Masked Mom

Mirror Image

2012-01-28T21:38:00.001-05:00

How to express the extent of my exhaustion? I was going to just pick a number on a scale of one-to-ten, but that's cliche, so instead, I'll share this tidbit from my evening.

Just now, I noticed in the bathroom mirror that the "Old Navy" written across the front of my fleece sweatshirt was backwards. For a good thirty seconds, I was completely convinced that meant I had worn my shirt inside-out all day.

The Seeker

2012-01-27T22:58:00.001-05:00

I was at Hubby's computer (in a little room just off the kitchen) trying to bang out a blog post between turns of Risk Legacy (don't ask) when I heard two-and-a-half year old Seventh Niece calling me from the dining room.

"What?" I called back.

"Where are you?"

"Hiding."

"Where?"

"It's a secret." All the while she's getting closer to finding me.

"Where are you?"

"Hiding."

She's in the doorway. "What are you doing?"

"Hiding."

"From what?"

"Uh..."

"Kids?" she asks.

"Yes," I say, scooping her up. "But one kid found me. Can you guess which one?"

"Aw, man."

PS--No Risk pieces were harmed in the making of this post. Though I must admit that the first time I played this version, I looked at the colorful little pieces with their utterly chewable protrusions and remarked, "If they don't want us to eat the pieces, why do they make them look so edible?"

Save The Date

2012-01-26T22:40:00.001-05:00

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should've been more specific."

~~Lily Tomlin

(This one goes out to Youngest Sister, who has always shown amazing restraint in the "I told you so" department.)

Before we even get to my offense (which is enormous), let me begin with my defense (which is puny).

When Daughter-Only was born, she joined a household which included three older brothers, the oldest of whom was six. I had worked full-time up until the week before she was delivered. We also had a dog and several cats, most of whom I ignored completely, but I am adding them to this list in hopes of tipping the scales of justice a little bit in my favor. The ultrasound I had a week or so before she was born showed that she was a girl, which after three boys in a row, was a mind-blowing distraction of its own. (Honestly? I thought the tech was just messing with me because she had just asked me how many of which variety I had at home.) In addition, I went into labor at approximately 2 a.m. and delivered around 6 a.m. thereby messing with my sense of time even more. And not to protest too much, but I also had surgery at 9 a.m. the day after she was born and was released out into the world a few short hours later.

Consequently, my sense of time was somewhat distorted and for several years after she was born, I told everyone Daughter-Only's birthday was June 24. It was (and remains) June 23.

Youngest Sister tried to point this out to me on at least one occasion. I shudder to recall the tone in which I said, "I know my own daughter's birthday."

When it was time for kindergarten registration, I pulled out Daughter-Only's state-issued baby pink birth certificate and was horrified to discover my mistake--my face was pinker than the paper the correct date was printed on. I have since apologized (and made unnecessary excuses) to Youngest Sister, but apparently, the universe has decided that I have not yet done penance enough for my mistake.

Earlier this week, Daughter-Only's first-ever income tax return was rejected for e-filing by the IRS because the birth date listed on the return did not match the birth date on file with the Social Security Administration for that Social Security number. Let the record reflect the fact that the application for said Social Security number was filled out by me before I left the hospital after giving birth to Daughter-Only. And, if we've learned anything here today, it's that there was a time when I truly did not know my own daughter's birthday.

I broke the news to Daughter-Only that her refund would be delayed because the Social Security Administration had her birth date listed incorrectly.

Daughter-Only said, "How does that even happen?"

"Uh, somebody must've screwed up somewhere along the line."

I always wanted to be somebody...

Class of 86

2012-01-25T23:58:00.006-05:00

(With thanks* to Beth over at Word Nerd Speaks for the post that inspired this one.)

Today marks my 86th consecutive post--shattering my previous record of barely scraping together thirty consecutive posts for NaBloPoMo each November. Certainly, many of those 86 posts have been of the quantity not quality variety, but most were at least not humiliatingly terrible and a few of them have actually made me kind of proud. Making the commitment to daily blogging and actually keeping it has been a revelation to me in so many ways--some of which I may babble on about at some point.

Tonight, though, I mostly want to babble on about one of the things that has made daily blogging not only possible, but a real pleasure, and that is the sense of community I have found in our little corner of the internet. I would guess that I read around 30 blogs regularly and I check in as often as I can on quite a few more. I tend to comment in some way on almost everything I read because, for me, I know how much the acknowledgement and sense of connection means.

In addition to daily posting, I work full-time (at a job that is, like many jobs, alternately incredibly rewarding and deeply soul-sucking) and share my home with Hubby, two grown-ish children and (often) their significant others, and three dogs. And, of course, I'm still tending in some long-distance way to the oldest two growner-ish children. Daughter-Only and I also share a computer. She is finishing high school online and working at the local grocery store so the time she has available to use the computer is at a premium and often overlaps with mine. All of this means that on some days, I binge on posting, commenting, visiting. And on other days, I'm a ghost of my usual presence, lucky to post a crappy cell phone picture with a punny caption on my blog and a couple of lame emoticons in the comments section elsewhere.

None of this should be mistaken for a lack of gratitude for my readers or a lack of interest in the blogs I frequent (and unfortunately frequently miss a few days of) because I have great bloggy love for all of you and the sense of community and connection is more meaningful to me than I can really express without sounding like a total idiot. (Sounding like a partial idiot? Apparently totally okay.)

I think a part of what makes our little corner of the internet so great is the richness of the lives we come here to share, so even though I have seriously considered using a vacation day at work just so I could put the finishing touches on a blog post or catch up on reading everyone else's fantastic posts, I know the truth is that the very reasons it sometimes gets crazy-busy trying to balance the blogging life with the real life are the reasons both lives are so rewarding.
*And maybe apologies.

Apropos

2012-01-24T23:04:00.000-05:00

So, I had every intention of writing a post that was an answer to the thought-provoking post Beth over at Word Nerd Speaks wrote on Sunday about blogging habits and time management, but due to unforeseen scheduling issues (aka poor time management?), that post will have to wait for tomorrow.

In the meantime, the post is worth checking out if you haven't already read it and I'll be back with my answers to her questions tomorrow.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Mondays*

2012-01-23T19:26:00.000-05:00

Masked Mom's Media Monday One-Word Review: Icky.

*Particularly overcast-drizzly-36-degrees-in-January-dirty-slushy-snow-on-top-of-mud-too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it-feel-like-I-worked-a-full-day-before-I-even-get-to-my-paying-job-where-I-get-to-put-in-another-eight-hours-Mondays.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Sunday, October 25, 2003

2012-01-22T22:26:00.001-05:00

This week's entry is all about the numbers. So here, a few numbers to get you started. At the time this entry was written, Son-One was 15; Son-Two, 13; Son-Three, 12 and Daughter-Only, 9.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday, October 25, 2003

Mornings at our house are all about the numbers. For instance, six people and one bathroom. The boys are up by 6:45 and out, ideally, by 7:30 (no need to panic until 7:45, though). Daughter-Only is up by 8 and out by 8:30, ideally, but 8:35 is the absolute panic line for her because her bus driver is constitutionally incapable of coming on any kind of regular schedule. We don't expect on-the-dot timing every day, but this guy can't even keep it within a ten-minute window--hence cause for panic at 8:35 even though on many days he's not there until 8:55 or later.

Adding to the numerical joy is the fact that my alarm goes off at 6:30, so I can be sort of a back-up for he boys' own alarms. Rather than reset my alarm for 8, when I actually have to be up, I repeatedly hit the snooze alarm, which goes off every 9 minutes for an hour-and-a-half (ten times). I do this even when it's obvious the boys are up without needing my backup (nagging, I believe, is the more familiar term).

I am a snooze alarm expert--capable of hitting the snooze button purely by instinct, often with no fumbling around. It's as though there is some biomagnetic connection between my hand and the button. Even when I'm so groggy I can barely open my eyes, I can do the math to figure out when the next alarm is going off (how many minutes are left and the nearer I am to the end of my "snoozing," the more precious each minute becomes).

One morning this past week, Daughter-Only, Hubby and I were all trying to get up and out of the house by 8:30 and the following conversation took place:

D-O (looking at the clock on my nightstand): MOM! It's 8:10!

Me: It's ten minutes fast.

Hubby (barely lifting his head off the pillow and squinting at the clock above the computer): That one says 7:55.

Me: Yeah, it's five minutes slow.

D-O (from the dining room): The microwave clock says 8:03, but it's two minutes fast!

For some reason, this struck us all as beyond hysterical. Of the other clocks in our downstairs--there's an alarm clock in the computer room, which is either unset or unplugged, there's a clock on the CD player in the living room, which is unset and flashing a completely incorrect time, and there's a clock on the stove, which was at one point correct, but between power outages and Hubby rearranging appliances (and hence, unplugging the stove), it is wrong by hours. I used to go around setting the flashing clocks, but have long since given up. Hubby is a habitual rearranger and won't reset any of them himself.

As for the stove clock, which is an analog and, therefore, non-flashing, I see it's incorrectness as an homage to my grandfather, whose stove it once was. Pap had refused to turn the clock forward or back for daylight saving adjustments for as long as I can remember--just that one clock so it was more a symbolic rebellion than anything. I got the stove last year as a hand-me-down from Dad and Girlfriend when they replaced it with an all-digital, touch-button, ceramic-top model. For all I know, the new one automatically makes adjustments for daylight saving, which seems so wrong somehow.

In any case, the clock on the old stove is wronger than ever and I view this as an extreme version of what Pap was trying to say when he refused to change his clock on the whims of society. Not merely (as Chicago so pathetically (and pseudo-philosophically) crooned): Does anybody really know what time it is? More like: Who the hell are you to tell me what time it is?

An Exception To That Rule You Learned In Sixth Grade

2012-01-21T22:45:00.004-05:00

It's said that familiarity breeds contempt. I'm not sure what mere proximity breeds--complacency? nonchalance? Something, anyway, so that when you live very near a wonderful place--even a Seven-Natural-Wonders-of-North-America level wonderful place, you have a tendency to not just take it for granted, but kind of forget it exists a little bit.

Which is how, despite living less than two hours away for more than twenty years, we never went to Niagara Falls as a family until my mother-in-law's visit in the summer of 2010. (It's amazing what you can find right under your nose when you're trying desperately to entertain an out-of-town visitor!) We spent the day at the park, wandering from stunning view to stunning view, picnicking together in the shade of mulberry trees with the roar of the falls in the background, feeding practically tame squirrels our leftovers.

It was a fantastic day that we commemorated with lots of great photos. Perhaps none that truly captures the spirit of our family more than this one:

You can pick your nose. You can pick your friends. But you can't pick your friend's nose, unless, of course, your friend is Nikola Tesla.

Special Orders Don't Upset Us*

2012-01-20T21:31:00.001-05:00

For dinner the other night, we had wheat pita pockets with shredded sandwich steaks, mushrooms, onions, peppers and American cheese. I remarked to Daughter-Only's boyfriend, A.M. that they were our (admittedly pale) imitation of the "Number 9 Pokket" from D'Angelo--a New England sandwich chain where, at the Loudon Rd., Concord, NH location, Hubby and I had our first (and only "official") date in 1987.

Please do not read this as a pathetic, poor-me confession, but that date was also my first (and only "official") date. I was eighteen and had suffered through four years of assorted crushes bookended by my epic, recurring crush on Mr. High School. As a pathologically shy Army brat, I was never in the sorts of social situations that would lead to "normal" adolescent interaction. To make matters worse, the few people who did have daily contact with me were treated to the defense mechanism of sarcastic one-liners designed to keep everyone from noticing how scared shitless I actually was. (This worked depressingly well and I was often told by people who subsequently got to know me better that I had terrified them at first.)

Anyway. My first date. Our first date. We went to D'Angelo, where Not-Yet-Hubby ate a Number 9 Pokket. It looked and smelled spectacular--and it's surprising that I am nostalgic--and not bitter--about the Number 9 since I did not even eat a Number 9 that night. I did not, in fact, eat anything because, really? I was so nervous, there was no way in hell I was going to eat in front of him at all--let alone eat anything as messy as the things on offer at D'Angelo.

We left D'Angelo and decided to go for a drive and eventually ended up on some dirt road in the wilds of New Hampshire, just after dark. He parked near a little bridge at the edge of a narrow stand of trees and asked if I'd like to walk along the creek that flowed there.

By the light of a full moon (I'm not even kidding), he led me to the mossy bank of the creek where we sat together for a few quiet minutes, listening to the gurgling of the water over the rocks and watching moonlight dancing over the little ripples in the water.

He turned to me with the kind of soulful expression only a nineteen-year-old boy could muster and said, "You have the most beautiful eyes."

And I, in what I hoped was my most soulful voice, said, "Thanks, they were a Kmart Blue Light Special."

Because...come on! Full moon, babbling creek, soulful staring. Intensity overload. Cliche overload. It was a toss-up as to which pushed me over the edge, to be honest.

To his credit, he laughed at the joke and we talked for a few more minutes, about what I can't even vaguely remember and then, he leaned in to kiss me. The moment our lips touched, I dissolved completely...

...into uncontrollable giggles. I don't mean cute little giddy giggles either. I mean fish-out-of-water-flopping-around-on-the-mossy-bank-of-that-damned-creek-gasping-for-air hysterical laughter. And, while I know fish do not generally snort, there may have even been some snorting involved.

Again to his credit, Not-Yet-Hubby gave me a minute to recover, graciously accepted my apologies and tried again. And I laughed again, and apologized again, and then we gave up and got back into the car and drove up and down the Kancamagus Highway, listening to the Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume 2 on cassette because it was 1987, and that was cutting edge car technology, thank you very much.

Three-and-a-half months later, we were married. And twenty-five years later, we serve our "Number 9's" with a heaping helping of well-aged, leftover giggles on the side.

*"Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us..." Burger King, of course, not D'Angelo. It's always nice when my embarrassingly encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s TV commercials can be put to good-ish use.

Of Grand Mothers and Mediocre Metaphors

2012-01-19T22:11:00.001-05:00

My Nan, with my father around 1951. You can't tell from looking at her, but she had a serious aversion to labeling and dating photographs, which I believe she inherited from her own mother and as a consequence, I have inherited several generations worth of unlabeled, undated photos, which I store in a plastic tote labeled "Anonymous Ancestors From An Unknown Time."

My Nan would've been 90 today. She was my paternal grandmother, whom we called "Nanny" growing up. Her version of how she got that name, rather than the more conventional "Grandma," was that as a toddler, I couldn't pronounce "Grandma" and said "Nana" instead. My mother's version was that my grandmother was too vain to approve being called "Grandma," so insisted on a name with fewer age-related associations. There is no end to the stories in which my mother's version differed dramatically from her mother-in-law's version, which is a pretty standard phenomenon, I guess.

In honor of the anniversary of her birth, a re-run of one of my stories of my grandmother:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kiss My Dupa

When I was growing up, spending time with my paternal grandparents, Pap had a habit of sitting in a chair in the corner of the kitchen beside the woodstove, sometimes reading, sometimes just sitting there over his ridiculously strong cup of tea, looking curmudgeonly--he had more hair and fewer teeth but otherwise resembled Nebbercracker from the movie Monster House in some significant ways. I know Nebbercracker was supposed to be a scary bad guy, especially at the beginning, but I found myself a little nostalgic and missing Pap even in the opening scenes of the movie.

Anyway, there he sat, in the chair in the corner of the kitchen and Nan was often puttering around the house or watching TV in the living room. The house was a converted hunting cabin and had only three rooms so when he yelled for her, in his phlegmy, grunty way (emphysema), she wouldn't have any problem hearing him.

"Em," he would yell, and then pause for a response, which wouldn't come, so he'd yell again.

"Em!"

"Em!"

"Emma!"

Meanwhile, my grandmother was wherever she was smirking and rolling her eyes, knowing what was coming, and not answering because of it.

"Em!"

"Em!"

"Emma!"

This would sometimes go on for three or four rounds before finally, finally Nan would cave and say, "What?!" or sometimes (if this was, say, the third or fourth time that day that Pap had gotten into this mood), "What, you crazy old son-of-a-bitch?!"

And always, always, always, Pap would say, "Kiss my dupa*!" He was a sixty-something-year-old man with a six-year-old's mischievous glint in his eye. Sometimes--even if it was the fourth or fifth time that day he'd pulled his clever little trick--he would laugh so hard a coughing fit would ensue.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately--not merely because it's the kind of funny-in-a-warped way story that is so typical of my grandparents--but because in my own funny-in-a-warped way brain, it's become a metaphor for my entire life.

There are some things about myself and my life that I would really like to change. I would like to be more motivated and energetic and I understand that the main way to get moving is to actually move. I want to spend less energy procrastinating and more energy actually accomplishing. I lecture myself pretty much perpetually. The last ten minutes before I fall asleep, many of my thoughts begin with "First thing tomorrow, I will..." and yet day after day after month after year, not much changes.

So there is the lecturing side of myself--the well-intentioned, you-can-do-more-better-faster self but then there is the other side, sitting in the corner, clamoring for attention. ("Em!" "Em!" "Emma!") And that more-better-faster person tries nobly to resist the pull of the non-productive, unhealthy, but oh-so-deeply-ingrained creature of slothful habits, but finally, finally, always, always she gives in and shouts, "What, you crazy old son-of-a-bitch?!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A few links (with previews) to other stories featuring my grandmother:

Weirdness: "My Nan was Catholic and a kleptomaniac, among many other things, not that those two things--Catholicism and kleptomania--are directly related, of course."

Don't Judge a Post By Its Title (Or Lack Thereof): "...have me thinking about what other genetic time bombs my grandmother has left behind. Will I soon start eating kidney beans out of the can while watching People's Court and Entertainment Tonight? Will I shave my legs with a dry razor while sitting on a lawn chair in the front yard?"

"Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning...": "I sometimes think parenting is just an elaborate payback for all the grief we caused the adults in our lives when we were kids...Oh, Nan, wherever you are, they're getting back at me now."

*Growing up, I knew "dupa" was "ass" and just assumed it was German, given my grandfather's heritage. But, turns out, if it is German it is regional slang borrowed from one of several Eastern European neighbors

The Lazy Activist's Guide To Internet Protests

2012-01-18T11:24:00.001-05:00

Numerous websites and blogs are blacked out today in protest against the possible passage of SOPA and PROTECT IP laws. I seriously considered blacking out my page as well, but I would've had to download a back-up version of my current template and otherwise engage in tech-related stuff that generally ends in frustration of astronomical proportions and irreversible (by me, at least) and annoying changes to my template. Therefore, I am just sending you over to Kelly's place--Southern Fried Children--where you can get more information on the laws that are being considered and what you can do to help.

Google has also started an online petition against the legislation. You can find that here.

Today's Post Brought To You By The Letter "E"

2012-01-17T22:45:00.002-05:00

I would endeavor to elaborate upon the enormous toll that egregious misuse of the English language exacts upon my soul and the ways in which that exaggerated effect may be evidence of my own mental health issues, but I lack the energy. Suffice it to say, perhaps if I were more evolved, signs like this:

...wouldn't make me scream "Eeeeek!"

I will grant you that eloquence is in the eye of the beholder. The definition of "eloquent," however, is not.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: The Sun

2012-01-16T20:11:00.002-05:00

I eagerly await The Pushcart Prize anthology every year. It's subtitled The Best of the Small Presses and showcases literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from a variety of small magazines and other venues. It is a thick volume full of amazing work--the kind of stuff I would probably never otherwise have the opportunity to read, living as I do in a teeny, tiny town in a rural county with the nearest "newstand" likely to carry literary magazines of any sort hundreds of miles away.

Each year, I get a little crazy imagining all the work I'm missing by not being able to afford subscriptions to the magazines that originally published the work in the anthology's pages. One year, I did something about it and took $36 out of my tax refund money and splurged on a one-year subscription to The Sun.

That one-year splurge has turned into an every-year splurge (except the one year that Youngest Sister sprung for the renewal as my Christmas gift--thanks, again!). Occasionally, money has been too tight to renew on time and I have missed an issue or two, but I keep every issue I have received in a tub within arm's reach of my computer desk. More importantly, I carry photos, phrases, and revelations I've found in its pages with me everywhere I go.

It is difficult for me to speak of The Sun in terms rational and sensible enough to really capture its amazingness (see?). The Sun carries no advertising. The black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout each issue are simple and often breathtakingly evocative. Though Hubby doesn't read the magazine, I have often come upon him holding an issue, intently studying the cover photo. And when I got out a few old issues today for reference, I was repeatedly distracted by the amazing photography both inside the magazine and on its cover.

The writing within its pages is raw and gritty in its intimacy while often touching on strikingly universal themes. There is an interview at the beginning of each issue, usually with an activist of some sort or someone otherwise on the fringes of society--psychologists, physicists, artists, environmentalists, shamans and so on. January's interview was with Ina May Gaskin, "the midwife of modern midwifery." These interviews are always informative and often enlightening.

After the interview, there are fiction and non-fiction pieces, with poetry tucked in at the edges. And at the center of the magazine is several pages of a column called "Readers Write," which shares true stories readers have sent in response to prompts (this month's prompt was "Boxes."). The subjects are as limitless as the human imagination and the one thing the pieces all share is writing of the highest quality.

Here a few snippets from past issue:
"...Love

is the the thing you

press your face against,

trying to figure out how

to get inside without breaking it."

~~from "Lost Keys," a poem by Tony Hoagland, The Sun, June 2011

"'Do you think we'll ever be friends?' I say. 'You and me?'

'We're sisters,' Eileen says.

We could be friends--if you would change every single thing about you, I don't say to her; she doesn't say to me."

~~from "Final Dispositions," a short story by Linda McCullough Moore, The Sun, February 2009

"I am broken and my mother's old age is what's breaking me, I think, standing naked in my bathroom, one foot propped up on the sink, clipping my toenails. The bathroom is dirty: haris everywhere, beads of mold in the corners. Cleaning has become a luxury. Someday I will spend one afternoon a week scrubbing my bathroom, but for now I wipe the sink with a dry Noxema pad, scrape some loose hair from a corner, and hurry out.

My next thought is: It is not a bad thing to be broken. When something's broken you get to see what's inside."

~~from "At Her Feet," non-fiction by Pat MacEnulty, The Sun, May 2008

"Raising three children is like fording a swift, waist-high stream whose stones are covered with moss: it's possible, but move heron-slow and measure each step, or you'll topple and end up who knows how far downstream."

~~from "My Anti-Zen Zen," non-fiction by Chris Dombrowski, The Sun, August 2011

Some of the things I read speak mostly to my mind, others mostly to my soul. The Sun is one of those things that consistently speaks to both.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Priceless.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Monday, June 5, 2006

2012-01-15T19:49:00.004-05:00

"I thought I understood what he was doing, it was the kind of thing I would do: force myself to look at something painful in small doses until I got to the place where I could look at it steadily without it breaking my heart."
~~Gail Godwin, Father Melancholy's Daughter

Tonight's selection from the spiral notebook journal is from an entry inspired in part by a friend's reaction to hitting a deer with her car. She casually mentioned a day or so afterward that she didn't feel she'd "processed" it yet.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday, June 5, 2006

...It's a huge difference between us--and I'm not really sure I'm on the "better" side of it.

I don't really understand the process of "processing." I'm not good at it. I mostly kid myself that I don't need it. But really, even if I did need it, I'm not sure I'd know how to do it. I mean, yeah, the writing helps, but it's more an end than a means to an end--if that makes any sense--and, honestly, the time and energy to write about what I might need to process is often used up by just surviving whatever it is I might need to process. Again, if that makes any sense.

