The Po Show

Valley Girl

I have *so* much shit to do right now, but it's the last day of the month and I wanted to post one "background piece" about me. The woman who started the NaBloPoMo (I get all thrown off by that, since it's got Po in it and is too much like my AIM screen name) said that personal blogging is largely composed of navel-gazing (or something ever so vaguely to that effect), and I've been thinking about my origins.

I was born in the valley. And by that I mean *THE valley*, the San Fernando Valley. I clearly remember my kindergarten teacher asking me where I was born, and I kept saying "the valley" and she kept asking "which valley?" and I kept insisting "the VAL-ley!," because there were no other valleys as far as I was concerned.

We always just called it the valley, and it was where my family had first settled when they came off the boat from Japan, and it was where I spent my first year. I always jokingly say I was the original Valley Girl, since I was born there, but I really never spent much time living there. I did, however, spend a lot of time visiting, because my grandparents and my aunt lived there, and we drove down from Oxnard at least once a month, the whole time I was growing up.

But even though I only lived there a year, you can take the girl out of the valley, but I guess you can't take the valley out of the girl. At the advanced age of forty, I still pepper my language with valley talk. I say "like" wayyyyy too much, and "totally" and "you know" and "whatEVer." I still love a good mall (I remember the Galleria back in its heyday, when it was a primo mall, before it got all sad and empty, and now newly reincarnated into a pseudo-mall).

I was in high school when Moon Unit One Zappa came out with the song "Valley Girl," and I used to wow people with my perfect rendition. The frivolous nature of valley girls amused me, and I wanted to be like them (as opposed to the poindexter professor geek girl I was).

What happens to valley girls in middle age? So many of their mannerisms seem inappropriate; valley girls are supposed to be all about youth. But time marches on, and it's like, you know. It will be interesting to see what happens when valley girls become the geriatric crowd.

Gag me with a ventilator!

I'm Selling IT

I'm still doin' it eBay (to quote an old ad campaign) hardcore. I've put up over 100 auctions in the last two evenings, which is why I don't have time to blog :).

I'll be back when I'm not so frenzied. It's a good frenzy though! It keeps me from snacking.

Fear and Bravery

I was thinking about my mother for some reason today, about how fearful she's been my whole life. She's scared of all sort of abstract things in a very real way, and projects those fears all over the place. Things that would NEVER occur to most people become a source of fear and worry, especially worry. She's a World Champion All-Star Worrier, and I feel perfectly justified in laying the blame for my own obsessive worrying at her feet. (As Ross says, I constantly assume that the worst possible scenario is not only possible, not only probable, but inevitable.)

I gave her a personalized license plate holder last year after she bought a new car; it says PROFESSIONAL GRANDMA (which she is; she takes being Grandma to sublime heights). She put it on the front license plate, rather than the back one. She knew I noticed, because she explained, "I didn't want on the back, where people behind me could see it, because they might think, "Oh, it's a grandma!" and rear end me." Who the hell worries about that? Who the hell would even have that enter her mind?? My mother, that's who.

She offers up fear and worry on the behalf of total strangers. As we were driving on the PCH, past houses perched up on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific, she said, "How can people live so close to ocean, on the hillside? What if they slide down into the ocean? I'd be so scared to live there!" Every single time some natural disaster occurs somewhere in the country, be it a hurricane, tornado, major ice storm that blacks out people's electricity, whatever, she's always certain to mention it to me, saying, "How can people live where they have those terrible things? It would be so scary!" I'm always quick to remind her that there are many people who would never live in CA, because of the earthquakes, but that's not the same to her.

All of these constant worries and fears have annoyed the hell out of me most of my life, especially since I became an adult and my mother grew much frailer and more mouse-like to me. I snap at her way too much about these verbalized fears, which I always later regret because she really is the sweetest person who ever walked the face of the earth.

And today, I was thinking, I consider her such a fearful person, but damn, what she has been through in her life! When she was a teenager during WWII, she was sent to work in a munitions factory in Japan. All these young girls, separated from their families, making bullets and bombs. Some of them had their fingers blown off, and all the girls regularly had to run into bomb shelters when American air raids flew overhead. But she says they weren't so afraid, and she actually remembers it as a nice time, when all these girlfriends were away from their parents and shared camaraderie and went berry picking and laughed together. It was the closest thing she ever had to a college/sorority experience. How brave would *I* have been in those circumstances?

And she left Japan with her husband and three small children, to return to America to start a new life, with no prospects and no money. Of course she didn't have much choice, since my father had decided on the whole thing, but how brave must she have been, to hold her children's hands and keep the family intact? Could I have been so brave?

I really need to cut my mom some slack. She's a hero.

Love of Stuff

Urgh, missed another day posting yesterday. Well, I already fucked up the NaPoMo, so what's another missed day? Especially, as I've already noted, I was trying to post everyday for no one but myself, and I'm well accustomed to failing me.

But here I am, back to posting, on my newwwww computer :) (said in that upbeat, punchy, 70s game show announcer voice). I heart this computer. I was editing my eBay pictures that I took yesterday using iPhoto and almost cried at how wonderful it was. I've been struggling mightily in the desert of PC lameness for so long now, and feel like I've reached the promise land.

