Either, Or

This, I think is the choice:

Either I have already put in my life-time supply of Viagra and Cialis and have no more need of further low-cost offers (unless I run out of it after the presumed 82.5 years' worth expires, and/or fail to die with my week-long hard-on in hand (as it were)).

Or I am still a sexual/internet neophyte (the two are synonymous, we presume) and am genuinely interested in providing my personal clandestine pharmacist with details of my needs.  In this case, I can choose from any of my daily 178 offers for V!i!gr@ or Ce@|is.  But how am I to understand my burning need, if the initial offering comes couched as follows:  "armadillo genuine flagrant testosterone jambalaya psuedo frilly punctiliousness stampede"?  And when I place my order:  how is "Ce@|is" pronounced, exactly?  (I have no idea, except that I am certain-sure it begins with a hard "C")

In (slightly) more serious vein:  can anyone enlighten me, in regards to our lawmakers' various apparent attempts to spend their free moments (when not honing their understanding of the Constitutional definition of "marriage") regulating away spam, what on godsgreenearth the 'rights' of 'legitimate advertisers' might have to do with this? 

I personally have, I believe, in my more-than-a-few decades' worth of virtual and actual bombardment from advertisers, purchased precisely one (1) thing that came to me unsolicited.  And let me assure you:  no hard C was involved.*

What do you think?

*that one thing, in case curiosity is killing you, was a subscription to the alternative parenting magazine "Brain, Child."  But I will go to my grave claiming I would eventually have found it on my own .

Letting Her See Violence

I've learned two primary Art of Parenting lessons in the past 6.5 years:

1. It's impossible not to judge others' parenting, but don't dwell overmuch on judgment.  Note the differences, register them, and then look for the forest beyond the trees.
   
2. Never defend your own parenting.  Reconsider your choices and act accordingly, but never defend your choices to those who would judge.

I'm about to break both those rules.

Three wonderful mothers with three different parenting styles (all of which I admire deeply) once had three-year-olds when my eldest was three.  One had a son who, when I visited to see a new sibling, tossed a plastic ball in the air, hit it unerringly with a large bat, and sent it whistling toward me ("Incoming!" yelled the dad cheerfully).  The second has a son whose clever hands could, and were permitted to, wield grown-up knives and saws at an early age ("No, no," I'd say nervously to my own completely unskilled would-be copycat, as she reached for his tools).  The third has a precocious daughter who met me in their livingroom one chill early winter day, holding a Newsweek and pointing to the livid image on the cover:  "Lots of people died," she lisped sadly, pointing to the burning tower.  She indicated the airplane headed for the second, and with a shrug and a resigned smile, added:  "Bad driving!"

I love and admire my friends.  In many ways, I think of them as better mothers than I am.  In many ways, we are all just feeling our way.  We've all made different choices.  We've also all made judgments: me of them -- and them of me. 

The latest occasion was our monthly book club.  Long ago we'd meet with our babes-in-arms and talk about diapering and childcare and sleeplessness.  Now we meet alone, and talk about grown-up books.  But the talk almost always slips back into mothering before the farewell.  Sunday, it honed in on movies, and what children should and shouldn't see.  Someone mentioned a twelve-year-old who'd seen The Lord of the Rings.  Heads were shaken.  Mention was made of violence in entertainment translating to violence in real life.  Sighs were sighed over the culpability of the media.  Eyes were rolled over parental lack of insight and oversight. 

I stared thoughtfully at the wall.  Because my six-year-old just finished watching The Fellowship of the Ring.  Only it wasn't like that, you know (it never is, is it?).

The oddest thing is that I'm an anti-media freak.  My kids do not watch commercial tv.  They do not watch Disney.  They've never been in a movie theatre.  They've seldom seen a cartoon, and then only "educational," and on video.  Pretend weapons are frowned on in my house.

So how......?

