Sometimes a man…
Sometimes the beauty of life…
Sometimes…it feels…

I don’t have a story to tell because all I did was turn on the television and call my best friend.  My daughter Emma asked me where we were saying her best friend’s mom was flying around Boston that day and just missed the flight that crashed into the first tower.  I only remember it for what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know that it was a terrorist act.  I didn’t know that Osama Bin Laden was that real.  I didn’t know that “they” hated us.  I didn’t know what we did to make them hate us.  I didn’t know that the towers would fall. I didn’t know that people would jump out of the windows to keep from burning or dying from smoke inhalation.  I didn’t know that the firefighters would rush in just before the towers fell.  I didn’t know there would be two planes to hit the towers. I didn’t know it could be so easy to execute such an elegant, well planned, unavoidable attack on American soil.  I didn’t know that it would be used to justify two wars that are mostly still ongoing.

What could I tell my daughter about that day?  How could I tell her that those two wars ended up killing over six thousand more American soldiers.

Operation Iraqi Freedom: 4,442

Operation Enduring Freedom: 1,584

These deaths, I have to tell her, had nothing to do with 9/11 except in the way that it made us all so afraid that we would do anything, accept anything.  And then finally, I’d have to tell her that it wasn’t about us that day: it never should have been. It was only about those who died.  It was about them and it should always be about them.

And yeah, it changed everything.  My heart still breaks for the victims. And the anger at our government for what we did after that, even though the world maybe feels slightly safer without Saddam Hussein, still resonates.  But it’s not about me.  It never was.

Just because. Still here in Yosemite — will leave tomorrow am. But in the meantime, here is one of my rock gods — the great Tori Amos who can play piano like she’s a possessed thing….There are a few of these women songwriters and musicians who really just redefine music, I think. Ms. Amos is one.

The wailing sax. It wails like the long tail of a lion, flicking itself up arrogantly, swaying, slithering, and always with its own personality from the lion; the lion can’t do without the tail and the tail can’t do without the lion – so goes the relationship between Bruce Springsteen and his sax player, the great Clarence Clemons. Fans of Bruce know that it wasn’t just the way Clarence wailed on that thing, but the light and humor he brought to the stage. In the personality department, no one in the music industry at all can compare with Bruce. Bruce is Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined. He is John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He is both the genius and the enigma, the saint and the sinner, the hurricane and the rain.

I recently had a conversation at a school fundraiser with an actor. He was talking about his early days wanting to be in a Rock n’ Roll band, being from New Jersey. At one point way back when he found himself in Asbury Park auditioning for a club. The opening act before he went on were nobodys. He didn’t know the name of the band but when they took to the stage, the wiry lead singer launched into a version of Proud Mary that stopped him in his tracks. Everyone in the room quieted to watch this righteous bolt of lightning sing a bluesy, raunchy version of a classic. Now, of course, everyone does Proud Mary like that. But then, it was something new. When the singer got off the stage everyone wanted to know his name. And of course, his name was Bruce Springsteen.

Some people are born that way.

But the E. Street band was a whole different thing. It wasn’t just Bruce Springsteen. Sure, he could have been successful – lord knows – without his band but with his band? He was a religion.

Much of that religion was due to Clarence Clemons, who died this week. Clarence, forever immortalized in Tenth Avenue Freezeout:

The best collaboration between them is probably most famously Jungleland off of Born to Run – but I prefer Darkness on the Edge of Town, mainly because Bruce plays the guitar on that one and plays it really well.

The E. Street band did a lot of touring in the past ten years, after breaking up and reuniting. I was glad I got to see them play throughout the past twenty years. But it isn’t until one of them dies that the impact can be detailed, outlined and understood. Clarence Clemons, it turns out, was so much a part of the E. Street experience the audience loved him and needed him as much as Bruce did. And so we say goodbye to the future of the whole fucking city.

Rest in peace, big man.

