I Missed The Memo

I missed the memo on old age, optimism, and omphaloskepis.

All week, I had been psyched to see The Avengers with my husband, but he got shafted into working all day.  Sucks for him,  but I wasn’t going to let pre-arranged babysitting services go to waste, so I figured I’d still go to the movies on my own.  But instead of swashbuckling superheroes, I spent my afternoon with a fairly attractive bunch of geriatrics (that description applies to both the actors on the screen and most of the audience.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel features every elderly British actor you can think of and they’re all amazing.  The characters are in turn sad, sweet, sage, and even sexy.  These are people who are coming in to the homestretch, so to speak, and have found themselves in a dilapidated hotel in India trying to make sense of their long lives and find happiness in the time left to them.

I’m getting to the point in my life where the idea of old age is starting to feel very, very real.  When you’re a kid, you can’t even fathom what it would be like to get old, but now I can sort of glimpse it.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offers an interesting vision of what the  “golden years” could be like, and one of the recurring themes is one of irrepressible optimism:

This gem is offered up by the character of Sonny (as played by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame) who is the hotel’s proprietor.  Not much is going right for Sonny, except true love, but he is a great spin doctor for himself.  He has an adorable way of rehabilitating even catastrophic news in order to find the bright side.   Sonny is optimistic almost to the point of delusion, but y’all know how I feel about hope, so this is the kind of crazy cheerfulness I can really buy into.

But the little aphorism that’s quoted throughout the film goes beyond optimism, I think.  It’s the idea that maybe, if things are a real mess, the universe gives you enough time to sort them out.  Or maybe, if it is the end, and things are still a mess, you find the grace to accept the mess and be okay with it.  Either way it works, it sounds pretty good to me.

And that brings me to omphaloskepis, which is the practice of staring into one’s navel in order to achieve a meditative state.  As this blog probably illustrates, I navel gaze quite a bit, not so much to meditate, but just to try to figure stuff out, and maybe just amuse myself.   It’s a skill that will come in handy when I’m an octogenarian living in India.  Memo received.

I missed the memo about sugar, self-esteem and sudden death.

I’m staring down the barrel of 40 and so I’ve recently re-doubled my efforts to lose weight and get healthy.  As my friends and I have talked about the various things we’ve tried in an effort  to clean up our diets, a recurring theme has been how sugar affects our weight, mood, and just about everything else.

Sugar is getting some attention among doctors and nutritionists these days, because there’s some re-thinking of the notion that sugar is just “empty calories”.  Research is yielding some pretty scary stuff about how sugar is fundamentally different in the way it affects the body.  Theories about nutrition seem to come and go like fashion, but this is some compelling stuff…

I’ve been having a pretty ardent love affair with sugar most of my life, but I’d say things got pretty serious once I got to college.  I went to college in Atlanta, which is a town that runs on Coca-Cola. In the South, Coke is so beloved and ubiquitous that when you are offered a sweetened carbonated beverage, there might be an exchange like this:

“What kind of Coke you want?”
“Sprite”

Sodas had been a treat at home, but when I got out on my own,  it wasn’t  long before I was drinking the brown and bubbly with all three meals.  Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty bad soda habit. I’ve given it up for Lent here and there, but I’ve always fallen off the wagon.  But I’ve begun weaning myself, and I’m really trying ditch the sodas for good.  Graphics like this have started to scare me straight…

Damn...that's a lot of sugar.

But when it comes to giving up the extra sugar, the deck is kind of stacked.  Not only are we hard-wired to enjoy and crave sweet things, our efforts to resist the treats are constantly undermined by the indignities and insults we suffer all the time.  Check out this post in one of my favorite blogs which summarizes some interesting research about the nature of will power.  It seems that will power can be, at least in some situations, a function of how we’re feeling about ourselves in a given moment.  The research suggests that when we experience some rejection or criticism, we’re less able to resist treats.  I am a freakin’ poster child for this phenomenon and this why I no longer keep candy on my desk at the office.   A tense phone call or a snarky e-mail would send me diving into the Hershey’s kisses.

