I'm So Busy (I'm Such a Martyr!)

Here's how I feel this week:We all get like this, and we act like it's a virtue.I was so busy yesterday I left a pan on over a full flame while I went upstairs to start the bath.David was there and got to the pan before it charred the onions entirely but he couldn’t be two places at once so when I tore back down to the kitchen to see about the pan I left the bathtub running and..Well not really but almost ....Then he caught me this morning peeling out of the driveway, over a little too far to the right so the pine boughs came right INTO the passenger-side window and tried to comb my hair again for me .I was 30 feet away by the time I saw that Old Dave had seen me. He just held out both arms, palms up, as if to say "Whaaat?"I answered with the same gesture only in my case it meant "Search me! I don't know what I'm doing!"I wrote a book once called Vacationing in My Driveway about how all the best fun in life comes when you slow down enough to notice what’s actually going on around you.I took the picture for the cover. This is it:This is our driveway. This is my car, or the green version of it which was mine until I worn it down to a rusted nub and got the red versions that I have now.I think it’s time to take some of my own advice here, or I won’t be pedaling happily away too much longer. Oy!

Clean Your Mind

  If you could clean out your mind the way you clean out your house what amazing amounts of room you would have - to learn physics, say, or Italian. I would love to learn Italian! Even hearing the music of it you can’t believe the people speaking it are just answering basic questions like, “What time does the train come?” In with phrases like “Buongiorno!” and “Dopo di lei” I say! Out with that memorized list of English prepositions that got stapled into my brain by my Seventh Grade teacher with her thin cloud of dark hair hovering like a mist over her pale shiny scalp.She was our English teacher but she doubled as the headmaster’s secretary and I can’t help but think she must have found that second role difficult, since the man saw himself as the sole person competent enough to save the nation.I know he WANTED to educate us -- I  had him for Latin my last year at the school -- but I also know he wanted to punish us.He would single us out and make us stand trembling beside our desks one by one while he hammered us with unanswerable questions about politics.“What did the American voter THINK, electing that fool Roosevelt who saddled us with this crippling national debt?”We didn't know. We were 12 years old! And it was the 1960s, not the 1930s!He ranted anyway.Worse yet, he believed in corporal punishment and how sick we all felt seeing the male teachers swing back their special wooden paddles and bring them down hard across our classmates' tender fingertips.The teachers used only their paddles, but that headmaster favored the rod, which he kept stored in a special solution to keep it supple. He used it mostly on boys whose families were poor and unlikely to question him. I noted even then that he never dared cane Dr. Black’s son, or the son of Attorney Smith.But let me turn away now from that dark past and focus on the good and real teachers, now, at the school year’s start.The good and real teachers never abuse their power. They are firm but they are kind.They are strict about keeping order, but they do so in a gentle and measured fashion.Nobody gets targeted in a real teacher’s classroom. Nobody gets shamed. The good and real teacher will also tell you the truth about yourself when you need to hear it.I think of the time my high school French teacher told the whole class it looked like Mademoiselle Sheehy was “growing a little BIG for her breeches.”I was the show-off-y Mademoiselle Sheehy, and I knew she spoke the truth.The lady never raised her voice; never brought her personal demons into the classroom.I remember her dictating vocabulary quizzes to us that one autumn and noticing how her gaze would lift away from us and drift out the window as we scribbled our answers. She had just lost her life’s companion to an early death but that occasional faraway look was the only sign we ever had of her heartache.I can still see her now, small and compact. She stood for the whole class and spoke every word of t.e lesson in French until even the slowest of us got so we could think in that language.All this was years ago but it is as if that teacher is with me still, correcting and encouraging me. This is what good and real teachers do. Lucky children who sit now before the ones like those!  

