Winter is Being SUCH an Asshole This Year

A few nights ago, I was taking a bath and thinking about this guy I saw buying a bunch of lottery tickets at the gas station and I worked up this analogy of how people of limited means who are opposed to a progressive tax system because they think they'll be rich one day are dumber than people who buy lottery tickets.  But then I got out of the tub and started to write it and the metaphor grew more and more tortured so I got back in the tub, but this time with an Entertainment Weekly and a bourbon.

I want to never not be in my tub anymore.  And my tub sucks.  It's one of those shitty built in the wall ones that you can buy at Home Depot for like $7.95.  I can't keep my boobs and my toes under water at the same time.  It's small.  It sucks.  But it's warm.  Especially with a bourbon.

I'm not writing this from my tub.  Instead I'm sitting in my living room which smells vaguely of pee because the goddamn dog peed on the rug this morning because she's an asshole.  There are two cute girls on the couch watching Frozen and that's pissing me off because even though I like that movie, we should be watching it ironically.  But since they are 10 and 7 they don't know how to do that yet.

This winter sucks, you guys.  And I'm not normally a person terribly bothered by winter.  What's this winter like for people who hate normal winters? I'd send some sympathy their way, but I'm saving it all for myself.  I am only feeling sorry for myself.  If winter and the dog can both be assholes, so can I.

I used to be like Elsa - the cold never bothered me anyway.  It bothers me now, though, because it is a million degrees below zero.  Also, I'm worried that I may have unhealthily internalized Frozen since this is my fourth viewing of it.  It's too goddamn cold outside to do anything but go to the movies and you can't take a fifth grader to American Hustle.  I get Elsa (you should click on that link... ).  She's my girl, even if her head is bigger than her waist.  I want to run away to a magic castle that I never have to leave mostly because driving anywhere is impossible due to the permanent sheen of salt and frost on my car windows.  

My car's being an asshole too.

I like to indulge my pissiness by reading internet comments from climate change deniers who think that this winter is evidence that there's no such thing as global warming because then I can roll my eyes dramatically and say, "Oh yeah, this is normal, motherfuckers."   Stoking my own sense of intellectual superiority is warming.

There's another polar vortex coming on Monday.

I'm going to take another bath.

The Shuddering Black Hole of My Memory

Because I have towering technical abilities*, I put a youtube app on my Wii and I use it for yoga videos.

Well, I intend to use it for Yoga videos but instead I sit on my yoga mat and watch music videos from the 80s where I'll giggle at the hair and the smoking and the casual misogyny and then I'll start watching TV theme songs which will then make me think of Too Close for Comfort which will make me remember that one where Monroe got raped by a couple of women so I'll watch that clip and then I stop feeling nostalgic for the 80s because that was so gross also Reagan was president and that was awful no matter how much I weighed 110 pounds (a number lost forever to the endless abyss of The Past).

Also, I'll watch videos I posted there from when Laney was much littler.  Like this one:



And, you guys, I know this is Laney!  This is definitely Laney.  I have vague memories of a short person who would wear dresses and spin.  But, I cannot call it to mind!  The gorgeous, 5' tall be-hoodied girl that I'm trying to figure out how to talk into a training bra before tee-shirt season comes has entirely replaced her.

So here is the question I pose to you:  if your kid is 8, or 10, or 13, or 16, can you call to mind what they were like at 4?  When we're actively doing the rearing (raising?  is it rearing or raising? I know one is for children and the other is for cattle....), are you so in it that you can't recollect earlier stages of being in it?

And when they leave the nest, does it come back?  If your kid is 25 or 30 or 40, can you call to mind the 4 year old them?

Now if y'all will excuse me, I gotta go take some more videos...

* If you would like to share in my towering technical abilities let me share with you the internal monologue that accompanies mine: "[PANIC!][START CRYING JUST A LITTLE] Oh my god, with the endless waterworks! For crying out loud, turn it off.  Is it off?  Turn it back on. [RELIEF][OUTSIZED FEELING OF ACCOMPLISHMENT]"

Rough Night - Short Blog

It was a rough night around here.  Lots of tears and lots of self-doubt.  This business of raising children is not an easy one and the worst thing about it is the constant nagging suspicion that I'm doing it wrong, that I'm passing on things that will make my daughter's life harder.  Sometimes I feel entirely unequal to the enormous responsibility of raising this wonderful girl.  How will I ever be able to send her off into the wide world, away from my protective arms?