I've also been loving my newwwwwww car (also said in that "come on down!" voice, which Tessa has adopted perfectly. She'll say "We're going there for the first time in our (pause) NEWWWWWWWW CAR!!!") It handles like a dream, feels so good and luxurious, has so many *cool* bells and whistles. I totally totally heart my Outback. My old Passat was a timebomb literally about to go off, and I was so happy that the dealer bought it from us, because I did not want to be responsible for passing that car off to another consumer.

But in the midst of all this, I'm wondering what the hell we're doing, buying these big ticket items right now. It's right before the holidays (have spent much to bring gladness to our loved ones), and we spent $1600 on plane tickets to go back to CA. The trip was supposed to be our Christmas present. So I can't say this computer was our present to ourselves.

Yes, I could say we NEEDED a new car, but our old car did in fact still run and get us from place to place. I could say we NEEDED a new computer, since our laptop died and our desktop is a piece of shit that takes 5 full minutes to boot, but that POS does still work and still performs the minimum functions necessary for my eBaying, which is truly the only activity I can say is absolutely necessary as far as computer needs go around here. And both the computer and the car are fairly luxurious in relative terms. We could have bought a much cheaper car and spent $10K less, and could have bought a cheap PC rather than a Mac and spent half the money.

I sort of pride myself on being thrifty, being the bargain shopper, so luxury is usually not on the table. Plus we've been struggling on the edge of financial solvency for so long, with no savings whatsoever. Shouldn't we be saving to, like, buy a house someday?

Probably, but for now I love my new stuff.

Freakin' Amazing

We're lazing about here on the day after the day after Thanksgiving. Ross made homemade waffles and we're finishing our coffee.

I just asked where Matthew was, and Ross replied, "He's in his room, reading." I peeked in and sure enough, he was lying in bed, reading.

You have to remember, this is a child who NEVER READ ANYTHING except under total duress, as recently as the beginning of this school year. He had never in his life picked up a book for fun, when he could be playing video games or watching TV. I'm absolutely stunned that this is happening on a regular basis now, practically everyday.

There's really no other explanation for it, so I gotta say, Yay meds!!

Conspicuous Consumption

Ah, the grand tradition of Black Friday! The day that sounds like people are jumping out of windows because the market crashed, when in fact it's the day when people are crashing into stores in the dark cold of pre-dawn, trampling each other to get the cheapest plasma TV in creation. I actually didn't hear of any tramplings this year (there seems to be at least one every year--last year it was at a Wal-Mart in CT).

Ross actually hauled himself out of bed and was at Best Buy at 4AM, trying to score a cheap laptop to replace the one that died a few weeks ago. We need a new desktop too, since our PC is on its very last legs, but we were hoping for a new laptop to take to CA with us next month (not flying JetBlue, so no screens in front of children for 6 hours). By 4AM, there were, Ross estimates, about 1,500 people at Best Buy. Hopelessly outnumbered, he headed to Circuit City to see about their laptop specials. Crowds were overwhelming there as well. He headed to the Apple store (the mall opened at 6AM) and talked at length with a salesguy about the iMac. We've wanted to get back to a Mac for a long time, but there weren't very good deals going, so Ross came home at 6:30 empty-handed.

I got up and was ready to hit my two Gymboree stores. I'd already stayed up till 1:10AM getting my online order submitted (crappy Gymboree.com!!! It kept dumping my cart!!!). I'd already put down my holds on Wed., and the stores were nice and empty. This is my kind of Black Friday! 30% off plus an additional 20% off plus my 5% Gymboree Visa discount.

I stopped by the Apple store and thought the iMac looked nice. I called Ross and he agreed I should just get it. We needed a computer desperately and sometimes you just have to decide not to try and go for the cheap and less satisfying. We still want to get a laptop, but we're now giddily in love with the new iMac.

We may be in the red, but it was a good Black Friday.

A Day to be Thankful For (Okay, I ended with a preposition)

Despite rain and very heavy traffic, we made our way to a lovely family Thanksgiving gathering. It wasn't *our* family, but we felt as welcome as if it was :).

This is yet another example of the awesome (as in, inspiring awe) power of the August List. How is it that I am lucky enough to have a friend, whom I had never met face to face, invite me and my whole family to her parents' home for Thanksgiving dinner? How can a person care so much about someone who has only been words on a computer screen, and an occasional picture on MyFamily, that she would offer to share one of the most intimate, most classic family traditions of the year?

Well, the beautiful Amy seems to care that much about me, because she did :). And I'm so glad she did, and I'm so glad I accepted (I'd had a bit of trepidation about Matthew being in a group of people he didn't know), because it was a wonderful party. Everyone was *so* incredibly nice and friendly and we all had such a great time.

I barely saw Tessa the whole time, as she immediately latched onto her new friends and they were out of sight most of the afternoon/evening. Matthew had a fantastic time, right from the beginning, when Rebekah looked at what he was playing on his DS and said, "You have Pokemon Ranger! You're so lucky!" With that, he suddenly became the focus of attention, and he enjoyed it immensely. He sat on the couch and the other kids watched him play and were impressed by his prowess, which is pretty much his idea of the perfect day.

Which left me wonderfully free to sit and talk and talk with Amy and her family, and it was such a delight. That Auggie magic happened, in which it didn't seem the slightest bit unusual to be talking in person with Amy, because I was as comfortable as if we'd sat side by side and talked and laughed together for all of the ten years we've known each other.

