la femme follette

pulsing

For dinner tonight I made the lentil salad from stupid June's issue of House Beautiful.

It was ok.  Fille & I had it each on a bed of romaine with a poached egg.  My son doesn't eat eggs. 

I had tea with Eve yesterday; she was somewhat harried & distractable.  The 4 of us traveled to The New Barnes on Monday & it is everything every other reviewer says it is:  lighted (also, somehow more distressingly full of screaming children, idk).  Sunday Fifille & I had a restful, provincial-NYC visit; it was lovely.

It had been years since I'd had such a small radius on a NYC run:  We came into Penn Station in the late morning to saunter over to show for our brunch reservations at Cookshop; the ballet was at The Joyce, which was 2 more blocks downtown, back over on Eighth Ave.  The company was Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet -- they were so fantastic.  On our way back to Penn Station, we stopped to avail ourselves of 30 minutes of reflexology -- which isn't actually as good as it sounds once you work out it is only 15 minutes per foot -- and we were home by 9. 

It was really great.  Now the pool club is up + running every day & nothing gets done.  I swim a million yards while the kids goof around, mostly so I don't have to talk to anyone about anything.  If you'd like to reach me, leave me alone.  Goes double for you.  Yes, you.

mat party

Lilies are just obscene. Honestly.

I don't care for them at all & am curious how I wound up buying a big bouquet of Stargazers. I think it was because they were paired with irises. Also, because the smell of lilies was pervasive in the shop & I wanted a cut flower that smelled. Well, these have opened since then & indeed!

In advance of Mothers' Day, Fifille went to Mari, seeking his assistance in making [some kind of fancy, idk] dinner for me.  Mari told me that he got down to her eye-level and told her, "That's very nice, honey, but Femme doesn't want that.  Femme wants a day where she doesn't have to talk and everyone does their chores."

Best husband.  Yes.

We were sitting at the table Sunday morning, he & I.  My departure was imminent, but I was enjoying my second cup of tea and paging through The New Yorker, looking at cartoons.  Mari was poking desultorily at a piece of toast with jam and asking questions about cartoons that looked interesting.  First, Garçon came in to ask me if he could make [some kind of unusual] porridge for breakfast.  I said, "I don't care what you do, I'm leaving."

A minute later, Fille came in to ask me if she could have fig preserves in her yogurt.  I told her the same as I told her brother.

I looked at Mari, who was just sitting there.  "Do they not see their other parent, right here?  This is why there is a day, honey!  A whole day!  Good-bye!"

I went to the sauna, which, ok, I got a little ahead of myself on the calendar, sauna-wise.  I was just there Thursday because the forecast for the weekend was in the 80s, and I did not want to get involved in a whole sweaty Betty kind of a thing.  But, I got hung up on Thursday morning, returning emails and texting and doing laundry, so I did not get there as early as I wanted to do everything I wanted -- scrub, massage + general sybaritic wallowing -- there just was not time before I had to come back to the kids in the afternoon, so I had the scrub and the minimum pre-scrub wallowing required there.  Alors.

I decided to go back because I felt like Ideal Getaway Mothers' Day involved a massage and a nap, which, obviously there is only one place to go for that.  Throw in snacks and a lot of luxuriant bathing and good.  Great! 

When I got there at 11, the first massage opening was not until 4.  "Ok," I said. 

The dude was confused by my compliance, "But I meant four o'clock."

Now I was confused.  "You mean four o'clock today, right?"

Right, see?

I was so excited to have five hours yawning in front of me, to dawdle and paddle and rinse and mask and unmask and rinse and re-rinse and do whatever I wanted with no one to bother me!  Yes!  There are five freaking ways to take a shower there!  Yes!  So I spent the time in a comfortable circuit of, yk, scrubbing, steaming, scrubbing, saunaing, rinsing, steaming, scrubbing, rinsing, drying, then lying in the warm clay room while I waited to get antsy/thirsty.  Then I would put 0n my sauna-issue tunic and relax on the sofa, reading the January 2011 issue of Elle and sipping water and/or green tea.  Then I would lie in the hot-hot room, get all sweaty, and start again. 

I had a hunk of Ossau-Iraty in my bag with some almonds, and a stupid apple, which turned out to be good thinking when I decided I did not want to fool around navigating the co-ed area just to eat beef.   