My Haunted Ride

Well I found the bag with my lost items and a good thing too, since the spare car key old Dave loaned to me was bewitched.It has that touch pad on it, you know the one, that you use to make the back hatch pop up or the sliding doors open.(This my car by the way, a 2005 Town and Country.)Well none of those functions work with Old Dave's key. His key to my car behaves so badly he has to bury it in the back yard so it will cease communicating with the vehicle. (OK, not really. Really it’s in his the bottom of his sock drawer, which is practically the same thing.)With his key, when you’re done driving it, you turn off the engine, press ‘Lock’ on the little keypad that’s right on the key and walk away, secure in the knowledge that your vehicle is protected. Not with Dave’s key. With Dave’s key you lock up and within 20 seconds people are yelling that one of your sliding doors is.“Hey, you left your DOOR open!” they call as if you’re the stupidest person in the world, but that’s only if you’re lucky.If you’re not lucky, as I learned yesterday, you come back from 45 minutes in the grocery store and only THEN find that the car door is open and a family of raccoons has moved in and begun preparing dinner.So the first thing I did yesterday was go the dealership to see about making a new key to replace my old key.“That’ll cost ya $225,” the woman in Service told me.“I can’t pay that! I said and went on to explain the problem with Dave’s key. “Can’t you just do something to make it stop talking to my doors this way?”“Gosh, I don’t know. Let’s move you over to Parts.”So over I went to Parts, where I explained my problem to the equally nice person manning that desk.He listened as I gestured to my car, visible through the plate-glass window, just 50 feet away.He tested its battery which was fine, and laid it on the counter to consider the problem.Then “Hey! I didn’t even touch the key and look!” he cried, gesturing outside. “Your left rear door slid open!”“What I’m sayin’!”So he has ordered a new key with no smart functions at all that will cost me less than 50 bucks.Of course Old Dave is trying to call this a waste of money. “The key is fine,” he said if you can call a key fine that has to be buried at all times to make it stop poltergeisting all over the place.Anyway I go back to the dealership today and pick up my new, UN-smart key – which I’m thinking I will keep ON MY PERSON at all times - maybe inside my bra even, which is where I keep my Bluetooth – so that I never again find myself locked out as I was on Wednesday.Still, all’s well that ends well and I am happier than I can say that my missing bag was found.I went back to the mall in person again yesterday and walked from office to office asking after that lost RadioShack bag. “Sorry” they said at Macy’s Lost and Found. “No, Sorry” at the Mall Office. “Sorry!” at the Customer Service counter at the mouth of the Lord and Taylor walkway.Then, I went back to EBar, the fancy-coffee place just outside Nordstrom’s. I had bought a coffee there Wednesday and that’s the first place I went in retracing my steps that day, but they hadn’t seen my bag either.This time though on my second day of scouring I approached the barista.“Nobody turned in a RadioShack bag to you, did they?”“The other day?”  she said.“Yes,” I said with a quickening heartbeat. ‘She walked ten feet down the counter and bent over to reach into a shelf.“Here ya go!” she said. “Somebody brought it in at the end of the day.”So it wasn’t stolen at all but only lost.I love it when things are only lost because I believe all lost things come back to us in the end.  When I was two I lost my favorite ball toy and mentioned it aloud it in my prayers every night along, with the little stray cat we called Stranger who was with us for only about a week. God please find… “ I prayed.Those two things aren’t back yet but hey: I’m still in the early innings here, right?

the lost bag and keys, found at last

the lost bag and keys, found at last

Back in Harness

The first day of school hereabouts and rainy too. My ever-bubbly neighbor called merrily back to her household upon walking out her door at just now.Meaning JUST now, at 5:25 in the morning. “Good bye Good bye! Have a great day!”  etc.That’s what woke me.It also woke Old Dave, who since 2:00 am had been in the living room on his insomnia couch where he very nicely goes so as not to disturb me by switching on the light. He gets under his special insomnia blanket and starts in reading the Wall Street Journal’s tiniest-printing pages and before he knows it he’s dozed off again.It’s better than Sominex! he says, showing how sweetly out-of-date he is, talking Sominex when fully one-third of the American population is mainlining Ambien and having somnambulistic adventures that would make your hair curl if you thought about it at all . (ASLEEP WHILE DRIVING? This person in the oncoming car is actually sleeping?!)So this nice neighbor’s voice woke him as I was saying and woke me too.HE sank into the bed, sighing comfily and went back to sleep for another two-and-a-half hoursI couldn’t do that.Not on the first day of school.Never mind that my kids are out of school themselves.Never mind that I haven’t been a teacher for many years.Three years ago my brother-in-law, then a school principal, asked me if I wouldn’t like  to be a permanent substitute just from April vacation until the end of the school year on June 20^th."'JUST' that long? You mean of course every day I suppose?""Yes every day.""You mean ALL Day every day?""Well yes all day every day."I have gone in to many a classroom since I became a writer to give little talks and workshops but I have not since Jimmy Carter was in the White House spent more than a day max. I’m an ‘act’, a guest speaker, a one-hit wonder.Spend the whole day in front of the kids, hour after hour, class after class, selling joy, and the fun of learning, and the satisfaction of mastery over a subject?The thought that I could do that now from the midst of this dabbling and dilletantish current life made me blood pressure soar.It’s not a job for the faint of heart. It’s a job for the pros, the heroes, the athletes, in other words the teachers who,  in my town anyway, start all over again today. And I know one thing: THEY sure won't need Sominex tonight or anything like it either.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0_pOLHghkY]