So I'm thankful for the friendship, and the family, that we got to partake in today. Thank you Amy, and thanks to your sweet family for sharing your Thanksgiving with us. It was a delight!

Ahhh, CRAP!

Two-thirds of the way through the month, and I blew it! I'm so torqued!!

At 12:13 AM, I realized that I had not posted for the day. During the day, I had actually had a topic in mind and everything, but hadn't gotten around to committing it to bytes. Tessa was home sick yesterday, and I was back in full-time mom mode, without the mental space I get while the kids are in school. Then last night, I was struggling to get auctions listed on my piece of shit, on its last legs computer (eBay was having a 20 cent listing day!), while trying to simultaneously watch the UCLA game in the reflection of the photo frame screen we have against the wall (Tessa refers to this reflected image as "Mom's TV" :p).

Ross and I ended up going to bed to watch the end of the game (YAY! BASKETBALL SEASON IS BACK, BABY!!) and by the time it was over, it was 12:13 AM and I'd missed posting for the day.

Oh well, I was doing the NaBoPo for no one but myself, and I'm used to letting myself down :p.

Nice Mom

I think I deserve some kind of nice mom award today, for braving both Costco and the local produce store, both of which were swamped with people shopping for Thanksgiving, as I searched out fruit for my son. The grocery stores have crappy fruit. Costco is hit or miss on fruit here, and all they had that looked decent were apples (so I bought 28 apples, which will be consumed in less than a week by Matthew). Then I went in search of mangoes, which are not really in season in the places they grow right now. But they are his favorite.

Hours spent driving and standing in line, for fruit. He's lucky he has a nice mom!

Socializing

We had such a role reversal today. After going to the NY Hall of Science, we went to visit some friends (friends we've known from Ross' UCLA grad days, who have two boys between our kids in age). When they heard that we were going to visit, Matthew wished he had brought along his DS, to have something to do at their house. Tessa was delighted to be visiting and playing with the boys. These are the usual reactions we get to the notion of socializing with other people.

By the time we got home in the evening, Tessa was tired and said she wished we had not gone to their house (she actually had a good time while there). Matthew said he had had a great time and was happy we had gone to visit.

Tessa was just over-tired, so that's why she was being a butt, but I was pleased to see that Matthew had seen the visit as such a positive experience. He played really nicely with the boys all afternoon.

Yet another example of how things are really progressing with Matthew :)!

Magic Sizing

I'm sitting here wearing size 4 pants. They fit fine.

Back in like, 1985, I wore size 4 pants. They fit fine.

In *no way, shape, or form* am I the same shape or form that I was in 1985. I weighed about 25 pounds more, a great deal of which is padding around my abdomen.

What is *up* with that? Who do they think they are fooling, having shifted sizes so much in 20 years? I think 1985's size 4 would probably be a size 0 now, which is just a ridiculous size, in and of itself. I mean, size 0? Are they going to shift sizes again and start in with negative numbers?

I don't know why this bothers me so much, other than it seeming very manipulative and dishonest of the fashion industry. Is this supposed to make me more likely to buy pants, if I'm buying the same size that I bought 25 pounds ago? Are they afraid I'll run shrieking from the dressing room if I have to put on pants with a number on the label three sizes bigger than I used to wear (since I'm realistically three sizes bigger)? And then they would lose my sale?

Because I probably would :p!

Hangin' with the Third Grade

I spent an hour yesterday afternoon and 45 minutes this morning in Matthew's class. It was fun and funny and so sweet to see how very happy Matthew was that I came.

Yesterday was Math Workshop time, when the kids sit on the rug and go through exercises with the teacher. And OH MAN, you should see the interactive whiteboards they have in all the classrooms in our school now: http://www.gtcocalcomp.com/interwriteschoolboard.htm. These things are absolutely, freaking amazing! I love our school!!

This is Matthew's time to shine, in Math Workshop. He raises his hand at every question, confident he knows the answer. He *wants* to be called on, which is worlds away from how he used to feel in class. It was wonderful to see. The class went through some word problems, then went back to their desks to partner up and work on similar problems. I got to be Matthew's partner :). He finished his problems so quickly the teacher gave him a blank sheet to make up his own word problems. Since I was there to help him with spelling, he finished that up too.

At one point, his teacher stopped by to let me know that on the statewide math assessment that all the third graders took a few weeks ago, Matthew had gotten a perfect score. She laughingly said that he had assured her that he's always gotten perfect scores on math tests, though she tried to tell him that it was okay if someday he didn't get a perfect score.

This morning was English Language Arts time, which is Matthew's most challenging part of the day. The hardest academic area for him is writing and spelling. The class was working on listening and taking notes, so first the teacher read a short story, then she read it again and the class was supposed to take notes on what they heard. This was just way too difficult for Matthew, who got bogged down from the beginning trying to spell "jungle" (which was the setting of the story). After the teacher was finished reading, he was still frantically trying to write what had happened in the beginning of the story. I prompted him to stop and look at what the teacher was writing on the board, as she and the class went through bullet points of what had occurred in the story.

