefficient errand running; I am not going out without getting several things done in a fuel-conscious order. I stopped at the grocery store before it even opened and rushed the door when it did. When I got to the checkout, I noticed two new employees--the cashier and the bagger. New to me, anyway. I know everybody else. Perhaps they're always there before 7:30 a.m., but I wouldn't know, since I am barely conscious at that hour. Both were teen boys, possibly enjoying a summer job.

Bless his dropout heart, the cashier did not know what my produce was. Now, I ask you, are LEEKS or CURLY PARSLEY exotic vegetables? Checkout Dweeb stared at the leeks as if they were a Close Encounter of the Allium Kind. My basket also included the type of Swiss chard called "Bright Lights" for its red, orange and yellow stalks. I could tell as he examined it that he was pretty sure it wasn't even edible, but at least he didn't code it as rhubarb or something. When the thought balloon with the big question mark in it hovered over Checker Dweeb's head, Bagger Dweeb would say with a snicker, "I dunno man, I'm just a bagger." Therefore I was obliged to dictate the items so that Checker Dweeb could look them up.

It was not until I arrived home and started unpacking that I realized the extent of Bagger Dweeb's intellectual deficiency. As you may know from a previous post, I hoard canned goods and am very fond of Muir Glen Organic Crushed Tomatoes with Basil in the really big can. I'm unable to get near them without taking some home. They stick to my cart magnetically. To my surprise I discovered all the heavy cans of tomatoes organized together in a single bag--with my large bag of fresh tomatoes ON THE BOTTOM OF THE BAG. What was going through Bagger Dweeb's mind? "Oh, she likes crushed tomatoes, so we'll just crush the fresh ones for her, too"?

Thanks so much, Bagger Dweeb, but we don't really like crushed tomatoes in our salads.

Remind me not to go grocery shopping at 7:30 a.m.

Tyke-ism

Ever the kid to articulate interesting ideas, Tyke came up with a new one. Yesterday I heard him scream in the downstairs guest bathroom. "Mo-o-o-m-m-m! There's a giant spider, no two giant spiders! And they're going to eat me!" This is annoying, not because I am the family's designated spider-rescuer (I love them), but because only a couple of days ago I had carefully de-cobwebbed the downstairs ceilings and apparently all that work had gone for naught. Upon discovery of spiders, other people expect me to capture the leggy things immediately and take them outside. I went downstairs with my rescue jar.

"What are they, Mom?" Tyke asked, terrified.

"Oh, for heaven's sakes, Tyke! They're just Daddy Longlegs." And slow and dumb and non-menacing. A quadraplegic chipmunk is more ferocious.

"Wait . . . the females are usually the ones who spin the web, right? So shouldn't these be 'Mommy Longlegs'?"

Touche, Tyke!

Unfortunate Phrasing

My big kid, G, attends not only a regular high school but also the nearby city's regional arts academy, where he was selected on a competitive basis and then won the lottery to get in. He got in for musical theater and vocal music. He's young, but has many senior friends and mentors who are graduating and going to music schools and performing arts colleges. In honor of them, he asked me to take him to their senior recitals. Acquaintance A is a musical theater major, but G warned me that he doesn't sing very well, which I had deduced from the Jazz 'n Ribs celebration at a restaurant in which G sang last weekend. This came to light in the auditorium when A sang the solo, "Try to Remember" from "The Fantasticks." He stumbled all over the rhythm of followfollowfollowfollowfollowfollow and ended flat. Then, when it came to the lyrics, "the kind of September that---made--us--mellow" (my emphases), he slightly botched the phrasing and pronunciation and sang

try to remember/the kind of September that made a----smell-o

G flinched in his seat and I could not believe my ears. But my digital voice recorder confirms it. The poor kid. I don't think he even knows made a smello in front of all those people.

Apology to Nature

The other day I was driving Tyke to his baseball game, and a bird smacked into the windshield. I didn't even see it coming, and what could I have done, anyway? It's nesting time around here and the birds are flitting around helter-skelter. They hit the family room picture windows all the time and it knocks the poop right out of the poor buggers. My car wasn't going very fast, but I assume the bird wound up dazed on the road getting hit by someone behind me. I couldn't check and felt terrible. This is the third time in my life I have had a windshield-bird encounter. The first was a big redbird in Texas, who despite his size, was no match for my aircraft-carrier-sized 1969 Mercury traveling at 55. The second was a dove in Tucson (I wrote a sonnet about that one). I just absolutely hate the thought of hurting living things, and am worried that the karma of possibly killing three birds is going to come back to me.

OCD Much?

In the previous post about my sicko non-perishable-goods acquisition, I failed to mention that when I retrieved all the black beans from the cupboard, I had noticed that EVERY can was dented. Last week, I went back to the bean aisle to replenish the depleted supply. I started to put three cans of house-brand black beans into the cart, but then noticed that every one was dented. This was clearly a job for Weird OCD Can Woman! Out of curiosity, I felt compelled look for a can that was not dented. The black beans were on the bottom shelf, so I sat myself right down on the floor and went to it. At one point I had pulled off 62 cans of black beans before finding a single can that was not dented. After checking every last can of available inventory--I forget how many in the final tally--I found only two undented cans. I took them and put all the dented cans back and rudely left them for other people. Yes, such are the droll amusements of a nutcase. It was too embarrassing a discovery to mention to the store manager.

Recycling

I'm all for recycling, and participate religiously. However, I am tired of the amount of time it takes to search for the recycling numbers on plastic items. Also I'm maybe just a bit blind as a bat. This town is exasperating in that it only accepts #1 and #2 items, and they have to be a certain size, and they have to have certain-sized openings, and it's frustrating. Furthermore, I've trained my sons judiciously in how to sort and set out the recycling, but in the past SIX YEARS they have never done it right, and there's always a set of leftover junk in the garage that sits and waits for the next pickup day. I give lessons and supervise, and I've even written an illustrated manual (which they intentionally lost), but they always surprise me with a mistake. This week it's a clear #1 pizza lid blatantly left in the kitchen. Okay, I've vented on this subject. Onward.

Enduring Questions and Odd Opinions

I think blue is not a valid color for M&Ms. They disturb me. I don't like the blue dye that melts onto my hand. Also I think it was the blue M&M that replaced my childhood favorite, the TAN colored M&M, and I resent it.

Why do we have to take money out of our wallets to spend money on a wallet to put our money in? Something's fundamentally wrong there.

Huge question: why are there no such things as plain 'A' and 'B' batteries? And why are there multiple kinds of 'A's but no "single 'A'"? We have triple 'A,' double 'A,' leave 'B' right out in the cold, and skip directly to 'C.' What is up with that? And then there's the completely anomolous 9v. What dweeb exercised the power to change the nomenclature?

Be Careful How It Sounds

2008-04-21T14:28:00.005-05:00

So we are watching TV the other evening, and I am in the kitchen cooking while the others are in the adjoining family room (open floor plan). An ad comes on for a new acid-reflux disease drug. And I hear the name of it and yell, "Are you kidding me? You're kidding me, right? Did they just say A$$ Effects?!!?"

And the others responded, "Mooooommmmmm! Don't talk like that!" And I ran into the room so that I could see the text on the TV, and it turned out that the drug is called Aciphex. Ac-i-phex. To the eye, this is all right. But NOT to the EAR without the eye!!

I wondered: What company in its right mind would permit its branding team to name something Ass Effects? Honestly. Sounds like a, uh, quick-release suppository to me, not a GERD medicine. I'm really good at naming, and they need my services. (Really! I used to win prizes for product names.) Anyway I was so incredulous I had to look online. Turns out that this medicine is manufactured by a Japanese pharmaceutical company, who probably understood English only well enough to know "acid" and "-ex" or "effects" would sound logical and alluring together. But they didn't know enough English to think about the genuine connotation. Oh, I love this kind of stuff. It makes my day. And they are stuck in perpetuity with this name until the patent runs out! Ha! I can't wait to see if it turns out to be a big seller in the English speaking world or not. "Our market research tells us that Aciphex is not well received in English-speaking countries because . . . people say the name is offensive. We are unable to determine why."

A$$ EFFECTS, that's why!

The Second Close Call

2008-03-27T21:07:00.008-05:00

I had a bizarre time last Friday (Good Friday!). DH and I stayed in our room late and had a little date since he had the day off and the boys are certainly now old enough to pour their own darn cereal and figure out how to amuse themselves and get going on homework. We came downstairs at lunchtime. DH made himself a lunch and after I cleaned up a little I made myself a little saucer with some leftovers of Irish potatoes/cabbage and a small piece of corned beef, which I heated in the microwave. You must know about me that I do not eat beef at all except some years on the occasion of St. Paddy's. I had one bite of potato, and then a tiny bite of corned beef. And it must have been the toughest morsel of corned beef in Christendom. I chewed, and chewed, and chewed, and chewed some more. But at some point that bad boy of shoe leather had to go down. Eventually I swallowed it, but it hadn't become any less tough for all the work.

And then . . . NOTHING. It went past my swallow-point, but no further. It just stuck right there in my craw. I could breathe fine, but then when I tried to swallow anything else (including, ahem, to be indelicate, my own natural saliva) I could not. I had to spit it out. I had this happen more than a year ago with a little bite of dry chicken, but after a couple of hours it resolved itself and somehow went down. This time I waited a couple hours and nothing changed. I tried to make myself throw up, but couldn't get my stomach to do anything, just my throat. I tried the following liquids with no success, just a complete 360 degree return: water, cranberry juice, coffee, seltzer (the seltzer was the WORST; thanks, DH, for your brilliant suggestion). DH kept saying, "Just gulp down a huge amount of water all at once and it will go away!" Nope. When I did that I spewed all over the kitchen. I hacked and barfed all day an no evil corned beef nugget emerged.

Finally I told DH I needed to go to the emergency room; I just could not stand it anymore and it wasn't going away on its own. DH made me drive myself to the hospital! (I believe this had something to do with NCAA basketball.) I had to take a Cool-Whip tub to spit in. (See! Jeff Foxworthy take note: recycled Cool-Whip tubs are truly useful for something other than yer family salad bowls!) Let me tell you it was all kinds of fun having to sit in the waiting room spitting up in front of a bunch of weirdo complete strangers, one of whom was so impaired he kept insisting my coat belonged to him. The rest of them were all watching basketball on the waiting room TV.

Eventually the very kind triage nurse put me in an ER bed and no one else did anything for a long, long time. People would come in and ask me what the hell that tub was and look at me like I was fresh in from the looney bin.

Lucky me, I got head doctor Vinnie Goombah and his merrie band of med students, who treated me like a retarded bag lady. (Not fair! The real, truly antique nut cases were in the beds moaning on either side of me!) I tried using my charm and sense of humor, and the med students laughed but Vinnie was too dumb to understand that I was joking around with him. This guy did not even use correct grammar, and he is a head doctor! ("If dis thing DON'T go down, we might hafta do a procee-juah on ya.") He sounded like one of the Three Stooges. He was also very insulting, telling me I should CHEW MY FOOD and JUST HOW BIG WAS THIS PIECE OF MEAT and WHY DID I TRY TO BITE OFF THE WHOLE COW AT ONCE. I was furious because I had not done those things and indeed I DO NOT EVEN EAT BEEF so why was he giving me a hard time? Oh, and a couple of times I guess he thought it was clever to make comic faces at me by thumbing his nose when others weren't looking. Right back at ya, Vinnie Goombah.

They decided to give me an IV push of something called glugagon, which relaxes the smooth muscle of the esophagus. The theory is that the blob will either go down or come back out. Well bless the heart of the guy who did the extensive venipuncture. He was good as gold. Not two minutes after the glucagon, I had the World's Biggest, Most Exhausting Barf, and he knew it was coming, and he held the bucket and patted me and got me a washcloth. Then we had to wait for twenty minutes or so. The stupid muscle spasms in my swallower did subside quite a bit, but it wasn't really over and I kept up an Olympic burpathon and feeling as though the muscles were still spazzing.

Finally, the miracle moment came when I was able to take not just one tiny sip of the mini-Coke Vinnie's minions left with me, but five sips. Then I had 1/4 cup of water, and it all stayed down. The throat was very tired, but apparently functional again.

Then a cute and patient Indian girl doctor came in, saying, "I knew you were the person I was looking for because I saw your throw-up bin!" She was the GI specialist and said they had decided to do a procedure called endoscopy, in which they knock you out, hold you on your left side, shove a cable with a camera in it down your throat, and look around for what's wrong, displaying your most private innards on a computer screen where everyone can see. Then, when they find the sticking goo, they take an instrument and shove the offending matter down. NICE.

Okay. So they promised me I would NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING because of the sedation. Ha! I remember every minute of it. Anesthesia and I do not get along and never have. What they really need is either a crazy a$$ hypnotist or a really huge cast-iron skillet to hit me over the head with. I remember having my wisdom teeth out at age 14; I also clearly remember having major abdominal surgery, when I also remember the nurses not having anyplace to put me after the pre-op "sedation" had supposedly kicked in. Therefore they put me in a basement supply closet (conveniently adjacent to the operating room) while I was STILL LUCID AND TALKING.

Anyhoo, they get me prepped and a couple of them are saying, "Are you on blood-pressure medication?" And I said, "What?" (If anything, I've always had low blood pressure; it only goes up during the stress and exhaustion of an asthma attack.) So they tell me it is going through the roof. Huh? Then they tried a cuff that fit better, and still, through the roof and I'd better tell my doctor that I need to go on blood-pressure medication fast. Despite the fact that I have BP checked as part of my normal doctor visits every two or three months, and they've never said anything about it being high. Great, that's just the kind of news I need when I'm choking to death already. I explained that I had been continuously barfing my guts out for hours, and felt as though my eyes were going to pop out. All that work came with a whopping-bad headache, too.

Furthermore, the guy who's setting me up and telling me tsk tsk about my BP feels compelled to tell me how, if this is my first time there for choking, it will not be my last time; I'll be back and we'll get to know each other real well. Then he tells me this story about a very old man who comes in almost every week because he is too lazy to put in his dentures and he bites food off whole and can't chew; he just swallows it. NICE! Like I need to know the details of Mr. Anti-Denture Man. I tell setup guy that I promise to keep my teeth in for future eating, since they are all mine and still pretty well attached. He doesn't laugh.

Finally they give me the "sedative" and I'm lying there loudly saying over and over every few minutes, "I'm still here!" so that they will know I am not knocked out and please God I want to make sure I'm fully knocked out before they start sticking things down my gullet. (All I can think of to take my mind off worry is the "sedagive!" line in Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein," one of my favorite movies.) Then this complete PYGMY ZOMBIE of a doctor who hasn't shaved in three days steps inside the curtain, looks straight at me with an absolutely serious white stone face without ever blinking his eyes, and says, "It's very important to CHEW YOUR FOOD," as if he expected me to sit up straight and salute him. And just in case Mr. Personality had not made his point, he said it again, exactly like a robot. Well by then I was really damn hopping mad (and the sedation was not sedating, which made me scared AND mad), and if it weren't for the fact that they had me tied to the bed with tubing and devices and beeping apparatus, and surrounded with people and another device strapped to my mouth, I would have clawed his face off. That was his entire input into the situation, and then he walked away. If I hadn't had a jaw-positioning thingy in my mouth I would have shouted, "It's very important that you GET YOUR BALLS CUT OFF so that you cannot procreate!" I was so appalled that I made a big face of complete outrage at him as he turned and walked, and one of the med students saw me and turned around and cracked up in the corner.

Just a warning to the cheery and effervescent Dr. Anderson: I know your name and I have the hospital discharge "customer care suggestion sheet" right here in my hot little hand and a Forever stamp to mail it with!

Then they started the shoving. And DO I remember it. Can I get a witness! It does not feel good to have large long foreign electronic objects shoved down into your very personal tummy. Or to have people standing behind you repeatedly pushing you onto your shoulder to keep you in position.

Anyway by 2:00 a.m. they had called DH to pick me up and I was good to go. Oh, yeah--we had to leave my car overnight because I wasn't allowed to drive under the influence of the [non] sedative. But I haven't been able to eat anything very solid all week--my throat still hurts from the probe and the prospect of food is just too traumatic. Water, smoothies, bananas, soup, quiche, cottage cheese and mashed taters are my friends and will not betray me!

So . . . I have never been so thankful for liter bottles of cold water before (I now keep one in my hand always). Or for cranberry juice and coffee. Yum. Not so much the seltzer. And I'm pretty thankful that I didn't die on Good Friday and not resurrect on Sunday.

Monday, Monday

2008-03-13T12:01:00.005-05:00

For almost two weeks, I've avoided discussing today's topic. I had to give it time to fade a bit. For some time I could not even permit myself to think about it; such is the mind's capacity for emotional self-preservation.

The best thing I can say is that this is the story of how being a dilatory wretch might have saved my life.

On Monday, March 3, completely against my usual habits, I ventured out of the house in the early afternoon to visit the ATM at our closest neighborhood branch. (I very rarely use cash and therefore almost never go to an ATM.) The bank's only a couple of blocks away and is very small and friendly place. There's never a line of more than three customers. If a fourth comes in, that person is quickly helped by someone at the desk.

Before I left the house, I heard a brief unsubstantiated announcement on the local late-morning news that a bank in our little town supposedly had been robbed and that a state-police chase was underway. This was just background noise as I was sipping my coffee and reading e-mail. I didn't listen to it at all. There'd been a long string of bank robberies in towns around ours, but we are quite the exclusive little town, and our bank chain has never been the target. It was fairly surprising to hear that one of our town's banks had been hit. There aren't too many here, but I couldn't really imagine that ours was the one. Odds were slim to ludicrous. It's just too dinky, and there'd be so little payoff for the robber!

I got to the parking lot and headed toward the door. A woman customer was following right behind me. I got to the ATM just as the woman came into the vestibule and attempted to open the main door into the bank. I heard her jerk the door and discover that it was locked. She muttered an oath. I looked through the doors just as she swore, and saw some man in a fancy suit jump up behind the entry desk, come out in front of the desk and smile. (Completely wrong for this location. There's never a guy in a suit there. Never. ) My eyes opened wide, and instead of pretending everything was business as usual, I frowned at the man stupidly, obviously, and protractedly. The disgruntled woman immediately left as I was snatching the receipt from the ATM. As soon as I realized the doors were locked during regular business hours and some weird suit was manning the door, I knew that it was MY bank that had been robbed! I needed to swear an oath myself at that moment, not because of irritation about inconvenience like the woman behind me, but because, Thought #1: I realized I was at a crime scene immediately after something bad had happened!

Not wanting to call any attention to myself by running willy-nilly outta there, I turned and strolled swiftly to my conveniently close car on the shortest path possible. On the way to the car, I noticed some guy to my right at the edge of the alley next to the bank building with a tripod and a huge camera. I mean huge. I don't even know how he carried it in two hands. Thought #2: This guy is obviously not a surveyor. To my left, a white van with some kind of media logo showed up and parked across from my car. Non-surveyor guy kept moving around to get better images. I gunned my car out of there and straight to the grocery store across the street.

