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

"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

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...

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

"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 Mom³ doesn'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

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*...

...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

"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

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?

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

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

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

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

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*

"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

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

"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

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"

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

"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

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.