Matthew started to get very agitated, since he was frustrated that he hadn't been able to do the assignment. He stomped his feet a bit and growled a little in his throat, but when I put a hand on his shoulder, he stopped. I told him to just copy the bullet points the teacher was writing on the board. He furiously started writing without looking at his paper, and he was writing over what he had already written himself. I told him to look down at his paper while he was writing and he noticed what he had done. However, rather than getting more upset or trying to erase everything, he simply kept copying from the board.

This was amazing for him! The "old Matthew" would have thrown a fit, screamed or kept stamping his feet, would have crumpled the paper or threw it on the floor. He would have refused to continue with the assignment. But this "new Matthew" got it together and finished working, then put the paper into his folder when instructed to, along with the rest of the class. It was absolutely dazzling for me to see.

Then it was time for the parents to go, as the kids were going to go into their reading groups. Matthew has gone from reading absolutely nothing, except when forced to, to reading for hours for fun, this year. Talk about dazzling. He says it's because of the reading group, which is a group led by the inclusion teacher. Matthew has gained so much confidence in reading, in such a short time (I literally saw a change within two weeks). I don't know how much of this was medication-based, but the change definitely did coincide with an increase in his Ritalin dosage. In any event, it's wonderful.

So I've gotten what I wanted, what I pushed for. Matthew's had a good start to the school year. Far from perfect, but in comparison with the horrific starts he's had the last four years, it's cause for celebration!

Kudos

I just got a call from Tessa's teacher. I was going "Uh oh" when I saw it was the school calling, figuring it was the nurse again, telling me that Tessa was sick and I needed to come pick her up. (She called yesterday just before I got home from running errands, saying Tessa was complaining of a stomachache. I hustled over to school, but when I got to the nurse's office she said that since she hadn't heard from me [I left her a voicemail, but apparently she didn't get it.], she took Tessa back to her class, which was at the gym. So I went up to the gym and Tessa wanted to stay because she was feeling better, so I left her. It was too late to go back home, so I vegged in the car till it was pick up time. There's 40 minutes of my life I'll never get back.)

ANYWAY, Tessa's class was supposed to go on their first field trip today, a walking trip to the "alternative high school" to see a production of "Beauty and the Beast." It's only about a half mile walk, but we're forecasted to get rain later today. I had to tell Tessa yesterday that if it rained, the trip would be cancelled. She was very sad this morning when I told her it was supposed to rain, and thus the trip probably wasn't going to happen. No buses had been reserved for the trip, and parents couldn't drive them because of liability issues.

But her teacher just called, and asked in a hurried voice if Tessa had permission to walk in the rain. She explained that the trip had been cancelled, but the children were so upset that she had spoken to the principal to ask if they could still go.

She said, "They announced on the loudspeaker that the trip was cancelled, and all their little faces just fell!" So she got the go ahead to take them, if the parents agreed that it would be okay for them to walk in the rain. It's not raining now, and they should make it back in time before it starts, so I was more than glad to give my permission. It's also 65 degrees, so even if it does rain a little they should be okay.

I just thought that was so incredibly great of Tessa's teacher, to try and make this work, to try and not disappoint the kids. She's a newly minted kindy teacher; she just finished her master's degree and this is her first teaching job. I think that a more jaded teacher would not have bothered, trying to quickly call 15 parents to get their permission, and trying to get the kids there and back before it rained. Just so they wouldn't be sad.

You rock, Ms. Rodrigues!

Hump Day

Yay, I made it half-way through the month, posting everyday! Not bad considering how lame I was about posting before.

(Okay, I realize this is not much of a post for the day, but Tessa and I both may have stomach flu and it's been a tough day.)

Kindergarten Morning

I spent an hour and a half in Tessa's class this morning. As part of National Education Week, parents were invited to come and observe a typical morning in class. This was nice, since our school is a closed campus, meaning the kids are dropped off outside the building, so I never get to see their classrooms. It's such a contrast to when Matthew was in K, and I used to walk him into the room everyday (and try to help him settle into an activity during "free centers" time). Every morning I see Tessa to her class' line, and watch her march into the building, and that's that.

This morning was devoted to Literacy Centers. Just the *name* completely and totally blows me away. I still have not adjusted to this whole concept of teaching kids to read in kindergarten. It was a lot more low-key when Matthew was kindy in CA, and even in MA reading instruction was not as intense as it is here. I watched Tessa and her peers in their group write out a poem about their families, label pictures they had drawn of the members of their families, use highlighters to mark the words they could read in the text. (The most hilarious moment of this segment was when they were choosing highlighter pens and another girl chose the one and only pink highlighter in the cup. You should have *seen* Tessa's eyes widen and I could just read her mind: "SHE TOOK THE PINK ONE!!!")

I saw the other groups work on spelling new vocabulary, on sorting words, on looking for written words around the classroom, on coming up with words starting with every letter in the alphabet. It was all striking, that these tiny children were learning to read, two months into kindergarten. It is *especially* striking considering that English is the second language of the majority of these children (some definitely are not at all proficient, so there is an ESOL teacher who regularly comes into the class).

Tessa is so in her element in kindergarten. Her hand shoots up immediately whenever a question is asked. She always wants to be the one to "share" next when the teacher asks the class for their thoughts on a story. She's so confident and so smart and several times the teacher's aide looked over at me and smiled broadly when Tessa made a comment.

