The Big Scare: Is my daughter a wingnut?
“Do you want to go to the beach?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go to the zoo?”
“No.”
“Do you want to go to the aquarium?”
“No.”
This is a typical conversation between my daughter and me these days, and it’s not just limited to offers of big excursions. It happens when we discuss the possibility of doing anything other than viewing High School Musical 2 for the 943rd time. And as a woman who once practiced kissing techniques using a Shaun Cassidy album cover, I totally get it. Zac Efron is so fine that even a newt could recognize the hypnotizing hum of his sky-blue eyes. And there’s always the possibility that he and Vanessa Hudgens will finally get that uninterrupted kiss. A glass tank full of shimmering sardines has nothing on that.
Still.
Any opportunity I offer my child—from walking the dog to taking piano lessons to learning about tsunamis through wild bathtub splashing (who wouldn’t want to do that?!?)—is met with a definitive oh-hell-to-the-N-O! It’s unbearably frustrating to be on the receiving end of such assholery. It’s like a never-ending tap dance: See me over here? (Rhythm roll.) I’m trying to entertain you! (Shuffle-ball-step.) Trying to make your life fabulous! (Windmill arms, jazz hands. Big! Smile!)
Response from my child: No.
It makes me want to punch myself in the face while wearing the jagged, over-priced, purple quartz ring I was forced to purchase at Hunt & Gather after it broke when Ruby dropped it on the floor—after already having been reprimanded (twice) for dropping other breakables on the floor. Mark my words: I’m going to give her that ring on her wedding day.
Worse, though, than the self-face-punching frustration is the gut-punching thought I had in recognizing this pattern of now-predictable negative responses: Is my daughter a Republican?
Oh, how the head spins. I nearly had to lie down after typing that. That my child should grow up to be a Republican is my third worst nightmare. (The second is that she would also be an evangelical golfer, but I’m going to stay positive.)
When I first voiced this concern to my husband, he brushed me off. “Don’t ever say that!” he said. That I should accuse our Pride and Joy of such an ugly thing made him angry, which is totally understandable. The possibility makes me angry, too. For six years, we’ve worked hard to raise a good, solid liberal who can one day hold her own against the 19—or is it 20 now?— children that have been delivered into the world through Michelle Duggar’s Slip ’N Slide vagina.
We own a hybrid. We recycle and eat organic. We clean trash off the streets in our neighborhood several times a year and donate to the less fortunate. We practice throwing peace signs at aggressive drivers with ugly bumper stickers. We have naked time. We listen to Michael Franti.
Despite all these efforts, the growing evidence is disturbing.
Our child is selfish. And greedy. And she doesn’t like to share. That is, unless we have something she wants, and then, of course, we’re expected to share. No discussion, no meeting half way. She balks at reasonable concessions and then goes nuclear, taking what she wants as we’re still trying to figure out a compromise. This, because getting what she wants is in her best self-interest and long-term goals, everyone else be damned.
She is—and it pains me to admit it—a hypocrite.
To make matters worse, she comes in a mesmerizing package filled with promise. With giant brown eyes, dimples and a gap-toothed smile, she can wrinkle her forehead and present herself in a seemingly genuine and well-intentioned manner. The kid can placate a gullible crowd with a determined, passionate and convincing argument, even though—upon closer consideration—it lacks rationale and is filled with holes and, yes, sometimes a few fibs. She’s so good that we, too, are susceptible to her sideways, circular, grammatically challenged fast-talk. Thanks to a few well-played hugs and kisses, cuddles and compliments (“Mama, your eyes look so pretty today!”), she tends to get most of what she wants, often at our expense.
Horrified by this set of circumstances, Sam and I put Ruby on the couch the other day and forced her to watch Inside Job, followed by Sicko and two episodes of The Rachel Maddow Show. We then offered a comprehensive lecture about the dangers of global warming; the constitutionally protected right of American women to have access to safe abortions; why gay marriage, prostitution and pot should all be legal; and how it’s totally normal that a shirtless Zac Efron makes her blush.
After she passed a short quiz and went to bed, we turned to the child-development literature where we learned that Ruby is right on track with respect to age-appropriate behavior. Not only is she behaving exactly as she’s supposed to be, but she’s also still ripe for the imprinting of our atheistic, heathen-based, live-and-let-live belief system. She is not (thank every pagan God) a Republican. She’s just acting like one.
Undervalued: The absurdity of teacher as scapegoat
“Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: Teachers make a goddamn difference! What about you?” —From “What Teachers Make, or Objection Overruled, or If Things Don’t Work Out, You Can Always Go to Law School” by poet Taylor Mali
As I write this, the battle between the mouth-breathing governor of Wisconsin and American workers is raging. It’s my hope that, as you read this, the 14 Democratic senators necessary for a vote on Scott Walker’s union-busting bill will still be in their undisclosed bunkers, fondling their newly grown balls. It sure has been nice to see the Dems finally stand for something, even if it is too little too late.
Regardless of how this “brouhaha”—as Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal dismissively called this pivotal moment in American history— plays out, and aside from the larger issue of Unions: Good or Evil?, I am awestruck by the widespread disdain for teachers, a profession, as it happens, largely undertaken by women. But that’s another column.
The broad demonization of teachers is being underscored by the daily news cycle. It’s not just one or two states taking an antagonistic stance toward teachers; this is happening everywhere.
State education officials in Michigan have ordered closure of half the schools in Detroit, where class sizes in the high schools will swell to 60 students in the coming year.
In Providence, R.I., teachers were given a layoff notice last week. This doesn’t mean all 2,000 of them won’t have jobs next year (some of them definitely won’t). But it does mean they work the remainder of this year knowing they may not have jobs next year. Yay for workplace morale! I should point out that annual layoff notices are not uncommon and are, on the contrary, part of the fabric of our modern education system. They’re a yearly occurrence across the country. Sort of like Christmas. With lumps of coal. Delivered by Scrooge.
