LaurieWrites

Giving up Lent for Lent - or How It's Not the 40-day Shred

My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent.
Me: Does she know what Lent is?
Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.

I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)

I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.

My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.

It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.

The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.

I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.

I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.

There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.

And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.

Phone it in, baby

That's what I was attempting to do - curse Verizon - because the THIRD phone they've peddled to me since the spring is now useless, charger dead, and the internet ate my post.

It's a bit unnerving to be living in a house with no landline with a dead cellphone. Yuck. 

I marched in there today and told the (very nice, for a change) woman managing that this phone, this particular model, was a piece of garbage, end quote - this after getting through the impossibility of the boy they had policing the front door, who couldn't answer a simple question.

"Who is the manager?"
"Umm, we have a lot."
"A lot in general, or a lot on duty?"
"A lot...both."
"I'm late and can't stay, but could you get me a business card for someone who can address my concerns, because this is the third phone I've had since perhaps March and it is a piece of garbage?"
"Umm. Er. Derrrrrrrr."

I am not making this up. It was just utterly, completely maddening. He didn't comprehend how to answer my question, and they have him as your first line of assistance at the door. When you're working retail, if you don't know who your manager is, especially in a little tiny store like this, you are fired. It should have given me the right to fire him.  As it stood he just stared at me blankly.

"Look, I really just want to talk to someone who can help me. Do you think you can figure out who that is?"
"Lemme go check."

And with that he toddled away. I refuse to go to their tech support counter one more time with this phone. People in San Quentin were treated with more dignity and respect. The last time I was there, I got so upset that I swore I wouldn't put myself through it again with this piece of crap, and that if it broke again I was going back to the sales side and they were going to emancipate me from it.

This is what happened to me today. He returned with a very friendly woman who seemed frightened of me on sight, so that meant my extra crazy eyes that I conjured up before I walked through the door were working. Seriously, this time around they're making me bring the crazy. I totally didn't want to do this. But at this point, given that my life is about making and taking inane phone calls for a variety of consistent school projects, I NEED THE DAMNED PHONE TO WORK.

I have her e-mail address. I need to deal with this tomorrow, and I'm dreading it.

 

I mean, WHERE IS MY iPHONE, GOD??? Isn't that the important stuff you're supposed to be dealing with???

In other news, I have two new BlogHer posts up, this one about the pet rescue efforts in the San Diego wildfires, and this one about grandparenting from a distance, mostly with the help of technology.

The Copters Have Landed in Facebook

This is absolutely ridiculous.

I mean, really, really.

"Wark recalls getting a call from a parent who had "psychological and sanitary concerns" about a student's new roommates, both of whom were gay men."

Call me judgmental, but, first of all, sanitary concerns about GAY men? Talk about barking up the wrong tree. (I live with three straight men, by the way.) Second of all, what the hell? I know that jerkdom is by no means restricted to parental status, but please I hope that for every parent who is a jerk, there's a non-jerk in the wings to cancel him or her out. (And also note that I cannot explain why this topic resonates so much for me, all the time, for reasons of employment and other perks that I enjoy, but it DOES.)

Whatever happened to going out and living your life? I'm so close to my parents it's ridiculous, but I have been free to decide with whom and where to spend my time, independent of their judgments (and sometimes to their panic and disappointment) for many, many years now. I was given what I believe is one of the most important things you can get from a family situation, and that is the open ability to form my own opinions and relationships.

It hasn't always worked out to my advantage. I used to be particularly slow on the uptake when it came to who and what was good for me and who and what wasn't. But I had things to work through relative to common developmental issues, like "the popularity myth: self-loathing, jockeying for position, and other adolescent joys" and "just because you say you're my bff doesn't mean a damned thing when you ditch me for someone else at 2 a.m." You know. Stuff like that.

It must be done. This is America, home of "Mean Girls" and "Heathers" and "Bill and Ted" and cowboy movies rife with betrayal of homies right and left. And although I've made many missteps, often in the white hot glare of my mother standing there going, "I just don't knooooooowwwww about that girl/guy", with  my dad in the background going, "Whatever you think is right. It's up to you" (maddening!) it's common psychological knowledge that that which our parents refute and judge is that which we are either going to likely want to consume in mass quantities or reject outright in fear that they will no longer love us and kick us out of our dysfunctional family units, not knowing for a hot second what we ourselves would do if we were open to independent thought. I don't know why this is. I'm a counselor, not a clinical psychologist. I'm sure you can find it in Freud's stash somewhere. Maybe I'll look it up later. I believe there is a reason though why every person I knew raised in a particular fundamental Christian church was either a missionary or a drug addict by their second year in college. When things are black and white, no essay question, parent knows best and don't you forget it, it gets really freaky when life doesn't turn out that way, or your FEELINGS send you in a direction that you never dreamed you'd go, or you were told that you under any circumstances whatsoever must not. It's an unavoidable part of the beautiful disaster of life that people do not exist in checklist form. So either you try to make it that way and head for a remote location to teach English or you throw out the list and fire up another joint. (And I'm NOT saying that ALL people who do these things are doing so in response to anything other than free will. Just most of the people in my old circle.)