Clean and Empty

Well, the summer houseguests are gone,and now I’m cleaning and putting the rooms to rights, vacuuming up the hundreds of spider webs that I just KNOW weren’t here two weeks ago (A spider web from the mirror on my bureaus to the curtains on my window!  A spider web WITH A SPIDER, not five feet from the bed, where I have been sleeping all week...alone....with David a thousand miles away bringing the wonders of foam to a grateful nation.The vacuuming part is actually sort of fun. It reminds me of going to Confession in the hard old days when you had such terror about having to report every bad intention never mind every bad act; but afterwards - ah! - You felt so clean! Shriven was the word they used. This house is shriven!The sleeping-alone part seemed like it might be fun for a change but it hasn't been.Oh at first it was cool knowing I had the bed to myself and piling all kinds of things in there with me but after that...  I don't know.Last night I tossed and turned.I miss the old ball and chain and when he gets off that plane at 4pm today I can tell you I will be HAPPY to see him, that wiper-down of counters  and picker-up of sticks outside, that meticulous householder. I suppose he'll notice right away that I ran over a giant bottle of Nivea with my car. It exploded with a loud crack when it went under the wheels and sprayed its special Super Enriching formula in a 30-foot delta across the driveway.Yeah. He'll notice that. He is  one vigilant guy. Here is a picture of him now, keeping watch over our littlest one's supper that time we took all the kids to Disney World. (Or, come to study it more, he might just be eyeing everyone’s leftovers.)I hope he even gets here early. I think I'm growing a little odd without him. Can you say Grey Gardens? :-)There was something cool about old Edith Beale but ice cream in bed taken straight from the cartoon is generally a bad idea. :-)

Richard Nixon in a Wig

My cousin thought that was a picture of my wet bottom on the plane – see here – but that could never be me, and not only because it’s practically impossible to take a picture of your own backside.It couldn’t be my bottom because I would never wear shorts on a plane.Why not? Because I’m older than faxing, that’s why.I may even be older than office photocopying. Wait let me check.... YUP. WAY older than office photocopying!And when you’re old in this way you wouldn't dream of wearing shorts when you fly. Instead you sort of dress up, a little, even today.In the old days when a lady flew, she wore not just a skirt and heels but often a hat – a hat! And little white gloves, natch.I just came across a few photos of me in my senior year of high school on a trip my family and I took to Our Nation’s Capital, which is what we called it back then.I’m wearing the get-up I flew down in – well minus the hat because now we were touring around, in our high heels and our skirts and it was like 90 degrees although it was only April.My mom had on this shawl-collared coat in fake cashmere. My sister Nan looked like Grace Kelly. And I looked like Richard Nixon if he dressed up as a woman.Also a little like Imogene Coca. Remember her?The point is we made this big effort and we made it because that was the expectation placed upon women: that we’d smile, and be charming and stoke male egos in all places and at all times. I remember weakling down a street when I was just 17, homesick, far from my family, getting plumper by the minute on the Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding Dinners the college kept serving us, accompanied by buttery homemade rolls and followed by puddings and thick chocolate cakes. I was dawdling along the street minding my business when a guy around 35 passed and said to me in this really nasty voice, “SMILE for God’s sake!"It was the "click" moment for me all right, when the personal became the political, just like our Gloria described 40 years ago.God bless Gloria! God Bless the Women's Movement I say! And, sisters, if someone asks if you're a feminist you just tell them, "You can bet the farm on it BABE! "

Your Friends All Think You're Crazy

Speaking of how others see you, the low point of your relationship with your significant other has to be when he or she tells you that your friends all think you’re crazy.  (And here's a pretty crazy person right here so thrilled at the idea of being away from her work station that she's blinded by smiling!)  My sister Nan's onetime spouse said this very thing to her once and it immediately shot to the top of the list we keep of the all-time worst things one person can say to another person.But now I look at yesterday’s post about all I carry onto a plane and am compelled to wonder about my own sanity as a person who will only travel with her own food. Who must personally concoct all her own beverages. Who would not in ten million years eat the fruit from the salad bar.Does this mean I have trust issue then?( "What in OUR house?!" as Lady Macbeth says when it's discovered that the poor old king has been murdered even though she was the one who goaded Mac into killing the guy.)Could be, could be. That would certainly explain why I'm so uneasy as a passenger that I keep my foot jammed down on an imaginary brake. I do trust Old Dave behind the wheel which is surprising since the guy tailgates like you wouldn’t believe. And yet t he’s never had a mishap on the road, never gotten so much as a speeding ticket, galling fact, but there it is. He says he thinks it’s safer to ride close to the people in front of you somebody else doesn’t cut in and themselves cause an accident.I guess you can rationalize just about anything if you try hard enough. Doesn’t the White Queen tell little Alice that she has sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast?Maybe the main impossible thing I myself believe before breakfast is that I'm sunnily normal.But come on. Is anyone normal really? I mean why else did God put Lady Gaga here on earth to spread her Born This Way message?I could treat you to a dozen examples of the odd things I do but hey. I bet we all have a list of oddball secret things we do. You know there are people out there who save their toenail parings in  ajar. You know there are people saving their bellybutton lint in case they want to spin it  into wool some day and knit up a bunch of tiny sweaters.What’s fun is noticing the oddball things in yourself.Tell you one thing: it sure helps you keep from judging others.See this grand lady below with her nose in the air?I can get behind the sitting with your drink and gazing around part but where’s the fun in judging what you hear people saying? I’m usually too busy smiling and shaking my head at the varieties we humans come in. That and guarding against any cut up fruit the bartender may try sticking in my drink.