Back in Madison, Wisc., highly paid (non-unionized) administrators are refusing sick pay to teachers who were absent from work while protesting Walker’s proposed bill. Each of these administrators—who I know have never fudged on a sick day—is conveniently channeling an inner Helen Lovejoy. The poor children are not learning when a teacher spends a day in the capitol rotunda with her sign that reads, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”
Never mind the civics lesson inherent in civil disobedience; these teachers should shut up and teach—and never deviate from mandated curriculum. Or else.
As if the headlines aren’t alarming enough, one little jaunt into the toxic waters of any comment section reveals a widespread derision.
“I love teachers…. for all their self righteous babble…” wrote someone calling himself Deucejack on The Huffington Post. “[T]hey don’t give two nickels about the kids they supposedly provide a service to. LMOA at teachers…. Now I’m laughing at the unions in their last nose dive.” One thing is certain: Douchejackass here could have used a better grammar teacher.
Comments like this are disturbingly abundant and wildly narrow in their vision. Just as in any other profession, there will always be what I call “driftwood” among teachers; there is a small subset who are underachievers, skaters, system-bilkers and incompetents. They exist and Sarah Palin is the poster child for this unrefudiateable fact. Her devotees serve as supporting evidence.
But, by and large, teachers teach precisely because they give at least—and usually far more than—two nickels about the children in their care. With a child six months into kindergarten, I’ve had an opportunity to spend time in the classroom and see what a teacher does when she’s set adrift by a society that progressively downgrades her worth.
With increasing class sizes, no aides, few support staff, absurdly limited supplies and resources, an endless barrage of new training requirements and too many too-busy-working-multiple-jobs-to-be-involved parents, a teacher puts a smile on her face and welcomes her children in the morning. Then she goes right on ahead and teaches her ass off.
While meeting district-, state- and federally mandated goals, she also acts as counselor, nurse, custodian, disciplinarian and parent. She manages personalities, fixes scrapes and cuts, wipes noses and tears. She helps her kids navigate ever-changing relationships and moods. At any given time, she’s attending to the hurt feelings of one child and attempting to engage another whose attention span is fleeting. She may be patiently problem solving with a child who struggles with a concept or assisting four others on a math test. Often, she’s doing any number of these things simultaneously, while teaching!
In addition to all of this—and her prep work and training and certifications—she responds to perhaps the most demanding customers in her equation: parents, both those who respect what she does and those who don’t. There isn’t enough money in the world that could entice me to do even that part of the job, let alone the rest of it.
For seven hours a day, five days a week, 40 weeks each year, for 13 years, we put our children in the care of teachers. But from the way many folks are vilifying them, you’d think our little bumpkins were spending time with Osama bin Laden.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
The Palm Pilot: Who needs church when you have an app?
One of my daughter’s schoolmates walked up to me the other day, her blue eyes wide, and apropos of nothing, said, “If you don’t go to church, you can’t know God.” She was confident. I, on the other hand, was rattled, given that the outrageous remark came from nowhere, as outrageous remarks from 5-year-olds often do. Still, I’m not great when put on the spot, and my involuntary response ruled the moment.
“Well, that’s not true,” I said.
“Yes it is!” said the sure-footed little darling.
“Well, some people believe God is all around them,” I said. “And some people—.”
Some people, I thought to myself, don’t give their kids iPhones because if Little Miss Sure of Herself had an iPhone, she would know that in the age of new media, church is nearly obsolete.
Case in point: After consulting with priests, the co-founders of LittleiApps have developed Confession: A Roman Catholic App. The Pope has bestowed the app with his seal of approval, which is hardly surprising given he up and abolished limbo a few years back because, he argued at the time, limbo is just a “theological hypothesis.” Ahem. I mean, Amen.
Selling for $1.99, Confession became one of the top 50 most-purchased apps from iTunes as of late January, a boon for the developers, one of whom claims his tithing more than compensates for the profit he doesn’t admit making. The same goes for the suckers guilt-ridden among us: To be absolved of badness without setting foot in a church, for less than two bucks? That’s like an additional 50-percent-off clearance at Barney’s for the financially challenged fashionista. At that price, I could justify purchasing it to satisfy my curiosity. But I’m a Jew; recognizing a good deal is in my genes.
Concerned this purchase would be a donation to the Catholic Church—where the Grand Pooh-Bah wears purty dresses and protects the child molesters within its ranks (talk about a dude who need this app!)—I decided to buy some clown porn to balance the karmic scales. I got freaked out, however, by the still images on the producer’s website (if a photo of clowns fucking doesn’t do it for me, a moving picture is out of the question). Instead, I made a donation to Planned Parenthood.
After printing the receipt for my records, I opened my new app and readied myself to feel closer to God. Sure, there’s that whole I’m an atheist thing standing between God and me, but I’m not closed to the possibility that a phone can be a conduit for spirituality. Just the other day, a girl next to me in yoga class was texting from downward dog and her chakras seemed perfectly aligned. Why not an app to save my soul?
Before I could properly confess, I had to register: The app asks for a Name (iSinner), Sex (doggie style, pls! Er, I mean, female) and Birthday (1998—priests like minors); there’s a required and oddly limited pull-down menu for Vocation (single, married, priest, religious) and Date of Last Confession to be updated with each subsequent use. The brilliance of technology will keep the confessor honest in the way a priest on the other side of a thin partition can’t; there’s no fudging the date of your last confession here.
After setting my password (I’ll let you imagine that one), I went to the Examination of Conscience page and reviewed the Ten Commandments. Some people need an e-reminder that killing, cheating, stealing, lying and screwing your neighbor’s husband are no-no’s. I’m good to go on the How to Behave as a Human Being because my mama raised me right, so I skipped to the confession.