I sat in the grocery parking lot and watched the camera guy and van. Local media for sure. After hyperventilating for a few minutes, I calmed down and went into the market. Then I thanked my lucky stars for the fact that I am a lazy butt! Think. If I were an industrious, efficient person about completing chores and errands, I might have gone to the bank two hours earlier, when the nutcase was in there robbing it, in which case I might have become a frigging hostage or cross-fire fodder.

During the couple of days following the crime, the news came out that the suspect was 24 years old and a resident of this town (shocking--we don't have reprobates in this perfect little town! We only import them from the surrouding suburbs!). He had a warrant for arrest, was out on parole for robbing a woman at knifepoint two years ago, and had allegedly raped a woman over the weekend and stolen her car, the vehicle that was used in the bank robbery. State police said the guy did not use any weapon in the bank robbery, but after a multiple-town car chase during which he disabled the car he was driving by crashing and abandoning it in the local city, he fled on foot and threatened police with a knife. Ignoring all admonishment to release the weapon and comply with requests, he was eventually shot and died at the very-nearby hospital.

Damn, I'm so glad I'm lazy and keep a strange schedule! Being a punctual early bird could have gotten me killed.

Monday, Monday . . . can't trust that day! Monday, Monday, sometimes it just turns out that wa-a-a-a-y-y-y!

On the late-night news, the footage and photos showed up. For about a second and a half of footage, there I was in my tatty winter coat of a certain color and heavy boots, waddling from the parking space toward the bank door. I could tell it was me because of the hair. Of all the days to have my Mr. DeMille moment. Then I really wanted to swear.

Ah, well. Better that than knifed or worse!

Pantry of Shame

2008-03-05T14:53:00.012-05:00

I'm afraid the terrifying time is coming when I will soon step over the line and become my mom. I have dreaded and fended off this day all my life, but this weekend I saw it loom in all its unmistakably horrid clarity.

Years ago, when I was a kid still living in my parents' home, I remember my mom doing the grocery shopping bright and early on Saturday mornings. She did this because she worked during the week and used to scream about all the "non-working idiots" who would show up at the grocery store just after 5:00 on weekdays.

"They have all day to go there," she'd scowl. "Why do they bring all their tired, snot-nosed brats and go at the same time as the hordes of people on their way home from work? There should be restricted hours reserved only for working people." Not a bad idea. And during years when I've been a stay-at-home mom, I've always remembered that issue and gone to the store during hours when I would not infringe on harried and hurried wage earners. Conversely, during the years when I've busted my butt at work without kids or have busted my butt at work AND been a mom, I have certainly noticed exactly the shopping behavior that peeved my mother. She gave up on the after-work routine, and instead went when the store opened on Saturday. This nearly guaranteed that she was one of only a handful of people in the store, and she'd be back before 8:30 a.m., when she would then drag me out to haul in and put away the goods.

As I got older, sometimes my otherwise clueless dad would help. Mine was a dad whose domains were the garage and the vegetable garden. He needed to do nothing more than point his finger at a garden plot and prize-winning tomatoes would spring fully formed from the ground. Blindfolded, he could assemble a whole car or a hi-fi from random parts with no instructions. But ask him to do anything in the house and he was a bumbling Eeyore.

An indelible crack in our idyllic (hah! I make myself laugh so hard) family life appeared one morning when BOTH Dad and I carried in the groceries and started putting them away. I was working on the can cupboard and dry-goods cabinets. Mom was rushing out to her helmet-head, solid-resin-lacquering hair appointment. My dad was sitting on the kitchen floor stuffing things into the side-by-side refrigerator/freezer (I hate those things and will never have one. Maybe this is why). As Mom headed for the door, he yelled, "[Name!] I am about to put a pound of butter in the freezer but cannot find a place to put it. I notice that you already have no fewer than FIVE pounds of butter taking up room in this freezer along with four cartons of orange juice concentrate and five boxes of peas and carrots. Why do you insist on buying the same items every week when we already have five of everything?"

This might not seem at all profligate to people with many mouths to feed, but we were a family of three. Like me, my parents were only children, but they had grown up during the Depression. My Dad's family were much better off than my Mom's. His parents had been able to build their own house, and my dad started making money at after-school real jobs when he was 12. By the time he was 14, he had his own multiple cars and raced them illegally on some hills above LA with all his pals, a la a much-earlier "American Graffiti."

In contrast, my mom's father died in a head-on car wreck on Pacific Coast Highway (Rt. 1) when Mom was barely of school age. Her mother was a wild artist who refused to follow any straight-and-narrow path (except morally), and was always doing bizarre jobs that barely kept them afloat. One day she would write a letter to Great-grandma telling her she wanted nothing more than to be a milliner and design fabulous hats. The next day she would take a temp job as a court stenographer or work in a railroad office. They were basically poor, proper Baptist southern girls who lived in barrios on what were then the beach-rich "outskirts" of Los Angeles.

Mom told me many stories of how Grandmother would leave her in the morning before school with some change and a note telling her what to get at the grocer for dinner. They didn't have enough money to keep food in the house; they bought their goods day by day. Since they lived by the beach, it was often fish that Mom found the cheapest food. Until she died, she was the WORST fish cook ever. I think she was an intentionally pathetic fish cook. She had had her fill of it, and she had washed her hands of it. (I on the other hand could cook and eat three whole pounds of catfish or anything else and not even bat an eye, I love it so.)

But I soooooo digress! The point is that my mother had a deep-seated fear of never having enough food in the house, because most of her life she never did have enough. She told me stories of how she actually gloated that she had shoes to wear to school when the migrant-worker kids did not. Of course, as a child, I could not really imagine what this felt like. I always had two pairs of school shoes, one pair of church shoes, and tennies. But I saw evidence of want in the kitchen. I do remember as a tiny child when my mother panicked about the Bay of Pigs crisis. She freaked out and I was just a teeny preschooler and started wailing because she was wailing. We did not have a basement or a "bomb shelter" [how pathetically misguided were those?], but we sure enough had enough canned goods to feed the whole neighborhood. What good this might have done after nuclear holocaust, I cannot imagine.

We had a can cupboard that most people would call a "pantry." It started out as a simple broom closet, but my dad put shelves in it. It was floor to ceiling and narrow, but fairly deep. There was never a moment in my childhood when that cupboard was not so jam-packed with stuff that the contents wouldn't leap out at you when you opened the door. Sometimes it would open itself and items volunteered themselves. At an early age I was already trained to catch whatever flew out, having learned the hard way that it was really bad if what fell on your flip-flopped foot was a glass jar.

In my years of restocking the cupboard with new goods, I constantly would have to rearrange things so it would all continue to fit. There were certain cans that became personally legendary to me, sort of like favorite old Christmas tree ornaments. I'd dig around one month and find some ancient loganberries or pumpkin (why did we need those? I don't know! She did not bake pies). Then I'd shuffle the cans and not see them again until six months later. Rediscovering them was almost like running across an old friend or a treasured photograph. I'm pretty sure we harbored more cans of corned-beef hash than three supermarkets put together. This, however, my dad would not complain about because he loved it for breakfast.

Then there was the day when I opened the door, and something had burst over every surface in the entire cupboard. And guess whose job it was to clean it up?

I don't remember exactly what it was, but I believe it was a way-old (and sometimes things in there were over 12 years old!) can of fruit in heavy syrup. I recall the stubborn stickiness, and how I had to wash all the other cans on the shelves, and how the mess mercilessly required more and more wiping.

It was then that I secretly started culling cans. In school I was very interested in biology, especially bacteriology. Among other things, I was freaked out by the idea of botulism. (Hah, now we intentionally inject people with it!) And once I'd heard of botulism, I looked at that can cupboard in a whole new light. That cupboard suddenly looked like an EVERYTHING MUST GO sale.

Flash forward to the present. This weekend, disgusted by the lack of tidiness control I have in all rooms but the kitchen and master bath/bedroom, I started some spring cleaning in the kitchen. I had noticed that with all my winter hoarding, I could never find what I wanted from the kitchen shelves without basically removing everything, pulling out what I wanted and starting over. Furthermore, I hate it when the shelves are dusty or sticky or oil has seeped from the bottoms of bottles and left goo on the shelves. The plan of attack was to take everything out, arrange it by category the way it originally was, wipe down the shelves, and put it all back in memorized order where I could instantly find it.

To my horror, when it all came out into the clear light of day, I discovered I had already nearly become my mother.

Exhibit #1: Beans, Anyone?

This is only a partial expose. Not all of the beans are even out of the cabinet yet! Inventory: Great northern, Pink, Cannellini, Garbanzo, Black, Pinto, Blackey peas, Navy, Small white, Vegetarian baked. Not shown: Roman, Green pigeon, Light kidney, Dark kidney.

Not surprisingly, I used just a few of these to make a huge pot of chili that could feed us for nine days. Fortunately, my neighbors have gone away for a couple of days, so I'm going to put a big container in their fridge. A walk-by chili-ing. The rest, after three days, I'll freeze. Also, note to self: Invest in Goya Foods and get back some of the investment.

Exhibit #2 from the Den of Iniquity: You Say To-mah-to

Inventory: Peeled imported. Crushed organic. Crushed not organic. Sauce, sauce, sauce! Paste, domestic and imported.

Exhibit #2B: Oh, yeah, Beans, Beans, They're Good for Your Heart!
In my mother-in-law's antique mason jars:

Blue jar: Receptacle waiting for the Unknown Beans. Turtle. Red lentils and split green peas. Green lentils. Flageolet. Roasted soy. Mung.

Exhibit #2C: Wait, Did I Say "Beans"?

Oh, yeah, some others. Pea. Mung.

Exhibit #4: Pasta much?

We could feed the whole marathon: Orzo. Gemelli. Farfalle. Spaghetti, thin and regular. Pounds and pounds of cappellini. Linguine. Manischewitz fine yolk-free. Manischewitz fine regular egg. Cavatappi. Medium shells. Wide egg noodles. Homestyle egg noodles. (Even my window frogs can't stand it if I bring more on.)

Exhibit #5: Let's Go to The Movies!

Exhibit #6: What's for Breakfast, Jemmie?

Ooooh, ayyye! And toss me an oatcake with the porridge, Jemmie! (Oops, I'm marginalizing the Irish side.) Long-cooking regular. John McCann's Irish steel cut. These are just the jarred ones. There's another whole huge drum full of regular in the cabinet.

Exhibit #7: Tea for Two, or Three, or Seventy-five

Tazo Zen, loose and in bags. Tazo China Green Tips. Celestial Seasonings: Mandarin Orange Spice and Red Zinger. Edinburgh Scottish Breakfast loose. Bigelow: Cozy Chamomile and Lemon Lift. Traditional Medicinals Smooth Move (a fine laxative--note frog's position). Mighty Leaf Organic Earl Grey. Herbal chest remedy (in plastic bags--it's not what it looks like!). I'm not going to count the cocoa mix.
-----------------------------------
It's clearly an embarrassment of riches. But at least I've learned I'm better organized in the kitchen than my mother (honestly, who knew!) And to my credit, I buy stuff a few times a year at Sam's Club and BJ's. And we have more members in our family than in my family of origin.

The refrigerator is clean and reorganized every weekend, so we have a clear conscience and need not go there. The teeny freezer compartment, however, is maybe jammed from floor to ceiling and not so fun. Unorganizable on any day, it cascades whenever the door opens.

Next Confession: I didn't talk about the other half of the pantry (oils, juice, vinegars, Chinese stuff). Nor did I begin to delve into the cavernous condiment cabinet, but ALL of the condiments are regularly used, fully justified, and our whole family loves every bit of what's in it. So there.

Good Video

2008-03-04T11:24:00.002-05:00

Speaks for itself. I would laugh harder if I thought it were not just too true.

Bloopers Nouveau

2008-02-28T14:58:00.002-05:00

As is the tradition, I spent a happy week this month scoring the practice "Response to Literature" portion of the 10th-grade Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). The test itself, and the scoring process, make up quite the quagmire. I'd like to discuss it, but for the sake of space, time, and alienation of readers, will not. I'll just say that we scorers are a congenial bunch who come back year after year. We're a handful of very involved parents and former teachers. I am both.

For some reason, this year the gods blessed me (or maybe not) with piles of honors class papers among the general. Regardless of their writing prowess, however, even the best students make blunders under the pressure of this challenging timed practice test, which permits students only 30 minutes to read a very long story and 40 minutes to write four pages about it. For my own entertainment, I keep a running list of student comments I especially enjoy. I must also add the disclaimer that the students' papers are numbered and anonymous to all but the course teachers, and that we are under oath to pass to another reader any paper whose writer we detect through other means that we might know--such as through handwriting, content, or style. I do not in any way intend to demean any of these students. Truth be told, by now even the students probably don't remember what they wrote. The following are this year's funnies. And, to give the kids their due, in almost every case it's clear what they really meant to say. But as a favorite professor at UCLA used to tell us when one of us bombed on a paper, "Mr./Ms. Fill-in-name-here, I'm afraid once again you have failed to achieve art."

People tend to take a long time to greavie over the lost of a loved one. (I prefer my "greavie" over meatloaf.)
The symbolism intraged me. (Intreging spelling.)
Before, Luis was a self-centered drug dealer. (Ahem; he was a gang leader! Are you writing about the story's sequel, which we did not read?)
Luis is Jorge Cintron who owns a car junkyard. (Interesting. This would make Luis his own father. How 'bout that!)
Luis seems to have an epifiny.
Luis seems very rebelliont. It is his rebelliontness that gets him in trouble. (I am still waiting to go through my rebelliont phase.)
In answer to this question of what were my initial thoughts to this story, my initial thoughts were very hazzy.
No matter how unseemingly unredeemable he was . . .
He change from criminal to civilian. (Wow, we'd better stay away from everybody in the armed forces!)
Human nature is volital to our race. (I have no words.)
The hubcap symolisms the moon.
He was never motavied.
He had a propose in life.
He past away.
My dad pasted away. (Paste, Dad, paste!)
If you catch the moon, you will only be left with is the sun. (That's, like, so totally profound.)
. . . where his mom's funeral was commissioned.
It is human nature to finally crumble for love. (Now I understand why I've been falling apart!)
Luis was malipulative. (Nice word!)
He turns into an awesome person who finally learned to release his inner mess. (Better get out of the way when you see him coming.)
He was amazed at her elegancy.
She symboled Luis' mother.
He finally shows his true emotions and deminar.
The pinical of the story . . .
He was feeling really self riteous.
Myabe he should of just did his full time.
He stood out late for her.
It reminds me of my cuzin.
Holden . . . lets Pheobe go lose her incense. (I almost had to leave at this point. And, sad to say, I did laugh hard right there in a room full of very quiet readers. And it was fun when the second reader got this paper, because she laughed, too. I think it's my favorite. P-H-E-O-B-E. Incense. Still laughing.)
He had never talken to anyone deeply.
Noami the girl that was looking for an especific hubcab. (Sometimes she was Noami, sometimes Namoi, but never Naomi.)
People in general have rocky relationships with their parentals.
When I was just a toddle . . .
He was sad, depressed, lonely, and lonely.
Luis has also had the coming of nowledge. Know he nows . . .
From his rebel juvenile hall days to working at the lumber yard . . . (Again, is this from the sequel? In this story, he works at a junkyard!)
They were like two strangers living under one house. (Just like the Wicked Witch.)
He changed into a better, more considerable person. (It was eating all that pizza.)
At the beginning of the story Luis is miscivous.
I cannot have a relaxed consiounse.
I liked the story because it had a deasant plot line.

And now for the school district. Prior to the scoring, the schools sent us a sheet called "Scoring Guidelines for CAPT Response to Literature." To give them the benefit of the doubt, I can only imagine that they have hired a typist who is 1) not a native speaker of English, 2) one-eyed, and 3) has lost a fingertip in an accident. I asked the chairmen of the English departments about this and they concurred. One of them even graciously accepted my smartass copy, which I had marked up in red.

This does not mean that nay interpretation is acceptable, Rather, it opens the door to multiple interpretations, not a single . . . (yadda yadda comma splices galore and transposed letters and no periods and inexplicable capitals and inexplicable lack oF caPitals)
The scoring will be "focuses" in that scorers will look for . . .
A response may not contain all the characteristics of the core it receives.
Does the student recognize inconsistencies of ambiguities in the text and attempt to deal with them? (Whoa! Inconsitencies of ambiguities? Show me!)

And my favorite: one of the department heads' names is comically misspelled. I asked him if all of this was on purpose--just for a laugh. Unfortunately he said the mistakes were real.

Just to be fair to everyone else, the tragedies hit home as well. For when I recognized that I had some honors papers, I seethed with morbid curiosity about my own kid's paper. Of course it would have been unethical if I had considered scoring it, but I sure as heck wanted to see it. Or so I thought. It only took a few seconds for me to recognize the handwriting, although it was uncharacteristically. And I was truly gobsmacked at the shocking incompetence. No one, and I mean no one among the honors group had done what he had. While the others had waxed eloquent over four whole pages in tiny, cramped handwriting, my kid left the first page blank except for the penciled palimpsest, "This." This what? On the second page he wrote a single paragraph of purple-prose nonsense that barely hinted at his comprehension of the story. (What shocked me even more was his legible handwriting. I had never seen his school writing in anything close to legible form. The fabulous vocabulary did not surprise me, but his willingness to use it in a school paper was--he uses it orally all the time, but not typically in papers. On the other hand, it did not add up to a convincing argument.) On the third page, which entails connecting one's understanding of the story with other texts, media, or personal experience, again, nothing. Nothing from the erstwhile KING of meaningful and interesting connections. Then, on the fourth page, which addresses "the literary merit of the story," he went buckwild crazy and filled the page with lucid observations.

CHOKE. I could not toss that paper back on the "to be scored" pile fast enough! Not only that, but I also felt so bad for the two scorers who would eventually have the misfortune of reading his paper. Worst of all, I couldn't shut my trap when he came home so I asked him if my description of his paper identified it as his paper. He admitted that it was his. And I told him straight up how I would have scored it had I scored it. It turned out that my score was spot-on with the scores he eventually received. (Well, at least one thing went right; the scoring process is as objective as it can be.)

I feel guilty and sorry for the poor kid, because I am afraid it is my fault he sucked on the practice test. He is stuck with a snarky, rampant writer/editor for a mother and a serious, pedantic mathematics professor/research scientist father. No, I'm not being fair to my DH. We're both pedants. Pressure much? No matter where he goes, he's between a rock and a hard place with parental good intentions mixed with high demands. He knows I am firmly on the side of his English teacher and that she and I correspond frequently. He doesn't like her, but I absolutely salute her for being tough on him and putting up with his resistance. I also thank her for going into the trenches every day and not breaking under the obvious weight of what she encounters in student writing. My kid stubbornly fights against my every suggestion, even while stridently begging for help.