“Hello, this is Mrs. So and So, your daughter’s science teacher? We need your permission for her to take home a baby.”
“A baby?”
“We sent home a permission slip but your daughter never turned it in.”
“A baby?”
“So does she have your permission?”

A frantic call from my daughter earlier that afternoon alerted me to there being something important either she had forgotten, or worse, I had forgotten, that now needed to be hastily fixed. I was pretending not to know what the “baby” was but I did know. It was a futile experiment to wart off teen pregnancy in middle school kids. What with all of the raging hormones, pop songs, sex-soaked billboard ads, and Viagra ads (“erections lasting more than four hours”) the school district was spending some of its money trying to do the jobs parents should be doing as in, “if you turn up pregnant at 14 I’ll rip your hair out.” Just kidding. Maybe not so severely but with the same end-result. Are parents doing their job? Apparently not very well. Add to that, the allure of all that attention they get, all of the TLC pregnant women get, and that TV show 16 and Pregnant. To say nothing of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin.

“Teenagers shouldn’t be having babies,” I told my daughter and her cousin at the mall the other day. “They should just go have abortions like sensible people do.” Okay, maybe I said it and maybe I didn’t, but the point is that no one really has abortions anymore. There is a race war on, haven’t you heard? Hispanics are taking over the planet. White people better start having babies, many of them, and fast.

It’s possible I have become hysterical and am imagining things. Either way, I knew my daughter wanted to do “the baby thing,” because it was just too weird to pass up. Who wouldn’t want to try taking home a doll-baby that cried on a timer, that you had to feed, and rock, and change its diaper, and burp it? It came with a little blanket and clothes!

I first set eyes on the thing when I went to pick her up at a friend’s house. All of these 13 year-olds had babies to tend to. Really, I felt like I’d flown to Utah and was visiting a plural marriage home in the FLDS. They were frantically throwing their babies around, rocking them violently back and forth and when the baby finally got quiet because they’d done something right, they would simply prop it up on a chair as one would do to a doll or a half-read novel. Of course, I did not hesitate to tell them, any time you set a baby down like that they’re going to fall right over onto the tops of their egg shell heads!

By the annoyed looks flicked back at me by them I figured they wanted us moms to stop clucking about. We couldn’t help it, though. As soon as one of the babies started wailing it thrust us backwards in time, to the dark ages of panic — where you’re up in the middle of the night and all you want to do is make the baby stop crying. Not in a way that would put you on the nightly news, of course, but in the normal, motherly way. You know, feed it, rock it, burp it. All of these reactions, by the way, are recorded in the thing. This is how the student is graded. Can they react properly to a crying baby? Wait, is the point of it to TEACH them how to be mothers at 13 or is the point of it to annoy them so much they want to put off being mothers as long as possible.

It’s hard to know. But from the reports my daughter gives me about sex ed in public schools the only time she’s seen an actual penis, apparently, was “in a cartoon” drawing of one (egads) or one riddles with sores. They also saw a video of childbirth. They are doing what they can, I figure, to deter the tweens from their predestined roles as young mothers. Good luck with that. Nature has a way of shoving all of the particulars on the backburner when we’re talking about LOVE and SEX.

But maybe, just maybe, they’ve freaked my daughter out enough that she’ll stay a virgin until she’s at least 25. You know, why is it the business of public schools to teach kids about sex and pregnancy and all of that? Are parents really that out of it that they don’t fill their kids in on this stuff?

Either way, by the time four AM rolled around, that baby started wailing and there was my poor Emma rocking it, feeding it, shaking it (no, she didn’t shake it) as it wailed and howled into the night, sending adults within hearing distance to stir awake and wonder what the fuck was going on in our apartment. Emma started to whine to her mom, “oh god, I can’t do this. It’s broken! It’s broken!” She’d been complaining that the baby was broken because it wouldn’t stop crying. “It’s not broken,” I reassured her. Just keep rocking it.

About fifteen minutes of solid wailing later, to the point where I almost whipped out a breast and started feeding the thing (no, I didn’t), it finally silenced itself.