And as I was kvetching about this on Facebook, I remembered a previous blog post I wrote in which I needled at the idea of re-inventing myself.  One of the first comments on that blog post was from my late sister-in-law, Debbie, who said to me "I think you're a beautiful person. I don't know why you want to change yourself at all."

Oh, that made me feel so much better!  It was so reassuring and so kind and so loving.  Debbie thinks I'm a beautiful person!  How wonderful!

So, I got to missing Debbie in the most selfish way because she was so good at making me feel better.

Debbie taught me so much about being a mother.  Outside of my own mother, I have no greater influence in this fraught, wonderful, terrifying business.  She was just so great at it!

Oh, Debbie!  We miss you so much!  I know your kids miss you desperately. But I also know they'll be OK: they were raised by a champion.  They'll do just great.

I hope I can always remember the things her beautiful, short life brought to me - how freeing it is to forgive people and remind them that you love them. How much it means when you tell someone that you think she's a beautiful person.

Debbie was a beautiful person.  And we were so lucky to have had her.  The best honor I can do to her legacy is to remember what she brought to me; to do the best I can and to remember how much it means to tell someone you think they're beautiful.

Still, I feel so sad right now.  I miss her.

Facebook is like a Car... or Something

I have long aimed for more equanimity.  I want to be a person who let's things roll, man, lets it go. I find this especially difficult when I'm driving - tailgaters, drivers who don't turn their lights on in inclement weather or who turn on their blinkers as they're making a turn make me want to Cut A Bitch.

It's similarly difficult with stuff that annoys me online.  That stupid FB badge seems to exist independent of the human who posted it, kind of like how the car that cut me off seems to exist independent of the fully-realized individual operating it.  It's like the car and the person are one less-than-human irritation and that obvious Abraham Lincoln misquote with "you're" spelled wrong has subsumed the reality of the person with feelings who posted it when she was drunk.

I do not flip other drivers off or lean on my horn, though, no matter how irritated I am because I have trained myself to remember that there are Real People in the driver's seat.  And I do not go ALL CAPS when people post Facebook memes that make me bonkers because I have hurt people's feelings and gotten in rage wars on the Internet which are just depressing.

Still, much like drivers in Suburbans who can't parallel park set my teeth on edge, there are some things that popped up on Facebook multiple times this year that shutting up about has given me stress headaches.  Want to hear about them?  Here they go:

Thing The First: The Old Lady with the Plastic Bags at the Grocery Story
If you're on Facebook, I'm sure you've seen this posted about 4000 times over the year.  The short version of the story is that a cashier at a grocery store tells an old lady she's a total jerk for not bringing reusable bags to the grocery store.  Then the old lady totally schools the cashier by telling him that the old days were green on their own (reusable milk bottles, drying clothes on the line, etc).  I'm cool with the gist of this story.  Most of our environmental woes now are due to mod cons and rapacious over-consumption and the relentless corporatization of the world.

But this story hinges on the clerk being a total asshole to the old lady, with the easily inferred assumption that your reusable bags are bullshit, man.  I would wager that the Venn Diagram of People Who Bring Reuasble Bags to the Grocery Story and People Who Are Assholes to Old Ladies in Grocery Stores is two disparate circles.

I cannot tolerate a straw man argument.  It is the very height of lazy rhetoric. If you want to make an argument that we should embrace the old ways a little more, you can do it without inventing a dickhead Trader Joe's cashier.

Thing the Second: My Mom Smoked and I Played Unsupervised and That Makes Me Way More Badass than These Fucking Kids Now

I had really hoped my generation, which grew up under the wearying moral superiority of the Boomers, would have been done with the Hatin' On the Kids Today thing that is emblematic of every generation's introduction into middle age.  Alas, I was wrong.  This is a link to a blogpost that runs through the general thing.  But if you're on Facebook, you've seen it in a million different ways - we played outside unsupervised, our moms smoked while pregnant, and (my personal favorite) we rode in cars without seatbelts.  And this is why we are Made Of Awesome.

My only response to that is gonna be these charts on childhood mortality from the Dept. of Health and Human Services:

Apparently, all this crazy attention to safety has ended keeping a bunch of kids alive who will end up ruining America by being insufficiently awesome.