No wonder he spends his life devoted to music instead!

Oh. And said kid was recommended for next year's AP English class. Go figure.

And another ad . . .

2008-02-27T16:58:00.005-05:00

Thanks to a comment from Nance, whose blog I read regularly and admire, I've remembered another ad that drives me crazy (see preceding post). Nance took me down a notch for not just coming out and saying VAGINA, instead using the jejune, not-even-properly-euphemistic "va-jay-jay." Well played, Nance. But I just wanted to try it for once. So I did, and now I'm over it.

Onward. In thinking about "vagina," I remembered a pregnancy-test ad that rankles me. And not a moment after I remembered it, I heard that very ad as I prepared my morning coffee. It was scary, really, as if Big Brother had detected my thought and plotted vengeance! I am, however, proud to state that I do not know what brand name it promotes (because the main gist of the ad is just too ugly to stick; in fact, it splashes off). The pregnancy test stick is shown against a solid black background, and flies through apparent space like the Starship Enterprise. It even has a shuttle-like separation as the cap disengages. Then an imposing MALE voice states something like, "It's the most state-of-the-art piece of technology you'll ever pee on."

Heaven help us. When I had cats, they used to like to pee on technology (old-timey technology, like LP record albums and phonographs, a VCR, and the sacred portable "word processing" typewriter. They would pee on anything that took my attention away from them--The New Yorker, textbooks, the Sunday Times.) That is, until I had them NEUTERED. That nipped the habit in the bud post-haste. While I'm all for snarkiness and sarcasm and cynicism and cattiness, this ad steps over the line of decency. I don't want a man talking to me about my pregnancy test. Someone who might be a real user is much more credible. Stupid announcer! Spare us, and do not "boldly go where no man has gone before." Oh, and that's a whole other irritation--the famous split infinitive, "to boldly go." Going on a piece of technology. No, thanks to toilet humor!

I'm Back . . . for A Moment . . . About Dumb Ads

2008-01-18T14:57:00.003-05:00

I abandoned this blog quite a while ago. I was just tired of it and was in a slump, and when I'm in a slump nothing particularly strikes me as blogworthy. I felt like a child on Ritalin needing a long drug holiday, so I took it. Not Ritalin--the holiday.

And as I return, it doesn't shame me to say that my mood swings are getting pretty wide these days owing to the beginning of menopause. I'm happy to report that I don't give a damn, and I've quit being all polite, and it feels really good to be unapologetically crotchety.

Of course I will start by admitting that I watch too much television and that it has rotted my brain so that it probably looks as though I have bovine spongiform encephalitis. Even my use of the BSE term is proof that I have a problem, because it's only the animal form that has that name. I think the human manifestation of the disease is CJD ( Creusfeldt-Jakob disease). Such forgetfulness is a symptom of the "m" word. Anyway, for a few months now, I have been harboring resentment against some ads that finally coalesced into a critical mass, making me want to stick my spongy head in the sink and flip the garbage disposal switch. But of course I'm not a pinhead, and I'm not going to waste myself over TV ads.

However, as a critical reader, writer, and viewer I do notice everything about the ads. Would I buy this product? In the following cases, I proclaim a resounding "No!"

First, I want to lambaste the big pharmaceutical companies. Now, first of all, I have to issue the disclaimer that I know Big Pharma has kept me alive against astounding odds. For that I'm truly grateful. As a lifelong severe asthmatic, I've had many, many near-death asthmatic experiences. Some people have occupational hazards; I have none (as a writer and editor who works from home, what could happen? I guess I could trip over my computer cord, or an irate client could murder me for not getting published). But I sure do have chronic existential hazards. Maintaining existence has been pretty had for me. Anyway, as thankful as I am for [some of] the medications that have been made available during my lifetime, I'm healthily skeptical of some others. For years the "rage" medications' side effects rendered me ill, jittery, nauseous, moody, and insomniac. They caused headaches so bad I had to decide between the headache and the asthma, and frequently I chose to tolerate the asthma just to get relief from the headaches. These days I'm seeing infuriating "la-la-la" happy ads about miracle medications. There's one with a carefree woman who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow riding along in a convertible and claiming that previously she thought she had been "in control" of her asthma, but wasn't really, until she found this new drug. I want to slap her face. I have been on that drug and every other "state-of-the-art" asthma medicine, and I follow my regimen religiously. It seems to reduce exacerbations. But never, not once in my entire life, have I been "in control of my asthma." I can't make plans; any day is a potential heyday for an attack. I just want to slap these people silly for suggesting predictable "control" is possible. Of course, most of the time I'm too wheezy to manage the exertion required to slap someone silly.

Enough about the pharmas. Another irritating ad is a little old, and disappeared so long ago that I had gratefully forgotten about it. Unfortunately, it has inexplicably resurfaced with great vigor and repetition, and makes me want to go on a rampage. A mom in a grocery store is pushing her evil, spoiled little girl around in the shopping cart. You know the type of kid I mean. Spawn of Satan. The child seems to have sprung from a Stephen King novel, from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," or from one of the old Billy Mumy episodes of "The Twilight Zone." She's utterly manipulative, controls her mother, and knows she can win every time. The mom needs parenting classes, stat.

"Broccoli," the mom says as she reaches for some. "I don't LIKE broccoli," the smirking child says. "Some chickennnnnn," the mom says. "I DON'T LIKE chicken," says the girl, very self-satisfied. "Waffles," the mom says. "I don't think I LIKE waffles," the mini-vixen says, as if there's a kid in the whole wide world who doesn't like waffles. Then the mom picks up a multi-pack of Pediasure(R). This is Mom's big mistake. The little girl's face shows the barest hint of insincere, ingratiating approval. The final scene takes place at home, where the brat is shown happily sucking down the Pediasure(R) and rewarding Mom with a smile. Stupid mom. She's already allowed this young child to develop an eating disorder.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think this ad should be rewritten to go a little more like this. I know this is how my own mother would have handled it if I'd tried to pull such a stunt. First of all, except for her spoiled baby attitude, the girl is much too big to sit in the shopping-cart baby seat. That's Mom's initial error. Mom should rip her right out of there and make her walk on her own two perfectly good legs. Let her see how weak and sore her stupid legs are when she refuses to eat right and develops rickets! Second, when the impudent juvenile turd says she doesn't like everything, the mom should knock her upside the head, purchase the broccoli, chicken and waffles, drag the kid out to the car, strap her up uncomfortably in her car seat and take her straight home. This way, the Pediasure(R) will never get purchased, and Mom will get daughter to eat normal people food like broccoli, chicken and waffles, or else let the little bitch starve until she decides she will consume more than an unvaried, ridiculously expensive liquid diet. Of course, the problem with this revision is that it isn't going to sell much Pediasure(R). But honest to God. Even my dad wouldn't drink his "Geriatrisure" (not the product's real name), and he was dying and hungry. Apparently there's a reason this company needs desperate and terrible advertising. Their product sucks. That's a little joke.

Next on my list of heinous ads is the latest series for Pepto Bismol(R). What idiot(s) decided graphic depictions of the disgusting symptoms that might call for Pepto Bismol(R) were a good idea? The very thought of giant Godzilla having upset stomach, heartburn, or godforbid, diarrhea (!) is enough to make me rush to the toilet to vomit. The ads inspire the need for the product. But the company didn't stop there. Now there's an even more ludicrous ad purporting (and I say "purporting" because I refuse to believe the phenomenon's real) to show strange global auditions for the "roles" of heartburn, upset stomach, diarrhea, etc. The auditioners look, sound and act like mental hospital escapees. I can only imagine, and hope, that this ad campaign sets Pepto(R) sales well behind--no pun intended--and they will have to spend a lot of additional ad money catching up after this disaster.

Then there's the recent Monistat(R) ad for yeast infection medication (miconazole nitrate). The main element of the cure is a vaginal suppository they call an "ovule." As you'd well expect, it's egg-shaped. An ovule is an unfertilized seed. I am sorry, but I do not get the backwards logic in the marketing here. No matter how desperate the infectious circumstances, I am not going to shove an egg up my va-jay-jay. I am full of eggs already, and at this age would kill myself if another one EVER managed to get fertilized. By biological law, eggs are only supposed to come OUT, not go in! What were they thinking?! Furthermore, I am pleased as punch that my eggs have nearly stopped doing anything whatsoever except, perhaps, shriveling up. Good riddance.

The Chunky ChipsAhoy(R) ads, featuring animated chocolate chip cookies that inexplicably stand vertically on their own and can speak, sing, and dance, really upset me. They just make me sad. In this case, it's not that I'm repulsed, but that I feel bad for the cookies, and specifically because of this campaign, I will never buy and eat them. For me, it's a reverse ad campaign. It's not funny to me that the cookies facilitate their own demise. The ads flop because their emotional appeal goes not to my mean-spirited side, but to my sympathetic side. "Today is the first day of the rest of my life"--boom, gone! It's tragic. Car ride with "Don't You Want Me Baby?"--four of them snatched up in a heartbeat. I have always wondered what happens to the car after the driver gets eaten. Does it crash into other vehicles, killing their passengers as well? The "If You Want My Body" one, where the bachelor cookie briefly entertains a date, is just sick. Not only because the bachelor cookie gets grabbed right out of an embarrassing intimate moment, but that after he's devoured, the dumb blonde date looks up and says, (desperate), "Call me?" worst of all is the eulogy ad, in which two cookies fondly remember one of their recently departed cronies. In the very moment of their grief, they're pilfered right out of the funeral home. Is nothing sacred? Ick. I do think the ads are kind of funny, but for me in terms of selling a product, this series operates like aversion therapy.

Finally, there's the egregious campaign for Charmin(R) toilet paper. (Yessiree-Bob, there's actually a website for Charmin(R), complete with a section on "toilet paper history"! Sheesh. Are we not above potty jokes?) Why did good ol' Mr. Whipple have to up and die on us? Bring him back, please! He's been replaced by a stupid family of bears. That's right. Bears. Because the company apparently thought it would be clever to allude to the figure of speech, "Does a bear $h^t in the woods?" And that's just what the animated bears do. They try to make the bears cute and appealing, but puhh-leeze. There are a couple of ads in which little bear and parent bear are in the woods, and little bear goes behind a tree and uses Charmin(R). Because heaven knows bears use toilet paper when they $h^t in the woods. (Where do they put the discarded paper? Is this environmentally responsible? Let's not think about that.) It's not any more attractive that the ads are animations. Under no circumstances do I want to think about bears $h^tting in the woods. Nada. Zip. There's another ad highlighting the availability of two types of Charmin(R), distinguished by two different bears, one blue and one red. I do not like blue bears or red bears. They don't really mean anything to me. And I dislike witnessing the moment that they both have urgent elimination needs while on the BEACH, and race like crazy for the public outhouses. That's their private "business," and I do not care to share it. Henceforth I will have a hard time at my favorite place, the beach, because now I'll associate it with pooping bears. Thanks, Charmin(R), for ruining idyllic beach thoughts for me. I pretty much find toilet paper ads of any sort offensive. It's rather personal. It's not a product that requires advertising; it's the sort of basic staple that everyone needs anyway. Why underscore the obvious with an expensive campaign in very bad taste?

Perhaps this cynicism and refusal to believe in the public's gullibility are why I did not last long in the advertising industry.

Star Light, Star Bright

2007-10-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

Help. I'm having one of those brain fugues that make me think the men in white coats from the Mental Institute for the Criminally Editorial might drive up in front of my door any minute.

I've been reading a lot of blogs, and, usually, the comments. Most of the blogs I read deal with English language issues, copy editing, rare and interesting words and origins, etc. You're right--these blogs don't happen to appear on my blogroll now because I just don't feel like taking the time lately to add them to my template. Anyway. The blog writers are usually highly skilled, but the commenters aren't, necessarily. Lately I've run across a problem that seems to be with my own feeble little mind. Commenters seem to be using "may" and "might" interchangeably. Maybe that's perfectly acceptable practice now, or is just more colloquial than I was taught. Every time I see one of the uses I go bonkers trying to decide if it's correct or not.

Perhaps I'm just a dinosaur, but I could swear that I was taught way back in the day that there is a specific difference in these usages. And I am certain that I have used the distinction in copy editing, but I CAN'T REMEMBER HOW! I thought "may" was present and "might" was past. But I can't find a good example of this, and I've looked it up in a dozen references and teaching textbooks, and no one mentions it at all. Even the highly didactic and butt-slapping Harbrace College Handbook, looking menacingly over its half-moon glasses, doesn't cover it. The books all address may/can but I don't have a problem with that one; it's obvious. This may/might is not an easy issue to wrap a feeble mind around, either. Because to begin with it's a conditional, and its time dimension only confuses matters. And of course because it's conditional it could refer to the future, and each of them seems to apply in that situation. Both words just seem to float perfectly legitimately in the existential linguistic ether.

Do you remember any such thing, or am I just a flaming idiot?

First star I see tonight/I wish I may/ I wish I might . . . have this wish to untangle may and might. (That line didn't scan well at all, but I'm desperate.)

Hell, big guns--I'm going to resort to a dictionary! Yes, even those of us who are [nearly!] flawless pedants know multiple dictionaries are their best friends.

[Brief break]

Well, apparently I'm NOT a senile dumbbell who misremembered. Thank God. I was about to voluntarily commit myself to the MICE--see expansion of acronym in first line of this post.

The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (p. 613) says:

may/may/v.aux. (3rd sing. present may; past might/mit/) 1 (often foll. by well for emphasis) expressing possibility (it may be true; I may have been wrong; you may well lose your way). 2 expressing permission (you may not go; may I come in?). 3 expressing a wish (may he live to regret it). 4 expressing uncertainty or irony in questions (who may you be?; who are you, may I ask?). 5 in purpose clauses and after wish, fear, etc. (take such measures as may avert disaster; hope he may succeed). be that as it may despite that; nevertheless (be that as it may, I still want to go). [OE maeg f. Gmc, rel to MAIN1, MIGHT2]
NOTE: Traditionalists insist that one should distinguish between may (present tense) and might (past tense) in expressing possibility: I may have some dessert after dinner if I'm still hungry; I might have known that the highway would be closed because of the storm. In casual use, though, may and might are generally interchangeable: They might take a vacation next month; He may have called earlier, but the answering machine was broken.

I guess it's official: I'm a "traditionalist." And so the problem of tense still stands: the example of interchangeability involves the FUTURE. Yeah. So what did I say to begin with? Anyway, apparently I'm not living on the far side of crazy yet.

Happy Fall!

2007-10-10T13:24:00.001-05:00

The gosh darn "minimum" amount of pick-your-own Cortland and Gala apples from the orchard--a half-bushel! My DH was good enough to SAY NOTHING when he saw the sheer volume. He could have lit right into me, but didn't. Besides, he likes to bake really huge apple streudels. I see a lot of pie and applesauce and upside-down cake and tarts and give-aways to friends in the immediate future.

Unbelievably huge pumpkins outside one of the wonderful colonial houses in historic Deerfield. I hope the residents don't need to rush out the front door in an emergency, because them gourds ain't movin' outta the way.

Some of the "drops" that have fallen off the apple trees.

Squirrel in pumpkin, my porch. It's not this year's picture, but I like it.

Pumpkins in the fog.

Saved-Up Tidbits

2007-10-10T12:59:00.000-05:00

Overheard and noted, but not posted 'til now:

G [waxing all arrogant and "knowledgeable" about technology]: People who buy iPods and iTunes are like people like us, who buy stupid Dell computers. They're just wasting their money on the Cream of the Crap.

Tyke [having been asked in the car if he can hear what's coming through someone else's earbuds]: I must be blind, because I can't hear it.

Fellow Mom [on yearly trip to Vermont, without her glasses, looking at note at the bottom of lunch receipt]: Thank you for dancing with us? Click here for last year's misreading.

Tyke, being asked a quiz question, and answering the question before the quizzer was even finished:
Quizzer: "Which Romans were rich and powerful . . . "
Tyke [interrupting] The Greeks!
Quizzer: The question was, "Which Romans were rich and powerful, the patricians or the plebeians?"

S: I answered that question by the process of elim-illumination.

Me [looking at bottom of shopping receipt]: Historic Decaffeinated Museum Store? (Deerfield)

Neologisms Abounding

2007-09-24T12:53:00.000-05:00

Tyke: Mom, what's a malevictorian? (valedictorian)

Yay! I really love this one. He has outdone himself. It's so evocative, making images rush into my mind. Immediately I think of Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein, the grave-robbers of Edinburgh, Rasputin--the list could go on and on.

BTW, that's the incomparable John Barrymore as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in the 1920 film of the same name. Swell!

Yet Another Tykeism

2007-09-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

Again, Happy B-Day, Tyke.

Tyke came home with his graded "Nature of Science Survey." He got a check plus. I think, in a way, his teacher was giving him a lot of credit which he might not have deserved. The survey was designed so kids could agree or disagree with the statements, and state reasons for their opinions. All of his other answers were clearly sound, but this one was fishy:

Statement #3: Imagination and creativity play an important role in the work of a scientist.

Tyke's answer: Yes, because if Thomas Edison didn't have the creativity to make a light bulb, it would be dark today.

Uhhhm, no, Tyke, but sort of.

Also, for background of why this is funny to us, you should know that we used to live in Corning, NY, home of the fabulous Corning Museum of Glass. The first Edison light bulbs were mass produced in the Corning glassworks. My kids could tell you anything about the history of glass. They used to want to go to the museum every single weekend (which we could do for free just by crossing the main street, being employees of said company), and we used to get private tours by the wonderful curator on slow weeks. His name was: Mr. Starr! And they loved that, at the end of the tour, he would give out little smooth glass blobs from his seemingly infinitely deep clownlike pocket. And once he gave them a big blue glass star, which they still have.

Thank goodness it isn't dark today. Thanks for the creativity of scientists like my DH! And thanks to Thomas Edison, and to Corning, too.

Happy Birthday

2007-09-19T16:13:00.000-05:00

Today is Tyke's birthday. With each year I feel his strong tug AWAY from my apron strings, and I feel sad. He's my little sweetie and I don't know how I'll manage when he turns into a teenager, which is somewhat close to around the corner. He's already talking teen-speak and the purty girls flock around him and call him on the phone all the time. Sigh.

In his honor and in honor of his specific request, I baked a chocolate cake with frosting. But I am the world's least skilled baker, being the oddball in our family who does not care about either sweets or chocolate. In order to cook something really well, I need to imagine an appetite for it.

Later (when I get time) I will post a picture of the ill-formed cake. My poor kid. He watched me make it and has already laughed heartily over it. He was bribed to cease; I let him have the shaved-off, unlevel cake top as well as the left-over frosting.