It was so fun, and so heartening, to see my girl doing so well in big kid school. She's waited her whole life, literally, to go to the same school as her brother (from the time she used to toddle into his kindy class and make herself at home). And she's rocking the house :).

The Tooth Fairy

Tessa lost her fourth tooth today at school (her second lost tooth this week!). Her top front teeth are very wiggly, so they should be coming out soon too. It's so funny to think that they all came in together (she popped 6 teeth in 5 weeks when she was about 6 months old), and now they're all falling out together.

I'm so glad they're falling out, since they had all had cavities that necessitated lots of dental work. She was an amazing trooper through all the drilling and filling (at the tender age of 4), but a couple of the fillings (11 in all) wouldn't stay in even when filled twice. So now she's shedding these hole-filled teeth and starting over with new adult teeth. Please please let these be sturdier.

So the tooth fairy is scheduled for arrival tonight. Last week when she lost a tooth, it was evening and the tooth fairy had been unable to prepare (i.e., make sure she had a dollar bill), but she was lucky to find that she had some Sacagawea dollar coins in her sock drawer. Tessa was thrilled to find the "gold" coin so that worked out great. (Am I a cheap tooth fairy? A dollar a tooth seems generous to me, but I keep hearing of other tooth fairies who leave more. My niece is a generous fairy for her kids, and leaves $5 a tooth. My kids only got that amount for their first lost teeth.)

Matthew is getting very skeptical of the tooth fairy. He wanted to leave her a note, grilling her on various fairy topics. He said that the next time he lost a tooth (I honestly don't know if he's going to lose any more. How many baby teeth do we have?), he was going to hide it really well to see if the TF could find it. Tessa desperately wanted to know where, but he wouldn't tell her, saying, "The tooth fairy hears all." How ominous.

I'm ambivalent about the tooth fairy (and Santa, for that matter). Yes, it's magical and fun for kids and all that, and most are really not traumatized when they find out for sure that these mythical beings are really their parents.

But I'm struck by what Matthew asked me after Tessa lost a tooth earlier this year. He outright asked me if the tooth fairy was real.

I answered, "Of course."

He asked, "You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Mommy?"

Well. I totally copped out by saying, "Some people think she's real and some people don't, and the people who think she's real get money for their teeth, and the ones who don't, don't." He turned around and went on his merry way without another word. Matthew knows instinctively how to keep his cash flow going.

I'm bothered by it because it is lying. It is deception. We sternly admonish our children to tell the truth, but we perpetuate these frauds. But I started it, and I feel like I have to keep it going.

Because Tessa would be *incredibly pissed* if she woke up tomorrow morning and there was no golden dollar coin under her pillow.

Big Kid Mom

That's not a reference to my expanding size :p, but a reference to myself as the mom of big kids.

Today we went to the movies. Ross and our friends (who have two boys, aged 7 and 6) went to see Borat, and I took my kids and theirs to see Flushed Away. Everyone made a big deal about me doing this, like I was attempting open heart surgery with a penknife or scaling the Empire State Building in my underwear. Our friends even brought me a bottle of wine (to be consumed after the movie, not during) as a thank you for letting them off-load their kids so they could enjoy an adult movie (so to speak).

And a few years ago, when their boys were younger and much spazzier, and Matthew was a ball of anxiety who couldn't sit through a movie without having to leave, and Tessa was afraid of the noise and the dark, it would have been a huge ordeal for which I probably would never have volunteered. But it was fine, perfectly fine. The kids were all very well behaved and enjoyed the movie and I was actually able to enjoy it too. No one fought over shared popcorn, no one talked too loud, no one had to go to the bathroom, no one had to sit on my lap and bounce up and down on my bladder (that used to be Tessa).

They are big kids now, and there are huge advantages to having big kids. A multitude of everyday activities are so much easier with big kids. I'm coming to appreciate it more and more.

Whether that realization actually cures me of my baby lust is a completely different story, but made for a nice trip to the movie theater.

Geezers

My sister turned 50 today.

This is my closest sister, both in terms of relationship and age. (My brother turns 55 next week and my oldest sister turns 57!) So now all my siblings are in their 50s. Whew. But then, I'm 40 now and they have a hard time wrapping their brains around that.

I remember asking my sister, when I was about 8 years old, if she had been jealous when I was born. She shook her head and said, "I think I was more excited about you than anybody." She helped raise me, since our mom worked part-time. I have some odd memories of hanging out with her teenage friends at the bowling alley and the local hospital (for some strange reason they used to dress in funny clothes and walk the corridors. With benefit of hindsight, I think they were probably high).

It occurred to me that my oldest first cousin is turning 70 next year. My first cousin! Of course this all comes of having parents who were 39 when I was born (definitely an oops baby). My mom turns 80 next year, as would have my dad if he had lived. My oldest *grandniece* turned 10 this year. All these decade milestones are swirling around in my head.

I'm so struck by how the generations shift. Family gatherings used to have my mom and aunt doing the cooking and hostessing. My sister and brother and their spouses were the parents of the little kids running around. My cousins (my aunt's sons) were the young adults. I was the weird tween whose contemporaries were my second cousins, the children of my older first cousins. My grandparents sat on the couch and watched the goings on.

Now my mom and aunt sit on the couch. My dear grandparents have long passed. My nieces and I are the moms of the kids (of course, I started way later than they did, as did my cousin and his wife, whose girls are around Tessa's age). My oldest nephews are the young adults.