Thing the Third: If You Choose Not To Consume Meat You Are No Fun at Parties

This is from Buzzfeed (and is also cribbed from a joke made by a vegan comedian):

More than the other two, this is emblematic of something that shows up a lot:  the poster is annoyed by someone else's dietary choices and so posts something about how intolerant vegans/vegetarians are of meat-eater's dietary choices.  The old pot/kettle strawman again.  It is true that Morrissey or PETA show up in the intertubes a lot saying stupid things, but making the assumption that all vegans are Morrissey is equivalent to assuming that all meat eaters are Ted Nugent.  

Based on my own experience as having lived both as a meat eater and a vegetarian, the chances of having someone shit on your dietary choices are a lot higher for the vegetarian than they are for the meat eater because the veg is in the minority.  And if you choose to live your life as a vegan, I am here to tell you that you are actually badass, because that shit is HARD!   

If you enjoy meat, go eat a fucking hamburger, but if you assume your bacon consumption affords you moral superiority you have become the vegan you love to hate.

Bonus Thing: White People Stop Misquoting Bill Cosby

That thing you think Bill Cosby said he probably didn't say.  Also, if you are a white person, don't make grand sweeping statements about how black people need to improve themselves.  It is the very height of obnoxious.   

Well, this bout of bitching has left me feeling rather unencumbered, and wondering what the Irritating Facebook Memes of 2014 will be.  

On Being Ornamental

We called our paternal grandmother "Mammy" because that is the kind of thing you get to do when you have a Irish/ southern upbringing.

Mammy used colorful language.  I don't mean she was profane (outside of, sigh, the occasional racial slur), I mean she had a host of these Irish expressions she'd pull out with great style.  For example, Mammy would hand a broom to me and instruct me to make myself "useful as well as ornamental."

It's funny, right?  You are welcome to use it with your own children.  Consider it a gift.  And despite what I'm fixing to write below, I'm going to keep using it because it is an excellent expression.

Moving on...

Just a few minutes ago, I was upstairs arguing with Laney about what she would wear tomorrow to the play we're going to.  And all through the argument I was hating myself for arguing with her. I can tell it hurts her feelings when I don't like the clothes she chooses.  I get disgusted with myself when I pull her hair off her face because I think she looks prettier that way.  This emphasis I put on Laney's prettiness is uncool.  I should not make an ornament of my little girl.  She is not decorative.

I mean to appreciate her beauty in the way she wants to present it, not in the way I want it to be presented.  She is my beautiful girl who only wants to wear turtlenecks or hoodies with leggings and who cannot tolerate the idea of any foofaws in her hair.  But I fail all the time.  I find myself, despite loud internal remonstrations, urging her towards a convention which privileges ornamentalism.

Here's a fun thought experiment.   Google the term "beautiful girl." Wait, I'll do it for you:

The Brits have this great word they use: "samey."  Aren't these women "samey"?   All hair and boobs (and Hermione, interestingly).  This is not to say those aren't beautiful girls.  But can't we expand our ideas of what a beautiful girl is?  Does it only have to be white girls with low body fat, luxe hair and ample boobs?

I've spent a good chunk of my life dissatisfied with the way I look.  If you added it all up, I bet I've spent a solid year of my life wishing I looked different.  And I'm terrified of passing that on to my daughter.  I'm so afraid that my displeasure at the way she looks will start her down that path of self-loathing, endemic to American women who take it as gospel that the only acceptable way to look is to look like those women in the picture above.  

I hate that I privilege this dangerously narrow standard of beauty and I'm trying to stop.  I haven't managed to do it yet.  But I'm trying.  I'm trying.   And I don't kid myself that I have the power to insulate her from it.  But I can try.  

***********************

Our argument about what she would wear tomorrow ended with my apology.  I was wrong.  I told her I was wrong and I apologized.  This is all I can do. Tomorrow, she will wear her favorite red turtleneck and black leggings which is a lovely, Christmas-y outfit which she is comfortable in and which she likes.  She'll flip her necklace out over the turtleneck and show off the charms she's collected.  And she will look like Laney and she will look beautiful.

The dress I bought her will stay in the closet.  And I won't mention it again.

I Know, I Know... Horrible Person Says Something Horrible. But...