I am notorious for failed cakes. Sometimes I have to stay up all through the night to bake a cake over and over again until I get it right. And I rarely even bake a cake from scratch. I can't even get a MIX right! Not so this year; but, still, it's humiliating. I once made a huge sheet cake for my grad school class in honor of the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was an albatross, indeed. It was from the first attempt at this cake that I learned my apartment oven was not level. Then, on the second try (after figuring out the leveling problem), I dropped the cake. The third was a charm, however, and the ship and albatross were real works of art. But lord was I tired after that all-nighter.

When I was in high school, I decided to make a special birthday cake for my dad. I planned it well ahead. But Dad's birthday was in July, and at the time I lived in California with no air conditioning, and it was hot. I baked the cake but did not know how long I should let it cool. I kept checking, but the darned thing just wouldn't cool down. Dad would be home soon and I was on a deadline, so I frosted the thing earlier than I should have. I left the kitchen, and when I came back just before Dad got home, I found an Earthquake Cake. First, the top layer had slid halfway off the bottom layer and part of the way onto the counter. Not only that, but it had opened up in three directions on the top, like a volcano or something. In any case, it was a true freak of nature.

Anyway, long live my little Tyke. We have put the cake in the refrigerator to avoid further weepage and sinkage and slippage and who knows what other atrocities of pastryhood.

That reminds me: in grad school my DH had a French housemate who frequently phoned his grandmother in France. She was from a different part of the country than he, and thus spoke a slightly different dialect with different inflections. One time I remember him calling her and he said to put the gateau in the refrigerator, and she went ape, thinking he was telling her to put the cat in the refrigerator. Long live the cat! Long live the gateau! Long live the Tyke!

Accidents

2007-09-09T13:31:00.001-05:00

Thus begins a very long preamble to a story that perhaps will not be as long as the preamble.

Sometimes stupid things happen to me that are just so unlikely and ridiculous and inexplicable I want to jump off a cliff, hide under a rock, or ask the powers-that-be for a big do-over. Like the time my suspicious next-door neighbor's overly ebullient golden retriever escaped the yard (because the NEIGHBOR had turned off the electric fence), and very heavy but stupid young dog came over and nearly bounced me to death, including biting my butt and making a hole in my pants, and in order to ensure the dog's safety and to keep him out of the street, I chased the dog, caught him by the collar, and took him back to his own front door. And looking all torn up and disheveled, I said out of breath to the neighbor, "Here's Bowser. Because he thought I was playing, he was a very haphazard runner and hard to catch. And by the way, he bit my butt, and wrecked my trousers, and knocked me down, and I'm hurt!" And the neighbor looked at me as if I had nefariously kidnapped his stupid dog and had been planning to hold him for exorbitant ransom and I deserved every minute of attack, chase and pain. With menace in his eyes, he stood back from the threshold and said, "WHAT are YOU doing with MY dog?" Returning him like a good neighbor would, you asshole. Because YOU turned off your invisible fence.

Apparently in his world there was no such thing as his making such a mistake, so in his mind there could be no other explanation for this event than my having done something clearly evil. It couldn't be him, so it must be me.

And his wife operated in the real world with a very similar illogical mind. There was the time when she--a genteel, perfect Southern lady who always had a new haircut and manicure and was like a militant Martha Stewart craft mom on steroids--called me up nearly weeping because she had heard (how?) that I was having a dinner party and had not invited her and hubby. "First name, do you HATE ME? Because I heard you were having a party and didn't invite us, and I can't imagine what I could have done to you to deserve treatment like that. Sniff." I remember how hard it was not to cackle and snort. To her perfectly polite Southern mind, no sane woman on earth would dream of not inviting the neighbors to a planned party. She had always invited us, and quite frankly we usually didn't go. BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE WERE NOT OUR FRIENDS.

So I had to explain to her something I'm not sure she was able to wrap her blessed little mind around: Our dinner party did not include her or any other neighbors or any friends because my DH was a new manager of a new team at work and the event was exclusively for his team and they would be talking about highly proprietary work information. I am quite sure the neighbor thought I was lying. Well, go weep into your big puffy homemade tissue paper flowers.

Anyway, these are situations that I could never have seen coming. They don't make sense at the time or later and all you want to do is yell, "This isn't what it LOOKS like!" They're permanently daffy, and there's nothing anyone or history can do about it.

Thus were a couple of my vacation circumstances. I don't get it. But apparently I had a bizarre sleeping accident.

We were renting a very nice cottage at the Cape

and we slept in an enormous skylighted room with a queen bed. Because DH has life-long back problems due to athletic injuries, we have not slept in a conventional bed in 18 years, but this one (at first) seemed quite comfortable. For most of the week we were rested and didn't get sore backs. What I did notice, however, was that if only one of us was in the bed, it was very comfortable, but if both of us were in the bed, a mysterious sink-hole would develop toward my side. A couple of days before we left, DH got up to go to the bathroom. I was sleeping on my left side clinging to the left side of the mattress (as you would sleep in it, not as you would look at a bed from its end). I had learned to cling so as to avoid the intermittent sink-hole. When DH came back, the chasm opened up and I was jerked right into it and forced to roll over hard onto my right side. And I heard and felt a snap-crack and shouted in pain.

And, Reader, I believe I fractured a rib.

That's right. My rib is broken, or something between ribs is badly sprained, from a sleeping accident.

I'm not even going to bother talking to my doctor. If I explained what happened, I would see her face wiggle in little bunny attempts not to burst out laughing, and then she'd probably suspect I was lying and we'd get embroiled in some ridiculously wrong-headed, trumped-up and absolutely false abuse write-up. It's so pathetic, and so not plausible, but believe me, I was there and that's exactly what happened, and I'm still in the substantial pain to prove it. I was considering the possibility of raging osteoporosis but I'm not that old and have had frequent density tests and, hah-hah, I'm still sufficiently dense to rule that out.

For the past nine days, I have not been able to cough, sneeze, or laugh. Do you know how hard that is when you are a flaming asthmatic with allergies and a funny family? Torture. It's also really bad because asthmatics need to cough to keep their lungs clear. Coincidentally, I have to go to a pulmonologist tomorrow, so I have no idea how I'll weasel my way out of the spirometry and cough tests.

In a fairly unrelated, but equally stupid incident, just after we got home and started unpacking I was standing in a wifty pose (read: "thoughtful") in the kitchen with my arm bent and my hand near my collarbone when #1 Son charged in to give me one of his signature awkward surprise displays of affection (ASDAs). Said son is fairly huge at this point; he's quite a bit taller than I and he outweighs me by more than 50 pounds. He's a big barrel of a boy and will be a whopping solid bear of a man. So he came up behind me and grabbed me hard in a shock hug (around the ribs, ow!), and in reflex I jerked my hand up, and in his brute strength he jammed my arm against me, and he made me slug myself just under the collarbone. This was not fun at the time but didn't really seem to hurt the whole night it happened--certainly not as much as the squeeze around the ribs, which set back the healing to square one.

The next morning I almost couldn't get out of bed. It felt as though I had slugged myself with a spear clear through the chest and shoulder and out the other side. In subsequent days, I couldn't sleep on one side (ribs) and couldn't sleep on the other side (shoulder/collarbone).

In my closed little mind there is no such thing as a bizarre sleeping accident, nor is there involuntarily slugging myself so it feels like I've been in a car wreck. Who knew? Apparently these things do happen. I'm sure emergency-room doctors have collected reams of better, more scintillating examples. (Note to self: Look for book.) Mysteriously escaped neighbors' dogs can bite you on the butt in play and their owners will treat you as though you should be put away in jail, and you can break a rib and pierce a shoulder doing absolutely nothing. You just never know what might be lurking around the next mattress. No--wait a minute--that doesn't sound right. That locution itself was an accident.

Insults

2007-08-16T10:08:00.000-05:00

In anticipation of vacation, and the promise of being on the beach again, I find my mental faculties waning. Just imagining the breeze, remembering the briny smell, and looking forward to perfectly barbecued bluefish has rendered me a bit brain-dead ahead of time. Not to mention the irritation of making lists of things that need to be taken. I'm a terrible list-maker and no matter how many days I chisel away at the list, I will invariably forget something important.

Therefore, since I can't think, I have nothing original to say today. But a friend sent me one of those "viral" e-mails (not an e-mail containing a virus!) that gets forwarded all over the internet, and this time it was a good one that really made me laugh. So I'm going to spread it further.

It's a shame that people don't seem to be this witty in our era. Following are many examples of proof that the "diss" really is an art.

When Insults Had Class:

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... If you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill...

followed by Churchill's response:

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second, if there is one." -- Winston Churchill

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." -- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." -- Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy." -- Walter Kerr

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar Wilde

Lady Astor once remarked to Winston Churchill at a Dinner Party "Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee!" Winston replied, "Madam if I were your husband I would drink it!"

What's the Diff?

2007-08-13T11:03:00.000-05:00

Tyke: Mom? Dad? What's the difference between "incarcerated" and "incinerated"?

Mom & Dad [prolonged laughter followed by apt explanation]

It was an amusing moment, but I shortly thereafter I had another, much more sober thought. In at least one situation, I wish incarceration and incineration could be combined. When it comes to the case of the inhuman scumbags responsible for a recent unspeakable crime, I think there are isolated situations for which the death penalty should be reinstated in Connecticut, and these sick bastards--inexplicably free as birds on parole at the time--should be burned alive on the town common. The only problem is, there's not a town common big enough for the huge crowds who'd gladly race to the site to cheer it on. I'm sure the draw would be bigger than Rolling Stones, U2, and Police concerts combined. Maybe the event--undoubtably overflowing--could be held at Rentschler Field.

The crime: Two life-long criminals recently out of prison, who apparently met at a halfway house where they had both stayed in the past, go on a crazy protracted spree similar to that of the Manson gang in the late 60's. They rape, beat, strangle, bank-rob and tie up a family, set the house on fire when at least three are still alive inside, and then deliberately crash and wreck police cruisers upon attempted escape in--what else--the family's car, which they've stolen. Accidentally, there's one poor survivor. He undoubtedly wishes he didn't live through it.

http://www.wfsb.com/news/13762474/detail.html

Oh, and so far all that's come out of this is the news, revealed today, that parolees who meet certain criteria (like these guys) will be required to wear GPS devices. Yeah. So that the next time a parolee decides to go on a spree, the "authorities" (as if they're looking anyway) will know where they're out continuing to commit crimes. And if their free space is limited to their neighborhoods, their neighbors will get to be the lucky victims.

For some crimes, there should be absolutely no "salvation" or "forgiveness," or "mercy," and unfortunately there is no punishment yet devised that is bad enough to fit. We, the taxpayers, get the privilege of footing the bill for serving them "justice." They get to be fed, clothed and sheltered for free. They get TV, cigarettes, libraries, internet. (Frankly, I hope they partake of lots of cigarettes and die slowly in great suffering.) While incarcerated, they clearly can't work, so aren't paying taxes back into the system that supports them. Meanwhile, legitimately homeless people unemployed due to a Bush economy--or bankrupted by scam mortgages or astronomical medical bills thanks to our excellent health care system--are viewed as social pariahs to be shooed off the street. Why are people who clearly could not have done such a thing if they thought they had anything worthwhile left to lose anyway entitled to justice? They didn't think their victims were entitled to anything.

Exterminators

2007-08-07T13:49:00.000-05:00

This morning, while driving Tyke to his trumpet institute at the university, we got stuck behind a large commercial diesel truck for a while. We were listening to NPR and I forget the context, but the speaker said, "They'll have to call in a fumigator." After a couple of minutes we started moving again, and

Tyke: Mom, is a fumigator an alligator that eats fumes?

Yeah, kind of like the opposite of a fire-breathing dragon.

Proof

2007-08-06T11:12:00.000-05:00

Every now and then--though frankly not very often--I get lulled into the false sense that my teenage son is developing just fine: decision-making, grades, talents, logic, and ability to communicate with others all seem to be gradually and demonstrably inching up with each passing day.

But yesterday I was rudely yanked out of said comfortable lull, and quickly remembered that what Dr. Phil says is absolutely true: the part of teenagers' brains that helps regulate judgment and reason just isn't developed yet. I just got MORE absolute PROOF.

Despite many caveats from family and doctors, Kid has feigned obliviousness to the fact that he is becoming overweight and, except for dance, hardly ever exercises at all except whatever they make him do in gym at school. But now it's summer and there's no gym. His only exercise is digits at the keyboard and an occasional romp in a friend's swimming pool. I respect and heartily promote his interest in all the arts and don't care at all if he chooses not to participate on sports teams. That's just not who he is. But the weight gain is concerning, and so are the poor eating choices and lack of exercise. If they don't change, Kid's going to have a heart attack during his first year of college because he'll go buckwild crazy eating the wrong things with no supervision.

And that, friends, would really piss me off, because we have put an extraordinary investment of love, time and money into Kid. And he hasn't exactly been an angel--far from it. A pain, oftentimes. If I only had a nickel for every tortilla and four dollars back for every six-dollar brick of cheese and gallon of milk he's consumed over the past two years, I could pay for that extra year of college he'll need after screwing up freshman year. Not to mention how much pizza (or--should I say--how many whole pizzas) he's eaten while we weren't taking inventory.

If we are what we eat, he's The Big Cheese. He eats however much there is, including what I hide in the freezer. I keep trying to have cheese so that I can use it for specific purposes in planned meals, but by the time I get to the day of the meal I've planned, the cheese is always gone and I can't cook what I planned. Pretty much everything from the grocery store disappears within two days after it's purchased. If I buy one pound of something, he eats one pound. If I bought 89 pounds of something, he'd eat 88 and not leave enough to do anything else with. Whatever there is, he eats until it's gone.

Clearly I am a Dangerous Enabler. It's up to me to stop buying tortillas and cheese! It's up to me to quit buying any groceries at all! If we just didn't have any food in the house, he wouldn't have a problem.

Anyhow, on the weekend I noticed Kid at the computer, honest-to-goodness actually looking up the new FDA recommended food pyramid (mypyramid.gov). He's taking an American Government course in summer school, so my bet is they talked about regulatory bodies such as the FDA. Bodies. Hah.

(I must say, in my opinion, the "new" food pyramid is completely nonsensical and fails as a piece of "graphic art." To me it communicates nothing but a marathoner running Capitol steps for some cause-- rainbow pride?--but I digress.)

Kid was making a list of recommended foods and servings. This is what he ultimately came up with for a full day worth of meals (he typed up a list and printed it):

Diet
3.3 oz. whole-wheat grain bread
1 oz spinach or lettuce
1 oz. carrots or sweet potatoes
1.5 oz. black beans or kidney beans
3.5 oz. corn or potatoes
2 oz. green beans, beats [sic], or asparagus
2 oz. tomatoes, eggplant, or mushrooms
.5 oz. olive oil
7 oz. beef or chicken
4 oz. cheese
4 oz. milk
3.5 oz. banana
3 oz. apples

Exercise
45 minutes fast biking or running
7.5 min push-ups
7.5 min sit-ups
strech [sic]

I thought that was okay, except the "fast" exercise, which he hasn't gradually trained for. But at least he was thinking about taking responsibility, and putting forth some effort to figure out his needs.

Then I discovered the actual plan. As I watched him carefully weigh the items on the kitchen scale, I realized his gathering wasn't a day's worth of itemized, meal-by-meal eating. He went into the cabinet and got out the blender. Yes, he was going to make a day's worth of sustenance all in one fell whizz.

Before I could prevent it, he dumped it all in; asparagus, frozen corn, milk, bread, cheese (of course!), tomato, carrots, banana, olive oil.

Quickly I felt both faint and sick, and left the room. Little brother was shrieking, "Nooooo!! That's groooooossss!" Kid turned on the blender, and that was it.

He poured it into a big plastic glass and started walking around the open floorplan with it, sipping as he ambled. He said, "See, it's not bad! In fact, it doesn't taste like much of anything at all!" as the rest of us turned our heads.

Later, I made him clean up the huge mess he'd made (including spraying puke-colored blended gook all over the kitchen door and its window panes). I also noticed some items in the refrigerator. One was the less-than-half-empty cup, with plastic wrap floating over the top. The other was a Tupperware container spilling over onto the shelf with the remainder from the blender.

I'm guessing this diet will go well. If anything could put a person off his appetite, that would be it. And, someday--perhaps soon--maybe he'll go back to eating his veg, fruit, bread, milk and cheese separately, or in sensible combinations and quantities. And I will remember as a mantra, every day, what Dr. Phil said.

Creative Reading

2007-08-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

Tyke [looking at rather poorly printed text at bottom of a restaurant receipt]: Mom, who's Cash Tender Ed? Was that our server?

Weird Dreams

2007-07-14T16:29:00.001-05:00

Weird dreams visit me quite often. There was the one years ago where my toddler and I were wading in six-inch deep water in the Caribbean and a sea turtle swam up and swallowed him, and I thrashed out after the turtle and swam like hell until I caught it by the leg. I stuck my hand straight down the turtle's throat and turned its entire body inside out (just like an oven glove) until I saved the baby and swam him safely back to shore.

Most of my dreams are architectural. This has been going on all of my life. I relish those dreams because they let me inhabit fascinating spaces that are conjectural and conceptual and often make absolutely no sense, and yet I get to occupy completely illogical and fabulous places. I find this tremendously freeing, since most of mundane daily life, literally and figuratively, is bordered by such maddeningly predictable, unremarkable walls.

Yesterday one of the boys and I were watching part of an episode of "How They Do It" on Discovery (I think). There was a segment on how they make and package bandages, and much more compelling, a bit on how microchips are fabricated. I like this kind of stuff and so does the kid, but the kid was very tired from athletic overexertion and said he hated it and could not stand it anymore, so off it went. But I was still thinking about the microchips.

This morning, as I was dreaming I somehow got stuck in a big potato-chip factory tour. They showed us everything from slicing to how the oil gets put in the frying vats to the draining, conveyors, salting and bagging. But on this tour, I got shown more than the salting. I was on a flavor tour! And lucky me. What flavor did I get? Salt and vinegar? Sour cream? Jalapeno lime? BBQ? Cheddar? Not that I like any of those. No. Yecchhhh. In fact, I'm a potato-chip purist. Plain-old classic is good, and when I'm feeling wild, the ripple kind that you can dip without breaking.

I was on the tour of

Steak & onion flavor

I don't eat beef, haven't for many, many years, and can't really stand the thought of it. Why did my mind come up with this?

Nasty!

Quick! Where do I turn in my tour ticket and trade it for a different tour?!! Where do I turn in my dream ticket and trade it for a different dream?!!

Another Stupid Mishearing

2007-07-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

For years I've had a special drawer in my mind that records what I would call fractured mishearings of song lyrics.

Just today, G and I were in the kitchen and he barely started to hum "The Immigrant Song" by Page and Plant of Led Zeppelin. Then he went into a deliberately funny and obnoxious mime dance of a flailing rock star, shaking his long hair and throwing his guitar around. I was washing dishes, but I sang the lyrics. He said [get this] "Mom, how do you know every lyric to every song?" As if I were so old I could never have owned a radio as a child. Gawd.