In the morning, my poor daughter said as she carried the quiet baby out into the living room as if she were carrying a too-full glass of water, careful not to spill a drop, “I’m not having a baby until I’m at least 30.”

In the end, she was given an “F” for the assignment. Apparently her friends had been throwing the baby on the floor to make it stop crying because, they said, it was “broken.” Yeehaw.

You know, it isn’t even really that good of an indicator of what it’s like to have a newborn. Not in the good ways and not in the bad ways. But I think it did sort of put the idea in my daughter’s head of the kind of responsibility it entails. Not that she is ever going to end up a teen mom. I love kids, I love babies — I wish her nothing but happiness and I know she’ll be a great mom. Just not at 13. Or 16. Or even 18.

This is the part where I say I am a single, unmarried mother who went into it with no shame. But I don’t wish that on my daughter. I don’t know what it is like to have a man around to help raise a child. I’m sure there is nothing better than that, even if they want to sleep through the whole thing. Even if the marriage doesn’t last. There isn’t really a way for schools to teach that part of mothering – so they do what they think they can get away with. Preventing teen pregnancy, they feel, is a good place to start. Oh, my friends, if life were only that simple.

From Wikipedia:

Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

That’s TOTALLY ME! Except the brilliant poet for all time part. But seriously, she is one I look to in moments of despair about my life. And though only wore white in high school, I have a “thing” for white t-shirts. Surely that counts.

It hit me today that being an unmarried woman of 46 years old was somehow a very bad thing. Most of the women I know who are my age were married at least once in their life. Not being married makes me feel, all of a sudden, like a societal misfit, a freak. Oh god.

Does marriage make you happier, as studies suggest? Does it trap you in a lifetime’s worth of misery? Is it the best thing ever, especially as you near the end? Or is it a little bit of all of that? And what is wrong with me that I never did it? It was partly that when I came of age women in my social circles weren’t really the marrying kind. We were just coming out of the 1970s and women empowerment and all of that.

I think the idea was, you go have a career, live your life a little and then get married and have kids. Recently, Jonathan Franzen gave a talk to a group of students where he mentioned the power of, and the necessary piece to life’s puzzle being love. When he spoke to the students, he very candidly mentioned his marriage breaking up. “We were married too young,” he said. He made it sound as though they gave it their all to try and fix it. But it just fell apart anyway. I suspect that is what his novel Freedom is going to be about. I can’t know because I’ve only finished the first part and have stalled reading the rest. This article talks about what Franzen left out when he redid the speech for the New York Times.

Franzen is on to the something. Love, as it turns out, IS the juice of life. The kind of love one gets, from what I observe, from a long marriage is the kind you want to take with you into your old age. The question then becomes not “Do I love this person” but “can I tolerate this person”? Can you tolerate them, forsake all others for them?

Half of me feels panicky, like I’d better get married like tomorrow – just so that I won’t seem so different from anyone else. The other half says, fuck it. Why should I?

I would have a father figure for my daughter (a good reason)
I would have someone to be with every night (but I like my freedom)
I would have a partner in old age and finance (but I like my freedom)
I would be participating in a cultural ritual that bonds me with my fellow citizens (does being on Facebook count?) and removes the “freak” stigma (like I really need another one)
Sex (doesn’t getting married guarantee you have sex with yourself for the rest of your life?)
Someone to cook for (that would be fun)
Someone to love (love…it always gets back to that)

In the end, I can no more conform to a ritual that, like the priesthood, seems to encourage torture to the male and female. On the other hand, a basic tenant of being a human dictates that we try to fit in with everyone else. This is really what advertising is about, the old “if you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have iPhone” thing? It’s all about trying to take away the ache of being different.

I know single people, even single people older than me. We drift around in this world untied to anyone (except children of course). What do married people think about us, I wonder? Do they feel pity? Do they feel a wee bit of envy? Or do they just wonder what is wrong with us.

