Collection

Here is a plot bunny giant enough and strong enough for me to want to saddle it up and gall-hop away: on "crones" in sci fi. YES, PLEASE.

(N)o person inherently deserves to have a larger psychological piece of the universe than another person

I would add: or physical piece. Walk like a man, talk like a man - get crashed into by men, my friend! This phenomenon is the WORST in grocery stores, and it's always white men.

the brittle tedium of being yourself in a foreign place

This is an exhibit I might have to visit, Hopper and hotels. (Initially, I used the term "go see" in that first sentence, but changed it to "visit" ... both because my brain insists upon certain rhythms - but also because it seems, in the dingy gradation of color words have for me, a better choice for the picture.) What Sebastian Smee reviews as problems are part of what I see as the strengths in Hopper. The unfinished stories these pieces evoke. The "clunkiness" of his female figures strike me as, in fact, similarly honest to the rest of his images; celebrating bodies which are not artistically or aesthetically perfect. The strands of hair, the skin tones and shadow are impeccable. I can see muscles and bones where Smee apparently cannot.

Bufforty

It's weird. Being 49 doesn't wig me out, but my age in comparison to others is what gets me sometimes. Years ago, with Daniel Craig's first Bond outing: finding out I was several weeks older than James Bond gave me a turn. That one's still some cognitive dissonance for me.

Finding out today that Sarah Michelle Gellar is turning FORTY. Well. I pretty much can't deal with this at all.

Buffy indeed lives.
Image: Wikipedia, duh.

Thank heavens Tony Head is still older than I. It's the little things.

Collection

This is a GREAT piece from NPR on fun that's no fun for some - but if you listen, please also read. Because this piece is monochromatic.

Okay, and in the what is old department, we have irony … which, like anything else, is STILL not new again. Does anyone remember the scene from Name of the Rose, where Brother Jorge argues against the idea that Christ ever laughed? It’s a more important question than most of us are really able to comprehend. The turn-of-the-millennium context is strong, but I might quibble with one or two points on the Protestant history in this essay. But the overall point is: one generation ALWAYS complains about the next. (This one is for Jeff Sypeck, as we were so recently discussing the subject of hand-wringing elders!) I would argue the statement that people are especially self-aware these days. And what we’re dealing with nowadays is less “irony” than a couple of decades of SNARK, which has become exhausting.

Walt Whitman, recognized, in 1871, that "the aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of."

Enclothed cognition has been getting a great deal of attention. NPR’s recent piece by Invisibilia included the issue of feeling in control – a test subject who participated in one study protested that she preferred to feel like she was more in control – but, of course, we take control over this in the choices we make out of our wardrobes in the first place, right? I have had countless discussions with others at the office in any one of my squillion different jobs and offices, about how multiple people seem to be dressed the same way on a given day, or about wearing bright colors to wake or emotionally perk ourselves up.

I personally feel I exert a great deal of control over my emotional state and my readiness for a day based on how I choose to dress. It’s one part of the reason I set out my clothes when I come home rather than trying to choose something in the morning. Planning saves me time and pre-caffeinated “thinking”, and it gets something done I won’t have to manage in a stressed-out state. I also have a little fun with it – ooh, what jewelry will I take out on the down, what style will I deploy? And I go to bed knowing it’s one less thing to deal with. It’s also a decompressive time at the end of a work day. I come home, feed the kids, put Pen in her yard, and Goss and I go up to the quiet bedroom, where I shuck the day literally and figuratively, and plan the next one. It is a peaceful ritual, and gives me quiet time with The Grey Poobah, while Yellow Poobah enjoys some decompression of her own in her beloved yard.

On August 8, as I languished in the Atlanta airport with thousands of other victims of the Delta outage,  one of the things I noticed was the number of people who were dressed WELL. I was not one of these people. When I travel at all, I tend to dress not merely for comfort, but actually for invisibility. When I was young, this was a mechanism to deflect attention to whatever attractiveness I possessed, and to make my way with the least resistance. Flying or driving, I did not want to be approached - traveling alone, nobody wants company at the rest area or sitting tightly packed on a plane. A woman doesn't want to be subject to her own appeal. With age, I continue the comfort-lack-of-style as a matter of practicality and owing to how sick I get.

There is a freedom (hah) in ageing-woman invisibility, but for a lot of us it is also painful. If your figure has also changed with the years, it can be difficult to survey a crowd of thousands and to feel invisible. Or, worse, to think of being seen - for the dowdy old thing you have become. No longer caring.

Mr. X is coming in my direction at some point in the next several months. Invisibility is a problem, and frumpy is a not-having-it deal breaker. So I have invested in some comfort clothes that are less ... beige.


Okay. Enough of that.

Now on from enclothed cognition to ... well, how about literally another way of thinking?

… that Botox thing, where empathy is constrained by the paralysis induced by the botulonum toxin? It’s called embodied cognition. Huh.

Collection

In the world of quackery - I so love this article. On the mathy of homeopathy: “If a single molecule … were to survive the dilution, its concentration would be 1 in 100200. This huge number, which has 400 zeroes, is vastly greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe (about one googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes).”

Without comment on what quantifies “best” in the quote here, the piece I’m linking to it is worth a look. “The best newspaper in the world should not run articles that might as well be headlined “Ladies, You Might Think You Look OK, But You Don’t.””

Damn, this is good writing. Funny, insightful, beautifully expressed. I hope it will be heard. “Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.” “Today 'empowerment' invokes power while signifying the lack of it.”

Brexit. Hmm. “My admittedly primitive understanding of democracy is that we're supposed to move toward it, not away from it, in a moment of crisis.” … an interesting essay, presented without opinions from yours truly. On the concept of “Too much democracy” …

... and here we have a civilized discussion (including actual British people!) at Colin Smith's blog ...

The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their 'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be...

--Michael Moorcock

Not the NRA ... on the history of Sig Sauer.

On the question at this column, “Joke or Threat” – a joke isn't, if the audience is actually threatened. “If he’s been asked repeatedly to stop making sexual jokes and comments about Sophie, and continues to make them, he is actively and intentionally causing her harm.” It is dispiriting that this needs to be explained, even to people who think they are friends.

“For older folks, automobiles were, and are, the technology of freedom; you’ll get them into autonomous vehicles when you can peel the stick shift out of their cold, dead fingers. For younger people, automobiles, especially in cities, are becoming an unnecessary complication to their busy lives—a car detracts, rather than augments, their freedom and mobility. Rather, it is their smartphone that gives them access to the world and that they perceive gives them freedom.” (Bonus content – the usual dismissal of anyone between the so-called Boomer and Millennial generations: “The shift to on-demand, autonomous personal transportation as a service, rather than vehicles as owned artifacts, that generational change will enable, could happen relatively quickly—perhaps in less than a decade as purchasing power shifts from the boomer to the millennial generation.” Man. It’s a shame, sometimes, that my generation never existed.)

A lifetime of leers. Not an edgy short story, I'm afraid.

Snobbery, Fashion, and Manners of Speaking

The vocal fry thing was only the beginning.

In recent months, verbal linguistics have been a constant obsession. I keep noticing how speedily pronunciations are evolving, and thinking about how they have changed in the past.

Watching films made in the 1930s, I get a sense of the vogue way to speak when my grandmothers were young - what "modern" used to me - and I wonder how their voices differed from one another in their primes, based on the way I remember them before they died. Both Virginian, but from different places, different backgrounds. I can still hear my mom's mother's voice fairly clearly in my head.

Listening to younger women now - and knowing that, though my generation's ears often find it annoying and even unintelligent-sounding, vocal fry and creak are now considered signifiers of education and success - I listen for different types of this evolved valspeak, and try to understand where the annoying affectations of my own youth became the worthy attainments of a new age ... and I wonder how quickly another mode of speaking will take over, what *is* taking over, and how these things will sound to those finding their own, new voices. How quickly fashion will change.