I sometimes feel like I'm skimming across the surface of my life without really getting wet. I'm flitting from moment to moment without having time, energy or inclination to "process" it.

At other times, I think the complete opposite. I imagine myself harvesting bits and pieces from moment to moment, sometimes without even noticing, and then planting them in hopes they will grow into something--an insight, a lesson, a plan.

What happens is often a combination of both. I ignore it, I ignore it, I ignore it until I can't ignore it anymore and then I try to process it for a little while until I get distracted or tired or overwhelmed.

And all the while, it's still there.

Still Recharging

2012-01-14T20:30:00.000-05:00

(Couldn't find a credit for this image. Found the (uncredited) image posted on numerous tech blogs by bloggers who claim it's a photo of something called an "Icon charger" for iPhone and it's been "coming soon" since at least as far back as summer of 2010. Maybe it should be called the iCon?)

Not The First Time, Probably Not The Last

2012-01-13T22:45:00.003-05:00

Mostly, I love my job, but some days take a day or two to recover from. Yesterday was one of those days that took so much out of me that today I am sitting here feeling like my brain has been replaced by a wrung-out dish rag. I've got nothin'.

So here's something I wrote a million years ago, originally published in At-Home Mother magazine, Volume 1, Number 2, 1998.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Live and Learn: A Mom's Eye View Of Cliches and Common Sense

They clutter our conversations and seem always to be on the tips of our tongues. They are words to live by--maxims, bits of wisdom, cliche's built on a grain of truth. But how well do they hold up in the hectic world of modern motherhood? Here's a mother's perspective on some popular platitudes:

A pessimist sees the glass as half-empty; the optimist sees it as half-full.

A mom knows that either way, when the glass spills, it's the same amount of liquid to be wiped up or pre-treated.

Don't count your chickens before they've hatched.

We're pretty sure this is a reference to science fair projects. We strongly recommend vetoing any project that requires finding permanent homes for a dozen or so living things.

Let the buyer beware.

This applies to everything from diet aids yo buy to shed those last few pregnancy pounds to the toys displayed on the pegboard in the cereal aisle at the grocery store.

Look before you leap.

Look not only before you leap, but also before you tiptoe across the kids' room in the dark. Beware tiny, sharp-edged toys magnetically drawn to the softest parts of human feet.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

There's no telling who's been there before you and with which color crayon.

The early bird catches the worm.

And he'll want to keep it forever in a coffee can under his bed. This applies to late risers as well, and far from being limited to worms, it can include a wide variety of amphibians, reptiles and insects.

Still waters run deep.

Except in the case of mud puddles, which, while deceptively shallow, contain a seemingly endless supply of water and sludge.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Moms would rather see no eggs in the basket. Between salmonella and the mess factor, we're convinced no one under ten should have anything to do with raw eggs.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Of course, before we take that step, we have to find clothes that go together, put them on frontward and right-side-out, find socks that match (each other and the outfit), locate misplaced shoes, round up jackets, coats, mittens, hats, sunblock and bug spray (and any other seasonally appropriate accessories), and establish whose turn it is to ride next to the door (by chronicling who rode next to the door each of the last 42, 000 times the car left the driveway). By then, of course, we're too exhausted to go any further than the grocery store.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If Laughter Is The Best Medicine, Why Is It So Contagious?

2012-01-12T22:45:00.002-05:00

Always eager to come to the aid of a friend (and to be granted an easy post idea on a day when I had no time to flesh out any of my own ideas), I am delighted to honor cdnkaro's request to share the video of her husband, Ian, laughing almost to the point of needing medical intervention. As she mentions in her post, Ian would greatly prefer this video not go viral. Cdnkaro, of course, would be delighted if it did. Let's see what we can do to help her out.

(There is a link to an image of the comic Ian found so hilarious on the original post over at four under 4 (plus two).)

Up On The Rooftop...

2012-01-11T23:27:00.006-05:00

Throughout December, I read with great interest a variety of different views on the Santa myth. I found all the reasons given for the various choices regarding Santa--pass the traditional myth down, debunk it, let the kid kind of decide--fascinating and thought provoking.

Now that Christmas is safely over, though, I think it's only fair that I tell you all that I am in possession of conclusive evidence: Santa exists and...he's a vampire.

On Christmas Eve, while waiting for their kids to go to sleep so they could perform Santa duties, Baby Brother and Sister-In-Law came over to our house to play Balderdash. Balderdash, for those unfamiliar with the game, is essentially hilarity in a box. This is especially true if you're not terribly concerned with who wins and instead focus on making your fellow players laugh so hard they're in danger of rupturing something.

In the game, you're given a clue--the name of a person, a movie, initials that stand for something, or an obscure word and you're supposed to write down a convincing enough guess that other players will vote for your option. Everyone's guesses are turned in to the "Dasher," who reads them all out loud, including the actual answer. The dubious honor of being the Dasher travels around the table round-by-round. The only way to get points as the Dasher is if no one votes for the actual answer, which almost never happens.*

We were in the middle of writing down our guesses for the category Laughable Laws, completing the phrase, "In Sterling, Colorado, a cat may not..." I was rolling my eyes heavenward in search of inspiration when I caught a glimpse of some kind of movement at the edge of my vision. I turned toward the movement and there was nothing there, but just as I was about to look down at my paper again, I caught another movement. This time, I rotated my head a little further and saw a fuzzy brown bat flying directly for my face.

I screamed more from being startled than from any innate fear of bats in general--though, judging from his facial expression, which I was close enough to read clearly, this one was not in a particularly good mood. (Have you ever noticed that bat faces kind of look like angry little baby faces?)

Mass hysteria ensued. Three dogs barking. Seven adults ducking and screaming. Daughter-Only and her boyfriend diving under the dining room table. Hubby calmly trying to shoo the bat out the sliding glass door while telling the rest of us to calm down in an annoyingly calm voice. Me, with visions of splattered bat guts dancing in my head, yelling for someone to please turn off the ceiling fans and then running into Hubby's office and closing the door behind me because I was laughing so uncontrollably and at such a pitch that I thought it might throw off the bat's powers of echolocation, which were apparently already somewhat compromised.

The bat eventually fell to the floor in the living room--Hubby is unsure whether our guest hit the ceiling fan or one of the dogs managed to knock him out of the air. The bat was stunned, but otherwise unhurt and Hubby scooped him into a Nike box and opened the box on the back deck. So, you know, Santa could fly off to finish his rounds.

Because, obviously, that wasn't just any fuzzy brown bat in my dining room around midnight on Christmas Eve--it was Count Saint Dracuclaus, right?

*Further proof that our bat visitor was, in fact, imbued with mystical powers: when we all recovered enough to return to the table and begin voting, Baby Brother read all the answers out loud and no one voted for the real one because the real one was "In Sterling, Colorado, a cat may not run loose with a tail light." Not only does it make little to no sense, it also sounded suspiciously like someone had gotten interrupted mid-thought by, oh I don't know, a semi-menacing-looking flying mammal. Those three points Baby Brother got for that round didn't have a shiny bow on top, but they sure as hell were a gift.

A PS--This is my second Balderdash-related blog post. You can read the other one here. Pointless aside: for months after that I first posted that one, it had daily double-digit page views from Finland. I'm still not quite sure what to make of that.

Sock It To Me

2012-01-10T22:51:00.002-05:00

Some time after the Great Sock-Context Debate of 2007, I made the life-altering decision to start wearing men's white crew socks just like Hubby wears and I've been buying them in bulk for both of us ever since.

Now all the white crew socks in the house* belong to both of us, so I can no longer fairly be accused of sock thievery or using one of his socks "out of context."

Hubby has had some trouble adjusting to the concept of "our" socks, though and will still occasionally say, "Someone is stealing my socks again." And I will take great delight in saying, "I can't steal them because they're my socks, too!"

Today, there was a random (dirty) sock in the middle of the entryway floor and Daughter-Only said to her father, "Well, it's yours or Mom's because no one else in the house wears that kind."

Hubby said, "I know it's my sock because it doesn't have any holes it. I also know I didn't leave it there."

At this point, I peeked over the stair railing. "I've got news for you--I've been buying big bags of white crew socks for both of us for a couple of years now so you can stop trying to claim all the socks without holes as your own."

Smirking, Hubby said, "No, all the ones with holes are definitely yours."

"Honey, they all have holes--otherwise, you couldn't get your foot in them. So, they're all mine and I win!"

With that, I triumphantly swooped down, snatched up my dirty sock and flounced off to add it to the pile of my dirty socks.

*Except the six Nike pairs he saves for tennis, which I swear to Federer and Agassi I've never befouled with my foreign feet.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: The Wilder Life: My Adventures In The Lost World Of Little House On The Prairie

2012-01-09T22:20:00.044-05:00

"It disturbed her to read biographies of writers she loved; she preferred not to know anything unlovable about them."

~~John Irving, A Widow For One Year

As previously mentioned, since childhood I've nursed a low-grade obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books. I once thought I might qualify as a semi-rabid fan since I had read the travel diaries and collections of letters and other non-fiction writings Laura had left behind, but then I heard about Wendy McClure. McClure, the author The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, is on a whole other scale of rabid.

McClure so loved the Little House books as a child that, as an adult, she sets off on a quest to not only learn more about the world of the Little House books, but to actually live it (albeit in a very modern and limited context--for example, buying a butter churn on eBay and using it to churn butter in front of a TV playing episodes of the Little House on the Prairie series). She travels around the country to sites significant in the books as well as to sites not included in the books that were significant in the lives of the actual Ingalls family. She is in pursuit of something she cannot exactly name--some essential essence of the Ingalls experience or of Laura herself, though it's never clear (even to McClure) whether it is the fictional or real-life Laura she is most in search of.

She finds out things that she definitely was not expecting--especially about what was added to and left out of the books and about Laura's sometimes thorny relationship with her only child, Rose Wilder Lane. She gets both literally and figuratively lost along the way--taking wrong turns on some of her road trips and finding herself perusing both academic texts about the family and Japanese anime versions of the stories from the books.

She almost lost me along the way, too. There is a part about a third of the way into The Wilder Life, where McClure expresses her all-caps opinion that "LAURA IS NOT A TOMBOY." It is not that I'm terribly attached to the notion of Laura as a tomboy--in fact, I'd never really given much thought to topic at all. Laura definitely was more rough-and-tumble and feisty and generally just out-there-in-the-world than her older sister, the prim and proper Mary, but I don't recall ever thinking of her specifically as a tomboy.

What annoys me is that McClure's vehemence is so over-the-top that it's hard not to think she sees something wrong with anyone ever having been a tomboy. As an unrepentant tomboy, I found it a little difficult not to take that a bit personally. McClure's strident (and, at over two pages, somewhat long-winded) defense of her position made me wonder what issues in her own life were influencing her concern with Laura's perceived femininity or lack thereof.

She almost lost me again with her rant about the columns Laura wrote for the Missouri Ruralist (which were collected in Little House In The Ozarks). While McClure sees the Laura behind those writings as "a know-it-all aunt droning on and on," I've always experienced those pieces as the mental meanderings of a woman who, like most of us, is just trying to figure things out. I had to put down the book for a bit when McClure used one of my favorite quotes from those pieces to illustrate her point, ending her commentary with "I suppose she's got a point there, but zzzz."

The thing about shared obsessions is that even though the object of our obsession is the same, our perception of that object almost never is. Obsessions by their very nature tend to engender in us an almost possessive interest in whatever it is we love and woe be unto anyone who challenges my perception of my beloved.

I am glad I went back to finish the book. In the end, as with most quests, McClure's journey taught her as much about herself and her own life as it did about Laura and the Ingalls family. In reading The Wilder Life, I may have accidentally learned a few things about myself as well.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Informative.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Wednesday, November 20, 1991

2012-01-08T22:45:00.003-05:00

Today is Son-Two's 22nd birthday. And while I find it incredibly tedious that I continue to be so taken aback at the ridiculously rapid passage of time, I nevertheless continue to be taken aback. (Perhaps both the tendency to be taken aback as well as the tendency to be annoyed by it are both symptoms of my ever-rapidly-advancing age?)

So, for today's offering, a brief glimpse into Son-Two's life as an almost 23-month-old--as well as a brief glimpse into my own life as a 23-year-old mother of three children three and under.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wednesday, November 20, 1991

Today--Son-One came out of his room and said, "Where did Son-Two's Weeble go?" Having just heard the toilet flush, I had a pretty safe assumption where Son-Two's Weeble* had gone. I plunged and poked and prodded and prayed and finally, the toilet was flowing normally again. Alas, we shall never see the Weeble again. But the loss is minor compared to my panicked imaginings of the backyard being dug up to remove the poor, wobbly plastic dude from the sewer pipe.

*For the record: this kind of Weeble:

...as opposed to the similarly-sized, but smooth-sided and infinitely-more-flushable version apparently being produced today:

Of course, for sheer flushability, not to mention choking hazardousness, there was no beating the '70s version, which was similarly egg-shaped and only about a third of the size of the current model.

Snapple Fact #356

2012-01-07T20:19:00.002-05:00

Second Niece's Facebook status yesterday was "Snapple Fact #683: Snails have teeth. What????? 0_o"

There followed a goofy exchange in which I told her not to worry because snails couldn't catch her and she asked what would happen if she was asleep and I said: "How can you possibly sleep knowing snails have TEETH?!"

The whole thing reminded me of the time a few years ago when Daughter-Only bought a warm Snapple and stuck it in the freezer for a quick chill before her soccer game. She left without it and several hours later received the following text from her beleagured mother:

Uh. Your Snapple's cold.

Can I Get That In Writing?

2012-01-06T23:45:00.002-05:00

"Put things into words and there's no telling when you'll get them out again."

~Carrie Fisher, The Best Awful

"What you fear, if you turn toward it, will give your writing teeth."
~Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend From Far Away

Though I have been keeping my Spiral Notebook Journal for about 28 (!) years now, there have been gaps--sometimes stretching into months and even, in one instance, over a year--where I've written nothing at all. The gaps tend to coincide with big, scary life stuff--capital-F Funks, above average turmoil and upheaval, that kind of thing.

And though the pages are often used to exhaustively analyze the words, actions and emotions of myself and those around me, there are all sorts of things that get put in there much after the fact or not at all. I've thought a lot over the years about why that happens. (I've even written a few extraordinarily navel-gazy entries about the phenomenon.)

Theoretically at least, the journal is private¹ and there's no doubt that I use it primarily as free therapy. (It's the only therapy I know for sure will be covered by whatever health insurance I have (or don't have) at any given time.) So there should be no restrictions on what I write there, but clearly there are--and part of the reason has to do with what cdnkaro over at four under 4 (plus two) so succinctly said in her post "Pass" a little while ago: "There's something about the written word that lends significant weight to one's thoughts."

I know this to be true from experience. I need think no further than the enraged ranting entries that have so often made me angrier rather than helped me work through my anger.

And I know it to be true in my gut as well. There is a way in which writing something down--especially something painful or, worse, shameful--makes it more real. For me, it is something that goes beyond just leaving a written record that others--or even some later version of myself--might stumble upon. It is not about evidence, exactly, but about the way in which the written word helps to create the story we tell ourselves about our lives in a much more substantial way than the intangible thoughts that comprise the ongoing narratives in our brains.

While I shy away from writing the biggest, scariest feelings out on paper, I also know that sometimes digging around in them on paper will result in an understanding I might not have achieved otherwise. And, in fact, that light-switch click of insight is one of the primary reasons I've continued to keep a journal for as long as I have. The problem, of course, is that when you're dealing with putting big, scary feelings on paper, there's no way of telling when you begin where you're going to end up.

Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to avoid writing about the things I fear the most. How does that avoidance affect not just my journal writing, but the writing I put out there into the world?²

Natalie Goldberg addresses the issue of fear many times in her various books on writing. In Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir, there is this passage:

This is the beginning: to let out what you have held hidden.

Here's another rule of writing practice: Go for the jugular, for what makes you nervous. Otherwise, you will always be writing around your secrets, like the elephant no one notices in the living room. It's that large animal that makes your living room unique and interesting. Write about it...Get it out and down on the page. If you don't, you'll keep tripping over it.

Goldberg goes on to suggest making a list of all the things you shouldn't write about and then systematically writing for ten minutes about each one. I confess that even though I've worked my way faithfully through many of the other exercises in this book, this is one I've skipped up to now.

But, I'm determined--some day soon, I'm goin' in.

1. At some point, I decided that as long as what I was writing was true to who I was in that moment, I would stand behind whatever it was, embarrassed or not. I wouldn't be happy if, for instance, someone's feelings were hurt by something they read, but I decided that by reading work meant to be private, that was a risk they took. (Full disclosure: I copied and pasted this footnote from a comment I left on an earlier post. So naughty--and lazy.)

2. I also have significant concern for how this avoidance is affecting my overall mental health, but this was a post about writing and I left that concern out. Then, too, as a self-identified writer-type person, my mental health and my writing have been hopelessly entangled for as long as I can remember.

Word Problem

2012-01-05T23:30:00.003-05:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are two pictures of words worth?

Royal Pain

2012-01-04T23:30:00.003-05:00

I like to think of myself as a pretty down-to-earth, easy-going individual--at least outside the house. After twenty-four plus years of marriage, Hubby has, of course, seen the darker side and doesn't hesitate to remind me of it every chance he gets.

For example, there was the time a few years ago when, a week or so after being attacked by a demonic weiner dog while I was on a flower delivery, I received a phone call from the Health Department telling me the dog had finished its confinement and did not have rabies. When I got off the phone and said to Hubby, "I don't have rabies." He said, "Well, then, we need to figure out what is wrong with you."

His latest opportunity came courtesy of Ancestry.com. I'm still a little* lost down the rabbit hole of genealogy (and finally reliably able to spell that word correctly on the first try) and Hubby will occasionally stick his head in my computer room door--I assume to see if I have lost consciousness and am maybe drooling on the keyboard.

Over the weekend, he was standing over my shoulder when I discovered that my 19th great-grandfather (and several of his successors, apparently) was the Lord of Deursen in the Netherlands, maybe even before the Netherlands was actually the Netherlands (in the mid-1300s).

Hubby says, "Royalty?"

I say, "Minor-ish Dutch royalty--yes, it appears so."

Hubby says, "That explains the attitude."

*Little may be an understatement. I just calculated that I spent a total of nine hours over the course of the last 30 just trying to untangle the knot of Cranky Ex-Boss Lady's maternal grandmother's family. A knot, which, by the way, began with four different last names and got more complicated from there.

Hope!

2012-01-03T23:22:00.002-05:00

Part of what I do at the halfway house is the menu planning and grocery shopping. At any given time, I have two residents who are my "pantry guys" who help me keep track of what we need to get, etc. Last year, one of them handed me a scribbled list on a crumpled scrap of paper that said: green peppers, milk, spaghetti sauce, HOPE!

He was a life-long alcoholic in his mid-fifties with thick silvery gray hair and a well-trimmed mustache. He had been a model resident--always doing his share and then some, but that week he was in a little bit of a rough spot, an emotional slump. He was as cranky as I'd ever seen him--surly and even a little snappish when really pushed by the younger guys in the house, which wasn't like him at all.

Later, when he had worked his way back into a better place, we joked about which grocery store aisle exactly you'd have to look in to find hope.

He left the house shortly thereafter and moved into our supportive living program--which provides some structure, but much more independence than the halfway house (I call it a three-quarters-of-the-way house) and did very well there.

He was working in a job he loved, had gotten his driving privileges back, was rebuilding damaged relationships with family and friends. Through it all he maintained his sense of humor, generosity and kindness to others. And though he could be something of a gossip (he knew the doings of all his friends and acquaintances with a precision unmatched by anyone else I've ever met), his interest in other people's lives was genuine and tempered with compassion.

Early Friday morning, we lost him to a cancer that first presented itself as a particularly persistent hoarse throat--for weeks, he thought it was just the lingering effects of a late spring cold.

May it be some comfort to his family that he had two healthy years in which he had gained some measure of peace--and yes, hope--within himself.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Out Of Oz

2012-01-02T23:49:00.003-05:00

I came upon the book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West years ago, completely by accident when Cranky Boss Lady's neighbor lent her a copy. CBL was underwhelmed and made it to page 9 one quiet afternoon at the flower shop before giving up. Knowing my voracious appetite for books of all types, she asked me if I wanted to give it a try before she gave it back to her neighbor.

I was dubious--while I read pretty widely, I venture into the realm of "fantasy" titles only rarely. In addition, at the time the book was being offered the hype around the Broadway musical was at an astronomical pitch and that sort of thing tends to be off-putting to my inner contrarian. But it was a really, really quiet afternoon at the flower shop and I was bored with the book I had brought with me so I gave it a shot.

I kind of don't blame CBL for giving up after the first 9 pages. It's a little slow to start, but somewhere shortly after page 9, something happens, not so much in the story at first, but in the hypnotic rhythms of Maguire's language. I was drawn in--seduced even--by Maguire's voice in that first book, which was unlike any I've ever read.

After Wicked, it was eventually on to Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men, each of which I read with a growing sense of amazement: Maguire had somehow made me want to spend time with talking Animals [sic] and well-worn characters like Dorothy and the Good and Wicked Witches. More surprisingly, he made me actively care about their fates.

Finally, finally, finally comes Out of Oz, the final book in the series, released in November. As with all the books in the series, I was so drawn in to the world Maguire has created (on a foundation laid by Frank Baum, of course, and even to some extent to the 1936 movie version of The Wizard of Oz) that it was sometimes hard to drag myself back to the by-comparison-black-and-white reality of my world.

I am not sure what more I can (or should) say about a book for which I was willing to risk not exactly life, but limb, so I will stop my blathering now and just say if you're looking for something to immerse yourself in, give Wicked a try and see where the Yellow Brick Road leads you.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Satisfied.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Tuesday, December 9, 1998

2012-01-01T21:44:00.002-05:00

Every year, as December winds down, I try to remind myself that the end of the year and the beginning of a new one are merely numbers on a calendar that itself is just an attempt to break infinity up into comprehensible pieces that our feeble minds can more easily understand. And every year, I'm reminded that while it is an arbitrary designation, it is also an almost irresistible one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tuesday, December 29, 1998

I've been thinking about that expression "It's water under the bridge." I've always thought of it as a reminder that we are helpless to change the past and as advice not to let our pasts affect us in the present. That view overlooks the transformative power of water--the ability of water to radically alter (permanently) the landscape it passes over, around, under, through. It's water under the bridge, yes, but each ounce that flows there chips away grains of sand on the bank, rubs pebbles a little smoother, leaves behind minerals it's carried from upstream. Water under the bridge.

I'm beginning this journal in the last week of the last month of the next to last year of the last century of this millennium. It's that taking stock time of year--the stakes a little higher than usual what with all those zeros hovering on the year 2000 now only a teensy bit over a year away.

Taking stock of my life--particularly if my focus is the past few years--is a dangerous activity on some levels. There's such a fine line between "taking stock" and dwelling--taking stock a healthy constructive activity with (hopefully) the healthy outcome of a stronger sense of self (where you're coming from, going to, etc. Which reminds me of a line from a Shaun Cassidy song*: "'Cuz I know where you're coming from and goin' to--I even know exactly what you're gonna do.") and dwelling an obsessive exercise in masochism. Guess which one I'm better at?

