I’ve moved a lot in my life. A lot. I recognize that part of what makes me forever a person on the outside looking in is that I have never had a home, as it were. Trees grow roots and stay there for a long time. Oh, the lovely things that one tree can bring to a whole place. The shade in the summer, the colorful changes of the seasons. It can be climbed and carved into. It can be stared at. Swings can be hung from it. Unless it gets root rot or some angry neighbor makes you cut it down, those trees can live a long time. I wish my life had been shaped around a tree. Instead, I have drifted, like the seeds from a weed – coming off of this plant, floating over to another place, somehow taking root temporarily. Eventually, for whatever reason, usually because it didn’t belong there, it’s ripped up again, its seeds sent adrift.

As a single mother I didn’t want an endless parade of men nor of places to define my daughter’s early life. I’ve almost succeeded with half of that. I did finally shut the door on the relationships after a particularly disastrous one. But our home has changed many times. We’re not in a place longer than four years or so. We’ll be moving again in a couple of weeks. It isn’t a big move. The last three moves have been in the same part of town but just a different place. First a roomy two bedroom, then briefly a cramped one bedroom, then a roomy two bedroom and now we’ll be moving to a cramped but very pretty two bedroom. The main reason for all of these changes has been the cost of living.

Before that, when my daughter was small, we moved three or four times because of a relationship. If I ever decide to do that again, it will be the last time.

But I don’t think my daughter has ever really lost a sense of home. No, she has an unusual upbringing. Her “home” has always been with me. It would probably have been a lot worse for her if she’d been swapped around from person to person. But you know, we’re resilient, we human beings are. And I know, in our own messed up ways, my daughter and I are still fortunate people compared to many on this earth. We all know that there is a kind of “right way” one is supposed to live one’s life. So you know, we’re not “right.” So what?

I have to believe that with self-confidence, a talent for writing and a passion for reading, not to mention good looks, my daughter will do okay. We have to work on the whole boy thing, the relationship thing. At least I know she has a good one with me and maybe that will help her on down the line. Maybe?

For my part, I knew I would never be one of those “right living” types. I was born on the Island of Misfit Toys and I will forever remain there. That doesn’t bother me most of the time. Most of the time.

I noticed that a part of my tooth had chipped off a few weeks ago. It started as a kind of uncomfortable space between my molars but I thought, I’ll just go get a crown. Or else I thought, this is going to stop feeling annoying eventually. But I waited too long and now I have tooth pain. I have inflammation. I am now probably going to have to have a root canal. And then a crown. We’re talking something like $1600 when all is said and done. Talk about an unexpected expense.

I have been planning a trip to the Cannes Film Festival, you see. And so I really needed to pinch pennies. But of course, life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans. Thank you, John Lennon. I go in for an assessment with a root canal specialist on Monday. Until then, it’s anti-biotics.

I tell you this, though. If this were the olden times and no one really cared how many teeth you had – I swear – I’d grab a pair of pliers and some whiskey and I would yank it out myself. It hurts. And I think all of that money may or may not worth keeping this tooth.

I’ll probably have to shell out the dough. I’m annoyed. All’s I’m saying. The video above is courtesy if my friend Bill who likes to see me writhe in agony and fear. Marathon Man kind of cornered the market on dental pain as torture device.

Now, where did I put that bottle of Rye?

I was never a pretty girl, not traditionally pretty anyway. Maybe charismatic, got “sexy” a lot, but pretty? Not really. There is something in Rielle Hunter I recognize and identify with. She is so many good things – and yet, she’s the object of our collective scorn, along with our collective disgust at John Edwards. I think Rielle, despite the spiritual gobbledegook she spouts, really does get the bigger picture — the biological forces that drive men to do what comes naturally to them – fuck anything that will let them fuck it — and that it’s hard for one woman to satisfy that need. I like the matter-of-fact way she lays it out in this revealing, must-read interview in GQ magazine.

Rielle clears up a few things I’d long been wondering about. The media machine has cast Rielle as the predator who went after John Edwards with no consideration to his cancer-stricken wife. The truth is that John Edwards saw in Rielle a girl he knew he could “own” in a matter of minutes. Why did he know this? Because she wasn’t a pretty girl. I think she is probably very attractive, though, just not traditionally pretty. When you are pretty you are treated differently; you are less accessible. And when you aren’t pretty, it is a big thrill when the captain of the football team looks your way. It might seem old fashioned, but I’m wondering if it isn’t true.

At what point does a woman stop being able to pose naked, no matter how good she looks? I’m going to put the number at 50. 40 plus is still young enough, or MILF enough, that it can work on multiple levels. Post-50, we’re talking art class or black and whites, a la Man Ray. But the kind of stuff Cindy Crawford is doing here? This is a last gasp.

I have long admired Cindy Crawford – first off, I’ve always thought her to be one of the most beautiful of the beautiful – inside and out. Something about this, though, makes me feel some pressure to look like that. We are, after all, very nearly the same age. Could someone do a gal a favor and hand over the razer blades?