It's a different situation if you think a person you love is in harm's way, and is too ignorant or brainwashed or like adjective to get him or herself out of a situation. If my sister were moving in with someone I'd seen smoking crack on a couch or raising his hand to her, I might be trolling Facebook with a little more reckless abandon, knowing full well however that no matter how much I knew I was right, she might reject my attempts to help her and consider me the one with the problem. But if she moved in with a gay man or woman? Awesome! Let's add some extra dressing to the stereotype salad and say "YAY! Softball tourneys, Natty Boh, and black labs running amok in the backyard!" or "A pink fuzzy couch and Top Chef marathons in the living room for everyone"

But we have a winner. We have, because that is what we need, someone to blame. And it's a PROFESSOR casting stones at the late Mr. Rogers.

Anyone who blames Fred Rogers for screwing up kids by being one voice of sweetness and light in a cruel world that also included 9/11, George Bush, and the Smurfs with their degraded language skills ("That's just SMURFY!" What?) missed the politics, pop culture AND pop media train about fifteen years back. This kind of reasoning would also allow me to blame the Wicked Witch (and her sadistic dog-killing alter ego Miss Gulch. Yeesh. I need to seek out a biography of L. Frank Baum to see what went on in his childhood.) in the Wizard of Oz for my occasional lapses into unexplained tears and gently neurotic core. Let us always blame pop culture, and take the responsibility squarely off of our shoulders. Forget killing my television - apparently it killed ME. It's not like any of us have brains, or central nervous systems, or learn anything from books.

Mr. Rogers belonged to my people anyway. He was the Grandpa changing his shoes for millions of Generation Xers, and we still churned out a mass of people who died in the name of grunge and Tiffany in Playboy years after she hit the shopping mall. He cannot be co-opted for the millennials, who would also not know a thing about the homoeroticism of Land of the Lost either, taught as they were to fear the Teletubbies and THEIR leering, seductive ways. Fred Rogers was old news by the time these kids were out of pull-up pants, so back off.

Facebook is a thing. It is a place, as is MySpace (which I blame for poor spelling and pink lacy banner graphics, among other things, but not the decline of civilization, because clearly Mr. Green Jeans is to blame for that, right?) and that dinosaur Friendster and Flickr and whatever other place you choose to dump your personal information online. Facebook's powers can be used for good or for evil. You can wish a friend a happy birthday or be a creepy stalker (she's not that into you. Stop checking her status.) or you can play Scrabble, or do what most people seem to be doing and spend endless amounts of time adding and removing these tacky applications that are turning it into a wasteland of unnecessary drop kicking and pwning. Using Facebook for roommate shopping is an activity for college students. If you want an account of your own, for your own, you know, LIFE, that's fine. If you're using it to profile your kid's friends for ANYTHING unrelated to criminal activity (and even then, if they're 18, it's their bag and the university's, no matter who's paying the bill) that's just a shame.

If I show up and the person in my room has swastikas on the wall and a white hood in the closet, I'm going to residence life and I'm probably going to cry at some point and they'll move me or I'll move myself. They may not have put that on their profile, so like most things in life, I have to see it in person. My graduate school roommates had an argument one weekend while I was home, and I came back to a house full of profanity-laced notes on doors and the knowledge that the one with the "good girl" persona drank a beer every morning before class and buried it in the garbage can. Why this bothered the other one - a compulsive shopper with a rage disorder who then paraphrased Sheryl Crow by constantly singing "JULIE likes a good beer buzz early in the morning" while stalking around the house in a green mud mask, I don't know. It wasn't my business or my problem. They were both gone by Christmas, and I got an apartment off-campus. Most roommate situations turn out to be a little bit sketchy and given to extremes.

Regardless, Facebook alone cannot give you the sum of a person, and in many cases misrepresents them entirely. A photo of my old roommate would never have let on that she needed a beer to face the day on campus, or that the other one would get her car keyed by an Ohio housewife in the WalMart parking lot for shouting "F'ing MOTIVATE!" behind her in the parking lot. If you looked at my profile now, you'd think I was a fuzzy, glowy, chubby girl with a thing for pop culture who lived my life in the blogosphere.

Wait. Haha. No, really. I'm much more complex than that.

You would not know that if your daughter or son had lived with me at 18 that I would have been friends with people who were WAY higher up in the social hierarchy than I was, who still considered me a commodity because I gave advice that only a square peg can give, because I lived on the outside of a number of worlds that never really let me in. And also that I was funny, and was friends with a ton of different people, as my friend Heather says, "infiltrating many groups, aligning myself with none." You would not know, independent of my sexual orientation or the color of my skin, that I would not by any means allow your child to die in a pool of their own vomit after a night of ill-advised freshman year drinking. You would not know that I would have the courage to stand up to a 200-pound asshole with additional beer muscles who was harrassing your child of either gender, and I'd sooner let someone pound on me than any friend of mine.

