ms. malaprop – Page 3 – Wrekehavoc.com

Category: ms. malaprop

getting in tune

Posted on November 2, 2011November 1, 2011 by wrekehavoc

it’s all cher’s fault.

back in 1998, a new technology, called auto-tune, was employed on cher’s hit single believe to ensure that her vocals were perfect. (if you’re brave, you can give it a listen. i’ll wait.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbXiECmCZ94

did you hear those notes where it almost sounds like her voice has become like a synthesizer? where she sounds more like a machine than a human? welcome to the magic of auto-tune. and over the past 10 years, it has become a huge tool in the world of pop and R&B. people in country have admitted to using it, too, like shania twain, tim mcgraw, and faith hill. it appears that everybody want to rule their pitch.

music, to those of you who know me or who have paid any attention whatsoever to my blog over the past 9 years, takes up a lot of space in my brain. to me, it is an art that clutches at all that is human inside me and which expresses frailties and strengths about our experiences in life and love and spirit and everything in between. auto-tune removes all that is human and imperfect from music. it distances the artist from the craft. and it creates a gap between the artist and me. there is this computer that sanitizes and perfects the experience.

if you are really all about the music, and if you are really all about creating a real experience, a real moment between yourself and others, then you need not use auto-tune. i cannot imagine bob dylan auto-tuned, or bruce springsteen, or aimee mann, or anyone whose work i respect. i don’t expect them to have perfect performances, and i don’t want their voices synthesized into electronic nirvana. i want to hear them raw and real and regular. i don’t expect vocal pyrotechnics; i expect emotional truth and warmth.

can you imagine john lennon auto-tuned? nope. me, neither.

sometimes, especially in pop and R&B, there is this need to embellish vocal embellishments. it’s like artists are not so much interested in the emotion of the song but rather in proving they can glide around 16 notes in a second. their vocal chords are superior, apparently. but doing so is fraught with easy failure. auto-tune to the rescue! just because whitney houston could do it without doesn’t mean you need to, and you, too, can sound like a diva! the tv show glee is rife with it. i wonder whether broadway is now, too.

nope. not for me. maybe it’s the aural equivalent of telling those damn kids to get off my lawn, but i don’t want any auto-tune in my music. and if they want to keep it real, then artists ought to demand that their imperfections remain for us fans to love or not love. i know music is a business, but if the product actually becomes 100% manufactured for our listening pleasure, then there’s no art left.

i like the illusion that there’s something honest going on there, but auto-tune completely pulls back the curtain and let’s you see that the wizard is truly bankrupt, false, and neurotic.

quite possibly, talentless as well.

star, star (starf***er)

Posted on November 1, 2011November 1, 2011 by wrekehavoc

it’s all just for show.

i don’t really keep up with the kardashians, but a friend was just sharing with me that kim kardashian, the woman who rode her sex partner to fame in a raunchy tape, the woman who just had a $10 million wedding (for which she was paid handsomely), has now filed for divorce 72 days after said marriage.

krazy, right?

but besides her self-important penchant for spelling everything with a k (or would that be mama kris’s penchant, naming all her kids with k’s — you can bet that wasn’t her hubby, bruce jenner’s idea), kim has konsistently been in the spotlight…famous for…being in the spotlight. and short celebrity marriages aren’t new (looking at you, dennis rodman and carmen electra.) i wonder, though ,whether public opinion, which seemed to groove on her public sexcapades, will still clamor over her now that she’s made a total mockery over marriage. for i don’t believe rodman and electra were actually paid for their wedding photos, access to wedding info, etc.

see, not only did kim get fabulous gifts, three different vera wang dresses, and oodles of fabulousness all gratis, but with the ads shown during her wedding special, she earned close to $18 million for all her marital troubles.

lord only knows what she’ll make from her pre-nup.