“This app is intended to be used during the Sacrament of Penance with a Catholic priest only,” reads the disclaimer. “This is not a substitute for a valid confession.” Ah ha! I get it. This app is a shortcut, like a “Sabbath” setting on an oven.
So there I sat at my dining room table, talking to my iPhone. Not talking on my phone, but to my phone.
“Are you there, God? It’s me, Aaryn,” I said, recalling one of my favorite Judy Blume books. “Uh. Last Friday, my in-laws took my daughter for the morning so I could write. But instead of writing, I—masturbated.” Just saying the word “masturbated” made me kind of horny. Is it bad to be horny during confession?
Holding my phone, I continued: “And as long as I’m confessing, God, well, last Monday, I told a 5-year-old fan of yours that some people don’t believe in you.”
My iPhone then did what I imagine lots of priests do: It went to sleep. I felt a little offended that I had to log back in to finish up. Not to mention I was trying to hurry so I could masturbate before I had to pick my kid up from school. Alone time is precious in these parts.
After my confession, I was prompted to read a little ditty called “Act of Contrition,” which I did, though I have to admit I kept getting distracted by the sound of my eyeballs rolling to the back of my head. I didn’t feel all that sorry. In fact, I was kind of bored. But I said “amen” and waited for my absolution.
For $1.99, I felt nothing but amusement.
Spend the money if you want, but, in my opinion, there’s only one way to know God and it has nothing to do with showing up at church or iConfession.
(As published in San Diego CityBeat.)
I love my snowbirds: My in-laws are here to stay
It was Monday, Dec. 20, and we weren’t expecting my in-laws for another four days. But then the phone rang.
“We’re making really great time. The weather’s been terrific, and there’s hardly any traffic. We’re in a town called—” My father-in-law paused to double check. “Uh, Lakeside? Have you heard of it?”
“Lakeside?!?” I said to Sam, when he relayed the information. “But—they’re supposed to be in Santa Fe right now! What the hell?”
“They’ll be here by lunch time,” Sam said. I blinked at him in silence. I started to hyperventilate. “But I’ll tell them to come at dinner,” he said. I was getting dizzy, seeing spots and auras and tracers. I genuinely like my inlaws, but I was dreading this visit.
“What do you think? Is 4:30 OK?” I nodded, and sat down on the couch using a hand to steady myself. I asked Sam to bring me an ice pack for my head.
And so it was that my husband’s parents—along with my sister-in-law and one cute but yappy lap dog—left blizzards and black ice in their rear view mirror and began their first winter as snowbirds. It was now only the distance between East County and the College Area separating me from a two-and-a-half month visit.
No, that’s no typo; it’s my reality. A two-and-a-half-month visit! With my in-laws!
Good Christ.
The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.”
Now, I don’t need a jungle between my in-laws and me. But one plane ticket is about right. I’m the Queen of the Short Visit, Master of the Three-Day Weekend. I can tolerate just about anything for 72 hours, but give me an entire season of my mother-in-law’s perfume and my furry father-in-law shirtlessly sunning himself in my back yard? Well, then. You can just consider me a wild card.
It’s worthy of mention that my husband and I haven’t lived within 1,500 miles of a parental unit for more than 20 years, a choice with which we are both very content. We visit with my mother twice a year, and she and I chat on the phone once every three or four weeks. It works for us.
My in-laws, on the other hand, would like to talk daily. And visit often. And hug and kiss and generally enjoy each other in person, all the time. This is uncomfortable territory for a girl who digs her obligation-free existence. Family dinners? What is that? It’s accurate to say I went into this whole we’re-coming-out-for-the-winter arrangement with a little bit of apprehension.
OK, so maybe that’s downplaying it. I’ve been a little bit more like a 4-year-old having a temper tantrum, complete with foot stomping and fist pounding. It’s not been graceful.
But back to their first night: Their arrival was as smooth as 17 clowns piling out of a Volkswagen Beetle right in the middle of a meditation retreat. The cosmos was disrupted with much exclaiming and fawning. There was tearful hugging. And kissing and touching and stroking of hair and multiple expressions of how exciting it was to have So! Much! Time! Together!
There was a dog-butt-sniffing frenzy and then a small territorial battle. There were the noise-making toys brought cross-country for Ruby and the excited screaming over a much-anticipated Barbie Bus.
There was the kitchen takeover and general overcrowding of our little home, already overstuffed with Christmas paraphernalia. It was pandemonium. It was sensory overload. It was everything I’d imagined it would be, and I knew I couldn’t deal for another two months. I poured myself a cocktail and stretched a thin smile across my face.
During the coming weeks, my in-laws settled into a little house they rented in South Park and Sam and I set a few boundaries—he, of course, being more tactful about it than I. When my mother-in-law happily chirped that they’d booked the house for next year, it was through clenched teeth that I said I wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet.
My mother-in-law ignored that and went about her business. She and my father-in-law began to get familiar with what they now call “our ’hood.” They introduced themselves to shop owners and neighbors; if you live or work in the area, I’ll bet money you already know Tommy and Marsha from Wisconsin.
My mother-in-law signed up for knitting workshops. My father-in-law walked the beaches. He’s pushed well beyond his fear of Southern California freeway driving, and just the other day, I watched him top out at 70 mph—I didn’t know he could go over 50—while talking on his cell phone. I was so proud of him.
My sister-in-law does her thing, sometimes with us, sometimes without. But what matters is that they’re all making their own life here, and the presence of a routine has made together-time more wonderful than I’d expected.
