Cocktails anyone?

Posted on March 22, 2010 | 5 comments

This morning I have buyer’s remorse because yesterday I bought a very expensive hat. Not only did I buy a hat, but to encourage me to buy a hat, my husband, Andrew, said he’d buy one too, so I’m actually having buyer’s remorse for two.

We went to a high end craft fair called Paradise City. I’m calling it a craft fair but the producers of the event call it ‘a fair of fine and functional art.’ It certainly was fine, and some of it was even functional, but I’d be hard pressed to label as functional some of the art (like the glass pieces that were so delicate we were afraid to breathe near them). There were a variety of things that fell in the ‘beautiful-but-who-are-you-kidding-about-functional?’ category. Take my hat (please!).

I tried on a lot of hats in the Denishe booth. They all looked wonderful on the round styrofoam heads they were sitting on, but once on my head they lost their appeal. I was shaken by the experience because my mother always used to tell me that I had a ‘hat head’ which I interpreted to mean that I looked good in hats. Now I’m wondering if she meant I had a head shaped like a hat. Eventually the artist, Denise, determined that we were looking at the wrong colors and indeed when I put on the red hat I was instantly struck by how cute I looked, despite the fact that I couldn’t imagine actually wearing the hat in the real world.

Denise, assured me that a hat can be worn anywhere, anytime; that I could put on my hat whenever the mood struck me and go about my business. She talked me into it. Not in a pushy way, in a soothing, ‘you can do it’ kind of way. I decided she was right. The hat was funky and playful and so am I. Later I visited her website, Denishe. She has a section for ‘funky’ and my hat isn’t in it. My hat is under the menu choice for ‘cocktail.’ She never once mentioned the word cocktail. I rarely go anywhere just for cocktails. Does that mean the hat will never get worn after all?

To understand just how unlikely it is that you’ll see me wearing my new hat in the supermarket, check out the cocktail line at Denishe’s site. The way the site is constructed I can’t get you directly to the photo. When you find the white cocktail hat that sits very tall and branches out in lots of directions picture it in red. That’s mine. Or visit this link for Paradise City; today it’s also shown there.

Denise insisted that she wouldn’t sell me the hat unless I promised to wear it at least twice. I assured her that I would. Not only am I a woman of my word, but I need to amortize the cost of this hat before I go out of my mind. Cocktails anyone?

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Posted in March

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Self-censoring is a parent’s best weapon

Posted on March 15, 2010 | 2 comments

When my daughter graduated to the Young Adult section of the library I was proud and excited. I didn’t give a thought to what she was reading because I naively assumed that if it was labeled Young Adult than it was age appropriate. Granted, she hadn’t hit thirteen yet so I knew some of the books might be too adult but nonetheless I figured that if she wanted to read them, and could understand them, then it was all good. And if she couldn’t understand them it didn’t matter anyway.

Then one day she told me she’d read a great book and I should read it too, so I did. That was the end of my blissful ignorance. In that particular book, Deadline, (which, by the way, I thought was extremely well-written and recommend highly) there was, in no particular order; a boy with a terminal illness; a girl with a little brother who turned out to be her son, the result of being raped by her uncle; an alcoholic ex-priest who’d molested children, and more. That was when I learned that nothing is taboo in YA literature.

That experience made me question, briefly, my decision not to censor her reading material, however, my daughter is a voracious reader; it’s not unusual for her to take ten books out of the library at a time. It would be a full time job to stay on top of YA books to the extent that I could approve or reject her choices. Laziness aside (which believe me, is a major contributor to my resistance) censoring anything is a slippery slope. My daughter knows better than I do what she’s capable of understanding and if it’s too graphic, or too scary, she self-censors.

The movie rating system, designed to protect parents from making stupid mistakes with their children’s viewing choices, continuously disappoints me. The choices that the MPAA makes are not consistent with the choices that I would make for my child. I’d much rather she hear a few F-bombs than be exposed to people being blown up, yet the former nets an R rating and the latter a PG-13.

We were away for a weekend with another family and we rented I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry for the kids to watch, because my daughter insisted it was age-appropriate. The kids in question ranged from 9- to 13-years-old. The sophomoric humor was immediately off-putting for me but the kids were enjoying it. Each time something questionable was said or done the parents would sneak looks at each other to see who was going to be the first to crack and shut it off. Consensus came during a shower scene where several buff naked men, shot from the back, prepared to play ‘pick up the soap.’ Our collective parental gasp made it clear that no amount of arguing was going to get the movie turned back on. That movie was PG-13.

This weekend, we watched Up In the Air. It had one brief scene of a naked woman, shot from the back, and verbal innuendo about the sex post-facto. Oh yeah, there were F-bombs. That movie was rated R. Guess which one I’d prefer my daughter watch?

