Dear Readers (all six of you), I’m moving my blog. I’m pissed off at blog.com for switching all of my pictures over to a weird cartoony guy holding a sign that says something about exceeding my monthly limit. And I can’t figure out how to fix it.
So you can find me here at my new Wordpress home. A new post awaits you!
And I smiled.
Remember discovering Nietzsche? Remember endlessly quoting Nietzsche? Remember being unabashedly smart and twenty-something and certain that all of the grown-ups were too concerned about the wrong things. Remember quoting Nietzsche to [or about] your parents?
There are so many great Nietzsche quotes like “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule,” and “Fear is the mother of morality,” and “People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”
So I smiled when I read the Nietzsche quote in Mike’s paper. “Right on time,” I thought, and I penned “love it” in the margin. And I do love it…”The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception. ” It’s a great quote, and I’m glad Mike discovered it.
I’m sure he was, as I was, led to Nietzsche by a super-cool friend, a boy who wears too much black, whose hair is too long or who has too many piercings.
That boy was in my classroom a few years ago, quoting both Nietzsche and Jung and peppering his paper with references to the Superman and the Shadow Self that only I understood. He liked it that way. He liked to feel that he was, as Jane Austen would say, “a cut above the company” in the freshman comp classroom. Mike has this air about him too, as I sure did I back in my Nietzsche-quoting days.
But, I later discovered, Nietzsche was also a bit of a dick. He was terribly brutal in his thoughts about women. He said things like, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent,” and “Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman,” and “For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.”
He was also somewhat xenophobic: “‘Evil men have no songs.’ How is it that the Russians have songs?” and “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris .”
And clearly anti-religion: “After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.” and “God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight,” and “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
As I continued to read Mike’s paper, which contained the appropriate amount of 20-year-old philosophizing about what it means to lie and what really constitutes a lie, and what Neitzsche meant, I was brought back to my own 20-year-old brain. And I know that an equally patient freshman comp teacher penned some encouraging comment over my own presumed-brilliant integration of Nietzche into my essay. I strove to impress with my deep thoughts and high brow allusions, and she was probably already well versed enough in Neitzsche to know of his dickishness.
I wonder if she smiled.
I also found this “vampire” article from Oprah.com (yikes, I know) through CNN.com, and it seemed to compliment (or would it be complement, Nina?) my “Girl Talk” post.
Enjoy friends, and I’m guessing that no one really wants to hear my emerging theory of how LOST’s Desmond is, in fact, a Christ figure.
(Little Gwennie actually made this connection when she saw, in a children’s Easter book, a picture of Jesus coming out of the tomb. She said, “Mommy, Jesus came out of the tomb like Desmond came out of the hatch.” First of all…mother. of. year. for letting my four-year-old watch LOST. Second, the lit nerd in me is already textually analyzing LOST and building a mental outline of the similarities between the Desmond/hatch and Jesus/tomb stories. I may even develop a LOST theory based on my findings)
So, because I don’t want to lose my six or so readers, I’ll be back when I write something you’ll want to read.
(UPDATE: Desmond, aka Henry Ian Cusick, WAS Jesus in The Gospel of John the Baptist ! Thanks Anonymous Blue Girl friend!)
At her funeral, the priest described her as someone who had a “difficult time” expressing her love and that she had a “tough life.” He said that she often failed or refused to acknowledge the love of her family, that she hated getting old. And then he said that “the only thing golden about the golden years is your urine.”
My thought during this bleak (and let’s face it, a little disturbing) service was how does a life of 80+ years, three children, eleven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren end with fewer than 10 people at a service where the priest spoke of urine?
My answer: complete and total focus on the self. In all of the time that I’d know her, I seldom heard Grandma C utter a sentence that didn’t include the words “I” or “me.” And it was never “I want to help you.” It was always that someone was doing something to her or not doing something for her…endless cycles of how she had been wronged or what others weren’t doing right.