It wasn't just that I'm a life-long Tolkein addict, and was looking to rob the cradle for another victim before her time.  Really.  And it wasn't just a happenstance set of events over which I seemed to lose control -- although it did begin that way.  The kids asked where I'd gone, on my extremely rare few hours' time away during a weekend.  I explained:  the final movie from some books I'd always loved. 

"I want to see it," demanded Ms. Six.  "It's a grown-up movie," I explained, "but there's a first book that I could read to you.  And then, later, the others.  And you can see the movies after I've read all the books to you."  I was thinking:  years.  I forgot my eldest has inherited my pig-headedness -- and an endless tolerance for the read word.  We went through The Hobbit at record speed.  I loved it.  She loved it.  We started on The Fellowship.  It was harder going.  I caved in to my baser instinct.  "I'll just let you watch the birthday party part of the movie," I said, "since we've already read that part."  We watched it on DVD on my laptop, curled on my bed, with her pressed into my body and eagerly eating up the lucious New Zealand Shire.  We kept reading.  We read through to the Council of Elrond.  It was slow, with lots of High English and poetry.  She began to fidget.  "Okay," I said.  "We can see the movie from the birthday party through the Council, if we make it through the reading."  She re-focused.  She earned her reward.  We discussed the differences between the book and the movie.  Which characters were like how we'd imagined them, and which were not.  What things the movie left out that shouldn't have been left out.  What parts of the plot had changed, and why.  Which role we'd play if we had the chance.  Who we'd love to meet in real life.  We read more.  We watched more.  We read more....

By this time, it was obvious where I was headed, so I started creating ex-post facto logic.  I want my children to meet evil, first, in a place where it is controllable, clear-cut, and absolutely imaginary.  I want my children to appreciate deeply thoughtful prose.  I want my children to understand the nature of art, and the difference between art in all fora.  I want my children to first be scared when they are with me, pressed against me, so I can feel them tremble and then talk about it (she was scared about the cave troll, so I talked about the artist, and why he made the choices he did, and how you make a moving cartoon from a static picture.  "He looked really real," she said dubiously.  We made flip-books of stick-figures).  I monitored her remembered dreams; her play-time.  I made sure she wasn't obssessed or unduly worried.  I........

Eschew judgment.  Avoid defensiveness.  I know.  I know. 

I'm Saying Eli Sent Me

When I began my afternoon sneezing fit the other day, my colleague "Eli" sauntered over to have a word.  I looked up (it's only possible to look up at Eli when sitting down), a wry grin already on my face.  Eli affects me that way about half the time.  When I have time for him, he's fascinating and hilarious.  When I don't, he's irritating and incomprehensible.  Eli himself, however, never changes.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Eli grew up on a kibbutz near the Red Sea, herding sheep and repairing a endless line of hard-worked farm equipment.  Eli's immigration to the U.S. with his wife and three children some decades ago added to our melting pot an acerbic bit of spice of the sort that feeds this nation's greatness. 

As an employee, Eli does have his down sides, not the least of which is his disdainful and untrusting attitude toward all our clients (akin to how one might treat someone with suspected connections to urban terrorism).  This may be an offshoot of Eli's birth in the cauldron of the Middle East, or perhaps the fact that our clients have, indeed, on more than one occasion gone back to their home laboratory and issued a patent application suspiciously similar to Eli's prior art. 

Eli receives a U.S. patent approximately twice a year.  His brand of engineering is intuitive, and thus sometimes bears the brunt of ill will by younger, better-trained engineers who claim he can't analyze himself out of a paper bag.  But they change their tune soon enough when up against a problem in one of Eli's particular specialities.  Eli has a gift, born not of study and the scientific method, but of something far more visceral.  His fellow engineers, while accepting his input eagerly, don't hesitate to mock it by mentioning that it might have something to do with putting the goat in the house.  This is a reference to Eli's tendency to punctuate his expostulations on all things professional and personal with morality tales that lose something in the cultural translation. 