I continue to censor movies in my own, lazy fashion. I know from experience that the visual nature of movies makes a deeper impression on my daughter than reading, so if it’s too ‘adult’ or scary we don’t allow it. But then, if it was too ‘adult’ or scary she wouldn’t want to see it.

When it comes to books, however, self-censoring is a highly effective parenting tool, and the only one I need.

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Posted in March

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When did you grow up?

Posted on March 8, 2010 | 3 comments

The expression came of age generally refers to a culturally prescribed time; the law says you can be tried as an adult; your religion says you’re a voting member of your community; your parents make you pay rent. Most people can answer the questions “When were you born,” and “When did you graduate from high school,” with a high degree of precision. I’m curious about people who say “I grew up in the ‘50s,” (or ‘60s, or whichever decade they deem appropriate). What do they mean?

What constitutes growing up? It’s not a vertical measure. Is it a moment in time, like when you came of age; when you started high school, had your first kiss, stole your first car? Is it open to interpretation or is there a rule for it?

If I grew up in the ‘70s can someone else my age have grown up in the ‘80s? I liked the ‘60s but can I claim to have grown up in the ‘60s if I was only eleven when they ended?

It’s not unusual to hear someone volunteer, “I grew up in the x’s,” but when was the last time you heard someone ask, “When did you grow up?” I think we shy away from that question because it’s too vague. We know no one will respond, “I grew up at 8:15pm, November 13, 1974,” so rather than ask we triangulate an assumption from dates like birth and high school graduation; questions easily asked and answered.

Growing up is a process. It can cover multiple decades. I was born at the tail end of the ‘50s, highly influenced by the events of the ‘60s, went to high school and college in the ‘70s and didn’t start to figure it all out until we tipped into 2010. I’m still not convinced I’m a grown-up.

So I ask you, when did you grow up? And perhaps more pressing, when will I?

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Posted in March

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What’s freakin’ wrong with the F-bomb?

Posted on February 27, 2010 | 6 comments

When I was a teenager I swore a blue streak. There were one or two words that I considered taboo, well, one anyway, but other than that not much was off limits. I might have made an effort to curtail the swearing in front of my parents but I couldn’t have been 100% successful because I remember my mother telling me, with a long suffering sigh, that the problem with swearing wasn’t intrinsic to the words themselves. The problem was that when I swore I wasn’t using my brain to come up with a more effective way to express myself. I respected that argument and am ready to use it myself if and when it becomes necessary with my own daughter.

Despite the logic to my mother’s assertion, there were times at work when no other words would do, which brings me to the F-bomb. First let me say that I was very much a grown-up when I first heard the term ‘F-bomb’. I’m fairly certain that I was in my late thirties, perhaps even early forties, before I was introduced to it. That may be because in my generation we didn’t censor ourselves so there was no need for euphemisms. It seems, however, that the crew coming up behind us was a more genteel lot.

Some years ago I became aware that often when I used the F word, people would laugh in that slightly shocked way, indicating that while they would never use that language, coming from me it was entertaining. Then a strange thing happened. I started hearing the word ‘freaking’ all over the place, usually without its final ‘g.’ The same people who squirmed when I said the F word (or as they would say, “dropped the F-bomb”) not only didn’t seem to mind the word freakin’, but used it themselves!

I ask you now, what’s the freakin’ difference between the F-bomb and the word freakin’? If we all know what’s really meant, why is my use of the F word shocking (and apparently occasionally, as someone once reported me to HR, upsetting) but the word freaking itself is not a problem? Are the people who say freaking use their brains to come up with a more effective way to express themselves than I am?

I don’t know the answer to that. I’m going to ask my mother.

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Posted in February

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The smell of despair

Posted on February 22, 2010 | 1 comment

To collect unemployment benefits you have to agree to look for work every week, report any income you make in a week you collect, and attend a two-hour seminar on how to find a job. You might be able to fudge the first two but there’s no wiggling out of the third.

The address for the seminar closest to my home was a mall in Cambridge. Who knew there was anything other than retail there? But lo and behold, between Jack’s Smoke Shop and PetSmart, there was a doorway with a sign above it for the Career Source.

The door opened into a long corridor that reeked of stale smoke, the smell of despair. At the end was an elevator. I waited for what seemed like forever for the door to close for the short ride to the third floor. When I reached the office I struggled in vain to figure out where I was supposed to go until someone flapped her hand in the vague direction of the room. By the time I took my seat in the classroom I was more than a little irritable. Then we met our presenter.

This man, I’ll call him Peter, introduced himself as someone who could relate to our situation. He’d been let go from his job as a European History teacher at a parochial school several years before and that had led him to his current job preparing us to go out and find gainful employment. He was a soft-spoken, articulate man. He led us through a handful of predictably content-free PowerPoint slides with such sincerity and care that I found myself paying attention in spite of my resentment. And all the other attendees were too.