While we were singing this song together, I confessed to G that I never had been able to understand a particular line of the lyrics to "The Immigrant Song," even though I had listened carefully to all the lyrics for about a thousand years. It was a function of the recording, not a problem with the artists or their lyrics. I've written articles on this subject (misheard lyrics) before, but today I confessed a crowner that I hadn't mentioned before because I'd completely forgotten about it.

Even as a young child, I had always understood that "The Immigrant Song" was about the Viking invasions. And so it is. But there was a single line which threw me, making me think the song was not only about the Vikings, but also perhaps about Ellis Island immigrants. What I didn't understand was the line that begins,

Oh we sweep with thrashing oar

And since childhood, I've thought the next line was

I want to go and see the Western show!

My childhood reasoning was that yes, the Scandinavians were "immigrants" [read invaders] very early, and then much later, in the 19th century, many immigrants came by boat to America for what they hoped would be a more prosperous life, not as invaders. So as a kid I reasoned that perhaps along the way the immigrants might have heard about cowboys in America, and Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. But I could not understand why, out of the entire song, there was just one line that seemed to allude to more recent times and goof up the unity--the established chronology of the whole song. It was just too anachronistic in the middle of a song that otherwise made exclusively ancient references. It was plausible, but really bothered me.

G quickly researched the exact lyrics. He found out that the real line was

Our only goal will be the western shore.

G said, "That's excellent, Mom! I really like it! I think that's your stupidest mishearing yet!"

Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh. Ooooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh.

Fill In The Blank

2007-07-05T22:17:00.000-05:00

I love the way writing exercises crack through banal rationality to offer a glimpse of our native wild mind (see Natalie Goldberg's books for excellent ideas). A couple of weeks ago I was waiting for outrageously expensive new functional tires to be put on my pathetic old car, and tried this exercise from Behn & Twichell's The Practice of Poetry (HarperCollins 1992), called "As/Like/Finish the Sentence." It was contributed by Linnea Johnson.

Rules:

Fill in the blanks as rapidly as you can. Do not think. Write. If you have no reflex response, go on to the next sentence. Stop when you slow down.
Reread the sentences you've finished, circling a couple you like best. Begin a poem using a simile/metaphor/analogy you've written.

I haven't done a poem yet; haven't even decided which sentences I like best. But here are my sentences. The part in regular font is the prompt from the book; the italics are my fill-ins for the blanks.

A spider on an old man's beard is like a carol wafting through a cathedral.
The oars on the boat rowed as if they alone could bring back President Kennedy.
Nothing was the same, now that it was a hot refrigerator.
The wino took to coma like a used car to a scrap heap.
The dice rolled out of the cup toward Len like sewage rising through the basement drain.
A child in a warm laundry pile is like a duck in a pond.
Puffy clouds in your glass of wine are harbingers of time-clenched fancy.
Fall's leaf-filled tarp is like muscles stretched out over bone.
The fog plumed through the gunshot holes in the train windows like furtive ghosts seeking refuge.
The gray honor walked up the satin plank as if each step took on a new-found planet.
Canceled checks in the abandoned boat seemed to bounce just like the yellow rubber they swirled in.
If I should wake before I die, give me wisdom and blueberry pie!
Alannah poured coffee down her throat as if reversing wind through a trumpet.
Up is like down when the cat falls off the chimney.
You mine rocks from a quarry. What you get from a quandary is an equilateral quadrangle.
Marlene dangled the parson from her question as if shaking off a mosquito.
She held her life in her own hands as if it were Socratic rubble.
"No, no, a thousand times no," he said, his hand pulling off the Santa beard.
The solution was hydrochloric acid; the problem was, therefore, indisinguishably disintegrated.
Love is to open sky as loathing is to a cellar cubbyhole.

Gosh, now I want to go try this again!

Poetry Thursday . . . a little late

2007-07-05T14:04:00.000-05:00

Because of the holiday, I'm all goofed up this week. On the Fourth we had a day of sloth, socializing, real concerts starring the kids, and barbecue invitations. Tuesday we had new garage doors, lifters, remotes and keypads installed, and it all went terribly awry. Today I'm still reeling from the garage-door fiasco (they had to come back this morning to fix all the bollixed up business, including their thievery of our ladder), and because yesterday was so relaxing, today feels like Monday and I keep consulting the calendar only to review activities for the wrong day. Frankly, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, except for getting the garage-door installers to redo and make it all properly functional without harassing them.

Oh, yeah! It's Thursday. That means Poetry Thursday. And because I was derelict in my duty last week, I feel the guilty obligation to post something, even though it isn't any good.

My previous post about raccoons confirmed that I'm fairly blackhearted when it comes to nuisance wildlife. I think it's cute and love to watch it--from a distance. But I'm a beast, too, and I won't put up with the invasion of my territory if it results in damage.

I wrote this before the raccoon post, when I had not yet been enlightened as to which animal was creeping about at night. It was clear to me that it wasn't the squirrels, because they wouldn't take the bait by day--but I got a notion--imagine that squirrels were stealthily creeping about at night and hoarding things that they wouldn't touch by day?

The Porch

One by one the night squirrels come
silent and haunting
tree to tree
roof to roof
like acrobats in “Crouching Tiger”
furred and tailed.

Wrought-iron pillar to suet cage
blue spruce to hopper feeder
spilling the miniature birdbath

hungry
marauding
devouring stale rice crackers I tossed to taunt
whoever would take the bait.

Next time I’ll leave
wasabi peas.

Destruction

2007-07-05T09:59:00.000-05:00

There's a great poem by Joanne Kyger ("Destruction" in the section entitled "Beasts" in Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor) that describes how a bear ransacks a cabin. This morning I looked out the kitchen window to discover this--look under the bench:

At the base of the wrought-iron post is a pot full of lily bulbs. The plants are flourishing and just on the verge of blooming into my favorite big pink Asiatic lilies. I should say they were flourishing, until the middle of last night sometime. There used to be three plants, but as you can see from the photo somebody marauded one of the plants. Ripped it right out of the pot. Took the buds off. Shredded the stalk in half. Tore the precious leaves right off that sucker.

Who? Who? Who would do such a thing? Rampant, egregious destruction. A blatant, violent attack upon an innocent and potentially beautiful flower. Obviously it wasn't deer; they can only nibble. Not squirrels; the plant was to big for them. Not the many birds, however aggressive they may be, and many of them are.

Tyke took one look and said, "Raccoons."

He's pretty smart, that tyke. Of course he is right. I've never seen any raccoons around here, but I know they're on our property and the neighbors'. Tyke said that once when he was up high in his favorite tree he saw some raccoons going into a den by the remains of an old stone tree ring on our property. Occasionally they get into garbage cans and tear up garbage on the street.

So, news for the raccoons: I am officially stalking you. What would you like to taste next? A little arsenic? That can be arranged. When I catch you, I'll hang you upside down from the wrought iron post and pelt you with a slingshot full of large gravel. I don't care if you DO wash your grubby little hands before you eat. I'll grab them and tear you limb from limb.

I guess it's obvious that PETA gets no vote from me. I have even worse things to say about squirrels.

From now on, No Trespassing! I'm playing hard ball.

New Nonsense from the Home Trenches

2007-06-28T12:30:00.000-05:00

The Geico Cavemen often have a better vocabulary, and better insight, than I. (P.S. I heart the Geico Caveman who occupies the Caveman's Crib--he's pretty snarky and crabby, but he is so savvy, intellectual and sophisticated, and his apartment is downright awesome. I like dressing him up in his hopelessly retro tennis outfits. He knows how to party. I would totally eat the shrimp cocktail, and I want a set of those refrigerator poetry magnets in Esperanto!)

Tyke (convalescing on sofa with ice pack after the toe-smashing incident and looking a little downhearted, worried about whether he'll be allowed to participate at baseball practice): Mom, I'm in a fig.

Me: Whuuutt?

Tyke: You know. I'm in a fig!

Me: Huuuunnnhhhh? [Grunt]?

Tyke (really loud this time, as if increased volume will help me comprehend): YOU KNOW!!! I'm in a FIG!!! You know, a FIG!

Me: [feeling like a complete imbecile] I'm sorry, Tyke, I just don't understand what you're trying to say.

Tyke looks at me in silent disgust, as if to say, "You old people are so pathetic."

A whole minute goes by. I assume the meaning in the message will remain a mystery. Once that minute has passed, I've given up and forgotten about it.

Tyke: Oooohhhh!!! OOHHH! I know! (pause) I'm in a FUNK!!

Me: [laughter to the point of hyperventilation; faint]

Cut to this morning.

Tyke: Mom, why are inches so long?

Me: [Long stare. Silence.]

The Definition of Irony

2007-06-26T11:37:00.000-05:00

Kid leaves open trumpet case in the very center of bedroom floor.
In morning, Mom takes other kid to nine-hour daily musical theater camp.
While mom is gone, kid goes racing up stairs and into room.
Kid smashes foot on trumpet case.
Mom comes home.
Kid informs mom that he thinks he broke a toe or two.
Mom calls doctor's office for appointment.
The only available appointment is at the precise time of the weekly trumpet lesson.
Mom calls trumpet instructor to inform her that kid probably broke toes on trumpet case and can't come to lesson because fixing toes will be happening at the time the lesson should take place.
Doctor is informed that on any other day at the time we are visiting her, we would be at a trumpet lesson. Doctor thinks the story is very funny.
Trumpet instructor says, "Well, okay. Tell him no foot tapping when he practices!"

Old and New

2007-06-14T13:11:00.000-05:00

(Click on pic for larger view in separate window)

I should probably save this for the Fourth of July, but it's occurring to me now, so here goes it.

This week, I'm thinking about Father's Day. I'm not just thinking about my own father, but about all those fathers (and mothers) who came before him and, against all odds, somehow resulted in my life--the life of an only child and the life borne of parents who were also only children. Given history, it all seems so unlikely that I'm here, and that I could even know what I know.

Preface: I'm a fourth-generation Californian. My DH is a third-generation New-York-stater.

Since our whirlwind wedding, we've lived all over the country and even out of it. Shortly after we moved to CT, DH and I uncovered some family history we'd long wondered about. Both of us have roots in what is now called the US or America all the way back to about 1636. We have 14 and now 15 generations of documented family trees. In my case, no one but Americans intermarried; what I mean to say is that we don't have any immigrants coming into the family later than 1636. On DH's side, there's only one German forebear who arrived in the 19th c and not through Ellis Island. We've just been Americans marrying and procreating Americans. And for many generations before that, my ancestors on this side of the pond were Cherokee--real natives of this land.

When we lived in England, people assumed that because we were "American" it automatically meant that we were offspring of recent immigrants, as in Ellis Island. We got into many heated discussions. Other people got really mad at us because we wouldn't disclose what "nationality" we really were. They suspected we were trying to hide something. They had no concept of mixes, which I thought was completely odd, since they are in a tiny island country that is all about historic invasions and is also, unlike the US, just a stone's throw to any part of Europe. Many of them said we couldn't possibly know who our ancestors were, because they didn't know who theirs were. Preposterous.

It was all very provincial and close-minded, except for the handful of folks who were in awe about how far back we could go and wished they knew that much about their own families. The highlights of our living in England were our visits to ancestral places where as many as four generations back to the early 1400s were buried together in crypts with their names carved into huge stones in the floor aisles of Norman churches. We met the record-keepers of those churches, took pictures (froze our butts off since the churches were stone), and got a town tour showing us the home of one of my ancestors--a medieval manor that's still there, dovecote and all.

Anyway, a long time ago we were talking about our genealogies and stumbled upon the fact that both of our families had settled in the same area, this area, in the 17th and 18th centuries. We used to joke that maybe we got married but were already relatives (not just a lame joke, but also a creepy one!). When we got here, we researched and found a bunch of our ancestors buried here. We freaked out when we found some of them of the same generation from both families in the same cemetery. That's just weird.

The photo above is one of my favorite pictures (click on it for big), which I took when three generations of us visited an 18th c church in Hartford in order to scrutinize the cemetery and find our folks. A wedding was about to take place in the church, but the minister graciously brought us through the wrought iron gates and escorted us out to the back where we could be with our people.

Awesome.

We couldn't stay long, but we did find our relevant stones. Then we had to leave since the wedding party were arriving, and on the way out I snapped the photo. This beautiful church is nextdoor to what is known here as The Gold Building (because it's a skyscraper of gold reflective windows). Note: This is not the building of the same name that's in Albuquerque, NM. I've also lived there, but that's not the building I'm talking about.

I loved the juxtaposition of the history next to the modern commerce, and the distortion of history as captured in the modern lens and windows.

And I love the fact that we--completely accidentally--have come home to our ancestral roots.

Poetry Thursday: Color Pact--Umber

2007-06-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

The prompt word I got today was "umber."

I love it! Thank you, prompt generator.

This poem may not make any sense to anyone who has not tried watercolor painting. It's about the color names.

Color Pact--Umber

Mine is the umber that's not yet burnt.

It hovers
Madder, like rose genuine

and falls incorrectly,
awkward,

through ochre and sienna
desperate to be

Alizarin
(it has no promise of Crimson)

and ends

Raw,
closer to

scarlet lake

Poetry Thursday: Four-Letter Gulf

2007-06-12T13:10:00.000-05:00

This week I was thinking about four-letter words. Not the "four-letter-word" kind of four-letter words. Just words with four letters. Rules: 1) How about a poem written exclusively in four-letter words, 2) only you can't use any "naughty" four-letter words?

Well, I hammered and hammered and found out it was

hard
work

Then I got a somewhat decent poem, but after I was absolutely certain I was finished, I found a gosh-darn five-letter word! It was

shoes

And the way I felt was [Insert favorite four-letter expletive here]. And I had to

slap

my forehead and try yet again. And when I endeavored to take out the shoes, I had to change feet to foot, which worked well to get rid of the plural but made a not-as-good sounding poem (in my opinion) and lost a pleasant rhyme.

So I have two versions: one that follows the rules exactly, and one that just barely doesn't.

Blogger absolutely, routinely, and subversively will not allow me to put my line breaks or in-line spaces or what would appear as tabs where I want them or permit me to put in deliberate WELL KNOWN HTML CODE for such spaces in its "Edit HTML" supposed feature, so it can go eat itself. Because of this, my poems do not appear as I graphically designed them, and this makes me furious. Despite the fact that I know how to code, these poems are misrepresented as posted.

To that I say, Bu@@ CRa9!

I. Four-Letter Gulf (with five letter word, ohwell, sigh, oohh, sigh is four)

Boys trot toes thru sand,
find star fish arms.
They slap full guts over surf;
foam wash tops damp hair.
Land sips shoes, shoes slip from feet;
wade bath sops bald heat.
Gust, wind!
Leap this deep dew's pool.
Air's hand, clap!
Drag time.
Wave wets away dusk:
gold orbs slip down, gild back seas.

Hail, cool sky's moon.

II. Four-Letter Gulf (with all four-letter words--not so good)

Boys trot toes thru sand,
find star fish arms.
They slap full guts over surf;
foam wash tops damp hair.
Land sips shoe, shoe slip from foot;
wade bath sops bald heat.
Gust, wind!
Leap this deep dew's pool.
Air's hand, clap!
Drag time.
Wave wets away dusk:
gold orbs slip down, gild back seas.

Hail, cool sky's moon.

My Inner Criminal

2007-06-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

Any of you who have read my posts over time will already know that I am a raging asthmatic. I have a number of prescriptions and a regimen that I adhere to strictly in order to keep myself alive. Although I'm under constant monitoring by my docs, over time I have occasionally bought over-the-counter tablets because under certain circumstances they really help clear out excessive mucus in a way that none of my prescriptions do. This improves my overall condition. Furthermore, I always try to have tablets on hand if I travel, because any change in my environment always exacerbates the asthma. That's a 100% reliable given.

So we were finally getting our summer plans in order, and that included vacation. I started thinking about what we might need to take with us this year and whether anything needed to be upgraded. I riffled through the "family hygiene" Ziploc baggie to make note of what was present and what needed adding or replacing. (The Ziploc contains everything anyone might need--bug bite remedy, children's fever reducer, Dramamine, Benadryl, topical anti-itch creme, extra toothpaste, shampoo/conditioner, combs, sunscreen, yadda yadda, yadda). I noticed that the travel Primatene tablets were absent. So while I was out after regular grocery shopping, I stopped at Walgreens to pick up a small box of 12-24 Primatene for the kit.

For months and months, our local Walgreens has been getting a major facelift. Half the store is blocked off and empty, and the other half is completely mixed up; nothing is where it used to be and even the Pharmacy counter is now hidden in the bowels in a far-back corner. After wandering for a while, I found the cold/allergy section and scrutinized the shelves for Primatene. I looked and looked for the familiar package and started to think I would have to go across town to CVS instead. Just before giving up, I saw a spot on the shelf with claim cards in it. It's like the sort of ticket you get at Toys 'R' Us when you want an extra-large item that they have to bring to the cashier station from the warehouse.

I had never seen such a thing before. The card said I had to present it to the pharmacist. Whuuuuttttt?? It's a frigging over-the-counter remedy that's been around for years. Oh, and I might add that it's less effective than it used to be because they took out a good ingredient that used to make it work better (I can't remember the name of that now). I was in a bit of a hurry, and now I was going to have to stand in line at the pharmacy and wait for them to rummage for a single item?

A kid about 17 took the ticket and scanned the shelves behind the counter. When he came back, with the box (the size of which I had no choice about), he had the audacity to ask me for ID. What the Fu$k??? This is a Walgreens, and a kid too young to be an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is asking me for ID? It's not a state liquor store and a jug of moonshine, for goddsakes. It's a box of 60 tablets, and by the way, I never wanted more than 24.

So of course I had to argue. The pharmacist flew out from between the shelves and said menacingly, "If it contains pseudophed it's restricted."

"But I'm not trying to buy pseudophed." She grabbed the box, frowned at me, and looked at the ingredients.

"It contains ephedrine. It's controlled." Oooh, the 'c' word! When I lived in New York state, "controlled" items were certified narcotics (such as a kid's Ritalin or a cancer patient's pain meds). These had to be prescribed on a special, separate pad and signed in triplicate. If every item on the form was not filled out in a very particular way, the pharmacy would send the person presenting the prescription back to the doctor to make the doctor correct the form. Every time I would go to get a bottle of pills, there'd be a mistake on the form and it would take days to straighten out. Days that someone was doing without important medicine.

What, I'm an effing narcotics head now and I have to be checked against the America's Most Wanted list?

I showed the boy my drivers license. I figured he was just looking for the date, the way they would at a liquor store if I weren't ancient enough never to be carded.

But, no.