I was in the tub reading Slate (I read my iPhone in the tub... this will end in tears) and came across an article by my girl, Amanda Marcotte, about what noted human hemorrhoid Rush Limbaugh had to say concerning the end of the filibuster on judicial nominations:

Let's say, let's take ten people in a room and they're a group.  And the room is made up of six men and four women.  Right?  The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women.  The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six vote of the 10 to change the rule.

Beginning, we can take as understood that comparing judicial nominations to rape is, uh, the stupidest goddamn thing ever.  It's offensive and sexist, sure.  But it's mostly just hella dumb.

Having dispensed with the obvious problem of this comparison, let's move onto the part that really struck me:

You guys, I know a LOT of men (and have known my fair share, if you know what I mean... heh heh heh).  In those numbers are a lot of lovely, wonderful, strong, feminist men (like the one I'm all married up to).  Some of them are just kind of OK men.  Some are straight up assholes. But I do not know (and have not known) ANY man who would vote to legalize rape!

Some of the worst men in the world are in the U.S. Senate.  Ted Cruz is a homelier version of someone James Spader played in a movie in the 80s.  Jim DeMint can eat a bag of dicks.  I hope James Inhofe drowns in the run off from a melted glacier. But none of those dudes would vote to legalize raping their female colleagues.  And they've got the Senate 80 to 20.  The dudes could easily break a rapin' filibuster if it all came down to gender lines.

Look, obviously all reasonable people can agree that Rush Limbaugh is an ambulatory infection. He is what happens when a burst blister gains the power of speech. He is a bandaid floating in a public pool, a pubic hair on a shared bar of soap.  He is a tumor.  He is the side-by-side used tampon and used condom you step on in the alley behind a frat house.  He is a bloated rat corpse. I do not care for him.   I am not surprised when he says horrible things.  

But that motherfucker evidently has 14+ million weekly listeners.  Do you think 14+ million listeners are going "shit, thank GOD there are so many women in my peer group otherwise we'd all start to rapin'"  

Who listens to this pestilent scab and thinks, "Ohmigod! My wife is the only woman in her office of four!  If we have majority rule for judicial nominations, she's sure to get raped!"

Who listens to this guy?  Don't tell me no one.  It's 14 million people!!!!

Fixing to Watch SNL and Wondering About the Sudden Rage

I'm actually not feeling ragey now.  I'm looking forward to watching SNL with Laney.  While I miss my darling little punkin pie baby, it is nice to be able to giggle at the dick in a box joke from The Neighbors that Laney sorta got.  She's innocent of the sexual connotation but thinks that penises are hilarious.  To be fair, they are.

I was in the car recently and the song Roar by Katy Perry came on and I found myself feeling really pissed and wondering why I felt pissed. Katy Perry inspires no rage from me.  She writes catchy, cromulent pop songs.  Her public personal is professional and inoffensive.  She's cute.  I sing along.  And then I remembered - I was pissed about when Katy Perry was on SNL and she did that song.  Let's take a look at screengrab from her performance:

The xy component of the internet at large got its boxers all up in a bunch about the grave disrespect that Katy Perry showed to the fellow playing guitar there.  How dare she ask guitar dude to wear this ridiculous outfit?  Who the everlovin' eff does this poptart think she is?  

Note there is a woman singing somewhere behind both of them who is dressed in the same manner as the guitarist.  No one was particularly upset about the indignities she was forced into.  Weren't her professionalism and artistic integrity equally as threatened? Hasn't she worked as hard to make it, studied her craft with the same diligence?

Apparently not. We are inured to the potential humiliation of the countless female background singers and dancers costumed in whatever nonsense best sets off the image the (male) frontliner is trying to suggest.  

On a stage men (especially white men) are privileged with an assumption of legitimacy that women (especially women of color... but that's a whole nother blog post) are not.  If you got pissed off about Katy Perry's furry guitarist - pay attention to the other musical acts you watch and check yer damn privilege.

It's 10:30 now, let's all enjoy whatever cray Lady Gaga brings to the SNL stage.  It will not achieve the soaring heights of Kanye West's cray.... oh shit, you guys think I'm kidding, right?  You know I love Kanye, for real?  I mean, he's not on my fantasy dinner party list because I'm pretty sure he's a narcissistic asshole.  But he does some really amazing stuff!  Let's watch a little Kanye West SNL cray. How amazeballs and gorgeous is this?   

Kanye West - Power SNL from Giorgi Tevdorashvili on Vimeo.