I wonder, too, how much of this occurred - how quickly speech changed - before media developed and burgeoned and kept us constantly aware of how we and others sound. Those thirties movies came at an era when image was literally projected for the first time, and sound became an emblematic part of fashion.

Clearly, language has always changed its sound. If new ways of speaking had not always superseded old ways - in coinage, but just as fundamentally in sound and emphasis - we'd still be speaking in what we now like to call proto Indo-European roots.

It's hard not to think recorded sound and image have not affected the speed with which these changes occur. It seems only yesterday I was complaining about the ubiquity of people emphatically growling HUJAPASSENT to indicate their certainty about something, and now I haven't heard it in months. Already out of vogue? I'm not even sure when I last heard curate; but artisinal has been fairly popular for a couple of years.


Getting out of coinage trends and looking at pronunciation, current fashion sounds to fogeys of (say) my Certain Age ... well, actually infantile. There is a trend for both overstatement and inaccuracy in diction, and some of the inflections and emphases echo those of a child just learning to speak.

A sampling of pronunciations which seem to be crossing regional lines, so do not appear to be related to particular accents:

Overdone ...

           diDINT (didn't)

           JOOLuhree (jewelry)

           feahMAlee (family)
           FOWurd (forward)

           MEEkup (makeup)

Underdone ...

           fill (feel)
           housiz (houses - first S sibilant)         
           uhMAYzeen (amazing)

           BEEdy (it took me some patience to understand this as a pronunciation of "beauty")
           BEDdur (better**)
 

The intensity of emphasis on consonants in middle of a word reminds old folks like me of a liddle kid's care in speaking words still new to their tongues - training the tongue to every part, every syllable of a word. It is adorable in a three year old, the way a toddler's emphatic way of walking is cute, as they learn refined balance.

In an adult - to more elderly adults - all this sounds considerably strange.



Here's where it gets REALLY interesting:

Considering how strange my slurring and curiously unsyncopated manner of speech must sound to those putting (let's face it) so much more effort into their speaking.

At Janet Reid's blog yesterday, we touched in the comments on the concept of dated voice, looking at slang and its changes since the 80s. But the actual mechanics of my tongue and lips, trained in a different generation, are themselves probably a giveaway of my age.

In the same way that, say Rosalind Russell's or Katherine Hepburn's youthful staccato and volume make people think that the acting in old movies was unnaturalistic, perhaps - my own seventies and eighties infused rhythms and inflections are distinct from the modes of speech in the under-thirty-five set right now, and probably sound artificial, if not downright lazy. It may be a more accurate signifier of my age than the old "check a woman's hands and elbows to see how old she really is" thing.

And oddly enough: Rosalind Russell was the absolute mistress of vocal creak ...

**Lest we think I'm talking only about female voices;

some of the most egregious infantile pronunciation currently available... 

Metal, Man

Most of my life I've never 'been' anything - I don't make much of an effort on those things that earn cred-points to 'make you' this or that or the other label-thing.

I'm a huge fan of Trek, but still consider myself somewhat outside Trekdom because I'm not dedicated and have never been to a Con and so on. I'm something of a nerd, but have never played video games (do we even call them that anymore, or is the word "games" itself now the entire description of what once we had to refer to as electronic games and so on?) or achieved academically or committed sufficiently to this, that, or the other geek-cred.

As with my association with subcultures throughout my life, I get in there from time to time, but I'm never a member.

I'm not even an 80s metal head.

When I was in high school, I thought I was a hippie but wasn't ... and thought I liked New Wave but wasn't all the way there ... and had friends into hair bands, but was shy of its brashness ... and, again: I wasn't anything.

The blurb under my bio? "I contain multitudes" ... ? In a way, it's both a brag and a lament. My personality is multifarious, nonconforming - but then, it's also a bit jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

It's fun to brag that my first two concerts were The Clash's Combat Rock tour and Bowie (I often don't point out that was Serious Moonlight - but still - I saw all the cool concerts). But I wasn't fully in with either of those crowds either.

When I met Beloved Ex late in 1987, and began a seven-ish year stint With the Band, I actually, finally, gained a bit of cred in the one place I've ever had it. And even that - by proxy, of course.

I spent those years gigging right along with BEx and the band. I even ran lights for them a time or two (not my first time; I did major in theater - and that comment that I was part of the Rhythm Nation refers to one of the best shows I ever did run lights for - a dance concert, set to the album). I helped set up and break down, I sold what swag they had from time to time, I absolutely acted a bit as an ambassador. It never hurt those guys to have a fox dancing and "WOO!"ing up front, getting others to actually form a crowd around the stage.

When BEx worked with a radio station on an in-house band called The Wham Bam Thank You Band - I was (by the radio guys we palled around with) called The Ma'am. My chagrin at the time was entirely faked.

So that post label, the one marked 80s Bimbastic Glory? It's the one label-claim I actually feel I can make. Yeah, it's a joke (I wasn't a bimbo, I just played one for the band). BEx and I were both actually pretty conservative, well-bred, nice kids. He was a bashful and mannerly corn-fed boy who opened doors for me and treated me right.

On stage, of course, he was a whole 'nuther story.

And so, I got my cred.



I have a soft spot for metal, and all those things we're supposed to find risible - or, worse, sanctify as part of My Youth - because it's been That Many Years since they were happening (both in the temporal and the hip senses of the term). Not all metal was born in the 80s and not all its musicians had the bad hair. (I had bad hair myself, but not because it was big.)

Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, AC/DC - I love some of the greats, and some we are supposed to consider not-so-great. Hell, years ago I saw Sebastian Bach - specifically to gawk at whoever would go see him past his sell-by date, and possibly to throw some Silly String around the venue - and hell if he didn't smack my attitude down by sounding good. Still an asshat, of course. But the guy can sing, and that's his job. My hat was off. G'wan, Sebastian Bach.

More recently, the same friend and her husband and I went to go see The Cult. And Ian Astbury was great, they were tight, and it was a wonderful show, we had a great time. I could have lived without seeing that one guy from my past, but the music? My jam. That was an excellent show.

I still love this stuff. I don't OWN enough of it, of course, but then I don't own enough Janet Jackson nor *any* Loretta Lynn, nor much else of a lot of the music I love either.

Judas Priest. Jeebers, and by Priest, I mean only where Rob Halford is involved. Because - Halford! It's a rock shout unto itself, his name. Woo!

Dio. Aww. Ronnie James Dio. Tell me any fan who doesn't go all AWW when they remember him. He was the best manner of spectacle - and he seems also to have been a great guy, a nice one. Aww, Ronnie James Dio. Rest in Peace - or in mayhem, if that is more fun for a rock god, man.

And Zeppelin.

I have a hard time with Zeppelin, because - I mean, Jimmy Page once basically attemped to own a little girl for a year or two. Pretty much did. And how HIDEOUSLY horrifying. How sick, and way beyond rock-and-roll demented. It's all the worse, given he's all but internationally deified, and grey hair has conferred upon him forgiveness for all sins, if not English sainthood ...

But damn me if I can or will cut Led Zep's music out of my life. "Thank You" alone has some deep roots in my memories, and I can't excise those, nor do I care to.

And of course "Whole Lotta Love" - the performance of which is a major factor in my saying BEx on stage was a whole 'nuther guy above. I saw people who'd known him as my dorky boyfriend witness him on stage and just about die of shock.

On stage, Beloved Ex was one hell of a rock star.

He was a GREAT front man, a talented singer, guitarist, bass player, AND writer.

His spelling was the pits, but that was dealt with in the divorce.



I feel the need to get out in my car with the fantastic JVC sound system (once it gets past factory standard, it's a "sound system" not a stereo) and listen to something really loud.

I'd do it in the house. But Gossamer tends to jump.

