I missed the memo about voting.

I turned 18 in 1991, just in time to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992.  I was lucky enough to come of age during a fairly heady time for politics, so I was swept up in the crazy optimism of the 90s when we just couldn’t stop thinkin’ about tomorrow.

And then a few years later, there was all the controversy and heartbreak of the 2000 election. With all those hanging chads, dimpled chads, and recounts, we all hopefully got the memo that every vote really does count.

Like a lot of bleeding hearts, I spent a good part of the next decade licking my wounds and contemplating emigrating to New Zealand.   After the demoralizing results of the 2004 election, I saw Sen. Kerry at a campaign rally for then-mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa and I burst into tears of grief as I gazed upon his long, gorgeous face.

But before that, another politician, one I had never heard of before, ignited a spark of optimism in me that I hadn’t really felt in years.  In the summer of 2004, I was sitting in a hotel room in Ontario, California, eating a sad room service dinner and watching the Democratic National Convention.  I was out in the hinterlands of southern California taking the Bar Exam. In the midst of this lonely, stressful experience, Senator Obama got me all fired up and ready to save the world.

Four years later, I listened to the “Audacity of Hope” while I was in labor. Seriously, Barack Obama sticks with me through the hard times.   So I was excited when Obama got the nomination in 2008, and that year, I was swept up in the enthusiasm that inspired so many people.  Check this out…

This was the line for early voting at the County Clerk’s office in Norwalk, California back in November of 2008.  It took five hours to get through this line.  Five hours.  But people were waiting willingly.  Joyfully, even.  I had never experienced anything like it.  And check this out…

Voting was a family affair that year.  Our baby boy was with my husband and me the whole time, and while he won’t remember this day, I’ll tell him about it.  And hopefully he’ll feel at least a little bit of the pride of civic involvement that we felt on that day.

And now here we are four years later and we are nearing the end of a seemingly interminable campaign season.  With all the silliness, ugliness, and downright treachery that the electorate has been subjected to this time around, I’m feeling a little less inspired and a little more battle-fatigued.   I voted by mail this time and the prospect of wrangling a four-year-old through a five-hour line for which there is no roller coaster at the end is a laughable non-starter.  But I did vote.   I hope you’ll vote, too.

Ballot cast and memo received.

I missed the memo about Aaron Sorkin, Sam Waterston, and the Search for the Center.

Gentle reader, I haven’t written anything for this blog in a while, mostly because I’ve spent most of the summer trying not to puke.  I attribute some of the nausea to morning sickness, but the recent political landscape has also made me want to barf.

Now that I’m well into my second trimester and the conventions are over, I’m hoping I can enjoy a little bit of respite before my ankles start swelling and the debates begin dominating the airwaves.  In this little interval, I’m trying to enjoy a bit more food, both for body and thought.

As a tasty little appetizer, I’ve recently tucked into Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”.  Yes, it’s sanctimonious and stilted, but I can’t help myself, I love it.  I wish I lived in a world where people spoke in full paragraphs, fueled by intellect, passion, and idealism.  I have a tendency to grand stand and lecture, so for better or worse, the totally un-ironic preachiness of most of the characters sounds pretty normal to me.

“The Newsroom” chronicles the trials and tribulations of a nightly cable news show, which embarks on a noble experiment to de-fluff its broadcast, and ratings be damned, report the news that really matters.  As you might imagine, this pisses a lot people off.  In a showdown between Leona, the owner of the network (as played by the legendary Jane Fonda) and Charlie, head of the news division (as played by the inestimably awesome Sam Waterston), there’s a great exchange in which Charlie explains what it means to report from the center…check it out, the whole thing’s great, but it really gets good around 1:50.

(Look at those trustworthy eyebrows…I think I would believe just about anything that came out of Sam Waterston’s mouth, though I do partially blame him for my decision to go to law school)

Charlie:  We did the news…

Leona:   For the left.

 Charlie:  For the center.

 Leona:  Are you fucking out your mind?!?

 Charlie:  For the center, Leona.  Facts are the center.  Facts.   We don’t pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don’t believe them.  Balance is irrelevant to me.  It doesn’t have anything to do with truth, logic or reality.  He didn’t go on the air telling people to give peace a chance, but evolution?  The jury’s back on that one.

I was blown away by Charlie’s little speech.  Like a lot of liberals, I get so caught up in extolling the virtues of pluralism and tolerance that I sometimes forget that ignoring actual facts for the sake of fairness is no virtue at all.  It calls to mind this little aphorism…

I know that by feeding my head and bleeding heart with Aaron Sorkin shows, I risk leaning so far to the left that I might fall out of my chair.  And I try to be careful of my own confirmation bias and I really, really try to listen to alternative points of view.  But yeah, as Charlie states better than I ever could, the jury is in about a few things, and what does it serve to politely yield the floor to people who don’t yield to facts?  Perhaps we can speed up the glacial pace of progress if more people just acknowledged….

I know that for a lot of good, smart people, questions of faith make questions of fact a lot more complicated.  I get it.  But it only took a few centuries for Copernicus and Galileo to be pardoned…so maybe there’s hope.   Still searching for the center and memo received.

I missed the memo about magic.

I’ve recently begun reading the Harry Potter books for the first time.  I know, I know…I’m crazy late to the Harry Potter party, but I think it took to my love affair with The Hunger Games Series to finally break down my resistance to fiction written for younger readers.  And like any sentient creature who’s read any of the Harry Potter books, I’m utterly charmed by the characters, the setting, and of course, the magic.

While Harry and the rest of the Hogwarts crew learn the ways of major league magic, I’ve been thinking about all the little bits of magic I’ve experienced in my own life.  I’m not sure if it’s good luck, good karma, or sheer force of will, but some wonderful things have happened to me over the years.  A college friend, observing that I seemed to conjure a lot of good stuff, even coined a term for the phenomenon….”Jamie Charm”.  I’m still not entirely sure what it means, but I’ll take it.

The magic I’ve experienced takes many forms, some small, some big.  I’ve landed perfect jobs in the nick of time.  I rarely get bitten by mosquitoes.  I avoided the pain and inconvenience of oral surgery simply by being born without wisdom teeth.  I typically don’t have to wait more than a couple of seconds for an elevator.  I’ve conceived two babies, both “on the first try”.

It’s that last one that has me reeling most recently, because it really does seem like magic, too good and lucky to be true, that at age 38, I could get knocked up within just a couple of weeks of deciding I really wanted another child.  At the first doctor’s appointment, my obstetrician high- fived my husband, because, statistically at least, we’re total freaks.   Our good fortune in the baby-making department leads to all sorts of magical thinking on my part.  It’s easy to mistake fortuitous physiology for fate.  But it has been my experience, that when things are meant to be, they often seem magically easy. But then again, when something seems to fall into our laps, we sometimes forget that we designed the chair, carefully constructed it, and then chose to have a seat at just the moment when the universe made the drop.

Maybe magic is just the fantastic intersection of the things we can control and the things we can’t, the collision of hope, intention, and chance.   In any event, here’s a really dreamy Olivia Newton-John song on the subject….[And please tell me that Xanadu is one of your favorite movies…seriously, Greek mythology, roller skating, and Gene Kelly…what’s not to like?]

Memo received.

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…

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.

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…

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?”

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!