I don’t know, peeps. I’m making this life thing up as I go along. I’ll keep you posted.

Or, the subtitle: world’s most boring blogger writes another post.

Well, here goes anyway.

That photo is of one of our three cats. We love our cats, my daughter and I do, even though that technically makes ME a “cat lady.” A scary prospect. But cats are one of my favorite things.

FLICKR

Flickr is also a favorite thing. One of the reasons I’m doing up these posts is to teach my readers, all two of you, how to host your photos on flickr. Why is this important? It just is. When you move your site, which you may do on occasion, either to a new server or because you were hacked, it’s so much easier if your pictures are not hosted on your server. Also, it’s just good blogging practice to host remotely. It’s never good to load up your server with a lot of media. Then again, they will come up on image searches if you do and that will draw folks to your site. There are good and bad things about it.

But these photos below are all hosted on my Flickr site, so I don’t have to store them on my server. Half the time, I upload them on Flickr JUST SO that I can use them on my site. I learned this trick from The Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond), and have since learned that a lot of bloggers do this.

My camera

It’s a Nikon D90. Basically, a starter DSLR. If you spend any time on Flickr you will notice that there are thousands of great photographers will excellent cameras who can take staggeringly brilliant pics. It’s just the reality of the times in which we live. Anyone can cook, as they say in Ratatouille. So I have a few lenses — an 85mm, which is so gorgeous (another thing I have to thank Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman, for). Also, I have a few others. The only thing I’m missing right now is a good wide angle lens. I have also found that the Nikkor lenses, which go with the Nikon, cannot be substituted with knock-offs and get the same result. So forget the Tamron lenses, for instance.

The other great thing about buying Nikon is that if you run out of money by the end of the year, which I invariably do, you can sell this stuff almost for what you paid for it and then buy it back the following year, maybe even getting an upgrade. A win/win!

Ipad 2 and Iphone 4

“Mama dollar and papa dollar.”

I put off buying the iPad the first go-round. But my dastardly friend Robert talked me into buying one this time around, the reason being – web development is headed for the handheld and I am going to have to be developing apps for the iphone and the ipad for my websites. Therefore, I need it (cough cough tax write-off, cough cough). I “need” it. Now that the justification or “juicy rationalization” is out of the way, how about that iPad 2? It’s pretty groovy. Really, my twelve year-old daughter is using it a lot more than I do. She uses it all of the time – she facebook chats on it, listens to youtube videos on it, and reads books on it. I’ll take it to Cannes and see what to do with it but I suspect it will end up being my daughter’s thingy.

I like it, though, I really do. I just use my own laptop computer more, and my iphone of course.

I will be developing (cough cough) apps for both of these eventually, along with the vegetable garden, herb garden I want to start, the novel I want to write, the books I want to finish reading, the mountain I want to climb, the man I want to marry — all of these things that dangle before me unfinished. Actually, I don’t think I ever want to marry unless it’s something one does at 70 years old to celebrate leaving the planet. Doesn’t it make more sense for a marriage to come at the end of a relationship rather than at the beginning?

Either way, the apps are the future, so we must improvise, adapt and overcome.

I’m going to think really hard for my next installation of favorite things — maybe some that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Or a breast and a thigh.

In appreciation of Tina Fey:

She is the smartest woman working and driving comedy. But more than that, more than being a role model to women and girls, she disarms you with unexpected observations that have come out of a lifetime of maybe feeling a little bit different – never someone who could just get by on looks (although she’s a looker) – always someone ready to look at things as they are. What I really like about her, and why it’s not surprising she went from regular writer to head writer a Saturday Night Live in a couple of years, is that she is decisive. Or seems to be. I haven’t read her book Ms. Bossy Pants all the way through yet. I know there is a part where she debates whether or not to have a second child. But she seems to me someone who makes a decision about something and sticks with it. This is why she is great at improv. In improv you have to always provide a “yes,” as she described in an interview with Steve Martin at the Nokia theater on April 19. If you say “I have a gun and this is a gun,” as she gestured with her finger. And if the other person says “no, that’s not a gun, that’s a pickle” or whatever that is referred to as a “no.” Steve Martin has some fun with this idea in this clip.