Aww. Gossamer. Even more loveable than Ronnie James Dio. And that is saying something.

Vintage Theory

I have a theory and it is mine, but you can have it - indeed, you can comment on it and all those lovely things we can do in blog-land. So go to it!

Today, I wore a soft jersey shirt with a raw-edged asymmetrical cut. It's a flattering top, very very soft, and several years old. The jersey has held up very well, and the raw edge is still perfect, no strings coming loose nor runs trying to open up in the weave. It's wonderfully comfortable, washable, and has a unique style. It is also the first top I bought in what has become a trend: the long-line asymmetrical sleeveless knit top with curious draping/ruching/mixed textiles, and at the time I bought it, it was daring and forward thinking. It's still an excellent design, still not widely imitated to effect as good as its own.

But it is several years old. And it is made of a very light, delicate jersey knit.


This got me thinking.

With the various vogues for vintage style - and this dates well back before Mad Men, Downton Abbey, or even the fashion, beginning in my own much-molded youth, for rockabilly styles - it's always been a mix of re-created ... and ORIGINAL ... vintage clothes. Inspiration for big-shouldered 80s styles lay in an interest in 40s fashion silhouettes, and we resurrect and imitate Victorian, New Look, Flapper, even 18th-century clothes.

Okay, we're not wearing 18th-century, but I've seen people who wear original 19th-century coats in my day. And certainly much of the 20th century is represented in vintage shops and so on.


Here is the thing I realized:

When the first whiffs of 80s retro came  along, I waited for the vintage to come out. And it never did.

Beginning almost alarmingly soon after the decade died, by 1990, Madonna was playing around in giant bellbottoms, and cork plats came into style all too quickly, ushering in the still-extant-to-some-extent 70s fashion rehash. The 60s have been in style since the 80s; plastic-fantastic colors and shapes and Carnaby cute replaying almost without let all along - winklepickers, granny purses, big hair and long hair and staid, nubby boucle knits and Flower Power.

We have pieces of these original decades. I have a 1940s grosgrain purse of my great-grandmothers, which is in spectacular, strong condition, and which I can carry on special occasions. I have a hat nearly as old, a straw hat of my grandmother's. I've seen American Duchess's Lauren modeling dresses she plans to WEAR, not just collect. I myself own a magenta moire' New Look dress made in the UK and very definitely original (that rare original large enough to fit a modern woman's body).

The reason these things can be recycled/reused is this: they were made well enough to survive.


The 80s retro never took off in the way previous decades did because there really isn't as much in the way of surviving originals. They are definitely still *around* - but the quality of clothes made in the 1980s does not stand up to the standards of previous manufacture or hand-making. Even the 70s still used more natural (resilient) fiber and tailoring made to be altered and some expectation that garments should be built to last.

In the 80s, earlier synthetics were perfected ("") and proliferated. In the 80s, seam allowances disappeared, never to be seen since. In the 80s, commerce overcame design, and fashion overcame style to a great extent. In the 80s, the concept of perennial pieces began to be depressed, if not actually opressed or repressed, and short attention spans for fads were built into an industry whose market influence discouraged classic must-have pieces and began heavily to emphasize label uber-alles.

There hasn't even been much whiff of 90s retro, and 15 years on I hear people occasionally actually talking about what they miss in 90s fashion. But the skater-skirts-with-tights and chunky Mary Janes are going to have to be rebuilt this time, because the ones we had bit the rayon-shrinkage or Payless-poorly-constructed dust, or at least are thinner on the ground (and, yeah, in textile) than better made clothes have been for those interested in older decades used to be.


All of it's getting thinner on the ground, of course. With profligates like me WEARING sixty-year-old dresses, they're not going to last the way furniture or architecture might. With others DIY'ing pieces already perhaps compromised - or NOT - even what survives intact is deliberately deconstructed (if not actually destroyed, at least by some lights).

With actual construction being the crap that it mostly is, there won't be many Members Only (or L'Autre Mode ... heh) jackets to go with prefabricated fake DIY Chucks or stirrup pants or Benetton slouches in United candy colors.

No wonder 80s retro didn't take off the way 70s and 60s and so on did before. It'd have to be remade altogether.

And who wants to do that ... ???

22, 222 ... and 20150626

Twos have for whatever reason always dominated my addresses, phones, room or apartment numbers and so on in my life.

Today is the twenty-second anniversary of the day I married Beloved Ex, and he’s been much on my mind of late. We’ve talked a couple times in the past month or so, and I’ll call him tonight to wish him well on our day and reminisce a bit like proper oldsters.

BEx was twenty-two (hah) and I nineteen when he and I first met. He was a would-be rockstar and I was – really quite unformed. I’d been through my little hippie kid phase, and entered into a bit of a groupie rocker chick mode when he and I got into a relationship, but as to who I wanted to me, or was, there were a lot of questions unanswered – indeed, unexamined at all – back then.

We were together six years before we married, and all I knew was that I had a good man and that was valuable enough I couldn’t look beyond that point. I clutched on entirely because he was (and is) a fine person and not half bad looking.

It’s funny, but I never had a thing for blonds nor the Nordic God thing in a man, but the fella I married was all of that. His resemblance to Michael Hurst of Hercules: the Legendary Journeys has always struck me, because – though Hurst appears a good deal shorter than BEx – the humor and goodness in their smiles were alike. But for maximum recognition value: BEx resembles Rutger Hauer to an almost alarming degree – physically. His demeanor is nothing so forbidding (men Diane likes: nerdliness comes first, then good-looking), and BEx is twenty years younger than the Replicant, but feature for feature the similarity may be stronger than Aeolus’s.

A friend of mine during the years I was married to BEx once explained to a table of friends out for a drink and a nosh, about the color of BEx’s eyes. She told the story of how her dad used to take her and her brothers camping. They would climb this beautiful mountain, in fresh air in the sunshine. They would stop at the top to lay out food and eat by a beautiful lake. The water was blue, and so clear you could see to the bottom. Her story went on a good five or ten minutes. And it ended, “And THAT is the color of Diane’s ex’s eyes.”

Gee. And all I ever did was gank from Carla Tortelli, who said, when asked if a handsome man’s eyes were blue, “*Sigh* Like Windex!”

Image: Wikipedia

I Googled him this week – why I don’t recall, but sometimes you Google an ex, and this is one of those “aww – Beloved Ex” weeks. This time, I got one of those ghastly Olan-Mills-for-the-corporate-office type portraits; weirdly taken from a high angle, so he’s looking upward and kind of cheesy, all be-suited and too tidy and slick. His blond-ness has subsided somewhat, but for one of your Nordic types, let it be said he is ageing spectacularly well. Lovely crinkles at the eyes, white teeth he doesn’t have to treat to get that way – that one crooked little incisor I was always a little too much taken with. The overall effect of the corporate pose is a bit “MY NAME IS HERB. TRUST ME!”, but the depth of knowledge if you know BEx lends a “yep, that’s him”-ness that sees that same old smile, the slight nervousness … those eyes.

I never had a thing about blue eyes themselves, but BEx’s blue eyes truly always were beautiful to me. In addition to his Nordic looks, BEx also has a Hungarian strain, and something in the expression of his eyes always spoke of the same melancholy Mikhayil Baryshnikov always had. As bright as he seemed to be, and as slightly silly, BEx houses a melancholy spirit not uncommon in the men I have loved. He and I laughed for years about an article he once read, that men who liked small breasts (I didn’t grow mine until years after our divorce) tended to be “slightly depressed” and men who liked larger chests were into football and less educated. Hooray for reductive stereotypes of men based on reductive stereotypes of women!