I did not get into any of the pools/streams, because there were a lot of newbies there (so much confusion + confrontation about how there are not bathing suits allowed, people clutching towels to themselves in the wet room, like, ok), and I idly witnessed one gal take her completely inadequate pre-pool shower & I did not want to be anywhere in the range of her miasma. 

OK, I mean, maybe it is weird to be told there is nowhere to change and then find out you can't wear your bathing suit and then get to the room with the showering and find out there is nowhere to hang yr towel because the people in here are all naked and bathing and no one really expected you to clutch yr towel, you, along with your mothers and their sisters and your best friend, ok.  But clean yourself up.  Scrub it off.  Use soap!  There are at least 36 shower nozzles on three walls where you can point the spray anywhere you want.  There are 2 shower areas with spraying from every direction! Yes.  Also:  just be clean because God, ew. 

But for all that I am going on about it, it was ok, because I don't care about the pools anyway.  None of them are the right depth, and sitting on the bench is too shallow and sitting on the floor is too deep, so it's fine.  I do like the standing-around, freezing-cold waterfall pool, I did that a couple of times, but it was just standing knee-deep, not awash in someone else's effluvia, and anyhow, I never saw Miss DirtyPants in there.

I ran my wet room/resting/reading-snacking/sweating circuit about 5 times before it was time for my massage and I do not think there is anything better -- no greater proof of total relaxation! -- than dozing off intermittently on a massage table.  So, that was good, and then only thing that could have made it better was a wheelman, but still it was pretty great. 

I came home long past dinnertime to find both children spent the day cleaning their rooms and the kitchen was clean, and my husband was somehow showered, but still in his bathrobe, but he is a grownup and OK to that.  The kids watched that Christian movie about the shark attack on the surfer while Mari & I watched Underworld: Mike Ealey (terrible! but only 88 minutes, so whatever). 

Today I am making a form that children in this house must fill out and give to me whenever there is an argument with their sibling.  No unauthorized arguments!  Allez!

cap times

Have a still life.  I just thought these crazy old beans were pretty in the light.

 

Omg, this thing with my in-laws is so exhausting.  Nitter-natter, blibber-blab.  I wrote about it a long time ago, obliquely:  Why, why, WHY do you not change yr tune in the face of my music?  Um, what?  Are you even related to me?

Kowalski is after me, always, to remember that there are people in the world not nearly as hardened to the notion of eternal refusal as I, that they are not as shrewd in their calculations of a relationship's tensile strength.  I remind him, often, that I am fucking benevolent.  Because BENEVOLENCE IS FUCKING FUN.  Mostly because I can lord it over you ... and still.  Still! 

Man, anyhow.

 

We finally saw The Avengers last night.  I did not think it would be good, honestly, but was not going to resist it, because it actually could not be worse than Iron Man 2.  Not possible.  Every time, I would get a little cranky because I just thought, "Oooooh, it just will not be good," then I would remember Mark Ruffalo was playing Bruce Banner & then I would be filled with zeal.  ZEAL.

But I was right, in that what I thought was going to suck about it did: murky villain development (also right about Ruffalo as Banner).  Actually, it was a whole murky villain story, really.  When they are in Stuttgart, and the villain is acting up?  That villain should have spoken to all of those people in German and the movie should have had subtitles.  Because that would have been truly diabolical.  Instead, he was just shouting English commands to a bunch of gapers, and I was just sitting there, thinking, This guy isn't even from Earth.  Why's he so wedded to speaking English? Ok, whatever.

Ok, so, whatever.  Too sad that [redacted] had to [redacted].  He was one of my favorite characterizations from the Marvel film adaptations.  Mari says [redacted] isn't really [redacted], that he is totally going to be in Iron Man 3.  I hope so!

 

If you didn't know, The Avengers is, like, the world's most popular film, which is fine, but it puts pressure on a family of people who like just the just-right seats and are willing to get there to camp out a little, but then are thrust into a situation where everyone is getting there to camp.  The four of us were in position to get our seats about 40 minutes before the movie started -- Fifille was stationed outside of the theatre with Garçon, finishing her between-activities meal, and Mari & I gave the kids their tickets & told them to come in when she was done.

Mari got a phone call from work right as he put his hand on the lobby door to open it for me & I waited about 15 seconds before I pressed his ticket upon him and walked away to go find our seats.

I mean, honestly.  Focus!

