What We Saw Today

A troupe of Morris dancers.

Three brides.

A pair of 11-day-old twins.

Eight ducklings.

Two bagpipers.

DUUUUUUDE!

Watching the NESN anchors watch the Fenway fans watch the end of the New York-Baltimore game on the scoreboard: surreal.

Winning the division: priceless.

Hilary Duff's Decolletage

Hilary Duff's boobs are totally bumming me out here, both aesthetically and conceptually (the aesthetic should be obvious, if your vision hasn't been totally deformed by porn, and the conceptual is the fact that a quite adorable starlet who is not even 20 feels that she needs to get implants).

I know two teenagers, both 18, I think, who have the most remarkable breasts. R's are quite huge, with cleavage to bury yourself in, and she parades them majestically upon her chest in the skimpiest of tank tops. A's are mid-sized, on the small end, and perky, kind of pyramidal. They are punk-hippie girls (yes, in 2007, that locution is possible) who wouldn't dream of implants. I wish I could feature them in a public interest campaign: Real Is Better (RIB, for short). Or perhaps Bring Out Our Breasts, or Believe: Ourselves, Our Breasts (you can do the acronym yourself).

[Despite blog appearances to the contrary, I am actually getting a lot done this morning. I'm just rewarding myself with breaks for my favorite mainstream press outlets.]

Edited to add: Sorry, the link's messed up, and I can't seem to fix it, but you can get the gist from the text (just imagine grapefruits at about the collarbone level).

Blackwater

Paul Krugman is spot on today too. (And I'm liking his new blog , even though for some reason I can't find it right now??? Hello? NYTimes website design team? You have some work to do.)

Capitalism, people, the problem is unbridled capitalism (under which I lump privatization, consumerism, class warfare--indeed, we might say that Kid Nation and Blackwater emblematize the sorry state we've [long since] arrived at.)

Kid Nation

Haven't watched it. Don't plan to. But Ellen Goodman waxes thoughtful and convincing on it here. I know we lost Molly Ivins, but with Ellen Goodman and Katha Pollitt, we're still holding on.

I'll Take a Week by Myself in the Maldives Now

S has had two days off since we returned from our vacation September 4. One of those was Yom Kippur (he worked the morning of Erev Rosh Hashanah and the evening of Rosh Hashanah). In addition, he has had a small handful of evenings off. Maybe four. I think he's been averaging 80 hour weeks (that's cross-referencing the 85 hour weeks with the weeks when he gets an evening or two, or even a day, off).

Here are some things I have done on my own:

- at least 20 bedtimes

- approximately 20 lice combings

- visits with his parents, my parents, and my sister

- two soccer practices and a half dozen swim practices

- a lot of homework supervision

- opening day parent meeting at Hebrew School

- two meet-the-new-principal meetings

- two school open houses

- I'd say 90% of the shopping (food, cleats, goggles and swim caps, etc.), laundry (including multiple loads of potentially lice-infected sheets and towels), cleaning (100% on that), and cooking (not so much)

- almost all of the cranky child coping

I'm really kind of over this. As Mary Poppins says (in one of our favorite quotes), "Patience falling, tempers rising."

(On the positive side: M and E are getting along well, for the most part, and I can leave them alone when I need to, which makes logistics easier than they used to be.)

Me

Recently someone I apparently used to know wrote about me (real me, not blog me) pretty harshly on her blog. In essence, she said I was a racist Mean Girl, and she hoped I hadn't grown up to be a Queen Bee Mom (implying, of course, that I probably had). I have no idea who this person is. A few candidates have been identified and exonerated, to my great relief, so I'm guessing it's someone I didn't really know. And given the circumstances and the company I kept back then, I can totally imagine why she would have thought I was a racist Mean Girl.

Of course, I prefer not to think of myself as a racist Mean Girl, but I am strangely undisturbed by her post. OK, honesty: I'm disturbed enough that I've got my friends trying to figure out who she is, and I'm writing this blog post, but I am not the devastated weeping wreck I might have been, say, 15 years ago when this person seems to have known me. I have no urge to call her out and tell her that I Am Not Mean, and Some Of My Best Friends Are Black, and if she'd seen me at the meeting I went to this morning, she would know that I'm the Good Kind of White Liberal.

I think I've come to accept, really just in the last few years, that I am who I am. Most people who meet me think I'm funny, smart, energetic, effective, occasionally moody, and perhaps a bit too outspoken. A few people who meet me think I'm an arrogant bitch. And, you know what? Those are basically two sides of the same coin: me, depending on your perspective. You know what else? Most of the people who don't like me? I don't like them either. In fact, I can't think of anyone I really like who dislikes me--now that might still leave me a devastated weeping wreck--which suggests that I am fully capable of being nice.