Personally, when time permits I love listening to Eli's stories.  Sometimes I can extract the point, on the basis of a degree in literature and some familiarity with Aesop and others of that ilk, but more often than not I'm just left shaking my head in delighted recognition that there are still cultural differences so vast, in this global village of ours, that the true sense of meaning just does not translate.

So I started sneezing, and Eli came over.  I can't pretend to capture his words.  You'll have to imagine something between Zero Mostel and Yassar Arafat (whom I'm sure Eli, with his The-World's-One-Immense-Ironic-Bad-Joke Attitude, would laugh to hear I believe he resembles).  In his characteristic hand-waving, aphoristic, article-free style, Eli informed me sternly that it was time to get off my high horse and go to the allergist.  I said somewhat shamefacedly that I had, and that I was allergic to the usual things (cockroach dung, dust, various trees, life in general), but I just didn't want to do drugs.  Eli waved his arms some more.  Making some unintelligible remark about drugs and youthful high jinks and how he understood my attitude completely, but I was an absolute idiot to hold it, he commanded me to go get a prescription.

My current state of wheeziness is the worst I've had in my several decades of suffering, and I've always resisted so far.  But something about Eli is irresistable.  Perhaps it's that powerful mystique born from millenia of survival under conditions too harsh to be imagined, and all the vast sardonic power of the humor derived therefrom. 

Anyway, I'm on my way to become one of the drugged.  I'll tell the allergist Eli sent me. 

I may also reference the goat in the house, just for laughs.

Are You Game? 

Okay, all you fellow non-poets out there (my good poet friends can play too, but you aren't allowed to laugh at the rest of us) here's the challenge: 

Write a poetic metaphor or simile.  Tell me what you are and give me a sense of how you feel about it.

There are no rules about format (this is where the poets aren't allowed to laugh).

Here's mine:

I am ice cream

coned

mint, maybe with flinted chocolate

dripping

sodden

sickly sweet

 

I am the river

slate-grey

gurgling under -road

swirling trash

against  girders

And yep, I know you can do better!

I Don't Do.....

Yesterday evening I just had one of those unfortunately revelatory moments when you realize that you are Not Actually As Wonderful A Human Being As You Thought.  I confess that I've had far fewer of these moments than would be required for true humility (or for a passing grade with whatever God or Goddess drew the dull duty of tallying these things), but still: it's not a moment to relish, eh?

So this was the source of my disillusionment:  I've always thought I was the be-all and end-all of parental self-sacrifice (particularly in relation to my spouse -- and I mean, that's the bit that counts when one's feeling particularly put-upon, of course, that holier-than-thou bit).  I was always on clean-up detail for the green poop and the multiple-pukes.  I did the night parenting.  I was the one the kids demanded when fever-flushed, or upset, or even deliriously happy.  I'm just that Essential Mom Type, all around.

But this evening I came face-up against the thing I don't do.  The spouse and the kids were at the kitchen counter when I came in from walking the dog.  They were happily engaged in something involving water and copious amounts of corn starch (which was all over the floor, countertop, clothing and hair).  Everyone was grinning.  "We're making slime.  Care to play?" asked the spouse.  I glanced at the operation.

"I have to do the laundry," I growled, and escaped the premises. 

No, it wasn't the mess per se.  I'm all for mess.  What I hate, you see, what I HATE is the feel of powdery stuff on my hands.  I'm the granddaughter of an accomplished potter and the daughter of a woman who's kneaded her homemade bread by hand for over a half-century -- but I can't STAND powdery hands.  No dried mud, flour, clay or corn starch need apply. 

I've known this about myself since I first extracted myself, horrified, from mud-pie-play, shuddering and desperately seeking the nearest flowing water.  But I'd never previously realized it applied to my parenting.  Woe is my ego!

What don't you do?

(P.S. on slime -- I did deign to dabble, once it was well-and-thoroughly mixed -- it's one of those totally cool gruesome kiddie science experiments with all sorts of lessons about material properties.  If you haven't tried it, go find someone who 'does' powder, and introduce the kids (you can play too, when they've tired of it....))