She focused almost exclusively on her hardships, as women sometimes do (as our family and cultural examples often instruct as to do) In her 1996 book You Just Don’t Understand, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen points out that men bond with other men through activities and that women bond with other women through “troubles talk.”
It seems that sometimes, we women can lose our sense of balance when it comes to “troubles talk.” We begin to see ourselves as helpless victims (with a capital V) of our issues, our childhood traumas, our badly gone relationships with others. I’m all for processing and counting on girlfriends through difficult times, but how many of these times are truly difficult and how many of these difficulties are imagined or contrived from the darker areas of our minds? Are we maybe paying too much attention to our troubles?
Today, I was working with a friend, Melissa, and she said something that caught my attention. She said, “I lost my three best friends four years ago when I decided to stop badmouthing my husband.” I believe it. When we stop talking about our issues, our troubles, our husbands, sometimes other women don’t know how to deal with us. I know when my best friend Nina went from a somewhat destructive intimate relationship into one in which she was truly valued and happy, it was a little weird. But her newfound sense of calm was palpable and infectious, and I was moved by how, despite her difficult past (not to mention childhood traumas) she was able to fully embrace the peace of her new life.
Nina inspired me to attempt a disengagement from routine “troubles talk.” It was my secret New Year’s Resolution. Now, while I certainly had the need to call a friend after a particularly bad day, for the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve carefully avoiding focusing on and talking about my troubles and concerns. Because to be honest, I’d had it up to here with issues, including my own. I’ve dealt with unavoidable life stress by working out (a lot), reading with my girls, and watching back episodes of LOST. What happened? I’ve spent less time on the phone, I’ve lost 15 pounds, and I’m a little in love with Desmond.
And, sadly, I have had some strange and distressing responses from one or two friends who seem to need me to be, well, unhappy, self-focused, and issue-obsessed. Why? Because they are, and they’re desperately in need of a “change back” to validate themselves. Sorry ladies.
However, above all, what I’ve really noticed is that buds of new relationships between women with whom I share interests and passions, not issues and drama. And I’ve also noticed that in my oldest relationships (with my best friend Nina and my sister-in-law Crse), I’m having a blast. Our conversations are toned with the kind of comradry that comes from years of real love and they’re punctuated with a laughter that is indescribably pure and beautiful.
It’s not easy to give up on drama, and life has seemed a little dull at times over the past couple of months, but I’ve learned to love a more silent phone. The pop-psychologists can keep their self-help books and their self-awarness exercises, and the priests can keep (and really should keep) their insights on urine. For me, the still clear mind that comes from letting go of ego will, I believe, lead me to relationships with other women that are more rich and loving and fun.
A few years ago, a new television show started getting all kinds of attention. To me, it seemed like a take on the old sociology group paper: if you had to pick 20 people to live together on a desert island, who would you pick and why? Everyone picks the doctor. No one picks the prositute. Well, this show had a doctor as its hero and no prostitute, so it already seemed, well, cliche to me. Add to that a cast that seemed a little too deliberately culturally and racially diverse and I rolled my intellectual eyes at the banality of it all. I refused to watch a single episode.
Then, three years later, screen writers went on strike, television shows ran out of new episodes, and I was bored and didn’t feel like reading on a Thursday night. Enter LOST with its one-hour catch up clip show and it’s season four opener. In those two hours, I joined the unwashed masses in Lostmania. I’ve now started making my way through the complete seasons of one through three on DVD. I’ve got a favorite character (Sayid); I’ve bookmarked the online fan sites; I played get your nickname from Sawyer (mine is Grimace); I know the identities of the Oceanic Six.
And here’s the thing. I was shocked by the high quality writing on LOST. I wanted it to be badly written (I’m an English girl, writing is my thing) so that I could justify my three-plus years of mockery and disdain, and sadly, there is no justification. LOST is, I’ve decided, some pretty high-quality television. The characters, even Dr. Jack, are not cliched; they are in fact wonderfully textured and interesting. They’re flawed and our beliefs about their inherent goodness or badness shift and turn, often many times in a single episode.