He was actually taking all the information off of my drivers license! He did not even explain to me what was happening. Had I had half a chance to know what this was about, I would have thrown the box back and stormed out in a huff. Shove your frigging Primatene where the sun don't shine! "Hey, what are you doing there with my personal information?" He didn't answer, just acted as if I weren't there. What was I going to do, leap over the counter and chase him down? The kid was slow as molasses. Don't their high school technology courses teach them how to use a keyboard? He kept squinting and squinting some more, until I decided he needed glasses. He was really milking it, squeezing every last bit of information from my license.

We are not free citizens, people. We are objects to be controlled by our information, a jumble of numbers and mere faceless subjects in a maze of databases waiting to betray the honest.

So that's it. My personal information is now in a database somewhere as a person of interest among those who might have the potential to sell street drugs. Give me a break! After I got the receipt, I read the fine print at the bottom, which says,

Federal law limits the sale of pseudoephedrine products to no more than 3.6 grams per person per day and limits an individual's purchases to 9 grams or less per 30 day period. Some states are more restrictive.

But I wasn't buying pseudo ephedrine. I was buying the real thing. Whoopee! Does that upgrade my criminal status to Addict or Drug Lord Extraordinaire? Next, I looked at the ingredients on the box. "Each tablet contains 12.5 mg of ephedrine HCI, USP and Guaifenesin, USP 200 mg." 'Scuse me if that looks to me like a mere pittance.

Because of this 12.5 mg--and never more than two tablets a day, I might add, since the shaky side-effects are overwhelmingly not worth it--I am now a shining star on the National Do Not Sell Registry. What would do if I go back in tomorrow to get another box? What if I decide to raid CVS? Are there DEA officers hiding behind the counter with cuffs, and a waiting vehicle out back?

If I could do the math, I would figure out how many grams of pure evil I actually bought. In any case, I fail to understand how this further violation and degradation of me as a citizen makes the government feel all better about its sorry self in its continued resounding failure in the "War Against Drugs." The people who legitimately need this medicine, who used to just breeze into the store and pull it off the shelf, now can't get it without interrogation and a fight. But what Big Gubmint didn't consider is that the people who really are making street drugs are not doing it piecemeal, by legally and dutifully purchasing one box a month of Primatene. All they have to do is raid a warehouse or truck or a drugstore and steal it. Much cheaper and more efficient.

That's right! I and all my mom-jeans-wearing housewife cronies have a big ring here in our little town, which I might add is above reproach. We go around buying up all the Primatene and NyQuil in surrounding snooty suburbs--patiently, month by month--and once we have a really good stockpile, we smuggle it down to the basement and scrape out the "good stuff" (which is what? I don't even know). Then we dress up like hookers in Land's End garb and sell it on the street. I wouldn't hold out much hope for what I could glean from a box of 12. But imagine the potential from a box of 60. Uh, maybe not so much.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. I don't have a basement.

Poetry Thursday: A Dark Memory & Revenge

2007-06-07T12:35:00.000-05:00

I'm not just lazy this week, but also really busy. Haiku and a cinquain will have to suffice.

Dark Memory

Chewed insulation.
Electrocuted squirrel.
All the lights went out.

Revenge

Onion
forces mourning:
its flesh white as a ghost,
spirits sharp as the butcher knife
carve tears.

Eureka!

2007-06-05T09:29:00.000-05:00

I'm still reeling with doubt. Surely I didn't see what I thought I just saw.

Out of pure curiosity, I was looking up the word "Mandelbrot" in my 1999 Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. Of course the word is too specialized to be in a regular dictionary, and I found nothing between "mandatory" and "mandible." Anyway, because I am a certified dictionary retard and have hardly gotten over the excitement of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, I kept reading the words under M. Two pages later, on page 605, I found the following confusing mistake that somehow did not get corrected during proofreading. I tried writing this up by formatting it as it is in the dictionary, but Blogger wouldn't let me and refused to render my hand-coded HTML, too. Also, I could not find the proper code to make a schwa in HTML. So I scanned it from the dictionary page:

Anyway, my point is, the entire dictionary entry of the word "manor" is hanging-indented directly under "ma non troppo," as if it is a subset of the entry "ma non troppo." And there's the interesting matter of that poor little orphaned word "manor" inexplicably following the cross reference to "troppo," as if it's shyly rehearsing to be the next entry. [Aside: This is pretty ironic. As is typical, Blogger has goofed up my formatting for this paragraph and refuses to let me fix it. I frequently hate Blogger, with its myriad non-functional "exciting new functionalities," and its refusal to let me put the code for an RSS feed in my template, and its loss of my profile changes and not letting me put up a new profile image, and its refusal to put a list of labels where I want them. But I digress bigtime.]

But, getting back to the error. Honestly. I am shocked to my foundation. As in "troppo," it's just too much. Help me! This is the Oxford American Dictionary, people! My favorite book(s) in the world, which would be my choice if I were stranded on the proverbial desert island, is The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. (Hee, it's two "compact" volumes as opposed to the 25 volumes of the full edition, but I would take both volumes, because who wants to be stuck with only A-O or P-Z?) Anyway, any English major--and I consider it a calling--knows that Oxford is the alpha and omega of authority. So why does the American dictionary have to have a proofreading error and be an embarrassment to us ignorant colonials? When I read Oxford, I expect impeccability.

Gosh.

It's one of those things that makes me feel conflicted and uncomfortable. On one level I think it's funny that I found perhaps the only error in a 1306-page book. On another level I feel a bit betrayed, and wonder what other mistakes might be in there that might mislead those who refer to it. On one hand I feel smug. On the other, I feel disappointed--crestfallen.

A lot of people--the vast majority, probably--would tell me I'm stupid and that I should just get over it. But it really means something to me. I haven't been this surprised since I was reading The Wall Street Journal and a writer, talking about a large number of some noun, said "gads" of them instead of "scads," and no one caught the mistake. "Gads" is not a quantity. The friggin' Wall Street Journal. Ever since then I read the Journal with slight trepidation. Sigh.

Poetry Thursday 5/31/2007: Moon and Peacock

2007-05-30T21:41:00.000-05:00

Theme: Rivers

Note: The little old towns I mention in the poem, Paradise and Garberville, are in Northern California. I'm a fourth-generation Californian now displaced, but I remember these towns through the eyes of a child. In those days, they were tiny, pristine, almost abandoned places, laden with gold-mining history and fable, hardly populated, struggling like ghost towns. Nowadays I imagine that they have become overrun by tourism. I'd rather not know, and like them the way they are in my memory.

Also . . . it's kinda funny how lyrics beget lyrics.
_____________________________

Moon & Peacock

for my mother

Preschooler,
I scooted across green kitchen linoleum while
Mother ironed my eyelet pinafores
listening to the radio
Mancini’s “Moon River.”
As iron's steam floats ceilingward,
she sings,
. . . wider than a mile.
I’m crossing you in style
someday.

Child,
our one and only roadtrip
to the pines of Paradise to see my grandmother.
To the car’s static AM, we sing
. . . two drifters, off to see the world
there’s such a lot of world to see.

Teen,
our second only roadtrip
Garberville, California.
We didn’t see the Lost Coast,
didn’t visit old-growth forests,
didn’t know about the Avenue of the Giants or
bright-yellow banana slugs on the green forest floor
beneath ferns.
Dad wouldn't go anywhere
or see anything.

We didn't have a hotel room
just a car.

We found our dinner
at the Benbow Inn
on the Eel River,
startled by peacocks’ flapping menace in trees and shrubs,
alarmed by their catlike may-awe,
their legs strutting among ours on the terrace and on green ground,
flashing, unfurling
unprecedented, embarrassing
feathered opulence.

We walked a curve along the Eel after sunset.
A searing moon rose through the trees
its light severing a path on water that ended
between our pairs of feet.

Adult,
our third only roadtrip:
she, marooned on a hospital bed.
We rifled through the cache of jewelry she wanted me to have
when she was terminal.
Spreading them on a green tray
she narrated each piece.
The best:
a gold stickpin,
peacock sitting on the moon.

Her final trip,
not mine,
she said,
You wear it on this side
after I cross the river. I'll be
. . . waitin’ round the bend
my Huckleberry friend.

Poetry Wednesday

2007-05-30T09:22:00.000-05:00

This Tuesday at Poetry Thursday, to which I have become addicted, Dr. Jim encouraged readers/poets to think about a few particular lines of poetry that have stuck with them, and to report them and their significance in his post comments.

This exercise threw me into an absolute tizzy. The lines popped right into my head. Not just "a few lines." Many, many lines. Which to choose? They came from all eras and shrieked at each other in determined voices and blinded me with a surreal mixture of images. The lines kept coming and coming, and started duking it out with each other. Finally I had to make another cup of coffee, sit down and close my eyes and catch the most resonant.

Three sets of clear winners emerged. Some come from Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes"; the second are from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." I won't discuss those at this time.

The victors come from Tennyson's "Ulysses." I was kind of surprised that I settled on something so antiquated, and from a poet who often has such a thumpy metrical effect that it's almost comic, but the lines and I have a long history together:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

I first encountered this poem in high school. Not because I was required to read it in class, but because I was a curious kid always snooping into books. I would read anything I got my hands on. One day I was home sick with asthma (an all-too-frequent occurrence), and stationed myself as usual behind my parents' comfy living-room chairs, which were set close to a wall of built-in bookcases. On a low shelf I found some of my two grandmothers' old textbooks. I had just finished wondering why one of my reverent and ladylike grandmothers had defaced an illustration of Nathaniel Hawthorne when I flipped pages and came upon "Ulysses."

From the scratchy comfort of the living room carpet, I had an awesome ride with an idle king from the distant past who could not rest from travel. There could be no personal experience that contrasted more greatly with my own. By the time I read the poem, I had never been outside the boundaries of California. We never so much as went on a family vacation. The farthest we would travel was twenty minutes to my grandparents' house, but that was rare. We did have a decent-sized sailboat, which my parents would race to Catalina Island and to Ensenada, Mexico. But despite the fact that Dad considered me first mate and I was a skilled and avid sailor, I was not permitted to go on these "long" trips. I had to watch from the gangway as the others sailed out of sight.

As I got older, I didn't venture very far from home. But when I got my first job at a small local newspaper doing page layout and typesetting, one of my first learning experiments was making myself some stationery with Tennyson's lines set in a display font accompanied by one of my own nautical drawings.

I took some back with me when I moved into a UCLA dorm. Nightly I chipped away at English Literature, Latin and the classics, sitting at the same carrel in the University Research Library. I encountered my royal friend Ulysses again when I read Homer, and when, inevitably, I took a Victorian prose and poetry course. I reset the same lines for another set of stationery when I worked at The Daily Bruin. I studied the Pre-Raphaelite painters and, encountering Waterhouse, recognized the patient Penelope, her unwanted suitors insinuating themselves upon her as she wove.

In those days I would never have projected that my future would take me well outside California borders or other countries many times. In subsequent years, though not very willingly, I would relocate like a nomad, sometimes staying in a place only six months or a year at a stretch, hardly getting my bearings on the compass before it would all change again. As if Ulysses steered my course, "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." Each time I pack the boxes, I encounter my 1899 illustrated edition of Tennyson's Poetical Works, and before shoving the book in among hordes of others, open it to the permanent bookmark in English Idylls.

It little profits that an idle king . . .

Each time I pack, I have to remind myself that I can take whatever upcoming adventure in a positive light. Inside I am still the girl on the carpet, safely hiding behind the chairs at home. I have to steel myself with Ulysses' overweening confidence in the promise of the next discovery on the horizon, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

For the time being, it seems that more than 20 years of moving around, which has been so very draining and made me feel so restless and unrooted and old before my time, is in a lull. Perhaps it has backed off and Ulysses is home with Penelope and Telemachus. Finally, I've been in one place for five years--unprecedented since I left college aeons ago. But I know that like Ulysses' fading "margin," this is but a looming illusion. As it has so often, it could end at any time, and the yet "untravell'd world" beckons unseen.

Returns Are In

2007-05-29T09:36:00.000-05:00

This is the sequel post. The next day, Tyke and I went back to the Hs' house to put the garbage barrels back in the garage. I went up to talk to Mr. H to apologize and find out what I could do. He was just in the process of showing Tyke what happened . . . and he locked up the door again!

I win! I screwed up the Hs' garage door lock so well that they were baffled the night before. Of course it was Mr. H who went into the garage through the house. That would have been fine . . . if only Mr. H could see. But, since he can't, he had no idea what was going on with the door.

They called the Overhead Door Company. The door company unlocked the door, and charged this ancient couple, Mr. H (96) and Mrs. H (80-something) $100!

$100 to unlock the door from inside. It probably took the guy five seconds to fix it.

I had an immediate, withering feeling. Mr. H added, "Oh, but the door guy said he could probably arrange a discount."

I told Mr. H whatever they charged him, that I would pay the bill because I had caused the problem in the first place and it wasn't fair for him to get stuck with the bill.

So now Mr. H was frustrated because, in showing Tyke what never to do, he had goofed it up again. I went inside and tried monkeying with the handle for a minute. Then I saw what Mr. H hadn't--a little twist button just above the handle. I flipped the button, and discovered that this is what regulates whether the handle locks or doesn't lock. Sheesh. I twisted it, and the handle went back to its horizontal unlocked position. (Whew! The need for a second visit by greedy Overhead Door was narrowly escaped.)

So I guided Mr. H's hand onto that twist button so that next time he can feel for it and release it himself without the help of a door specialist or locksmith.

I'm still on the hook for whatever Overhead Door decides to charge for that visit. Dumb bunny.

Sigh.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors; or No Good Deed

2007-05-17T18:28:00.000-05:00

. . . goes unpunished.

I have just received considerable punishment intention-wise, but it's absolutely not over yet. The votes are not in yet. I am sitting in the family room, looking out the window, waiting for the neighbors--whose "Samaritan" my widely celebrated son supposedly is--to come home and see what a terrible thing I've done on his behalf.

Now, to make a short story unconscionably long . . . and it is long, so set aside some time to get through it, as I did the actual event in real-life time.

We live at the end of a small private street inhabited, except for us, by retired people and industrious professional couples who work hard and do not have kids and are hardly ever home. About three houses down the hill is a very elderly couple--I'll call them Horace and Harriet H [henceforth the Hs]. Horace is 96 and cannot see except for some shadow vision, but he is somewhat ambulatory with a cane, has excellent hearing, is very socially engaging and loves to talk any audience's ears off. Horace fairly lives for an audience. This is one reason many neighbors avoid him. His wife Harriet is a spring chicken in her late 80s who cannot hear and uses a walker, but whose vision is fine. Still plays bridge weekly and even invited me once when one of her ladies was having a medical problem. She loves to wander out of the house and dig in the flower beds to plant impatiens, bending over in a shocking gardening way many spring chickens of 35 no longer consider possible.

Neither of the Hs can do anything without the sensorially complementary mate.

Last year, Mr. and Mrs. H asked my younger kid, Tyke, if he would be their official Garbage Boy. So now when he gets home from school on Thursdays, it's his job to run down the hill to the Hs' house, use the key to open the garage, put the garbage barrels and recycling bin on a cart, and tote it down the hilly driveway to the street. Then he rolls the cart back up and locks the garage again. On Friday when he gets home from school, he takes the barrels back in.

This being Thursday, it was Tyke's work day. But because he got into a special inter-school advanced band, this time of year he has to stay for practice late on Thursday. He didn't get home till 5:30; then he had to eat, change his clothes, and head directly off to baseball practice as well as play a game in treacherous weather. Big brother couldn't do the job, either, because he had already left to attend a concert.

We expected another storm this afternoon, and just after Tyke left for his game, the rain began. I realized that Mr. and Mrs. H might go to bed early and would probably be shocked to hear the garage door going up after 9:00 p.m. So I decided I would go down and do the garbage myself. (Let me say that it is never our habit to call first. We would either scare them or get trapped on the phone. It's just understood that regardless of which one of our family members does it, the barrel job simply gets done.) I grabbed the key and rushed down the hill as the rain pummeled harder and harder.

When I got to the correct, "garbage side" of the double garage door, I tried to insert the key, but it did not fit. At all. Hmm. Without thinking to look further, I turned the twist-handle and popped the latch. Just as I began to twist, I realized that these ancient doors are like our ancient doors (only we never use the handle): if you twist the handle, it's only an emergency measure for when automatic door opener isn't working and requires a manual override. Oh, by the way, somewhere in the part of the back of my mind that wasn't operating at the time, I know you only turn that handle from INSIDE the door if and when you have to pull the emergency "rip cord" inside the garage. In addition, I noticed in my mistaken action that the key seemed much too new to work with this ancient lock, and that the REAL, current lock was installed on the door frame on the pillar between the two doors. Too late. Cr@p!

When I then tried the correct lock, the key was hunky-dory and the door started to open automatically. Momentary hope. So Mr. and Mrs. H actually had a lock that worked like an external keypad. You turned that key and the door went up automatically. I'd never seen such a thing. Way more modern than the near-zero access options on my own garage. Too high tech. No wonder I didn't know how to use it.

So immediately I knew I'd bungled big-time. Because I'd turned the manual handle, the automatic unlock activated with the correct key couldn't raise the door; it turned on the motor and the light, but didn't open the door because I'd effectively disabled the chain drive or relocked the inside of the door. Double, unopenable whammy.

Here I was in the rain, trying to do something good for some old people and compensating for my son, the completely reliable little helper whom they lavish love upon. It wasn't his fault I'd blown their garage door. They had probably wondered why Tyke hadn't taken out the trash earlier, and they were, maybe and probably, in the house wondering why the garage door was making kooky noises. They couldn't run out to figure out what was happening. Was it a burglar? If I were 96, that's what I'd think.

I ran to the front door and rang the bell, but no one answered. If I were in my late 80s, I might not hear the doorbell. If I were 96 and blind, I'd be worried if someone rang the bell unexpectedly, too, and going to a window would be no good. I didn't want to scare them. I waited a long time. I figured Mrs. H couldn't hear it. I figured Mr. H couldn't see to get downstairs, and, in any case, neither one could get to the door quickly. I rang and waited. And waited some more.

Nothing.

It could have been that they weren't there, but I know they don't drive anymore, even though they still have a Mercedes that the family rolls out every once in a while to keep it functional. I tried to look in the side garage window to see if there was a car, but the light had timed out. So I ran with wet hair, looking like a bag person, straight across the driveway to the home of Bill, the neighborhood's megamoney IBM early retiree. Bill is the Hs' brief former Garbage Guy. Bill can't do the job anymore because he spends most of his time at a second home on Martha's Vineyard. I figured he'd know if there were any tricks with the doors, or might at least have phone numbers of the Hs' family members.

First, I had to sheepishly endure the inevitable, "You did WHAT? Say that again?" and a further, "You did WHAT??" followed by the wordless but unmistakable "you idiot" facial expression. Very painful.