As for the racist thing? I try, I try my best. I get it a lot, and sometimes I don't get it, and I'm willing to be called out, but the fact is, if you're a liberal white woman trying to do some good, you're going to get called racist, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad.

I always try to be the best version of myself, I don't always succeed, and that's all I can do.

My Glamorous Life

Tonight S and the governor are dishing up the restaurant's specialties at a benefit that teams local celebrities with the chefs of their favorite restaurants.

Oh wait, that's S's glamorous life.

I'm taking E to swim practice and going to the middle school open house. Yeah, baby.

Jennifer Garner

So I'm one of those people who likes to think Jennifer Garner is One Of Us. I mean, come on, she's married to Ben! (The post-J Lo, back-to-his-roots Ben!) And she shops at the Farmer's Market! In jeans and a t-shirt! She has that cute little girl, and she takes her to the playground, and she goes to Fenway Park (OK, that's Ben's influence, but she looks like she's having a good time).

I mean, she seems like the antithesis of, say, Tom and Katie, with their endless courting of the paparazzi.

Except then I start to wonder. Actually, I started to wonder a while ago. I was thinking about playground pictures. Denise Richards's playground pictures are obviously staged so as to garner [sic] maximum publicity. Denise poses; Jen plays. But if she didn't want the attention, don't you think she could play at home?

Then this evening I saw her in a Neutrogena commercial. Does she need the money? Or does she just want the publicity? Neutrogena: clean, classy: the Jen image.

But is it all just an image?

The Hegemony of the Testing Establishment

In nine years (cumulative) of public schooling, we have been, for the most part, highly satisfied. The caveat to this satisfaction is that we have bright, compliant children who love school and their teachers and do well on tests. So satisfying them, and by extension us, is not that difficult. But we have been lucky to have five fabulous principals and only one dud teacher. Sure the girls are occasionally bored or annoyed, but I don't have a problem with that: sometimes life is boring and annoying, and learning to stick your nose in your book and ignore it is an excellent skill (one I've certainly mastered).

I occasionally peep over the fence at the creative, integrated, child-centered curricula at the private schools where people I know teach and send their children, and I worry that I am depriving my kids of the kind of education I believe in, but, you know, they've done lots of cool stuff too: built a doghouse for a Habitat for Humanity House, written long stories about trips to London and New York, planted seeds, taste-tested apples, built beach dioramas and put on a play about tidepools and gone on a field trip to the beach, played Bingo in Latin, surveyed their classmates about who likes ice cream and who doesn't. Fun stuff.

Sometimes, though, I am reminded that I have signed my children up for a dozen years of testing, to little real account, and it makes me crazy. Today was one of those days. E's math homework was absolutely appropriate: which dog has more spots than the dog in the doghouse, continue the pattern, which picture has five crayons. Except that at the top of some of the problems it said "test prep," and the kids had to identify which answer was correct by coloring in the little circle (A, B, C, or D) under the answer. I had to explain to E that this was what she was supposed to do. M's spelling homework included analogies. Analogies? Help you learn to spell how? Oh yeah, they don't, they just teach you to take the SAT, and prove nothing at all about your intelligence except that you can do analogies.

Makes me crazy, I tell you.

I Knew It!

All we need is Manny. And Youk, don't forget Youk.

S is right. Dan Shaughnessy truly does hate the Red Sox. You don't write sentences like the opening of the third-to-last paragraph. You just don't do it.

You can say 3, though. Can you say 3?

Forget Brooklyn

Oh, hooray, an excuse not to read all those books I feel guilty about not reading--you know, the ones by all those Jonathans and all them. (I know, must read Jonathan Lethem...someday.) (The reason I trust this guy is his take on The Lovely Bones which I could not even read, though I tried, and which I simply could not believe was such a bestseller. And though I did love A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his critique is spot-on.) (I suspect he kind of loved it too, despite said critique.)

How to anow yore alder sister

(By E.)

1. Do not do what yore sister says.

2. be a brat.

3. Lie in yore sisters bed.

4. Get her relly agre so she hits you and gos to her room.

5. buy somthing with yoer own money that she wanted to buy with her own money and do not let her play with it.

6. Steel yoer sisters cloth.

Editor's note: Each of these tactics has been tested in our home laboratory. Indeed, this list was written on the yardsale whiteboard that is the subject of #5.

I can't tell you how happy I am

that the Yankees lost this afternoon.

It's going to be a long week.

In case you're counting, the number is 5.

Notting Hell

Lately it seems that just about the only topics of conversation amongst the 30/40something privileged parent set (which would be my set) are kids (corollary: schools), real estate, and infidelity. Notting Hell proves the point (though the point might need to be revised to feature the ULTRA-privileged, which is certainly not my set).