And if I weren’t already totally freaked out about sugar in general and soda in particular, just today there was this story about a lady in New Zealand who just dropped dead after habitually consuming fairly ridiculous amounts of Coke.  Holy crap.  I had long ago surrendered any delusion that Coke was in any way good for me, but it can kill you? (To be fair, broccoli could probably kill you, too, if you ate too much of it.)  The dearly departed Kiwi mentioned above is survived by a bunch of kids, who have a weird story to tell later in life…it might go something like this:

Oh, my mom died when I was *insert tender age here*.

Sorry to hear that…what did she die of?

She drank herself to death.

Oh, that’s terrible.  Was it vodka?  Scotch?

No, it was Coke. 

SERIOUSLY?

Seriously.  Memo received.

I missed the memo about empty spaces and irresistible impulses.

*rimshot*

Recently, my darling boy discovered that there is something inexplicably satisfying about filling the void of one’s nostrils with small, preferably edible, objects.  For your consideration…

This one's coming out on Prom Night.

Yep.  A mini M&M…which, by my calculations, is either now imbedded in his brain somewhere, or more likely, it melted and resulted in some chocolatey post-nasal drip.    I’m really not sure.  M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand, but no one said anything about what happens when you put them up your nose…

While children have been putting stuff up their noses since time immemorial, I still couldn’t help but freak out just a little when my kid did it.   And like any modern hysteric, I rushed to the interwebs for counsel.  One message board helpfully suggested that a wayward object will just fall right out once the kid starts crying.  Well, my son was fairly unperturbed by his predicament,  so I triggered the waterworks by telling him that his father was going to perform a little brain surgery to get the M&M out.  I might have mentioned that a pizza cutter would be involved.  I know…I suck.  To his credit, as my son cried, he said repeatedly, “I know you’re joking!”  I traumatized him, but I did not fool him.  And yet the M&M did not come out.  I suppose mommy will just have to double down on her contribution to the therapy fund this week…

I figured my cruel trickery, along with the bulb syringe business depicted above, would at least scare my boy straight. Alas, no. A mere 48 hours later, he put a Nestle crunch bite up his nose.  No photo this time, as we were at the movies as my brilliant child turned to me and said sheepishly, “There’s something in my nose.”  I’ve hinted before that there is something about becoming a parent that increases one’s capacity for the disgusting, and so without hesitation, I stuck my index finger up his nose and pulled out what went in.  I have to admit, especially after losing the M&M to the far reaches of my son’s cranium, I was a bit self-satisfied as I extracted this most recent nasal interloper all in one piece and with my bare freakin’ hands.  Those are mom skills to pay the bills.

I’m hoping that the novelty of all this has worn off for my son, as it certainly got old pretty quick for me.  Like an idiot, I have asked him, “Sweetheart, why did you do that?”  And of course he has no idea.  He put candy up his nose for the same reason some people climb Mt. Everest…because it was there.  An empty space, like a nostril, just seems to need to be filled with something, and the urge to fill empty spaces can be pretty compelling.

A lot of adult life seems to be about satisfying the compulsion to dig and then re-fill holes of one type or another, and the compulsion doesn’t always make a lot of sense.  So I thank my dear son for the reminder that not every empty space needs to be filled…leaving your nose empty literally gives you room to breath, and leaving some empty space in your calendar, your closet, etc. can also give you the figurative kind of breathing room.

Somebody is probably not be getting any little candies in his Easter basket this year, but nonetheless, memo received.

I missed the memo about Sanford, Skittles, and standing your ground. 

This week a lot of water cooler conversation in my office has been about the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin.  In case you’re just emerging from a coma or something, you can get the basic details of the case here.  Like most people I know, I’m outraged and heartbroken.  I think of my own son, and what a deep human betrayal it would be if some trigger happy, paranoid miscreant decided to just arbitrarily take him away from me because they had no common sense or impulse control.

The case hits a bit close to home for me because Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin lived and died, is the closest thing that this Navy brat has to an ancestral home.  My parents grew up there, my sister was born there.  I lived there for a time when I was a tiny kid and my Granny still lives there.  This small city north of Orlando was charming in my childhood memories, but these days when I visit, I am saddened to see how it has declined.  Pawn shops and bail bondsmen seem to dot a lot of corners.  There’s still plenty of good in the place, but everything is just a bit shabbier than it was a couple of decades ago.  And since I don’t live there anymore, I don’t have a fully informed opinion on this, but my sense is that the community is fairly segregated and race relations pretty much suck.  It is not terribly surprising to me that given where the events occurred that things have unfolded as they have.