*This quote is from "Our Night," which according to the infallible (heh) Wikipedia was written by Carole Bayer Sager and Bruce Roberts. It may or may not have been recorded by someone besides the incomparable Shaun Cassidy, but my only experience with it is from Cassidy's album Under Wraps.

If At First...

2011-12-31T23:58:00.005-05:00

"In school they told me practice makes perfect and then they told me nobody's perfect so I stopped practicing."

~~Steven Wright, stand-up special "When The Leaves Blow Away"

Tomorrow, I'm not even logging in to that site. I swear.

The Best Gift I Never Got

2011-12-30T22:14:00.000-05:00

I had a "real"-ish post planned for today--something sparked in part by something I read on one of the blogs on our little corner of the Internet. Fridays are one of my days off so I figured I had all day to work on it and get it "just so," instead of starting in the morning and then rushing home after work to finish it up in time to post three minutes before midnight and then spend two days editing the typos out of the post (as I did most of the rest of this week).

Instead, what happened was I spent most of the day enjoying the gift Cranky Ex-Boss Lady's daughter gave her for Christmas, which was a 6-month membership to Ancestry.com. Neither of them have internet access or even a computer at home, so part of the "gift" is kind of from me, as I will be doing the "legwork" of researching their family histories online. As of yet, CBL has not gotten me the list of names she wants to begin with, so I've been taking advantage of the unlimited access to research my own family tree in every direction imaginable.

It's astoundingly easy to get started and crazily addictive once you get going. Within a few hours, I was four or five generations back on multiple levels of my tree. While most of the records available are just-the-facts statistical type things (dates, names, locations), occasionally you can get a glimpse of a little more--height and weight on draft registration cards, surprising household compositions from various census records, etc. This afternoon, I saw the signatures of two great-grandfathers whom I never met on their World War I draft registration cards.

I also discovered that my father's father's mother's mother's father had moved in with his daughter and son-in-law after he was widowed. During the 1900 census, he was 72 years old. The census information shows that he arrived in the US from Wales in 1860, that both his parents were born in Wales. Then comes the Occupation column under which someone wrote, "Old man."

I realize this internet thing has been around for a while now, but it's still amazing to me that it's possible to sit in my desk chair, in my pajamas, in my teeny, tiny Western New York town and look at, say, the Welsh census from 1841--not just the figures, but a photographic image of the actual pages. It's so amazing, in fact, that I am thinking of asking Hubby to log on to my/CBL's account to change the password so I stand some chance of accomplishing something "real" tomorrow.

Behold! The Power of Weird!

2011-12-29T23:40:00.004-05:00

"'I'm not the person to ask about what's normal," Denise answered. 'I've mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.'"

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

"It took me a long time to realize that normal is in the eye of the beholder."

--Whoopi Goldberg, in an '80s stand-up special

Civics class in the fall of my freshman year was taught by Mr. Scovner, who was a long-term substitute for Mr. Ely, who was running for some local office.

Mr. Ely was an older man who wore corduroy suits (with corduroy bowties!) in colors that could charitably be described as earth tones, but were less charitably (albeit more often) described as shades of baby poop or vomit--mustard yellow, olive green, a couple of unfortunate selections from the brown spectrum. In addition to his dubious sartorial selections, Mr. Ely believed in teaching by rote--which means that for the few weeks at the beginning of the semester when we actually had him, his entire lesson plan was to make us write out the definitions of 20 words that were relevant to the topic of civics ("the study of government and citizenship") and then recite them aloud as a group every day.

Mr. Scovner, on the other hand, let us know on the first day what he thought of rote learning--he held up the list of definitions and told us he had faith in our ability to memorize them on our own and had no intention of mentioning them again until the scheduled day of the test. He was, of course, younger than Mr. Ely and bore a striking resemblance to a semi-spiffed-up John Belushi, who had died that spring of an accidental drug overdose--a resemblance, incidentally, which we were forbidden to mention.

Other than that prohibition, though, Scovner ran a pretty loose classroom and many, many afternoons were taken up by conversation related to civics only tangentially, if at all.

One of those conversations was about how we thought the Tylenol poisonings might--or should--affect Halloween trick-or-treating that year. Scovner went around the room asking us whether or not we would hypothetically let our hypothetical children trick-or-treat this year. Some people said they would let their kids go, but just be extra thorough in checking the candy. Some people said they would only let their kids go to the houses of people they knew very well.

When Scovner came to me, I said, "You know, I don't think I'd let my kids go at all."

And Scovner said, "Not even to people you know?"

"Just because you know someone doesn't mean they're not weird," I explained.

And Todd Smith* piped up from across the room, "Yeah, like, we know you--and you're weird."

Heh. What do you suppose it means that that moment makes me giggle to this day?

*It's rather convenient when someone's given name is anonymous enough to play the part of a plausible pseudonym.

To Thine Own Selves Be True...

2011-12-28T23:59:00.009-05:00

"We're not the same personality with everyone. We adjust our self to each person we meet, each situation we're in. We have a flexible self. In fact, inflexibility of self--fixations, compulsions--we regard as unhealthy. Just as being able to focus hard, but also switch attention has aided our chances of survival, not having to be exactly the same self with everyone makes us more successful socially. Does that feel false? Not true to yourself? Only if you believe in a rigid self that's uniformly on view. If you accept that self is a plural noun, more like a repertoire than a statue, then featuring one side more with one friend or associate than another won't seem dishonest."

~~Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

One night during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I had three friends over to stay the night. This would be an unremarkable thing for most high school girls, but in my case, it was an occurrence so rare that to my recollection, this was the only time it happened during my entire high school career.

Due to a combination of borderline pathological shyness and moving around every couple of years, along with my deep interest in solitary pursuits like reading and writing, I was never really part of a larger group of friends. When I hung out with anyone at all, it was usually with one friend at a time and the few close friends that I did have knew each other barely, if at all.

This night not only brought together two New Hampshire friends who likely wouldn't have said hello to one another in the halls at school, but also a Pennsylvania friend who was on a two-week visit, whom neither of the other two had ever met. At this great distance, it is hard for me to imagine what the hell I was thinking bringing the three of them--with little more than me in common--together in such a small space.

Somehow we managed. We drove around singing loudly to the radio in Pasta's¹ car and when, in the middle of a Huey Lewis and The News song, my sarcastic friend June said, "What is this, the Benny Goodman quartet?" I responded, "It would be if you would shut up and sing--otherwise, we're just a trio."

Later, the Pennsylvania friend and I somehow discovered that neither of the New Hampshire girls had ever tasted that German delicacy sauerkraut² and we made a late night foray to Shaw's in Concord to grab a can. At the very least, sauerkraut should come from bags and be cooked in the oven all day long. This sauerkraut was plopped out of a can and simmered on the stove while we played cards nearby. Though I repeatedly warned the New Hampshire girls that the spoonfuls they wrinkled their noses up at were not really representative of the sauerkraut experience, I'm sure that first taste scared them off forever.

The morning after that night, I remember thinking how each of these friends appealed to a different side of my own personality. June was my intellectual, acerbic side; Pasta my juvenile, goofy side; and MommaCW my more mature, thoughtful side. I don't know that I had given much thought before then to how I tended to compartmentalize my friendships--and therefore little bits of myself, but ever since it's been one of those themes that my brain picks up from time to time.

It's like the six blind men and the elephant deal--how many of my friends would it take to paint a complete picture of who I am? Would anyone fully agree with anyone else? Is it ever possible to get to the whole truth of someone's self with only bits and pieces to go on?

The holidays--with all those gatherings of family and friends, who would likely not be in the same room otherwise--have a tendency to stir up this inner debate like little else.

I tend to think of myself, and I think many of us do, as being fairly straightforward and on the surface about most things, but there is no doubt that I manage--both consciously and subconsciously--the information I put out there. Just for two very obvious examples, I tend to tread lightly around the subjects of politics and religion, despite pretty strong opinions on both, unless I'm certain-ish I'm in sympathetic company. If I am asked a direct question on either subject, I will wiggle and hedge if I think I can get away with it--but I will not lie outright. I have become adept at noncommittal responses and subtle changes of subject, but if I am backed into the corner of having to share a personal feeling that I feel may offend or hurt someone, I try to do so as kindly as possible, always acknowledging their right to a different opinion.

Does this mean I am being "fake" or "false" with people? Or does it merely mean that no matter how strong my opinion is, I don't feel it's more important than a given person's friendship?

Of course, not all issues are as "life and death" as politics and religion. In certain relationships, we bond over a shared interest that might seem at odds with an interest I share with another person. Would I have talked about my deep (and embarrassingly enduring) love of CBS soap operas with the occasionally intellectually snobby women in my book group? Or would I have talked about the finer points of the symbolism in Cold Mountain with Cranky Boss Lady, whose reading tastes tended toward paperback suspense novels with recurring characters?

No and no. Does that mean that one or the other of these passions of mine--books and shallow TV programming--is somehow more representative of who I am than the other? And does talking about only one of those passions with someone make me "fake" or "false?" Is there any way to share every bit of ourselves with any one person in our lives? Would we if we could? Should we if we could?

I don't have any answers this year, but the questions just keep getting more and more interesting.

1. Two of the nicknames used here have been used previously on the blog for these fine ladies. The fourth--June--referred to herself as "That Cleaver Tramp" when she commented on the blog. We took to calling one another "June Cleaver" in our early days of stay-at-home motherhood and it's kind of stuck. I am happy to say that all three of these friends are still in my life in some capacity or other.

2. One of the many dangers of having a mind like a lint trap is that I have zero control over what gets stuck in there or when some fluffy bit might fly loose. In the case of sauerkraut, I rarely see, hear, or say the word without my brain kicking out the punchline of a naughty joke from the fourth grade: "Sauerkraut, sauerkraut, sauerkraut, two with wieners and one without." And that almost never fails to remind me of Son-One bringing home this doozy, also from fourth grade: "What do a Coke machine and Monica Lewinsky have in common?" ANSWER: They both say "insert bill."

'Tis The Season For Boundless Generosity

2011-12-27T23:57:00.002-05:00

The holiday stomach bug has passed from family member to family member here at Masked Mom's Headquarters; no one has escaped unscathed.

I stumbled into work yesterday to cover the couple of hours until a coworker would come into relieve me. He took one look at me and asked if I was okay.

"Stomach thing." I groaned.

"Look, I like you and I hope you get rid of it soon, but don't get rid of it by giving it to me. Go home."

So I did and I am mostly better, but still having that washed-out feeling these things always leave behind. Hence, the washed-out post. Here's hoping for something better tomorrow.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: The Little House Books

2011-12-26T23:10:00.007-05:00

In fourth grade, our teacher, Mrs. Wentz, read aloud to us the books from the Little House series, beginning with Little House in the Big Woods in the fall and ending the following spring with These Happy Golden Years. She did not read us The First Four Years, which had only recently been added to the boxed set version of the books--she said it was from an unfinished manuscript that had been left behind when the real Laura died and that it had been finished by her daughter Rose. She said she thought the book was too adult for our delicate nine-year-old selves, practically guaranteeing that the curious among us would immediately seek the book out.

And so it was that the first Little House book I read was actually an afterthought to the original series. Little Sister and I had gotten the boxed set as a gift from our grandparents the previous Christmas and I pried that slender volume out of the end of the box and read it in a day and a half. Then I began at the beginning and read the rest throughout that summer.

As so often happens, these books came to me at exactly the right time. We were living "out in the country" for the first time in our lives--seven miles from town, on a dirt road, our nearest neighbor out of sight down in a gully half a mile away (a good portion of that distance taken up by the driveways of our place and theirs). The property we were living on had been an active farm, there were outbuildings from another era--a milkhouse, chicken coops, several collapsing barns. At the top of the trail between the barns, a maple sapling had grown crookedly through the spokes of an abandoned wagon wheel, which was still attached to a broken piece of axle. There were work harnesses for horses hanging in one of the sheds--the neglected leather split and cracked into patterns that you could trace with a finger as though they were hieroglyphic messages from a not-terribly-distant past. When my father hung twin tire swings in the huge maple beside the driveway, I wasted no time naming them Trixy and Fly after the ponies Laura and Almanzo rode in The First Four Years.

Except for the dissonance of reading The Long Winter during the height of summer--lying on a blanket in the front yard in shorts and a T-shirt in 80-degree weather with birds singing and bees bumbling lazily nearby while I read of the extreme cold and tens of feet of snow that put the Ingalls family and the whole town in peril--it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting in which to read those books for the first time.

The "first time" because of course I read them again. And again. I'm not even sure how many times now I've read those books. And I sought out others as well both by and about Laura--in high school, I discovered On The Way Home, a travel diary of the trip Laura and Almanzo made from South Dakota to Missouri, where they would live out their lives and West From Home, a collection of letters Laura sent home to Almanzo in Missouri when she went to visit their daughter in San Francisco in 1915.

Later, when I was working at a bookstore (yes, not only am I an addict, I was briefly a dealer as well), a shipment came in that contained the book Little House In The Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings, a collection of Laura's newspaper and magazine pieces. It never even made it to the shelf. I wrote about my attachment to that book here.

Recently, my love of all things Laura was rekindled when, while blog-hopping, I learned of a book called The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, by Wendy McClure. I am only a few pages in to this book about Wendy McClure's passion for Laura and her quest to trace the journey of Laura's family, but I am delighted to find myself vicariously living in "Laura World" (as McClure calls it) once again.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Timeless.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Monday, September 5, 1983

2011-12-25T23:39:00.003-05:00

"Stick with me kid and we'll go places." If Garfield had only known what he was getting himself into...

I've always loved this snippet from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird¹: "I started writing sophomoric articles for the college paper. Luckily, I was a sophomore."

While digging around in Volume 1 of my journal to choose today's selection for Spiral Notebook Sunday, I had to remind myself several times that I was a sophomore (and a high school one at that) when I scribbled such immortal lines as "The president is on TV. He has just set Dr. Henry Kissinger up as 'special aid' in Central America. No one else seems to agree with that idea. What with as Ronald, dear, puts it--'the inaccurate stereotypes' about Kissinger. He is talking about Watergate. I am too young to remember--and have no idea what Kissinger had to do with it. (At this point I don't particularly care--I really wish RR would shut up and put A-Team on.)"

That little nugget is one of the more coherent paragraphs amid lots of song quotes, soap opera plot summaries, random shifts in subject and frequent tantrums about how the Army and/or my parents and/or my geometry/Spanish/French teachers and/or any and all of my siblings were ruining my life. I was reading awkward passages aloud earlier to Daughter-Only and commented that the style could really be called extreme stream of consciousness because there's so little filtering--it was clear I was writing whatever popped into my head at a given moment, often midway through a previous thought.

So that's the field from which I chose the following passage in which my mother lays down the law about the bickering among her four children.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday, September 5, 1983

Family discussion time---one of the really lovely one-sided ones where Mom tells us all what's wrong with us and gives us a lot of "or elses." Well, this time it's get along or else no Guiding Light. Well, no TV or Atari anyway. Which means no Guiding Light, which means no Grant², which means we're going to get along. But for me the threat is the only reason--Guiding Light is the one thing the Army can't take away. They took everything else, though, and wrecked my entire life! And Mom isn't much help, lately..."You're not in Pennsylvania anymore." and "You're living six to eight months in the past." and so on. It was a really lovely conversation, believe me...Don't think I don't realize that I'm being bitter, childish, bratty, unreasonable and living in the past. Because I do--I mean I would have to be dense to not realize it with everyone telling me so.

1. There are many, many writing books that I consider valuable, but really only two that I consider essential: and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott is one of them. Anne Lamott has a knack for delving right into the heart and soul of things and the book is full of wisdom that is applicable not just to writing, but--as the title indicates--to life as well. The other essential writing book (that also has includes some sneaky life lessons) is Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. I have owned multiple copies of both books because I have a tendency to give them away to anyone who shows the slightest interest in writing.

2. The actor who played Phillip Spaulding on Guiding Light and I were on a first name basis, obviously. Throughout this volume of the journal, he competes for space--handily holding his own--against various crushes from high school.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle...

2011-12-24T19:34:00.001-05:00

...not only is it good for the environment, when it comes to blogging in the middle of the holidays, it's very energy efficient. Here, a semi-holiday-themed post that originally appeared on November 27, 2007.

My How Times Have Changed

Many years ago, when I still had time and energy for a book group, a friend gave me a recipe for an appetizer to take to the pot luck night my book group had every September. It was extremely simple and very tasty--Uncle Ben's rice, chopped spinach and shredded Swiss cheese in fillo dough cups (in the grocery store freezer already formed, thanks very much) warmed in the oven. I was mixing the filling in a big bowl and it was all brown and green and admittedly resembled dog vomit more than anything you'd want for food. Two of the boys (Son-Two and Son-Three, I think) went by and Son-Three peeked over the edge of the bowl and said, "That's not for us to eat is it?!"

When I told him I was taking it for the book group, he said, "You must not like them very much."

Fast forward to last night, Thanksgiving Eve. Son-Three says with evident anticipation, "You are going to make those little spinach cups, aren't you?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Four years later, and those spinach cups continue to be a hit--at Baby Brother's for our extended family's Christmas gathering, the first four people who I talked to greeted me with "Did you bring spinach cups?" Even better, they were all under twelve. I don't know about you, but I applaud anything that can make children enthusiastic about spinach.

Risky Business

2011-12-23T17:07:00.002-05:00

Here at Masked Mom Headquarters, we're a big board game/card game type family and always have been.

Hubby and Baby Brother are big fans of the game Risk in all its variations--between the two households, we have at least seven different versions of the game including both the Lord of the Rings version and the Lord of the Rings trilogy version (which adds to the map from the original LOTR version) and I think Baby Brother even has a Star Wars version.

This battle raged on for over a week--set up on our dining room table.

I am not the biggest fan of Risk ever--while I enjoy the actual game play and even the overall length of the game doesn't bother me, the time between turns is absurdly long. There used to be a commercial for Boggle (the 3-minute word game) that riffed on that theme. It showed four people playing an unspecified board game and as one guy finished his turn, he said, "Okay, I'm going to go out now and rotate my tires while I'm waiting for my next turn."

My brain can't handle a lot of unengaged time like that--it begins to feast on itself, but that's an issue for another day. I used to play a lot more than I do now--out of pity for Hubby and Baby Brother--but once the boys got old enough to play along, I could decline an invitation without suffering guilt.

Still, the debate about whether I'm exaggerating the length of time between turns and the inherent boredom factor in the game comes up fairly often. Last weekend, Son-One was home for a night and Hubby, Baby Brother and Second Nephew lugged out the original Risk and we all got an unexpected reminder that I am not the only one who is distressed by the downtime between turns.

Team Green: Head and shoulders above the competition.

Years ago, when Son-Two was maybe eleven or twelve--old enough to know better, certainly--I glanced up at him at some point in one of Hubby's interminable turns and realized that he was systematically biting the heads off of all his cavalry pieces. This serial decapitation was not being done maliciously. In fact, it seemed Son-Two was sort of absent-mindedly working his way through the idle troops in his little plastic holder.

Despite not wanting to encourage vandalism, I couldn't help laughing a little--okay, okay, I laughed hysterically--at the sight of that line of headless horsemen, casualties of Son-Two's boredom. Hubby was not quite so amused.

And ten or so years later, once again embroiled in the is Risk as never-ending as Masked Mom thinks it is debate, we open the box to those headless horsemen and I start giggling uncontrollably all over again.

"See?" I say, "Risk takes so long to play Son-Two had to resort to cannibalism to sustain himself."

Liebster, The Sequel

2011-12-22T21:03:00.003-05:00

Shelby over at WOM: Working Mom was sweet enough to give me the Liebster Award--my second. If you haven't already met Shelby, check out her blog if you get the chance. It is full of helpful tips and glimpses of her life as the working mom of two.

According to the "rules" of the award, Liebster is the German word for "beloved" and it's an opportunity to try to bring some attention to bloggers with under 200 hundred followers. As part of the rules, we're supposed to pass the award on to 5 other bloggers whose blogs we love. I chose 5 for my first Liebster about a month ago and those choices can be found here.

Here are 5 more blogs I've discovered in the past few weeks that I've also come to love:

Is This The Middle?
Buttered Toast Rocks
Life...Minute By Minute
Mark's Work
By Nicole

If you haven't already visited these folks, they're definitely worth the click.

Today marks my fifty-second consecutive day of daily posts (a personal best)* and a big part of what's made those daily writings possible is the daily reading I've been doing. There's a tremendous amount of inspiration and support to be found among the wildly eclectic and talented group of people who have set up shop on this little corner of the internet--and maybe the internet doesn't really have corners, and maybe I'm just a little giddy from too much raw cookie dough and molten fudge, but I'm really grateful for the ever-growing community I find myself a part of.

*I mention this for two reasons. First, no one is more surprised than I am that I have somehow come here with something (not much some days, but something) to say for 52 days in a row. Second, I expect to drop that particular ball any minute now so I'm trying to fully revel in it while I've got the chance. Thanks for your patience.

I Heard A Rumor...

2011-12-21T22:02:00.000-05:00

...that high winds and pouring rain are interfering with our home internet service so just this quickie post from work tonight unless the internet's up and running again before midnight. Otherwise, back tomorrow with the post I hoped to post tonight.

I'll Tell You Mine If You Tell Me Yours

2011-12-20T23:50:00.003-05:00

One of the residents at work recently got a prescription for ciprofloxacin, brand name Cipro--also known as the anthrax antibiotic--to ward off a non-anthrax infection. When he was taking his first dose, I casually* mentioned that anthrax treatment was one of the things Cipro was best known for.

He raised an eyebrow and chuckled uneasily, joking, "Uh, I'm pretty sure I don't have anthrax."

I agreed that he probably didn't. Then I said, "Have you ever heard my anthrax story?"

He raised the eyebrow again, a little skeptically this time.

I said, "What? You mean not everyone has an anthrax story?"

Then I shared my anthrax story, which technically is Hubby's anthrax story, but one of the great fringe benefits of marriage is you automatically get a proprietary interest in each other's stories so...

At one time, Hubby had a hazardous materials certification and worked sporadically for a company that would send him to all sorts of emergency and remedial situations. He removed underground storage tanks from an abandoned gas station. He cleaned asphalt that had spilled into a creek when the nozzle at the back of a truck was not properly secured during the road workers lunch break. He assisted with chemical disposal at transfer stations on occasion.

In the fall of 2001, a series of letters containing anthrax spores killed five people and sickened seventeen others. Hubby was called to work on the clean-up of the postal facility in Trenton, NJ through which the letters had passed.

Daughter-Only, who was in first grade at the time, told one of her classmates, "My dad's in New Jersey doing something with anthrax."

Fast forward to mid-January, Hubby has been home and back to normal life for several weeks by this time. He has just gotten out of the shower when there's a knock on the front door.

It's an FBI agent. He wants to know what, precisely, Hubby was doing with anthrax in New Jersey. It was all cleared up in a matter of minutes, but it's a story that will last a lifetime.
*There is some question as to whether it's possible to mention anthrax casually, as the rest of this story will endeavor to show.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

2011-12-19T23:59:00.005-05:00

Last week, when I left former President Bill Clinton's book Back To Work: Why Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy on the counter in the staff office at work, one of my coworkers saw Clinton's face on the cover and assumed it was a memoir.

"Why are you reading about Clinton?" he asked me. "Don't you know how it turns out? He bangs his intern. Did you get to that part yet?"

