Stop! You're Liking Things Wrong!

That title sounds like something Troy would say to Britta on Community, doesn't it?  I love Community.  Do you guys think the show will hold up without Troy? Do you care?  Do you watch that show?  Chances are you do not.  Not many people do.

I just love it (as I have mentioned before).  I love it because it's silly and weird and then has moments that are just lovely.  Like this:

This sounds simplistic to the verge of tautological.  But it's not. He's rejecting the virtue of not liking things, of being too smart or too cool for things, in favor of the joy that comes from embracing things.

Sometime around 1991 or so, my good friend Maura introduced me to Star Trek: TNG at which point I made rollicksome fun of her because I was a good Gen X-er and everything that was not rarefied was dumb.  But about 20 minutes into it, I got sucked in and have, ever since then, let myself like liking things.  I am awfully grateful to her for that.

To that end, here are a few discussion points for us to chew over the next time we head out for drinks:

1- How forward nacelles probably don't make a lot of sense in space, but they still make more sense than a Holodeck
2- How the odds are never in your favor
3- How I like to think I'd be Ravenclaw, but worry that I'm probably Hufflepuff
4- How I don't get how anyone doesn't choose Amity, although I'd prefer to dress like a Dauntless
5- How I'd still rather live on the Ice Planet of Hoth than the Forest Moon of Endor because: Ewoks.
6- How the Mother of Dragons is showier, but Arya Stark needs to end up on the Iron Throne
7- How I can't figure out WHY the Weeping Angels are so awesome and scary, but, man, they are, right?
8- How the Borg are way scarier than the Empire and arguably the scariest bad guys ever
9- How the Lost finale was worse than the Battlestar Galactica finale. Wait.  No.  The other way.  Wait…
10- How I'd prefer to have drinks with the tenth doctor over the eleventh, but would throw them both over for a night out with Captain Jack Harkness
11- How my nerdy passions stop at Lord of the Rings.  I need fully fleshed out ladies in my sci fi/fantasy
12- How sometimes I can't decide if I like Angel more than Buffy and worry that I need to turn in my feminist card if I do
13- How I cried at the end of Doctor Horrible because Joss Whedon is a damn artist
14- How I've seen things you people wouldn't believe
15- How I don't care who Lady Mary ends up with, but could listen to Isobel and Violet snipe with that super British affectionate bitchiness at each other all night (my interests are not THAT narrow)

Got anything to add to the list?

Paradise Lost/My Body

This is not a post about how my body used to be amazing and now the paradise of my amazing body is lost. I never lived in the Good Body Paradise.  I was a cute young thing once, sure, but I always felt like I looked gross.

This may have worked out to my net benefit, though.  As the great British philosophers One Direction tell us: you're not beautiful unless you don't know you're beautiful.  Then you're beautiful.  Only you don't know you're beautiful.  So you're walking around all beautiful and stuff, but you feel like you look sort of fat and gross. And that's what makes you beautiful.

And then Harry asks you to Prom!

Sometimes I wonder what I could have done with all that time I've spent hating the way I look.  I could have done something super productive like written a counter-ballad to One Direction which would have had something to do with how it's when you don't know you're going to get laid that you get laid.  This isn't true, but it would have made a nice counterpoint.  I'm going to call Katy Perry or Taylor Swift as soon as I get done with this.

Sometimes instead of hating the way I look, I work out.  Working out is a productive use of time.  These days whilst shakin' dat ass on the elliptical,  I've been watching Supernatural.   I enjoy genre television especially when story and plot serve the characters rather than the other way.  Supernatural lost its way big time, but ever since the Winchester boys became pawns in the cosmic battle between angels and demons, it's just really working for me.  On the last episode I saw, they introduced Cain as a character.  Turns out [SPOILER ALERT] Cain has been getting a bad wrap for a few millennia.

Heh.  That will never not make me chuckle.

Supernatural is great to work out with because not only are there frequent exciting fight scenes, but the two leads are dreamy boys with absolutely no body fat.  This is very inspirational.  Although, to be honest, sometimes as I watch the younger brother attempt to emote I imagine some handsome, zero % body fat, 6'2" actor who books industrial training films and bolsters his income either through prostitution or temp work watching the same episode and thinking, "I was up for the part of Rory Gilmore's dreamy season one boyfriend and and lost it out to this meathead who can't act his way out of a paper bag?  Really?"  And then he sighs sadly while he eats turkey wrapped in a lettuce leaf for lunch.

Poor Jared Padelecki.  I feel bad about that.  He seems (despite this super ugly tweet) like a good guy.  And he's doing the work.  I bet homeboy pulls in a solid 1000 sit ups a day.

And I bet he still sometimes thinks his body is gross.

I bet Jared Padelecki works out every time he feels like he looks gross.  But working out that much just isn't a good fit for me. Largely because I would hate that.  Also, the people I work with would probably be annoyed if I busted out push ups in the middle of conference calls.  I can hate my belly silently. I cannot push up without loud objectionable noises.

But I still think there's a join here amongst hating the way I look, hating how much time I spent hating my body and Supernatural.  And I bet you thought I'd never get there…

I'm gonna put Paradise Lost (the primary source, I believe, for this whole angel/demon cosmic war that's making me giggle from the awesomeness during latter day episodes of Supernatural) on my iPhone.  Every time I start to hate my body, I'm gonna read a little Paradise Lost.  I feel like I should have read it by now.  And I haven't.  Couldja just?

I'm gonna make some lemonade out of these self-loathing lemons.  And do something more productive than worry about the size of my belly.  I'm gonna get down and funky with old Johnny Milton.  I shall keep you apprised of my progress.  Although, to be fair, I may find myself drifting off to read some Supernatural fanfic when Milty gets too rough.  That's still more productive than hating the way I look.  And I hear Supernatural fanfic is NASTY!

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.