So last night, spending time with a nice array of the women on my mother’s side of my family (two aunts, mom, and a cousin), I shared the photo because I knew they would love it. Aunt G. would hardly have recognized the man in the picture, but those eyes were utterly unmistakable. Mom, who always did like BEx, may have suffered some resurgence of the “why the HECK are you not with this man” even as she simultaneously does know and understand. I paint a good picture of BEx and take my responsibility for my fundamental part in our divorce, but let it not be said I see no errors nor shortcomings at all.

The fundamental issue is this – I love BEx and always have and always will. But love is no reason to share your whole LIFE with someone. My life is going reasonably well. Only if, without him, it could not, should I be committed like that to any man, even if I do respect and care for him as much as I do.

There are those for whom in fact that would be more than enough, and compelling and successful. Without regret: I just am not one of those people. What I do regret, as candid as I may be in this blog and with certain people I love, is nobody’s business but mine and BEx’s.

Image: that was me

Twenty-two years ago in the morning, it was quiet in my parents’ home. I hadn’t expected that, somehow; thought I might be the center of attention in a hive of activity. But I had breakfast alone, I think – and had to kind of pull that together catch-as-catch-can. My dress was in the best garment bag ever – my childhood twin fitted Snoopy sheet fit it EXACTLY, and pinned shut to hold it together just right, in nice soft poly-cotton. My dad and mom were not given to maudlin hugs and Very Special Moments, and so at some point I worked my way up to my room and spent a long time getting ready. I put my hair up and did my makeup and put on my mom’s pearl jewelry, and I hope I cleaned my beautiful engagement ring so it would sparkle (my engagement ring is really beautiful, as was BEx’s band; we both still have them, which seems right for us two).

I don’t really recall getting to the church, but once there I have some memory of putting on the girdle and ivory hose and shoes, and then ceremoniously being dressed, for perhaps the only time in my life post-infancy. My dress was a marvelous thing, ill-suited to a Southern summer day (long sleeves and satin, high necked, and close to the body). When we went outside for photos of the bride …. even with dress shields, you cannot stop the river of sweat that will run down your spine on a hot noonday in the windless lee of a tall chapel, wearing so much heavy textile. Even the embroidery lace was thick and substantial. This confection had been hand made for me by a friend whose own anniversary, the day before this wedding, meant she could not be with us on the wedding day.

My dad and I convened in the vestibule of the chapel and there wasn’t a dramatic moment between us. I wanted one, but somehow the business of the pageant took us away, and we walked down the aisle (never knowing a month later he would be undergoing a sextuple bypass after a heart attack).

My grandmother wore magenta.

My mother wore baby pink, and she and my mother-in-law looked so soft and so pretty.

BEx had, at that moment in his life, basically a dutch-boy haircut. After years of long, beautiful curling warm-blond hair, in that period and after what seemed to us a drastic cut, he looked like the guy on the label of Sam Adams bottles. In a tailed and cravatted tux, he just looked handsome. And nervous as hell. I looked – I don’t really know. Manic and rapacious kind of come to mind, but I may have a bias against my old self. Maybe.

Ceremony over, we took more photos and walked to the reception, which I remember mainly for my overly self-conscious feeling I was being SUCH a successful, grown-up polite hostess. I talked with everybody, smiling and unfailingly (my idea of) gracious, which I suspect was a bit on the arch side. What became of my husband, I have no idea; I was doing my duties, which had nothing to do with him.

I changed into my going away dress (a gorgeous cut, but a black dress I now remember as a haunted, bad-omen object) and hat. We drove away in dad’s red Fiat, top down, and NOBODY shaving-creamed the beautiful finish on that car. No shoes or signs either. Just two young people in a great car.

We went back to my folks hosue for a while, where we opened presents. That night, we stayed at the Embassy Suites right in town. Before embarking on what little passed for a honeymoon, we stopped at my cousin’s farm and picked up my brother, for a day at an amusement park – bro along because (a) I rarely saw him, he lived in Hawai’i back then, and (b) he and BEx liked each other, and could ride the rides I’d get sick on. I hardly really remember the day, but I think we had a good time. Then we drove up to DC to stop in what turned out to be the hotel in which Marion Barry had been busted for drugs a few years previously. ROMANCE. It was a room on an alley or some equally ugly outlook, and I ordered ROOM SERVICE as a deranged splurge.

The next morning at breakfast in their restaurant, BEx was away for a moment when someone came to the table, and I self-consciously remember saying the word for the first time: “My husband will be right back.”

We stopped for lunch at my aunt’s house, with her and one of my cousins; a gloriously tasty gorgonzola and walnut salad I still remember to this day amongst our summer treats.

Then, on the road, back to Ohio.

We did have time alone, but our wedding and honeymoon were family-packed; a varied, busy affair indeed.



If self-condemnation is clear and stark in these memories, it’s not out of regret for the marriage nor even living resentments – against myself nor anyone else. Maybe just a way to keep myself honest. But those days themselves – this day, this anniversary (which, from glorious and sunny in 1993, is now a stormy, dark, and muggy affair indeed) … they are almost as fine as the man who gave them to me, shared them with me.

Happy anniversary, Beloved Ex.



And happy anniversary to all those couples who, today, can finally marry one another in every last one of our fifty states. Congratulations, in joy and gladness.

Pet Post II - The Electric Gossamer Boogaloo

Between the resident fuzzly poobahs, Penelope has historically taken up much of the pixel space around this blog, since she and Gossamer the Editor Cat came along. He came first, but she made her splash, and got me barfing up words in excess from the beginning. Goss has his own fame and fans, of course, but let it not be said I have more attention for one kid over the other.

Still perhaps the nicest cat I ever expect to know in my life, Gossamer’s major claim to drama in his kittenhood was the stupid froth about his name – long since buried by SMART people who appreciate all the cultural resonance of his sobriquet, and who dig the reasons I could not call the boy Velvet, for Maud’s sake. Since then, self-training as cats tend to be, and limited as his trick-doing interests and abilities are by design, he’s more interesting in more low-key ways than Penelope.

But interesting he is; I find myself constantly engaged by the little grey guy. He’s still a forgiving puss; gets stepped on by his lummox/person once or twice every week, but never holds it against me (though his rubbing up against me is often the cause). His eyes, if anything, grow greener and greener as he matures; his own fake-birthday will be May Day, and he will be three too, as is Pen-Pen.

At three, and especially this season, as he sheds and slims down again to his non-winter coat, he’s still the smallest cat I have ever had. Still the nimblest, too – and cats as a genre are not exactly clumsy things (though that one cat of mine sometimes had to pull The Fonz “I meant to do that” after a slip). He’s the lightest thing on his toes I’ve ever seen, and his leaps still look as perfect and smooth as old slow-motion falls filmed then run in reverse.

And, of course, I am obsessed with his toes. His front paws are the cutest I have ever seen (and Smikey Cat had some formidably sweet mitts on him), and that back leg with the lightning bolt on it still has the funniest way of kicking out when he is going at a kitten-trot. He’s the most herd-able cat I’ve ever seen, too; it’s rare he won’t go where I need him to, but he does hate the rare occasions I need to close him behind a door to, say, move furniture or things like that.

The longer we live together, the more he curls up on me physically. With summer, this may change again, but as of now he still likes to climb onto my hip or my back and knead and hang out. This weekend, when my back was bugging me, he somehow knew how to be precisely the right heat, and right weight, and curled up on my tailbone, helping me out with the soreness. And there are times he seems to know JUST where to knead, which is the best thing ever.

It’s impossibly sweet, of course – an animal actually resting on you like that. He does it when Pen is allowed on her corner of the bed on a Saturday or Sunday sometimes, and all I can think is – if this is being a Pathetic Old Pet Lady, I am lucky in my pets. Pen has learned her territory, and Goss cedes his own roaming spots to settle down on mama herself. Or if I have a weekend nap, he tucks in behind my knees, like I’m his fort, hiding and warm and quiet as can be.