Leaving aside the question of whether that's really appropriate office talk or not, his remark illustrates one of the more depressing things about Bill Clinton. The man had a stellar--though not perfect--record when it came to the economy. Among other things, when he left office, there was a budgetary surplus. A surplus! That's the opposite of a deficit. There was no deficit. And still, what people remember about him are his indiscretions and missteps.

This slim volume of economic analysis and advice is unlikely to change the minds of anyone still thinking of President Clinton as the guy who banged his intern. Worse than that--it's unlikely to reach the people who need to hear it most. Like a lot of books related even tangentially to politics, it will likely end up being more of a preach to the choir kind of thing--read primarily by people who agree with Clinton going in.

It's a shame, really, because the book is clear-eyed, well-researched, meticulously documented and full of common sense suggestions that legislators on both sides of the aisle would do well to take into consideration. Along the way, Clinton acknowledges his own mistakes and those of his fellow Democrats and he does not hesitate to give credit where it's due, even to the staunchest Republicans.

All of this in an easily readable and compact¹ package. A few bits that will stay with me:

~~"...fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and argument irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is a weakness. And if your policies fail, you don't abandon them. Instead you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme."

~~"The status quo is represented by much more powerful lobbying groups than the future is."

~~"No one can take the future away from us. But we can take it away from ourselves."²

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Thought-provoking.³

1. 196 6"x9" pages.
2. Emphasis his.
3. The hyphen makes two words one, right?

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Sunday, February 29, 2004*

2011-12-18T06:15:00.002-05:00

In this Sunday's excerpt from the Spiral Notebook Journal, in a spin on that old directive "Physician, heal thyself," our resident Nag nags herself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday, February 29, 2004

So despite my best efforts in October, I have once again allowed laziness and circumstances to overcome sense and my NEED to write. It could, of course, be argued that since I'm still, you know, technically, alive, "need" is the wrong word to apply to my urge, desire, or whatever, to write. By the same token, it could also be argued that the line between life and death is fuzzier than most people will acknowledge and being "technically" alive is not at all the same thing as living.

Writing a journal entry about journal entry writing is also not at all the same thing as writing a "real" journal entry.

*I mentioned in the opening post of this series that I began keeping the Spiral Notebook Journal in July of 1983. It is a complete fluke that all three of the offerings to this point have come from 2004. I found them in a wad of entries I had previously printed from the computer files I saved the journal to (from its handwritten origins) in 2005 and not from digging through the battered volumes themselves. But those typewritten entries (each saved with some specific purpose in mind--a purpose, needless to say, I have long since forgotten in most cases) cover several decades and still somehow I've cribbed notes from 2004 notes three weeks in a row. This is probably not as interesting or potentially significant as it seems to me at this moment. I am also probably not going to recall the promise I am about to make, which may be a blessing in disguise, but next Sunday, I promise to offer up something from that first spiral notebook, begun a few days before my fifteenth birthday.

Good News/Bad News

2011-12-17T19:53:00.000-05:00

Good news is my string of consecutive posts (welcome to #47, such as it is) remains unbroken.

Bad news is (due to being called in for two consecutive overnight (on my days off) shifts due to the illness of the regular overnight staff) this is the extent of that 47th post.

Good/bad news is I will have lots of time to kill on said overnight and will probably spend it leaving absurdly long comments all over the internet or attempting to write a semi-coherent post for tomorrow.

Holy Infidel Frog!

2011-12-16T23:31:00.003-05:00

Before I found my current job as Chief Nag at the halfway house, I spent ten years working in a small flower shop. Most of the time, there was barely enough business to keep the owner and I busy, but around the major holidays we needed extra help. Sometimes we would enlist the teenage children of family and friends to do what we called "hopping." A hopper would ride along on deliveries to take the flowers to the door while the driver turned the vehicle around, checked the route for the next delivery, and so on.

Before my own children were old enough to ride along, we had recruited the thirteen-year-old son of the owner's best friend who rode along with me on one particularly eventful trip. Our region was being hit by a major snow storm and while the areas we were driving in were relatively clear, we had the radio tuned to a Buffalo DJ who was reading an ever-expanding list of closing and cancellations.

At one point, Boy Hopper turned to me and said, "Wait! Did he just say Holy Infidel Frog Academy?!"

And, you know, in my semi-overwrought state (working retail during the holidays is full of wrought, trust me), I was pretty sure the DJ had said, "Holy Infidel Frog Academy." At that moment, it made as much sense as anything else I could think of.

As the DJ started at the beginning of the list for the umpteenth time, we cranked up the volume and were mildly disappointed to learn that it was the "Holy Infant of Prague Academy."

Some Signs Are Not As Clear As Others

2011-12-15T23:31:00.001-05:00

This photo that I took December 6, 2011 of a (cold-blooded) spotted salamander in the parking lot of Rite Aid in my corner of Western New York state is probably a sign of something (besides the obvious fact that I need to get a digital camera instead of relying on my crappy, outdated phone for pictures), I'm just not sure what.

(The fact that I've resorted to posting picture-based posts rather than more substantive ones two days in a row is definitely a sign that I'm having the kind of week that tends to hollow out my brain. Happily, today was the last day of my work week. Looking forward to recharging and catching up with visiting everyone else.)

Sign Me Up

2011-12-14T22:32:00.001-05:00

"Please wait to be seated...or I will smack you over the head with this heavy wooden sign."

"Your local grocery store--putting the 'quit' in Banquet since 1969."

"Don't hate me because I'm bueatyful."

By Any Other Name...

2011-12-13T23:57:00.005-05:00

As I've gushed several times on here in the past month or so, I've really been enjoying my bloggy renaissance--especially "meeting" new bloggy friends. One of those is cdnkaro over at four under 4 (plus two), who is juggling enough balls to make most of us dizzy and still somehow finding time to blog daily and visit other blogs and just be generally fabulous. Both of us were recently tagged with the "Tell Me About Yourself" award, which entailed telling seven things about ourselves and passing the award along to fifteen others.

Yesterday, cdnkaro posted "The Versatile Blogger Award," which had pretty much the same "rules" and passed it on to me.

As with cdnkaro, my blogging circle's limited diameter makes it virtually impossible for me to pass this on to fifteen others who haven't already received it in one or both of its forms. But I'm trying to expand the circle little by little and would like to pass The Versatile Blogger Award on to two worthy bloggers that have come into the circle recently.

One is sebtown294 who blogs over at In Search of a Title. I followed a comment she left here over to her post of some pretty amazing artwork and have been stopping back regularly since.

The other is Sarah who blogs over at My Life In Contradictions. I only "met" her a day or so ago when she "followed" me on Blogher, but I'm looking forward to getting to know her better.

Having just posted a 7 things list (not to mention posted 42 daily posts in a row), I feel like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of share-worthy things so decided instead to share 7 quotes that I think reveal a little something about how I see the world.

1. "I believe now that I wrote myself into life. Before I learnt how to do it I lived as if blind, forever raging against the dark. Learning how to write illuminated life itself for me, letting me see fully for the first time its shape and dimensions. Before I learnt how to write, I did not know who I was."

~~Susan Johnson, A Better Woman: A Memoir of Motherhood

2. "As I see it, we know we're truly grown up when we stop trying to fix people. All we can really do for people is love them and treat them with kindness. That goes for ourselves, too. That goes for ourselves, especially."

~~Phillip Simmons, Learning To Fall: The Blessings of An Imperfect Life

3. "What separates bliss and hell when you've got small children: about ten seconds."

~~Judith Newman, You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother

4. "Although my passion is for words, I also love playing with ideas, looking at something from as many sides as possible, lifting up an observation and shaking it to see if a revelation might fall out."

~~Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

5. "...when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation."

~~Michael Cunningham, The Hours

6. "She finally found grudges to be unwieldy things--hold those, and pretty soon you have to drop amusements to maintain your grudge grip; blow your energy on that and you may have none left for mischief."

~~Carrie Fisher, The Best Awful

7. "I wish I could leave a trail of gratefulness behind me that you could see, glowing thanks. I would pay to see the stars, but I never have to. This to me is one of those miracles."

~~Elizabeth Berg, True To Form

Masked Mom's Media Monday: All Over The Map

2011-12-12T19:40:00.039-05:00

A random-ish glimpse at some items that have found their way into my various collections:

5 CDs From The Rack Next To My Desk

1. Daryl Hall--Three Hearts In The Happy Ending Machine

2. Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler

3. Shaun Cassidy's Greatest Hits

4. Prince & The Revolution--Music From the Motion Picture Purple Rain

5. Melissa Etheridge--Breakdown

5 Songs From The Mix CD Currently In My Van's Player

1. The Wrights--On The Rocks¹

2. Jewel--Hands

3. John Sebastian--Welcome Back

4. Sheena Easton--Strut

5. Lifehouse--Whatever It Takes

5 Books Stacked On My Desk

1. Natalie Goldberg--Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

2. Mil Millington--Instructions for Living Someone Else's Life

3. Alice Hoffman--The Ice Queen

4. John Irving--The Imaginary Girlfriend

5. Marion Winik--Telling

5 Books Currently Checked Out On My Library Card

1. Wendy McClure--The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House On The Prairie

2. Rob Lowe--Stories I Only Tell My Friends

3. Bill Clinton--Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

4. Joan Didion--Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

5. Stephen King--On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(I actually own this title, but have not yet unpacked it since our move in April².)

5 Shows/Movies Saved In My DVR

1. O (recorded 9/22, still unwatched, though I have seen it before)

2. Parenthood (3 unwatched episodes)³

3. Once Upon a Time (1 episode, watched, but not deleted)

4. The Big Bang Theory (4 unwatched episodes)

5. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (6 unwatched episodes)

Oh, and one random number...

...randomly generated at Random.org, for the winner of the audiobook version of Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers:

1. #1 S. Stauss.

Thanks to everyone who entered with special thanks to number three, without whom the "random number generator" would've been the quarter in my pocket.

Masked Mom's One-~~Word~~-Line Review: Dorky and proud of it.

1. This link leads to the only audio/video clip I could find for On The Rocks, which happens to be an instructional video for line dancing. Maybe I just need to get out more, but the way the woman waves and smiles at the camera in the beginning just tickled me to death.

2. I have now further cemented my reputation as a somewhat questionable housekeeper by admitting that boxes from a move seven months ago remain unpacked.

3. Lesson learned the hard way*: if you are, say three, episodes behind watching a family drama, clicking on the show's home page in order to link to it for a blog post is a good way to expose yourself to LOTS of spoilers.

* And isn't that the best way to learn a lesson?

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Monday, December 27, 2004

2011-12-11T19:17:00.008-05:00

In this Sunday's offering, I ramble about some of the lingering effects of a childhood of Army Bratdom.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday, December 27, 2004

Finding myself moved to a new location or in the process of moving is a recurring theme in my dreams in the past few years. The only universal element in the dreams is the feeling of desperation and regret at being somewhere new. Whether I've made the decision to move or it's somehow understood that the decision was made for me, I'm always certain it's a terrible mistake. The anxiety of those moments is often intense enough to wake me up or instigate a change in the setting or circumstances of the dream.

It's amusing to me that my dreams seem to be addressing a decades-old anxiety (moving around, especially at the whim of the military bureaucracy) and at the same time reminding me not to take the stability of my current life for granted--even if that stability is largely geographical. As frustrated as I sometimes get with the circumstances of my life, there is no place I'd rather be--not merely because of the trauma and upheaval of moving, but because there is so much to leave behind. Family and friends first, but the comfort of a familiar area can't be overstated, especially to my Army Brat inner child. I often find myself reveling in the simplest things: for instance, I know four or five routes to get from here to the grocery store by car and at least that many by foot. It's a rare thing for someone to mention a street in town or a road in the lower half of the county that I can't picture immediately in my mind and tell you five aways to get there.

I have been here so long that I don't even have to think about where I'm going or how to get there. It has become ingrained, reflexive--a part of who I am. It is a sense of belonging built not only of people, but of place. I would imagine that people who had the luxury of growing up all in one place would be prone to take it for granted and even to feel stifled by it or resentful of it. I appreciate it to an almost geeky degree--I'm a total dork about it, if you must know.

Step One: Admitting I Am Powerless Over My Addiction

2011-12-10T22:46:00.003-05:00

"I'll just stay addicted and hope I can endure..."

~from Hooked On A Feeling

performed by B.J. Thomas, written by Mark James

Like most addicts, I've had nagging doubts about my ability to control my urges when it came to my drug of choice, but it wasn't until this week that I was forced to admit my life had become unmanageable in the face of my addiction. I have joked about it, minimized it, hidden it and even, sometimes, boasted about it in what I see now was a desperate attempt to cover up the devastating extent of my disease.

All that's over now--the protective armor of my deep denial was shattered this past week when I found myself standing in the rain at 11:14 p.m. in the parking lot behind the library with my right arm up to my shoulder in the mouth of the after-hours book drop.

After work Wednesday night, I had a pile of books on my front seat that I casually (but gently) tossed into the book drop on my way home from work. It wasn't until I started to get out of the van at home that I realized that the book I was in the middle of reading--Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire--was not where I had left it.

Of course, I had left it on the front seat of the van and when I'd gotten into the van at work, I'd reached into the back seat to grab the return pile to move them up front--my oh-so-clever attempt to not forget to drop them off--setting them on top of Out of Oz.

So that, rather than forgetting to return the books needing returned, I flippin' returned a book I not only wanted, but, in my humbly addicted opinion, desperately needed.

In hopes that the non-addicts among you may at least partially understand the depth of my distress at having accidentally returned this book, a few facts:

1. I am such a fan of the Wicked Years series, that when I unexpectedly found the third book (A Lion Among Men) on the shelf at the library (I'd had no "warning" it was coming out), I literally jumped up and down at the sight of it.

2. I have been eagerly (and impatiently) awaiting this fourth (and final) volume since I closed the third book in 2008--and even more impatiently since I found out the release date (Nov 1) a few months ago.

3. I was about fifty pages from the end of the (500+ page) book and all kinds of things were going on. I fully expected to finish that evening and was greatly looking forward to doing so.

4. At the time that I got the book, the library here in town didn't yet have a copy so it was ordered through the interloan system. If the book was actually removed from my account and sent back into the system, it could be a week or more before I could get the book back--longer if there were other patrons waiting for it. A week or more, people, of not knowing what the hell was happening to Rain and her cohorts. Simply unbearable.

So, for these reasons, when I realized I had inadvertently returned the book, I absolutely panicked. I immediately drove back to the library to see if it was possible to retrieve the book from the book drop.* I looked into the maw of the terrible beast and saw only darkness--and a metal grate that looked maybe a little like teeth. The grate was tilted toward the back of the book drop to ease the books gently into the bin at the back.

If I could just get my arm to the back of the grate, maybe my books were high enough up for me to reach a corner of Out of Oz. Maybe...(reach)...maybe...(stretch)...maybe...(ouch!)...

Maybe this manufactured emergency was about to become an actual emergency. Maybe I not only wasn't going to get the book back, maybe I wasn't even going to get my arm back...After the physics defying act of rotating my elbow in one direction while rotating my shoulder in another, I popped free and started to realize the wisdom of accepting what I clearly could not change.

If I couldn't get the book back right now, maybe I could stick a note in the book drop and ask the nice Library Ladies not to "return" it so I could pick it up in the morning. So I penned a quick note full of desperation and dropped it into the box, being careful to remove my arm as quickly as possible.

I am not sure what happened to the note--the Library Ladies never saw it, and it may still be hung up somewhere on the innards of the book drop monster. Regardless, the book was returned into the interloan wilderness sometime before the library opened at 10 the next morning.

Through a miracle of timing, though, I got a copy of the book back the next morning anyway because our library had gotten its own copy that very day and the fantastic Library Lady who answered my frantic call (two minutes after they opened) took sympathy upon me and set it aside for me to pick up.

But, you know, none of this means I have a problem, really. I mean, I can quit anytime I want.

Besides, what options do I really have? A twelve-step program? Where do you think all those steps come from?

That's right, a Big Book.

*I am not at liberty to explain why I know this, but it was possible to retrieve some books from the former book drop system--which was a little hatch in the front door of the library that dropped into a cart with a spring-loaded bottom that fell further as it got fuller. So, if your arm was long enough and your book hadn't slid too far down or back (or if, for a purely hypothetical scenario, the snow brush from your car was long enough to nudge a too-far-back book forward into arm's reach), it could be gotten back. Hypothetically. Ahem.

Puppet Masters: Kids Make Me Say The Darnedest Things

2011-12-09T23:12:00.002-05:00

Sometime in the past week or so (it's all become a beautiful, bloggy blur), I commented on cdnkaro's hilarious post "5 things I never imagined I would say...until I became a parent" about an essay I wrote (years ago) on the same topic. She suggested I share it and since it means less writing and more copying off my own paper, I'm happy to do so here.

This was originally written about nine years ago.

Puppet Masters: Kids Make Me Say The Darnedest Things

Let me assure you up front that I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe, for example, that the footage of 1969's mission to the moon was merely a clever fake. Nor do I believe that Elvis is still alive and in hiding somewhere--if he were, surely he would've done something when, in the '80s, the song "Love Me Tender" became the name of a dog food: Love Me Tender Chunks. ("Love me tender/Love me true/Feed me something new...")*

That having been said, it should be all the more alarming that there have been times when I've been completely convinced my children were plotting against me.

I crossed the threshold of parenthood--an institution if ever there was one--fourteen years ago and haven't had a day of peace since then. It is not merely that I haven't slept through the night in all this time, not merely that I haven't performed bathroom functions without company on one side of the door or the other in years. It is far worse than that. It seems I am at my children's mercy in more than just the usual ways.

Somehow--maybe a chemical agent in their construction paper creations--my children have gained control of my mouth. They make me say things I never dreamed I would say.

We all had lists of things we swore we, as parents, would never say to our children--things we heard often growing up: "Because I said so." and "If you all don't straighten up, I am going to turn this car around right now." and "If you're not careful, your face will freeze like that." That's just a partial list of things we knew for a fact we wouldn't stoop to say to our own children. Of course, the list and our principles often go right out the window when we're face-to-face with a three-year-old screaming at a pitch that could shatter glass or we find ourselves driving around town with a car full of children who, from the sounds of it, are reenacting the gorier scenes from Lord of the Flies just beyond the sight range of the rearview mirror.

Things have gone a step further than that in my house, though. In the past fourteen years, not only have I said--often loudly--all the things I promised never to say, I have said things that, were they overheard, could earn me a quick trip in a tight jacket to a soft room.

I have said, "What would you like me to do, write Disney?" when my oldest son, at age eight, repeatedly pointed out that the parrot in Disney's Aladdin had teeth, when real parrots so clearly do not. To which my son replied, "Yes, please, and while you're at it, tell them the lobster in Little Mermaid would only have been that red if it had been cooked."

To the emergency room staff, I have said, "My son swallowed a boutonniere pin." about this same son, who, at twelve, should've been well beyond the stage where choking hazards consume a parent's every waking moment. I was comforted to hear that my son wasn't the only one to carry the oral fixation past toddlerhood and into puberty--only the week before, a woman across town had had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on her six-foot-two-inch, seventeen-year-old son, when he accidentally swallowed a Lego building block he'd been absent-mindedly chewing while doing his homework. I can only imagine the sentences that came out of her mouth, once the danger had passed. Both boys escaped without permanent damage. Two years later, the verdict is still out on their moms.

To my second son, then eleven, who was repeatedly and fruitlessly running over the same piece of string with a soft-sided vacuum cleaner that clearly had no suction for a fairly obvious reason, I blurted, "When the vacuum cleaner looks eight months pregnant, it's probably time to change the bag." It's an indication of how far things have deteriorated that the phrase sounded perfectly logical in my brain. It was only after the words were loose in the open air that it sounded a bit, well, off.

Over the years, I have also said, "Son-Three, don't milk the dog." In my defense, my youngest son was, in fact, milking the dog. Our beagle had had puppies a few weeks before. Son-Three, then four, came upon her while she was resting on the sofa, the only place she could get any peace from the constant demands of her litter. She was lying on her side, teats exposed. Son-Three squeezed the nearest teat and a stream of milk shot across the coffee table. Still, "Don't milk the dog." is not the kind of thing you're prepared to hear yourself say.

To this same child, around the same time, I said, "Son-Three, don't swing from the chandelier." I felt I had stumbled into the punch line of a bad parenting joke when I came upon him literally swinging from the chandelier in the dining room. We moved the dining room table after that, and raised the chandelier, just to have to avoid speaking that sentence again.

My daughter, at eight, the youngest of my children and the only girl, has only recently come into her own in this department. Just a month ago, I had to say to her, "Don't rub bread on your face." She was standing in front of me holding two slices of bread, waiting for a gap in my phone conversation, apparently intending to ask what sandwich fixings were available when she began rubbing a slice of bread on either side of her face. Strangely, in all the years I devoted to daydreaming about the warm, wonderful, soul-searching conversations I might have with my children, and all the hard-won wisdom I imagined I might one day pass on to the next generation, the phrase, "Don't rub bread on your face." didn't play a major part.

When these illogical and unexpected phrases began popping out of my mouth at an alarming rate--looking back, around the time the first of my children became mobile--I couldn't help but be a little concerned. Was parenthood too much for me? Was my mind going? Worse, were the increasingly odd things coming out of my mouth an indication that our lives were spinning completely out of control?

With each passing year, though, I've come to see the odd phrases and the moments that inspired them not as symptoms, but as gifts. No, I am not exactly the parent I dreamed of being, nor are my children the spunky, but angelic tykes I fantasized giving birth to in my pre-parental days. But the reality is so much more entertaining, educational, and, yes, soul-enriching than the cardboard cutout daydream version would have been. And, maybe my kids are making me say this, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*This was not part of the original essay, but as I was typing this, it occurred to me that even if Elvis were willing to let the damned dog food thing slide, Lisa Marie's bizarre and blessedly temporary marriages to Michael Jackson and then Nicholas Cage would surely have spurred him into revealing himself.

Listen Here--A Giveaway!

2011-12-08T13:00:00.003-05:00

Updated: The audibook goes to...S. Stauss! Thanks for stopping by.

After the Masked Mom's Media Monday review of Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, I was contacted by the nice folks at Macmillan Audio, who asked me to spread the word about the audio version of the book by giving away a copy of said audiobook to one of my "loyal readers." You need not be terribly loyal to win--just let me know in the comments that you're interested and in a few days, we'll randomly generate a number with a random number generator and contact the winner who will receive the book directly from Macmillan Audio.

In the meantime, you can (I hope) preview an audio clip by clicking here.* Or, find more information about the audiobook by clicking below.

*I am generally pretty easy to please--especially when it comes to FREE blogging sites, but the fact that I just spent three hours poking around the shadier neighborhoods of the Internet (and sold a tiny piece of my soul, I'm pretty sure--though Hubby assures me I have a large enough soul to spare a little, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) and STILL couldn't find a way to embed an audio clip into a post successfully has made me a LITTLE irritable. I have settled instead for linking to the clip that is linked onTom Perrotta's page. Don't be surprised if, instead of hearing the first few lines of the audiobook, you are whisked away into Medieval Europe or the year 2413, a year in which, I hope, people can easily embed audio even in FREE blogging sites.

I'm Tellin'...

2011-12-07T23:24:00.002-05:00

The "kinda nerdy, happily wordy and bookishly dorkalicious" (all true and all stolen from her blog header) Word Nerd tagged me for the "Tell Me About Yourself" award, which involves sharing seven things about myself and then passing the award on to fifteen other bloggers. Here's the badge that comes with the award--I'm posting it here in spite of the fact that, based upon information she provided when notifying me of this award, posting it may contracturally obligate me to provide the Word Nerd with cookies. I actually enjoy baking--and I'm not even going to cheat and try to use that as one of my seven things.