I'm really glad I didn't have Facebook in college, because I wasn't secure enough then to know that a social networking site is not indicative of who anyone is, or certainly who our friends are. If you'd seen a page of mine from 1989, you would have known the surface, and what I chose to represent to the world to make sure, in my immature need for "friends" and acceptance, that I got it from wherever it was willing to come. I may not have had the courage to tell you, at that time, if I were, that I was gay, or maybe I would have pretended to be even though I'm not, because it was cool. I had no idea that external motivations and rewards aren't where it's at. I did not know myself at the time, in all my current self-aware glory.

I know there are more distractions now. I know parents love their children. But I also know that discriminating against another for reasons of religious, ethnic or sexual orientation is against the policies of most institutions of higher education in the United States, and certainly against Federal law, so if colleges and universities are doing this to satisfy "customers", they are not only breaking their own often enforced policies, they are killing the intention of a university education. It is not, as is currently often believed, to hook a kid up with a high five figure job, or provide a home base for spring break trips. It is to teach critical thinking skills, and to increase intellectual knowledge and personal productivity.

I also, truly know that there is a distinct fear of sending ourselves and those we care about off into a world that we can't imagine is better, only frighteningly different, a world where we (oh my WORD) have to live with people who don't act and talk and look and partner exactly like we do. But if people are going to these lengths to protect what I KNOW are the most precious things in their lives, with no knowledge of any personal harm done to anyone involved, this just isn't the right way.

And by teaching this kind of openness and honesty, I'm sure their kids have a triple-protected secret profile in the Singapore network. If you're looking for trouble, it's easy to overlook your own backyard.

Who and You?

This is just so, so disappointing.

I know it's been a few days since Hillary Clinton dropped the news that Celine Dion's "You and I" was the winner of her campaign song contest, and also did that stupid Soprano's takeoff video.It's taken me that time to process the news, really, and to come to terms with the fact that the campaign didn't just go with "Don't Stop Believing" as a last minute trendy option, to spare us two years (and possibly longer, shudder to think) of a song that was originally written as a commercial for Air Canada.

The comments here at the YouTube link seem to be oddly similar to each other in their support for Celine's incredible contributions to humanity and lovers of Vegas showtunes everywhere.

Now, just to be clear - I take this upcoming election seriously. For the running joke that politics can be, the reality is that the people who end up in charge do have a major impact on us all, and on the direction and attitude the world is taking. And I also consider music pretty important, so I actually voted in this contest. I get Hillary's e-mails (which are frequent) and when the list came I thought it was interesting that they were trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon full-force. I would really like to support a woman for president, but not just for that reason, and I haven't made up my mind yet, obviously, because it's just too soon.

But I also take music seriously, and all of that said, I cannot abide Celine Dion's. She scares me, a little bit, when she sings, and I don't care for bombastic screaming in general, unless it's of the arena rock variety, where it sort of works. She always looks like she's lunging at you when she's onstage, like she's going to beat the crap out of her accompanist, and I have absolutely no emotional reaction to her ballads. I've probably heard "Because You Loved Me" a hundred times, unfortunately, it's always been just "eh", and I am a sap who cries at anything remotely emotionally affecting.

So I find it really surprising that 200,000 people voted for "You and I," especially given some of the other options. We couldn't REALLY thumb our noses at censorship and artistic intimidation by choosing the Dixie Chicks' "Ready to Run"? Here's the list, and all I have to say is, Jesus Jones, friends. Was that intended to bring out the religious right? "Right Here, Right Now," with those engine revving sounds, doesn't call anything current or inspiring to mind, and Shania Twain certainly doesn't either (Shania Twain. Eesh.) And Smashmouth's "I'm A Believer"??? When "Allstar" was an option? Come on, folks. "I'm a Believer" is not just dreck - it's also inseparable from....yeah it rhymes...Shrek, and given that he's already an ironic, morbidly obese shill for eating healthy at one of the most unhealthy establishments on the planet, the poor little ogre is just too busy.

I know civilization is declining when our pop culture figures are confused from overuse, and one of the top presidential contenders has to dip back into the '90s pop music catalog to choose nominees for a "signature song". A friend of mine and I had decided that Brandi Carlile's "Story" would have been a perfect choice, but that was passed over for a rack of ancient and largely unoriginal tunes. Even a retread of the old Clinton campaign tune, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" would have been preferable to this stuff. I'm a Fleetwood Mac fan from way back - such a one, in fact, that I don't even turn off "Tusk" - so it seems that if we were going to go with something old, "Don't Stop" would have still fit the bill nicely. They could have even asked Stevie to rework something, to emerge from a haze of peyote smoke somewhere in Santa Fe and get together with the old folks like they do every few years, I guess when the stocks fluctuate or something.