PROSTITUTE

Offer (someone, typically a woman) for sexual activity in exchange for payment

– although she was paid $15 to join a man at his table, she never prostituted herself

Put (oneself or one’s talents) to an unworthy or corrupt use or purpose for the sake of personal or financial gain

– his willingness to prostitute himself to the worst instincts of the electorate

i’m waiting for her to get pregnant and then start selling her sonograms.

reality television has shown us that people will do pretty much anything for money and fame. people are willing to sell their families and friends down the proverbial river, risk life and limb, and pretty much lower themselves for all the world to see. and ironically, nothing on these shows is truly real.

between her surgically-enhanced assets and her apparently fake wedding, i wonder whether kim kardashian knows what is actually real. besides money, of course.

the godfather

Posted on October 24, 2011October 24, 2011 by wrekehavoc

she gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse…

when our kids were born, we never assigned godparents. see, i never grew up with godparents, so it never occurred to me to select anyone in particular to be godparents to our kids. besides, i thought hopefully, all my brothers, brothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law will hopefully take some liking to our kids and that’s pretty cool, right? (lord knows i am extremely crazy about my nieces and nephews.) not only that, but as i have no biological sisters, i have some friends who my kids have called aunt so-and-so and who have always been very kind and generous to them, treating them as their own and even looking after them at critical junctures.

when BC was young, my friend M2k (or aunt M2k, to be specific) fell head-over-heels for my girl. somehow, M2K got the whole girly-glitter-pink thing that i never did (probably due to the whole i grew up with brothers thing.) over the years, M2k has gotten BC all sorts of wild and crazy stuff from her travels; she has visited the girl whenever she’s in town; she even watched the girl while i was in labor with jools. and BC is just as crazy about M2k, for mary loves the lamb you know. one day, little BC announced: mommy, aunt M2k is my fairy godmother.

i loved the image of M2k floating around with wings and a wand. it suits her generous and loving self so completely.

anyway, we were talking about M2k the other day, as the girl is excited for the day when M2k becomes a mommy herself. and somehow, our conversation turned us to thoughts of a mutual friend of M2k’s and mine, David. David doesn’t get over here too often; he lives a continent away. But when he visits, he always has paddington bears for everyone, or GOOD chocolate bars that you can’t get here, or even foreign coins for the boy’s collection. he is big-hearted and a dear softie and someone with whom i wish i could spend more time in real life.

David, you should know, also happens to be gay. it’s not something that has ever mattered to me, the girl, or anyone in my house for that matter. it certainly became clear the first time he and i ever went shopping together — Best. Shopping. Buddy. Ever. (outside of my mom.) but in general, he isn’t my gay friend. he is my friend who happens to be gay. he never said anything to the girl about this, as it really isn’t something that came into the conversation. (his kilt, of course, is another story. the girl was FASCINATED by the kilt he has.) but the girl knows, and the girl doesn’t really care.

why am i spending so much time belaboring this point?

the other day, BC and i were talking about music. somehow, we got on the topic of a singer named Adele who has a gorgeous voice. i mentioned that David had met her once, and she was wildly impressed. we ended up talking about how David was doing, and then she lo0ked at me and, with a straight face, said: mom, if Aunt M2k can be my fairy godmother, can David be my fairy godfather?

at first, i had to stifle a chuckle. the girl clearly had no idea of the weird double entendre she had made. then, i had to resist the urge to slap myself for even thinking such a thing. wow, things get awfully ingrained in your head. did you really say that? i asked the girl, thinking she was being extra cheeky.

you don’t think he’d want to be? she asked, straight-faced.

i got over myself quickly and realized that just because that stupid idea flashed through my brain, i didn’t need to flash it through hers and continue down the path.

you can ask him, i replied. i bet he’d be delighted.

i told the story to David later. bless his heart, he didn’t seem offended by my tale. in fact, i hope he wasn’t drinking anything when he read my message, as i can picture the beverage spit all over his keyboard. (and wot a waste of wine that would likely be.)

true to form, he said he’d be delighted. you know, how could he possibly refuse?

what i did on my summer vacation: part 1

Posted on July 7, 2011July 7, 2011 by wrekehavoc

i know, i know. i’ve been scarce.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLXlwKbLjDM

it’s been a crazy year. but no matter what the gods threw at us, we were buoyed by the idea that at the end of june, we were going to spend 8 whole days at club med sandpiper in florida, followed by some time in south florida capped off by a visit with my old friends plus a phillies game versus the hopeless hapless helpless florida marlins. sun, beach, fun — what could be better?

to be sure, we have been to club med sandpiper before. 3 or 4 times, to be exact. (sort of.) we loved the fact that the kids loved having fun in the kids clubs while mom and dad did anything from flying trapeze time (no lie) to water skiing, to rollerblading to golf (okay, well, BS is the golfer; i find golf snoozeworthy.) there was a man as old as methuselah who taught the yoga classes, there was an adult pool and a restaurant for adults only as well as endless, delicious food.