I am, however, going to be a gigantic slacker on the passing the award on--I have only recently begun actively blogging again and pretty much everyone I "know" well enough to pass this on to is already on someone else's list. But I will highly recommend clicking over to Word Nerd's list of 15 and checking out some of the great writing and great bloggers listed there.

And of course, I would love to get to know better some of the bloggers who are not on that list who have recently been stopping by here. Anyone who is game, feel free to grab the badge (No cookies necessary--I'm more of a cupcake girl.) and link to your seven things in the comments here.

And now, at long(ish) last, my seven things:

1.As I pulled into work this afternoon, I was listening to the theme song from "Welcome Back Kotter". On purpose.

2. I did a 20 Things About Me post in 2005. I was going to cheat off myself and repost some of them, but I'll just link to it here instead.

3. I work at a halfway house for recovering addicts and alcoholics. My biggest struggle at work is dealing with residents in their late teens or early twenties--near or at the ages of my own sons. They always break my heart a little. Sometimes they break it a lot.

4. My DVR is set to record every episode of The Young and The Restless. I am currently 23 episodes behind, but I know I will eventually binge and get "caught up." Most of the time, I have no idea why I watch it even while I'm watching it, but I have so far been unable to stop.

5. For weeks after I finished Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, I couldn't talk or think about the book without getting actual goosebumps. It was the closest I've come to writing a fan letter since the one I sent to Melissa Gilbert in fifth grade. I still kind of regret not following through.

6. The fan letter I sent to Melissa Gilbert in fifth grade was part of a school assignment and had less to do with Melissa Gilbert herself and more to do with Melissa Gilbert as the embodiment of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose books I read over the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I still feel a weird attachment to Melissa and even read her memoir, A Prairie Tale.

7. I consistently mix up fours and sevens. Despite my ever-advancing age, I still have a pretty good memory for names, faces and numbers generally, but somewhere in my brain there are some crossed wires between sevens and fours--my mind retains them interchangeably and has for as long as I can remember. So I never quite trust myself with any number that includes either of those two digits. I have the same problem with the words "lawn mower" and "vacuum cleaner"--it requires conscious effort on my part to spit out the correct word.

You Say Potato, I Say What The Hell Are You Talking About?!

2011-12-06T23:51:00.001-05:00

Growing up an Army brat, I became accustomed to regional differences in speech. What was a "soda" one place was "pop" in another and "tonic*" in still another. Though these differences occasionally tripped me up (an example of which is coming soon), I mostly thought of them as quirky linguistic flavoring and collected the best of them, some of which are still with me.

For example, before I lived in Mr. High School's hometown in central Pennsylvania, I always put "soon" after the verbs in my sentences, like pretty much everyone I'd ever known--"I'll be leaving soon." By the time I moved away (the first time), I was mostly putting it before the verb, like everyone I was close to in that area did--"I'll soon be leaving." I have long since reverted to my default of after-the-verb, but every once in a while, a before-the-verb will slip out and make me all nostalgic.

Not all linguistic differences are created equally, though. Growing up primarily in towns around Pennsylvania, I pronounced--and still do--the word "aunt" the same way I pronounce the insects that live in hills. When I was in ninth grade, we moved to New Hampshire, where everyone pronounced it like the word "on" with a "t" stuck on the end. Of course, I had been aware that it could be pronounced that way--maybe even that it should be pronounced that way or may, at least, have been intended to be pronounced that way. But! That was not the way I pronounced it.

I couldn't bring myself to pronounce aunt "their" way, but neither could I bring myself to pronounce it "my" way for fear of being made fun of--a valid concern considering that I was badgered for months after moving about my so-called "Southern" accent. My understanding of "Southern" and theirs differed, of course. But I had little ground to stand on in that department, since Pennsylvania was, technically, south of New Hampshire--and apparently everything south of New Hampshire qualified as "Southern."

The point being, the entire two and a half years I lived in New Hampshire, I never once used the word aunt in mixed company. When I spoke about one of my (many, many) aunts, which was admittedly not often and probably less so under the circumstances, I always referred to her as "my mother's sister" or "my mother's brother's wife" or whatever verbal gymnastics were required to avoid that damned four-letter word.

After those years of bouncing around, I am still fascinated, though rarely shocked, to find that people from different areas have new and different ways of saying things, which brings me to tonight's story.

Recently, I pulled the halfway house van (commonly called, among the guys themselves, the Druggy Buggy--another turn of phrase that was novel when I first heard it) alongside the curb at the grocery store to wait for several residents. I was chatting with the residents who were already in the van when a man I had never seen before came to the window on my side and shouted, "Next time, instead of giving me the finger, maybe you should use your signal!" and then stormed away.

I was too stunned to respond and to this day have no idea who he thought I was or how he could've mistaken our very large, bright red van for any other very large, bright red van (there's not another in town, to my knowledge--in a town of right around 5,000 people, I'm pretty sure I would've spotted it by now) or me for any other driver from the halfway house, for that matter.

In any case, I was sort of sitting there with my mouth hanging open, figuratively if not literally, when the resident in the passenger seat beside me said, "You didn't finger him, did you?"

Uh, no, no I did not.

*I'm not sure if it's still true, but when I moved to New Hampshire in the '80s, "tonic" referred not merely to "tonic" but to any old soda.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta--UPDATED

2011-12-05T23:57:00.007-05:00

"We are like sheep without a shepherd,

We don't know how to be alone,

So we wander 'round this desert,

And wind up following the wrong gods home."

~~from Learn To Be Still

performed by The Eagles, written by Don Henley & Stanley Lynch

Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers opens in the aftermath of the disappearance (literally into thin air) of millions of people around the world. The official word is "It was a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn't appear to have been the Rapture." The event scientists, pundits, and politicians dub the "Sudden Departure" is interpreted--and used to advantage--in a variety of ways by different groups and individuals worldwide.

The suburban town of Mapleton, where most of the action takes place is home to a chapter of the "Guilty Remnant," a cult-like group who believe the "Sudden Departure" was the Rapture and have taken it upon themselves to "save" as many of the left behind as possible. The outward behavior of the group's members is distressing. They wear white, constantly smoke cigarettes in public, maintain strict vows of silence, and wander around town in pairs at all hours of the day and night as "Watchers," silently monitoring the behavior of their former friends and neighbors: "They just stood there, calm and expressionless, sucking on their cigarettes. It was supposed to remind you that God was watching, keeping track of your smallest actions--at least that was what Kevin had heard--but the effect was mostly just annoying, something a little kid would do to get on your nerves." As the story progresses and one of the main characters, Laura Garvey, becomes more deeply involved with the Remnant, the creepy and inconvenient outward behavior of its members pales in comparison to the sinister goings-on behind the scenes of Guilty Remnant.

The central characters in the book--Laura Garvey and her husband, Kevin, and college-age son, Tom, and teenage daughter, Jill, each deal with the cataclysmic shift in their understanding of the world in their own separate ways and each choice has its own set of consequences.

The search for meaning is practically universal, especially in the wake of incomprehensible events. Where and how we seek those answers may reveal as much about us as any external "answers" ever could. Desperation for answers can lead us into some desperate situations, as the Garveys learn in the course of the book.

With characters who take different "sides" in some of the essential questions about life--the search for meaning, the importance and place for faith, how (and whether) to carry on in the face of incapacitating grief--it would've been easy for Perrotta's characters to drift into caricature, to become two-dimensional representations of polar opposite positions. Instead, as was true in his previous work The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta shows us not just how people are, but how they may have gotten that way. It helps us to understand that even people with whom we most vehemently disagree may be just doing the best they can.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Recommended.

Find information about the audiobook and the opportunity to win a free copy here.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Wedndesday, September 8, 2004

2011-12-04T22:38:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Spiral Notebook Sunday." (a.k.a. "I promised to post every day in December after posting every day in November, so I will be resorting to whatever desperate measures necessary to put up a post every day, including, but not limited to, a weekly posting of random scraps from my spiral notebook journal, a work in progress begun in July of 1983 Sunday," but that wouldn't fit in Blogger's title box.)

Here's this week's offering, in which I muse about puberty and girly bits. Consider yourself warned.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Daughter-Only and I were sitting in the van in the grocery store parking lot waiting for Hubby to pick out videos and, out of the blue, she says, "I have a scratch on my nipple and it really stings!"

I mention this because I'm tickled that she would casually mention a stinging nipple--this in sharp contrast to my own deep phobia at that age (ten) and many others about my body, and especially, about speaking aloud about any portion thereof to anyone including (and perhaps especially) my mother. My mother never really gave me any reason to feel embarrassed or ashamed about my bodily functions--she was always letting me know I could come to her about anything, absolutely anything...[still] I had my doubts about spilling the beans about anything remotely related to my body and anyone else's and anything those bodies might be prone to do.

To illustrate the extent of my secrecy regarding such things, two stories:

I had my period for three months before my mother found out about it--and she found out then completely by accident. I hid what pads I used by rolling them up and sticking them inside empty bleach and laundry detergent bottles--in the days before recycling, they went out with the caps on, in the regular trash, so it was quite a clever hiding place. There was a brownish smudge in a pair of my panties that Mom noticed while doing laundry.

She was standing in the center of a pile of dirty clothes in the laundry room when she called me down from my room. She asked me about it and I sheepishly admitted that it had been going on for three months. I will never forget the look on her face--her disappointment and her struggle not to let it show.

Around the time I was thirteen, I was staying at Nanny's and Pappy's when I got this huge lump on my left breast. I assumed it was likely cancer and I just knew I would rather die of it than talk to anyone about it, undergo the necessary examination, expose my newly hatched B-cup breast to my mother, let alone a total stranger. I sat in front of Nan's vanity mirror, gazing into my own tragic eyes, contemplating the things that would be said about me at my funeral--how noble I had been to suffer in silence to spare my family the pain of my illness. Being the musings of a thirteen-year-old, there was a singularly self-indulgent note to the selflessness of my decision to go bravely into that dark night all alone. Of course, two minutes into this morbid fantasy, my tumor began to itch like crazy and it crossed my mind that it might be a mosquito bite--one of perhaps thirty-five I had at that moment. (The irony of a mosquito on what Pap had until recently referred to as my "mosquito bites" did not escape my attention even in my turmoil over my until a moment ago terminal illness.)

My point--lost in my meanderings--was that I literally would have DIED rather than mention my boob to my mother--at least in that moment, I was convinced I would rather waste away than speak up.

So, when Daughter-Only said to me, "I have a scratch on my nipple and it really stings," not only without a hint of discomfort, but without even a giggle or a smirk, I thought it was amazing.

In light of the fact that I don't hold my mother accountable for my own reticence on these subjects, I can't very well take credit for my daughter's openness and comfort. I think a fair portion of it can be chalked up to innate personality characteristics of each of us. Daughter-Only is simply more "out there" in every single way than I was at her age (or so many other ages as well--in fact, she's more open in lots of ways than I am even now).

As I said, my mother was always encouraging me to confide in her, to not be afraid to ask questions about anything and so on. (She was so earnest, in fact, that my silence became a weapon I could use against her in our power struggles--the most effective weapon.) She never let me doubt that she was available or that my body and bodies in general were anything but natural, normal and good.

I have gone in a different direction with Daughter-Only and the boys--whether by accident or by design--I have made issues like these a part of our everyday lives. It isn't an event to have a conversation in which words like masturbation or whatever come up. I guess the difference between my mother and me is that she wanted desperately to be comfortable with subjects like sex and the body, but she had no foundation in her own childhood on which to base that comfort. I had the foundation--and though I was unwilling or unable to take advantage of the invitation to share with my mother, my children are now benefiting from it. I think my mother would be gratified to know that all her efforts hadn't gone to waste.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS--This afternoon, when I asked Daughter-Only, who is now 17, for permission to use this entry, since it all began with a scratch on her nipple, she had only one reservation. She said, "The reason I feel more comfortable talking about things with you than you did with your mom has nothing to do with how different our personalities are. It has to do with our relationship. Most of my friends don't have the kind of relationship with their moms that I have with you."

I'm thinking of reminding her of this conversation the next time she's enumerating all the ways I'm ruining her life.

All I Need Is A Lobotomy...

2011-12-03T22:45:00.001-05:00

I spent the afternoon power shopping with Daughter-Only and Second Niece, who were looking for dresses for their work Christmas party, which, naturally, was tonight. We were very pressed for time--having left the house at 11 to get to a mall a little over an hour from home and ideally hoping to be back home by 3:30 or so, dresses in hand. That in itself was probably a fool's errand, but the fact that the only (semi-)rational adult on hand (me) is, even at this mature age, still pretty much the tomboy she's always been didn't help things much.

Both girls had picked their dresses and we were poring over leggings, stockings, and tights when Second Niece looked across the top of the rack at me and said, "How are tights sized? Are they the same sizes as pants?"

Tights? I haven't worn tights since kindergarten. They're not part of my required uniform.

"Uh...I really have no idea. You'd probably get the same quality of information grabbing any random guy walking by and asking him."

Luckily, we spotted the sizing chart on the back of the package. We were a little late getting back, but at least the tights fit.

Class Warfare? Now That's Rich

2011-12-02T22:01:00.005-05:00

"Take a step back and see the little people,
They might be young¹,
But they're the ones that make the big people big.
So listen, as they whisper 'What about me?'"
~~from What About Me?
~~performed by Moving Pictures, written by Garry Frost & Frances Swan

Today, let's talk about income disparity. Let's talk about the stubbornly high unemployment rate², despite the ever-increasing wealth of the alleged "job creators." Let's talk numbers, statistics, economic cause and effect.

Just kidding. This isn't that kind of blog. If you want that kind of stuff, there's no shortage of places to find it on the internet. And, just to get you started, here's a link to a page replete with graphs and even a gratuitous shot of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko sucking on a big cigar.

It's not that Masked Mom³doesn't care about numbers, it's just that she cares more about people. And have no doubt, there are lots and lots of people behind those numbers.

Some of those people are the ones who have loosely organized themselves into the "Occupy" movement. I say loosely since it has been commented upon repeatedly in the press that there seems to be no central organizing body behind the movement--just discontented people doing what they can to make a point.

In the beginning of the movement--before the concerns deepened to public health and safety⁴, one of the chief gripes heard from politicians and pundits was that the Occupy protesters had no coherent complaint, no clear list of demands. This baffled me. Maybe this is just "mom logic," but to me, their underlying message was extremely clear: "We exist. Pay attention."

Not surprisingly, my second favorite⁵ line of comments came from the same group of politicians and pundits who feigned such confusion about what the Occupy protesters stood for. Cries of "class warfare" came from all corners. The protesters were targeting the achievers, gunning for the job creators, undermining the upper class from which all good things, theoretically, trickle down.

On its surface, this accusation was absurd--it was clear, and only got clearer as things went along, that the protesters posed zero immediate threat to the status quo of the upper-class, high-achieving job creators. They were disorganized, after all, and completely lacking the resources to meet their alleged opponents on the traditional fields of battle--courtrooms, legislatures, the places where things actually get done. They could be (and were) dispersed as soon as their protests became too much of an inconvenience, er, threat to public health and safety.

Deeper down, the class warfare accusation becomes only more absurd and here's why. Class warfare absolutely exists in this country, but it is not peacefully protesting what you see as a long-standing imbalance in our economic system.

Class warfare is using the advantages you have--whether they are earned, bestowed, or the product of a seriously imbalanced system--to influence legislation to further tip the balance in your favor. Class warfare is pressing for deregulation and yammering on about smaller government while at the same time accepting ludicrous subsidies for yourself and your business. Class warfare is having not just enough, not even just more than enough, but more than you could spend in a lifetime and rather than being grateful, you do all that you can to get more, more, more, often at the expense of the very people (whether as labor or consumers) who contributed to your wealth in the first place. And class warfare is, most especially, blaming those people for the misfortune you not only may have had a hand in helping to create but, in some cases, actively benefited from.

One of the most high profile blame-the-poor-for-their-poverty remarks came, of course, from candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination Herman Cain, who said, in an interview, "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks--if you don't have a job, if you're not rich, blame yourself."

While Cain's version garnered more attention and was, perhaps, blunter than most, the blame-the-poor stance is a popular one⁶. Blaming the "victim" is a useful strategy in many instances, first because it absolves us of any culpability as well as any moral responsibility to help to alleviate the problem. And second, because it offers us the illusion of immunity to a similar fate. In order to protect ourselves, all we need to do is avoid making the same mistakes those losers did.

In this case, those "mistakes" include such foolish errors in judgment as being born poor, choosing to toil away in a job market where hard work all too often equates to barely a subsistence wage, devoting yourself to the wrong company at the wrong moment in history, failing to anticipate the catastrophic illness of yourself or a family member for whom you are responsible and a whole host of other socioeconomic "choices" the more fortunate are largely unacquainted with.

The gap between the richest Americans and "the rest of us" is more than merely financial. And closing that gap seems essential to any lasting change in a system that, if not broken, at least works significantly better for the few than for the many.

If we can't close that gap by appealing to the compassion of those the Occupy movement refers to as the 1%--and it's evident based upon remarks like Cain's that we cannot--then we need to keep looking for another way. Common sense--the idea that what benefits the smallest among us benefits all of us, both in practical terms such as disposable income, and in more intangible ways such as a more stable society--seems to also fall on deaf ears. (Ears perhaps deafened by years of rah-rah cheering for a top-down economic theory that demonstrably has not worked as promised.)

So maybe the only tack left is to appeal to the one thing human beings in general and the wealthiest individuals in particular seem to have no shortage of: the instinct for self-preservation. If we can't sell changing the system with compassion or common sense, perhaps we can sell it as being in their best interests. Sooner or later, these other people who have worked so hard just to stay right where they are or maybe even to find themselves losing ground, these people who live, if they're lucky, from paycheck to paycheck--these 99%--are going to show up at the doors of the people they feel, rightly or wrongly, should've done more. Pushed to their limits, they may become the angry villagers of a hundred cliched movie scenes, wielding torches and pitchforks.

So far, we've been lucky--the pitchforks and torches have been figurative⁷. How long can that luck hold out?

1. Or not.

2. In my e-mail inbox this morning: news that the official unemployment rate dropped to its lowest in 2 1/2 years: 8.6%. You don't have to understand much about fancy economic theories to understand that a world in which an 8.6% unemployment rate is hailed as good news--Breaking News according to the LA Times--is a scary world indeed. Particularly when you take into consideration that that 8.6% includes only people who are still actively looking for work--not those who have given up completely or who are currently "underemployed" with part-time employment when they want or need full-time or employed in a much lower paying field than they are actually qualified for.

3. Masked Mom is also not the sort of blogger who routinely refers to herself in the third person and she promises not to do it again in this post.

4. How much of a threat these individuals posed to public health and safety is certainly up for debate--in some instances it seemed, admittedly from afar, that the issue was less a real health or safety threat and more a "Damn! You're really getting on our nerves!" issue, which became a "We have all the power--let's prove it." issue in far too many instances.

5. Where favorite is defined as "things that have an unparalleled ability to annoy the crap out of me."

6. Another popular stance (on both sides, I admit, but here's an example from only one) is juvenile name-calling. The Facebook Friend of a Facebook Friend of mine commented on my friend's status update ("Idealism dies a hard, bitter death.") with the remark: "Idealism is the goal of mob rule. Just look at the Occutards." Not only was it mean-spirited, it was only tangentially related to the original status so, therefore, pointlessly and unnecessarily mean. (Pointless aside to an already pointless footnote: My response to "Idealism dies a hard, bitter death." was "Ah, but the parties you can have on its grave..." And also? I could use some more cheerful Facebook Friends.)

7. The fact that literal weapons--pepper spray and billy clubs--were used in response to figurative ones (posterboard and tents) makes me literally sick to my stomach.

Crickets

2011-12-01T23:37:00.001-05:00

During this past month of daily blogging, I have spent some time poking around in nearly seven years of my archives and I was reminded that at a certain point in the history of this little blog, I was part of a small circle of bloggers who visited each other regularly, rooted one another on in writing and in life, and in short became, somehow, more than merely faceless strangers at the other end of some cyber connection.

When I click the links on the comments from those old posts, they lead mostly to dead ends--non-existent profiles, blogs that haven't been updated in three or four years, unclaimed domains that are available at a low, low price. Most of my bloggy friends from those early days have been reabsorbed into their "real" lives, leaving barely a trace. This happened so gradually that I barely realized it at the time--absorbed as I was in some of my own "real" life distractions. It felt like I just looked up one day and everyone had snuck out of the room.

I've never seriously considered "closing up shop," but a ridiculous amount of time often passed between posts. As I mentioned in an earlier post this month, NaBloPoMo posts have consistently outnumbered posts from the rest of the year combined.

Worse, I have rarely commented on any of the many, many blogs I have saved in a favorites file--blogs I discovered after the quiet collapse of my first little blogging community, blogs I continue to read with regularity. Commenting on an established blog--especially one with a group of regular commenters feels a little like crashing a party. And, too, the idea that someone might click the profile link on my comment and find her way back to my blog and find a six-month-old half-hearted post didn't make commenting any easier.

All of this is to say that this month's NaBloPoMo and especially the opportunity it's provided to make new bloggy friends has really been a salve on my poor little blogger's soul. I'm looking forward to whatever's next.

With A Whimper*...

2011-11-30T23:13:00.001-05:00

...is not exactly the way I was hoping to end this year's NaBloPoMo, but I am still at work and unsure when I will be able to leave so better with a whimper than without a sound.

*If I were feeling more inspired and less exhausted, I would rewrite The Hollow Men with a NaBlo theme instead of just stealing a bit of its final line. Maybe next year...

Masochistic Nostalgia Highway, Mr. High School Exit

2011-11-29T23:40:00.003-05:00

"Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway."

~~Sloane Crosley in "The Pony Problem"

~~from I Was Told There'd Be Cake

I'm pretty sure I still think about him too much. I'm not sure a formula exists to calculate the exact right amount that a 43-year-old married mother of four should spend thinking about her high school crush. I mean, what variables would it take into account? But whatever the formula is or would be, I'm pretty sure I'm on the wrong side of it.*

Maybe it helps my case that he wasn't only a high school crush, but also a grown-up friend though only fleetingly. I only know that in spite of the fact that he has been gone for six years, I am still saving up little bits of things I want to tell him the next time we talk. There is still a slew of songs I can't hear without wincing a little. His voice, our voices together, still reverberate in my head sometimes--all the things we said and all the ones we didn't.

Our lives are assembled from the smallest moments--moments that fit together like interlocking pieces so tightly that the seams are indiscernible. Sometimes the pattern of our lives seems as inevitable, as predictable as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together to make the picture on the box.

But the seams are there whether we can make them out or not. And the pieces we have to choose from while not infinite are more numerous and more varied than we sometimes remember. I think that's part of why my mind goes back again and again to the places where those seams are--to the times when those other choices, those other moments, those other possible selves still existed.

There is something about realizing how different everything could've been that makes me appreciate the way things are all the more.

*T > S where "T"=The Current Quantity of Masked Mom's Thoughts About Mr. High School and "S"=How Much MM Should Be Thinking About MHS. Speaking of mathematical equations to solve life problems, you would probably be better off checking out this Dear Sugar column than trying read this post.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: The Breakfast Club

2011-11-28T23:34:00.005-05:00

I can't remember when, exactly, I first saw The Breakfast Club, the 1985 movie from writer/director John Hughes about five teenagers who walk into Saturday detention as stereotypes and walk out with a deeper understanding of themselves and each other.