And I’m not saying this because of their willingness to babysit, any time, for free! Dear Lord, Sweet Baby Jesus in the sky, the free babysitting is glorious! Just last Thursday, they picked Ruby up after school so I could go to the gym. When I got home, the dishes were done, the floors were swept, the laundry was folded and stacked and our windows were washed. I had to point out to my mother-in-law that she’d left a streak on one of the windows, to which she said, “Oh, fuck you!” God, how I love her.
My temper tantrum is over and this is my public apology for my private bad behavior. I have decided the good far outweighs the bad when it comes to living with only a 10-mile concrete jungle between my in-laws and me. I just can’t wait until they make it permanent.
(As published in San Diego CityBeat.)
Why Fight It?: How to grow old with flair and no apologies
“I’m not depending on fashion because what I do is very individual and this is mine and I enjoy it. That’s all. Nobody else has to like it as long as I look in the mirror and—Ah!— this is me, you know?“—Ilona Royce Smithkin, 90 years old
Without making an itemized list of my various physical and psychic ailments, I’d like to offer this thought on aging: It’s sucky. And just to get in the proper frame of mind for writing about how much I’m not enjoying it, I decided to employ the writer’s version of method acting and listen to some smooth jazz for a bit. That’s right. The words you’re reading have been strung together with country-club-foyer music as inspiration.
“Why smooth jazz?” you ask.
Because smooth jazz is like the McRib and Kathie Lee Gifford: It reminds me that there are things more dreadful and way less stylish than the inability to read a menu in dim light, standing-induced jolting knee pain and the eventual and permanent retiring of all high heels. Be still my heart.
Now, some things can be tackled. Like, when your daughter insists on repeatedly counting your forehead wrinkles, you can create bangs. Or when the Almond Roca and bourbon you consumed during the holidays permanently affix themselves to what was once your waistline, you can use an elastic hair band to button your pants (big shout-out to my once-pregnant friend for that tip).
But “That’s the Way of the World” by Earth, Wind and Fire re-mastered as a piano-and-trumpet convergence by someone named Kim Pensyl? That’s a travesty that can’t be fixed with a nylon zip tie. Becoming irrelevant is small potatoes compared with that, and it is this knowledge that keeps me positive in a fake-it-’til-you-make-it kind of way.
In my efforts to shrug off my disdain for aging and come to terms with the inevitable, I started searching the Internet for inspiration. Obviously, I’m not the first woman to go down this path, and there isn’t very much originality in dreading—or worse, complaining about—the aging process. I knew there was something out there that would stir my aspirations. I simply had to find it.
And find it I did. After suffering the usual plethora of mommy blogs (blech and double blech), I turned to my favorite fashion blogs, most of which are aimed at 20-somethings. But it was through these ladies and a complex labyrinth of links that I struck gold—or rather, Bakelite—when I stumbled across Advanced Style.
Hosted by Ari Seth Cohen, a young street photographer in New York City, Advanced Style is devoted almost entirely to the stylish older woman (though Cohen includes some very dapper men, from time-to-time).
And by “older” I mean “senior.” Cohen has a tab at the top of his home page called “I’m proud to be __ years old,” and all of the stylish women featured on that page proudly claim more than 80 years each. Not only that, but they also make being old look way more fun than any of this “prime of our lives” bullpuckey.
Cohen’s site is filled with wonderful photographs of vibrant, relevant women of very diverse and yet similarly concrete individuality. Most recently, he’s teamed up with a videographer named Lina Plioplyte of Teenage Peanut, to make videos of these women, shorts that are both inspirational and indescribably moving.
One of my favorite stylistas is the oft-featured and wildly bohemian 90-year-old Ilona, who has an insatiable thirst for color and no time to fret about age. She has short, bright-orange hair, the clippings of which she used to make a set of fabulously long false eyelashes that she’s worn like a trademark for 40 years.
“I’m in very good relationship with them, just like with my body. I talk to it. I say, ‘Now listen: I’m very nice to you, be nice to me,’” she says in her video.
We should all be so kind when we talk to our bodies.
Jean and Valerie of Idiosyncratic Fashionistas were recently launched to international fame after Cohen featured them on his site. During their interview, Jean extends an arm stacked with red and black Bakelite bracelets and squeezes—between fingers also adorned with Bakelite rings—Valerie’s homemade stress ball necklace. Their motto is “Growing old with verve.”
And then there’s Debra Rapoport, an expert thrifter with a pink streak splashed through her asymmetrical white hair. She takes us shopping in her video and tries on a black leather dress that zips down to there and up to here. She throws an orange boa over the top (“Nothin’ like an orange boa! You know how I love orange! Orange is neutral”) and the ensemble instantly underscores her magnetic personality. With all this, plus a body to die for, Rapoport is gorgeous, sexy, smart and wonderfully au courant. I want to be her when I grow up. Scratch that. I want to be her right now.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Advanced Style—The Best Website Ever Invented—is what you will not find: Women puffed up by collagen injections or boob jobs; women attempting to deny age; women wearing labels for status; women following rules (you should see the number of 60-somethings wearing skirts above the knee). You will not find Kathie Lee Gifford here. You will not find smooth jazz.
But, someday, if I’m lucky and if I stop my whining and really take to heart the message the ladies of Advanced Style are sending, you may find me.
(As published on January 19, 2011 in San Diego CityBeat.)
I quit, part two: Life before Facebook is better than I remembered it
I think it’s official: I’m a curmudgeonly old person. I listen almost exclusively to NPR. I recount, daily, how there were naps and no homework when I was in kindergarten. I sometimes drink coffee with my lunch. I can’t see well at night, and while I don’t have to put my teeth in a jar before going to bed, I’ve decided that Facebook is the Devil.
And so it was that without much pain at all, I found and hit the “deactivate” button on my account a couple of weeks ago. I was promptly bombarded with a well-executed, if ineffective, guilt trip: Rachel **** will miss you if you leave! Steve ***** will miss you if you leave! Joe ***** will miss you if you leave! And so on and so on.