Bill phoned the H house and got the answering machine. He concluded that Harriet and Horace had been taken out to dinner by their elegant, compassionate and thoughtful local-dwelling daughter, P, who's close to 60. Heck, goin' out past 7:30 p.m., the lot of them party hardier than I ever have at any stage of my life. But I digress.

Bill followed me to the garage door to assess my damage. It was official: the twist-blunder I suspected I'd wreaked had indeed occurred, and there was no way to fix it except to look from inside the garage. We went to the front door again, but as before there was no response.

Bill said, "Well, I do have a key for emergencies, but in this situation I'm not sure that's wise."

I replied, "Right. That's going too far. This doesn't require drastic measures, as it might in a health situation. As when Harriet calls the Fire Department when she has a nose bleed. You know, roughly twice a month."

"Yep. Okay. You run back up to your house, and I'll leave a note about what's going on and stick it on the garage door so that when P rolls up the driveway either she'll see it and know what to do, or Horace will amble out and find it. I'll tell 'em to call you at your number. I'll be in the front room of my house, and I'll notice when a car drives up or the lights go on over there, and after that I'll call you."

Agreed.

As I ran up the hill, I started shivering in my boots. Because two possible things are certain anytime you get talking to either of the Hs on the phone: either he will detain you for two hours talking your ear off about what it was like in our little town in 1950 (and you will never be able to get your point across although you are genuinely enjoying the history and would love to set aside another time to hear about it), or she will ask entirely pertinent, direct questions that you can barely understand but upon understanding earnestly want to answer, but you will never be able to get her to hear the answers. She'll just keep asking and saying, "What? I need you to come to bridge. What? Did you say you can play bridge? What? Did you say you can't play?"

It's devastating, really; any communication encounter with either of them that does not directly involve the written word, the Pony Express, a guiding hand, signing or Braille is an event to be avoided at all cost. Imagine how it was without telephones or incandescent light. We have such high expectations.

but then, as I was writing this--

Oh, excuse me. My phone rang. "Mrs. --? Horace H here. How are you this evening? We have just come up our driveway. We found a note that said to call you."

Oh, God! Now I was going to have to explain what happened, and he would either 1) talk right through me, or 2) not understand my explanation, or 3) start off on a never-ending tangent , or 4) pass the phone to Harriet.

"Yes, Mr. H! I'm so sorry, but Tyke couldn't take out your garbage today. I decided I'd do it myself while it was still light before the big storm, and I believe I accidentally did something bad to your garage door."

As predicted, he is thinking something else while I'm talking and replying to his own idea, and he doesn't comprehend me. I try to explain precisely what I did, but he doesn't buy it. He's a jack of all concepts, master of none.

"It's just the door. Sometimes it does that."

"Mr. H, I'm pretty sure I turned the handle and that disabled it. I locked it up somehow. It's my fault. But I know there's some latch on the inside of the door that will fix it."

In the background, I heard P say, "Daddy, the door's not going up." (Shudder on my end of phone. My fault.)

See. I had done it.

I gave up trying to tell Mr. H what happened. He was beyond hearing about it. Instead, I shifted my focus to the action item.

"Mr. H, someone has to go into the garage from inside the house to fix the door. There's a latch in there. I'm very sorry I screwed it up."

"That's all right, Mrs. --. " I looked out the window and saw that someone had turned on the lights to go through the house. "I think we've got it now. P took the barrels out. It's okay." (Humiliation mine.)

Five minutes later, Bill called.

"Hey, they're home. They put the car in the other side." Not helpful information. I wanted the other shoe to drop. This minimal Bill info did not tell me that the Hs or their resourceful daughter had figured out what happened to the door and fixed it. It just let me know that they'd been able to open the other side, which they always could have done with their remote control anyway. No more than a 50% chance of progress made on the blunder front.

See? No matter what moms do with best intentions, they're wrong.

Now I get to wait and see how my family will ridicule and verbally abuse me when they all get home. No one will thank me for taking out our own family's garbage and recycling (the kids' job which they weren't frigging here to do and haven't done properly despite direct specific instructions for the past five years), or for also trying valiantly to take out the Hs' garbage in the rain in order to save the reputation of the stunning baseball kid who the whole neighborhood thinks is a hero. They will just be universally mean and think it was funny that they got away without doing it and I got soaked and my hair looks idiotic and wild. Ha, ha, ha.

I hate boys. When I'm 80 something and finally decide to get a tattoo, that's what it will be. I hate boys, with a heart turned upside down and protected with a chain-link fence. And you'd better believe I'll carry a big, heavy cane and wear kick-ass boots. To thrash boys with.

On a nearly different subject--and this one's enjoyable--there's nothing quite like the satisfaction of being in cahoots with other neighbors who don't even like you and have never opened their door to you, and whom you don't particularly like, but who are entirely willing to engage in a phone-and-key-and-spying cabal on the brink of breaking in, in order to benefit someone special on your street whom you all commonly respect and care about.

Poetry Thursday 5/17/07

2007-05-17T11:50:00.000-05:00

We lived in England a little longer than a calendar year. My first son was only reception-school age then, and still an only child. We used to take the bus from our suburb into the city centre for adventures. We enjoyed the pedestrian mall in our otherwise wonderfully historic city. He still remembers a specific afternoon, and though he's a teen now, sometimes asks, "Mom, remember that sandwich?"

Baloney

In Bristol's City Centre,
we made the choice to enter
the Marks & Sparks to purchase prefab lunch.

We found a slatted park bench
beside a refuse bin's stench
and tucked into our soggy noontime munch.

My son sat weepy, moany
(he hates cheese and baloney!)
he raised the bread and earthward flopped the meat.

Before we knew what hit us,
with jerky, daft impetus
a greedy pigeon plucked it from the street.

He strutted, coldcut in beak--
(this feast could last a whole week!)
he gorged a bite, then flipped the ample snack.

He hadn't calculated,
(his hunger still unsated)
that what he'd tossed had landed on his back.

The stupid, flying rodent!
commotion most explodent
ensued among the others of his race;

They tackled mercilessly
they pecked their portions. Left he
confused, deprived, a meal-less disgrace.

Somebody Bob Overhearing

2007-05-14T21:33:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit behind in my language-overhearing postings. Frequently I make a note in my little 4.5 in. x 3.25 in. Composition book with marbled green cover and taped spine, but I don't get back to it for a looooooong time. Basically some cataclysm has to disjar it from its entrapment in the bottom folds of my handbag lining.

So it is with great pleasure that I suddenly remembered to find and get these off the docket.

At the end of April we (the two male offspring and I) were in the dumpy little car coming back from the elder's weekend Madrigal Choir rehearsal at the local uni, listening to something funny on National Public Radio, when Tyke wanted to respond (in the immortal words of the recently late Peter Boyle, of Young Frankenstein and Everybody Loves Raymond fame), "Ho-o-oly Cra-a-ap!" Only he suddenly bit his tongue and instead said,

Ho[ly]! Cr[ap]oowwly Bob!

Well, now every member of our family knows what we need to exclaim in moments of great emotional transport. "Ho! Cr--owly Bob!" It's your all-around general-purpose swear. It falls into the great tradition of, "Well, I swan!" as some of us used to say who were raised in ladylike Southern traditions. You could not say, "Well, I swear," or even permit yourself to think "I swear"; you had to think and say something at least once-removed, as if it were a seldom seen and quite possibly completely unwelcome visiting cousin. Sometimes it was, "Well, I swaaannneeee!" (Twice-removed.)

It's not just a Southern thing. Even my Northeastern father-in-law says the once-removed "Oh, Sugar!" instead of, "Oh, sh**!" I've never heard him say anything worse, although I'm sure he's moved to [often] and has [many times].

So for now, our family has adopted

Ho! Crowly Bob!

You cain't hardly beat an oath like that with a stick, and nobody, but nobody, can take eksepshun to it or be offended by it--yet--unless that person's name is ackxerly Crowly Bob and I hope nobody's is. If he was to come after Tyke, I'd challenge 'im and reckon there'd be fisticuffs, but so far we hasn't run acrosst no takers.

I currently live a couple of blocks away from the Mark Twain house. (Yes! I really do! It's my favorite place in town, because in the most recent renovations they obtained, reconstructed, and displayed the actual Paige Compositor that, for me as a writer and former newspaper typesetter and page compositor, has been like finding the Holy Grail. All my life I wanted to see that thing, and after all my ridiculous nomadic relocation, it came to me! Even worse, I want to just climb into the display and start composing. Don't tell anybody. They won't let me in anymore.) Anyway. Reading all that Sam Clemens litrichur including the Compleat Letturs and Ottobyografy to get yerself sivilized and sophiscated sinks into a person. Sorry;

Ho! Crowly Bob!

there goes my durn langige agin.

During the same car ride, #1 Son, G, having just come from a very formal lesson in Renaissance and Baroque song, read something completely mundane using a cheesy lounge-singer voice. Since I was driving, I could not afford to laugh as much as really I needed to. "Stop it! I'm gonna lose control of the car!" I said.

[Will ask boys to remember what it was G was reading, and will insert here when gleaned.]

Tyke said, "G, read it again in your decorish voice!"

I got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night

2007-05-14T15:34:00.000-05:00

Today's result from the poetry random prompt generator was "eclipse." Odd, I already had one for that wonderful word. It's a cinquain, based on a Cherokee myth.

Eclipse:
a great frog jumped
to gobble up the sun.
With greater noise we'll frighten him
back down.

Small Blessings, and Not

2007-05-14T13:05:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Mother's Day. I was planning to post a couple of poems, one that I wrote about being a mother, and another that I wrote about my own mother. But the day got busy and there was franticness and a whole-house aura of gloom-and-doom about the kitchen floor (which has been torn up, and, lucky family! It's all torn up in front of the sink and we can't walk on it now, so washing dishes and running the dishwasher are both inadvisable), and then we got tangled up in the return of Tyke from a sleepover, baseball practice and two baseball games (one of which was an impromptu playdate). All that was followed by trips to the hardware store and Radio Shack for necessary boy-project supplies.

To put it mildly, the day didn't go so well for this mom. I was hoping for some quiet.

Ha.

On Saturday, when asked what I wanted to do, I announced my Sunday plans: 1) I was not chauffeuring anyone anywhere; 2) I was not attending any events; 3) I was not cleaning anything; 4) I was not doing any favors; 5) I was not doing any dishes; 6) when I came down after sleeping in in the morning I wanted all the washed dishes put away; 7) I was neither cooking nor preparing anything for myself; #8 I wanted to hear the laundry going all day, but none of it would be done by me.

#s 1 and 2 fell apart right away. I chauffeured, and attended a baseball game, and chauffeured again.

#3? I got so disgusted with the kitchen counter that I cleaned it. And I made the bed because its dishevelment gave me the creeps.

Given my decree, #4 fell under the auspices of #s 1, 2 and 3.

#5 was interpreted by the Testosterone League (who outnumber me by three) as, "Neither are we, of course, so that means we'll just do what we always do, leave them there and wait until it's not Mother's Day or your birthday anymore and you'll wind up having to do them anyway."

#6 came at the price that while I wanted to sleep in, I couldn't because they made so much noise putting the dishes (which I had washed) away. Oh, and the birds were making such a racket, and the window was open and the traffic was loud, and despite the "shade" being down the room was a beacon of light, and then the frigging phone rang just to finish it all off for me, and of course no one else answered even though they were up and knew I was still in bed.

#7 Since I wasn't cooking, they foraged for themselves, and I didn't get anything to eat.

#8 didn't happen because either they weren't home or they were doing something else.

So I'll save the planned poetry post for later. Because of yesterday, I have a lot more poetry to write about being a mother, so it's gonna take a while.

Forget breakfast in bed. Unheard of in this domicile. Did someone even think of making a cup of coffee? I had to make it myself, just like every other day of the year. A gift? Don't be silly. At some point while I was sitting on the sofa, a muffled whisper came from the computer corner where #1 Son was IM-ing. "Ha--- m------ d-- M--." What? Did he say something?

I did, however, upon descending the stairs, find a hastily made printer-paper card on the landing. Tyke does not like to draw, as will soon become apparent. In looking at the card, you might think he is in kindergarten. But he's actually rapidly heading toward middle school. If I didn't love him and the card so much, and if he didn't have so many other more promising skills, I'd think it was just sad. I suspected that his father had forced him to do it at the last minute under extreme duress. And, for a kid who always scores 100% on his spelling and punctuation for school, it's downright pathetic.

But many years of neglect by my offspring have left me sniffing for the slightest crumbs of love, so I'll post the crumbs here.

I thought it interesting that he depicted himself as a baby in a high chair saying "Momma." It's true that we both look back on that and remember it being a very happy time. He still occasionally asks me if I remember when we used to have our daily cuddle time before toddling down to the school to get big brother from kindergarten.

Funny, too, that my shoes are so big. I'm wearing Earth shoes lately.

Inside (in his spelling): "You make the best food in the world! Thank you for giving me the cloths on my back and the food in my stumach. You are great!" Picture interpreted: knife to left of plate. Steaming plate. Fork. Even though that is not the order in which he sets the table. Shorts. Tee shirt. Sorry attempt at shoes with laces; at first I thought they were flies. They're kind of Charlie-Brownlike.

"You let me do lots of things like have my friends over ahd help sign me up for baseball. Thanks for that mom!" WHYBL stands for our baseball league. When asked who the "Yo" person was, Tyke replied, "I don't know. It's just some dude."

Poetry Thursday 5/10/07 "June Bug"

2007-05-09T22:00:00.000-05:00

This week's assignment was to use the random generator. My word was "static." Lucky me.

It reminded me of my elder child's bright, light, floaty hair when he was a toddler, how he loved to scoot around on the nylon carpet on his back, and of my opening the front door carrying him in my arms. He would always reach out to strike the little wind chime just inside the front door. He thought the sound of it was a special celebration. The chime now hangs outside our current porch door.

Here's the chime as it looks today, weathered, repaired, and as well loved by the whole family as ever:

Here's the poem:

June Bug

small George
juvenile June bug
scuttles his back
bellymound rolling
one side and yon across
gritted carpet

his legs laugh a tune
they knock together
he sings
"The Eatza-Pizza-Pie-der!"
small hair a gold
static clingstack

he plays
wood-and-metal chimes
small ears
tickled by the loud

"Birthday!"
he shouts,
"Birthday!"

Taste

2007-05-08T13:17:00.000-05:00

Yes, I believe words have flavor. Here I go again, watching the gol-durned corruption-box TV. I just heard a commercial for some sort of fiber product that you stir into a glass of water. They claim it's clear and

tasteless.

I remember the last time we heard that word used in an ad, and all of us laughed. #1 Son said, "How can a product like that be 'tasteless'? It's not kitschy or anything. Don't they mean, 'flavorless'?"

I think it's tasteless to talk about fiber and bowel functions on TV. But consider the source: I was also raised in a family where no one was ever allowed to fart except in the bathroom, and people certainly did not discuss such matters except in hushed tones and in extreme confidence. We were, uh, anal about it all. (Look at that, Mom and Dad and Grandma Sylvia! I said FART and ANAL on the world-wide internet and used them in conjunction with your names!) No, I'm okay. They won't beat me out the screen door with brooms or anything. But that's only because they're all dead.

Although my Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide does list "lacking flavor" as its first definition for the word "tasteless," and the first definition is usually the "preferred" definition, here at Chez Laugh About Language we take exception to that definition. It would be tasteless to poison someone with something flavorless. I don't want to consume anything that's tasteless, unless I bought it on purpose because I was charmed by its tackiness. I have a number of objects that attest to my lack of taste. For instance, I just bought a pair of UCLA Crocs in Bruin colors, bright blue and yellow. They are really ugly, and I just love them. They pamper my heel spur while at the same time looking like football helmets for feet. My son says, "Mom, those are shoes with a message, and the message is, 'trailer trash!'" They were a tasteless choice.

Anyway, my point? I don't like the usage of "tasteless" meaning "flavorless," because in my family it was never used. "Tasteless" always meant "in bad taste." If we meant "without flavor," we said "flavorless." In addition, we had a little rule that if you ran across a usage that resulted in some form of ambiguity or could be easily misconstrued, you simply said what you wanted to say a different way so as to avoid the ambiguity or misconstruction.

On to the next thing. On the local news the other night, "two men were seen to flee the scene." I might save that for a poem I'll write later. But it sounded stupid at the time. It looks better than it sounds, like "He just wants to get you a loan."

Which reminds me of one that has bothered me for years and which I hear on the news all the time:

A [insert age of person or vehicle here] was found (or discovered) missing.

No. It/s/he decidedly was not found or discovered. That's why they're referred to as missing.

Of course I wonder if there's an official linguistic term for such a construction. I guess it's a whole different sort of oxymoron. A verbal oxymoron? Usually oxymorons are modifier-noun constructions: "jumbo shrimp"; "government intelligence." This is a past-present participle construction. I can't think of any other examples of that, and I'm making my own brain tired trying to think. It doesn't get a lot of exercise. (Sometimes I am my own peeve.) "Dried sprinkling" or something like that. Oh, shut up and go do something else, sputnik! End of post.

Blast from the Past

2007-05-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

Now and then we have a fabulous unearthing here. It doesn't happen often, because frequent howlings from the local harridan (that would be me) routinely fall on deaf ears, so nobody cleans anything out except me, and Lord I am tired.

But Kid #1 actually cleaned up his room before his grandparents came to visit. And I mean CLEANED as he's never cleaned before. Victory! I went upstairs and found that he'd moved all of the furniture out of the room and put it in the hall. That's how clean. The process was scary, since I've never seen anything like it except when I do it myself.

After some hours (yes! I did say "hours"!), he came downstairs to show me a piece of paper. It was a wonderful sharing. I gave him a big hug, and it was mutual. The paper had come from an early elementary school journal. I believe it might have been something the administrators had him write one of the times he got angry and in trouble, and was required to reflect on and record his thoughts.

We tried to figure out how old he was when he wrote it. I worked it back to second grade. To my regret, I must report that his handwriting has not changed a whit since then. Fortunately, since then, we've also unearthed some large processing problems (not learning disabilities--just problems processing, organizing, and getting things on paper without a computer).

It says [preserving his original spelling]:

Success is a do it yourself project. Attitude is a little thing that makes a big diference.
"If called by a panther don't anther"
I've larnd perents do care about it.
I've learnd when I don't dance alot I get mad esely.
Violence dosn't help your feling.
& to say excuseme.
I saw a poleciman today how had to kill a man with his gun because he stabed his wife 30 times and killd her then tride to kill the polecman and his 4 kids.
today I find out what part in the play I have, I want to be pelvis elvis. he sings shake rattel them bones. I also had fun in math we did muliplication in the trillions it was cool. I hope I got a good grade in spelling, too. We did letters about blank [the rest is illegible, and it's been so long that even he can't decipher it.]
My Mom found a 5 store house with galotn spa [becomes illegible and unintelligible; he says he was just writing because he was told to write and he had to make it appear as though he were writing].