 

I got to the door of the projection room screening the movie.  It was closed, and there was a gaggle of students in a huddle about 15 feet before it.  I stood there for a second before asking them what was going on.  They helplessly told me they were cleaning the theatre ("or something") and so that was what was going on.  I stood there for about another 15 seconds before walking past them all to go in.  As I made my way, there was shocked murmuring about my breach, which, whatever, but let's come back to that.  I made it into the theater, gingerly, tentatively, walking the corridor quietly.

The cleaning crew was there, cleaning, with their flip-down dustpans.  One of the gals sweetly told me they were still cleaning & that was why the door was closed.  I told her, also sweetly, a little conspiratorially, that I was sorry, that the people outside had told me so, "But they did not seem like credible sources." 

Then I started doing my thing, you know, the reason I am assigned any task, because of the mind control.  It went like this, after my regretful, confused pause in realizing the kids outside had been right in their information & I was, in fact, in the way:

Oh!  There is a scene after the credits!  And the woman in the ticket booth told me every show has been sold out!  Oh!  The turnover, must be so high-pressure!  No wonder you had the door closed! 

Bingo.

The response was deafening.  Then we chatted, sororally, you know, while they were working.  I was digging in my purse, looking for a piece of gum ("Gum, anyone?  Ladies?")  They were wrapping up, I was being encouraged to go on up & find the seats, I said, "No, no, I can totally wait until you are finished sweeping, I'm digging in my purse for my stupid phone anyway."

Then a guy came in & I had to enchant him, too, lest he ruin it.  I looked up from pawing through my bag & said to him, sure of his hero status, "Do you have a flashlight?  I lost my stupid phone in this giant bag. [blink-blink-blink]" 

Then I waited until I was positive they were finished, in fact, until they had forgotten I was there, and I said, "Are you lovelies all set now?" I was encouraged to avail myself, et voilà!  I was the first one in the theatre with a prodigious headstart!  Fine!  Accomplished, alors!  I have a very special skill-set, you know. (You know.)

The funny thing about this entire way-getting vignette, which I told Mari when he finally arrived (after even our children! Work calls!), was that as I was bustling past the hallway-students, and they were murmuring, quoth one, as I wrapped my hand around the door handle, "She's just like my mother."

I turned to face them and said, with the kind of great satisfaction that I find is usually attended by some kind of button-pushing, That is because I am old enough to be your mother.

Which was great, and satisfying, really, but then dampened a little while I was digging through my bag by the realization that the edict was probably a teeny bit muted by them not realizing the absolute mathematical truth in my statement.  So maybe they thought I was just slagging on them for being pretend-babies, in that OH I'M SO MATURE AND YOU ARE SO YOUNG way, but no, really:  I am old enough to be any of their moms.  Their mothers are probably 15 years older than me anyhow.  I wrote about that once, too.  Oh, Ivy Leagues! 

 

When the previews started, I was served a heaping helping of crow, which was extremely satisfying for Mari, if you remember this. 

I could not shut up!  Whispering, Is this a dream?  It's a dream, isn't it?  Are they dreaming about dreaming?  [There was a football field, in some kind of distress]  That is totally a dream, I hissed.  [Another prosaic scene was exploding in some kind of chaos.] Dream!  [Joseph Gordon-Levitt showed his mug] Ooh, that guy dreams about dreams, honey, it is!  Then, JGL has a tense exchange with Anne Hathaway, after which editing cuts sharply to Christian Bale, darkly endangered.

 

I snapped to the same, rapt-yet-somehow-penitent attention he did on that long-ago day.  Oh, marriage!  This is why we have you!  xoxox

 

still, life.

We went back, Friday night, to the museum to take in the van Gogh exhibit, and frankly, should have just gotten a room since the weekend was busy-busy bridge-crossy full of cultural events.  Alors.

Eve accompanied us to the exhibit.  It was nice to see her and everyone played together nicely.  The museum was open until the unthinkable hour of midnight, because the people of the mid-Atlantic region need to see van Gogh, and honestly, my pert complaining about their refusal to accomodate notwithstanding, there are no museums I can think of readily that just grin & bear it with 2nd-shift hours in the waning days of an exciting tour.

It was a nice representation of the work in the period bounded by 1886-1890, roughly chaptered into: Paris; The Wheatfield Era; Clumps of Grass; Sous Bois; Radical Still Lifes. The audio-tour's exegesis used a lot of van Gogh's correspondence, which was very interesting -- he is rarely portrayed as being sociable or having a successful relationship with anyone but his brother.