I know that it was one of the first movies I ever saw on VHS and that I watched it at my friend, Pasta's* house and I think we may have rented Purple Rain that same day. Depending on when the Breakfast Club video came out, it may have been as early as late 1985 or as late as early 1987. In any case, in the twenty-something years since then, I have seen Purple Rain exactly one other time. The Breakfast Club? I've lost count.

So, let's dispense with all illusions of objectivity here and get right down to it:

Ten Reasons The Breakfast Club Is One of The Top Ten Movies of All Time

1. It opens with this quote from David Bowie: "...And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through."

2. "You see us as you want to see us--in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions."--Brian, the Brain in the opening and closing narratives, which are excerpts from the "Who Do You Think You Are?" essay they've all been assigned to write.

3. "It's sort of social--demented and sad, but social."--Bender, the Criminal in the conversation about social clubs vs. academic ones.

4. "I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need is a lobotomy and some tights." --Bender to Andrew, the Athlete (a wrestler, hence the tights).

5. "How come Andrew gets to get up? If he gets up, we'll all get up. It'll be anarchy!" --Bender, when Mr. Vernon tries to enlist Andrew's help in propping open the door.

6. "If I do what my mother tells me not to do it's because my father says it's okay. It's like this whole big monster deal. It's monstrous. It's a total drag."--Claire, the Princess.

7. Bender: "You get along with your parents?"

Andrew: "Well, if I say yes, I'm an idiot, right?"

Bender: "You're an idiot anyway, but if you say you get along with your parents, then you're a liar, too."

8. "...Coach thinks I'm a winner. So does my old man. I'm not a winner because I want to be one. I'm a winner because I got strength and speed--kinda like a racehorse. That's about how involved I am in what's happening to me."--Andrew to Allison, the Basket Case

9. "Well, everyone's home life is unsatisfying--if it wasn't, people would live with their parents forever."--Andrew to Brian and Allison

10. "I mean, we're all pretty bizarre--some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all."--Andrew

There's no doubt that I find The Breakfast Club one of the most quotable movies I've ever seen, but it's also so much more than that.

It's an enduring lesson that there is more to all of us than meets the eye--we are more than the roles we play, bigger than the boxes we find ourselves in. No one's path is as straight or as simple as it appears from the outside.

It's also a message in how hard it is to break out of those roles. After laughter, tears, pot smoking, vandalism** and deep conversation, there is a scene in which the five teens discuss what will happen on Monday, when they go back to their regular lives. Will they still be friends? The answer is a brutally honest probably not.

And, of course, the movie ends when detention ends so the question is never resolved. Even if they are utterly absorbed back into their normal lives, though, they take with them a moment of authenticity, a memory of true connection. As an adult, I understand in a way I probably couldn't have as a teen just how truly rare and valuable those moments can be.

Don't You Forget About Me, performed by Simple Minds is the song most people associate with The Breakfast Club, which makes sense both because it was the soundtrack's most successful single and because it captures the feeling that something found might be lost. To me, though, We Are Not Alone, performed by Karla DeVito, played in the dance scene actually captures more of the movie's theme:

"We are not alone

Find out when your cover's blown

There'll be somebody there to break your fall

We are not alone

'Cause when you cut down to the bone

We're really not so different after all

After all

We're not alone."

That's something I think we can all stand to be reminded of from time to time.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Insightful.

*A.k.a. Brunette Best Friend From High School. Pasta is still not her real name, but it was used so often it gave her real name a run for its money.

**The scene where John Bender dismantles a book and maliciously rearranges the card catalog drawer is physically painful for this Library Lunatic to watch.

Everything In Moderation?

2011-11-27T17:40:00.002-05:00

On Thanksgiving day, I glanced at my partially eaten dinner and groaned to Hubby, "I think I may have put too much food on my plate."

Hubby rolled his eyes. "That's never happened before."

I protested, "You know I'm the very picture of moderation in all areas of my life."

I may have overstated my case slightly, but I really believe there are only two areas of my life where moderation continues to elude me.¹ One is food. The other, of course, is books.

When I was a kid, my grandmother would watch what I piled on my plate and say, "I think your eyes are bigger than your stomach." For some reason, I loved hearing that--visualizing eyes literally larger than a stomach and speculating about exactly how they might've gotten that way.

Of course, Nan meant that I had taken more than I could possibly² consume. She was almost always wrong and, alas, to this day, my eyes rarely issue a challenge my stomach fails to meet. Why my eyes have such an insatiable appetite and so little control over themselves remains a mystery.

My other uncontrollable appetite is for books--and not just books but the written word in general. I will feast upon print anywhere it will stand still long enough for me to take it in. I've got it so bad that for a long time, I was trying to figure out a way to build a shower reader--a waterproof device in which to place a book. It would have some sort of lever system to turn pages and would also be adjustable to fit different sized books.

I don't spend much time thinking about that anymore. I figure at this point, it's only a matter of time before the eReader people and the shower radio people combine technologies. You can be forgiven for thinking that only a fanatic would even think about reading in the shower. You would be right--only a fanatic would be thinking about reading in the shower and that fanatic would be me.

Books and other printed matter can be found on virtually every flat surface in my house. The only reason they are not currently on literally every flat surface in my house is that we tidied up for Thanksgiving company. This has not resulted in less printed matter strewn about, but only in higher stacks on fewer surfaces.

With the exception of the bounty from birthday gifts of Barnes & Noble cards, this wretched excess is almost all from the library so it is not a financially costly addiction. But it takes its toll in other ways. It eats up a ridiculous amount of my "free" time, for one thing. And for another, I feel a certain amount of (self-imposed) pressure to get through it all before it has to be returned. If I run out of renewals before I have finished--or even started--a book it creates the completely unfounded anxiety that I will now never be able to read the book--as though getting the book out again after it's returned is not an option.

For these reasons and a few others, I have repeatedly vowed to go to the library with a list and not to get anything "extra." I did this again on Friday afternoon. I had three books to get for Hubby and that was all I was going to get.

My resolve lasted until I was three steps inside the door where I was led astray by a title on the new non-fiction table.

"That's it. No more," I told myself--in much the same way I have to tell myself not to stick my hand back into the package of cupcakes.

I grabbed the books for Hubby and set my stack of four books on the front desk. The librarian leaned across the pile and said, "You know, if you get a fifth book, you can be entered into a raffle for a free Kindle."

It's true what they say: the road to excess is paved with the Library Lady's good intentions. Better yet, when I returned with my fifth book, she told me that two interloan books I had requested were in.

I left the library with seven books. Seven--instead of three.

So, about that expression "Everything in moderation." Is it just me or is that "everything" in there a bit excessive, a tad immoderate? If moderation is good, then what could be better than being moderate about our moderation?

1. Two, if you don't count self-delusion, which I suspect I practice with great abandon, but I cannot be entirely sure. Delusions tend to keep to themselves and not stand around waiting to be counted.
2. Let us here acknowledge the difference between "possibly" and "comfortably." It is vast.

The View From The Aunthill

2011-11-26T22:06:00.003-05:00

Seventh Niece is two-and-a-half years old and is working on learning colors. When she comes over to visit, we have a 16-pack of Crayola Pip-Squeaks* washable markers that she loves to use.

With sixteen colors to choose from, there are a few off-the-beaten-path colors in there. The beaten path, in my opinion, being the Crayola crayon 8-box: red, blue, yellow, green, purple, black, white, orange and brown. (Even after ten years of working in a flower shop where people willy-nilly threw around words like fuschia and puce, burgundy and wine, sage and celadon and debated the subtle differences between lavender and periwinkle, my motto where colors are concerned remains: If it ain't in the Crayola 8-box, I don't know what color it is.)

Anyway, Friday evening, while the grown-ups were playing poker, Second Niece was set up with her bowl of markers, doodling away. She leaned over toward me, holding a greenish blue marker in her hand and said, "I using this..."

I took her hesitation to mean she wanted me to tell her what color it was. So I said, "Green?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Uh, blue?" I guessed again.

Again with the "no," this time a little more frustrated.

Shot in the dark: "Teal?"

The look she gave me was one of annoyance mixed with the slightest hint of pity. She said, "No...it's a marker!"

She may have a way to go on her colors, but she's making amazing progress in the sarcasm department.

*An absolutely uncompensated thumbs-up to this product, by the way. They are the most washable washables I've ever come across.

Fine Lines

2011-11-25T19:40:00.005-05:00

During a visit this spring, a group of us watched as Youngest Sister's then-21-month-old son climbed over, around and on a footstool in my living room. Second Nephew wobbled now and then before righting himself and all the adults in the room hovered at the edge, poised to catch him if necessary, but wanting to give him the opportunity to explore as much as possible.

Brother-in-Law commented that he and Youngest Sister had entered the risk-assessment phase in earnest with SN, who's their first child--trying to strike a balance between letting him have room to grow and explore his world and wanting to protect him from serious harm.

Here at Masked Mom Headquarters, we are at the opposite end of the parenting continuum--our youngest having turned 17 in June--and I told Brother-in-Law that I felt the search for the balance between protecting and stifling was never-ending and, really, the central parenting dilemma. It starts at birth really, but increases exponentially when our children become mobile, wriggling, crawling and toddling their way out into a world seemingly teeming with physical dangers and it doesn't move on so much as expand from there to include (the potentially even scarier) emotional and psychological dangers that are an inevitable part of making our way in the world.

On the one hand, it's perfectly natural to want to shield your child from every possible hurt, but not only is it impossible to do so, it's possible to do more damage than good by trying to keep your child too safe. Pain--physical and otherwise--is an essential part of how we learn our place in the world, the way we determine our strengths and limitations, how we find out all that we are truly capable of and how we come to know ourselves at the deepest levels.

Hubby and I always tended toward the more laid-back end of the protection spectrum.* In fact, during the conversation that day when Second Nephew explored the jungle gym of my living room, his mother, Youngest Sister, told a story about when Son-One and Son-Two were small. Son-Two, who was probably three or four at the time, came out of the bedroom crying and said he had fallen off of the dresser. Youngest Sister said, "You asked if Son-One had pushed him off the dresser and he said no. You didn't say anything at all about the fact that he was on the dresser."

Listen, it sounds a little insane when you put it that way--even to me. But at the time, they really enjoyed that dresser--it was wide and relatively low-slung. They had all sorts of imaginary adventures in it, on it, around it. I didn't think anything worse than a goose egg or a scrape could come of it. Classic risk-benefit analysis. And, of course, years (decades!) later I have the benefit of pointing out that nothing major ever did come out of it.

The counterargument that something major could have come of it is really the crux of the issue because something major could come of just about anything. As Brother-In-Law pointed out, every parent has to find his or her own comfort zone.

There is a degree of involvement that becomes unhealthy--when overprotection actually prevents our children from understanding natural consequences and learning to be responsible for themselves in the world. Hardly anyone uses the expression "helicopter parent" as a compliment--and with good reason. But hardly anyone acknowledges how truly difficult it is not to be a helicopter parent--even for someone who falls solidly on the more laid-back side of the equation.

When it becomes less about a scraped knee and more about a bruised psyche, things only get more complicated. Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, body image issues, bullying, broken hearts--the list just goes on and on and gets more entertaining by the day. Watching your toddler climb around a footstool becomes, with a breathtaking swiftness, standing on the sidelines as your adolescent children navigate friendships, school commitments, and, eventually romantic entanglements while you try to decide when and how far to step in.

I have a feeling that all the experience I've had with the fine line between keeping them safe and stunting their growth is responsible for some of the fine lines I see reflected back at me in the mirror every morning.

*Some of that can be attributed to a conscious choice on our part, but some of it can probably be chalked up to the fact that due to our insanity-induced procreative schedule, we were outnumbered and it was mathematically impossible for us to hover in so many places at once. Regardless, I stand by our stance while fully understanding that not everyone has the same stance.

Eye Exam

2011-11-24T16:34:00.003-05:00

Thanksgiving cupcake. Turkey with gravy, peas, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes with butter*:

Thanksgiving cupcakes as far as the eye can see:

Warning: creating Thanksgiving cupcakes as far as the eye can see when you're 43 years old and you don't get started until 9 p.m. may make "as far as the eye can see" a significantly shorter distance.

Hope everyone has a great day!

*The part of turkey is played by Brach's Maple Nut Goodies; gravy by melted chocolate chips; peas by green ball sprinkles; cranberry sauce by red sugar; mashed potatoes by dollop of frosting; butter by yellow decorating gel. The part of the plate is played by half a generic vanilla sandwich cookie covered in homemade butercream frosting. The part of the cupcake base is played by, uh, a cupcake.

A Sparkly Bow On Top

2011-11-23T23:28:00.001-05:00

Each year, the sponsors of NaBloPoMo have offered various prizes to participants who manage to blog daily throughout the month of November. I have never been awarded one of these prizes--I made a little joke about it in a post two years ago. This year the event's headquartered at Blogher and they are giving away prizes on a daily basis. And even with daily prizes still nothin'...

Of course, NaBlo is not really about the prizes--it's about "that geeky sense of accomplishment that comes from posting every single day for a month," as I said in that post where I (parenthetically) whined about not getting a prize--and that sense of accomplishment has been mine every year except one (thanks a lot, Time Warner and Verizon).

This year, as I gushed a little about here, I've gotten not only a growing sense of accomplishment as I've inched my way through the month, but I seem to have recovered a bit of my long-buried writing mojo.

An added--and invaluable--bonus has been discovering (and rediscovering) some great bloggers. One of those great bloggers is S. Stauss, who blogs over at Periphery. My bloggy crush on her started the moment I clicked over to her page and saw the tagline: "Out of the corner of your eye is where the magic happens." I loved the simple (magical) brilliance of it. Her posts are full of that same brilliance--she's smart and funny and has a way of looking at things that is quietly revolutionary, if that makes any sense.*

So I've been popping over to Periphery for her daily posts and yesterday, I found out she'd named me in her Top 5 for the Liebster Blog award:

"Liebster" is a German word meaning dearest and the award is given to up-and-coming bloggers with less than 200 followers (in my case significantly less--I was ecstatic to break double digits this week).

Not only was this a compliment from someone whose blog I love, it comes with a built in opportunity to share the bloggy love.

Here's how it works:

1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.

2. Reveal your Top 5 blogs (with under 200 followers) and let them know by leaving comments on their blogs.

3. Post the Award on your blog.

4. Enjoy the love of some of the most supportive people on the Internet.

Below you can find my Top 5--all of them are bloggers I've "met" this week, and they all really deserve an individual accounting of why I'm giving them the award, but I am unfortunately strapped for both time and mental energy so I will just list them all and say that, for different reasons, each and every link is worth clicking on.

1. Diminishing Gene Pool

2. four under 4 (plus 2)

3. Jane In Her Infinite Wisdom

4. Educational Anarchy

5. Julie's View formerly The Silver Lining

Check them out if you get a chance and while you're at it stop over at Periphery and tell S. Stauss Masked Mom says, "Step away from the mallet."

(A PS to those I've awarded--play along if you'd like, but I will completely understand if you can't fit into crazy holiday schedules.)

*And it may not as I am on several deadlines (holiday and blog related) and I am currently running solely on the frosting I've been licking off my fingers while making Thanksgiving cupcakes and the Diet Dr. Pepper I've been washing it down with.

When Every Single Word Makes Sense*

2011-11-22T23:44:00.001-05:00

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the one who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to sad songs longer than they've been living unhappy lives."

~~Nick Hornby

~~from High Fidelity

One rainy Saturday afternoon when I was fifteen or sixteen, my father walked into the living room to find me sitting next to the stereo near tears, staring soulfully into the distance singing along with some whiny, sappy pop song.

He took one look at my pathetic self and said, "You know, sometimes when you're feeling down, music like that makes it worse."

I hate to admit that I briefly wondered in that moment if my father even had a heart. How could he not understand that, as Elton John put it, "it feels so good to hurt so bad*" and knowing there were other people out there who had felt the same way at least long enough to write or sing a pop song was the most delicious sort of company for my misery?

It wasn't until I was watching my own daughter at fifteen or sixteen mooning over the desperate lyrics of her favorite songs, unable to answer a question without her voice cracking when she was in that mood, that I started to really have chicken-egg questions regarding the music of misery.

From the mom perspective, it certainly did not appear as though the music was in any way improving Daughter-Only's mood. In fact, it appeared exactly as though she was wallowing in her misery to the accompaniment of this music that was so depressing that even half a chorus half overheard had the power to make me cranky. I'll admit that on more than one occasion, I blurted, "How can this music possibly help?"

Then Daughter-Only would say out loud the things I had only said to my dad in my head: "Don't be stupid. These songs don't put me in a bad mood. They make me feel better because they match my mood."

Eventually, I remembered that "wallowing" was a word my mother used with some frequency to describe what it was she thought I was doing. And after I recovered from that wave of oh-crap-I've-turned-all-the-way-into-my-mother, I remembered just for a minute what it was like to be a teenaged girl, to have feelings so big that you can barely process them and instead of running away from them, you surround yourself with them, by cranking up the volume and singing along.

*From "Sad Songs Say So Much" by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

Masked Mom's Media Monday: "Dear Sugar" on The Rumpus

2011-11-21T22:46:00.001-05:00

I am wary of professional advice givers, especially the celebrity sort. So many of them seem to make their living spouting cleverly worded, overly simplified answers that people struggling with complicated, real-life problems crave, answers which nevertheless seem unlikely to provide any lasting resolution or comfort. These advisors have never met a problem that cannot be "solved" by throwing a few stale slogans at it: Be yourself. You teach people how to treat you. The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior.

Of course, there is a simple sort of truth to statements like these. The problem being that life is so rarely simple. I am more than willing to acknowledge that some of us (ME! ME! ME!) make things more complicated than is absolutely necessary with our constant worrying and picking apart and analyzing--why merely think about things, when you can overthink everything? But the Advice Givers generally seem to go too far in the opposite direction--parroting things their mothers probably told them when they were eight, which were, perhaps, invaluable on the playground but don't hold up long in the rough-and-tumble world of grown-ups.

All this is to say that when I came across a collection of "Dear Sugar" columns in The Sun magazine (recommended, by the way), I didn't initially have high hopes. The only way I thought the reading experience could be salvaged was if the column turned out to be satirical (similar to Jeffrey Goldberg's "What's Your Problem?" column in The Atlantic). That actually seemed like a possibility considering the name of the column--to my jaundiced Northern ear, "Sugar" is one of those Southern pet names that is just as likely to be used sarcastically as sincerely.

Instead of satire, I discovered that "Dear Sugar" was the Lay's Potato Chips of advice columns--I couldn't read just one. But rather than the crispy, greasy, empty calories perfect for mindless consumption of some other advice venues, "Dear Sugar" turned out to be a complex blend of more sophisticated tastes and textures, nutritionally substantial and satisfying to the palate.

The first tip-off that "Dear Sugar" wasn't your average advice column was the questions she chooses to answer. She does not shy away from any topic--no matter how gritty or petty, large or small. In the time that I've been reading, there have been questions about professional jealousy, sexual abuse, infidelity, the existence of God, body image, "sick" sexual proclivities, and so much more. All of these she handles with grace and generosity.

It helps (of course it does) that her writing is a tiny miracle in itself: lyrical and down-to-earth at the very same time. For example, these bits from her answer to "Seeking Wisdom," a 22-year old loyal reader, who asked Sugar what advice her 40-something self would have for her 20-something self:

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

She handles the hardest truths with exquisite care. She can be blunt, when necessary, but it is a bluntness tempered with compassion and an almost supernatural understanding of human nature. She pulls no punches, but when they land, they land like the reassuring shoulder squeeze of a good friend.

I know this is a post replete with over-the-top metaphors, but I feel she's earned them all. Let me leave you with one last one:

Sugar takes the most tangled knots of problems--spiritual, professional, interpersonal--and picks them apart, gently loosening the individual threads from one another and then she takes those threads and embroiders them into little pieces of art her readers can carry with them.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Mesmerizing.

Adventures in Amateur Dream Analysis

2011-11-20T23:53:00.009-05:00

"I search for the time on a watch with no hands..."

~~These Dreams

~~performed by Heart, written by Bernie Taupin & Martin Page

I blame Marci George.

She was my Intro to Psychology teacher in my senior year of high school and her ability to break down even the most convoluted dream in a matter of seconds was awe-inspiring. On the first day of the dream analysis unit, she asked for volunteers to share their dreams. One brave soul* raised his hand and assured her she'd never be able to figure out what his dream meant.

The dream involved him and his fellow wrestlers from the school team finding themselves in a war zone being barked at by a colonel no one liked or respected, eventually they were rescued by a helicopter and, when they landed in a field, there was a case of beer on a table under a spotlight, the table surrounded by a high chainlink fence with barbed wire on the top.

"That's an easy one," said Marci George and she went on to tell him (and the whole rest of the class) that the dream was about his frustrations with the wrestling season, maybe especially his issues with his coach and his feeling that the team was under attack. The beer at the end? It represented celebration of a victory that had so far been denied them.

In high school, I was almost catatonically reserved, so while I didn't react on the outside, somewhere inside was a cartoon version of myself with her mouth hanging wide open. How did she do that? What secrets did Marci George have to know to tap into someone's psyche using only a three-minute dream summary?

I've read a lot about dreams since then. I even invested in one of those "dream dictionaries" at one point or other, with common dream symbols and their "universal" meanings laid out in alphabetical order--I found it disappointingly simplistic and not at all useful. I began chronicling my own particularly vivid dreams in my spiral notebook journal in hopes of some day salvaging some deeper meaning from them.

I'm still not sure what Marci George's secret was, but I know that at some point, I realized I could do it, too. First, I could do it with my own dreams and then, eventually, other people's as well. For a long time, I made it a point to keep my interpretations to myself, partly because I didn't want to make anyone uncomfortable and partly because I didn't want to be humiliated if my guesses were completely off-base.

When she was in seventh grade, Daughter-Only discovered her mother's hidden talent, when I was unable to keep it to myself after she shared what I thought was an especially obvious dream.

I can't remember all the details of the dream she shared, but I think it involved a friend of hers being stranded in the middle of a lake or something and there were phone wires down all around, including in the water and Daughter-Only was standing on the shore trying to figure out some way to reach him. I told her I thought the dream meant that she was having trouble communicating with this friend for some reason--and she immediately got that look the cartoon inner me must've had when Marci George dissected the wrestling warrior's dream in front of the whole class senior year.

"Mom! How did you know?" Apparently, the boy in the dream, who in real life was a good friend of Daughter-Only's had recently begun "dating" (seventh grade version) a girl who did not want him talking to D-O anymore.

Daughter-Only was hooked--on the whole concept of dream analysis and on what she at first perceived as her mother's superhuman power. (Like a lot of "superhuman" powers, it turns out to be a lot simpler from the inside than it looks from the outside.) She told lots of her friends and even some of her teachers and for a while there, would bring home lists of dream summaries for me to analyze.

I protested--a lot--about my lack of real (or any) training and about how much harder it is to figure out what a dream means when you don't actually know the person who had it, but in the end I found the dreams irresistible and took a stab at every one. In every case, Daughter-Only reported back that the dreamer was in complete agreement with my guess.

After a while, Daughter-Only's interest died down a little--there was even a point where she seemed to be creeped out by the whole thing, saying, "Mom, I don't even want to tell you what I dreamed about because you'll analyze it."