And even though I usually don't care about such things, I think it is odd that the song of a Canadian citizen was chosen for this enterprise, albeit a Canadian person who lives in the United States and has made a trillion dollars here, so I guess that makes sense if we're going with the corporate take on things. It just seems sloppy to me, the whole thing, besides the fact that it's a crappy song. I have no problem with Canada, and in fact it's looking like a better than decent option these days, but there are so many better than decent musicians in this country, and the entertainment industry has been lined up to support the Clintons for years. Couldn't she have commissioned something?

All I know is that if politicians are going to keep co-opting songs for their own use, they should at least be good. Or maybe, as it's been said before, it's just me.

My day totally needed MORE FUCKING COWBELL, do you HEAR me, universal higher power? 

My day was sadly lacking cowbell, or any instrument that could perchance make a simultaneously soothing and invigorating "dinkdinkdink" sound. In fact, I think the cowbell may have been in the negative column.

Where was it? Who fired the PRODUCER? And were you out of your tiny little mind???

And while we're on the subject, my day also needed more salsa, homemade guacamole, and melted cheese. It needed ice cream. And also, sex. It needed sex, universal higher power. My day desperately needed to get laid. And I know I'm probably going to hell anyway and will go to the extra hot section on account of filth like that spewing forth from my crooked little mouth, but I don't CARE. In the existential world I live in hell is a concept to be parodied in Far Side cartoons and on South Park (Eric Cartman! My day needed more Eric Cartman!) I'm not afraid of it, I admit it. Ha! Hell? HELL AND DAMN!

How much karma did I earn today, anyway, hmm? How much? Oh - wait! I can't COUNT THAT HIGH!!!! I have a little scooch of it to burn.

My day needed less of the following: Words. Rationalization. Suburbia. Tragic overstatement of vaguely problematic issues. Traffic. Hysterical, guttural, very attractive closed-office-door tears. Snappish, impulsive behavior. Thwarted overthrows of another useless Bush administration miscreant. Stomach lurching anxiety. Second-guessing of self when appearing to do things as simple as walking down the hall. Predictable behavior.

My day needed more of the following (in addition to the aforementioned items): Wine. Hugs. Useful life choices. Chocolate. Fluffy pillows. Palm trees and the ocean. Music. Cream in my coffee and cookie dough in my ice cream. Campfires and s'mores and general warm fuzzy behaviors. Understanding. Sleep. Meditation. And did I mention sex?

Yes. Someone ought to take my day out for a nice steak dinner, dancing, and back to the master suite. Go ahead, universe. Bring it. Tomorrow is waiting and so is she.

The good people over at Indiebloggers featured the "Joy Unexpected" post yesterday. Of course I'm jazzed about that, thank Anastacia Campbell for her incredibly consistent awesomeness and kind words too, and welcome those of you who end up here from there. I only hope you haven't come by for continued sanity, because I'm sorry to report that it lasted for about five minutes. Then I woke up, there was white noise coming from the television, the Great Gazoo was hovering over my shoulder heckling like he does, and general upset and consternation stopped by to kick my ass into next week.

Help me.

I swear, if one more person is mean to me, tries to shame me for my words either directly or passively-aggressively, or plants him or herself square in front of me atop Mount Judgment and Self Righteousness this week, I don't want to be held accountable for my response. I don't know what kind of energy is following me around, but it's of the most unpleasant kind.

To clarify: a series of maleficent events that has now lasted approximately one week began with an encounter with someone who has (shall we say) some administrative control over my life. This person questioned me inappropriately, manipulated a situation that applies solely to me and transferred it completely to her own life, and in so doing turned a potentially very easy and productive transaction into a trip on the bumper cars to Crazyland, purple sparks flying from the ceiling. In the days since, two people have raised their voices at me, either verbally or in writing, to tell me that they really didn't like what I had to say or what I'd done, as processed through their own neural pathways. One of these people is about my age, all evidence that she is an aged schoolmarm circa 1927 to the contrary, and came up to me after I apologized for offending (VERY accidentally, mind you) her to see if "we need to talk further about this." Er, no, I was done an hour ago, when I apologized FIVE TIMES, told you I had signficant respect for you, and you told me that wasn't the point. Hmm. Then, knowing when I've hit an impasse, I smiled, told you I'd like to move forward considering we were in a room of a hundred people, and walked away from you and your unpleasant aura, thanks. Frightening how it seemed so important to her to have the last word - to appear in charge of the discourse - to salvage a relationship that really never existed in that specific of a form anyway.

Another talking-to came from a person who I actually respected and thought I could learn something from, who responded to what he found to be my "impoliteness" and some other word I've forgotten by being completely condescending, questioning my integrity, and throwing in a few other melodramatic statements for good measure.

Angry e-mail from him to me? Check.

Fairly assertive response from me that indicated that whereas I knew I'd screwed up, again, I'd taken responsibility and didn't think it warranted the insulting tone of his response, that oh-by-the-way made my stomach twist up to send and caused gastric distress that continues today? Awesome!

