Ask a Silly Question...

Me to Younger Girleen:  We don't bite people!  Why did you bite (Elder Girleen) on the back?

Younger Girleen to Me:  Because I couldn't bite her on the front.

Revisiting Ownership

My life these days revolves around a few simple but important mathematical equations, the simplest and most important being this:  brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = blog entry.  Clearly one or the other has been missing the past few weeks but we're back on track this morning.  

Actually, the more honest reduction of the above equation might be this:  brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = impractical flights of fancy, since on a 30 minute walk I was able to not only consider blog life but also imagine an alternate universe where I am the owner of a wonderfully quirky and hip coffee shop (all this being caused by walking past a vacant storefront) that not only serves the city's best coffee but also displays all my peeps' best art and crafts (to be knowledgeable enough to run it I will apprentice at my fav coffee shop, where I go to get my Large Special Friend; I'll hire artists as baristas through Craig's List) AND not only that, but in the same 15 minutes I can consider just how wonderfully purchase of the sixties-era aluminum tin-can Scotty Sportsman trailer listing on three tires  that I just walked past will change our lives.  

Not even heroin can get you to such places.

Now that you've had a glimpse of my overly-caffinated morning, I'll get back to matters at hand:

A couple of entries back, I made stab at parsing out a particular phrase, that phrase being one sent to me by email recently:  are you willing to own this effort?

At the time, I was interested in examining the way making such a request serves to distance the requestor from the requestee.  A little more thought led me to this:  asking if someone will "own" an "effort" rather than asking "could you help" ALSO makes it awfully easy for the requestee (ie, in this case, me) to say "hhh?  who, me?" and shirk any responsibility as well.  

It's sorta like Spanish grammer, in that rather than saying "I dropped the vase," you say "The vase dropped itself".  Efforts may be owned or not owned, but none of it has a damn thing to do with me.  

Ownership.   There's a video circulating these days  that makes it awfully clear just how unsustainable our consumer culture has become. The video's primarily discussing actual material stuff, but it includes a quote made soon after WWII by retailing analyst Victor Lebow that is now seared on my brain:  

Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.  We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate. 

Any one who has a kid is pretty aware of the ways in which the language of the marketplace has come to pervade our children's educational experience.  

Or maybe we aren't consciously aware of that.  But maybe they're all links in an insidious chain:  the fundraising auctions, the requests to "own" efforts, communications committees, corporate sponsorship, PR... all of these address us as consumers:  any time and money we might give an institution is cloaked in a consumeristic experience; rather than helping out, by owning an effort, volunteering becomes something I can choose (or not) to possess.  

The saddest thing is that this is a chain we've thoughtlessly wrapped around ourselves. And our children, those little beings we would lay down our lives to protect.    

Snippets

Yes, I've been a lame blogista the past few weeks.  Sometimes life gets in the way. Held a tamalada (tamale-making party) a few weeks ago (causing me to be more intimate with pig than I've ever been before:  I'm here to tell you you really don't want to eat tamales more than one or twice a year); then Elder Girleen and I squandered The Husband's last frequent flyer points with a whirlwind wonderful weekend visiting friends in The Big Apple.    

So, per the New Yorker, we've already established that diaries are full of dross; blogs, blather. What do you call it when you simply recount your life?  David Sedaris and Jerry Seinfeld discovered this long ago, but if nothing else, blogging has made me realize that  riffs about nothing may be inherently more comedic than ... well, life.  

This may be why the Wry School of Parenthood Writing is so popular and pervasive in the blog world.  The absurd is funny.  The day-to-day is just ... the day-to-day. 

In the homestretch to Christmas, though, I've got nothing going on but the day-to-day.  

And really, now that I think about it, what a jaded, crazy world we live in that I would breathe the words day-to-day and trip to New York in the same few paragraphs.  And since this will float around attached to my name for eternity, let me set the record straight:  we don't actually jaunt off to Manhattan on a regular basis.  

Back in the dark ages B.C. (Before Children), my mother, fretting about my advancing age and seeming diffidence about having offspring, would say Oh, but you get to experience childhood all over again!  (This wasn't her only persuasive argument by any means; she was also fond of saying but I want to be a grandmother!).  At the time, because I had no experience of childhood but a child's I was unmoved.  The thing I remembered most about my childhood was my painful overwhelming shyness.  No way did I want to experience that again.

The lovely, scrumptious center of the candy-coated experience that was our trip to NY was a matinee showing of Mary Poppins, not just Elder Girleen's first experience of Broadway but mine as well.  This tells you just how much the world has changed:  she is five, I'm 10 days away from 43.   