I said, "I don't have to do that if you don't want me to."

"Even if you don't say anything out loud, I'll know you're doing it in your head." She wouldn't have believed my denial and she would've been right not to.

Then came the ninth grade trip to the state Odyssey of the Mind competition--a nearly three-hour bus ride during which she and her teammates somehow stumbled on the topic of dreams. Daughter-Only began texting me details.

One girl had a dream in which a particularly obnoxious teammate (who, mercifully for everyone, was being transported by his parents) had grown a snout and a curly tail and was standing atop the Empire State Building giving a speech when he fell off. At the bottom, there was a table of judges who gave him very low scores.

I texted back: She's afraid of Obnoxious Kid "hogging" all the attention, showing off at the competition, figuratively falling on his face and making the team look bad in front of the judges. Bullseye!

A boy dreamed he was running through the woods from Indians one of whom fired an arrow that struck him in the wrist.

I texted back: Does he do something competitive where his hands are important? Video games? Musical instrument? Some kind of sport?

The answer: Marching band. Regional finals in three weeks. Bullseye!

It went on like this for another few dreams, then came this: A girl dreamed that she was at a hotel out of town with her mother and her sister's ex-fiance. The three of them were sharing a room, but none of the rest of the family was present. The girl went to go for a swim and found her 55-year-old mother making out in the hotel pool with one of her fifteen-year-old classmates.

I texted: I think I know what it means, but I don't think we should tell her.

Text came back: She really wants to know.

I texted: I will tell you, but I really don't think you should tell her. I think it means she is uncomfortable with the way her mother interacts with younger men, maybe especially her sister's ex-fiance.

Predictably, Daughter-Only failed to heed my advice. (When we talked about it in person later, she said that she had at least whispered the interpretation to the girl rather than blurt it in front of everyone.) Even more predictably, the girl turned herself inside out denying that my guess was even a possibility.

Completely unpredictably, given what she claimed was my failure with the first dream, the girl then told Daughter-Only a second dream. A dream I (in my wholly amateur fashion) found revelatory of another whole set of deep-seated insecurities.

I texted: I think it's time for you guys to play the Alphabet Game instead.

*The brave soul was not a friend of mine--I remember him solely for the dream and for one other thing: in the yearbook, under favorite color, he wrote "plaid." PLAID!!!

Nothing Scares Me

2011-11-19T19:13:00.003-05:00

Until this month's burst of productivity (brought to you by NaBloPoMo--now you know whom to blame), I had been going through an extended dry spell in the writing department. Here on the blog, of course, the archives for the past few years are almost laughably sparse, with November consistently accounting for more posts than the rest of the year combined.

Off the blog--in my spiral notebook journal--things have been spotty as well--I have been working on the same single subject notebook (70 pages, college-ruled, but still) since January 2010, which is unheard of and especially troublesome since that journal has functioned not only as writing practice, but as a therapeutic outlet (the only one I can count on to be covered by my currently non-existent health care coverage) since a few days before my fifteenth birthday.

In that third writing area, the one I don't talk much about here--potentially publishable stuff--the dry spell has persisted even longer. I have not finished, or even earnestly attempted, anything I intended to submit for publication since a piece that appeared in a literary anthology in 2005.

In the beginning of this dry spell, there were still ideas floating around in my brain, but I found I lacked the motivation* to do anything with them. I would sometimes pretend it was time and energy I lacked, but that excuse did not hold up when I considered all the time and energy I was "wasting" on things like Ghost Hunters marathons, futzing around on the internet, or even reading--which is a fine, and even necessary, pastime for a writer, but which defeats its purpose when it replaces writing entirely.

As the dry spell and its accompanying lack of motivation continued, it seemed the ideas began to dry up as well. I would think of a subject I might want to write about, but I couldn't think past the first line or two and the nothing that I assumed came after those lines terrified me so much I rarely got around to writing down even those first lines.

If I had, I might've remembered a core truth about writing. E.L. Doctorow said, "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

It is not necessary to be able to clearly see your destination when you begin, your path will almost always be revealed to you as you inch along. If it's not, consider turning around, choosing a new route or asking for directions at that gas station you just passed, but whatever you do don't just pull off to the side of the road and wait for things to get better. Scary things happen on the side of the road in the dark.

There was a point during this dry spell that I began to suspect I had not only lost the ability to write, but the ability to think as well. Without the structure, revision and discipline of writing, I was finding it more and more difficult to focus my thoughts--they seemed superficial and fleeting, insubstantial and definitely not worthy of memorializing by putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, so I wrote less, which seemed to make me think less clearly, so I wrote less, and so on.

Joan Didion said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." Turns out, that's me, too. All this time I've believed I was writing what I thought, but I was really thinking what I wrote.

*This lack of motivation stemmed in part from the capital-F Funk, which was a combination of my natural depressive tendencies and life events.

"Drinking the Kool-Aid"

2011-11-18T22:08:00.004-05:00

I'm subscribed to "breaking news" email alerts for both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. I can't remember how or when that happened, but sometimes up to ten or twelve alerts come daily and, for the record, the LA paper is good for three to four times as many alerts as the NY paper. I don't know if that's because significantly more important things are going on on the West Coast than the East Coast or if it means that West Coasters are significantly more agitated about world events than their "laid-back" reputation would suggest. Shoot, maybe it's not something sociologically significant--maybe it's just the settings I selected when I signed up for the subscriptions.

In any case, I rarely click through to any of the stories and I can't remember exactly what caught my eye yesterday*, but once I was on the LA Times site, I was down the rabbit hole of current events and op-ed pieces and eventually read a piece by columnist Meghan Daum about the prevalence of the expression "drinking the Kool-Aid" to refer "to someone who unquestioningly embraces a particular leader or ideology."

Daum seems to think that very few people who use the expression realize its connection to the Jonestown massacre, which happened thirty-three years ago today. Jonestown was a settlement built in Guyana by followers of Jim Jones, a political and philosophical radical who orchestrated the outright murders (by gunshot) of five people, including a U.S. Congressman, and the mass "suicide" of 909 others.

All but a few of the deaths were caused by cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, which Daum calls a "cheap Kool-Aid knock-off." The fact that Flavor-Aid translated as Kool-Aid in the public consciousness surrounding this horrific event is a testament to brand recognition that I'm sure Kool-Aid has never been particularly grateful for.

If I'm reading her complaint correctly, Daum is upset that the expression "drink the Kool-Aid" and all its variations is often used in situations much less dire than the Jonestown massacre. One of her examples refers to an Us Weekly report that said Kim Kardashian and her temporary husband, Kris Humphries were not getting along because Kris refused to "drink the Kardashian Kool-Aid." Whether the author of the Us Weekly piece was aware of the origins of the expression or not is up for debate (perhaps he or she just liked the alliteration of Kardashian Kool-Aid), but Daum is apparently bothered by the comparison of something relatively innocuous with something literally lethal. She says, "There's something grotesque, even offensive, about comparing public figures or members of opposing political parties or nonviolent activists to followers of a deranged, murderous cult leader."

I see her point, but still disagree with her. For one thing, hyperbole is a time-honored literary and oratory device--we all use it, most of us on a daily basis, when we say things like "I have a million things to do" or "If I take one more step, I'm going to drop." No one thinks we're really going to, for instance, poke out our eardrums with a rusty fork rather than listen to the co-worker in the next cubicle griping about our boss for one more second. For the same reason, I truly doubt that most people using the expression "they really drank the Kool-Aid" to refer to Obama supporters are trying to draw a direct parallel between the President and Jim Jones, the maniacal dictator of his own deadly Utopia.

My other objection to Daum's rationale is that I personally think that unquestioning loyalty and blind faith are always dangerous, if not literally deadly. Of course, there are degrees of danger and one hopes that there is never another occasion of mob mentality and leader worship so lethal and of such magnitude that it can be compared literally to Jonestown, but that's what makes the expression so useful--it's a cautionary tale in a concise package. I don't use the phrase often, but when I do it is with full knowledge of its provenance. In fact, in my opinion, its provenance and its impact are inextricably linked.

For me, Daum's most persuasive argument against the expression is that it's overused. While I don't relish the thought of offending anyone, as a writer (and even simply as a human being) I would absolutely use a potentially offensive phrase if I felt I couldn't make a point as forcefully without it. But I'd rather staple Roget's Thesaurus to myself page by page than to use a watered-down cliche.

*This is false. Exactly what caught my eye yesterday was not a well-thought out article on the European financial crisis or yet another piece about the Occupy movement, but a piece about Jimmy Kimmel's "National Unfriend Day," which apparently is a movement encouraging people to whittle their Facebook Friends lists down to something more approaching their Real-Life Friends lists. I was reluctant to share this as it is a rather embarrassing glimpse into my shameful taste for inane celebrity news. As with most shameful urges, I don't engage in it often and I talk about it even less.

The Man Behind The Curtain

2011-11-17T23:23:00.001-05:00

"Bob was right, Rosie thought, remembering something from the other day: Trying to reason with an addict is like trying to blow out a light bulb." --from Imperfect Birds, by Anne Lamott

After spending yet another day trying to blow out light bulbs, I came home exhausted and unable to imagine putting enough words together to form even a cursory post. Luckily (for my unbroken NaBloPoMo streak, at least), I found inspiration in my inbox in the form of a library notice letting me know that Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years by Gregory Maguire is available for pick up.

So, tomorrow, I am off work and off to see the Wizard. Here's hoping he can tie up all those loose ends from Son of a Witch that weren't really addressed in A Lion Among Men.

Staff Appreciation Day

2011-11-16T23:39:00.001-05:00

One of the things I love about my job--as "housekeeping supervisor" (or as I like to call it, "chief nag") at a half-way house for recovering alcoholics and addicts--is how appreciative everyone there is of the work that I do. I am thanked often and have been told repeatedly, by clients and co-workers alike, that the House would fall apart without me.

I don't really believe the House would fall apart without me, but after shifts like the one I just had, I am sometimes tempted to test the theory.

The Altar To The Muse

2011-11-15T23:48:00.004-05:00

"You have to lay yourself on the altar to the muse. Because once she stops coming around you're really up a creek without a paddle."

--Emmylou Harris

Son-Three has been dabbling in writing rap for a couple of years now--randomly spouting a line or two or even an extended group of rhymes that he's come up with. Recently, though, he and a few friends got together and have become more serious about it--including renting time in the basement recording booth of the local music store. And ever since he brought home the six-track rough-cut CD of their work, something sort of magical has happened.

He has been working the overnight shift for some time now and I work second shift, so I rarely see him before I leave for work each day, but one day last week, he was up and about and energetic at the ridiculously early hour of 10 or 11 a.m. He told me that he had woken up with several full-blown, multiple-line rhymes in his head and that with just a little tweaking he thought they were some of the best he had ever written.

Perhaps not surprisingly (hopelessly un-hip middle-aged mom that I am), I am no expert in rap, though I've listened to some here and there, but I am an amateur expert in word-play--both as practitioner and spectator--and I can objectively* state that I was very impressed by the wit, the twists and the vocabulary of the raps Son-Three shared with me that morning.

More important than what I thought, though, was the delight Son-Three took in the way they had come to him, fully formed, seemingly from some mysterious pocket in his brain he'd never even known was there.

We talked then about creativity and how sometimes things seem to come from a place that is both within us and Somewhere Else. Whether you think of that Somewhere Else as a stream of divine whisperings or as your own subconscious or as the inspiration of your Muse, the more seriously you take the things that appear from there, the more readily they will appear.

Eight years ago, when I first came across the Emmylou Harris quote about laying yourself on the altar to the muse, I imagined some esoteric, mystical, woo-woo ritual going on at Emmylou's house. Something involving sage and, I don't know, chanting, maybe. I think now that laying yourself on that altar is something much more down-to-earth and practical. Maybe it's something as simple--and as sacred--as writing things down, working to polish them, maybe even recording them in a basement soundbooth, and sharing them with the world.

*-ish. Objectivelyish. This is my kid, after all.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

2011-11-14T14:11:00.001-05:00

Once I get fixated on a particular author (and I am fixated on far too many to list), I will willy-nilly check out anything with his or her name on it without reading much in advance about the book. That's how I checked the latest David Sedaris book out of the library last fall without any warning that Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a collection of short tales featuring anthropomorphic animals with all-too-human issues. I have since browsed a few online reviews and the book is being compared (not always favorably) to Aesop or LaFontaine's fables or to James Thurber's work involving animals.

It is a small book--about 5"x7"--and only has 159 pages--quite a few of them taken up by the illustrations (provided by Olivia author/illustrator Ian Falconer), but it is definitely not light reading. Many of the stories had a kick of recognition or resonance for me, but none more so than "The Parenting Storks" about stork sisters who are arguing about how and what to tell their respective children about the "facts of life."

Having parented four children most of the way into (chronological) adulthood, Hubby and I have been dealing for twenty years or so with the question of when, how much and what to tell curious kids and even kids who express no curiosity whatsoever (who are sometimes the kids who need the most information) about not just the facts of reproduction, but the feelings and intricacies of human sexuality.

Almost from the beginning, we agreed that we would provide age-appropriate information as truthfully and matter-of-factly as possible and that we would try to foster an environment in which questions would always be welcome. We may have fallen short in a thousand ways as parents*, but I count our openness with our kids about sexuality as one of our great successes. I do not harbor the illusion that my children tell me everything, but I have little doubt that they know they can tell me anything.

In the spirit of openness, when the boys were first inching into adolescence, I told them there was a specific drawer where there would always be condoms. I would pay no attention to what was gone and would just periodically add more and, of course, if I ever neglected to add more and the drawer was dangerously low, they were welcome to give me a reminder.

A few years ago, Hubby was taking an online class that involved ethics and somehow, in the forum for the class, where classmates could hold discussions, the fact that we had a dedicated condom drawer in our house that all our children were aware of came up. One of the commenters, who had previously made clear her fundamentalist Christian beliefs, stated that providing birth control for kids was "lazy" parenting.

If the commenter had referred to our technique as "immoral" or even "amoral," I would've conceded that within the confines of her own belief system she had a point--though I do not personally see sexuality as a moral issue, I understand there are a good many people who do.

Even with the lazy remark, the commenter may have had a point if we had simply taken a box of condoms, dumped them in some random drawer and said, "Have at it, kids." But, in our house at least (and I'm sure in many homes where birth control is provided for teens), that drawer happened in the context of an ongoing conversation. It happened in the context of our own mixed feelings about our children's burgeoning sexuality--and our struggle to accept them as individuals with their own desires, motivations, and feelings. Not lazy work, especially when you take it seriously.

In fact, if we want to talk about what takes more "work"--psychologically, emotionally, etc--it seems to me that force-feeding your teens a pre-scripted "moral" reality about sexuality and expecting them to swallow it whole and abide by it is actually a path of significantly less resistance than getting to know your children and fostering an environment of openness where any question can be safely asked and answered.**

Of course, there is such a thing as too much openness--and the "smart" stork sister crosses that line and then some in Sedaris's "The Parenting Storks." In the end, the misinformation spread by one sister and the oversharing of the other together lead to dire consequences that aren't spelled out, but rather implied in the text and accompanying illustrations.

If the stories in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk are fables, they are not fables in the traditional sense--not the versions of Aesop we read in grade school with simplistic and clearly spelled out morals. Instead they are complex tales touching on prejudices and presumptions, the costs of abiding too closely to social norms or abandoning them completely, and the dangers of gullibility and misplaced faith. The illustrations--cartoon animals the victims and prepetrators of disturbing acts--are often disconcerting, but somehow absolutely perfect at the same time.

By showing us all this darkness in the hearts of animals, Sedaris shines a light on the ways we humans constantly judge and misjudge one another and ourselves and the price we pay for those judgments. If the stories stray at times into the overly graphic or the sensationalistic, so, too, do our lives.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Revealing.

*If we're lucky it's only a thousand ways.
**Even if that answer leads only to more questions. Even if that answer is "I have no idea, but let's see what we can figure out together."

(Full disclosure: This is not an entirely "fresh" post. About a third of it was written during last year's NaBloPoMo and it has languished in my drafts folder unfinished ever since.)

How Not To Talk To A Woman: Mother-Daughter Edition

2011-11-13T20:51:00.001-05:00

The other day, Daughter-Only's boyfriend AM lifted her into a bear hug and, groaning a little, said, "Are you getting heavier or am I just getting weaker?"

Rookie mistake, that. And, to his credit, he realized right away that he had blundered and spent half the afternoon attempting (albeit with mixed success) trying to atone for it.

Hubby, 24-year veteran of marriage, does not have inexperience to fall back on as an excuse.

While spooning the last of a bowl of chili into his mouth, he said, "What'd you do different this time? This is perfect."

Granted, there's a compliment in there somewhere, but it's overshadowed by the implication about the "imperfection" of countless pots of chili past. In fairness to him, his comment does highlight a drawback of that "intuitive cooking" I was pretty sure was going to make me famous a few posts ago: it's never, ever the same chili (chowder, soup, meatloaf, whatever) twice.

On the other hand, I have been the same wife* for twenty-four years, so you'd think he'd have a little more of a clue at this point.

*Actually, there are probably countless ways in which I am not at all the same wife I was 24 years ago. However, the backhanded aspect of today's compliment wouldn't have gotten past any of the many wives I've been.

Fell Asleep In The Walmart Parking Lot...Woke Up In 1985

2011-11-12T22:44:00.002-05:00

Today, I accidentally discovered a fold in the space-time continuum and it wasn't anything like the movies would lead you to believe. There was no need to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge into some swirly water portal, no being strapped into something that vaguely resembled a carnival ride, and, alas, no DeLorean piloted by Michael J. Fox (or, for that matter, Christopher Lloyd).*

Instead, I woke up this morning with a headache, the product of sleep deprivation and sinus trouble. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself (which is as effective a prescription for pain relief as practically anything available over the counter), I had mother stuff to do. Within half an hour of getting out of bed, I was in the car driving for two hours so that Daughter-Only, her boyfriend (AM) and another friend (RC) could attend an Open House at a prospective college all three of them are interested in.

This college happens to be the college Son-Two attended for two and a half years (and is currently on a break from) so, especially with the headache, I bowed out of the program and took my wounded self to the corner of the parking lot of a nearby Walmart where I promptly locked all my doors and fell into a ridiculously sound sleep.

I had intended to doze, but assumed I wouldn't be able to get comfortable enough--either physically or psychologically--to actually sleep soundly in the van, in a parking lot, in the glare of the sun. Once the seat was reclined, though, I folded myself into some sort of origami shape and I was out cold for two and a half hours.**

When I woke up with that groggy, hard-sleep hangover feeling, I turned on the radio and was greeted by the unmistakable voice of Casey Kasem doing the Top 40 Countdown for the week of November 16, 1985.

Dire Straits' "The Walk of Life" (#40) began playing and I was 17 again, living with friends of my family and driving 45 minutes one-way to be an out-of-district student at Mr. High School's school. The drive meant a minimum of an hour and a half of radio listening per day--and that's not even taking into consideration the two and a half hour drive (one-way) to go home for the weekend. Some of those songs (like #28: "Fortress Around Your Heart" by Sting) are embedded in me at the cellular level, I'm pretty sure.

Some of those songs (like #23: "I Miss You" by Klymaxx) were included on the three-disc set "Sappy Crap Soundtrack," which I made for Mr. High School in early 2006, complete with a goofy set of liner notes explaining the deep significance of each song as it applied to my Crazy Crush on him senior year. The fact that we got to laugh together over the angst and insanity of 1985 in 2006 was a minor space-time continuum miracle in itself.

A few songs into the countdown today, Daughter-Only texted to let me know they were ready to be picked up. She normally has full control of the music in the van, especially when she has friends along, but RC is an '80s music fan so we had two votes and this was an unprecedented fold in the space-time continuum that might never happen again. To comfort Daughter-Only, I told her we would probably lose reception fairly quickly.

We didn't though--the station was still coming in clearly for #20: "Lovin' Every Minute Of It" by Loverboy. By this point, Daughter-Only was most assuredly not lovin' every minute of it.

She did, however, thoroughly enjoy the college's Open House program, especially the part where she and RC found themselves alone with two college girls who were acting as student guides. One of the guides said, "So, do either of you have any off-the-record questions?"

Daughter-Only and RC said they couldn't think of anything then the girl volunteered, "There are lots of bars in the area and it's really easy to get in. I use a man's ID."

The other one spoke up, "I use a Pokemon card."

You know, something like that would never have happened in 1985.

In 1985, it would have been a Garbage Pail Kids card.

*Respectively, Kate & Leopold, Timeline, and Back to the Future.

**The Walmart in Dunkirk, NY is a happening place on Saturday afternoon and my parking spot ended up being significantly less secluded than it was to start with. I woke up surounded by cars on all sides, no doubt driven by people who are now convinced they've seen a homeless woman sleeping in her van.

Honoring Sacrifice: A Tale of Two Mothers

2011-11-11T19:56:00.006-05:00

Working at the flower shop in April of 2004, I was in a position to see a portion of the outpouring of sympathy, gratitude, and respect accorded the family of Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, a local boy who gave his life by throwing himself on a grenade in Iraq, thereby likely saving the lives of two of his squadmates. Perhaps it doesn't do to call a 22-year-old man who gave his life for others a "boy," and Dunham's last actions on this earth were certainly the actions of a courageous and mature man, but as the mother of three sons aged 23, 21, and 20, it's hard for me to see him as anything other than a boy in the same way I will probably still be referring to my own sons as "my boys" long after they have boys and girls of their own.

Corporal Dunham's mother, Deb, is a truly remarkable woman in many ways. I do not know her personally, but for the five years after Jason's death that the flower shop was still operating, orders would come in from all over the country for Jason's birthday and the anniversary of his death every year--people wanting his family to know he was not forgotten. On one of these deliveries, bearing several baskets and vases of flowers, I was met at the door by Deb who was holding a napkin full of still-warm chocolate chip cookies for me to take back to the shop. It may seem an inconsequential thing, but something about that simple act of thoughtfulness on a day when many moms would've been curled up in a corner mourning their loss really touched and amazed me.

In the years after his death, Corporal Dunham was publicly memorialized in numerous ways. The post office in his hometown is now the Corporal Jason L. Dunham Post Office. A naval destroyer bears his name as do various facilities on military bases around the country. In January 2007, Corporal Dunham was awarded the Medal of Honor--only the second soldier to receive the Medal for actions in the Iraqi War and the first Marine to receive it since Vietnam.

Corporal Dunham's mother has been present at various ceremonies honoring Jason over the years and she has done many print and on-camera interviews in various venues, including for a short documentary on the Marine Corps site. Without exception, Jason's mother has behaved with amazing dignity, grace and generosity while bearing one of the worst burdens a mother can bear.

I admire her strength and really see her actions as a way of honoring the sacrifice her son and so many soldiers like him have made for our country, but there have been times when I wondered how I would've handled myself in a similar situation.

The footage of the ceremony where Deb Dunham received the Medal of Honor from then-President George W. Bush especially made me think. This was at a time when doubts were steadily spreading about the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq. Those alleged WMD's had been the rationale for our presence in Iraq to begin with and not only had they not been discovered nearly four years into our involvement there, new information was emerging with some regularity that indicated many in the administration had known all along that the intelligence behind the WMD theory was faulty.

I had had my doubts about Bush and his motives in Iraq and elsewhere long before that point. If I had been in the position of standing next to him to receive an honor for my dead son, would I have been able to take comfort in the President's apparent appreciation of my son's sacrifice? Would I have nobly accepted the award being offered on behalf of a grateful nation?