Yesterday I heard myself telling a grown person who wanted a very stupid and irresponsible favor from me that in case he hadn't noticed, I didn't think he was funny. He deserved it, but still. I also allowed a thoughtless comment from a friend, and my immediate internal paralysis in response to it, to unhinge me such this weekend that I actually cried, in a most embarrassing way. And on Sunday, I was reprimanded for taking pictures of my family and friends at an outdoor concert, which so upset me that I marched up to the manager of the facility and demanded to see the Federal "no photo" law that he was invoking. Machine = me, raging against it, and this does not even take into account a few astounding family situations that fall into the expanding category of "That Which Shall Not Be Blogged."

Night before last I dreamt quite definitively that I traveled to Beijing, because I was ordered to report to China somewhere during my 4 a.m. REM cycle. There was much subconscious ado about plane tickets and airport transportation, packing and worrying over whatever the reason was I needed to go. A parking garage was involved, and the usual faceless specters who inhabit my dreams, because God knows I couldn't assign this kind of fantasy crap to real people. I also normally have no idea what my dreams mean and rarely remember them, but in this case I believe my psychic trip to China signifies my current general disconnect from the version of the English language that so many in my environment seem to be speaking lately, and apparently also other significant cultural customs of my homeland. You know, like being cool. And not a totally dysfunctional asshole. I'm sorry, Internet, there is just some seriously fucked up mojo in the planetary alignment going on here, and I am pissed off. I am. See? BLARGH. ME. ANGRY. BAMBAM. AHOY. And stuff.

(Yes, Karen, that's your perfect chair.)

So I'm talking about this anger, although I rarely do so this directly, like typing to the Internet is all direct anyway? But I just feel like releasing it in this venue. And I'm tired of trying to be nice to people, asking them how they are in sing-song voices like I do, and remembering shit about them like their favorite salad dressing and whether or not they like to sit in the front or the back seat, only to get REPRIMANDED like I'm five years old or intellectually deficient. I'm sick of approaching people openly and with good feelings (for the most part, except when I don't, and for that I generally speaking have a very good reason, or at least a good one), and getting a shit sandwich in return. I'm tired of being surrounded by selfishness and personal agendas. I'm tired of people abandoning loyalty and friendship for no good reason. I'm tired of people who don't know how to communicate, or who are too lazy or locked up to do it effectively.

As I told the person who kicked off my trail of tears this past Thursday, AND the person who was the latest offender today, I am totally aware of my words and actions, always concerned about their impact, and do not ever mean to offend. At the same time I'm very honest, though, so it's good to check myself now and again to make sure I haven't stepped over any lines. I'm going to say what I think most of the time, because I think it saves everyone involved a lot of trouble to be direct. At the same time I'll measure your responses and take care to be fair and equitable, unless I REALLY think you suck. A lot of times I'm guilty of sins of omission - not saying things because I think they'll hurt feelings. I am actually really careful with you, generally speaking. Patty Griffin has a beautiful song on "A Kiss in Time" called "Be Careful," which I think speaks nicely to the need to treat people this way. (great article about Patty here if you're a fan.)

"All the girls in the restaurant
Pretending to be nonchalant
Funny girls on the TV shows
Close your eyes and they turn to snow

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me

All the girls working overtime
Telling you everything is fine
All the girls in the beauty shops
Girls' tongues catching the raindrops

All the girls that you'll never see
Forever a mystery
All the girls with their secret ways
All the girls who have gone astray

Be careful how you bend me
Be careful where you send me
Careful how you end me
Be careful with me"

My friend Joan says that she thinks some of my problems in situations like this arise because I have, er, POROUS boundaries. I'm very open to other people, and put myself out there for communication, for good or for ill. I let people do what they will do. Her theory is that people sense that accessibility and either really appreciate it, or really misuse it, and sometimes both, but either way it's really easy for me to get sucked in.

I partially agree with her and on the other hand, I'm not sure, and I definitely know that it's nothing I can change, or necessarily want to. I personally do not know what happened to trigger all of this madness this week, though. It feels extreme. I mean, I do know what happened in each individual case, I guess. But I'm sad about it. I'm a little sad overall, because it feels like things aren't working out across the board, and since I'm the common denominator, what's going on? I would like some civility. I would like it if people were a bit kinder. I would like it if when these things happened I didn't automatically turn it around on myself, and worry about how it's all my fault, and start beating myself up with whatever large mental implement happens to be handy. And indeed if I wasn't expected to show up at work, I think I'd stay inside until I felt the winds start to change.

Screaming at the Monitor

Cindy Sheehan is going home.

This story is so sad. And if every single person in the world was a student in my classroom today, I'd make everyone read and discuss it, including the liberal and conservative reactions from a variety of quarters, just to check in with how he or she feels about the big and small picture in its context.

And throw in this essay written by an active duty soldier deployed in Iraq now while they're at it.