Last time I had friends over, he literally walked over them to get to me at one point; when he was a little ‘un he used to do that about as much as he’d be friendly to others, but it had been a while since he so pointedly preferred me in front of others. I didn’t pretend that wasn’t a bit gratifying; but am glad, too, he’s a nice little fellow to my friends and especially my mom and stepfather.

Like most of the cats I’ve had (he’s the fourth), he uses his voice seldom, but it’s a sweet sound when he does, and he still make sleepy-kitten noises if I pick him up from a nap or the like. His purr box is quiet, too, but he uses that frequently. And he drools when he’s getting really good pettin’s or kneading; some things do not change.


His editorial demands have become more sophisticated; as a three year old, of course Gossamer is no longer satisfied with simple ax-wielding, and demands diversity, as well as a wider point of view to buffer against unreliable narration. He’s a benevolent dictator in this, but a great little helper with the keyboard. Indeed, I have to cede the laptop to him from time to time (… if not cede the laptop to neglect, in favor of attention to him).

As Janet has observed, his tolerance for dog stories is constrained, but he doesn’t demand feline characters necessarily. Just a good story; and I try to oblige.

He’s encouraging regarding the work in progress.

But he does say it’s dumb I keep calling it Wippy. He has a thing about stupid names; go figure.

Time for a Penny Post

When Gossamer and Penelope first came into my life, there was a pretty regular stream of posts about their development and ours as a little community, with the occasional nod to making these points relevant to publish, but mostly just the indulgent and frustrated emotional responses of a pet owner and Virginian dealing with that ultimate trial: CHANGE.

“How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb?”

Five. One to actually do the job. Two more to stand off to one side, tut-tutting about how much better the old light bulb was, and fretting with semi-religious fervor about the implications of a new bulb. And two more to write the history of the original bulb with maps and Civil War footnotes.

My dear old Sweet Siddy La was the absolute finest in mellow, sittin’-at-your-feet dogness. She knew my dad a little when she first came around, and he approved of her. He tole me when I got her, “Don’t you feed that dog from the table, don’t you let her get fat.” She got the occasional treat (she loved pizza crust), but I never forgot what he said, and she did eat pretty healthily. To her last months on earth, you could see the shape of the muscles in her legs. And she had beautiful legs.

Lolly was a wonderfully “well behaved” dog, as defined by a bit of fulsomeness in the greeting department and a tuggy deportment on walks, but never causing messes in the house and always calming down fairly readily.

Miss Penelope, by comparison, has always seemed like a handful. For one, she’s still only three; not even the age *yet* that Siddy was when I was blessed to take care of her. For another, she is just a very different dog. Massively energetic, terrifyingly intelligent, skittish where Sid was calm and oblivious to storms (the one area in which Sid would lose composure. aww.). Penelope was untrained when I got her, and fed off the faintest energy from me with exponential emotional results. If I was upset, Pen was beside herself; if I became excited, she was rendered utterly uncontrollable.

And yet, from the beginning, she submitted to me in ways Siddy never did (and never had to). Pen was still juvenile when we came together, with all the dependence and the lack of discipline that comes with. I’d sworn I would not adopt a puppy, knowing the limited time I have to commit to training and so forth – and there she was. My dog. My baby, scared, confused, lunatic dog. And I loved her.

I despaired of time ever passing and her ever Being Like Sid (I never would have admitted it then, least of all on those terms).

But I reveled in her incredible trainability, and especially the fact that she would take command not only from me, but from others who came around; my friends and family.

It wasn’t long before she behaved almost as if she had a button – the alacrity in her obedience is still so speedy and so emphatic it’s as endearing as it is comical. She binds me to her, and I am overjoyed that she and I can communicate. She still thinks, “Oh! Mom told me to sit, so I will do that, then I will lie DOWN, then I will give her BELLY, because that is even more than she asked for, and I want to give my ALL!” – and we’re working on “that’s not sit” in the gentlest way, still. But “back” she has down to a tee, which is unbelievably handy for us both, and “stay” she’s getting better at though still likes boundary testing.

But in non-command behavior is her magic.

Siddy, right out of the box as they say, had some of the subjective behaviors one most wants in a pet. She would no more touch my food even if I weren’t in the room than she would poop in the house. I never had to teach her – and, after perhaps one incident of “HEY THIS DOG IS DIFFERENT” with Penelope getting tentative at my supper, she really didn’t require teaching on the point of food heirarchy either. Siddy was far more aware of her food surroundings, indeed, than Penelope is – a single molecule of anything people-edible going astray was instantly claimed and cleaned up by that Hoover of a Good Girl, but Penelope misses a surprising amount. She’s getting better, but actually drops even her own kibble and forgets about it from time to time. I drop a piece of it and tap my toe to indicate she should pick it up, she’s so het up about feeding time she can miss after three tries. Into each life, a little kibble must fall.

Gossamer’s even worse. But I do get a warm mommy smile at my Pen, when she is oblivious to tiny morsels available for the pickin’.


Penny turned three-ish on her made-up birthday, April Fool’s day. And it’s been during the past month or two I’ve been watching more changes in her, more maturity. She’ll never settle down, quite, but her ability to greet visitors with less wee-ing and tungsten-clawing (all well-intentioned love and submissiveness, but no more appealing to most contemporary humans) has  markedly improved. Though perhaps markedly is the wrong word to use …

In her own space and on her own time, Pen has always been a pretty mellow kid; prone to bursts of energy, and occasionally instigating, or being insitgated into kerfuffles with, Gossamer. But generally a dog – lying around and not being a complete drama queen about every last instant of her existence.

But seeing her regulate herself a bit at social moments is – well, I won’t say exciting. It’s just nice.

One of the best parts is this: Penelope is in her own skin, and she’s comfortable there. Her home, her dogmommy, her semi-pal Gossamer. She’s got this thing, y’all, she doesn’t have to freak about it alla time.

She’s home. It’s a good place for us both.

A Simpler Time

I’ve reached that age where, with a certain chauvinism and privilege, the memory of youth and childhood appear to me “a simpler time.” This isn’t couched in the presumption that my childhood was better than YOUR childhood, if you are of a different age – nor that my childhood could beat up your childhood on the playground. It’s not even a reflection of technology and so on. It probably IS the result of responsibility; we all think in those terms, I think. And (assuming I have gained any), there is the influence of increased knowledge, and emotional experience, always mucking up the works in life.

My kid-dom in the seventies, and teen years in the eighties, weren’t an exceptionally halcyon period. I didn’t like either stage of life very much at the time, and have zero yearning to return. Yet it wasn’t bad stuff, my youth and childhood. There were bullies, but they never physically harmed me, and if they scarred me much emotionally – well, it still led to who I am now, and I like that person pretty well, so though I can remember them it’s not with feeling.

Much was forbidden, especially in the very much younger years, and I was one of those kids always griping of boredom. I didn’t love going outside to play, and though I did love reading, when I read about agents and other writers’ PASSIONS for it, devouring Proust and so on from the earliest ages – I won’t lie, a lot of what I read for a good long stretch was MAD magazine anthology books, and as much as I liked The Secret Garden and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories, I couldn’t say with any accuracy that they changed my life or have a tearfully cherished place in my heart. My reaction when given the first NOVEL I ever read, was resentment that there were no damned pictures. Seriously – it didn’t mean maturation and getting older (that attainment that meant finally gaining every privilege denied to the very young), it meant my parents were trying to bore me to death.

Then, of course, I read the book (a blue hardback with dustcover I am fairly certain I still have, and in mighty good condition – unless I gave it to my elder niece …). It was called “War Work”, which was an extremely unfortunate title to proffer to young-me. I found the very word War a complete drag (reasons I am a Trek nerd and not Star Wars – seriously), and where my parents, especially my mom, undoubtedly associated the WWII story with certain halcyon days of their own, all I heard was “this is a story about war, something that interests me precisely not at all.”

