deus ex mama
the only reasons i didn’t smack the person who sent this to me are:
1) she’s in austin– my arms are too short;
2) can’t be mad at someone who remembers the bugaloos; and,
3) as she, my oldest friend in the whole world — since age 3 — is older than i am.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC0L7VXFvWY
March 9, 2008 — Your way with words will make it easy for you to get what you desire over the coming year but, having got it, you may then decide it was not what you wanted after all. Never mind. Life is not about finding one sure thing and staying with it forever. Each day should bring new challenges and delights.
(from the NY Post, so it MUST be true.)
this morning, BC and i were working on her hebrew homework. i’m stepping up my efforts a bit in israelite land, as i learned last week that BC has been actually memorizing everything rather than reading it. there’s a certain amount of intelligence in having a photographic memory, as she apparently does; but there’s also value in actually learning how to read it properly.
bizarrely enough, i did the exact thing when i was her age. i was terrified of my 3rd grade hebrew teacher, an excruciatingly thin orthodox lady with a scary flippy pageboy wig and a habit of sitting on the desk before us, chewing on her nails. i don’t really know why she scared me so much, but i spent the better part of that year either hiding out in the shul bathroom or feigning stomachaches and staying home to watch the channel 7 4:30 movie.
so when i actually “returned” to hebrew school full time, i had to catch up. i had learned a bit in 2nd grade, with the happy adventures of koopi kof (koopi the monkey) and the idiot children uri and riva, so i at least had a base. but i had to catch up. fortunately, i can memorize anything if you put it to music. (i memorized chemistry formulae in high school later, having put them to a billy joel tune. ah yes, i can sing it now: mole over liter is molarity; mole over kg is molality; p1v1=p2v2…yeah, i slayed in 10th grade.) once i started singing prayers, i knew it would all click.
it all worked fine until the cantor caught up to me when i started bat mitzvah lessons at 12. i couldn’t write my full hebrew name. he made me write it 100 times: sharon chava bat menashe v’etta riva. (i don’t actually have a hebrew keyboard, and most of the people who read this don’t read hebrew, anyway. so you’ll just have to imagine it 😉
yep. the jig was up.
but the beauty is that the cantor also understood that if he made a tape of my haftorah, i would not only sing along with it, but i would read it. and read it i did. (it was a weird story, too, one about which i always felt conflicted. at the time, i went along with the whole remembrance theme, but i was always a little disturbed by that story and remain so to this day.)
but i digress. per usual.
so while i am not too worried about BC learning hebrew in the long run, i feel like it’s my job to help her along here. i never force her to love going to hebrew school (though she is very fond of her teachers and especially of the principal, for whom she made a get well card this morning on her own volition); but i always tell her my rule: you have to understand your culture before you have any right to reject it.
(read: if i had to suffer through attend hebrew school, so should she. nyah nyah nyah. but seriously…)
i honestly don’t care if, one day after her bat mitzvah, she decides to become a zen buddhist. or an atheist. or whatever she wishes. but as long as she at least has the beginnings of understanding about her religion and a portion of her culture (she doesn’t just come from me, you know), i will feel a bit more satisfied. of course, i would love her to find some part of judaism to embrace, but once she is of an age where she can decide for herself, i don’t feel like i will be in a position to make her do it my way.
and i won’t.
today, BC and i watched a Diagnosis X where a healthy young long island guy suddenly experiences gastrointestinal issues and paralysis. finally, a doctor realizes he has guillan-barre which is an autoimmune illness not entirely unlike the ITP i had two years ago. his immunoglobulins were shot, like mine, so they start him on the magical IVIG, and he starts to improve and live a better life, although it takes him a year or two to re-learn how to walk. which he does. thank G-d.
of course, once i saw that the dude had an autoimmune problem, i started to get a little nervous. when they started him on immunotherapy, i started to tear up. sometimes, TV hits a little too close to home, and i feel so terrible watching people go through things like this. i remember all too well how scary it is when you’re body is going through a revolt and you feel helpless to stop it.
it’s like the flashback that never really leaves you.
enter BC, just as they’re hanging the guy’s IV bag. she sees me all teary.
BC: mama, you really shouldn’t watch these shows with me if they make you so sad.
me: honey, i’m ok. (sniff sniff) i just get a little sad watching someone go through that. you know, people die from this sort of thing. and he’s getting treated with the same stuff i get. i just hope he gets better.Â
BC: is this like what you have?
me: well, sorta. its a different problem, but it’s autoimmune, and its one of those things that just sneaks up on you and makes you sick and you never knew what happened.