I don't know Cindy Sheehan personally. She could be a real jerk for all I know, and I might leave a conversation with her not necessarily wanting to be her friend, or agreeing with her about very much at all, in spite of our shared feelings about Iraq. Since I don't know her I can't adequately make a judgment as to what her motivations were for embarking on this journey. But I do find it interesting that so much of the negative backlash talks in very angry language about how she was in this for personal gain, and calls her profane names, and questions her humanity on so many levels. This doesn't seem to be a very luxurious road that she's chosen to walk in the past few years at all, and I can't imagine who was throwing money at her to take that less-than-popular road of protest. And if they did, I'm okay with it, because if the public can support Matthew McConaughey while he travels the country in an Airstream trailer and takes a photographic record of his every surfing trip...well, we're screwed up as-is, so get out of your glass house before you throw the rocks.

I don't think it's easy for anyone to put herself out there for public ridicule, and to keep on knocking on a door when the leader of the country won't have a conversation with you must have been quite frustrating. That lack of participation was a hallmark of the way things go, lately, though - or so it seems.

"Wait for the soundbite, friends."

"Let the people who symbolize the 'left' and 'right', 'red' and 'blue' that we have to separate everything into these days sit on opposite sides of Scarborough's split screen and duke it out."

It is the mark of a civilized, confident, and educated (formally or from the school of life, equal parts) person to question, and not to take the surface of every situation for what it is, particularly when that "what is" involves the death of a son. I try to remember that all objects might be larger OR smaller than they appear in every case, but especially in cases of politics and religion and other equally difficult stff. Just ask anyone who's ever ordered anything from a catalog about the powers of optical illusion.

And you'd better bet that if I had been in Cindy Sheehan's shoes, I'd have been screaming at the top of my lungs too, once I woke up from numb shock and managed to trudge even a couple of steps out of the first phase of my grief. I'm not a mother, but I cannot imagine how I'd feel if my child were killed at all, much less in this hateful war of alpha-male domination. I hate it so much anyway, without any personal sacrifice or investment on my own part. I don't have any family members in the active duty military, although many of my male relatives, including my father and grandfathers, served in the Navy and the Marines. I read articles in the paper where the families say how they support their dead son or daughter's desire to serve, and I'm not sure I could be that charitable after the fact, even though admittiing that might get my house spray painted or me labeled an unpatriotic bitch.

Just ask Natalie Maines. All it takes is one sentence of dissent to get yourself on the hook, even if you're many steps removed from the situation.

Although rejecting the cause they died in the name of would certainly not call my love or support for my child into question, I would have such a fundamental difference of opinion with the choice to go that I'm not sure I would ever recover fully from the anger that must surely accompany that loss. And please note that although I don't have a yellow ribbon on my car, I do not condemn or lack support for the people fighting, which is a common empty criticism of liberal politics. God bless them if they're willing to put themselves out there and stand up for their beliefs as I stand up for mine. And also I wear red and blue (not white, so much - ketchup stains, you know) on the 4th of July, and I tear up when I hear the national anthem, and "God Bless America". I know where I was born and I'm glad it's not Afghanistan or Baghdad, and if I really thought for one second that this war was about freeing the women (in particular) there to live a life where they don't have to fear being killed for standing next to a man on a street corner, I might even see the eventual grace in it. But I don't. It's not about that. It's about something much more uncontrollable. It's about subverting a system we don't understand to get at something we don't have enough of, and no good mission has ever been built on that kind of shifting sand.   

I'm interested as well in why, at a time when approval ratings (for whatever pittance those are worth) for the president are at an alltime low, when even my conservative Vietnam veteran uncle sits in my living room and says, "We need to get the hell out of there. There's no point," there is still this refusal to discuss the opposing viewpoints so inherent in this war without screaming on CNN. The time for rhetoric is so long past. Even Jon Stewart must feel like he's running out of clips to satirize. And yet there's still no way out, it seems, and a national sense that until this president is done, at least, (and I can barely allow myself to think past that at this point) in Iraq, at least, we will stay. And that, to me, is unfathomable. Even with my minimal knowledge of military tactics, common sense indicates how getting out at this part would be difficult. It's like a massive hole has been dug, where at some point the sides must be shored up if you're on the bottom or the whole thing will come crashing down on top of you.

What I can really get on board with Cindy Sheehan about is that we are "a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives," as people seem to care more about reality and mediocre "entertainment competition" television than about issues of greater consequence to our national and global well-being. I like Sharon Osborne, but America's Top Talent is actually in the classroom and organizing the Race for the Cure - not balancing ten chickens on its collective head or burping "Freebird".

But there is a finer shade of meaning here, in this condemnation of the "dumbing down" of our society, beyond the supposition that human beings are incapable of great concern over huge issues like war and poverty. These things are so impossible to deal with because they are so immense and unmanageable. People can handle American Idol because it's easy, and they can process it because it's idiocy at its basest, most addictive level. And also it is bright and shiny and it has that same sappy Daughtry song at the end every week, which even I can sing. I mean, wait, Daughtry, isn't that the bald one from this season? Not the bug-eyed Navy bald guy from this year? Right. Regardless, Randy calls them both "dawg", so it's all good, yo.