LOST has, in fact, taken the time to develop characters in a way that few (if any) television shows have before. Their pasts are complicated, and yes, dramatic, but nonetheless, they speak to all of the mess that goes into making a human being and changing a human being from one week or year to the next. I particularly love the storyline from season one about Claire and the psychic. What’s with the letters on Charlie’s fingers? (Don’t tell me if you know. Remember, I’m three years behind).
The island time, flashback, and now flashforward narrative elements of the show are pretty innovative in television. And perhaps the unwashed masses are smarter than I thought because to keep up with all of these overlapping, underlying, and intertwining storylines is not a matter for the simple-minded. Not to mention that to understand Sayid’s storyline, a viewer must be at least a little literate in international politics.
So intellectual snobbery aside, I accept a collective “I told you so” from all of the LOST fans out there. Lesson learned… a closed mind, not matter how educated, is still closed and therefore somewhat late in realizing what others have already seen. That’s where I am, a little late and a lot LOST.
Mira responded (a little bit of a rant actually), “I just don’t get it. They call this the land of the free. How free is it if a boy can’t marry a boy? Or if a girl can’t marry a girl. They’re always talking about freedom. It’s in all the songs. It’s in The Star Spangled Banner. And for example, it’s in America the Beautiful, verse two!”
So it is Mira, so it is.
Yesterday at 8:30 a.m., even though all of the local schools were closed due to dangerous wind chills and the local news stations were advising residents to stay at home and inside, unless heading out was absolutely necessary, I bundled up the girls and took them to the Y. When I dropped Gwennie off at the Y’s child watch, I was chastised by the older [than me] woman who was working there when I observed that there weren’t, at that point, any other kids there. She said, “It’s only one degree outside, far too cold to take children out.” Fair enough, although, as I pointed out, my kids walked about 10 feet from a warm house to a warm car.
Admittedly, there is something more than a little crazy about NEEDING to get the hell out of the house on a day when the frigid temperatures caused the ATM at my bank to freeze. And it made think about why? What is it, exactly, about me that craves momentum, forward motion, nearly all of the time. Even when it goes against good advice or common sense? Even when I’m bone-tired.
I thought back to the words of Anne Lamott in Grace (Eventually). If you haven’t read Anne Lamott, you’re missing a real treat. She’s my favorite spiritual writer because she fully owns being deeply spiritually and personally flawed and constantly struggling (and she reminds me of myself).
Lamott describes a day in church when she just wasn’t feeling it but stayed for the service anyway: “…you have to be somewhere: better here, … than, … home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it’s good to be out where others can see you, so you can’t be your ghastly, spoiled self. If forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby, the world.”
I thought about the times when I “orbit my own mind”, and in these times, my thoughts and feelings spin and whirl, intersecting and splitting so that I connect events and behaviors that might not be connected, and I become very, very dramatic and unreasonable, at least in my own mind. I misjudge people; I over-judge them, or sometimes, I come to a place where I can accurately judge them, which is often the worst because then I allow someone, usually someone undeserving, to dwell, rent free, in my brain for the day/week/month. In any case, this pattern usually continues until I find someone who loves me to talk me down from this crazy floating place.
When I spend too much time in my own space, I become the “ghastly,” “spoiled” person that Lamott describes. I imagine that my feelings are the top priority–not others, not community, not the greater good, but ME. It’s obscene, really. It’s fortunate that most of the time, I can anticipate and cut short these [insane] tendencies.
There is something about momentum, too, on a day like yesterday. The getting going just to get going that is a thing of beauty in itself. And I’m the better for it. And the thing is, my girls are better for it too. Yesterday morning, and for several weeks, really, my girls have been bickering non-stop about ridiculous things like Lego pieces and Barbie shoes. Their ghastly and spoiled selves are out in full force at home, but in public, my girls are usually the most well-behaved kids in the room.