I was unmoved: As it happens, I was going to be drinking beers that very night, live and in-person, with all the friends who were going to be missing me. At least they’d have the opportunity to pine for me face-to-face.
Less than one week after freeing myself of the cloying self-promotion, inane inner dialogue and regurgitated thoughts that define Facebook, I heard Mark Zuckerberg talking on NPR about his latest endeavor to take over the world. Of his new e-mail-ish method of communication, he said: “All your IMs, messages, e-mails, SMSs go into that, and you have one history, and you can kind of go through it forever, right? And that’s going to be really cool because five years from now, you’re going to just have this full, rich history of all of the communication that you have with each of your friends and the people around you.”
A “full, rich history of all of the communication that you have with each of your friends and the people around you”? “Really cool”? Oh my God, you guys. Humans are so doomed.
Who wants a transcription of their life?
Not me, thanks. The transcribed existence is not cool. What it is is thoroughly disturbing. And let’s face it: Zuckerberg, of all people, should know that the only folks interested in his version of a “full, rich history” are lawyers.
Here’s the thing: What makes life full and rich is not a public announcement of every headache, twitch, itch, crane, peacock or firefly pose successfully (or not successfully) accomplished. Namaste.
It is not the status update about your sit-ups, push-ups, break-ups, breakdowns, kisses, orgasms, orgies and subsequent afterglow (and tagged photo documentation of all of it).
It’s not the countless wasted hours of swirly-eyed reading about all these things done or not done by your friends or “friends” or boyfriends or exes or childhood playground playmates whom you haven’t seen in 30 years.
It’s not the quick, heartfelt posting of “Happy Birthday, You!” on the wall of a friend whose memory in your mind’s eye is, more often than not, way better than the reality of who they turned out to be, the poor schmuck.
It’s not the use of what Grant Barrett of A Way With Words calls “paralinguistic restitution”—those little clues also known as <3 and J and LOL—in an endless effort to convey that which would otherwise be conveyed through a conversation held by two people in the same physical space.
And a full, rich history is definitely not navigating the dangerous quagmire of drama that arises when the <3s and Js fail to fill in the blanks after a simple status update is woefully misinterpreted.
What it is—this “full, rich history”—is what you build with the people in your real life, with whom you spend real time, to whom you send real birthday cards and for whom you buy real cocktails. It’s what you have with people who know your phone number—if not by memory, then by contact list—and use it.
It’s what you have with a person you can (and want to) touch and hug and laugh to the point of tears with over some joke that isn’t going to be recorded for all eternity, and, believe me, that joke isn’t going to be half as funny five years from now, with a few emoticons tacked onto the end reminding you to LOL.
A full and rich history is what you build when you look a friend or a neighbor or a parent or a child in the eyes and connect and discover and truly understand the complexity of being human. What makes life full and rich is the exact opposite of Zuckerberg’s wonderfully, permanently, litigiously tracked “forever” interactions. The brilliance and glory in a full and rich life is, of course, the fleetingness of it all. The impermanence of now. It’s the knowledge that there is an end in store for all of us, even—though they would deny it—for those who live today in prostration for an eternal tomorrow, an endless string of sunny days to be spent at the Great Big Shopping Mall in the Sky.
>It’s all temporary, so you’d better get busy and smell the roses. Or, spend your time texting to your Facebook wall, “I’m at the zoo with the monkeys!” while the monkeys fling shit at your oblivious face, turned down as it is, focused on your smart phone.
This constant exposure and revealing and sharing and recording and general vomiting of every single second of our lives—an ongoing habit shared by 500 million of us with a now-insatiable need for constant validation— isn’t meaningful. It’s gross.
And that’s why I quit. Because I want to be less gross. So far, so good. But we can revisit this status update when my teeth begin to fall out.
(As published yesterday in San Diego CityBeat.)
Dedicated to the Katherine Sweetman’s of the world, who dare to leap, no matter the consequences
I Quit: Or, like so many, I wish I could
It was during the afternoon of the day I experienced my first-ever anxiety attack—while driving to work—that I sat, parked in front of my friend’s house, and took the About.com Should I Quit My Job quiz.
The chest pains, sweating and shallow breathing I’d experienced earlier that morning excluded, I was a bit of a wreck. I had a canker sore in my mouth and the beginnings of what has been a lingering cold, and I’d thrown my lower back out a few days earlier while sneezing. Not weight lifting. Not screwing. Sneezing.
Fuck 40, is all I can say about that.
I sniffled and winced and then wallowed in self-pity as the first question loaded on my iPhone: “Your job is making you ill, True or False?” Well, duh. I systematically answered all of the questions, about 20 of them give or take, and after hitting submit, the following result appeared:
“You have many problems with your job and you should consider quitting soon.”
It was in red text, as alarming and urgent as a test of the emergency broadcasting system on late-night television. It might as well have said, “Girlfriend, the call is coming from inside the house!” Even though making life decisions based on an Internet quiz is about as reasonable as basing them on the predictions of a Magic 8 Ball or the words of a charming palm reader near the Spanish Steps in Rome, I decided right then that I was going to quit my job, benefits and money be damned. I imagined tossing my beanie high into the air on my last day, strutting out the door to the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I cannot describe the weightlessness I felt at the decision. My husband was unquestionably supportive. “You can create something,” he said. “You’ll have to hustle, but I know you can do it.”
For an entire week, I was floating, soaring, buoyed—except for the searing back pain any time I bent to put on my underwear, a problem easily resolved by not wearing any. I became the Yes Girl at work, committing to anything and everything I was being asked to do in the coming year, since—ha ha!—I knew I wasn’t actually going to be there in the coming year.