How We Look to Others

The late Caroline Knapp wrote once that all her adult life she knew she seemed very ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside but in fact was ‘roiling and chaotic' underneath, and boy did that ever strike a chord for me because I am told I seem pretty ‘smooth and ordered’  too.Once, when I brought a teen to look at a boarding school to which he was hoping to win a scholarship, the young woman who interviewed him asked to speak to me separately afterward. We chatted about things generally and about this young man too, and at the end she said, “I just feel as if I could talk to you all day! You’re so CALM!”She evidently couldn’t hear the yips and barks and funhouse shrieks going on inside me.You just don’t know what the inner reality of another person is; that’s why you can never judge.Another interpretation of myself that I've sometimes been treated to involves the fact that I tend to walk around with a smile on my face.“You’re always smiling at people! Why are you always SMILING?" near strangers have said to me in random settings.Out of the blue like that. Not during any kind of conservation. Just in this pointed, halfway-nasty way as if what they were really saying was, “How about I punch you in the face right now?”I've also noticed over the years that people who know you only a little often don’t like you that much, especially if you seem happy. It’s as if they think you stole their portion of happiness; that they could be a whole lot happier if YOU weren’t so darn happy.When I was as a high school teacher, students who knew me only from seeing me in the corridors sometimes disliked me.  I know because they would tell me as much, after they had become my students. But by then they were in my class, and wrapped in that warm blanket of niceness, the one that all teachers are meant to wrap their pupils in, and their dark assessments had melted away.Here's one thing I know to be true: If I find someone hard to like,  it's almost always because there's something about them I'm not quite ‘getting’ yet. I just need to pay closer attention and try to know them better.As to the always-smiling-at-people part, I smile that way because the aunt who raised me smiled that way -  throughout a life that was far from easy. I used to love walking down the street just behind her, to see the effect she had on the people in her path. By the time she had passed them, they were smiling too.So you can roil all you want on the inside or be baffled or gibbering like a chimp and nobody will necessarily know it. That’s one more nice thing the sainted Fred Rogers told his television audience of little ones: Other people really CAN’T read your thoughts and thank Heaven for that!

How We SEEM

The late Caroline Knapp wrote in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story that all her adult life she SEEMED very ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside but in fact was ‘roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath.”Only 'not noticeably, never noticeably' she then added and these words struck me as so apt and oddly…. familiar they got me wondering how many others have felt just this way, maybe not the secretive part but the roiling-and-chaotic-on the-inside part.I know I myself seem pretty ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside. Once, when I brought a young person to look at a boarding school to which he was hoping to win a scholarship, the woman who interviewed him asked to speak to me separately afterward. We chatted about things generally and about this remarkable young man as well, and at the end she said, “I just feel as if I could talk to you all day! You’re so CALM!”She evidently couldn’t hear the yips and barks and funhouse shrieks going on inside me.You just don’t know what the inner reality of another person is; that’s why you can never judge.A second, related interpretation of myself that I have been treated to involves the fact that I tend to walk around with a smile on my face.“You’re always smiling at people! Why are you always smiling?" near strangers have said to me in random settings. Just out of the blue like that.  Not during any kind of conservation. Just in this pointed, halfway-nasty way as if what they were REALLY saying was, “How about I punch you in the face right now?”Why do people come at each other this way? Are we hard-wired to harbor mistrust and judgment? Or is it that life here in Wild West America has brought out these qualities in us?I've also noticed over the years that people who know you only a little often don’t like you that much, especially if you seem happy. It’s as if they think you stole their portion of happiness; that they could be a whole lot happier if  only YOU weren’t hoggin' all the happiness for yourself.When I was as a high school teacher, students who knew me only from seeing me in the corridors sometimes disliked me.  I know because they would tell me as much, after they had become my students.But by then they were in my class, and wrapped in that warm blanket of niceness that all teachers are meant to wrap their pupils in, and their dark assessments had melted away.I've finally figured out one thing by now: If I find a person hard to like it is always, always because there is something about them that I am not quite understanding yet. I know I will feel differently if I can just get to know them better.As to the always-smiling-at-people part, I smile that way because my Aunt Grace smiled that way throughout a life that was far from easy.I used to love walking down the street behind her, to see the effect she had on the people in her path.  Invariably, by the time she had passed them, they were smiling too.So you can roil all you want on the inside or be baffled or gibbering like a chimp and nobody will necessarily know it. That’s one more nice thing the sainted Fred Rogers told his television audience of little ones: Other people really CAN’T read your thoughts and thank God for that, because as I write this I’m three hours late for breakfast and all I can think is “bacon-bacon-bacon” and “coffee-coffee-coffee.”