Yesterday, after days of crying over nothing and everything–complete with four-year-old hitting the floor drama–Gwennie made me a precious Valentine while she was in the Y’s child watch, and the ladies found her “adorable.” Mira made two new friends, a Weasleyish brother and sister who she described as being from “Dorkatania” because they couldn’t play either ping pong or basketball. But nonetheless, she was physically active and socially engaged with peers, and she had a great time.
The real magic is that when we got home, the girls and I were all quite peaceful. We rolled, cut, baked, and decorated lovely heart-shaped cookies to surprise Reg when he got home from work. Mira and I studied second grade science while Gwennie turned the whole house into a pet shop (we have THAT many stuffed animals) We read three chapters of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, multiple Curious George stories, and all in all, we truly enjoyed just being together.
And I’m not sure it would have been possible if we hadn’t gotten up, gone out, and reminded ourselves that we are, in fact, social creatures. That we’re just better people when we interact with others and remember that how we interact with the outside is what strengthens the inside. That it’s good to let go of our inward perceptions and redirect our energies into interacting. We can’t always be whole and reasonable people in the often cockeyed and lopsided spaces of our individual egos.
Today is both Mardi Gras, literally “fat Tuesday” marking a time of feast before lent, and Super Tuesday, the day when 20 plus states hold primaries and the 2008 presidential election begins to take shape. It seems to me only fitting that these two significant cultural events line up to mark the beginning of the end of President Bush’s term in office. (If you’d like, pause here to bask in the beauty of the phrase “the end of President Bush’s term in office.”)
For a long time, when we thought of New Orleans we thought of drunkenness, revelry, voodoo, and jazz. Thanks to Jelly Roll, Louis Armstrong, Mickey Rourke, Harry Connick Jr., and Anne Rice, our collective idea of the Big Easy was that it was a place to go to be a little bad, a little dark, a lot drunk, and a lot soulful.
And indeed, I was all of these during my one and only trip to New Orleans when I was 18. I bought many, many hurricanes (the New Orleans slushy drink that contains something like seven different kinds of alcohol) from little sidewalk carts and strolled through the French Quarter checking out the voodoo shops and the jazz clubs. A cute artist penciled a sketch of me that made me look more beautiful than I’d ever felt. I saw a pick-pocket in action. I learned to tie a cherry stem in a knot in my mouth. Someone stole the “help your local police, beat yourself up” button off my jean jacket. A street guitarist played “Wish You Were Here.” I saw my first drag queen.
For most of my adult life, these were my images of New Orleans. Every Mardi Gras I’d ache to get back to the city, but the time was never right (or the money was never enough). Still, when I thought of N’awlins, I saw that smiling girl in the sketch and felt the steady rhythmic jazz thumpings bouncing from the clubs out into the streets.
We all know, of course, when our collective images of New Orleans peeled away to reveal an ugly, ugly reality. Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans itself, came to represent the moment when all or most of America fully realized that President Bush simply wasn’t ever qualified for his position. Even those who had supported his decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq were having a hard time justifying this one. Katrina brought us the stark and disturbing images of starving babies and people wading through human and chemical filth begging for help from our government. I fell in love with Anderson Cooper and Kanye West for foregoing the safe dialogue of news reports and benefit concerts and speaking raw truths about politicians and institutionalized racism. I also fell a little in love with Sean Penn in his rowboat.
The safe distance of the television screen filtered, mercifully, some of the jarring reality many of us. But still, I asked “Is this my country? Is this really happening in America?” And I know I wasn’t alone. So to me, it seems fitting that on Mardi Gras we start, for many of us, the long-awaited process of voting the president out of office. It’s important that we begin this process, that we all are poised to take action now to truly begin to rebuild the image of America, which has become more than a little tattered, hurricane battered, and war torn over the past eight years. It’s not necessarily a happy Super Fat Tuesday, but it is a day, thankfully, of a growing national resolve to live a little better.