As I’ve been thinking about Trayvon Martin, I’ve been trying to be honest with myself about how I react to people, and when I might perceive other people as a threat.  I walk around downtown Los Angeles before the sun comes up most mornings, so I am on my guard against anyone who might do me harm.  The kind of profiling I do is to look for signs of crazy, and crazy comes in every color.  I give twitchy people and people who are talking to themselves a wide berth.  A young black man in a hoodie, carrying an iced tea and bag of Skittles would not seem particularly crazy to me, and the only thought I might have if I encountered such a person would be, “Oh, Skittles, yum.” 

Some might say that Trayvon Martin’s killer was somehow justified in presuming that Trayvon was up to no good.  After all, there had been burglaries in the neighborhood, and some had been committed by people who, superficially, looked a bit like Trayvon.  But even if you concede that there was any reasonable suspicion to  keep an eye on Trayvon, I just don’t know how you make the quantum leap between calling the cops to report a “suspicious person” and what ultimately happened in this case. 

One of the reasons cited for the cops not arresting Trayvon’s killer is that Florida has an enacted a “Stand Your Ground” law which allows people to use deadly force in a public place  when they feel there is an imminent threat of bodily harm.   The “Stand Your Ground” law is a departure from the idea that you could have a duty to retreat when you’re in a confrontation.  I’m a run and live to fight another day kind of girl, but I get that others might feel differently.  But there’s a big difference between standing your ground and picking a fight.  And when you’ve got a gun and your adversary has a bag of Skittles, that’s not a particularly fair fight. 

With the facts we know, as a human being and as a lawyer, it just boggles my mind that Trayvon’s killer has not been arrested.  If he can persuade a jury that he needed to shoot Trayvon to save himself, then so be it.  At least he’ll have the chance to explain himself, which is a lot more than Trayvon got.  Memo received. 

I missed the memo about contraception, conversion, and consternation.

As of this writing, I hope that the whole brouhaha regarding insurance coverage for prescription contraception is dying down.  Rush Limbaugh got his name in the news a lot for doing what he does best (and that’s being a professional asshole), but hopefully Sandra Fluke will soon return to a normal life not too traumatized or discouraged by all the slut shaming.

When insurance coverage for prescription contraception was recently raised as a political issue, I think my first reaction was, “Seriously?”

Right?

It just seems like there are so many other issues which affect so many more people that I couldn’t imagine that Santorum or anybody else had picked that hill to die on.  I don’t fancy myself a constitutional scholar, but I did spend a gazillion dollars on a law degree and dabbled in employment law, so I thought I might have been taking crazy pills because this seemed like such a non-issue to me.  I mean the Church, (and that’s with a big “C”) is a church, but the Church also operates all sorts of businesses, like schools and hospitals.  And these businesses employ people.  When you’re an employer, you have to abide by the laws that govern all employers.  Employers don’t get to pick and choose the laws they want to obey based on religious affiliation.  (Check out this video where someone who actually is a constitutional scholar explains it a lot better than I can.)

What makes this whole thing especially weird for me is that I’m a convert to Catholicism.  On a very momentous Easter-Eve back in 1999, I was baptized, had first communion, and was confirmed all in the same night.  It was beautiful and trippy.  Having long abandoned the half-hearted Southern Baptist tradition of my youth, I chose to convert to Catholicism after marrying a cradle Catholic.  This is going to sound a little (or a lot) flip, but conversion was not that big of a deal for me.  I had already been raised in a christian tradition, so the core beliefs were the same, it was just a matter of learning all the secret handshakes and whatnot.   The big night of Easter Vigil seemed very much like getting initiated into a club, and I mean that in a nice way.

Becoming a Catholic has been a meaningful and valuable experience for me, but there are parts of the Church’s teachings that I will probably never fully understand or accept.  If that makes me a “cafeteria Catholic” or even a  bad Catholic, then I suppose I have to be OK with that.