#9 is very weird to me--eerie, in fact--because when a layoff forced us to move from our tiny beloved town (the town where we were living when he wrote this piece), we did indeed find a 5 story house with a spa. (I'm still sorry. I never wanted to leave our wonderful house in tiny town.) The main point is, we didn't have to look for a different house until 2002. That's just weird. How did he know three years ahead of time? Given the date of his writing, we had only moved to [previous town] one month before. At that time were just beginning to enjoy what we considered our "new" house (our previous house), and he already had a prophecy about the next one. The one where we live now. Which is a split level with 5 levels because it is strange and built down a hill. Weird.

And he still has dance by passion, but he switched from modern to ballet and has two different classes a week. With dance, piano, and lots of singing, he is a happy camper now. He's had a pretty good run of years. I hope he'll keep out of the principal's office and never have to write such a thing again. Especially since he got into an arts academy for the rest of high school.

Poetry Thursday 5/3/07

2007-05-01T14:16:00.000-05:00

Ten-Minute Spill (full explanation of this apparent "nonsense" exercise follows; if curious before reading the poems, scroll to the text in red below.)

#1

Discretion is the better part of dolor:
Dribbling words of black pitch
down one's chin
a flapping,
doubly unstable cliff
is as wise as licking a needle
that's strung an acre
of blackberry thorn.
Better not to rend
the tender edge of voice.
-------------------------------------
#2

A foolish consistency
is the panacea of little minds
who'd rather jump off a cliff
than whir through the examined life
spinning under pins and needles.

Thinking,
a cloud of pitch in water,
inks up their days,
their mother of misinvention
scolds with muffled, murky voice.

Surprise:
the night comes brambling
to catch evasions, like blackberry vines.
__________________________

I really love the book The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, Harper-Collins, 1992). It's broken up into sections that help suggest ideas as well as hone skills: the unconscious as a source of ideas; image and metaphor; aspects of voice; accidents, chance, and the non-rational; structure and organizing principles; sound, rhythm, and the line; and revision and writer's block. Not only do the poets explain what they are unleashing and what you are accomplishing, but examples are also included.

If you use this book as a resource, you will NEVER have "writer's block," and so the final section will not be necessary. You might say the book is like, uh, to be indelicate--a laxative for writer's block. When I want a change or just some good fun, this is my absolute go-to pal.

The "Ladders to the Dark" section (tapping the unconscious) is probably my favorite. You can get some startling and fascinating results. And nonsense. And odd sense.

Today's poem was generated under the influence of Rita Dove's exercise "Ten Minute Spill" (p. 13). A couple of years ago I had the great honor of attending a reading where I got to meet Ms. Dove and thank her personally for the exercise while she signed my copy of American Smooth.

I think it would be really fun to do this in a classroom or with several friends and then read the differences of all your individual results. I haven't done that yet, but wish I had.

It goes like this:

Ten lines.
Include a proverb, adage, or familiar phrase (such as "robbing Peter to pay Paul," or "you can lead a horse to water . . ."). But you have to change the phrase or adage somehow. Mine were "Discretion is the better part of valor" and "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Use five of the following ten words (this is Rita Dove's list as published in Behn and Twichell's book, but I would suggest making up a list of your own and using at least five of them): cliff, needle, voice, whir, blackberry, cloud, mother, lick.
Do it in ten minutes (that's all that's allowed! Set a timer and quit when it rings, but you'll probably be done before then) and see what you get.

Teenage Conversation

2007-05-01T13:33:00.000-05:00

This is the whole thing.

Phone rings: Ring, ring.

15-year-old boy answers.

Complete silence.

15: Oh. . . . . . . . Hello.
(blabbering on the other end)

15: Yeah. (Clear that he does know the speaker.)
(further blabbering)

15: Yep.
(yet more blabbering)

15: (deadpan) That's good.
(some sort of appeal)

15: Okay.

Click.

Stupid Mom Redux

2007-04-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

As I've said here before--and recently, at that--one of the things I've learned as a parent is that no matter what they do, moms are always wrong.

Oh, yeah . . . subtitle of this post: Tell Me About It

A few weeks ago, I got exasperated with number-one son G because I needed to know how to get in touch with his dance teacher to warn her of some upcoming performance/lesson conflicts.

I'm in a constant state of irritation over this wonderfully creative child because he's notoriously irresponsible when it comes to his own activities and events, of which he has many. He never knows anything ahead of time about what he's doing where he's supposed to be, and if he hears anything he never tells the rest of us or gives us the flyers. He only remembers five minutes before he needs to be somewhere and expects the entire family to drop all their [already conflicting] activities to accommodate his immediate transportation needs. He pulled this on me yesterday morning before 6:30 a.m. "Mooommmm! Dad already left for work and I have to go to rehearsal for the show and be there by 6:45 or I'll get my head cut off and you can be back before Tyke gets up!")

Let this be known: I am as nocturnal as a kangaroo rat. I'm not good in the morning. In the morning, I'm territorial, snap, bite, snarl, and plot assassination of anyone who expects me to be cheerful and active before I'm good and ready. Do not cross the threshold of the inner sanctum!

On dance nights I typically just drop G off and wait for him to get well inside the door instead of going all the way into the studio myself, and, anyway, his lessons are not the first ones on the teacher's docket so I don't want to interrupt the flow of classes by taking up her time in between sessions. Apparently she doesn't use e-mail or doesn't want her address out or I was absent when the brains were passed out or something (for proof of this, see below). I don't actually remember what the deal is. I do know, however, that I am a nerdy e-mail-preference person rather than a phone person. I rarely pick up a phone to call out, and get positively angry at phones when they ring in. Except for their stunning usefulness in emergencies, I wouldn't mind their not existing.

Some days later, after my initial exasperation episode, two telephone numbers showed up scrawled illegibly on the "family notice" white board in our dinette area. By then I had forgotten all about the dance school and my question.

The rule is that once messages are obsolete or action items have been taken care of, I erase them from the white board. Out of courtesy for G, I left the cryptic numbers for a couple of weeks, but finally got tired of them and wanted them gone in order to make space for potential incoming messages. So I asked, "Are you finished with these?" And he said, "Yeah, I have been ever since they were up there."

Assuming that this was just a typical snotty teen response, I sighed and erased the numbers. (And, to give G his absolute due, he's actually shaping up into a pretty courteous young man, and isn't always so PMS-y anymore. I truly appreciate that his nasty attitude is gradually fading.)

A few more days passed. And suddenly something occurred to me.

"G, what were those phone numbers you had up there that I erased?"

"Mooooommmmm, DUH! You asked me to get the numbers for the dance school, and I got them for you! You're the one who erased them. What did you erase them for? Gees!"

Poetry Thursday 4/26/07

2007-04-25T19:26:00.000-05:00

I apologize. This is my first attempt at participating in PoetryThursday. If I'm lucky, I'll survive for next week's effort.

The Villanelle.

Just so you know--I honestly thought this "assignment" would kill me. But I'm still here to tell about it. At some point I felt so harassed by the form that I thought I had succeeded in making some sort of sense. But in the clear light of day I'm not so sure.

For starters, here's a germane quote from my dear fellow asthmatic Robert Louis Stevenson: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour." Thanks, Robert. That certainly applied.

Well, here goes!

Success: A Villanelle in an Archaic Style

There's little to be said for undue stress,
yet there's great flavor in a goodly gain.
They say nothing succeeds quite like success.

Conceit and vanity call for redress,
and tax falls heavy on a lord's demesne.
There's little to be said for undue stress.

To those with no compunction to oppress--
with limitless ambition to unrein--
They say nothing succeeds quite like success.

Great wrongs the great eventually confess,
but none's enough to drive them to abstain.
There's little to be said for undue stress.

A lack of motive leads to frugalness,
and parsimony pocketbooks constrains.
They say nothing succeeds quite like success.

Greedy or humble, why indulge excess?
In moderation, sacred or profane,
there's little to be said for undue stress.
They say nothing succeeds quite like success.

Death of My Hero

2007-04-25T10:36:00.000-05:00

First, the introduction. Readers: my hero. Hero: my readers.

Went to the pharmacy to pick up an inhaler refill this weekend. When I got home and opened the bag, this jumped right out at me:

Holy Gol' durned smokes! They're taking away the inhalers that I need to survive! (I should have thought a little more before I used the word "smokes." Obviously, I don't smoke.)

I support green initiatives. I recycle like mad and haven't bought anything aerosol since I was in high school. That was back when there were still aerosol deodorants! That, my friends, was many aeons ago. I'm what they used to call a "natural" (think Birks, broomstick skirts, whole foods and Buddha), and I never thought I had any use for hairspray, anyway. When I do drive it's a tiny Toyota I've had 11 years that still has under 100,000 miles on it. And the crowner? I even think Al Gore is kind of cute in an extra-large suited, geeky way.

But my immediate reaction to seeing this notice was seeing red. Alarm! Don't take away my inhaler! I went as ballistic as a wheezing asthmatic can go--which is, of necessity, rather quiet and snide, like the upset Geico Caveman, but with a wheeze. My mind instantly reeled with snotty comebacks of righteous indignation.

Get your big, fat pharmaceutically correct hands off my barely functioning lungs
Al Gore, I love you, but kiss my big, fat ugly cellulite hiney (uhm, was that too much information?)
Environmental impact? Yeah, but what about the big, fat impact on my lung environment?
LOOK OUT! I'm armed and dangerous! Next person to threaten, discontinue, or confiscate my inhaler gets a shot of cholorflourocarbonated albuterol in the big, fat face! Don't come any closer or the ozone gets it!

My elder kid said, "Mom! You're so stupid! It's not about the inhaler itself. It's about the harmful byproducts of the manufacture of the inhaler!" The Tyke had to pipe up, too, "Yeah, Mom! Gosh!"

I had to admit this was a good idea. Kid is pretty smart. But I had to check it out. I suddenly felt like an ignorant, crotchety old person. I gave Kid his due. "Perhaps it is about the manufacture," I thought, so I went to the suggested website. Of course, all you get is advertising about the pharmaceutical company's alternative to the discontinued inhalers. (Note: the link in the image below doesn't work; it is just a graphic.)

This is their verbatim information (and the copyright is theirs; I'm just quoting):

Inhalers Are Changing

You may have already heard about earth-friendly rescue inhalers. Soon all rescue inhalers will be made environmentally safe. This means the inhaler you know may change.

Most traditional albuterol inhalers use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the propellant to deliver the medicine into your lungs. They're safe for you, but hurt the environment. CFCs alter the ozone layer in earth's atmosphere, allowing more of the sun's harmful rays to pass freely through it. So the United States is switching to hydrofluoroalkane (HFA), an earth-friendly alternative to CFC. This change will help make the air better for everyone.
HFA inhalers contain the same medicine and provide the same relief as your current CFC inhaler. Learn more about them and find out why they're safe for you and the environment.
Be sure to ask your health care professional for more information about earth-friendly HFA inhalers.

As long as the new inhalers are as effective, I'm all for the change. Frankly, I always wondered about the propellant in inhalers and what it was doing to my lungs. For years, I have noticed that when the inhaler is nearly empty, I get a lot of pulmonary irritation (along with no relief from the medicine), and I assumed that was because the active ingredients were gone but the bothersome propellant remained.

Also, getting back to the aerosol, I don't really understand how, if it's going into your lungs, it is harmful to any environment other than your lungs, unless, upon the first exhalation after you use it, you release it into the air.

I dunno. Just don't take away my albuterol in a convenient form. I don't want to have to carry around my noisy constant companion. While enormously helpful, it's not very portable and extremely obnoxious. I guess I'm also scared, deep down inside, that I could wind up while still in my relative youth carrying around a trailer of oxygen and a web of plastic tubing. The threat of taking away the albuterol just scared me witless.

Poet Galway Kinnell Comes to My Little Town!

2007-04-17T21:56:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow night I'm going to hear a reading by Pulitzer-prize winning American poet, Galway Kinnell. Sue Ellen Thompson will also read. I haven't been this excited since last year when Robert Pinsky spoke at a church in Wellfleet (Cape Cod, MA), or, when, two years ago (University of Rochester, NY), I got to personally thank former Poet Laureate Rita Dove for teaching me a great writing/teaching exercise. That exercise was called "Ten Minute Spill." Check it out. It's in a great book called The Practice of Poetry, by Behn and Twichell. Ms. Dove was so awesome I nearly fainted on the spot at her book signing.
If you have time, go to this page (link below), look at the right-most column, listen to the interview AND the reading of Galway Kinnell's "Shelley" poem. I started crying halfway through the reading of this poem. He makes the years of this situation visceral. Those of you who listen to the interview will understand that I think it might be a memory-challenged reading; that and the content, closely related or separate, will determine how much my eyes will well up.

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/11/14_edgerlym_galwaykinnell/

After you hear the poem "Shelley," you will realize why, deep down, none of us ever could stand reading Shelley. I sort of could, sometimes. But mostly not. And I am a great fan of the English Romantics. I had been forewarned: my great high school English teacher, Marlys Nelson, broke into hysterics telling us about his death in a rowboat when he didn't know how to swim. He was a total idiot.

Any of you who care: The Kinnell interview might be important to hear because it was done two years ago and at that point Kinnell (who was then 78) was already speaking slowly and admitted some "memory problems." So the upcoming reading might not be as stellar as I anticipated. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes.

This is even sadder--I called the library more than a week ahead to ask them whether we needed reservations or tickets (last year in Cape Cod I needed expensive tickets for Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and the competition was cutthroat, and nothing was left a week ahead). Our W.H. librarian actually didn't know whom I was referring to until I repeated the poet's name several times. Then she stifled a laugh and said, "Oh, oh, you mean the reading? No, no, you'll be in the Town Hall. It seats more than 200 people. So there's no need for reservations. (Titter.)"

Hello? Librarian? Read much?

This Just In . . .

2007-04-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

For some reason I have a flurry of complaints today. I thought I was finished, when suddenly I listened to the news, and a Hartford, CT newscaster, breaking a story about an alleged criminal, said

. . . his identity has not yet been identified.

Help me.

Ow, Those Spines Hurt (or, wait, do I mean humps?)

2007-04-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

High School Kid (my son, cleaning a corner of the family room and bringing to me a book entitled Cacti & Succulents that has a big picture of a succulent on it): Mom, what's a succulent? Are camels succulents? Because--yeah--they contain water?

No, son. Okay, now it's back to the library for you.

Foot in Mouth Again

2007-04-17T12:20:00.000-05:00

There's a huge regional discount furniture chain here. The owners started out as average joes, broke and small. Over the span of 15 years, they've made it remarkably big. They now give back generously to the community and occasionally incorporate their charitable work into their ads. For example, they'll donate a percentage of their proceeds over a stated period of time to their current cause. They've recently been giving to a charity whose purpose is preventing premature births.

Throughout their entire series of homegrown ads, the owners do not strike me as particularly well spoken people. That's why I called them "joes," which was fairly rude of me. Recently I heard a new ad for the first time. It starts like this:

Mrs. Furniture [sitting on a Mr. & Mrs. Furniture bed with two babies]: Looking at Suzie and Johnny here, you might find it inconceivable that these twins were born.

Mr. Furniture: That's right. They were premature.

Police Relativity

2007-04-17T11:43:00.000-05:00

Elder son (G) and I were surfing the web to find out what the prices might be for tickets to the upcoming Police concert here. (It's not until way late in the summer, but we have friends who are going and, until just now, we ignorantly toyed with the idea ourselves.)

While I was waiting for the site to load, we were thinking, "We're considering paying the Police to give us a ticket? What's that about? Wouldn't we rather pay them not to give us a ticket? Don't Police usually just give you a ticket and it's only when you don't want one?"

The site came up and we started scanning the prices. Gads. [Many worse expletives follow from both kid and mom.]

The cheapest was $90, way up in the corner aerie which might as well be in the next town over ( a town where you don't want to visit, if you get my drift).

Having decided to remain suckers for punishment, we scrolled all the way to the bottom of the long, long page to see the highest price. We fanned ourselves and then fainted dead over. KINGS OF PAIN! $1090! I hate to use more than one exclamation point when one generally does just as well, but #$%^@%^&*@!!!

And G said, "So, say I were to want to sit in section 3. Hmm. Basically they're saying I could make the choice of buying three tickets to section 3, or having my tuition paid for the Arts Academy next year. Is that about it? [Blank stare/grave look on face]

"How could any concert possibly be worth that much? Gees! Wait . . . it's only the people who are the Police who can afford to go see the Police! There's your irony again . . . I think I'll take $90. No. What am I saying? I think I'll just wait and have James tell me how it was."

Acronyms

2007-04-16T15:19:00.000-05:00

While I'm in traffic, I entertain myself by looking at the license plates in front of me. In Connecticut, I see an inordinate number of personalized plates. Often they're clever, which is fun. More often, they're not, which isn't. But my favorite kind of plate to encounter is the accidental, everyday DMV-issue three-letter acronym. This state is fairly small, so the tag numbers have only six characters: ###, letter letter letter.

Last week I was chauffeuring the kids someplace, and I was approaching a left-hand turn. People went around me in the right-hand lane to pass, and to my amusement, three cars in a row had the following plate letters, respectively:

STD
HPV
HRT

Well, I tell you, I snickered so hard that I nearly missed my left turn light. I had to keep watching the cars in the right lane. What would be next? I was hoping

PMS
OBGYN (would have to have been personalized)

Unfortunately, they weren't. But OMG, what a coincidence!

Tater Tots

2007-04-16T14:03:00.000-05:00

Spring is finally making an attempt to spring, but it's not yet sprung. This weekend I took pictures of Tyke's spur-of-the-moment project, growing potatoes. It started out last spring, when we found a rogue potato that had sprouted beautifully in the kitchen cabinet. Tyke tended the thriving vines indoors until the weather was good and warm, then put it outside in a large flower pot, where the plant was very happy. By fall, the squirrels started vying for the pot. That gave us the cue that there were teeny taters underneath.

It was quite late in the season and, fearing their death by the coming frost, we uncovered the baby potatoes to bring them in for wintering over. They were the cutest little tater tots, between a half inch and an inch in diameter. I put them in one of our large unbreakable plastic cups and we set them on the kitchen counter beneath a window. We assailed all of our friends and the piano teacher and everyone else who came to the house: "Look at these!" I believe they all thought we were slightly nuts.

There they stayed until they felt the sun. Now . . . voila! They're making eyes at each other. Unfortunately, nighttime temperatures are still pretty low here, and we've been deluged by another Nor'easter storm, which threatens the state with floods. So it will be a little while before the little vines go out into substantially larger half-barrels, where this year they will be protected from squirrels and birds by both chicken wire and bird netting. We can't wait. Even if they don't yield any edible potatoes, we'll enjoy the vines. We'll also be starting our fifth annual crop of "Elf" sunflowers on the only windowsills in the house that receive sun.