One of the best anecdotes of the night, though, was when Steve Martin recounted exchanging emails with Tina Fey about their presenting an award at the Oscars. He says they went back and forth a few times, and a half hour later, she sends him a little script and says “how about this?” He said he loved it and that’s what they did. Here it is (but be warned – there is laughter and chatter in the background):

In this clip, Steve Martin is answering a question from the audience after someone asked Tina Fey where she got her shoes. Martin, seeing it as a ridiculous question, decided to answer himself. “You’ll want to settle in, this is going to be a long story,” he said. Laughter ensued.

If at first you don’t succeed, fail and fail again. Thomas Edison, born February 11, 1847, died October 18, 1931.

Here are a few of his quotes:

Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

I also found out that Thomas Edison was almost kicked out of school for being too hyperactive, asking too many questions — he was then schooled at home, with a tutor to help him learn what he most curious about: the world of science. Great minds never stop asking question.

The only way I can ever do anything is if I set out to fail. When you set out to succeed, the fear of failing will cripple your ability to take risks. So, set out to fail. Say – I’m going to do this thing and screw it up completely, but I’m going to do it.

I put together two dressers that came in the mail from Amazon. They were dirt cheap. I figured, how hard could it be? Especially if I was failing the whole time anyway? As it happened, I had to take screws out, put them back in, turn this piece around, re-screw it down – it was endless. And in the end, the dressers look pretty good. Only one of the drawers wouldn’t shut all of the way. So I tried, I mostly succeeded. I had two choices: be a total perfectionist about it and do it exactly right, or not do it at all. I settled on something in between: I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect but I was going to get it done. This basic philosophy might mean that you never really do anything really really well – but I think you do. Even if you want to do something well there isn’t any guarantee that it will turn out that way. Fail harder. Fail harder every day. Make mistakes. Make big mistakes, small mistakes, make them until they don’t matter so much anymore. I can’t think of any better way to go through life.

It has been a while since I’ve seen Heathers. There have been a few “burn down the high school” about girls since then, Juno and Mean Girls to name two. It seems like this young generation, though, doesn’t know or remember Heathers, which is too bad. It seems to have been born out of a time when things when dark humor was appreciated and welcomed. Now, it’s so easy to offend, so hard to go dark.

I showed my almost-13 year-old daughter Emma Heathers. And yes, while it has lines like “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” it is pitch-perfect in its tone, sarcastic, deep, right-on and funny as hell. My daughter was hooked immediately. Now all she can talk about is Heathers, Heathers, Heathers. She appreciated the elfin charm of Christian Slater (someday I will show her True Romance but not quite yet) and found in Ryder’s character a funny, smart, interesting, strong, rebellious HERO.

Love the shoulder pads, bulimia jokes, scrunchies, Swatches, busy eyebrows, The Limited, the constant repetition of “Oh the humanity!”

Heathers is about the horrors of high school, popular girls, yes. It is also about Winona as ballsy heroine out to make the world better – we need more Veronicas out there in high school land. First, she hooks up with a bad boy whom she cannot resist. Then people start dying, “my teen angst has a body count.” You don’t think they’re actually going to die but they really do start dying. That’s what is so funny, and so unusual about it.

Another reason people don’t revisit Heathers, probably, was untimely end to Winona Ryder’s career, which is hopefully back on track with her appearance as the aging dancer in Black Swan. But when Heathers came out, Winona was the IT girl. She seemed to have it all — and whatever it was she had was sucked up and owned by Julia Roberts a short while later — she looked like a pinup girl but talked like a boy. I guess that is what is meant by having it all. In the movies, anyway. For starlets anyway.