When I first saw notices about Notting Hell, I swore I wouldn't read it. I've given up mommy lit, right? Especially cute marketing mommy lit. But there it was on the shelf in the library, and before I knew it I was reading it, and then a day and a half later I'd finished it, and, you know, a few days later, I'm still thinking about it, which means...well, I'm not sure what it means, except that it's worth a blog post.

So Notting Hell is about super-rich yummy mummies who live on a communal garden in Notting Hill. They get all worked up about the super-rich Americans rebuilding their garage, they have affairs, and one of them tries to get pregnant. They also go out to lunch, do yoga, talk about feng shui, and enjoy (or pretend to enjoy) various annual communal garden events (member meeting, sports day, bonfire night). It's not the best-written book on the block, but, honestly, while I noticed the awkward sentences, I didn't really care--it's just not that kind of book. It also uses commodities as a shorthand for characterization, but, again, I didn't really care--it was just that kind of book. What kind of book? Trashy, eminently readable, all in all quite fun.

The chapters alternate between the first-person narratives of Clare (wealthy, uptight garden designer trying to get pregnant) and Mimi (poorest person on the garden, chaotic freelance writer and mother of three, including eleven- and six-year-old girls whom M became quite entranced by after I read her some funny passages--she kept asking me whether there was anything new about Mirabel and Posy). One thing that was strikingly skillful about the writing was that you got quite different senses of Clare and Mimi in each of the narratives, that is, from their self-presentations and the way they talk about each other, yet both those senses make sense--i.e. the book nicely shows the gaps between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

One thing that was strikingly odd about the book was that it went along in quite a jolly way with some angst but little heavy morality--and then all of a sudden, CRASH, Mimi is heavily punished, by her husband who has been the most easy-going of the bunch. Part of the goal, I assume is to make her husband, who doesn't care about the status obsessions of Notting Hill, a hero figure, that is, to turn farce into social critique. Except that her husband is aloof from the status obsessions of Notting Hill because he is old money (i.e. we're not talking Marxism). When Mimi and her family move to the country, all their problems are solved (i.e. the status-conscious materialism of Notting Hill was the problem? and punishment is really reward?) except that Mimi still describes everything she owns in name brands (satire? it's all just the same and punishment and reward are irrelevant concepts?). In other words, the book ends with some heavy narrative incoherence (or maybe it's coherence of a higher order?), but, you know, that's OK too.

As for those name brands and name drops, which are the novel's dominant motif: it was absolutely blatant how they function as a construct for reader identification. The book does include a glossary in the back (I wonder if the British edition has one too) which identifies all the shops and code words of yummy mummy Notting Hill life, but clearly the book's intended audience--or at least one intended audience--is those who can nod knowingly when Clare puts on her forget-what-they're-called boots or Mimi lunches at the E&O. And I, of course, totally fall for it, because I know what Agent Provacateur is! And I've been to that bakery! And aren't I lucky that even though I'm not a Notting Hill yummy mummy, I can read books about them! Ah, fiction...

So yes, though I'm sure it wasn't the author's intention, Notting Hell made me think about how fiction works, and I always like that.

[Sadly, I just had to give up on a new book by an author whose last novel I quite loved. In this one the main character is predictably unidimensional (i.e. the plot will obviously be generated by the need to make her multi-dimensional), and the bad use of pronouns and proper nouns is just too annoying to get past. The narration is third person limited (I think that's what it's called--I should know what it's called!--when it is third person but from the point of view and inside the thoughts of a single character), and the story totally focuses on the heroine, so it would be OK to use "she" most of the time, but instead the author keeps sticking in her name, including in the middle of quite short paragraphs that have begun with her name and continued to be about her. It just drove me crazy. I suppose you could say that this novel also made me think about fiction, and it certainly has a higher purpose than Notting Hell, with lots of big concepts like forgiveness and love, as well as politics, but...either I am once again proving myself a thoroughly superficial person in my fiction predilections, or Notting Hell is good at what it does, and this other book just isn't.]

[Edited to add: Oh dear, maybe I should have stuck with the abandoned book longer. But it's too late now, already returned it, and the review isn't compelling enough to make me want to take it out again...but I do feel bad now.]

Newspaper Reading

This Modern Love essay did little for me overall, but I loved the part where she woke up her sister:

It was late, but I called my sister anyway, letting the phone ring until I woke her. “Hello?” she breathed.

“Turn on your computer,” I said. After I directed her to his page, we sat there in silence, our phones pressed up against our ears, our breathing uneven.

“Oh, my God,” my sister said.

“Oh, my God,” I agreed.

My sister and I would so totally do that.

Here's a horrifying piece everyone should read. As I've said many times, sometimes I feel like I just live my tiny little life in total denial of what's going on around us.

And if you want horrifying in a tiny little way, here you go. I spent yesterday afternoon on the sidelines of a soccer field covered with six year olds. I can't even imagine.

Most Excellent Bumper Sticker Spotted on My Morning Run

Where are we going?
And what am I doing in this handbasket?