Conversations With Three

"Mom?"

"Yes, honey?"

"Suppose a little girl told her mommy, and told her mommy, that her seatbelt wasn't fastened for 40 miles, and her mommy didn't listen?"

"She would be a very bad mommy."

"And suppose there was suddenly by accident a house in the middle of the road, and the car bumped into it as it was going along?"

"That wouldn't be good."

"No."

"Honey?"

"Yes?"

"Did I remember to fasten your seatbelt?"

"Yeah."

"Okay.  Just checking." 

Praising With Great Praise

My youngest is easy to encourage.  "That's a beautiful picture!" I enthuse.  "All that red and purple is so colorful!"  She just beams.  My eldest is getting a bit more sophisticated.  "What a fantastic drawing!" I gush.  She puts her head to the side and sneers.  "It is not good," she objects.  "The people are all crooked."  I hesitate, wondering whether to take the "Picasso, not da Vinci" approach, the "Well I think it's wonderful" approach, the "better than 95% of all 6-year-olds" approach, or perhaps even the "But every try brings you closer to perfection" approach.  The point, of course, is to encourage.  To make her feel a sense of accomplishment.  To praise.

In my own working world people appreciate what I do, and I know that.  But because by temperament and training I'm the person who does the background work (the schedule coordination, letter-ghosting, resume review, PR prep, strategic planning sort of stuff) I don't get the big accolades and the public prizes.  Nor do I get the flowers on secretary's day.  I'm somewhere in the supportive in-between.  And it's an unpraised middle-ground, that backbone-of-the-organization place.

At my last review, my boss remarked on his perception that I was "just a lot happier than I used to be."  I was initially confused by this.  I realized the truth of it, but couldn't put my finger on when "mildly disatisfied" turned into "happier."  Then I sorted out some start dates. 

Writing on Xanga, and on a few other more "serious lit" sites, has not only given me an outlet for my most heartfelt passion, it's also brought me something much simpler:  praise.  Stupid though it sounds, every eprop is a little bright light in a dull room.  Every critique on my lit site is a congratulatory pat on the back:  "I care enough about your writing to read it carefully." 

My newest revelation, and resolution, then, is to seek ways to help others get this little extra lilt to the step.  If I just find a way to praise one person every day, the world will be a better place. 

Not so hard, eh?

What makes you feel properly praised? 

And do you get enough of it?

The Will of the People

I craned my neck to look him firmly in the eye, and he looked firmly down on me.  We exchanged a no-nonsense handshake.  "It's good to see you again, Sir," I said.  "It's a pleasure to be here," he pronounced, with great feeling and sincerity.

Then he moved on, and his wake of reporters, handlers, minders and sycophants washed me up to the side, part of the flotsam in the political process.

The governor of Ohio doesn't remember meeting me before, but he did, at a corporate awards ceremony, during which time each awardee was given three minutes of his undivided attention.  Forearmed with the knowledge that he'd also been a Peace Corps volunteer, that was my opening gambit -- and the full extent of our conversation.  His parting remark was something to the effect of "We must meet again some time and discuss the Corps!"  I doubted we would ever meet, and knew we'd never discuss the Corps.  The latest offshoot of a long line of politicos (his great-grandfather a President, his grandfather and father Senators), the governor was weaned on the skill of making every passing voter feel listened-to, appreciated, and involved, in as narrow a time-frame as possible.  And despite my own disagreements with 89% of what the governor stands for, I did.  I felt listened-to.  I felt a connection. 

Even my colleague Mr. Epiphany, whose role during our governmental pass-through was significantly greater than mine, and whose cycnicism more considered, muttered to me ex post facto "He really seemed genuinely interested!" 

The governor was, of course genuinely interested.  Interested in the vote.  Interested in the publicity.  Interested in the prominence of his state's position in the Union.  Interested in the welfare of the people of Ohio.

In that order.