According to Ryder, there may be a Heathers sequel in the works — sounds like a weird idea but if it brings newer, younger peeps to revisit the original Heathers, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Seems to me it’s not unlike Mean Girls, though, only without the murder and mayhem. Heathers took no prisoners. It didn’t try to be PC or worry about offending whole groups of people. Mean Girls, as funny as it is, want to be too nice to everyone. And that is really what the transition from the 1980s to the 2000s has been about: not offending.

I hope they make Heathers into a Broadway musical, if they haven’t done it already.

I saw Catfish. I hated it. I wrote up a review. But the comments were too much for me to take — they got personal — so I removed the review. But people still come here to discuss it and want to know what I thought of it. I probably was too impulsive removing it – I tend to be too impulsive about a lot of things – but it wasn’t worth the grief, that’s the truth. But here is what I thought of the movie, for one of the readers here – Chris – who asked me.

First, I didn’t think it was “fake” particularly. What I do think about that part of it is that we know these dudes filmed everything in their lives. So we know it’s not unusual that a camera would be around filming events that happen on a daily basis, from the mundane to the profane. But this much we do know, we older people who have been around long enough to remember life before video cameras even — this idea of living in public, living a life either online (as Angela did) or on video (as they dudes did) means that you have to do eventually become a performer in your life: you have to give your audience what they want.

For Lev and co. that meant they knew exactly what kind of extraordinary story they were stumbling upon and, to me, they were performing for the cameras in the ongoing narrative that was their lives. And for Angela, well, we know what that was about. Heartbreaking as it was, it was also a kind of performing.

I came out of it being repulsed by the boys, sympathetic of Angela and her family. Mostly I was grossed out that once they found out the real story that they pinned the camera on her and then decided to use that story to become famous. It was, to me, exploitative and opportunistic. I know a lot of people disagree with this. And here’s why: there are a lot of Angelas and a lot of Nevs out there. To varying degrees.

Angela’s heartbreak, her sad story, is the only part of the film of any worth at all. And the reason is that her truth is the only truth revealed. My main gripe with the film itself is that they don’t turn the cameras back on themselves and reveal their own truths. Why did Nev fall for what any intelligent person could see was an illusion?

What was he looking for? What did he expect to find? It was so obvious to anyone who uses Facebook — and this is where the opportunistic part comes in — that it is virtually impossible for a girl who looks like THAT to have only a small handful of “friends.” My 12 year old daughter has more friends than the fake Megan had. So that should have been a red flag right there.

But more than that, if the filmmakers felt they were mature enough to expose this story to the world — which they were not — then they should have had the balls to turn the camera on themselves: why did they want to tell this story? Why was it important to THEM to show this woman’s life. When Werner Herzog made Grizzly Man he did not just let the film rest on how weird Timothy Treadwell was and how ironic and absurd his death was – no. Herzog asks the tough questions about nature, about humanity, about our desire to see the footage of Treadwell being attacked. That is what is called being a true artist and a responsible documentarian. It is not enough to find something “weird, dude,” throw it up on camera and call it a day. The depth was lacking. The point was lacking.

However, that said – on the positive side, internet immigrants (as opposed to natives) might be shocked, shocked to find that people actually fake their identities on the web. Most probably don’t go to the lengths Angela did; she was clearly both arrogant enough to think she had it all under control, and in love with Nev enough that she lied to herself about what she was doing to herself, to him, potentially, and ultimately, to her family.

I have never thought “oh poor Angela.” She is diabolical. She probably knows it. What grossed me out was the exploitation from people who should have known better, the insult to injury of the film’s marketing campaign, and mostly, the people who weren’t part of the clusterfuck being dragged into it and humiliated all the same – the daughter (s), the husband, the disabled stepsons. It isn’t worth a dumb movie to expose those people to the world and do that kind of damage.

Many people will disagree with this, as there are a good many out there who fell in love with this film. I totally appreciate that, I really do. But for me, I was just grossed out by them. I think they should be putting their talents elsewhere. And I hope Nev has lost his virginity by now.