and the bread…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F98g-PoWYqM

club med sandpiper has undergone a pretty big renovation. where there once was a patio where the kids ran and ran, there’s now another pool, a lovely one with chaises all around. but if you want to sit in one of those chairs, you’d better put your stuff down on one to reserve it by about 8am or you’ll be sorely disappointed, as we often were. at times, we escaped to the adult pool, only to find other adults bringing their children to it. (!) one day, one lady removed her bikini top (a no-no on the beach, despite the number of people who were not from the US of A) while two clearly-under 18 boys ogled. (only adults have the clear wristband.) one actually stood up and stared at her freed boobage. i walked over to beavis while his butthead friend looked on. you do know this beach is for adults, right?

hey, he replied earnestly, i’m almost 17.

there was a lot of this sort of entitled attitude i experienced here on my visit, a surprise, maybe because this time, there was a predominance of americans?

there were some pretty major changes in the dining, and not just that my beloved chocolate bread was only served at lunch and dinner. firstly, the adult-only restaurant was gone, replaced by a lunch/dinner/post dinner snack type restaurant with an unchanging menu. one time, the girl and i went to have a snack. she ordered a cheese quesadilla with guac. i ordered the crudities, which were tiny, itsy-bitsy pieces of vegetables. (the carrot portion of the dish probably consisted in total of 1/2 of a baby carrot.) good thing i wasn’t hungry.

the main restaurant is buffet-style. in the past, there were simply massive tables where waiters would seat you and others together, travelers as well as the employees (or G.O.’s, as they are called). this was actually wonderful, as you ended up meeting other people easily and felt part of a community of sorts. not so anymore. now, people sit wherever they want, and there is a serious predominance of reserved tables. sure, if you have taken your family of 18 on vacation together, you probably want to sit together. but there were tables of 4 which bore the little Reserved For signs and which we found rather obnoxious. (of course, one day, one of the tables had a sign that said Reserved for Korn. sweet! my BS exclaimed. there are rock stars eating here!) we only sat with another couple once, by our invitation. we never sat with a G.O. (of course, we sat with plenty of flies, which aboundeth.)

anyway, you care about the food, and i do, too. gone is the freshly squeezed orange juice; i’m sure some stupid americans complained that it was too difficult for them to squeeze their own o.j. and why should i have to squeeze my own juice — i’m on vacation! (spoilsport.) the omelette guy is the best thing about breakfast; every day, i had my egg white omelette and my oatmeal and was happy as a clam. (note to self: are clams really happy? how would anyone know?) especially important, considering there was no chocolate or white chocolate bread at breakfast. (have i mentioned how much i love this stuff?) curiously, the skim milk went M.I.A. most mornings. i’m not sure who you have to sleep with to get skim milk instead of whole or 2%, but it was annoying.

i’ll combine lunch and dinner. it’s easy to combine them now, as they are pretty much interchangeable. in the past, there were theme nights, and it was fun, albeit scary, for an american palate to encounter some euro foods. not any more. usually, there was some asian (read: fried rice or something indian-like/curryish) sort of food which was heavy on the salt and limited on the actual spice or flavor. in fact, BC thought that they must have a basic asian flavor that they use for all their asian food, and it isn’t even good. there are often pieces of fish or fowl and sometimes beef. crab legs one night. but nothing stood out. and the desserts were completely lackluster and repeated. in the past, there were different desserts cranked out by the bakers. now? it’s the same few sorts, rotated, plus cookies at lunch. so dull, the kids and i decided to eat our beloved chocolate bread for dessert.

waterskiing and rollerskating are no longer part of the program. (well, you can waterski, but it costs extra now.) i tried taking a golf lesson to attempt to catch up to my BS and try to play on the pitch and putt. the lesson: how to grip a club. the instructor spent 10 minutes berating me because i have a lefty grip. then, he told me to stand behind him and watch. oh, and whenever he said left, i should substitute right. thanks. after not being able to see him, i waited until the question and answer time. only, too bad for me — he had a cellphone call to take. i waited patiently for him to finish, then i approached him. only once again, too bad for me — i encountered a french-canadian golf gang hell-bent on monopolizing the teacher’s time. literally every time there was a break, i tried to get his attention. sadly, i am not cute and don’t speak with a french accent, so he continued to pay attention to these amazons from montreal. finally, fed up, i left the course. i had stood in 90+ degree heat and wasted my time for an hour. thanks, dude.