The class was filled with all manner of folk, our own little microcosm of society. There were women with manicured nails and guys with dirt under their nails. There were people with dyed hair, gray hair and no hair. There was a man with an earring in each ear and a woman with multiple earrings in one ear. There were watch caps and baseball caps and wool hats. There were band-aids and tattoos and canes. There were native English speakers, people who spoke English as a second language, and people whose Boston accents were so thick they sounded to me as if they came from a foreign country.

Sitting with these people was a humbling experience. For many of them what Peter was saying was going to make a huge difference in their lives. He was arming them with valuable information about how to approach a job search. He was explaining the free services and resources that were available to them through the Career Source. He was giving them hope.

I went in feeling put upon and annoyed that I had to sacrifice my time to be there. But I left grateful that such a place exists, knowing that for lots of people that compulsory seminar is as valuable as the unemployment payments themselves.

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Posted in February

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Buy in haste, decorate slowly

Posted on February 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Why is it that purchasing a house, the single most expensive thing you’ll ever buy in your life, has to be done in a rush, but deciding what rug to put in the family room can take years? It’s true that making the decision to invest in buying a house can take a very long time while you agonize over your ability to take on a mortgage, but once the house hunting is actually underway, buyers are often faced with the need to make an offer on the spot or lose the house of their dreams.

The house hunt is an intimate process, particularly if you’re doing it with a partner. You’re searching for a house that will be a home. You want a place to raise kids, celebrate life’s highs and ride out the lows. You want a safe haven from unsatisfactory jobs and friends who invariably let you down. When you find a house that resonates on your particular frequency, you can feel it. And as you envision your furniture in that house, you hear another couple say to the realtor, “It’s perfect. We’re going to make an offer.”

All of a sudden your chest feels tight, there’s a knot in your stomach and you start having trouble breathing. You now know with certainty that this is meant to be your house. It is the only house your furniture will look good in. There is no other house in town that can compare.

You rush up to the realtor as soon as the other couple steps away and say, “We want this house. Whatever that other couple is offering, we’ll go higher.” Within 24 hours it’s over and you’ve won. The house of your dreams is yours. You’ll be in debt for the next 30 years.

And thirteen years later, you still can’t agree on a rug for the family room.

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Posted in February

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5-pound bag of peanuts

Posted on February 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

I don’t do a lot of entertaining. Having friends over usually means serving dinner and I’m not much of a cook. So when I do invite people over I try to set reasonably low expectations. I may ask something like, “Do you have a Cheez-Whiz allergy?”

Sometimes the gods will be smiling on me when I invite my in-laws over for dinner. My mother-in-law will say, “That’s wonderful. I’ll bring dinner.” There’s nothing like having a dinner guest who brings the meal. She is a fantastic cook. She can whip up a meal for 30 people with a half hour’s notice and it will taste like she’s been slaving away for hours.

I also don’t watch sports (if you don’t count the opening ceremonies for the Olympics; I like the parade of nations). So imagine my husband’s surprise when I told him we were hosting a Super Bowl party this year. “To watch the game?” he asked, with a horrified look on his face. “And the commercials,” I reassured him.

There were going to be seventeen of us in all. I wanted to have enough appetizers so that everyone would be able to find something they liked. I believe what you lack in quality can be made up in quantity. I envisioned people spread out all over the house, some watching the game in the family room, some lounging in the living room, others gathered around the dining room table sharing stories while the appetizers magically floated from room to room.

The guests, however, stayed glued to the TV in the family room, where the chips and salsa, cheese and crackers, and Spanakopita from Costco were on the coffee table. The appetizers that were strategically placed in other rooms were largely untouched; a fig and olive tapenade with goat cheese, a veggie platter with low-fat dip, a bowl of kim-chee and a plate of California rolls.

We did empty a few bottles of wine and lots of bottles of beer, and everyone seemed to have a good time. So I guess it doesn’t matter that the 5-pound bag of peanuts is still a 5-pound bag of peanuts. There’s always next year.

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Posted in February

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A blanket apology

Posted on February 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

As evidenced by previous posts, this blog has no particular theme. It will reflect whatever is top of mind when I sit down to write. These days I spend a lot of time thinking about my work-in-progress, a Young Adult novel for, well, young adults. (I look forward to telling you more about that in subsequent posts.) I also spend a lot of time thinking about my daughter and that’s where I feel the need to issue a blanket apology, in advance.

I, like you, have limited patience for people who talk about their children ad nauseam. It’s okay, you can admit it, we’re alone. When your friends start talking about their children you fix your smile and prepare to be a good sport. If the story is about a younger child and is told in a voice meant to approximate that of the child, you might even leave your smile in place like the Cheshire cat and go off to your happy place in your head.