The fact that Paula Abdul - one of the flightiest relics of a decade whose cup overflowed with flighty. The video with the cat anyone? - a cranky, narcissistic British man and another guy whose vocabulary consists of a total of ten real words plus a few that are made up can command the attention of millions of people for at least two hours every week is a frightening commentary on our societal need to dumb things down, lest we crack under the strain of the real reality. This season had to resort to a debate on the aging form of beatboxing (which at its highest level can be pretty damned cool, but Blake? Not. Doug. E. Fresh. Just sayin'.) for lack of anything more interesting to talk about, because even the talented people were boring. Did you see Melinda? Did she not look drugged at every point when she was not singing? That's all I got.

It's all brain candy - empty calories, easy going down while it rots your neurons. But who doesn't need it sometimes, really? People work hard jobs at places like Victoria's Secret and Microsoft (it's all the same...shilling a product.) They have family struggles in duplexes and mansions. They sit or stand for hours in some form of commuter hell, and shop in stores where they may or may not be bombarded with "We Built This City", by Starship (please read the trivia, if you care about such things. Amazing.) in the grocery store. So at night it's Snackwells and Idol, and maybe that shores you up to face another day. (I don't know about you, but for me it's Shear Genius and a glass of wine on Wednesdays. And did I mention that the finale is tomorrow night? I never said I was immune to this stuff. I just pick a different channel most of the time.)

A focus on pop culture at this intense level also fuels our need to witness competition and that whole "triumph of the human spirit" thing that sold ad space on ABC's Wide World of Sports for decades. Except in this case, the human spirit's triumph lands you in a Coca-Cola commercial with nine other contestants in carefully contrasting outfits. I stop myself, and I wonder why I care about these things, realizing that I got sucked in without my knowledge, and I force myself to think about things that are infinitely more important but over which I have so much less .

America also loves a tragedy and a trainwreck, which is the why the horrifying pictures of Lindsay Lohan from yesterday morning are all over the trash gossip blogs. I've seen a couple, and it's safe to say she looked half-dead. Again - easy to look at with a healthy dose of schadenfreude (hello, spelled that right the first time. Amazing!) in your morning coffee. But if that was your real life, and that was your real friend, wouldn't you pick her up and dust her off and drive her home before it got any worse? I would. A nation - or at least a media - so obsessed with Anna Nicole Smith is a nation that is clearly hurting. And I wish I knew what to do about that beyond making facile statements about balancing it out, paying equal attention to the light and the heavy, and forwarding links of "Faces of the Fallen" to my friends as wells as screenshots from People.com. You know, so we don't forget that a world away from where Lindsay's passed out in her Mercedes, and where Britney is composing a shockingly eloquent blog post about her own tiny world of likely valid human suffering, people are dying in a dusty hellhole because they really believe that they're doing the right thing. And that most of the those people have mothers, and although those moms won't perhaps shout from the White House lawn like Sheehan, maybe they should. How can you not scream, or want to, knowing these things are happening?

I think the question on every level is, "What are we doing?" Or, more to the point, "What am I doing?" I honestly believe - and I'm not meaning to sound hysterical but perhaps I am anyway - that we are at a very precarious time in history where our words and actions matter perhaps more than ever, but for the most part people are so distracted with the glut of information and things to worry about that we don't know what to do or say first. Does one volunteer? Write letters? Work for a nonprofit? I've done all of those things at one point or another and I do know that one action alone doesn't solve anything. My next step is a personal choice to devote the next phase of my life to trying to contribute to the conversation in a more constructive, action-oriented way.

Our basic structure as a capitalist country puts self-interest and involvement above everything else to build us the strongest base it could. It allowed people to come here from Ireland and Korea and, yes, Iraq to build businesses and go to school and learn what the books and the streets had to offer, both good and bad. It afforded my family a spot in the middle class in mid-20th century DC, a toehold that it's harder and harder to maintain, because nobody has gotten much beyond it, but that's actually okay. It also fostered the ability of well-connected people like the Bush family to essentially form a "business" that happens to be the Presidency of the United States, and I don't know to what degree that has impacted where we find ourselves today. That's one of the big, existential questions - the sort of rib roast of a question that makes you reach for a hamburger instead, or maybe, on a worse day, a Twinkie. For some reason this Sheehan story has me really charged up, and angry, on a level that surprises even me. I hope that somewhere in whatever spiritual form he exists, Casey is proud of her for going to bat for him and all the brothers and sisters in arms that he has. I don't know what happens after death and am not a huge fan of people who tell me there's a policy and procedure for it all. But I do know that if there is a heaven, and I were there by the same means he was, I'd like to send my mom some telepathic gratitude for walking up to the person she held responsible for my death and give them hell. I'd do the same thing for her, and God knows if I had kids it would be on.

Dear man singing on the elliptical machine next to me,

Please stop.

Thanks.

I think she mentioned him.

So I'm taking pictures of the cherry blossom tree when the guy on the pay phone goes nuts.