Of course, the novel was about a bunch of kids many thousands of miles and nicely protected continents removed from actual wartime, and involved playing games and the small hurts and so on of the characters and the times.


As I’ve said before here– the fact is, I generally feel like I fall short in the “passionate reader” aspect which is pretty strongly emphasized in the industry I aspire to. I don’t have moist stories to share about the first time I ever heard Charlotte’s Web read to us in school, though it certainly affected me, at least at the time. (My readerliness falls short in so many ways.) I can’t pretend I was outlining my own career nor plans as an authoress, indeed, before my mid-thirties. And we see how I have progressed there … ahem.


Back when things (and my brain) were simpler, the prevailing assumption was still that a girl child grows up and gets married, and husbands provide the breadwinning function. Yet even by the time I got to middle school and high school, that was changing. For a while, it was, “women CAN work” … and I was all, “Well, who needs THAT!?” – and then it pretty much became apparent that we were all going to have to work, aspirations or no. I was not excited by this aspect of social change, but let it be said I was never really into the whole wife-and-mother thing either. It’s just that I was an underachiever, I did LIKE boys, figured for (perhaps too long) sooner or later I’d find one who could feed me well enough, and nothing much shone forth in the firmament, leading me toward some magical calling.

Once high school had worn on for a couple of years, I began to realize the inevitable – not only that I was probably going to have to work for a living, but that the likelihood of being able to do so by simply being admired by millions and made independently wealthy thanks to my beauty and (acting) talent was vanishingly slim. I still majored in theater (or Theatre/Dance, as the also vanishingly slim department at the school I unfortunately chose as a non-launch-pad for this career) in a ditch effort to get some program to do that work for me, but knew well enough that I’d probably have to get a job.

Job, for me, meant “secretary” – and still does, though my level of commitment has arisen somewhat.

I took typing at age seventeen, in a horrible room at the back of the school filled with Selectrics and a punctilious teacher with little use for my brains and creativity (ask me about the jobs where that was the case too! not.), and managed to get out of there with the necessary skill set to feed myself if the right rockstar didn’t come along.

Of course, he did, but he ended his rock starring career in support of our marriage, which I promptly discarded. There were conversations during our bliss, as to whether we could afford toilet paper or not. I can’t even say “we were rich in love” because I was a nasty little vain shrew (back then), and money wasn’t even my problem.

Things, already, weren’t very simple anymore. And didn’t get moreso from there.


One of the biggest ways life is no longer simple lies in the fact that there is only one soul to manage the whole thing. From kitty litter scoops to mortgage payments and some sort of social life, there’s nobody to share it with. Nor, as when my childhood was so *delightfully* simple, to depend upon without thinking. Anything gets put off? That’s me without gas in the car or a slipping credit rating, or no heat because – no oil. Or hungry cute furbabies, subtly bonking around metal bowls, because mommy’s distracted. Aww. My life’s not actually all that complex, Batman – but heck if even the smallest detail can be left to somebody else.

It scarcely leaves time for the dazzling gorgeousness of Authoressial glamour, I tellya. And I am nothing if not heart-stoppingly glamorous. Just ask the cat.


So of course there’s a fantasy, that publication will somehow change things around here.

I don’t want to be Rowling, or King. Yet I’m well aware the old dreams I joked about, of “midlist glory” are frankly kind of dangerous, second-career-wise.

Yeah, I’ve always got typing. But typing isn’t paying for refinishing my kitchen floors, or vapor-sealing the basement. The joke about glamour – look, I picture myself talking at colleges and JRW_____ events and even churches and doing signings, hopefully. I like the idea of my bespectacled, turtlenecked nerd-chic portrait, and working to support my books. I *love* the idea of some fourteen-year-old kid falling for the story, and studying the history, then maybe turning around and telling more stories of their own – because they read me, once upon a time (har). I can’t wait to get scared that nobody showed up at that bookstore where I’m shilling, and even more scared because lots of people did.

I can’t wait for things to get MORE complicated. Unexpected. Unusual. Even frustrating, whatever the frustrations may be between advance and paying-out, another novel, and royalties. I can’t wait to cross the ocean, even if only vicariously flying on the leaves of my book, as it’s sold in Europe – and, hopefully, maybe even beyond. If I ever got to GO where I write about – Istanbul, Ravenna, the Channel Islands (oh yes, I have a third book in mind, once Ax and the WIP are out) … dang, that’ll be something neat.

And I hate flying, y’all.

Lay on the complications; childhood gave me much to be grateful for, but life’s not done yet, and I’m not persuaded my simple, safe youth and childhood are the be-all and there’s nothing left to seek. Let’s find out what sort of kinks this second job will bring on once it’s PAYING, at last.

Simple was so seventies. Show me the coming years. Show me the future …

Nude Ricks

Once again, the old lady is trying to teach herself new tricks – or, at least, new habits. This one has been a long time coming; I put it off for years because I felt My Habit is Valid, then for the past year or so just because I Have Enough on my Plate.

But new year, new ways to do things, and new horizons. So it is time, at last, to tackle the retraining of one of the oldest, most ingrained typing habits those of us of a certain age cling to: the two-spaces-after-a-period stop.

It’s long past time where I can counter-complain to those who despise the “river of white” that “oh yeah, well the unbroken block of text is ugly too” – and the fact that the river is poor-looking mostly in two-column justified text, which emphasizes space in a way even non-columned justified (never mind unjustified) does not produce, just doesn’t matter anymore. Single-spacing is standard, and if I wish to be in the business of writing, I need to provide standardized product that can be used and *will not annoy* professional readers. The "river of white"-ers have won (because GBOTs are so pretty). So it is time for me to stop doing the search-and-replace remediation, and shift my baseline.

After the fact changes leave room for accidents to creep in, because in writing, AFTER-after-the-fact (editing/revision) is ALWAYS a factor.

Too: there’s a simple benefit in learning a different way to do things (I won’t be dumb and call this “new” – just because it’s new for me doesn’t make the standard a fresh little baby). Learning how to print in lowercase again, after years of writing in all-caps … relearning cursive, after using it in no script but my signature … dealing with my geriatric typing habits, learned on the original selectrics in typing class thirty years ago … I may be a Virginian (*), but change is good and I can appreciate that. It’s also wise to keep the brain limber and learning, and not depend upon opinions formed a generation ago to inform the entire way I live my life.

And so: the two spaces must go. So far, that’s been a change involving lots of delete-backspacing, and even retyping at the terminus of every single sentence in a post, comment, or paragraph. But I’m getting better. This post has gone well, anyway. And, if it’s like re-learning how to hand write, it won’t take too long.

Are you ready to dam (and/or damn!) your rivers? If you’ve done this, let me know how it went – and what worked for you!



(*How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to do the actual changing of the bulb. Two more to stand off to one side, TSK-TSK-ing about how much better the old bulb was, and how the new bulb probably won’t keep us warm in winter, may cause migraines, won’t light as well, and will change our lives for the worse. And two more, to write the history of the original bulb, with maps and Civil War citations.)

Author's Notes

Today, Clovis' two comes come in at the top, followed by a look at the type of king he was (literally, literally), and I thought we should round off this post with the Saint who baptized the King.


PHARAMOND
FICTIONAL; originally called Merovech, I changed this character’s name the moment someone fist asked me about Dan Brown.  Pharamond’s name does belong to another semi-historical/legendary king of the Franks.


RAGNACHAR
Ragnachar is a historical king, seated at Cambrai, and known to have fought beside his kinsman, Clovis.  Tales of him dating from Gregory of Tours’ day depict a dissolute, villain enough to make even Childeric’s early dissipations mild by comparison.  Though there is always room for the possibility of bias and propaganda in primary sources, rehabilitation/revisionism would do away with too many good stories in this case, and so we have the older, less-powerful cousin who both envies and ties himself—for a time, loyally—to the arc of Clovis’ much brighter star.  The tales of “my Farro” come largely as recorded in sources; and, of course, one can take the particular type of sexual slurs against Ragnachar with all the veracity that belongs to Clotilde’s bloodthirsty family and some of the more magical legends attached to Clovis himself.