BC: (with insistence) but you’re not going to die.Â
me: no, honey. i’m not.
cartoon network is looking better and better to me these days.
it could always be waaay worse, i know; but today is just sort of a sad day while we await some sort of monsoon here in the People’s Republic. i usually hang with my little hellboy on tuesdays, but due to some pediatric scheduling joys, i need to take BC to the doctor’s today for her well-child checkup. her birthday is in december; but between the wait, the apparent need to schedule the checkup after the previous year’s checkup; and some sloth on my part; she’s not getting her checkup until today.
(i suspect we’ll loop back to december appointments by the time she is 18. thank you, blue cross.)
taking them both to the doctor’s simultaneously is a disaster. last week, we did it when jools had a doctor’s appointment right after BC was done with school for the day. another child in his class had impetigo, and it started around her mouth. the teachers, wanting to prevent a wild outbreak (today, impetigo. tomorrow, SARS.), sent him home as a precaution, as the dude has dry cracked lips. guess what? the pediatrician agreed with my assessment. as i had a doctor’s appt that day (which resulted in my whisking myself downtown to his school, then whisking back to mclean (motto: mclean; maclean; mcClean. who the hell knows how to spell our name?)), the dude ended up joining me at my doctor’s office. my doctor took one look at jools and said: this child has dry, cracked lips.
but at the pediatrician’s office, the mecca from which we receive all notes permitting our school entrance (and which i actually like, by the way), we waited for a little over an hour before we saw the doctor. in that time, my kids:
okay, okay. they’re just typical kids. and i was a typical mom with a typical i just drove through rush hour traffic for a 5:00 appointment, and now i get to drive through rush hour traffic at 6 to get home headache. but i just couldn’t bear a repeat today.
so the dude abides his time at preschool today. he’s probably cursing me and being traumatized to the extent that he will need therapy later because his mom didn’t apparently love him enough to keep him home today.
so of course, i feel guilt. i miss that little guy. just add it to the list of reasons why i suck as a mom.
and, to top it all off, sunday is my birthday. and i’ll even lose an hour of my fucking birthday, thanks to daylight savings. it’s all a conspiracy, i tell you.
i want my damn hour back, thank you very much.
i need to be an equal opportunity decade offender, but somehow, the 1980s gave me a lot of fodder that makes it into this category. and howard jones, he of the fluffy cockatiel hair (which i ended up with circa 1986) (there are pictures, i’m mortified to state), fits the bill with things can only get better.
this is a great song when you’re on the elliptical, i must tell you — crank the resistance up to 12 and try to dance around. but back in the day, when my hair was well on its way to its biggest and scariest incarnation, i loved this song. why? well, in 1985/6, i felt like things were in a bit of a shambles. i was transferring back home to rutgers (motto: no one wants to call it new jersey university) because i missed the seasons and because i felt like a part of me was losing my mind living in a place where i really, really didn’t belong. (meaning miami. not the people i went to school with. i am still close with several people from UM, some of whom actually live in and around miami to this day.) i don’t regret my time in miami for a second — it was a world i don’t think i would have otherwise experienced, and i learned a lot while there about people, places, and things that wash up on the beach at night that smell funny.
in short, i traded a beach for a blizzard.
i also was knee-deep in a relationship with a person i would call hamlet. he’s really a good person; he just didn’t know what he wanted at the time, rendering me a bit of a wreck. i was hopeful i could figure out whether things would work from a closer distance, though that wasn’t the driving force of returning to NJ. i just missed the place; and the english department at RU was (and still is) top-notch.
so, i packed my teeny canary yellow toyota tercel (with black pleather interior and no A/C in miami — talk about a great car to have in the heat!) and shifted my way up to the auto train with my mom in tow. after my car was completely saturated with dead love bugs on the FL Turnpike, we boarded the auto train (the two youngest people on board, and she was a little older than 40 ;-), and i planned to start over again in the garden spot of new brunswick, nj.
yep. things. can. only. get. better.
only no one told me they’d get worse before they got better. i felt really alienated my first semester, though i thrived academically and was accepted into the honors english program. and hamlet? well, that didn’t work out, and i was a bit of a human disaster for a few months.
but things DID get better after that. a LOT better.
so every time i listen to howard jones, i always remember that things can always get better. you just have to wait some times. and other times, you have to hit a lower bottom before things are on the up-and-up. and other times…
well. you get the picture.
through meanderings, i found this hysterical meme on flickr: what if you made a pie chart of a song’s lyrics? or some other graphic but quantified representation.
one of my faves: kiss off by the violent femmes. (yep, that one’s for you, auntie psycho from rutgers 😉 [naughty lyric alert for those of you listening in the office.]
i’m going to have to try that at home.