In the outset, a museum guard was after me to tell me that I could not have my cell phone out during the exhibit, as there were no photos allowed.  I knew there were no photos allowed, which is why I was using the MemoPad function on Mari's camera-less BlackBerry, which I switched with him because my BlackBerry is outfitted with all kinds of recording devices.  I gaily showed her how my phone had no camera and pointed to the notes I was taking on the screen. 

 

I took this photo during Wednesday's general admission in the regular galleries, where photography is, in fact, allowed.  This is extremely representative of what was in the exhibit; also, paintings here & here.

Still Life with a Bouquet of Daisies, 1886.  Oil on paper, mounted on wood.  Vincent van Gogh.  Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Charlotte Dorrance Wright.

 

"I am just using it to take notes," I said. reassuringly, sympathetic to her rigor.  "It is the 21stc, so I tend not to have pen & paper."

She was sympathetic to me, but insisted I put it away.  I asked her, coyly, "Do you have a pen?"  Because I did have a Moleskine, but I did not have a pen.  She told me then that there were to be no cameras, no cell phones, and no pens or paper in the exhibit.  Um, ok, whatever then.  I mean, right?  We had entered the zone of OK now you're just making shit up to be on a power trip.  I mean, honestly.  I got a pen from Mari and took notes on paper freely through the remaining galleries with no trouble at all.  But be warned, because the ubiquitous cell phone has ruined things for compulsive note-takers all over.  I did have similar dust-up at the National Gallery's Gauguin exhibit last summer, though they backed off (reluctantly) when I showed them there was no camera.

Anyhow.  The curation was tremendous; it seemed as if the narrative around which they collected pieces was to put aside this idea -- widely promulgated -- that van Gogh was just a wild maniac who flailed in desperation at the end.  The exhibit ended on a really optimistic note, with this painting, which I had never seen, nor heard the story behind.  Until then, I'd had no idea van Gogh ever experienced even one single moment of joy in his adult life, none of the five of us had (3 of us adults, 1 with a baccalaureate in art history), so that was a really high note to end on, we all agreed.

Again, Garçon was somehow listless & self-indulgent + amiable & civilized, at once.  The same as the time immediately preceding this trip, I let it go.  Just, yk, Whatever, child.  I don't care about you.  Shhhhh.  And all was well.

Things are fine, really.  I read this book a couple of months ago, called Unhappy Teens.  The reason I read it, mostly, was because it was written by a goddamn M.D., not some Ph.D. pretending to have some vast clinical experience, which (as we have seen), means only as much as you are willing to let it affect you.  Also, my care & keeping of a teenager was imminent. The primary thrust of this book was to say this:  By the time your child is a teenager, they know what you expect.  Shut up about it.  They know it.  Every time you talk about the thing, you make it into a thing.  Let the thing go & watch the thing happen. 

Ok, so I have to say that there has been -- in all the years leading up to this one -- no lack of exposition in our parenting.  There is a lot of transparency in our work.  So I think that my child, even more than the mean, is well-equipped to know what the expectations are.  Then when he was 13, yk, I said, Fuck it, good, he can do it himself, I have done all I can.  So that is going pretty well.  Sometimes he tries to get in my face, as is his way, and I just don't care about him.  It's like, "Are you still here?  Shh.  I don't care about you.  I'm reading The New Yorker, you're in my light." 

It is also somewhat helpful to have the maniacal , clusterfucking sideshow of last winter still ringing in our ears, so that when I have to, I can say, "You know, this is the kind of behavior that you have that when we report it makes professionals say that you belong in a mental hospital.  Do you need a rest in the mental hospital?  Think about it."  Because honestly, I do not have the time.

One hilariously adorable thing about him this last few weeks:  Annie Clark.  My son, who cares about nothing, I promise you, was genuinely moved by the accomplishments of little handless Annie Clark & her penmanship award.  Why, just last week, we were talking about Miss Annie Clark, by way of Marcel Duchamp & his poor, shattered Large Glass. 

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923.   Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels.  Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequest of Katherine S. Dreier.

As we sat right here, Garçon was totally dismissive of my musings that maybe Annie took her inspiration from Duchamp's spirit of persistence and ascribed to her v realistic, logical, laudable steps toward a goal, the sort of which I had no idea he even realized existed.  God bless you, Annie Clark.  Seriously. 