Under the influence of such a loss, would I have been able to restrain myself from asking impertinent questions about the "cause" my son had died for? Would anything other than the presence of the Secret Service have been able to prevent me from calling the President of the United States a murderer and a liar directly to his face?

There was another mother who lost her son in April of 2004. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq when the Humvee he was driving was ambushed. His mother, Cindy Sheehan, chose a different--and some would say much less dignified--path than Deb Dunham did. Within a few months of her son's death, Cindy embarked on a path of anti-war activism that included the hyper-publicized "Camp Casey" in August 2005 during which Cindy set up camp a few miles from President Bush's ranch in Texas, demanding a face-to-face meeting with Bush so that he could explain what "noble cause" her son had died for. Cindy waited there for nearly four weeks and was never granted that meeting, but she did not go away quietly and continues "speaking truth to liars" (the tagline of her current website "Cindy's Soapbox" ).

Along the way, Cindy has weathered many criticisms--she has been accused often of being unpatriotic and of dishonoring her son's memory with her protests of our government's actions. This strikes me not only as an incorrect assertion, but an absolutely ridiculous one. Cindy has been vehement in taking advantage of the very rights and freedoms her son--and thousands and thousands of others--died to protect. She has done so at great personal cost not only to herself, but no doubt to the rest of her family as well. She has been arrested many times--including as recently as last month.

Do I agree with every idea Cindy Sheehan has put out into the world in the eight years since her son died (especially some of her most recent thoughts)? Not by a long shot. Do I think all of her methods are the most effective available? Also, no. Do I believe her actions are her sincere efforts to honor rather than dishonor her son's sacrifice? Absolutely.

If our soldiers are going to continue to fight and die, isn't one way of honoring them to continue to ask those in power how, exactly, these sacrifices our soldiers are asked to make will protect our nation and its citizens? If the places our soldiers are asked to fight and the actions they are asked to take seem only indirectly and incomprehensibly related to the safety of our nation, are we not entitled to a full accounting of how these efforts will make us safer?

It is not only possible to support the troops and still question the government, it is in some ways the most meaningful and long-lasting support we can give.The notion that our soldiers fight and die to protect our freedoms but that by exercising those freedoms we are somehow dishonoring our soldiers is absurdly un-American.

Deb Dunham and Cindy Sheehan are two mothers who chose to honor their sons in wholly different, but equally valid, ways. Today, my thoughts are with not only those lost sons, but with their mothers as well.

To all those men and women who fought and are fighting still, here's the thing: That America you're fighting for, it's a complicated place--and it's worth it. We owe you our gratitude in every goofy and glorious way we can express it.

A Mother's Wisdom Is A Precious Thing*

2011-11-10T23:44:00.003-05:00

After work tonight, I pull into the driveway to pick up Daughter-Only, who wants to go to the store for an emergency beverage stock-up. We are bereft of beverages here, unless you count water from the tap or fruit juice from the fridge, which Daughter-Only most certainly does not.

In any case, my job is only 5 minutes from my home, not enough time for my van's antique heating system to begin blowing anything approaching hot air and the temperature has dropped significantly since I went into work so I am dressed inadequately and shivering uncontrollably when Daughter-Only joins me in the van, also dressed inadequately and already beginning to shiver uncontrollably as well.

She immediately turns the blower up as high it will go. I say, "It's only going to blow cold air harder if you do that."

She says, "If I turn it up, it will get hotter faster."

"Uh, I don't think it really works that way."

She loudly mock-whines, "YES! IT DOES!"

I say, "Daughter-Only, saying something louder does not make it any more true."

I think there are lots of people in this world who could really stand to learn that lesson, but we'll talk about teenage girls and conservative talk radio hosts another time.

*Based on Daughter-Only's logic, that should read: A MOTHER'S WISDOM IS A PRECIOUS THING

Speaking of Parentheses (We Were...Yesterday)

2011-11-09T23:32:00.003-05:00

A longish quote from one of my favorite authors, Sarah Vowell from her book Take The Cannoli: Stories From The New World:

"Phone rang. It was Dave, a writer friend. We talked for over an hour, mainly about punctuation. He has big plans for the ellipsis. He's mad for ellipses. I tell him, yeah, I have similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period). Dave is trying to decide whether he wants there to be a space before or after the ellipsis. He's unsure. Is the ellipsis powerful because of what is not said after the dot dot dot or is it a cheap excuse for not being able to verbalize? Conversely, do we parentheticals want to communicate by cramming more in, thus slapping what we're not saying in between what we are, officially, saying? Or is it because we can't decide?"

First of all, an hour-long conversation about punctuation? How the hell do I get invited to that? Because, honestly, I feel like what's missing in my life is extremely in-depth discussions of punctuation and other literary-related things.

Secondly, I, too, am a "parenthetical." (Though I never knew we had a name until I read this passage.) This is especially true in my spiral notebook journal and in long, babbling letters I used to plague friends and family with back in the days before e-mail, Facebook, and affordable long distance phone calls.

In one particular letter, which, without exaggeration, I am pretty sure was 15 or more pages long, I had parentheses within parentheses in all sorts of complicated configurations and completely lost control of the situation and accidentally closed a set too soon. I noted to Youngest Sister, the oh-so-fortunate recipient of my massive missive who was away at college at the time (probably learning to use parentheses with discretion and restraint), that I had had a "premature parenthejaculation." Even completely alone at approximately 1:45 a.m., I laughed so hard at my wit that I was wheezing a little before I finally got it together.

Here on the blog, I try mightily to restrain myself--though I all too often replace my parentheses with footnotes. Some evidence of what happens when the efforts at restraint fail can be found here. (That post also happens to illustrate pretty clearly what it's like inside my brain most of the time. Try not to be jealous.)

Parenthetical Recipes: In The Kitchen With Masked Mom

2011-11-08T13:54:00.003-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, Baby Brother's Ex-Wife texted me to ask for my recipe for potato bacon soup. This presented a problem as I don't actually have a recipe for potato bacon soup. My potato bacon soup (which is semi-legendary for both its flavor and its aroma) was actually inspired by a commercial I saw a few years ago for Tim Horton's potato bacon soup. I thought--damn, that sounds good and it doesn't seem like it would be complicated to improvise it. And improvising it was not at all complicated; explaining how I improvise it is a whole other thing.

With BBEW yesterday, there ensued a series of texts in which I admitted I basically just wing it and gave her a list of ingredients (with only vague quantities) and general instructions.

During this textversation, BBEW suggested that I should write down some of the recipes for my "signature" dishes, including my clam chowder, which is an adapation of a semi-homemade recipe I found in a women's magazine more than a decade ago. Little does she know (and I didn't spoil it by telling her), but I have actually written down my clam chowder "recipe" such as it is. It appears below, copied and pasted from the Facebook message I sent to Little Sister last year when she asked for the recipe. Try fitting this on a 3x5 card:

"Like I said last night, I'm not really sure on the measurements of anything. I just make in the biggish pot (like the one we make pasta in) and put in what looks right. The original recipe was four servings so I've always at least doubled it anyway.

Start with celery, onion and bacon chopped. (If I had to guess I would say a cup each of celery and onions and about six to ten pieces of the bacon.) Saute them in the biggish pot until they start to soften. Add clam juice (the original recipe called for 8 oz bottle so at least double that) and chopped potatoes. (I think the original called for four medium chopped--I just eyeball it to match the amount of clam juice I put in.) Boil until the potatoes are almost tender (about 15 mins ish) then add two cans chopped (or minced if you prefer) clams and about half a pound of salad-sized shrimp (you can get them frozen or usually in the fresh section at Giant, which I greatly prefer even though I think they're just thawed out frozen ones--the quality is better) and a 16 oz bag of frozen corn.Then add "some" milk--just until the color looks right. Heat through.

Remove from heat. Then, you can either take out about a half cup to one cup of the potatoes, mash them and put them back in to thicken it or you can just add some instant mashed potato flakes until it reaches desired consistency. Give it a couple of minutes between adding flakes to see how much it thickens. I would guess I usually use between half a cup and a cup of flakes, but that's really, really just a guess. Season with pepper (and salt, if desired--I never add additional salt--the clam juice is ridiculously salty).

Let me know if you have any questions."

Am I crazy for imagining there's a Food Network show in my future? We could call it The Intuitive Chef because that sounds slightly more upmarket (though no more accurate) than The Guessing Gourmet.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: i never metaphor i didn't like

2011-11-07T23:51:00.004-05:00

You know the guy who will tell a joke and then begin explaining why the joke is funny even while everyone around him is already laughing? Apparently, someone gave that guy a book deal.

I have a serious quotation fetish--I have them scribbled on scraps of paper, filed away on index cards and neatly printed out in fifteen or twenty hardbound journals. It's no surprise then, that I was interested in the cleverly titled i never metaphor i didn't like: a comprehensive compilation of history's greatest analogies, metaphors and similes [sic] by Dr. Mardy Grothe.

What was surprising was the fact that I couldn't actually finish the book. The quotations, as far as I made it through them, were fine-- some of them were familiar, but many were new to me and many of them were clever and relevant and entertaining. The commentary interspersed between those quotations, however, was intolerably condescending.

For example:

Quotation: "'We are all but sailboats on the river of life, and money is the wind. With enough money, you can blown anywhere.'--Dennis Miller"

Commentary: "...Miller is only partially talking about being blown by the wind."

And another:

Quotation: "'Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.'--P.J. O'Rourke"

Commentary: "O'Rourke's point is that born-again Christians are such an easy target that it's not particularly impressive to make wisecracks about them."

And the final-I-give-up-I-can't-take-one-more-word straw:

Quotation: "'Little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by a bat.' --Tennessee Williams"

Commentary: "Williams was referring to Capote's high-pitched voice."

Trust me when I say that in the 98 pages I was able to make it through, Grothe does not miss a single opportunity to point out the obvious.

It is clear from the introduction as well as from comments throughout those pages, that Grothe is passionate about metaphor and has great respect for the quotations he's chosen as representative of the form. What he seems to have an utter lack of faith in, however, is his reader. This is baffling to me as it would seem only logical that someone literate enough to be interested in the book would have a cultural IQ above room temperature and would not need every nuance explained.

The book is dedicated to Grothe's eight-year-old grandson. Perhaps Grothe spent too much time around that age group while writing this book? In any case, his tone and constant unnecessary explanations are nothing short of insulting.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Disappointing.

Oh, Now I Get It

2011-11-06T22:16:00.001-05:00

Despite numerous efforts to fully understand the "logic" behind Daylight Saving Time (including the ones chronicled here and here), I still find it a baffling and largely insupportable practice. Apparently, I am not alone in my bafflement.

Here, the Top Three Reasons for Daylight Saving according to random people I had the pleasure of speaking with on Fall Back Day*:

3. So farmers have more daylight to harvest crops.

2. So school children do not have to walk to school in the dark.

And, my favorite by a long shot:

1. It's an evil plot developed by the Chinese to interfere with America's productivity.

*According to Second Niece's Facebook status, today qualifies as a legitimate holiday. Hence, the capitalization.

Six Degrees of Separation: Babysitter's Edition

2011-11-05T20:17:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, while watching a DVR'd episode of Castle with Hubby, I saw a name scroll by in the opening credits that I thought I recognized. I sat straight up in my chair and began shouting like a lunatic.

"Wait! Wait! Go back--did that say Eric Tiede? Little Sister and I used to babysit Eric Tiede. I mean, maybe it's not the same Eric Tiede, but that's really not that common a name, I've never met anyone else with that last name."

Hubby rewound far enough to confirm that the name was in the credits and then he spent three or four minutes convincing me not to pause the show and go check IMDB--three or four minutes during which I could easily have gotten the information, I'd like to note--and instead suggested I just watch the episode and see if I could spot anyone who looked familiar.

Despite my protests that I had last seen Eric when he was four and that it was highly unlikely that I would recognize him now (26 years or so later), I suspected I did recognize him as the comic book store owner and after half an hour or so of Internet research, I confirmed I was correct.

I was absurdly, ridiculously excited to find out that I babysat someone who now has an IMDB page.

Imagine then, what happened when I realized the full six-degrees-of-separation implications of my association with Eric Tiede. The possibilities are endless, but here's my favorite so far:

1. I babysat Eric Tiede.
2. Eric was in a film with David Arquette (The Land of the Astronauts).
3. David Arquette was married to Courtney Cox.
4. Courtney Cox was in Friends with Jennifer Aniston.
5. Jennifer Aniston was married to Brad Pitt.
6. Brad Pitt cohabits and parents children with Angelina Jolie.

Hence, thanks to a babysitting gig in the '80s, I am less than six degrees away from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Speaking of babysitting:

Brad and Angie, I'm totally available. Give me a call.

Battle of the Bulge

2011-11-04T21:09:00.000-04:00

In the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, while at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, two friends and I invented (or thought we did) a game we called Rate-a-Bulge, which is exactly what it sounds like. This was in the mid-80's, an era during which even non-Speedo trunks left significantly less to the imagination than the board shorts that are so common today. This bulge rating was going on within easy earshot of my long-suffering mother who was sitting on a blanket nearby, flipping through a magazine.

As I remarked in my spiral notebook journal later that night, on a scale of 1 to 10, there weren't any Tens, but there were enough Eights to make looking worthwhile.

One of those Eights had just wandered by to the accompaniment of our hysterical nudges and whispers, "Guys! There's an Eight! An Eight!"

My mother glanced up, saying, "Where?" And when we pointed (oh-so-subtly, of course) him out, she said, "How is he an eight? He's not fat at all."

Apparently, my mother thought we had been spending the afternoon rating belly bulges.

Why I Love My Job, Item #398*

2011-11-03T21:24:00.001-04:00

Overheard in the van:

Guy 1: Hey, Guy 2, you got any of that gum left?

Guy 2: Nope. I chewed it all. Didn't you see me blowing bubbles while Random Stranger was speaking?

Guy 3: Who's Bubbles?

*This number is completely fabricated and not in any way meant to indicate that there are actually almost four hundred things I love about my job.

Riding It Out: Stronger Bacteria and Weaker People

2011-11-02T19:49:00.003-04:00

I have a cold. I've had it for three days. Many people I've come into contact with in the past two to three weeks have also had this cold and recovered within four or five days. The symptoms are mostly manageable, though I have only worked half days all week, mostly because I can.

I have lost track of the number people who've asked me if I've gone to the doctor yet.

I have not lost track of how annoying it is to explain that there's really not a lot a doctor can or should do for a cold--that going to a doctor before ten days or so are up is really an exercise in futility and just a way of contributing to the overprescription of antibiotics.

In my humble, and partially educated, opinion, overprescription of antibiotics as well as overuse of antibacterial products has helped to create stronger bacteria and weaker people.

So, I will be over here, bundled in my blankie, snuffling and sneezing, content* with helping to build my immune system and doing my part to deny bacteria one tiny opportunity to do the same.

*Content may be too strong a word...

The N-Word

2011-11-01T10:42:00.000-04:00

It's time to roll out the N-word again: NaBloPoMo. Thirty posts, thirty days. I'm in, for the sixth consecutive year.

Let's start small and, with luck, work our way up.

That Voodoo You Do...In Your Sleep

2011-10-29T19:10:00.001-04:00

Texts between me and a friend* I haven't talked to in a few weeks:

Masked Mom: Had a weird dream last night. In it, you had hurt your wrist. I'm a little bit of a freak so I just had to check on you.

Friend(ish): That explains the pain. Now put down the doll u evil bitch.

*With friends like these, who needs any other entertainment?

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Charlie's Angels

2011-09-26T13:03:00.016-04:00

Let's begin with two concepts that I hold dear: One is that the problem with trying too hard is that when you fail, you fail spectacularly. The other is a saying from the recovery community: an expectation is just a premeditated resentment. I think both of these observations apply to my experience with the first (and what will be, for me at least, the only) episode of the new Charlie's Angels.

I was a huge fan of the '70s show--of course, I was eight years old when the original show premiered so it's entirely possible that my standards weren't terribly high and, for that matter, that nostalgia has clouded my judgment about the "quality" of the origial show. Nevertheless, I admit up front that my fond memories of the original show may have influenced my impressions of the rebooted version.

I had a gigantic girl crush on Farrah Fawcett (yes, I even had the poster--the swimsuit from which, by the way, was donated to The Smithsonian), which expressed itself primarily in lingering fantasies that I was the long-lost daughter she had given up for adoption and she would be coming any day to rescue me from the dreary life she had doomed me to in a moment of impulsive selfishness*. When my friends and I played Charlie's Angels on the playground, though, I was always Sabrina, the smart, but comparatively "plain" Angel, played by Kate Jackson.

And we played Angels obsessively in fourth and fifth grade, solving complex mysteries in the time allotted for recess, and occasionally having to say, "To be continued." when Miss Lazorchak called us back to class. I was always trying to up the realism of our play and I remember covering my fingertips in ink and then pressing them to a piece of Scotch tape, leaving fairly credible fingerprints on the sticky side of the tape. I would then place these strips of tape at the scenes of various imaginary crimes around the playground for the other Angels to find.

Watching the new Charlie's Angels was not significantly different from how I imagine watching a bunch of nine- and ten-year-old girls playing Angels on the playground would be: lots of action, not so much character development, juvenile dialogue**, and acting so self-conscious and overthought that you can practically see the thought bubbles above the actor's heads: hit this mark, now make this expression, pause...

The issues for me began in the opening sequence when the middle Angel, "Gloria," was a woman not featured in any of the promos for the show. Conspicuously absent from that sequence was the actress Minka Kelly who was heavily featured in the promos. (Minka, by the way, is the only reason, aside from a warped nostalgic curiosity, that I decided to even try to watch the show. She is a passable actress and unspeakably gorgeous into the bargain. She has the kind of face it's actually almost painful to look at.) I don't think I will be spoiling anything for anyone who has not already seen the show (and who has an IQ above room temperature) when I say, "Disposable character alert!"

I thought killing off one of the "original" main characters was a cheap stunt--maybe an attempt to get us to bond with the remaining characters when we saw them suffering and pulling together to avenge their friend's death. Problem being, we never had time to get emotionally invested in Gloria or the other two Angels and the scene immediately following Gloria's predictably explosive death, does nothing to increase our investment. The Blonde One (I did not learn either the character's or the actor's name) makes all the right facial expressions and has tears dripping off her face, but when she says the ridiculously overwrought line "I never though my heart could hurt this much," it is in a tone so completely soulless and shallow, you can be forgiven for thinking you've accidentally wandered into a retelling of The Stepford Wives. Even the intake of breath mid-sentence seems a calculated attempt at imitating real human emotion.

I watched another ten minutes of the episode, long enough to see the introduction of Minka, before I gave up. The only real mystery about this show is how anyone made it to the end.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Ugh.

*Never mind the fact that I bore zero resemblance to Ms. Fawcett or the other fact that my parents were TEENAGERS when I was born and, therefore, unlikely to have been on the prospective parents list of any adoption agency.

**Sample conversation:
Angel: How's Charlie?
Bosley: Devastated. Losing an angel's his worst nightmare. It's mine, too.
Angel: We're going to find out who did this if it's the last thing we do.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

2011-08-15T00:15:00.002-04:00

As a mostly unrepentant tomboy and the mother of three boys, I was acutely aware of issues of feminine identity from the moment late in my pregnancy with Daughter-Only when the ultrasound technician told me she was a girl. On the one hand, I was afraid I wasn't qualified to raise a girl because there was so much about being "feminine" that I didn't understand or felt I fell short of. On the other hand, because physical appearance--and all the girly stuff that came with it--had been not merely a secondary consideration for me, but barely any consideration at all, I felt I had a better than average chance of raising a daughter whose focus was more internal than external.

I remember when Daughter-Only was weeks or maybe even only days old, she was sitting in her carrier in the middle of the dining room table when I walked by and cooed to her, "Oh, look at the pretty baby." I immediately caught myself and launched into a diatribe to Hubby about how easy it is to fall into focusing on the "wrong" things and that we needed to make sure when we leaned over her, we cooed just as often about her intelligence or her kindness or her sense of humor.

Of course, that was only the beginning of the back-and-forth issues with femininity and the ways societal expectations shape our own visions of ourselves. While we missed the Disney Princess onslaught by a few years, for which I'm grateful, we haven't escaped questions and issues with gender roles. There were many times when I could've used the wise and witty observations from Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girly Girl Culture.

The book focuses on the effect of corporatized "pink and pretty" culture, with its focus on external appearances rather than internal resources, on the psyches of the young girls it is marketed to and how much parents can or even should do to minimize or offset those effects. It is bits of investigative reporting--Orenstein at toy fairs, television networks, beauty pageants--interwoven with scenes from field research (a.k.a. actual parenting) with her own daughter and the daughters of friends.

Though Orenstein clearly has strong opinions, there is nothing preachy about her tone and, instead, we are given the opportunity to see a real mom struggle with issues she feels deeply about and come to some of the same compromises we all find ourselves making. It is one of those rare books that is both heartwarming and thought-provoking, written in an easy conversational style that makes considering an issue of real substance not only painless, but a real pleasure.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Insightful.

Time Is a Four-Letter Word

2011-07-09T22:17:00.028-04:00

What I've been doing while I've been away from the blog:

1. Strengthening my never-weak grasp of the obvious (as evidenced by this post's title).

2. Honing my already sharp skills of procrastination (about which, more later).

3. Reminding myself to keep track of all the stuff I keep forgetting.

4. Mastering the fine art of cutting off my nose to spite my face. (After futilely fighting the impulse for decades, I've decided to embrace it wholeheartedly. The good news: all that energy I'd been wasting on resisting the urge is free to be channeled into other pursuits. The bad news: those pursuits turn out to be primarily nose-cutting-off related.)

5. Wasting a lot of time worrying and complaining about how little time I have to do any of the things I actually think I should be doing--writing, for example, on the blog and elsewhere.

Drafted: Random Excerpts From As Yet Unpublished Posts

2011-04-09T21:28:00.007-04:00

Saved April 2, 2011: "Ah, the sweet smell of procrastination in the morning, er, afternoon or, you know, whenevever I get around to it."

Saved March 3, 2011: "Daughter-Only and I do two kinds of arguing--the real stuff, the get-out-of-my-life-I-utterly-hate-your-guts-door-slamming stuff and then the other stuff, which we tend to do in front of her friends--an entertaining bickering which they all seem to enjoy greatly."

Saved November 11, 2010: "We may have fallen short in a thousand ways as parents, but I count our openness with our kids about sexuality as one of our greatest successes. I do not harbor the illusion that my kids tell me everything, but I have little doubt that they know they can tell me anything."

Saved May 17, 2010: "A week or so ago, I had a dream in which Mr. High School was trying to text me. I was somehow waiting to receive the text while also able to see him as he was trying to peck out the words with fingers that appeared to be freakishly large above the itty-bitty keyboard of the teeny-tiny phone he was holding."

Saved November 25, 2009: "One is silver and the other gold."

Saved April 24, 2008: "How far down your drunk-dial list do you have to get to call the girl you had a crush on in seventh grade?"

Saved December 6, 2006: "A cigar may sometimes be just a cigar, but around here, a dog is hardly ever just a dog."

Saved August 8, 2005: "It's a weird time to pursue 'fame and fortune' in a given field. In some ways--the American Idol, Survivor, and clones ways--it's easier than ever to achieve some semblance of fame or notoriety. But I think it's also harder than ever to get recognition for real talent without being dismissed as a 'wannabe.'"