These are the defense mechanisms we employ when parents are speaking admiringly of their offspring. The reactions are different if the parents are angry at their children. Those stories are entertaining. They cause our antenna to go up as we lean forward in our chairs. Our heartbeat accelerates as we anticipate a story that will validate that we are not alone.

Parenting can be a very lonely job, not unlike writing a novel. Even if there is another adult in the family there are hours in the day when you are on your own, or worse, just feel like you are. Parenting happens in real time, you don’t get to go back and edit it once you’re done. So what do we do instead? We talk about it. Sometimes the stories are uplifting and sometimes they’re a downer, but there’s a constant stream of them because parenting is 24/7.

So, I hereby issue a blanket apology for all the posts about my daughter that will inevitably worm their way into this blog. You are not obligated to read them, of course, but she is an endlessly entertaining subject. She’s very smart and as an only child she relates well to adults. Her teachers are always struck by how nuanced her sense of humor is and how well she communicates. Why just the other day, oops, sorry. This post was the apology, I’ll save the stories for later.

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It takes more than a fence

Posted on January 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

Our neighborhood was built on top of what was once a swamp. As a result, most of the houses get water in their basements. Our house was new 13 years ago but it was built during a very wet rainy season and it took a Herculean effort to get the basement level dry enough to pour the concrete. Sadly, even Hercules couldn’t completely solve the problem. A couple of years after we moved in we had to hire a contractor to bring in a backhoe to dig a ditch across our yard so he could lay pipe to carry the water from the sump pump out to the sewer. (Don’t tell anyone that, I’m not entirely sure it was legal.) Since then our basement’s been pretty dry. Not so the house diagonally across the street.

That house is older and gets a lot of water in the basement. The owner pumps it out through a hose that he runs from his basement window across his back lawn out to the street. Unfortunately, that corner of his property abuts another neighbor’s driveway and therein lies the problem. During the winter that water hits the edge of the driveway where it meets the road and turns into ice.

The two elderly women who own the house that belongs to that driveway (the youngest of whom is 72) live in a constant state of anxiety, worrying that one day one of them will slide on that sump-pump-delivered patch of ice and break something. They’ve spoken to the neighbor about moving his hose to a storm drain at the front corner of his property but to no avail. Apparently that would be unsightly and bad for the grass. If you’re keeping score, the risk on his side is a one-inch-wide swath of dead grass versus a broken hip for the other team.

There is a town bylaw (Title III Section 30) that says, in part, “No person shall cause to be discharged any water on public ways of the Town if in so doing ice is formed in such a manner as to make unsafe the passage of vehicles or persons on such public way.” So why, you may ask, did the Public Works office dismiss this particular situation as not applicable? To quote Churchill, it’s a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

One thing is very clear; it takes more than a fence to make a good neighbor. And putting up a fence won’t help this particular neighbor if his irresponsible behavior causes someone to get hurt.

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Posted in January

What’s in a name?

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 3 comments

I want to talk about the name of this blog. It is not about travel (unless you consider wandering around in my mind with me a form of travel). The title, Everywhere I Go, is short for “Everywhere I go I see people I know and they’re all ignoring me.” I’m an inveterate, unapologetic people-watcher. And because I’m looking at faces instead of staring at the ground, or a PDA, I do often see people I recognize. Admittedly they are not always people I know, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen them before. It’s not unusual for me to see someone, say, on the street in downtown Boston, and then later that day see them again, like in the parking garage at Alewife station. I don’t know them but I sure do recognize them.

I go to see the Red Sox occasionally. I’m sure that among the 35,000 some odd people at Fenway with me are people I know. Sitting between home and first, about halfway back, I get the urge to stand up and shout, “Does anyone here know me?” I haven’t done it yet but someday I might sneak a bullhorn in and try it. Last time I went to a game I saw a woman from my neighborhood right as I walked through the turnstile into Fenway Park. I felt kind of smug in my seat that particular day.

I like to think that if I actually know the person I see that they would, indeed, say hello or otherwise acknowledge my presence, but that’s not something you can count on. I know plenty of people who pivot and go in the opposite direction as soon as they see someone they recognize from their past. I, on the other hand, tend to follow the person around until I can catch their eye and confirm that I know them.

One day my husband, Andrew, and I were driving in Cambridge and I saw an old friend in the passenger seat of another car. We were approaching a stop light and I said to Andrew, “Pull up! Pull up! It’s Larry, I want to say hello.” As our car pulled up beside the other I said, “Put down your window, hurry, before the light changes! Larry,” I called over Andrew. The person in the other car turned his head and I hissed at Andrew, “Put up your window, put up your window!” It wasn’t Larry. And now when I say to Andrew, “Hey, I think I know that person,” he ignores me.

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Posted in January