Anyhow.  I miss you, little weblog, come back to me!  xox

              

time can do so much

Due to a confluence of factors, there was reveille en fanfare this morning featuring a medley of The Righteous Brothers and a piano sorely in need of a tuner.  I have been thinking of Ghost ever since.  Ghost, right?  I forgot about that movie!  Holy crap!  But I was enjoined to participate in my own bloggy project et voilà, ok.

We traveled across the river today, since I was feeling better than I have in weeks, with the intention of seeing a major van Gogh exhibit in its final days.  We could not, because I do not pay attention to all of the discrete member mailings & emails from every museum we patronize like I should.  Had I, I would have realized that the Philadelphia Museum of Art treats its members like the general public when it comes to special exhibits with timed tickets.  The Phillips, The Barnes, MoMA, all give the green light to members to go on in at their convenience, whatever, thank you so much for yr fat checks, but not this one.   But whatever, we will endure the drive again & today, we took on general admission ... alors là.

You know,  we are show-goers -- we have to be, to make best use of membership fees and the way in which we can avail ourselves endlessly of our proximity -- and it has been such a long time since we have just loafed around a museum, loafing.  It was really great.  Even though Garçon was kind of inert during the excursion, it was fun.  I actually started to let it get to me & then I remembered this time & yk, even if he is ... Jesus Christ, you know what: it's enough to bring him to the water.  And he is 13, so I have to not care more than ever. 

But even a loafer's agenda needs a little direction.  I decided we should make our way to Étant Donnés, and honestly, I stand by my assessment -- who the hell would ever think to look for it in grimy old Philadelphia?

It is a long trip to the end of one of the wings.  Along the way, yk, plenty of the late 19th/early 20thc.  Fun.  Loafy!

The Large Bathers, 1884-87. Oil on canvas. Auguste Renoir. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Mr & Mrs Carroll S Tyson Jr Collection.

The Large Bathers is one of those canvases that draws me in every time we go here -- partly because of its location (location, location) in the corridors, but also because it is so replete with work and life.

Fifille mentioned today how you can see the girl underwater as you would in life.  Yes.  I mean, Jackson Pollack doesn't care about that kind of realism, but it is quite a thing. 

Cy Twombly would not care about it either.  I felt sad, today, knowing Twombly wasn't here in the world anymore. 

Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978. Parts 4, 5, and 6 of 10 parts. Oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas. Cy Twombly. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Samuel S White, III and Vera White. 

 

I was happy, in fact, to move into a room of Ellsworth Kelly canvases & remember he is very much alive.  Also, to send a quickie MMS to my pal Alex. 

Left to right:  Barge, 1955, oil on canvas; White and Black, 1955, oil on canvas (Collection of the artist); Study for Atlantic, 1956, oil on canvas, 2 joined panels (on loan from Jack Shear).  Ellsworth Kelly.  Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

Alex!  Speaking of you! 

Étant Donnés: 1. la chute d'eau, 2. le gaz d'éclairage ... , 1946-66. Mixed media assemblage. Marcel Duchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of The Cassandra Foundation.

This is, you know, when you look through the holes in the door! 

I remember last time we saw this, at the special Étant Donnés: Bits & Bobs exhibit: the security guard was all up in our grills about how we should not let our children see this part of it.  He was nearly hysterical and we were utterly nonplussed, plus all Thank you, but we heard you, now myob, ok?

I mean, isn't everyone's elementary-school kid readied for a weird kind of a mixed-media roadside womanslaughter display?  No?  Then go to more fucking museums already!  Sure! 

But please, please, let us get to what is really important.

Becky!

These are things which are for sale.  I promise you, if the salmon-colored creamer pitcher had been in this inventory, nothing would have stood between me and it.  Or, the turquoise sugar bowl, whichever.  As it was I had to pry myself away from it all.

I hope you are all happy. À bientôt!

 

if I had a hammer.

I flipped the calendar page this morning to see Fifille wrote this.  Adorbs!  High fives to homeschool! 

 
I think she has union gains confused with Gen 2:2.

 

I know, you're like, "Wait, no.  That's not how it goes, honey.  You are usually much more  OMIGOD YESSSSSSSSSSSS HIGH-FIVES TO ME I DID IT!!! than this."

 

Right, but I was like that in January.  We were at Sal's, sacked out in front of his teevee, watching October Sky.  Fille asked, "Why does Homer have to work in the mine?  His dad got hurt at work." 