I don't feel all that much older, but everyone around me sure does age!

Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day is sort of hard for pacifists.

Normally I wouldn't say much about Veteran's Day. We didn't get it off for school when I was a kid. It wasn't a holiday for me at work (except when I worked at the VA). But it's a school holiday here in NY (geez, what ISN'T a school holiday here in NY! Which is nice, but it extends the freaking school year to the end of June!). So I felt like I sort of had to explain to the kids why they were getting a day off from school. Especially Tessa, who wants an explanation (often in-depth) about EVERYTHING.

So I tried to keep it succinct, and just said it was a day to honor the people who had fought in wars. Of course this is not completely accurate, since not all servicepeople have fought in wars (like their Grandpa, who was in the Korean DMZ during the Vietnam War, missing Ross' birth). But I'm just not feeling up to explaining the entire military industrial complex. It's not just hard to explain, but thinking about it makes me physically ill. The kids know, vaguely, what a war is, in that it is a situation in which some people fight some other people, but they have no details.

I don't know, honestly, how much Matthew knows about the war in Iraq. We do not watch TV news, and Ross and I don't talk about the war much, so he doesn't get any exposure at home, but he does go out into the world on a regular basis. I'm sure he's heard something at school at some point. I guess I could ask, but I feel like that's opening a whole can of worms. I guess I would go with the old chestnut "We support the troops but not the war," but that seems like such a cop-out to me.

We're on borrowed time about having to talk about war, though, I think. At some point the kids are going to ask (again, probably Tessa). And the complexity of trying explain pacifism appeals to me about as much as trying to explain agnostism (a WHOLE NOTHER issue on which we're on borrowed time! I have had to try to work through questions of what a church is, and what happens to people when they die. God has been briefly touched upon. I'd rather talk about where babies come from. But I digress).

It was so much easier when my kids were two and were only concerned with how to make Teletubbies appear on the television :p.

Madame Speaker

One of the most remarkable things to come out of this truly remarkable election, of course, is Nancy Pelosi emerging as the first female Speaker of the House. I'm having trouble with Madame Speaker, though. Why can't they have a more neutral substitution for Mister Speaker (Your Speakership, Your Speakerhood, Speaker-ee-no)?

Madame makes her sound like she's running a whorehouse. (Which I guess she is! Ba-dum ching!)

I'm also already sick (and it's just started) of hearing people talk about her "style" in such negative terms, things they would NEVER say about a man. Yeah, we've all heard these terms a gazillion times in regard to female politicians and female corporate executives. Men are "decisive" and "tough negotiators" and women are "bitchy" and "hard to get along with."

I know Pelosi may not be everyone's cup of tea politically, but to slam her for being a strong person sucks.

The capper for me was on Election Night (I NEVER EVER watch cable pundits, since they make me want to throw things at the TV and we can't afford a new one) when Chris Matthews was on with some analyst, asking him what "Nancy Pelosi can do to appear less strident..." She had just delivered her speech following the announcement that the Dems had taken the House and Chris Matthews said she had sounded "like nails on a chalkboard." It's been awhile since I was so pissed.

You've come a long way, baby. But apparently there are people who are still going to call you a bitch.

Fleetwood Mac Reprise?

Can you hear it, just a little?

Don't stop, thinkin' about tomorrow.
Don't stop, it'll soon be here.
It'll be here, better than before.
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.

I'm having slight flashbacks to 1992, and Bill and Hill up on stage with Stevie Nicks, and everyone was singing that Fleetwood Mac song. And it was EXUBERANT. I was sitting in Honolulu watching the returns with Ross and our dear friend Scott, and we had taken back the White House. I'll never forget the feeling.

Ross and I had just come off a year-long sojourn in Washington, D.C. and the hallowed halls of Congress. Lots of our friends went to the Democratic National Convention that year. My friend Joel had been campaigning for Clinton since the early spring, riding school buses to other states, sleeping on floors here and there, canvassing.

I was a staff assistant for the Honorable Edward R. Roybal (D-Pasadena) and I saw firsthand what went down in Congress. It was even sicker than people think (and it's even sicker now, according to friends who are still there). Bush the Elder was President then, and things get ugly when you have divided government.

But hell, I'll take that ugly over the ugly we've had with all-Republican rule. I know how important it is to have control of Congress, because the party in power gets to chair committees, and the chairpersons get to set the agendas. Gawd, it'll be good to have Henry Waxman back as Chair of the Health and Human Services Subcommittee. Sure, Bush is going to make it ugly, but I think the Dems are finally ready to say, Bring it on, after all this time of stumbling in the wilderness.

Just please, don't let them squander this chance. We all remember how the jubilation got cut short in 1994.

Ooooo, don'tcha look baaaack.
Ooooo, don'tcha look baaaack.

No Counting, No Chickens, Nothing Hatched!!

I have spent the last couple of weeks not allowing myself to get excited. 'Cause dude, I've been burned before. I just couldn't handle the heartache of letting myself hope too much, only to have those hopes dashed.

Projections of the election have been so headily rosy for the Dems, and Ross has been following it all very closely, so I've heard a lot secondhand. He has been checking Pollster.com, like every 15 seconds, the last few days. He keeps filling me in on various developments, on various polls and projections, with a kind of stunned wonder in his voice.

