The Po Show

As God is My Witness, I WILL Blog Again!!

Okay, I'm agnostic. But I liked the sound of that title.

What happened? I was all fired up to blog regularly again and I so fell down on the job, yet again. So, here's the latest litany of excuses (drumroll please...):

Um, we were about to go into spring break. Then we were on spring break. Then I had to ebay a lot because I didn't ebay during spring break and I needed to raise some cash, fast, to pay my Visa bill. Then we were absolutely stricken with allergies from hades, which left me in a haze (yellow green rather than purple, which would have been much prettier). Then Matthew got deathly ill for a couple of days (during which he ran a 104.8 fever). Which pretty much brings us up to today.

During that time, there were several things I thought to write about. One of them was particularly interesting (to me), particularly pithy. Something about the kids, and their impact on me, on my self-identity......shit, I can't remember. But it was interesting, trust me.

All I know is that tomorrow is May. It's really spring, as evidenced by the baby green leaves on the trees (and burgeoning blossoms). It struck me as so odd yesterday, that there were leaves on the trees that were not there two weeks ago, yet it seems perfectly normal for them to have leaves. Just as a month ago, it seemed perfectly normal for them to be bare. The human mind does this weird trick on itself, by which the current state of things is always felt to be the norm. I guess the problem arises when the paradigm shifts and the mind refuses to go along, and there's that uncomfortable grinding of the gears.

Anyway, we are in spring, and it's beautiful, but hard to enjoy since it's made us so incredibly miserable. This is the worst allergy season in a decade, and we live on a street lined with oak trees (oak being particularly allergenic). Having lived in CA for so long, it got tiresome listening to people from elsewhere bemoan the lack of "real" seasons there, but I gotta say, given the choice between "real" seasons and far fewer allergens, give me the barren L.A. basin. Plus, that whole "never gets too hot or too cold or too humid" thing really has a lot going for it too.

Well here I am, talking about the weather again. The weather and the kids, the kids and the weather. Here I am, two months and two days from turning 40 years old, and that's all I can find to talk about.

Oh, about the kids. Today we went to ToysRUs to cajole the kids out of the house (Matthew is still feeling quite off after having been so sick, though he had one of his characteristic quick recoveries). Tessa couldn't decide on what "little" toy she wanted to get (as opposed to a "big" toy that cost over $10. She did come to realize that the actual size of toys does not always have bearing on how much they cost). She found a Dream Dazzler makeup set that was $1.97 and absolutely flipped. She's been wanting a makeup kit forever and though I really am not thrilled with her having even pretend makeup, I was thrilled with the price tag (yay parenting values!). Then she ran around outside absolutely waxing rhapsodic over this makeup kit. She even cradled it in her hands and sang to it. At one point walking back to the car she handed it to me and asked, "Will you hold my baby for a second?" I'm a big fan of making my children happy, but this was a little disturbing.

Ugh, said child is now wailing about something, so that's all the blogging for now. Hopefully it will not be 23 days before I do so again.

Anonymity

I realized that in my last post, that was the first time I've said my name. And I'm wondering why.

Certainly this is The Po Show, and I'm Po, but no one calls me that. Ross used to quite a bit, but more or less stopped years ago. I'm Paula, but I haven't been Paula here.

Lots of bloggers (real ones and posers like me :)) refrain from putting their real names on their blogs, for a multitude of reasons. Most just don't want the public to know their full identities, as a privacy issue. Some fear wackos out there (and certainly there are plenty of those) who might do who knows what if they had a real name that might lead to a real address.

But I don't have any such fears. I really don't think anyone's reading this anyway other than a few dear friends who know who I am. I have stated my husband and children's real names on numerous occasions. If you google "the po show" you get a bunch of articles about some poetry theatre in Seattle, or things that involved a show with a post office box. I'm not there. And who would be looking anyway?

I think the reason I haven't said my given name here is that I like being Po in this venue. I like being able to write and think and carve out just the tiniest bit of mental space, apart from my daily life of driving children from place to place and grocery shopping and putting a million little Trader Joe's pizzas into the toaster oven. All necessary and important tasks in their own way, but pretty fricking banal. That's what Paula does (or actually, that's what Mommy does).

But Po, she gets to write, even craft, a few paragraphs every once in a while. Even if they are nothing earth shattering, even if they are mostly about the mundane goings-on, they are mine, and feel like they should have a different moniker attached to them.

Rock on, Po.

Sports Talk, with Paula

Last night my much beloved UCLA Bruins lost the NCAA Basketball National Championship.

But it's okay. They should be insanely proud of themselves to have gotten so far, considering how lousy they played at the beginning of the season and how NO ONE thought they had a chance to even get past the second round of the tournament. Every step of the way, all the jerks on ESPN and CBSportsline dissed the hell out of them. From one ESPN writer's prep article on the Final Four, you would have thought it was the Final Three. But those magnificent boys played their hearts out and made a run all the way to the championship. I can't wait for next season.

I have not felt this passionate about sports in a long time. See, I actually do not like sports very much, except college basketball and football (I positively despise pro football and get so tired of baseball by the end of the loooooong season that I want to puke). Prior to hooking up with Ross I didn't like ANY sports and was very contemptuous of athletes in general. Then I married a jock (a geeky, talented, brilliant jock) and graduated from a college that places a big emphasis on athletics, so I started to get into sports in general.

It became actively funny. For awhile I worked with a group that was all guys, and I was more interested in and knew far more about sports than any of them. One day we were at lunch and I was going off on a tirade about the Dodgers, during the course of which I called Mike Piazza a "sorry sack of shit." My dear friend Damian turned bright red and started laughing hysterically, that choking, uncontrollable kind of laughing.

He then launched into a California-boy's idea of a Brooklyn accent and started a "sports show" routine: "Hi, this is Sports Talk, with Paula. Tonight we're talking about that sorry sack of shit, Mike Piazza..." Then he started laughing again and couldn't continue. But for years to follow, every time I started in on some sports topic, they'd all say, "Hi, this is Sports Talk, with Paula."

But the UCLA Bruins are the only team that truly has my heart. We were living in Westwood when they won the basketball National Championship in 1995, during Ross' first year of grad school back at UCLA. We were part of the crowds that spilled out into the streets, exulting in the heady atmosphere. We got home before cars started being overturned and the police showed up firing rubber bullets though. We were too old for that. But man, that night's victory was intoxicating and I'll never forget it.

The last UCLA basketball game I attended was their home game against Cal in the spring of 1997. I was several months pregnant with Matthew and got so worked up during the last minutes (they lost!) that I started feeling contractions. Not good.

We took Matthew to one UCLA football game when he was about two, but basketball is too noisy indoors, so we haven't been to a game since. And of course for almost four years now we've been out of L.A. We don't get to see nearly as many UCLA games on TV as we'd like here on the East Coast, since even when they are doing really well the cable stations usually opt to show some eastern teams' game. Poor Ross will scroll through the listings every Sat., seeing if the game will be shown, and usually it is not.

But this year, we got to see the Bruins roll through the tournament, to one last night of
March Madness (in April). They totally got outplayed, but that was okay.

It was a hell of a run. And this sports fan loved it.