At the end of the performance, when the actress that plays Mary Poppins soars up and over the audience on wires, her umbrella unfurled, I glanced over at Elder Girleen.  She was clapping wildly and her eyes shone like stars.  In fact, veering into sentimental territory, you could practically see her soul shining out through her eyes.  She was completely and utterly happy.

Oh, I realized, so that was what my mother meant.  It's not just that you get to re-experience childhood when you have children, it's that occasionally you get to re-experience childhood within the context of your battle-hardened adult life.  

And that might be the most magical thing I've ever experienced.  

Caught in the Capitalist Matrix Once Again

A while back I vowed to self-censure as far as writing about certain parental groups with which I am emmeshed goes, and where I couldn't self-censure, having already shot off my mouth, I would redact, but yesterday I received an email which included this request:   "Also, would you be willing to own this effort?" and if I can't dissect that language here, where can I dissect it?  

My kinder side won't allow me to divulge the particulars of what exactly I'm being asked to own, and what owning of it might mean, but bear in mind that this discussion takes place on the periphery of the "educational experience" of children who are mostly too young to know whether they are being taught the ABCs in English or in Swahili.  Also that agreeing to own anything at this place will mostly just put me in a world of pain and add at least 250 emails to my inbox... all before Christmas.    

Asking me if I would own this effort is clearly a ... veiled?  coded?  benign? more polite? ... way of saying the much clearer "would you do this for me?"  

So... why not just ask me to do it?

Because asking me to do it outright would require agency on the requestor's part:  "would you do this for me?"   And the act of doing something for someone requires give-and-take, a favor asked and bestowed, a personal connection.  Talking about ownership removes the requestor from the process entirely, and absolves them of any responsibility regarding it.  

When I received this email, I had a brief Walter Mitty type moment when, more than anything, I wanted to respond:  As someone who once contemplated joining the socialist party, I'm not all that big on ownership....

Or, maybe a better response would be:  I would love to disown this effort.  

Yeah, Things Do Look Different...

This might be considered by some a throw-away post (I mean, you can't get any more navel-gazey than discussing the look of your OWN blog, can you), but yes, I've changed the layout.  

It wouldn't be worth mentioning except for the fact that the layouts have clearly gotten more and more blog-like as the months go by.  When I started, I wanted something that looked as much like print as possible (ie, a blog as if published by the New Yorker, maybe).  Well, now we've got four months under our belts and I've realized that the Blog Is Its Own Beast.  It shouldn't look like print because it has nothing to do with print.  It's a completely different animal.  

Besides, fiddling with templates is a great way to sit at the computer and pretend you're doing something productive.  

I know I've fallen down on my job here lately, but you know, I've got other stuff going on right now.  I've got to go out and buy stocking stuffers for my own stocking and then pretend to my children that Santa Claus put them there.  

So, is it Blather or is it Dross? (Another Rhetorical Question)

From a recent critical piece in The New Yorker:  

In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential — the "woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" pieces — are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre.  If it doesn't contain a lot of dross, it's not a diary.  It's something else — a journal, or a writer's notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).  

Interesting hair-splitting; but true, I suppose.  Funny how much more serious dross sounds than blather, though.

And Now Let Us All Contemplate...

Way back in the 70s, when eating whole wheat bread marked you for the commie pinko hippie you were, my parents embraced composting with the sort of energy you'd expect if composting created... gold... rather than, well... dirt. We were newly moved to the South, I was having a good old time starting first grade the year the elementary schools in our town were being desegregated (nothing like learning a song called "Glory, glory to old Georgia, the South will rise again!" and being laughed at because you say "you guys" to encode skepticism about the South into your bones) and my mother concluded that the way to turn approximately an acre of hard red clay into a flourishing garden was to amend it with compost. (38 years later, she turns out to have been right: patience is a virtue).

My parents had owned a house previous to buying the one that over the years became the family manse, but I'd been a baby, my brother hadn't hit the scene yet, and that house had had starter house scrawled all over it. This house, which they bought when my dad started his professorial career, was the real deal: solid, brick, front yard, back yard, lots of bedrooms, basement and attic, and even doors that sometimes swung open of their own accord.

Taking produce scraps out to the compost was a chore meted out throughout my childhood:  I remember doing it even as a slouching teenager, when I showed my distaste for the whole process by simply flinging scraps onto the top of the pile, rather than covering them with leaves (and then sneaking a cigarette in the backyard).

Given all this, it stands to reason that as soon as I hit thirty I became genetically incapable of throwing away apple cores — as soon as the Husband and I settled down in one place long enough we set up a Family Bin.  

And even the most skeptical have to agree that there's something seductive  about composting:  I may not be able to spin straw into gold, damn it, but I can turn garbage into dirt like nobody's business!

Elder Girl's school also composts, and recently she RECOILED IN HORROR when she saw me put orange peels into the compost bin.  