(the husband had a similar experience in the teacher’s intermediate class. so it wasn’t just a beginner neeb like myself.)

i spent some time in the weight room, which is nice but small. people hog the ellipticals and the one treadmill. and people also don’t wipe down the equipment. (the husband was stunned as i brazenly told a man next to me not to forget to wipe down his machine that he had drenched. yes, i am that lady.) once again, another situation where you have to fight to get to do something you should be able to do on vacation. another hassle. and as in most cases, the G.O.s are not paying attention and don’t want to get into any sort of situation with patrons.

the girl is old enough for the teen club; she was allowed to basically wander the place at will, which she loved. but the boy was not so entranced by his group, the manatees. and frankly, i had the feeling that the G.O.s who ended up with his group probably had somehow felt like they had gotten the short end of the stick. i didn’t sense that any of them particularly liked kids, which is such a vastly different experience than what i had had when my kids were younger. back in the old days, G.O.’s tried to create a fun pride in the group with cheers and songs. i didn’t see any of that happening here.

and then, there was the slapping incident.

jools tells me that he wasn’t allowed to eat dessert. i asked him why. he tells me that he said: ew, gross! when this one boy stepped on a grape. and then, the boy slapped him. now, two things should be evident here to any of you who are parents: 1) the story makes no sense, and 2) WTF? a kid slapped my kid? so, like any concerned parent, i went to talk to the G.O. well, yes, she said, jools lost dessert because he didn’t listen and went to get dessert before she said he could get dessert. (which, for reasons i don’t understand, they were only allowed to get the ice cream and not the cookies, which is absurd. oh, and they wouldn’t let them have soda. hello? this is VACATION. i paid for all this food. let my kid eat whatever he wants, thanks very much.) this had happened the day before, so she wanted to teach him a lesson.

okay, i replied. so tell me about the slapping part.

well, she continued, a boy did slap julian. i asked her what happened to that boy.

he lost dessert as well.

hold the phone. are you telling me that not listening and getting dessert is on the same level as slapping another person?

of course not, she said. i talked to his dad. (i don’t think there was any time for her to actually have spoken to the father, and there was never any apology. i doubt this ever happened.) so the next day, i had a kid who didn’t want to go back to group, and i frankly didn’t want to send him there because i wasn’t certain he was being treated fairly and kindly. considering the kids camp is the number one selling point of this entire operation, this is a serious dealbreaker. while i adore spending time with my kids, we have always adored club med sandpiper because the kids have fun and the parents get a break. and now? no breaks for mom and dad.

so basically, we have here uninspiring food, G.O.s who don’t seem to care a lot about the kids in their care, pushy people, an inability to participate in most activities because they are crowded, adult-only places where the adult-only place is never enforced by anyone, and just not a lot of fun to be had at a not-so-cheap cost. we used to hold all other vacations up to club med sandpiper — we didn’t care that it wasn’t the fanciest place. we l0ved the feel of the place. we loved the community. we loved the energy. and now? there’s none of that. sure, the physical plant is probably somewhat improved, but in general? a serious, serious disappointment.

and this was our big vacation for a few years. thanks for nothing, club med.

guilty pleasure monday: you make your own heaven and hell right here on earth (the temptations)

Posted on May 23, 2011May 14, 2015 by wrekehavoc

be forewarned: i am probably going to accidentally trounce on beliefs without meaning to and without any malice. apologies in advance. i’m thinking aloud here.

all this talk about raptures is puzzling to me at best. and that’s at best.

i had to do a little reading about the concept of rapture, as it is a christian concept and thus obviously nothing i was taught as part of my time with mrs. hannah felder, the torah-ettes, and our stunning hebrew school curriculum. there’s a piece of the christian bible called thessalonians (which i had to practice saying, i would add — that word is a tongue twister and made me feel like i had a lisping challenge) where paul writes one of his epistles. (i remember reading a bit about him in college through the confessions of st. augustine. that paul was pretty prolific.)