I had a definitive date on which I would submit my resignation, and I would finally realize my dream doing something I love. Ours would be a household with two self-employed people, a terrifying leap, but a breathtakingly exciting one, too. And I knew such a decision would result in an improvement of my mental and physical health. I waited for my ailments to resolve.
But then: Blasted reality took hold in the form of an insurance broker. One conversation—complete with a patronizing lecture about the devil otherwise known as universal healthcare, and the assessment that, Oooh, basal cell carcinoma? Yeeeaaah, insurance companies will view you as Lingering Death’s first cousin—and suddenly I was slammed back to earth, my body hitting the pavement with a tremendous splat and bounce, brains and organs and limbs everywhere. It was ugly. Good thing I have health insurance and can see a doctor about fixing the mess.
The broker—who I’m pretty sure was busy stroking his little capitalist-happy wiener as we chatted—made it clear that the open market would not be amenable to me. It appeared that a COBRA plan costing nearly $1,700 a month would likely be my family’s cheapest insurance option. Insert a loud Chris Berman Whuuuuuut?!? right about now. That’s more than my mortgage.
I’m not the first American to go down this treacherous road; I know I was only exploring that which millions of work-hating drones, self-employed, under-employed and unemployed folks have explored before me. But that doesn’t make it any less infuriating. Having no outlet for the outrage really smarts, too.
The problem of obtaining adequate health coverage for my family as I faced the reinvention of myself was startling enough to give me sleepless nights, stomach aches, two more canker sores and an additional upper-back spasm that made right-side lane changes impossible. If you pass me on the road, you’ll notice I’m still going in circles to the left.
The choice can be summed up thusly: Stay in a miserable job that kills me slowly so I have access to affordable medical care to treat said dying. Or! Leave the job that kills me in lieu of doing meaningful work that brings me improved health and fulfillment and hope to hell no one in my family gets so much as a spider bite, because one serious health issue could ruin our credit, decimate our life savings and cause us to lose our home. In short, seeking happiness could cost me everything.
On the recommendation of About.com, and with the support of people who love me, I scootched right up to the edge of that cliff. I let my toes extend out over the edge, raised my arms akimbo and tilted my face to the sun as I leaned forward against a horizon-less abyss. Then I got a bad case of vertigo, chickened out and resigned myself to the only realistic, if depressing, option there is.
I’ve found ways to make my current job tolerable and am staying put for the time being. I’m not giving up on that other possibility, but it will have to come with more preparation and in a less dramatic, Steven Slater-y sort of way. The silver lining is that I can afford to have the deep tissue massages that are—hopefully—going to resolve the seizing of my back. I hope to be wearing underwear again very soon.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Not in my house: Don’t plan to come over here and watch commercial-free TV
It’s quite possible that my household is the last one on the planet without a DVR. I keep lobbying for one, but my pleas are met, every time, with counter arguments superior to my much weaker begging points.
I made my most recent pitch the day after fumbling for the remote during a commercial break on Monday Night Football. I had been less than graceful in my attempt to protect the delicate eyes of our 5-year-old from seeing the gun-and-bomb violence advertised during what Palin-fawning Americans insist is a family pastime. Never mind that she’s watching football, the contemporary version of gladiators. As far as I’m concerned, a knee bent in reverse might as well be a pastie-clad nipple compared with those military-recruitment ads or spots for certain video games.
“We’re not getting a DVR,” Sam said to me when I mentioned I was going to call about getting one. “We don’t need it. We don’t even watch any shows besides Mad Men, and there are only two episodes is only one episode left in the season.”
“But—the insufferable Meg Whitman ads! You know you hate her hair!” I countered, mouth agape. He wasn’t moved.
“Election season is almost over. And a DVR just means I’d have another piece of electronic equipment to figure out and manage and program. And I’d have to listen to you bitch about how it’s ‘broken’ when I accidentally erase a show you weren’t ready for me to erase.” I shut my mouth as he continued. “And then I’ll have to call Cox when it goes wonky—because it will go wonky. You know our track record with electronics.”
He had me on this point. And then he added: “It’s not a big deal. I’ll just skip Monday Night Football from now on.”
If you felt a violent jolt last Tuesday evening shortly after dinnertime, that’s because the entire universe came to an abrupt halt as that last sentence was uttered. Apparently, my man is so staunchly in the anti- DVR camp that he’s willing to give up Monday. Night. Football.
I stood before him, arms crossed, one hip thrust forward and one eyebrow raised in my hard-earned Hope Brady impersonation (she’s still on Days of Our Lives).
And then I threw in my best oh-no-you-di’unt neck-wobble when I challenged him: “Even when The Pack are playing?” I had to resist the urge to tap my foot.
He stared at me. I stared at him. There was a little twitch near his left temple. A tumbleweed blew by and it was nothing but crickets up in our house until Ruby broke the tension with the cutest little fart ever. “Excuuuuse meeee,” she said, giggling. With this diversion, I felt the debate shift in my favor. I was getting closer to that DVR by the second.
After a little pre-battle mantra chant on Thursday morning, I dialed Cox Communications—from memory. Like 363-TILT, the phone number of the first boy I ever kissed while sitting on a blue swing at Reservoir Park, 262- 1181 is with me forever. Only, unlike Mike Allen, Cox isn’t cute in that pre-pubescent, disproportionate-facial-features kind of way. And while Mike Allen’s braces didn’t lock with mine as I had worried they might, I am inextricably bound to my cable company.
You see, Sam isn’t the only one who has Cox on speed-dial. I call regularly to find out why our OnDemand isn’t loading or why our modem isn’t working or why our cable bill is escalating. Each time I’m forced to call, I have visions of being on the evening news as the woman who went postal on the cable tech. It’s a good thing they’re usually based out of places like Iowa and Delaware. A flight to their offices would really diffuse the impetus to kill.