Citrus hurts the worms' stomachs!  she cried.  

Every morning I prepare grapefruit for the girleens and because of my upbringing, very fiber in my being shrinks from throwing those peels into the garbage can.  My hand hovers over the bowl for scraps for the compost.  But...those poor worms, their stomachs eaten away by acidic citrus!  I'm damned if I do or damned if I don't, which, now that I think about it, is an example of an either/or that seems to be becoming a uniquely 21st century dilemma.  

The trend in women's magazines this year seems to be the sort of article that bemoans the fact that the holidays are weighed down nearly to drowning point by consumeristic crap.  These articles cozy right up to advertisements for all manner of beautiful, luxurious and useless things.  Oh, yeah, I vow, reading these articles, this year we're going to simplify!  

Then, of course, I slam the magazines shut and head for Target.  

Because The Husband and I are the sorts of parents who want to do right by our children, at least one Sunday a month we drag our formerly agnostic selves to church, and this past one, the Simplification Message was delivered from the pulpit.  Yes, yes, I thought.  We'll metaphorically unplug the Christmas tree this year!

Then the sermon ended and we were reminded that the Cathedral Bookstore had books for sale in the Parish Hall and 10,000 Villages was displaying its wares in the library.  

This what it means to be liberal at the dawn of the 21st century:   continuously bombarded by philosophically irreconcilable messages. About EVERYTHING.  All the time.

Don't know about you, but I'm off to do some conflicted Christmas shopping.

The Turn of The Screw

Those who know me best know I have this thing about ghost stories. Not only do I love them pure and simply, so much so that in spite of all the navel-gazing I can engage in, I've never even bothered to examine why I might be so drawn to them, I love the sort of conversational down-time that leads people to reveal ghost stories to one another.

Luckily (or not, depending upon how you view things), I've had plenty of employment chock-full of the sort of heel-cooling that lends itself to the telling of ghost stories. Nothing like cleaning national park cabins in the rain to get two maids making beds in the mood for swapping ghost stories! Smoke breaks from waiting tables: also a good source. Ditto long aimless car trips taken in your twenties.

I've never heard a bad ghost story, because even the most rudimentary snippets of one carry so much cultural weight that you can pretty much fill in the blanks yourself. Even the worst storyteller can raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a few choice ghostly sentences.

Stay-at-home-momdom, it turns out, sometimes involves that same sort of downtime, particularly when one spends a lot of time pushing a stroller in the company of other moms. Taking walks for over five years, I've heard fascinating things (all to be kept private for the sake of the tellers) over the years.

Yesterday, while walking, I learned that someone who knows someone that I know is being troubled by ghosts. The family is newly moved into an aging grande dame of a Victorian house that when they purchased it was sadly in need of a face lift, which, threats of divorce and bankruptcy aside, they were thrilled to deliver.***

The house is now freshly-painted, wired for electronics, pristine, lovely.

But late at night, after the rest of the family has gone to sleep, the mother of the house has begun hearing what sounds like the rattle and turn of an ornate flourish of brass doorknob, the one attached to a particular closet door in the upstairs hallway. She tends to hear the noise most often when she's brushing her teeth. She rushes out of the bathroom and peers down the hallway: nothing but late night and sleeping house. Goes back into the bathroom to rinse and spit, and there it is again, that small insistent rattle.

The closet, the friend who knows the friend tells me, is the only interior door in the house that had a sturdy latch on it, placed at adult height.

What do you want to bet, the friend tells me as we walk along, that that was the Victorian time-out closet?

I'm too lazy to look it up, but wasn't it the presence of a child in a ghost story that Henry James considered the turn of the screw? Ghosts are all well and good but throw a kid into the mix: well, now you're cooking with gas!

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Younger Girleen fumbles toward figuring out potty-training (this will come as no surprise to astute readers). I mean a lot of time. In fact, I spend more time sitting on the bathroom floor conversing with Younger Girleen while she sits on the potty than I probably do on anything else right now (this may be why I'm so concerned about effective use of my free time).

This afternoon we were having one of our periodic bathroom klatsches when Younger Girleen looked up.

Daddy's here! she said brightly.

Daddy's at work, I explained.

Then who's that man?

What man?

That man I hear talking?

Where is he talking?

In the back yard.

What is he saying? I pursued, curious.

This took a little thought on Younger Girleen's part. He's saying Mama, she said. He's saying Mama, mama, I want my mama.

God help me, I actually stood up and flicked back the curtain and peered out into the back yard.

Everybody wants their Mama, even ghosts in the backyard.

***Interestingly, the house is in the neighborhood that was also the location of the very best ghost story I ever heard, told around a campfire at Big Bend. I've concluded this particular neighborhood is Atlanta's ghostliest, but local readers should feel free to put in their votes...