(speaking of prolific paul, i always love being at weddings with BS when they get to the part of paul writing to the corinthians. my husband always makes me laugh: dear corinthians, he’ll whisper, STOP. how’s the leather business? STOP. etc.)

so that thinker named paul, he took on the thessalonians as well, only this time, he was talking about christians being taken up to G-d. and i’m no theologian (so i will defer to my friends who are), but it sounds like depending on which sort of christian you are delineates how the whole rapture scenario plays out. but ultimately, my understanding is that as long as you are christian and have declared Jesus as your savior, you are good to go toward that heavenly reward.

see, here’s where i get a bit perplexed and i’m hoping someone out there can help me out. in judaism, i think we earn our place in heaven by good works. i don’t think the concept is limited to jews, either — i think anyone who does good on earth can enter heaven (if it’s a concept he or she believes in, obviously. not everyone does.) you don’t have to belong to any particular religion; you just have to be a decent human being. now obviously, behaving as Jesus would want you to would put you in this category, methinks, as Jesus had some pretty critical ideas that i can appreciate. but in our non-christian worldview, i don’t think you have to be christian to earn your place with The Big Entity Upstairs.

so is it enough to surrender yourself to Jesus or G-d? i’m thinking about all those poor people who stopped their lives in their tracks last week because they believed that rapture was imminent. they handed out pamphlets; they paid for billboards; and they did everything they could to spread the word. i respect their right to share their ideas. however, is that all there is to it? just believe and you’re done?

you need to understand that i am somewhat skeptical about organized religion, including my own. but a worldview i do embrace is all about your behavior here on earth. how you treat people in the here and now is everything to me. and frankly, i am not doing this because i am hoping that i end up in G-d’s good books (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s, for that matter.) i do that simply because i want to be part of a world where people treat each other kindly and fairly. i’m far from perfect on this front, of course; but it’s something i strive for every day. it’s something i try to share with my kids every day. and all these people who are eager to die and be lifted up to heaven — have they completely given up on improving life on here in our world? i find people like that to be the scariest people of all.

i know that life for some people is very, very hard. i know that i count my blessings all the time — i have a healthy family, i have access to lifesaving medicine, i have people i love and who seem to like me, etc. — so it may seem pretty easy for me to talk about good works and good deeds. but when you look at history and see persecuted peoples, people under the greatest of stresses, there are countless stories of grace and courage and, as my tribe would put it, mitzvot. i think, for example, about the righteous among the nations, non-jews who risked their very lives saving jews during the holocaust.

isn’t that sort of deed enough to earn your place in heaven?

but is that really a good reason to do the right thing? no one really knows what happens to you after you die. maybe heaven. maybe worm food central. who really knows? and i don’t begrudge anyone their beliefs, but you can’t really control what happens to you after you die. you can, however, control how you behave in the here and now. you can create heaven… or hell… right here on earth, as the temps sing.

and shouldn’t that be the focus?

To the Mom Who Films Every Single School Performance

Posted on April 13, 2011 by wrekehavoc

Dear Overzealous Mom,

After several years of attending chorus and band concerts, talent shows, award ceremonies, and other school assemblies, I have become, in short, familiar with your work. You are the woman who leaps up before each and every song start or critical moment, flips on your video cam, and starts to preserve those wonderful childhood memories we all wish to remember as we move along that strangely short continuum known as life. I’m very glad that you are careful to gather each and every note your child has warbled. I envision a home library filled with videos, each carefully categorized for future generations’ use.

You may not realize this, but thanks to your fastidious attention to capturing those moments, you have also become a part of our family’s memories. At first, I would attempt a paltry photograph here or there, only to capture your back, shoulders, or butt (the latter of which has gotten larger over the years, which I can glean from my photographic evidence.) I would try to sit elsewhere in the auditorium, and yet, like two toddlers hellbent on getting the one toy in the room, our worlds would collide again and again. Over time, I gave up hope at actually watching my child in any performance; I would simply hope that my being there was enough for her. She’ll never know that I spent my time, teeth gritted, trying to see around your standing, ample frame, hearing less her voice and more of the whirr of your taping.

I should learn to live with the fact that your child must be more important than mine or anyone else’s here at school. However, now that the final year at elementary school is coming to a close, I have been asked to share any photographs I have of my child at school activities for one final montage at the graduation program. Instead, as I gather together my collection of pictures, I notice a preponderance of shots of you. While your family may never show much interest in watching your thousands of hours of video, my kids will have to content themselves with multiple shots of your posterior.