The automated lady picked up the phone and chirped directions at me. “I see you’re calling from 619….” Yeah, yeah. I entered all the digits necessary to get to the main menu, and then I pressed zero to speak to a representative. Because that’s what I wanted to do: speak to a human being. But did it get me a human being? No. Communication breakdown: “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand you. Please enter 1 for…” I felt my blood pressure rising.
Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.
I pressed zero again—and was looped around again. After the third time at this little game, I held the receiver in front of my face and yelled at the automated lady, “What part of ‘press zero to speak to a representative’ do you not understand?!?” In customer-service training manuals, this particular customer reaction is commonly known as the Belfer Method. It is completely ineffective.
I hung up and called back, starting the whole process again, only to have the automated lady say, “Due to the high volume of calls, your wait time is 11 minutes. Would you like to have someone call you back?” Why, yes, automated lady, yes I would. I selected this option by pressing the key I was told to press. I held it down extra long just so they would understand my request, and then I hung up. More than 11 minutes later, my phone rang. And, wouldn’t you know? It was the automated lady: “Please wait for the next available operator.”
Nam-Myoho-fuck-this-shit!
After another few very long minutes, a human lady came to the phone. But by that time, I’d exchanged my silly mantra for vengeance. I was so pissed that I’d have been more likely to vote for Meg What’s-With-Her- Yoda-Hair Whitman than give Cox a penny toward one of their stupid DVRs.
“We don’t even watch television anyway,” I told the human lady. “It’s just another piece of equipment that won’t work properly,” I said. “So, you can just keep your crummy DVR.”
And we’ll see just how many Mondays go by before the discussion begins again.
(As published—mostly—on Oct. 13th in San Diego CityBeat.)
When worlds collide: The incompatibility of stoners and control freaks
Confession: I am not a stoner. I’ve smoked weed in my life, a lot of it by some standards, I suppose. And while I think it should be legalized—along with prostitution, gay marriage and the right to vandalize Glenn Beck’s cars— it is not my drug of choice. Pinballing my way through life is about as comfortable to me as clocking in for a corporate job might be for Tommy Chong.
I like to be on time. I like to know where my keys are. I like to remember my appointments. I don’t like to get to a party only to realize yesterday’s underwear is balled up against my thigh in the right pants’ leg. And I definitely don’t like to meander when I have some place to be.
Last Thursday, I had a concert ticket, and since my husband was out of town, I’d booked a sitter. Ruby and I were eating dinner, and as the clock ticked past the sitter’s arrival time, Ruby said, “Mama, I don’t think Mimi’s coming.” I had the same feeling and sent her a text, to which she didn’t respond. She didn’t answer her phone when I called her a few minutes later. Even though she’d confirmed this gig three hours earlier in a message on my landline, I knew she wasn’t coming: She’s a stoner.
I quickly phoned every sitter on my roster until I found a backup, who arrived exactly when she said she would, 45 minutes later. This girl is not a stoner. Though grateful, I was already stressed when my friend Stacy arrived to pick me up.
“It’s a party: I brought the minivan!” Stacy was slowly scooping school projects and clothes and half-filled water bottles from the front seat and tossing them into the back. We were supposed to be having drinks with some other friends at that very moment, but Stacy was running late. I could feel my stress level building but was trying to hit the reset button. Being a few minutes late wasn’t going to kill me.
“We’ve got to pick up Jenny and make one other stop,” she said. “Tell Gayle we’ll be there in 30 minutes.” I took a deep breath, hit “send” on the message and climbed into the car, trying to be cool, to roll with it, to shrug off the frantic, running-late angst that plagues me.
“So, we’re going to grab Jenny—oh, shit! I need to get gas!” Stacy realized. “But that will only take five min—oh, shit! I left my ticket back at my house.” I began to feel the need to breathe into a brown paper bag. She was driving like a nana in her minivan, and I imagined reaching my left foot across the console and stomping down on the gas pedal, her foot pinned beneath mine.
“And after we get Jenny—who you are going to love, by the way—we need to make a quick stop at the dispensary for a couple joints.”
Oh, Jesus Christ, you’ve got to be kidding me! Really? A dispensary? We’re grown women. Couldn’t you have taken care of this earlier?
I bit my tongue all the way to Jenny’s house, which was lovely. I got a partial tour—met the husband, two kids, two dogs and a cat, wasn’t feeling nervous at all about the time, no siree!—and then we loaded back into the minivan. Jenny, a sexy, free-spirited blonde with her peasant shirt, sand-papery voice and nowhere to be, passed around her to-go mojito while recounting a wild story about being punched in the face at a Brad Paisley concert she was recently bribed into seeing. I checked my time machine to make sure it wasn’t set to 1985, made sure my seatbelt was fastened and pondered whether the fist of a redneck or the headliner was more horrific.
We motored on down the road well under the speed limit—which was probably good considering the open container—got gas and drove aimlessly for a few blocks looking for the dispensary. It was high school all over again, and it was dreadful.
“Oh, shit! I think I passed it,” Stacy said.
The words “oh” and “shit” were beginning to have a Pavlovian effect on me. Two very big and very slow U-turns later, there we were, three utterly conspicuous (and relatively hot, if I do say so) moms in a minivan the color of obligation, sharing a cocktail while parked in front of a marijuana dispensary.
Which was closed.
“It’s supposed to be open ’til 9!” Stacy was genuinely perplexed that stoners didn’t honor their stated business hours.
“Call the number—maybe they’re not really closed and it just looks closed.” Jenny began to recite the phone number. Stacy dialed, then shifted her body toward me and offered what currently occupies the top spot on my Best Quote of the Year list.
“Aaryn, quick: Google ‘marijuana dispensaries, 92115.’” Dear reader: These women? They are stoners! Stone. Ers. They are Spicoli. They are Cheech and Chong. They are Edina and Patsy! Which is cool if you’re them, but unbelievably, infuriatingly un-cool if you’re not. To be honest, I wanted to punch both of them in the face.