Like a lot of Catholics (but not all like Lawrence O’Donnell erroneously suggests in the above-linked video), I don’t think that artificial birth control is wrong. What simultaneously cracks me up and makes my head hurt, is that the Church accepts Natural Family Planning (NFP) as a way of preventing pregnancy, and to be effective, NFP requires women to take daily temperature readings, monitor cervical mucus, etc.  By keeping track of fertility signs, couples can avoid conceiving by limiting their business meetings to days when it’s unlikely they’ll be fruitful.

NFP requires some fairly sophisticated scientific knowledge, but God forbid (really, God forbid?) that we use our scientific understanding to develop a tiny pill that achieves the same result as NFP, but without the charts and without the unfortunate references to egg whites.  I suppose you can outsmart God with a basal thermometer, but outsmarting God with a tiny dose of synthetic hormones, or even a bit of latex,  is just going too far. I’m an even worse theologian than I am constitutional scholar, but I don’t see how this makes any sense.

To my fellow Catholics who do avoid artificial birth control, I say this:  So do I.  But that’s ’cause I’m pushing 40 and “Russian Roulette” is pretty effective for women my age.  The window where this will be an issue of real personal significance for me will be closed in a few years.  At least when I enter the phase of my life where I’m having purely non-procreative sex, I can be assured that the Viagra will be covered by insurance.   Memo received.

I missed the memo about attention deficit and Downton Abbey.

As I begin writing this post, it’s about T-minus one hour until the finale of season 2 of Downton Abbey and I am all a-flutter as I anticipate the resolutions and cliffhangers that might be a part of this delicious bit of television.

I do love TV, but I’ve found in recent years that I’ve become a pathetic multi-slacker.  I typically can’t watch TV without my laptop and phone nearby.  I think my inability to focus is pretty symptomatic of the mixed blessing that is modern living.  The gizmology which permits such wondrous access to information and interconnection does have the side effect of taking us out of the present moment.  Often if I’m watching TV, I’m also looking up the actors on the IMDB website, or reading and posting comments about what I’m watching.  I suppose this does kinda enrich my TV watching experience, since I learn a few tidbits about the careers of the actors I’m watching and sometimes comparing reviews in real-time can be fun.  But mostly, I think, it distracts my attention to the point that I miss out on whatever really good bits there might be in whatever it is I’m watching.

I’ve been reflecting on my scatter-brained approach to my viewing habits since I’ve begun watching Downton Abbey.  In case you missed the Downton Abbey memo too, I won’t give anything away, but it really is the most fantastic TV show.  It’s on PBS, but don’t let that dissuade you.  At its core, it’s a soap opera, with all the wacky twists and machinations that make that genre so delectable.  But its setting in Edwardian England, on an unbelievably beautiful estate, elevates the upstairs-downstairs drama to new heights.

While my love of NPR is unparalleled, I’ll cop to the fact that I haven’t been a huge fan PBS, until now.  I think I’d avoided PBS programming because it doesn’t lend itself to my distracted way of watching TV.  To enjoy a show like Downton Abbey, which has a gazillion characters and lots of textures, you have to pay attention.  No tweeting, no Facebooking, no working on your blog.  Just watch.  And for watching, one is richly rewarded with zingers as delivered by the incomparable Dame Maggie Smith.

So…15 minutes to go now, and we’ll see if Cousin Matthew and Lady Mary uncross their stars and find a way to be together, and if so what might Sir Richard do to seek his revenge? And what about the beautifully stoic and recently newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Bates? Will they find their happiness destroyed by a wrongful(?) conviction? And what about Lady Sybil and Mr. Branson, and the unwed mother Ethel, and the conniving footman Thomas, and oh poor, plain Lady Edith, will she ever find a beau? These questions and more may be answered tonight…so time to put away the laptop and really tune in.   Memo received.

p.s.  The first season of Downton Abbey is available on Netflix and Hulu, and the current season can be streamed from the PBS website.  Be warned, it’s addictive!

I missed the memo about kid lit, kindles and Katniss Everdeen.