I’m picking out the finest samples for the entire 5th grade to enjoy.

Yours,

Wreke

Originally published at Smartly.Com

animal

Posted on March 31, 2011 by wrekehavoc

yeah. i’m that mom.

today was the big day in second grade. parents were invited in to see the two-part museums the children had created for american studies and science. part one involved native american tribes. each class contributed two docents to discuss their particular exhibit. i was thrilled to witness jools and his little girlfriend rose perform as docents, discussing all sorts of native american things. (not as thrilled as jools was. he often isn’t selected for these sorts of things, and as he was this time, he was jumping out of his skin. he couldn’t wait to do his bit. which, i would add, he did knowledgeably and marvelously, unbiased mom that i am.) we all moved around to each class’s native american exhibit, listening to their classes’ docents discuss all things powhatan. it was really a creative and well-done idea, and i send many kudos to the teachers and kids who worked very hard to put it all together. a lot of learning clearly took place!

part two of the exhibits involved their biome unit. (i don’t remember anything about biomes when i was a kid. we just talked about nature.) the kids learned about three different biomes: the desert, the deciduous forest, and the grassland. each child was to make a diorama depicting an animal from one of those three selected biomes. they also needed to write about the animal, it’s interdependent relationships, and interesting facts. there were quite a few bison, many cheetahs, lots of slithering snakes, all probably selected from the big list o’ animals distributed at the start of the project. did we pick one of those aforementioned animals?

of course not.

when we sat down to discuss the selection of the animal, we went to a website recommended by the teacher as a great resource on animals. from there, i’m not sure where we went, but we stumbled on an animal which, the minute i read its name, i knew would be the one the boy would select. ohmygawd how COOL, the boy exclaimed when i showed him a picture of this little, nonpredatory, ant-eating aussie lizard. it was settled. our animal would be: the thorny devil.

now i could tell you loads and loads about this adorable little dude, but a picture (or video) is probably way less verbose and far more informative than i’ll ever be.

anyway, we read together in books and on the web about this little creature. as he has a tough time writing neatly, the boy typed a sentence a day about this lumpy lizard until we had critical mass. we also discussed how to make the diorama. i reminded mr. man that i passed the second grade; so while i’d be glad to talk about the project and help him get what he needed, for the most part, he was on his own. he painted the inside of a girl scouts thin mint box blue and pasted cotton balls for clouds. we put down a mass quantity of glue on the bottom and poured sand (from our old sandbox sand bag) on it. he made a shrub out of green tissue paper from an old gift. the husband bought the boy some clay, and he fashioned a lizard as best as he could out of several colors. and then, he stuck toothpicks all over the lizard to show it’s spikes.

so today in class, after the native american museum part of the program, we entered the kids’ classrooms, whereupon everyone stood up and talked about their animal. the boy did a fine job mentioning that the devil gets water by both absorbing it through it’s tummy as well as by drinking the rain gathered in the little valleys created by the spiky skin on his back. well done, little man. he was so very, very proud.

and i was, too.

so then, we all walked around the classroom, admiring everyone’s work. i noticed plenty of ready-made plastic animals stuck into boxes. some dioramas were really quite realistic — one boy put actual cacti into his to show it was the desert. (i’m too much of a slacker to have gone there. bully for him.) and i stopped for a moment, standing by the boy’s diorama, when i overheard two boys talking as they peered into jools’ work. look, one boy said, laughing as he looked at jools’ interpretation of the thorny devil. he stuck TOOTHPICKS into his lizard. that looks dumb.

and i couldn’t help myself. i know i’m supposed to behave. i know i’m supposed to be an adult. and i know i would say something sharp to my son if i heard him making fun of someone else’s hard work. and, as part of the global village which it takes to raise children, i spoke up.

you know, i said, giving my sternest parental look, it’s really hard to make those spikes. you shouldn’t make fun of something if you haven’t tried it.

the boys looked at me, surprised, then sheepish. and fled.

natural instinct is a hard thing to fight.

middle of the road

Posted on March 23, 2011March 23, 2011 by wrekehavoc

middle school. the loveliest time of life, methinks.