REGES CRINITI
“Long-haired kings”; Franks of the period attached symbolic importance to hair, and their kings wore long hair as a badge both of power and position.  Stories abound of those who were shorn or tonsured like monks in a metaphorical display of their loss of authority.  As is illustrated in Clotilde’s threats to the young son of Chararic and the aftermath, for a victim of being shorn thus to even speak of growing his hair back was a clear threat to any king who wanted to see him stripped of power.
Tangentially related to this is the reference to Basina’s scalping, after her adultery.  This was intended to echo as much the fate of Morgause at her son Gaheris’ hand, as to reflect the connection to the archetypal power of long hair for Frankish royalty.


REMIGIUS
Bishop Remigius of Rheims, born 437, lived to the year 533.  By the time of Clovis’ baptism (as calculated from 508, rather than 496), he had already attained seventy-one years, and he eventually far outlived Clovis himself, surviving to the impressive age of nearly ninety-six.  This alone would have lent him a literal venerability, and his character certainly lent Remi a fame at least as great, if not even greater, than Clovis’ own.





As always, Author's Notes excerpts are excerpted from the MS, which means they are written "in-universe."  These posts should not be taken as historical resources.

Slacker

I have long hated Pandora Radio because it will not allow listeners to shut off its “you might also like” algorithms, which for me are (as with all such suggestion-generating applications) a terrible failure.  I’m a contrarian by nature, and so have a ready supply of impatience for missteps in these intrusive little marketing devices, as well as a hearty disdain when a suggestion goes really wrong – so Pandora is just not the option for me, never has been.  Slacker Radio’s “suggestiveness” can be pretty tightly minimized (and, for a fee, turned entirely off), and even when it’s on, it doesn’t seem to be quite so bewilderingly miscalculated as, say, Blockbuster or Pandora or my grocery store’s coupon-generating printers are.

Let it be said that, in addition to the contrarianness, I am old enough and private enough that these things continue to wig me out even something like eighteen years or so since their advent in earlier, rather less insinuatingly personal and scary forms.  The fact is, I’ve ALWAYS found this type of marketing frightening, and always will.  It icks me out, sets my teeth against certain brands, standards, and manifestations – and keeps my jaw on the ground, that so many people don’t seem to mind this insidious searching of their personal preferences.

All of which is beside the point.

The point is that, today at work, Slacker was still showing its autonomy at me, and it worked out.  I’ve only crafted one station for myself, and it contains all my moods, from Apoptygma Berzerk to Priest to Adele and the Beatles and Type O Negative.  Most days, in the office, Slacker stays in a somewhat electro/industrial vein, with some pop and what we once amusingly called “Alternative” thrown in.  There are days, though, when I start off with Judas Priest’s “Alone” and then follows up with Metallica, and I stop and go “hm” for a moment, and decide – yes, that’s just about right, thank you, Slacker.  Today, obviously, was one of those days, and it reminded me how much I like metal, enjoy Zeppelin, and old school hard rock.  As much momentum as dance tunes can give to a day, there’s no arguing that Iron Maiden particularly slows me down.  And then, because it’s sort of a funny diet I’ve fed the little beast, it’ll drop Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” down in the middle of these things, and my odd little brain thinks, “that goes together better than you’d think” and then go on to whatever I’ve got to finish on the desk.

I once bought a Priest CD, along with a Leonard Cohen and a Billie Holiday.  The clerk at the store (I was in California) gave me the smiling eyebrow and said, “Shopping for gifts?”  I was a tad confused and said no, it was driving music (I was in California driving between SF and LA, and my rental had a CD in dash; at the time, this was pretty state of the art), all for me.  It was clear I’d made something of a conquest just by failing to fit in a musical box, and I got to muse a bit about what it must be like, the parade of individual tastes one must serve selling music all day every day.  Obviously, given that that was something like 15 years ago, I was pretty pleased with myself for my little toppling of expectations – and, equally obviously, I still revel, as I always have, in gravitating to what genuinely appeals to me, rather than to what is served to me (lord, just trying to imagine what my life would be like populated only with that music made for women such as myself is stifling).  Just think what an eyebrow I might have gotten if I’d had Ice T in that little stack of CDs.

To our culture and society, there are aspects of my nonconformity which speak to an inherent immaturity:  I refused to cut my hair when it became age-appropriate by those standards I consider to be utterly superfluous.  I never stopped going out dancing – and I am forty-five.  Being unmarried and not a parent, I have held on to habits generally reserved for “the young” (if not to say ‘those who are fifty pounds slimmer and fifty miles more currently fashionable’ than I am).  Being a relic of the 80s and 90s, I still admit to listening to Judas Priest and yet also pretend to be conversant in Deadmaus and even FGFC820, which should be so far outside the frame of reference of a person such as myself as to be almost anger-inducingly alien to me.

To be sure, I sneer like the old broad I earned every second of being, at the names of twentysomething celebs and performers I’ve never heard of.  It gives a special pleasure to indulge in this privilege of age, this frank indulgence of chrono-bigotry, even as I know precisely how irrelevant and, indeed, stupid it is.  But it is as much a joy to ignore expectations as it is to play into and play with them ... and I get to listen to good music, at that.

Literalism versus Favoritism

Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive.  Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.

Well, I didn't learn not to state them.  But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.

So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously.  I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.

It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation.  My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point.  It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.

And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine.  Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA.  I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.

It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own.  Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous.  And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.

I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with.  Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person.  Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.

This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations.  It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.

Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most.  Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity.  There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving.  Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.

I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.


Question something you hate, or love, or fear.  Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right.  There's almost no liberty like it.  Almost no power at all.  It is joyous.

Age Eleven

In 1979, I was eleven years old, and went to see The Muppet Movie.  This was a little bit strange because at that age, I was too old for the Muppets, and even today I look back on the show and the film not as a pleasure of my childhood, but perhaps my first introduction to an experience we come to know as adults as a guilty pleasure.  Seeing the movie may have been more acceptable than watching the show because, at eleven, and in the seventies, there was essentially no entertainment meant for me.

Between Francis Hodgson Burnett and Judy Blume's "Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret" there was no transition.  Back then, eleven went somewhat unregarded.  Hollywood was aware of what Kids Today may still be calling little-little kids, and had gotten an inkling or two about teenagers, but "tweens" were not yet invented and the millennial arrangement by which medium-aged children would become a goldmine had not been drafted.

There were G-rated movies and there were PG ones, but there wasn't much for double-digit-but-not-teens.  Likewise, there were Golden Books and there were paperbacks stuffed with compilations of B.C. comics or excerpts from MAD Magazine, but this was a time when publishing was not dominated by - indeed, not even interested in - the youth market.

And so, eleven-year-olds who understood themselves to be too big for the Muppets went to the Muppet Movie anyway, enjoying it in spite of their maturity - and in spite of the fact that we mostly didn't give a hang about Madeleine Khan and all the other cameos either.

The Muppet Movie is available on Netflix streaming now, and I am watching it.  And, by now, I think I may be exactly the right age to enjoy it without guilt.

Almost A Year

Last year, I was hit from behind on my way into work on a Friday morning, and got a sprained neck, a migraine, and what appears to be a fairly permanent weakening and en-sore-en-ing of my back for my troubles.  The other driver paid her fine out of court, and I settled with her insurance for $1000.  Considering the issues I've had ever since, and expect could last me a lifetime, I let 'em off easy, but the fact is I wanted the hassle over with, and don't really regret not being more punitive at that time all that much.