News from the Airport

1.)    The good news from the airport is, if you were born before 1937 you no longer have to take off your shoes and light coat! Victory for the over-75s!2.)    The bad news is, you can’t carry your snow-globes home in your suitcase anymore.  "Tough luck, people" the sign all but reads. Pack ‘em in your checked luggage and take your chances like the rest of us.. And speaking of taking your chances, I almost packed my tube of sunless bronzing agent but then pictured what would happen if a gorilla sat on the suitcase and the stuff glooped out and gave all my whites a healthy tan? Just the other day my friend told me about his suitcase: it arrived at the destination city laid open as if by the Jaws of Life with the suit he was going to wear to the family wedding hacked to pieces. It was like someone took a machete to it he said.Also: The news from the airport that isn’t new is:a.)    They’re still taking people’s pictures in that screening both that shows your soft little clam-body all naked and defenseless, though I must say I don't see why people get so upset about this gizmo. I figure it’s just some poor soul behind a screen 100 or 200 feet away stifling a yawn as he looks at us all, or anyway the ones chosen for the screening, all in that same boring pose, legs spread apart, hands clasped above our heads like so many out-of-shape prize-fightersAND....b.)    The line at Starbucks is endless. Hurry past any airport Starbucks at 6am, 2pm 11pm and you'll see two dozen people lined up for that pricey fix. Sometimes even Santa needs some java. I saw him just yesterday trying to sneak this  snow globe past Security.No dice.But lucky for him he was born before 1937 so at least didn't have to step out of that marvelous outfit.  I'm counting the days til 75 myself.  Having to take off that underwire bra and put it in the bin is really gettin' kind of OLD for me. :-)

Fashions in Dieting

This new health-consciousness, I don’t know. In the old days, you didn’t really know what your body did with what you ate. You thought it rude to inquire, almost. In the old days, if you dropped food on the floor, you’d kiss it up to God and pop it in your mouth anyway.“You eat a peck of dirt before you die,” my ancient great aunt used to quote from her own childhood, and her faith reassured us:  She was born in the 1860s and lived on past the age of Sputnik.Today there’s no trust of this sort. You simply can’t buy a packaged food item without seeing that list of ingredients on its side. And as for produce, every single apple bears a sticker nowadays; every banana in the bunch.And food habits in the old days were a different thing.Say you had a big morning ahead of you.“Eat a good breakfast!” your folks would boom, and then they’d come at you: with stacks of toast slathered in jelly, pancakes drooling in butter, and eggs fried in the fat that they’d cooked the bacon in.In my house, the grownups also gnawed the knuckles of the turkey carcasses and sucked the marrow from all the beef bones. We kids were too squeamish for it, but they ate organ parts too: the chicken hearts and the chicken livers. The brains and the stomach lining.Most Americans ate that way: avidly and a lot.And even after those first postwar decades, they kept the party going, with fondues and casseroles and dessert every night. Now you’re likelier to see skim lattes and dishes made of tofu, which is light and spongy and like somebody’s brain, pigeon’s more than a cow’s maybe.Also, people really drank: Highballs. Cocktails. Now it’s more wine and beer, and pregnant women leave the stuff alone entirely.Back then too, cigarettes were everywhere. Even the TV anchor delivering the news had one, right there in an ashtray. I we never rode the 50 miles to our cousins’ house without being closed up in air made blue by cigarette smoke.It’s what adults were then: Smokers. Drinkers. Big, big eaters.You can tell they ate a lot by looking at the snapshots, the men with these peacetime pot bellies which they were wore their belts up over for some reason, giving them all a kind of Oliver Hardy look.Today, nobody wants a pot belly. Everyone wants to look chiseled and edgy, though few of us do, God knows.The gym-addicted do, of course.  I found myself in a social hug with such a person recently. The blades of her hipbones stabbed my stomach and her pointy chin trowelled into my shoulder. It was like hugging a garden implement.Yet as a nation we’re growing fatter instead of thinner.  They say it’s the fault of the Super-Sized soft drink, 32 ounces of high-fructose corn syrup sold for a song everywhere you turn.So we miss our old food-treats, but then we go and invent new ones. So what can we conclude here?That we’re all for improving ourselves, but only a little.And that we sure like to look on the bright side. In fact I read in a news magazine’s cover story on the Faith of the Nation that according to the poll they were citing, most of us (a) don’t believe in Hell, (b) do most definitely believe in Heaven, and (c) are just sure we’re going there.Optimists, see?Let’s all toast to the optimists then – but let’s hold off on those Belgian waffles too.