BC has a big science test today. we’ve been reading about the sun, the moon, the tides, matter, molecules, and atoms. she even drew me the little H2O drawing that we did in beginning chemistry. in 10th grade.
BC is in third grade.
i love the way the teacher writes out a plan of attack for studying. each day, we have been studying from a sheet; and each day, we add a little more, then a little more, then a little more. i hope this sort of thing rubs off on madam, as she clearly doesn’t seem to be a person who wants to study because, to quote her, i know this stuff already, mama.
it’s nice to be doogie howser, but you still need to study, darling.
girlfriend seems to be heavily interested in science these days. i’m secretly glad of this, as i somehow never got jazzed much about it. (in fact, i must say that i have probably learned as much about earth and rotation and revolution in this little study exercise as she has.) her TV faves include untold stories of the ER, diagnosis X, and of course my personal fave, trauma: life in the ER — with occasional interruptions from the shows about people having babies, which she likes, too.
while i am secretly glad that it moves her away from some of the crappy cartoons she is prone to watching, i often wonder whether i should be more concerned. girlfriend doesn’t care about watching actual bloody surgeries. and she gets irritated when i start to weep, especially when we watched these two egyptian twins get detached from each other’s brains.
yesterday, we watched a show where a western NJ boy (yes, of course, all magical things happen in NJ) got med-evac’d to UMDNJ in scenic newark because he sawed off two fingers in shop class (moral: mamas don’t let your babies grow up and take shop class.) i couldn’t watch as the kid showed his hands. girlfriend watched with keen interest.
mama, she always reminds me, if you can’t handle it, you should really leave the room. later, she asked me what the words in front of the show meant.
oh, i replied, you mean “viewer discretion is advised”?
yep.
uh, viewer discretion advised means i should use MY discretion over YOUR viewing time, sister.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IlHgbOWj4o
well, actually, i love america’s sweetheart, circa 1980. valerie bertinelli, former wife of eddie van hamster (and ohmyGAWD he’s too cute in this clip) has written a tell-all book about her life, including bits about drug use (NO!) and infidelity (NOOOOOO!) and even dates with stephen spielberg (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)
but valerie wins quote of the week, even this early, with this gem:
“I just figured, if they’re going to watch me lose 40 lbs. and I’m going to be embarrassed that way, and there’s going to be fat-ass pictures of me with my butt hanging out in Hawaii, I thought, ‘Why not let the inner me out, too?'” Bertinelli said. “Because the inner me is, I hope, prettier than the outer me.” Âfat-ass pictures of me with my butt hanging out. words no publicist would ever write.
i love this girl.
hello, jenny craig? i’m bringing my fat ass down.
it’s no secret i love the beatles, and i am ashamed very little by them (ok, so qualifiers include the entire magical mystery tour movie (motto: we’re stoned, and we don’t even care if the Queen knows it) and their worst song ever, mr. moonlight.) it must be apparent — one of the major search terms that brings people to wreke land is paul mccartney. and i cut wings a lot of slack. after all, i decided i would marry macca when i was 4; and i didn’t really switch favorite beatle allegiance to john until i was well into adulthood. i heart paul. and i still do.
(paul, if you’re listening: i’ll sign a pre-nup! really!)
anyway, i grew up with wings; since the beatles didn’t tour, it was about as close as i could get… i would wait with bated breath until the latest albums would come out, as late as 1980 before i began to wonder why i was still listening to stuff that older folks liked. i still think band on the run is a solid work; but i must confess that i also adore venus and mars, a loopy LP that i think paul clearly wrote with huge stadium concerts in mind. and the single venus and mars/rockshow totally caters to that idea. sure, there are adorably whimsical lyrics elsewhere on the album which i frequently quote when i am talking about my BS; and letting go is a killer song.
but rockshow is exactly what my 11 year old, never-been-to-a-rock-show self thought that rock shows must be like: loud and energetic and exciting… which they have been, though not always. there have been shows where i wondered why the artist even showed. (there have even been shows where i pondered whether the artist onstage was, in fact, a cardboard cutout propped on the stage. but i digress…)
i was a bit chagrined when i saw sir paul for the first (and only) time in 1993. i thought he was rather hammy: look at me, the cute one, i could sit here and fart and you’d cheer. it made me a bit angry at the time, especially since i had spent a lot of money for tickets that were waaaaaay in the back of RFK stadium. but since he lost his wife and then subsequently started getting screwed over by his second wife, i’ve softened a lot.
(if you’re out there, paul, i promise, i won’t marry you for the money. just let me hear you every day and that will be enough.)