(It was a perfect morning for a run--just a nip of chill in the air, the river and pond were glassy still--and I felt perfectly in tune with my legs.)

In Which I Am An Unrepentant Feminist

I pretend to understand when women get married and change their names--of course you want to share your children's names, sure it's easier, how nice of you to want to make your husband happy--but really I don't. On a certain level I don't care--I have remained friends with many women, most of them younger than me, who have changed their names--and the power of my aesthetics over my politics is visible in the fact that the one good reason I can see for changing your name is hating the original name and delighting in an excuse to jettison it. Bottom line, though: if you are of my fortysomething mom cohort, and your parents did not bestow upon you a moniker like Turdimsprezechelheimer and you have changed your name, I not only don't get it, but I will always feel like there is a fundamental difference between us. And, you know, there usually is.

In No Longer Red State Capital City Suburb, there was me and J and J and L and Dawn and a few women I worked with, and that was pretty much it for original name holders. All the neighborhood moms had taken their husband's names, as did all the younger women we knew who got married. And J, J, L, Dawn, and the women I worked with? Smart, older feminists, who got what I was saying. The other women? Nice women whom I liked a lot and was happy to hang out with, but from whom I felt, fundamentally, different.

And this is one of the many reasons I feel at home in East Coast Big City. I think I can say that virtually every fortysomething mom I know has kept her name. Some of them have even--how anachronistic!--hyphenated their children's names. And we are not even the only family who has given their kids the mother's name. (In fact, one of the few truly annoying moms in my circles: has her husband's name. Though, now that I think of it, to counter that, one of the nicest moms I know has her husband's name--but she's also in her mid/late 50s.) These moms? I like them, I'm happy to hang out with them, and they get what I'm saying.

So, yes: job, house, and financial travails aside, I'm still glad we moved.

(This post was inspired by receiving the Hebrew school directory and noticing that the parents have different names in just about all the Town families--which is not the case for the families from Fancy Republican Town Next Door--and then going on a Yom Kippur hike with a bunch of neighborhood families and attending a break fast with a bunch of 6th/1st grade families, all of which families had moms who kept their names, all of whom I quite adore.) (J, I wish you had been there!)

Edited to add: I'm totally down with both members of a couple changing their names! (See Jackie's comment below.)

I've Fallen In Love

With a shoe. That I can't afford. And probably don't need, though I kind of do. I mean, I don't need that particular ridiculously expensive shoe, but I could definitely use a shoe (actually two) to wear to work. If I had work.

As M would say, with great dramatic effect, "It's traaaagic!"

We Didn't Have a Name for It Then

A long time ago, my sister and I arrived in Amsterdam the night before New Year's Eve. We had thought we would easily find a hostel or cheap hotel--in fact, I think we just planned to stay at Bob's--but no go. People laughed in our faces. No reservation the night before New Year's Eve? Forget it!

We stood in the square outside the train station, wondering what to do. If worst came to worst, we could always spend the night in the train station, we figured, and then go back the next day to England, where my sister had a cozy dorm room (we slept head to toe in her very narrow bed, and cooked in the communal kitchen where everyone had their own shelf with their own national food).

Then I saw a man with a big backpack emerge from the station and walk purposefully across the square. I figured he had a place to go, so I went up and asked him if he could suggest a place to stay. It turned out that he was not the tourist I'd mistaken him for, but an Amsterdamian returning from a chess tournament. He, too, scoffed at the idea of finding a place to stay the night before New Year's Eve, but he followed his scoff by inviting us to come stay with him until we did find something.

Somehow the chess tournament made him seem safe. Plus, it was a long time ago and we were young. Truly, we hesitated barely a moment before accepting his offer.

He lived in a squat in an abandoned hospital. A bunch of young people had taken it over, and by then it was a fairly reputable squat that also housed a youth center and an organization that sent bicycles to El Salvador, among other things. His flat was an old operating room with 20-foot ceilings, tall windows, and granite ledges. He slept in a loft and my sister and I slept on the couches. He loved Siouxsie and the Banshees.

He insisted that we could stay with him as long as we wanted, but we did try to find another place the next day, New Year's Eve, and then we gave up. That night his friends invited us to a vegetarian New Year's Eve dinner--I think he had a date--and we ate the traditional New Year's Eve olliebollen with them, and then went out into the streets where people set off fireworks all night long.

I think we stayed there, in the hospital squat, for almost a week, visiting the Van Gogh museum and the Anne Frank house during the day and falling asleep at night to the sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I meant to send him some bootlegs when I got back to London, but I never did. It's one of the things I regret.

This NY Times article on couch surfing made me think of that time. Our experience certainly proves their philosophy, and yet there's something to be said for unorganized serendipity.

[Go ahead, click on that Times link, whenever you're reading this post, and say "so long" to Times Select!]