But you see, I was really sure that Bush wasn't going to gain (we won't say "win") the presidency (both times) and umm, he did. I swear I still have not recovered from 2004.

So I spent the day, not glued to early returns, but instead at the mall with my kids. We got their holiday portraits taken (the BEST portraits they've ever taken, YAY!!! Usually I'm hard pressed to choose one vaguely acceptable pose, in order to have portraits to dispense to the grandparents for Christmas, but this time there were MULTIPLE good ones! Of course, one kid always looks better in a particular shot than the other, so there's one where Matthew looks fabulous and Tessa's bow is crooked, and one where Tessa looks divine and Matthew's got a sort of funny look on his face, but that's okay. I even bought their individual shots, as insurance in case their school pictures, taken two weeks ago, suck). We had lunch. We went to some shops. Tessa fell down while spinning on a stool at Picture People and was tearful, so we went and had ice cream. Tessa dropped the ice cream off her cone and we had to stand in line again to beg a replacement. Then she ate it and everything was all better.

Then we went to vote. They came into the little curtained cubicle with me and I cast my hopes for a better day. They kept wanting to know why I was only picking names from the same line :).

So I'll wait, and there will be no counting of any kind of poultry before they are suitably decanted, and I will tell myself not to hope too much.

But of course the hope is there, in my heart.

Blech Part Deux

I'm still feeling really sick, have a low grade fever, and all. But here's a real indication of how out of it I am:

I didn't feel up to making my usual breakfast (toast w/pb, not that that is all that hard!) after making the kids' breakfasts. So I threw in a couple of pumpkin muffins that I made last week into the micro and set it for 30 seconds.

Fast forward to a little while ago. I was sitting at the computer, thinking, Hmm, I'm a little hungry. I looked around the kitchen but didn't see anything I wanted. So I thought, Well, I'll just eat a couple more muffins.

I put some on a plate, opened the micro, and, you guessed it!, the original muffins were still sitting in there.

I think I'm going back to bed now.

Blech

Here's a riddle:

What do you get when you have:

Warm weather. Cold weather. Warm weather. Cold weather. Warm. Cold.

Answer:

A nasty disgusting freaking head cold!!

I fought valiantly all day yesterday, slamming Airborne, but the cold won the battle this afternoon. I wish I had a spigot on my nose to turn it off. I have a fever of almost 100 (I know, not much, but I feel like hell).

But I remembered to blog today :p!

Hours are not always what they're cracked up to be

Hilary, if you're jealous of me (please see comment in my last post below), I'm MAJORLY jealous of you too :).

You have a career you love, that brings you a sense of personal fulfillment. I don't have that. I don't even have a JOB that I mildly like, that brings a modicum of fulfillment.

That's part of the weirdness of having all this hypothetical free time (I still call it hypothetical because it never feels like I don't have anything to do). It's a lot of hours, and yet I have trouble figuring out what I'm doing with them. They're just sort of melting away in the stratosphere. So what am I doing with my life? I'm caring for my kids, I'm running a household, but so are people who are otherwise occupied for most of their daytime hours.

I feel like I'm sort of whiling away my life, and while I am enjoying the luxury of hours, I sort of feel like I'm lacking meaning and focus. And self-worth, definitely lacking in that department.

I can't go on like this indefinitely, but I'm not sure what else to do with myself.

The Hours

Wasn't it Virginia Woolf who asked, "But what about the hours?"

I currently have more hypothetical free time than I ever have had in my life. I say hypothetical because, of course, there's always stuff to be done. There's housework and never-ending laundry and daily grocery shopping (there is always something I must get, usually for one of the kids, that absolutely must be gotten. The usual suspects are apples or bagels for Matthew).

I spend a considerable amount of time on eBay-related activities: packaging up purchases, going to the post office, taking pictures of stuff I have to sell, itemizing my inventory, writing up descriptions in preparation for putting things up on auction (which is always done at night after the kids are in bed). I spend a considerable amount of time going to Gymboree and looking at their stuff, and buying their stuff, and buying more of their stuff. I also spend a lot of time yakking with the saleswomen there, since they're often my only social outlet.

So what do I do with my hours? I'm not entirely sure. They certainly are consumed; I find myself startled and hurried almost everyday, realizing it's almost time to pick the kids up from school. But if I look back on yesterday and ask what I did, I'm often at a loss to account for all my time.

One of the first things I did, when the kids started school, was read. I went out and bought some books, real books. Not magazines with short stories that I could get through in between fetching and toting for my children, but actual novels. It was the height of luxury to be able to sit and read, uninterrupted, for hours at a time. I honestly have not done that since I've been a mother.

I also rested. I took naps. On a few occasions, I came home from dropping them off at school and I hopped back in bed. I didn't have to worry about setting an alarm, because I didn't have to leave to pick up Tessa in an hour. The second week of school, I got sick, and I was able to just stay in bed and read the whole day, till it was time for pick-up.

I've been online WAY too much, and this is a real problem. The time suckage involved in reading and posting to my Gymboree groups is just too many of my hours. It's something I really need to work on.

Matthew had all his neuro tests, and I spent a lot of time researching and worry about those. I also spent hours researching Ritalin and Zoloft online too (ah, Google, a blessing and a curse). I ordered holiday gifts. I even bought a few things for myself (brick and mortar and online).