Instead, I put the kibosh on a subsequent dispensary hunt, grabbed my phone and fired off a text to Gayle.
“these guys r going back to jennys for weed. we’re going to be thirty minutes.”
At this point, I couldn’t see clearly through the rage in my eyes. There was some discussion about rolling papers. My flaky sitter called, apologizing profusely. And I ended up waiting in a line for will call, brooding and stewing in my own anger, while the girls had a blast working on what surely had to have been one of the best white buffaloes ever created. Bitches.
I like these women, I do. But I’m too square for such antics. Next time, I’m taking my own car.
(As published on September 30 in San Diego CityBeat.)
Bye-bye, little one: An argument in favor of the kindergartener
It’s official. Last Tuesday—after I helped thread her arms through the stiff straps of a backpack covered in more pink and white butterflies than were flitting around in my stomach—I walked my daughter one block down the street for her first day of kindergarten and, in doing so, became a cog in the busted-up, broke-down, rusted-out, caving-in jalopy known as the San Diego Unified School District. But this column isn’t about SDUSD, a bottomless well of editorial fodder; there will be plenty of time for my commentary on that hot mess over the next 13 years.
No, this is about Holy shit! I’m not the parent of a toddler anymore!
You know the first thing I did after leaving La Princesse at class that morning was to b-line for a cocktail. I wanted to bring a flask in my purse and take a nice, big draw from it just as I stepped off school property, but I really have made an effort to leave high school behind me. It would be a bummer to get blacklisted from my kid’s new school for drinking on campus. On Day One. I’d rather earn my banishment with some caustic columns.
Of course, I was a little misty as I watched my child’s giant backpack walk away from me toward her new classroom, the whole of her eclipsed except for two long, skinny legs in laceless, pink-sequined Chuck Taylors and a perfectly round Afro-puff topping it all off. It was downright cartoony, and I hummed “School House Rock” on my way to meet my Maker’s Mark, thinking of how far I’d come.
Oh, the memories: There was the time Ruby smeared poop on my face. And the incessant late-night wailing that forced Sam and me into garage exile for the better part of a year. Or the meltdown at the pumpkin patch— man, that was an illusion killer. In an act of self-preservation, I pretended I didn’t know her and just let her sob and leak snot on herself in the dirt amid hay bales and ponies, while all the other families sipped cider and took photos for their scrapbooks and happily picked out their gourds and corncobs and whatnot.
Those miserable days have receded sufficiently and are now humorous anecdotes I offer in conversations with new parents to explicitly convey that they are not alone, and to subliminally convey the fact that they are completely fucked. To this day, whenever I see disheveled parents maneuvering diaper bags and strollers and Snack Traps while hunched over trying to prevent their new crawler from tumbling head first into a menacing pile of fire ants, my first thought is always: Better them than me.
Babies might smell good, but let’s be honest: They mostly suck.
Having a 5-year-old is much more palatable. For one thing, they don’t pee and poop in their pants anymore. That’s a big bonus. Sure, there’s the occasional oops-I-waited-too-long leak that they neglect to mention and which you only find out about when you pick up their inside-out heap of clothes they left on the bathroom floor. FYI: Unexpectedly wet kiddie undies evoke the same kind of reaction as walking into an unseen spider web.
And as long as I’m talking bodily functions, being summoned to the bathroom to verify that, Yes, honey, you’re right. That is diarrhea, is only better than a diaper trauma by a number of degrees. But it is, unarguably, better.
Another plus is communication. When a baby doesn’t care for her food, she spits it out like an oscillating lawn sprinkler, and suddenly you’re washing walls while contemplating taking lovers, Seasonale and a secret apartment in Crown Point (a small dream, yes, but it makes visitation easier than an apartment in Positano). By contrast, a 5-year-old will keep the grilled onion on her protruding tongue, contort her face like Popeye and flail her hands in the air next to her head until you remove the offending bit with your napkin. After a long sip of water from her glass (no more sippie cups!), she’ll look directly at you and say, “What the hell, Mama? I said ‘No onions!’”
Getting dressed is so much more pleasant with a 5-year-old around: Not only can she dress herself, but she can also create ensembles. She has a will and is going to exert it. Giving in to her proclivity for pairing autumn-hued plaids with pastel stripes and primary polka dots, often layered and topped with a pink gingham belt and/or a tulle skirt, beats the hell out of onesies and baby-jeans with those maddeningly miniscule crotch snaps.
I stay out of the fashion choices in my home now and only venture into jacket-battle on truly cold days. And I do insist on underwear beneath skirts if we’re going to be leaving the house. I’m a stickler on that point. You never know when you might be exiting a limousine to the flashing bulbs of paparazzi. You never know when you might suffer that accidental leak.
The best thing, though, about a kindergartener, is that they can make you proud in deeply meaningful ways that can’t be dismissed as gas (a first smile is still charming) or natural progression (first words, first steps, first haircuts, first skull-shaped self-inking stamp pressed repeatedly along every wall in the house at a 36-inch height). A toddler is the drunken friend whom you must prevent from dying; a 5-year-old is the pragmatic one who hears “No” and offers 17 plausible ways the answer should be “Yes.”
“What do you call the person that’s in charge of the school?” Ruby asked her dad during curriculum night while she and three of her new friends were pretending to play classroom. The role of “teacher” had been delegated and Ruby was unsatisfied as “pupil.”
“You mean the principal?” Sam asked. “Yeah,” Ruby said. She skipped back to where her friends were playing. “OK,” she said to them, “I’m the principal.”
Au revoir to those bruising toddler years. And bottoms up to the brutality ahead.
(As published today in San Diego Citybeat.)