I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t love to read.  As a child, I enjoyed wandering around libraries and losing myself in the words and the pictures of books, glorious books.  Still,  I suppose I was just dabbling  until I was introduced to A Wrinkle in Time and The Arm of the Starfish in elementary school.   Madeleine L’Engle was my gateway drug.  Once I figured out that novels were this marvelous form of transportation, I was totally hooked.  Then I started pretty much inhaling all the Judy Blume books in the school library, then graduated to the dark, incestuous world of V.C. Andrews, and then I was swiping my Dad’s Stephen King and Robert Heinlein novels.   Yeah, I was a book junkie.

As a grown up, I’ve continued to be a pretty voracious reader.  But in recent years, it’s been mostly code books and Sandra Boynton.  I always read a bit for fun, but the leisurely trips to libraries and bookstores were an infrequent treat.

But now…. I got one of those schnazzy kindle fire thingys for Christmas and I’ve discovered a whole new world of multi-slacking.  In addition to using it for Facebook-stalking old boyfriends and watching cute cat videos on YouTube, I can use my kindle to read actual books!  I’ll admit I’d initially been kind of resistant to the whole e-reader thing.  The brave new world of publishing had vaporized my husband’s old job at a magazine, so I admit I held a grudge.  But the kindle fire was seductively cheap for its capabilities, so I reluctantly started coveting it.  And now there’s no turning back. All the books I could read in multiple lifetimes, lots of them free or really cheap,  at a mere flick of a touchscreen.  I’ve seriously died and gone to nerdy girl heaven.

One of my first acquisitions on my new gizmo was The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  I’d been hearing about these books for the last year or so, but dismissed the thought of reading them since they were technically “young adult” novels.  I don’t have my AARP card or anything, but I somehow thought anything with the YA label was somehow beneath my undeniable  sophistication.  Boy, I am I ever glad I got over myself and read these books.  I can’t remember when I’ve been more engrossed in a story or more neglectful of the laundry.

If you haven’t read any of The Hunger Games books yet, I won’t give anything away.  Just suffice it to say, I want to be Katniss Everdeen when I grow up.  She’s a complicated, tough little bird and I’ll be thinking about her a lot, for a long time, I think.

It seems kind of fitting that my love affair with books has been rekindled (sorry, couldn’t resist) by the very sort of books that got me hooked in the first place.  There’s usually something pure in adventure stories for and about the young, and there’s extra magic when a book bridges generations, as The Hunger Games seems to be doing.  When the first of the movies comes out in a couple of months, I predict I’ll be queuing up giddily for my ticket along with lots of people both older and younger than myself.  With so many fans out there, the line might be kind of long.  But I’ll bring my kindle so I’ll have something to read.

Memo received.

I missed the memo about smiling.

Smiling's My Favorite!

I’m technically a native Californian, but I spent most of my formative years in The South.  Say what you will about Southerners, they’re friendly folks.  When you walk or drive down the street in a small southern town, it’s pretty much expected that you will smile and wave at just about everyone you encounter along your path, whether or not you know them.  That’s just what you do.

So imagine my confusion and discomfort when I moved from a small town in Virgina to the big city of Los Angeles.  I persisted in my smiling (though I dispensed with the waving) and people in the City of Angels responded strangely.  If passersby made eye contact at all, it was usually with a blank or slightly angry expression.  More concerning was when my smiling resulted in guys turning around and following me down the street.  It wasn’t my intention to look flirty, but I suppose when all the other women were walking briskly and averting their eyes, my smiling seemed pretty alluring in comparison.

So quickly I learned, don’t smile so much.  And when I stopped smiling so much, I think I got a little less happy.  Maybe it’s one of those weird connections between the mind and the body that Ph.ds are still trying to sort out.  All I know is that much like Buddy the Elf, I just like smiling.  I smile when I’m happy, but I’m finding more and more that smiling makes me happy.

As part of my recent job change, I’m now one of those urban clichés in opaque black tights and Steve Madden walking shoes, hoofing it from the train station to my office.  Now that I’m out of my car, I’m actually seeing people, and I’m trying to get back into the habit of smiling at them.  Maybe it still makes me look flirty or crazy, but I don’t care.  Not to get all Mother Teresa on you, but…

Smiling is kind of like an open door…it is inviting.  It might sometimes invites people to follow you home, but I think it more often invites good things, like friendship and warm and fuzzy feelings.  In this way, smiling is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I could explain, but Deano sings it better than I could say it..

Merry Christmas and memo received.