It's only the beginning of the school year. It's about 140 more school days till the last day of school. What will I do with the hours?

Blog or Die?

So I understand there's this big going-on this month, promoted under some name that features a lot of word fragments. here

Participants are supposed to blog at least once a day throughout the month of November. Since I fortuitously blogged on the first day of the month (by pure coincidence, since I blog like twice a month), I thought that, simply as an exercise in self-motivation (since I find it hard to be motivated to do ANYTHING these days), I'd try to do it.

I was struck by the tongue-in-cheek slogan Blog or Die, though. Obviously this is in reference to the Vote or Die motto that was pushed by various "youth cultural warriors" (i.e., people who had made a lot of money off of selling music and other media to kids) during the 2004 election.

Boy, has that slogan come to bite them in the ass.

18-21 year olds did go to polls in substantial numbers in 2004, though how much of it was influenced by Vote or Die, it's hard to say. And now, so many of those kids are even more cynical about the voting process. WTF, they say, we voted and nothing changed. It got worse. WTF is the use? So voting advocates who are targeting youth now say they totally have to approach them differently, rather than blythely saying Vote or Die.

But in an electoral year in which the way the votes swing may indeed impact how many more people will go over to Iraq to die, it's not an empty slogan. It's real and it's important.

Hmm, see, this is why I don't blog very often! I like to wait until I have a solidified concept in my head, and I've run it past myself a few times to make sure it makes sense. What I just wrote smacks of babbling. But then I guess that's not unusual in the blogsphere.

I'll try again tomorrow :p.

Weedless

"Weeds" is done for the season, which means it's done for the next 9 months or so. That's a long time for me to live without my favorite show.

I'd vaguely heard about this show during its first season on Showtime. Then when the DVD of that first season came out during the summer, ads were plastered all over the place and I was amused by its concept: upper class suburban mom turns into pot seller. Plus it was golden southern California in the background, so I had to see it.

We rented the DVD (LOVE Redbox, which is in my grocery store and rents DVDs for $1 a night!) and I was totally blown away from the first episode. Loved the cast, loved the plot lines, loved the writing. We tore through the whole season in two nights.

And I wanted more! So I convinced Ross that we needed Showtime. Now understand, we have always been Basic Cable folks. Simple people who were too cheap to pay for the premium channels, who figured that we didn't need any more channels because we didn't have time to watch the regular channels anyway.

But this was beyond luxury. This was "Weeds," which was now considered (by me) a necessity of life. So we signed up for Showtime.

Yeah, the plotlines started getting a lot more far-fetched, sometimes to the point of annoying. But I was taken in by it all, and I wanted it to keep going. The last episode on Monday had a ridiculous, multi-plot line, cliffhanger. Bleah. I don't want to wait the length of time it takes to gestate a baby to find out what happens!

I have not been so into a show in many, many years. I actually don't think I've been this taken with a show, where I really CARED this much about a fricking TV show, since "thirtysomething." And that was a LONG time ago!

And I'm wondering why. Why this show? It does have the blend of melodrama/quirky humor that I love (being melodramatic and quirkily humorous myself). But what was the hook here?

I decided early on that it was the character of Nancy that somehow really got to me. Here she is, this pampered but feisty mom, about my age, who abruptly finds herself widowed with two kids and a big house in an upscale neighborhood on the hillside. What does she do? How can she support them? She finds an opportunity, selling pot to her wealthy stoner neighbors. She reconciles this to herself, that they are consenting adults, bastions of society, who just like to get high. She does not sell to kids, her buyers do not commit crimes to afford her product. Of course things snowball considerably as the show goes on, but that's where she starts from.

It's her mother's love that got me, I think, her absolute love for her boys, that made me love her character and the show in general. She walks a tightrope, lying to them about what she's doing, trying to shield them from the knowledge that their mom is a drug dealer. It hurts her, a lot, to do this. But she's trying to provide for them, in the way that she knows how.

And she's really lonely. She struggles with being a single parent. She's living a shadowy existence, trying to maintain her suburban mom image while leading this insane double life (which gets more insane as she teams up with her partner to grow the ultimate weed).

There was an episode in the first season that I keep thinking about. I was going to blog about it (like many, many, many topics, I blogged it in my head but never got around to actually putting it down on the screen); I was going to call the entry "Sex, love, and videotape." At the very end of the episode (during which her younger son has spent a lot of time surreptiously watching home videos of his dead father), Nancy is sitting alone in her bedroom, watching a video of her making love with her dead husband. She smiles, and she cries.

I thought about that act, watching images of your most intimate moments with the love of your life, who is now completely out of reach. The pain of it seems unbearable, but yet I understand the temptation to watch, to see him again, to see what you shared, to derive some measure of comfort in the midst of all your loneliness and emotional exhaustion.

I guess I love the show because I see myself in Nancy, and I hope to never be left in her situation. I don't want to be the one who has to stumble around and go on and find a way to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the kids. But I love watching Nancy struggle to do it, and I root for her.

"What do I tell people when they ask what you do?," her son asked her in the last episode (after she has finally admitted that she sells pot).

"Tell them I'm your mom," she answers, brushing the hair out of his eyes, tears welling a bit in her own. She tries to smile.

Exactly.