i’m very fortunate to have a relationship with my daughter where she still deigns to speak to me. at the ripe old age of 12+, girlfriend is supposedly at the point of life where parents are beyond embarrassing. i remember trips to the mall where i tried to walk several paces away from my mom (not always, of course — just when kids from school were sighted) and pretended to have been apparently spawned from thin air. don’t get me wrong — i have always, always adored my parents. but it was a tricky phase at times, balancing the person i was with the person i knew i should be.

girlfriend doesn’t seem to be bothered by that sort of nonsense. she’s clearly more mature at this age than i was. (arguably, she is still more mature than i am, but that’s fodder for a different day.) she walks with me. sometimes, she’s even willing to still hold my hand. (not when her friends are around, of course, but that’s to be expected.) and best of all, she continues to tell me all about the magical time she is having as a young middle schooler.

middle school, in her view at the moment, is full of dudes experimenting with their respective swaggers. i hear tales of boys using extremely profane language (one was talking directly to BC for a time. i called his mom, as i knew that if it were my kid, i would want someone to call ME. bless that mom’s heart; she heard me, understood me, and together, we worked to change that situation around. i am very grateful to her.) i hear of boys putting irish spring soap in their pants, mushing it around, then taking it out and giving it back to other boys, an act which seems unbearably odd. and of course, on her school bus, there is the issue of the traveling tampon. it is apparently the height of comedy to throw a tampon around the bus, although the other day, girlfriend was extra-mortified by this activity, as the aforementioned feminine protection product had what appeared to be some blood on it.

ew.

most of her girlfriends appear to be relatively sane at the moment, but of course there is talk about the girls who are rude, petty, and mean. there are the girls who are dressed up, date, and go grinding with the boys at a monthly local church dance. some things never change, i guess.

i asked the girl once about whether kids were dating in the 6th grade. her response?

well, yeah, if you call dating sitting together in the cafeteria, hanging outside during lunchtime, and then, if you’re really, really crazy, walking up the street afterschool to the harris-teeter to go get a free sugar cookie.

i have been informed that this sort of activity is not for her at the present time. i am, in short, relieved.

middle school is like a cauldron of sturm und drang. i continue to share with her my tales of my time in hell, where the boys ran around and snapped your bra straps without anyone screaming sexual harassment and where having glasses and/or braces was pretty much a sentence into your own private gulag for a few years. mercifully, the latter seems to not be in play anymore, but it is still a rocky, rocky time. her tales sometimes are so cringeworthy; they remind me of times i didn’t particularly enjoy. and yet, i hope i continue to hear her tales, no matter how graphic, gory, or gross.

for as she crosses the street toward adulthood, it’s sometimes a good idea to continue to hold hands while in the middle of the road. at least, for now.

guilty pleasure monday: incense and peppermints (strawberry alarm clock)

Posted on March 21, 2011March 21, 2011 by wrekehavoc

because you just never know where your inspiration will come from…

so yesterday was purim. purim, to me, is the very best jewish holiday going. chanukah gets more press because here in america, it has ended up in a tit-for-tat with christmas. american jews run to the shops to buy altogether too many things for their offspring, because G-d forbid jeremy or sarah feels left out of the gift-giving frenzy. oy veis mer.

but purim? hands down, it rocks.

i sometimes call purim the jewish mardi gras. (well, only in my little bear brain, of course: obviously, it has nothing at all to do with the tale behind mardi gras, but it’s almost as much fun.) sure, you have to sit through the reading of the book of esther (the megillah, as in the whole megillah fame. not to be confused with the gorilla of a similar sounding name.) but every time the evil haman is named in the story, you are encouraged to make boatloads of noise (vuvuzelas, anybody?) to blot out the sound of he who should not be named, one of the bigger villains who wanted to kill all the jews. (sadly, this appears to be a recurrent theme in our cultural history.) it’s literally the only time i let my kids yell boo in public (though in all fairness, i haven’t yet taken them to a yankees game.)

you’re also supposed to get seriously wasted on this holiday:

A person is obligated to drink on Purim until he does not know the difference between “cursed be Haman” and “blessed be Mordechai”

honestly, as a mom and as a person of a certain age, i don’t really ever get to do this. and i still didn’t get to do this. but it’s nice to know in the back of my mind that i’m supposed to do this on this one-time-only basis each year.