Needlework, Really?

This was me at the eye doctor's where I just went for my annual checkup. It was hard enough driving home after with cloven hooves for hands on the wheel never mind having messed up peepers.The funny thing  is I went to this eye doctor’s with a sackful of needlework. NEEDLEWORK! At the eye doctor’s! where the first thing they do to you is tap your head back pry open your frightened little eyes and squeeze an oily yellow blurt of squirt into them!The squirt is a numbing agent of some kind  that anesthetizes the area so that they can then squeeze in the drug that dilates the pupils – or as the tech explained it, paralyzes the muscles so your poor irises CAN’T contract to protect the eye from too much light. Bring on the eclipses!  The light barrels on in and that’s how they check your pressures to be sure nobody backstage there is cookin’ up a sneaky case of glaucoma, which can leave you blind - or, in my mother's case, necessitate an iridectomy that leaves you with eyes like a goat (see above.)Make no mistake: I’m happy to have my eyes checked. In fact and I find all parts of the exam both entertaining and instructive. I just can’t seem to get it through my head every year that of the muscles are paralyzed I won’t be able to focus. That is, read.Or choose a playlist on my iPod.Or, God  knows, do needlework.And yet I brought the iPod.I brought the needleworkI brought even the Kindle thinking to set it on A VERY LARGE FONT for the 40 or so minutes I would be waiting for my pupils to dilate and my doctor to finish Facebooking her friends over her ham sandwich .In the end it was all foolishness. First, the wait was one 15 minutes, and second , the muscles of my eye were stopped in their tracks, like the butterflies my sister and I used to asphyxiate and then mount with common pins in our grandfather’s old cigar boxes.So no reading. No groovin’ on tunes. Certainly no needlework.I just had to sit looking like this for six hours waiting for the drug to wear off. Paralyzed is paralyzed it seems, however strong you may wish otherwise.

Clone Yourself and Go Naked

It's too hot to work so I thought I'd just find a dock and go sit by it.That's Old Dave on the left.(Italian you know; they take a good tan.)I'm the other three, the ones with the Irish pallor...I cloned myself to get more done about a year ago. It works! This is Terry One Two and Three, with Terry Four Five Six just fixin' to get their feet wet....Terry Seven and Eight are cooking lunch and paying bills. (Hey, SOMEBODY'S got to stay dressed and serious!)

Me, I Looked Like Bea Arthur

You hate to think so but it’s true: compared to, say, the French, we Americans look pretty sad. I mean there they are sipping fine wines in their awesome clothes, and here we are chugging down our Big Gulps and boarding airplanes in our sweatpants. It’s not so much that we don’t care  how we look. It’s that we lack confidence and are befuddled when it comes to our dress. Because what else but a befuddlement born of uncertainty could be responsible for the way we go around in clothes as baggy as old pajamas? I mean aside from the fact that we’ve all grown a mite hefty? And when we’re not going around in clothes that are too baggy, we’re going around in clothes that are too tight. Think how many of us look like teddy bears sausaged into pantyhose.I bet I look like that every time I try going to the gym in that perfectly serviceable leotard from the great Age of the Fonda Workout.I think we all worry about our ‘look’ these days, in a way that nobody worried in an earlier era, the men in their fedoras, the women in their sheaths.I recently attended a neighborhood gathering described on the invitation as a ‘cocktail party,’ a word whose elegant associations evidently threw us all for a loop.We SHOULD have been perfectly casual in our attitude toward the event. After all it would be just us neighbors with no danger of our running into any red carpet moments.Plus, less than an hour before the party was to start, a storm straight out of the Book of Revelations blew in, and the power went out all up and down the street. Thus, chances were, we wouldn’t even be able to SEE one another.Still, we all fretted, as we discovered once the sun returned and the party started in earnest.One neighbor came in classic cocktail-party garb: a little black dress with super-high heels. Yet even she worried she was dressed wrong.“I had doubts at the last minute,” she told a group of us. “‘What am I doing in THIS?’ I thought, but by then it was too late to change.”A second guest said, “Heck, look at me! Do you SEE this jacket?”It was seersucker. Red seersucker, or was it a reddish pink?“AND it’s part of a SUIT!” he yelped. “I had the whole thing on before it occurred to me that it might just be a little MUCH!”But to me he looked great, as I told him when we all stopped laughing long enough to resume talking.What didn’t look great was the get-up I had on, a weird, semi-tunic-y thing that had looked very chic when I saw it on that cruise ship, especially after all the Daiquiris I’d inhaled out there on the deck. In truth I looked like all four Golden Girls rolled into one. AND, with the curse of the curly-haired that is my curse, and the rain that had so lately buffeted us, my hair had Gone Rogue; just swelled right up, like the foil around your Jiffy Pop.But hey, what are you gonna do? We’re not Parisians and that’s a fact. So really we might as WELL jump into our clothes, baggy or sausage-casing tight and toast the summer - just maybe with a nice French wine instead of a Big Gulp. And while watching this to-me-very-funny video of how some people used to actually dress at the gym. I did! I actually did![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu7c9H6ngLI]