Even so, this weekend I did myself a number, indulging in that favorite pastime I learned from mom when I was a kid - moving the furniture around for the season.  "It's cheaper than redecorating," she always used to say.  And, even more practically, it also provides different climate control benefits for different times of the year.  In winter, the furniture moves closer in, circling around the center of the room, making the most of sunlight encroaching farther into the living room, and giving a sense of coziness.  In spring and summer, I pull things back and take advantage of this space, opening up the couch and chairs, and eventually making the most of cross-ventilation.

The thing is:  my coffee table is made of stone!

The demands we put on our backs just in every day work can be quite enough, but dragging a big sofa around, shoving a big coffee table--and just bending and shoving and reconnecting everything, plugging in the lamps, all that stuff, tell on me as I get older.  And there's nobody but me to do it.  So when that need for change comes upon me, it's not like I have kids or a spouse to help out.  And the kit and pup, marvelous creatures as they are (and Penelope's so strong!) are poorly equipped with thumbs, bless 'em.

Thank goodness I bought a heating pad after that accident.

Forty-Plus

I like a lot of the observations in this post, but the images bring it home.  A great post - though I am too lazy right now to add "me three times" on my own ...  *Grin*

How Good Does A Whore Have to Be?

... or ... "Yet Another Pop-Culture Critique/Rant/Hypocrisy" ...

When we were together a few weeks ago, I was admitting one of my worst guilty pleasures and we got to talking about reality TV.  He asked me, quite sincerely, because he believes there has to be a reason for things, "What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"  He wanted to know who reality TV "stars" are - or what they do - that people would want to watch.

The thing about it is that he misunderstands the concept of content in this context.  He and I come from a mindset in which "entertainment" is defined by a certain set of expectations, and "content" is a commodity with demands upon it.  We grew up in a world where television (for instance) was more often written than not.  Entertainment was expected to be about something, involve a plot, make a point, cause some sort of emotional reaction.  It wasn't necessarily sophisticated; it was just the mechanism of "the entertainment industry" in a different time.

Human beings, though, are natural voyeurs, and happy to find lazy ways to make money too.  When we learned (a) how wide an audience there is for "reality" - for peering into other people's supposedly "real" lives - we made fortunes for, at first, the Sally Jessy Raphaels of the world, the Maurys, even the Robin Leaches.  Over the years, one hour of "reality" ceased to be enough, and we began to see The Real World and its ilk, and the genius move was made.

All it takes to make a mint, for anyone who can stomach participating, is to find ostensibly pretty people (the idea of what constitutes "telegenic" is another post I may indeed never have the stomach - nor even the hypocrisy - to write) willing to go on camera for "life".

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I can tell you pointblank that watching the Sally Jessy's and the like had an effect on my expectations of myself.  My being a lycra-wearing eighties girl obsessed with whether every man in the world found me attractive in that limited and specific way which seems important to some people (particularly at a certain age) was NOT born of the man who loved and married me back then, nor of my family and lessons I learned from anything resembling life.  It was born of those things I chose to expose myself to, even those things I still pretend to be a snob about and think I am superior to.  It was born of shouty talk shows and Kelly Bundy and commercials glorifying screeching "femininity" and brashness of the sort centered entirely on getting attention, regardless of its type or ramifications.

The diet available today frankly makes me blanche.  I'm daily given reason to be glad I am as old as I am - because if the girl I was then happened to be a girl NOW, I would unquestionably be first in line (in, likely, multiple lines) attempting to sell my "life" so I could be famous, could prove myself interesting, could prove myself "hot", could make money doing so.

The irony, of course, is that my very lack of substance, perhaps to some extent my very lack of certain appeals - that would have been exactly what would have made me what passes now for a wild success.  The tawdriness and emptiness is "what makes these people worthy of a TV show."

Rather than expecting a plot or a point, huge swaths of entertainment now are based on the goal to elicit that glow of schadenfreude which tells viewers they are superior to what they're watching.  Laughs or shocks are always good - and, of curse, there's always that genre of shows pitched at women telling us we are supposed to consider highly saturated magenta and blue lighting on tatty LA mansions as "fairy tale" settings for vicarious love and romance (and, indeed, certainly conditioning younger women and girls in the lessons of hideously distorted gender roles, body image, and social behavior) - but, at the end of the day, SENSATION has come to replace the content middle aged folks like me and X once expected.

It doesn't matter so much who the whore is, willing to be pimped to unseen watchers for the release of sensation their televised experiences will engender.  It doesn't matter which whore you get out of the phone book, if that's a call you want to make, as long as they fit the general description you request.  Willing to abdicate privacy and a personal life, or willing to perform certain unspeakable services - as long as they are, it doesn't matter who it is.  Success is measured not by talent, nor charisma - but only by the reaching of that sensation, the release, the short-term goal of a disinterested consumer.

It doesn't matter who provides their personal exposure - there is really no "who are these people" factored into this transaction, nor the financial rewards of the industry it has given gargantuan birth to.  As long as a fairly minimal interview with casting agents and a perhaps even more minimal background check is perfunctorily satisfied - the human fodder need not be particular nor honestly individual (*peculiar* is not the same thing ...) in order to satisfy the demands of reality TV.

"What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"

Worth is the wrong choice of words, perhaps.  "Willing to do it" might be more to the point.  And it's a heartbreaking, dispiriting point, really.

I think of the number of women of my generation who wore stripper shoes and tiny dresses on talk shows for one hour of fame back in the eighties, and whose doing so was essentially ephemeral, is now over, and probably forgotten ...  Then I think of the number of women just in a single day, now, whose self-abasement for others' entertainment is likely to live on in a way those talk shows could not have made possible.  I think about how many of them parlay their appearances on The Bachelor or any one of those "Wives" shows or any one of a thousand competitive quasi-beauty or quasi-talent or quasi-game shows into *careers* of selling off further parts of themselves, and it makes me so sad.

And, of course, so superior - about "those kids today" and every possible other middle-aged (having lost my own twentysomething physical appeals) cliche'.  Superior because I escaped the opportunity to sell my entire life like that, and thank G-d I am old enough to have escaped it.  Superior over even the middle-aged, telegenic barbies of my own age, staging hyper dramatic middle school cat fights for a living.  Superior to those who think game shows yield love and commitment worth the name.  Superior to the entertainment itself.

I respond EXACTLY, in short, as I am supposed to.

And it still makes me so sad.  Kicking the whore out of the room when you're done must feel like that.

Lightning Bug Time

It never seems like seasons take as long as they used to.  Spring moved so slowly (back when we used to have spring; you young people might have liked it, it was a beautiful time, following this quaint thing we used to call "winter"), you could ache just waiting for the days to get a little longer.

A few minutes ago, it was February.  Today, it was 90 again, and it is May - and the daylight stayed until eight o'clock.  In a few minutes, it will be June - we'll have our longest day - it will be time to notice nights getting longer again.

Three years it's been, since I saw X the last time, and it hardly feels like time's moved at all.  It did its job with the sense of loss, when he did not come home that December.  But seeing him this past weekend - it didn't feel like all that much time had passed, and it didn't seem to *take* that long between, to me.  I don't invite more years to pass before I ever see his face again.  But I can do them, at this point, standing on my head.  It seems nothing anymore.

It may have been a hallucination; but yesterday I thought I saw a lightning bug.  Would have sworn - but no other glimmers appeared.  In my experience, you don't usually see one without seeing others.

Reassuring, that - that it may still be too early in the year, for anything - that time isn't simply blurring and homogenizing completely.  We didn't have winter, and aren't getting spring.  But the lightning bugs will not betray me.


Even so - once they do come (the bats have, though the missed a few other bugs who didn't miss *me*), they'll be gone again so soon.  Every year I can't wait to see the first one - and moments later I realize the last one has come and gone and I missed it.