i did, however, eat my weight in hamentashen this year, the three-sided cookie that we red sea pedestrians eat as a traditional holiday treat. old skool ashkenazi jews like to eat them with poppy, prune, or apricot filling. bleh. over the years, though, i have enjoyed more and more delightful fillings, like cherry, chocolate, and basically anything not poppy or prune oriented. i mean, imagine if you did get drunk AND you had eaten a lot of prune-filled delights? i shudder to think.

so what the hell does this have to do with a psychedelic hit, you might ask? (well, besides the being wasted part of things.)

many synagogues put together a purim carnival for the children. ours was no exception — lots of games and a moonbounce for the kiddies to enjoy. BC missed the entire thing because of a prior girl scout commitment (and BOY, was she mad.) but jools? he had the time of his life. he played all sorts of carnival games, winning tickets to earn small prizes. that being said, his eye was on a particular prize — candy. he loaded up on a lot of hershey kisses and miniatures.

but then, he went up to a friend of mine, who was running the prize area, and he was counting his tickets. how many do you have? she asked him. he continued to count.

i’m trying to see whether i have enough tickets. i want to get a peppermint patty for my sister. she loves them. i want to get one for my dad, too.

bless my friend’s heart. thinking of your sister and your dad is a mitzvah. you can have one for each of them, no tickets required.

i am always incredibly grateful when a child does the right thing and an adult reinforces the message. it really does take a village to raise a a child, and moments like these, i’m so glad to find like-minded people in my little village of sorts. it’s magical, it’s meaningful.

and, like incense and peppermints, it’s so sweet.

discovering japan

Posted on March 16, 2011March 16, 2011 by wrekehavoc

or, in truth, rediscovering it.

years ago when i was working for the world’s then-largest online service, i had the privilege of working in the international division. our company had joint ventures in several nations (and launched still others while i was on staff.) i had been restructured from my other position in the company, and i was exceptionally grateful for the opportunity to continue contributing toward the company in this young division. somewhere along the line, i believe i was told that my job was essentially paid for by our joint venture with japan, which of course made me especially grateful and sensitive to those folks out in a wildly-different time zone.

and it really wasn’t easy working as a product manager in this realm, to be sure. our US counterparts regularly ignored our requests for products and actually belittled us to our faces. they were the 1000-pound gorilla to our small but feisty group. to fight the gorilla, we often had to resort to guerilla product marketing/management tactics in order to serve our clients. hell, my then-boss (and beloved BFF) and i did not have a computer on which to load the japanese software — you needed to have a japanese operating system in order to use the japanese software. so we did what any two enterprising girls would do — we somehow located a forgotten computer through our snooping, er, research methods, liberated it stealthily, and brought it into my office, where we loaded the software. it seems silly now — we needed that machine in order to test our products and see how things worked. but as the rodney dangerfields of the company, we just didn’t get any respect.

(no respect, i should add, save for one US product manager, who to this day is my friend and who actually worked to help us, probably to his occupational detriment. imagine that — we all worked for the same company, and he took it to heart to mean that we should work together. what a revolutionary idea!)

i ascertained so many nuanced things from my interactions with my japanese counterparts. it wasn’t always easy being on conference calls either very early in the morning or late at night; (i’m sure it wasn’t easy for them, either!) i learned, for example, that just because someone there says yes to you does not necessarily mean that he or she is agreeing with you; rather, it just means that you’ve been heard. i’ve since learned to truly pay attention to people when i’m interacting with them; there’s more going on there than one might expect.

anyway, i loved working with all the folks overseas; i hope they realize that we really tried our very best for them against some absurd conditions. i continue to be pals with some of my UK, canadian, and japanese counterparts. and i’m worry about my friends in japan. sure, they’re mostly in tokyo — but the tales of the city closed up, with no food on the shelves and aftershocks and radiation makes me want to go and airlift everyone out of all of the affected areas. we’ve already given money, but the helplessness i feel all of the way around the world makes me cry daily. i want to do more. i want to help more. i want to somehow make the world safer for them and for everyone.

and i want them to know how amazed i am by what i see, how astounded all of us in america are. i see a nation of very courageous people who are just doing the best they can under horrific circumstances. there are super-heroics going on at the nuclear plants, where people are risking their very lives in order to save their countrymen and the world. i am awe-struck. would people be like that here under such conditions? i don’t know, but i hope so.

but i hope people in japan know that people in america are with them. for the people of japan are surely in our hearts.