Speedos!

And a Voice emerged from the crowd saying to the Prophet, “Speak to us of Speedos, Master!” And the Prophet answered saying,

“The person brought for the first time into the presence of the Speedo  at first startleth and turneth away, surprised at what a complicated structure hath been devised, not by the folks at Thpeedo, but by Nature herthelf. (Ack! Cough! There. That's better.)

“Nature, Who causeth the mountains to shout to another over the plain and sometimes even throw rocks.

"Nature, Who maketh the trees to toss their long branches like unto crazed young girls at rock concerts, thus frightening the birds for hectares in all directions.

"Lo, even Nature,  Who hath devised the means for  the fat little birds to cling to their tree  branches, even while sleeping; which hath devised the means for The Great Large Birds With Funny Eyes to snatch The Rabbit from her clover dinner quicker than thou canst say ‘Holy Crap what was that?’

"On the body of Woman, the organs of increase are largely out of sight and yes, thanks very much the Prophet knoweth very well that he borroweth from Shakespeare when he uses that phrase. He also enjoys referring to himself in the third person and tough luck if thou dost not approve. (How many books hast thou sold? Serf?!)

"I tell you, Nature hath hidden The Woman’s complicated workings behind a magic curtain such as can be seen in the puppet shows on old Mister Rogers Neighborhood episodes. “But on THE MAN'S body it is a whole other thing:

On the body of MAN, it is All Right Out There In The Shop Window so to speak, and that being the case, this piece of men’s gear is just TRUTH IN ADVERTISING.

All these things have I said to you this day. Now please someone fetch me a beach towel. I believe I’ll Speedo up too and strut along the strand a bit myself.

Lemmings, & Ban-Tights-as-Pants?

Somebody commented yesterday on the post I did about how people do love to express themselves in their dress.  “Judging by what I see in public, teenagers dress to say, ‘Here’s who they are – and I’m like them!’”

It's true. Go to the mall and there they are that certain segment of teen girls, middle schoolers especially, dressed alike down to the least particular. In winter it’s all Uggs all the time, and those pajama-bottom-looking sweatpants with writing on the fanny.

Or else it’s Uggs with tights, which is a great mistake.

In fact there’s a whole website devoted to what a mistake it is to wear tights as if they were pants.  Here is it’s manifesto:

Let’s be clear: The wearing of tights as pants is an abomination.

TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS.

Sure, in the context of sports, ballet, hair metal and Renaissance fairs, tights function as suitable leg coverings but still:

TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS

No, these are not activities that transform tights into pants; these are historically acceptable acts of pantlessness.

Tights as pants leave nothing to the imagination.

Tights as pants are an affront to those of us who prefer not to know the most intimate details of our neighbors’ bodies.

Tights as pants are the fashion equivalent of

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

This gratuitous divulgence of assets repels where the tights-as-pants wearer presumably hopes to entice.

We have tired of attempts to force tights into general use as outerwear it concludes and have decided to do something about it.

I didn’t click on the link to SEE what they are doing about. You can do that if you like.

I’ll settle for closing with this harvested-from-Google-Images picture, worth a thousand words as the fella said. (Poor girl! You just never know who’s going to point a camera at you next. I hope she doesn’t recognize herself.)