"Don't you DARE mention your psycho freaking ex to me! Fuck him! God bless his PSYCHO soul, but fuck him! And you too for mentioning him. Do you really think I give a fuck what goes on out there in Arkansas or South Dakota or wherever the hell he is? Do not EVEN mention that shit to me. Talk about whatever you want to talk about, but do not talk about your psycho ex to me. I do not want to hear about him. Do not do it! Fuck him!"

He hung up the receiver upside down.

Guilty

Reason #147 why I occasionally feel guilty because I am a bad person:

My current set-up at home is such that I often go to the cafe at Borders to work on writing projects. I spend money so I don't feel guilty about taking up the space, not that I should anyway because I spent hundreds of hours underpaid on the clock for this place when I worked here, so I figure they can put me up and let me jack their electricity for life as kind repayment.

I love the concept of "The Third Place," and for me bookstores and coffee shop-type places are that spot. It's where I've fallen in love with ideas and people, made some of the friends who sustain me, and also where I escape from my peculiar version of reality. I can plug into a laptop, an iPod, and somehow to myself. Occasionally I invite other people along for the experience, but mostly it's just my thing. Scattering my ashes indoors would be gross, but this is where I'd hold my own personal wake when I die, so I'm hoping my family will be down. I should probably tell my sister, at least.

The thing is, that although I know it's not a library, there are sort of unwritten rules of engagement in spots like this, that differ depending on the day and time. You do not come here to rock out. You also do not come here to drink, or to get disorderly or in any other way ridiculous. It's not a diner and it's not a bar, and considering the extensive amount of caffeine consumed, it's generally a pretty chill environment (there are exceptions to this, and that's cool too. I've been in a few party-centric cafe environments, but that's generally not my thing.)

One evening a few weeks ago I was working on something or the other at Borders, in a room full of people who were basically doing the same thing. Nursing, pre-med and other kinds of science students always proliferate, who you can identify by their anatomy coloring books and the looks of total misery on their faces. Lots of freelancers hang out, too, in a variety of fields from what I can tell from passing by laptop screens. Of course, the usual suspect writers and designers are here, because who can afford or really needs office space at this point?  I guess I consider them my tribe.

Anyway, into this space walked a family, with a relatively chill little person, probably two or three years old. He was chill, at least, until his mother (perhaps grandma, I couldn't tell) placed the XYLOPHONE that she had apparently just purchased for him on the table, gave him the mallet, and bade him to BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF IT.

I couldn't believe my eyes or my ears. All around me, heads shot up like prairie dogs out of their holes, jarred out of whatever their thought process or muttered conversation might have been, to the dissonant clanging on a substandard XYLOPHONE. (Did I mention xylophone? And why Borders sells them is another question - and rant - entirely.) The child produced terrible noises from this thing for a few minutes, oblivious to the death stares that should have been totally directed to his caretaker and not him, because what did he know? And then he stopped, clearly losing interest.

"HERE!" she bellowed, shaking the mallet (I think that's what you call it? I used to know but I can't remember and obviously am shaking with such rage from remembering this that I can't be bothered to look it up.) in front of his face, and forcing it into his hand again. He resisted for a minute, and then I guess decided that if Mom thought it was such a swell idea it must be, and hey, she was encouraging him to make noise, so BAMBAMBLANGBLANGBAM, there he went. This went on for probably fifteen minutes, in a room that had been previously collegially busy, with people coming and going, but by no means had the monkey with the cymbals arrived yet.

Why would someone do this? I just don't understand. I don't know if people just don't care if they disturb people, or they have a point to prove, or feel that people shouldn't go to coffee shops with any expectation of peace, and that it's a spot for spontaneous, horrible expressions just like any other. I have no idea. And as I sat there and looked at this child repeatedly grow tired of this toy and put it down, and his mother essentially entertain herself at his and others' expense by making him cause a racket, I felt terrible for how irritated I was. I felt like a cranky old lady who was thinking things like, "MY parents would never have done that" (because they wouldn't have. It just wouldn't have happened in my universe) and "MY child would never do that" (because he wouldn't. Are you kidding? Noise at home: cool within reason. Noise where it makes strangers hate you, BEFORE it's school-sanctioned? No dice.)

I write this because I'm sitting here again (and yes I know I'm the one with a problem, thanks), and a nearby grandfather is standing in the middle of several people who are studying, incessantly shaking a rattle that must have been produced at General Motors, because it's almost as large as an automobile. The baby doesn't like it, and is screaming because he hasn't yet grasped the great gift it is to sit in a bookstore cafe, TOTALLY STILLL, because he appears to be a year old and ought to be somewhere where he can crawl around and do his thing. This person has no concept of the people in his environment, or he doesn't care. His arm must be getting tired by now, but I think he's just fucking with me, personally? Don't you? Because it's all about me. And you. So next time you think to bring your random musical instrument to the bookstore (of, for God's sake, that stupid Bluetooth device that makes you talk to the CEILING, REALLY LOUD, so I have to hear all about stuff I really don't want to know and I'll hate you so much against my will that I imagine you disintegrating into the floor) please don't. Please.