While recounting the visit to a large group of project-associated clients and colleagues at dinner that night (two Big Deal meetings in one day = two too many for me!), one of the more jaded of the group said laughingly:  "What would America be like without the politicians?  Do you think we'd actually get things done?"

After the laugh, I mulled that one over.  A democracy requires the people to elect its leaders, which means would-be leaders must place themselves often before the voters for consideration.  But in this world of the sound-bite, the photo-op, and the instant three-minute connection, when does the leading or representation actually happen?  I asked one of the governor's aides what percentage of his time was spent at "events" like the one we were experiencing.  "The governor really likes these," said the aide.  "He loves the chance for one-on-one."  One-on-one?  It was a theatre.  A circus.  Nothing unscripted was said.  And the aide showed me his boss's schedule, when 45 minutes of "office time" was slotted between our little hoop-la and the next one down the street.

I'm wondering whether that old adage is still even minimally correct:  "The only good thing about democracy is that there's nothing better."

Grainy

grainy-eyed wee hours

too much

stress

people

meetings

duties

this

that

the other

 

air

I

need

air

(completely unrelated pause to share something insanely funny:  while erasing the latest 435 pieces of turd in my inbox, I fleeting noticed a vanishing message from "Virile Products" entitled "Stop importence and Pay Less")

Walk on the Wild Side

Three and Six and I (after much struggle between our dissimilar lists of preparations when taking a walk in the brisk pre-dusk chill of a winter farmscape; e.g. whether actual socks were necessary beneath the boots, whether actually zipping the coat was required, and whether gloves were an appropriate accouterment) let ourselves out the door and into the joyous reception of the dog, eager to follow us to the ends of the earth (or at least to the nearest parting-of-the-ways where a passing woodland scent would send her rocketing off into the hinterland despite my screaching imprecations and threats of confinement). 

We performed the standard rote bit of theatre at the road:  Me:  "Now look both ways!"  The girls (in chorus, swiveling heads rapidly and sightlessly from one side to the other):  "No. No."  We proceeded down the steep slope, now denuded of last weeks' snows but still hard-frozen and slick.  Six, gloveless hands in pockets, set off independently at a racing pace.  I waited for her to fall, but she's miraculously drawn a amazing sense of balance from somewhere in the gene pool, and was soon lost to sight amid the brush in the vale.  Three dutifully trotted rapidly after her, with me galumphing behind.  Three took a spill at the first water-bar, then at the second.  I warned her about the third, on which she teetered but didn't fall. 

We started up the hill, where a sheet of crinkled ice still clings to the sunless side of the valley.  "If you walk on that, you'll fall down."  I said.  Three took two unhesitating steps forward and crashed definitively.  I stood silent.  "I told you so!" giggled Three cheerfully.  We proceeded on to the junction in the path where the tractor had broken the crusted earth and left deep squishy ruts.  I picked my way delicately to the side.  Three tromped joyfully in.  "Mud is slippery," I remarked.  I was interrupted by a scream from the top of the hill, where Six, having crested the rise, was now running away from a thundering steer.  She hid behind the bole of a large tree while the steer snorted and sniffed.  "Stand your ground!"  I yelled.  "If you pretend you're powerful, cows will believe you."  There was a s-p-l-oo-shhhh behind me as Three took another pratfall, this time into deep cold mud.  She giggled "My boots are all yechy."  Boots, yes, and knees, rump and waist too.  Seizing her firmly by the paw, I marched up the hill where Six was plastered to the tree-trunk.

Rejoining forces, I shouted at the steers (sniffing around their treed victim like ungainly, oversized coonhounds), who shied away.  Delighted, Six and Three shouted too.  The steers turned tail and rumbled off.  We explored the water trough, with its icy remnants, before heading home. 

Overhead, a lone redtail hawk ducked its head as it slid into the chill, darkening aircurrents above the valley.  In the west, the red-orange glimmer of the setting sun glowed behind bare black trunks.