Express Yaself

Once, young guys wore briefs and old guys wore boxers. Now it’s just the opposite. Once, it was sailors on boozy shore-leave who got tattoos. Now, even kids in braces and Marching Band uniforms get them. Customs change.Girls still saunter around with vast crescents of flesh showing between their tops and their pants even though the fashion mag I just read in line at the pharmacy says it's not ‘classy’ to do this.People have a wish to expresses themselves, that's all. This is who I am,” is all they're hoping to say.I have a 20-something friend who dresses in a kilt when he’s of a mind to, and he certainly doesn’t do THAT to shock anyone. Yes, he studied the bagpipes once, but he’s also an Eagle Scout, a wilderness survival guy and an EMT. Oh and the computer hasn’t been invented that he can’t get to sit up and beg. So try pigeonholing HIM, you know?It was back in the mid-90s when our oldest got a tattoo and I can tell you that very few young women were doing that at the time, especially among the other double-Econ-and-Religion majors there at Wellesley College. As I recall, her dad had something to say when he heard about plans for this species of personal ornamentation. “Well, you’ll never get a job in the corporate world!” he told her tartly.“Oh Dad, I’m not going into the corporate world!” I remember her saying with a big smile. “I’m going to head up a federal agency!”“But why is she DOING it?” this mate of mine asked the ceiling later.Neither of us knew - until she came back from that trip with her best college pal Sarah and saw it. The tattoo that encircled her arm just above the elbow was the same daisy-chain pattern of the wedding ring of her grandmother, recently deceased. She had carefully made a pen-and-ink sketch of the ring's design and brought it with her to Nevada.So she didn't get it because of any fashion; she got it it as a symbol of something important to her.Also I will say these many years later, she DID join the corporate world, MBA in hand. And her equally tattooed best pal Sarah is now in Infectious Disease doc at a prestigious Boston hospital.So maybe we have to look at all fashions as mere avenues for people to express themselves.Thoreau said it: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him put on the undies he likes, however tailored or hanging down. :-)Here is the girl today with that her grandmother's wedding ring pattern and her new baby girl.

The Humor's in the Contrast

It felt sort of WRONG to have this jokey kitchen magnet on my blog here Tuesday. Even in this far ‘breezier’ culture it felt too.... daring, almost, to post - especially for an old classroom teacher like myself.

But it just struck me so funny, the contrast set up between the crudeness of the phrase and the prim look of this MadMen-era lady with her hands prettily folded under her chin and all. They call that cognitive dissonance; you get that when a thing you believe to be true conflicts with another, previously held thing that you've already told yourself you believe. Discomfort arises then, though you wouldn't know it to look at this lady's expression.

Here are some examples of cognitive dissonance, offered by somebody in a chat room on the subject:

Say you eat a few grapes in the Produce department of the supermarket. You know it’s wrong but you tell yourself you’re just checking to see if they’re any good.

Or, you speed on your way to work. You're breaking the law - you know it - but you tell yourself it’s more important to get to work on time.

Or – here’s a doozy- say somebody you dislike makes a really generous gesture towards you. Because you WANT to dislike this person – since you have actively disliked him all this time – you write it off his kind gesture as an attempt to make you feel guilty

A lengthy diversion I know but it comes to mind in relation to this funny picture.

Because, you know, the lady LOOKS like some kind of servin’-others-at-all-times Ozzie and Harriet-style saint but here she is saying something snarky – get it ?

I offer another for you below, which I also really like. Maybe all of us nurturers just really need a little snark to even out all that sweetness and light. :-)

What the Heat Can Do

I started the day yesterday sumo-style, which is to say I was lookin' like one of these three babes...I ended it  like this, from an actual self-portrait taken in my living room around 7:00 last night .That’s what extreme heat will do to you, especially in a basically un-air-conditionable house built in the 1890s.Like tallow, the fat just melts away. (It does leave you a mite thirsty however.)  ;-)

Pedicures Schmedicures

Back in late March, I tagged along with Old Dave to a Plastics Conference where he kept busy attending workshops with names like “Gasket Enhancements 2012!”Since none of these workshops really piqued my interest, I used my time in the blazing Florida sun to people-watch at the pool, peer futilely into the unreadable screen of my i-Phone  and get a pedicure.This last thing made me so happy I swore I would keep up appearances footwise for the next six months right up until boot season.Instead I haven’t been to the pedicurists once,  and here we are more than halfway through the season of the Strappy-Sandal.Maybe I should feel ashamed going around with the toenails I was born with but somehow I’m not. Ten perfect little ovals looked good enough to God on his drafting table; shouldn't they be good enough for us?Or maybe it’s my time of life and curmudgeonliness is at last descending on me. Here's an adorable piece of cognitive dissonance for you, this lady's face and what she is saying ha ha..