Anyway, speaking of naked and speaking of pressure, is anyone else a little geaked out by all of the nudity at the gym? Granted, I’m not all that used to gyms since I often work out either in yoga classes or at home or jogging outside somewhere. Recently, though, I’ve become addicted to the gym. It is the one thing I look forward to every day, as psycho as that sounds. Why do I love it? I love the treadmill, I love the weights and I especially love the sauna. One thing I don’t really like is all the naked women – of all shapes, ages and varying degrees of shame of humility. I hate it when there is some nude chick splayed out in the sauna for instance. Yesterday, there were two of them. One elderly Chinese woman was talking remedies while another much younger one was laying there in the altogether with it all hanging out. The conversation went like this, “yams are very good for lubrication.”

“Oh, that’s good for me because I have painful joints.”
“Painful, joints, yes, yams are very good for that. The body is almost completely water. A woman’s uterus is all water. You must lubricate with watery foods.”
“I eat lots of tofu.”
“Tofu is good!”

I know, it all sounds perfectly fine. It IS perfectly fine. I am the one with the problem. I totally admit this. I know that some time I won’t care about all of the naked ladies at the gym but I’m just not there yet.

We held one of our biggest fundraisers so far yesterday at a location near Emma’s school. We had a garage sale on one end and a cookies and lemonade stand on the other. I was dispatched to the lemonade stand with my friend Karen and several of our kids. It became a celebrity magnet. First, an actress none of us recognized gave the girls a hundred dollar bill, which made their day. Then Scarlett Johansson walked up to the booth with a friend. She asked them what they were raising money for (Washington, D.C. trip) and how much they had to raise ($15,000) and that it was “to see Barack Obama,” we all hope. And Scarlett and her friend gave some money and walked on.

They were so nice, so laid back – the only weird thing was that Scarlett had dyed her hair dark red, maybe so as not to be recognized. She was stunningly beautiful, more so than she looks on screen. She had skin the color and luster of milk and long legs. Very nice person.

By contrast, Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale drove by and though Gwen waved she did not stop nor give any money to the fundraiser. She also visited our yard sale to ask about the preschool they have there — and the paparazzi popped out of cars and started snapping photos of them. Perhaps they were being chased, which maybe explains why they didn’t help out with the school fundraiser.

Then they drove back by our fundraiser and once again didn’t stop. I can only assume they didn’t want to have a million pictures of them in their new neighborhood – I don’t know.

All’s well that ends well as our fundraiser made our single highest total so far for any fundraiser, $4,000.

LiveScience looks at whether humans were meant to be monogamous in the first place. They draw the distinction between social monogamy, the Jackie/JFK type of marriage where the parenting is solid but the male animal naturally strays, and the kind of mate-for-life monogamy that is, well, fundamentally against the nature of most mammals.

“I don’t think we are a monogamous animal,” said Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. “A really monogamous animal is a goose ‚Äì which never mates again even if its mate is killed.”

Meanwhile, Slate.com looks at the downfall of the society due to the sudden and marked rise in single parenting. Actually, it isn’t really single parenting; it’s what they call “unwed motherhood,” of the Jamie Lynn Spears variety. Actually, Spears is not really the type of female who is destroying society one bastard child at a time, but rather the older women who should know better.

Yet again the stat of how worse off children are when they are born and raised in a single parent household. Surely there are more factors to be considered, not just the overly simplistic label of “unwed mothers.” Believe me, an invested single mother who strongly desires to be a parent can be the best mother a child can have. I think the article places too much importance on the two-parent household except for the money thing. I do think that money makes the difference. More money means more freedom by one parent to be at home with the kids. More money means no latch-key kids. More money means less panic, less of a reluctance to take stupid risks for money, like turning to crime. You can still raise a child well on a limited income and there is no guarantee the end result will be a tragedy – I mean, look at Oprah for god’s sake. In the end, every case is individual and nothing is set in stone. The real problem, as my sister keeps lecturing me about, is education. It is the lack of education or the problems in the public education system that really do let down the at-risk kids. In other words, it really does take a village, especially if there aren’t parents at home up to the task.

I can’t bear the recent story of the lost whales in Sacramento. A mom and her calf got stuck when they swam down the wrong river and now they are on display, confused, and swimming in circles. They were encouraged to swim back out by whale sounds, which worked for another whale back in the 1980s. But that was a male whale and, let’s face it, homeboy would do anything to get near a female whale, even if it wasn’t his own species. But these are females and they’re probably smarter. And anyway, she clearly has other things on her mind:

The scientists have been playing sounds of whales feedings rather than love songs. “Because she is with a tending calf we don’t think she would be interested in any breeding-related calls at this point,” said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist at the National Marine Fishery Service.

It’s all very sad. Unless they find a way out soon they’ll die. They can’t feed off of anything in the fresh water river. Good god, somebody please do something.

More of the sad whale’s tale

So, my 8 year-old, who loves horses, got to spend Spring break at horse camp. She loves nothing more than this camp, which I consider to be a bit over-priced for what it is, but I can imagine what it’s like for her: all horses, all the time. Paddock boots, riding pants, crops, gloves, the whole nine yards. She is a driven little thing, managing to be alternatively sweet and demanding at the same time. But unfortunately, she got a hard lesson in mean girl bitchiness. What is it about us girls that makes us act like hideous bitches? The girl was the daughter of two semi-famous TV stars and it was clear that this poor girl was the product of having been raised by nannies and assistants. Otherwise, why bother being so mean? Emma said, “everybody liked her – that’s what made it all worse.”

Myself, I had to practice deep breathing not to walk up to that pint sized creep and give her a piece of my mind. I told Emma she is on my list.