Then Garçon told her, "Because his dad was management, [Fille], not union."   OMIGOD YESSSSSSSSSSSS HIGH-FIVES TO ME I DID IT!!!

 And don't you just always love Chris Cooper anyway?  Hearts!

Yeah, but high-fives to homeschool, mostly.  Garçon was doing a theatre class with a mixed-age group from 10-14.  He told me that the instructor asked the kids, "What makes a good story?"

Garçon said -- I don't know how many kids answered before him -- "Well, a good story needs conflict.  Your hero needs to overcome obstacles." 

So, first of all, when he told me this story, I thought, Get the fuck out of here!  This child has listened to something I have said?!?  Because that is a stock phrase from my mouth & you know it.  The second thing is, I guess, the instructor was like, WHOA, DUDE!  TOO FAST!  Which made me laugh, a little.

The three of us then started talking about basic narrative conflicts --  Man v Nature, Man v Man, Man v Himself -- I was asking them to name books they knew that used one of these conflicts.  But every time I would say, "Man against Man," or whatever, Fifille would pipe up in helpful concert.

"Or Woman against Woman, or Man.  Or Woman against Nature, or Woman against Herself," she would say, over & over, with some increasing amount of insistence. 

This went on for some time, her interrupting & pedantically revising, before I realized: She has no idea that we generalize with the masculine.  Whoa!  That was some kind of mind-erasing shit for me.  Breathe deep, Ophelia!  Twirl!

So that's mostly what we're up to here, yk, Commies, dismantling the patriarchy.  You have a great night.  xox

quiet endings

We had a graduation thing to go to today, for a workshop session Garçon has been in, lo, these 8 weeks.  There was a paper that came home to me -- how many people, what would I bring, etc.  There was a Sign-Up to Bring Checklist, and I got flustered by it, then forgot about it.  Later, Garçon told me he signed me up to bring crudités + fruit salad. 

I thought that was weird, since the list had choices on it like cookies, brownies ... cheese & crackers, things that people would surely bring that he could not eat in their most common variety but which I could sub with none the wiser.  But, whatever.  Also, fruit salad?  What?  Why?!  Chopping?  Nuts?  Peeling?  Melon??  Still April, fruit salad!

Garçon said, this morning, while I was puzzling around the Costco, "Maybe you should just make the one with the blueberries and the oranges."

I was pert when I reminded him he can not eat oranges.  He said, "Mom, it doesn't matter.  You make so many good foods that people enjoy eating, and I can always eat more of yr cooking."

Flatterer!  Scoundrel!  This comes right on the heels of my bittersweet realization that every year both children are allowed whatever it is they want to eat for supper on their birthdays, and they have never ever asked to go out to eat.  I mean, we go out to eat, and even for special occasions, but for their birthday dinner they always present me with a long, handwritten list of homecooked favorites to eat all at once.  (sweet!) This is another way in which they drain the life from me. (bitter!)

 
 

But the salad is dead easy, definitely in the Make & Take file.  I do not even remember from wherever this knowledge was transferred to me.  Pour one pint blueberries into a bowl, add 1 can drained mandarin oranges.  Sprinkle over a heavy snow of slivered almonds, toss.  Sprinkle with a haze of sugar, maybe a little lemon.  It doesn't hold up for a long time, but it is good while it lasts.  It makes a fantastic summertime dessert.  Or, potluck fruit salad in April.    À bientôt!   

earth day. rainy night.

I bought these earrings on Friday.  A dangly clump of seedy, little, freshwater pearls.

On Saturday, I wore them when we met up with some friends who came up northward of their usual NE Corridor position to take care of  some obligations in our tri-state area.  It was really, really nice to see them.  Because it is great to see old friends right in front of you in this oft-tiresome digital age. 

Mari pulled me aside while the lot of us were rambling around, paired-off, adults freed-up by the magic of school-aged kids being nerds together.  He lifted my hair on one side & said, "I really like these.  Are they new?"  And that was nice, too.

 

Let's catch up soon.  I'll make the big bed with a million extra pillows & we can lie around on top of it.  After we've gotten a good bit out of chatter out of the way, we can read from the big pile of April's fashion/design/home-and-garden magazines and/or have a snooze. BYOB. xo 

oh, a wiseguy!

Mari told me we were going to see The Three Stooges, sure, but that before the weekend was finished, I would see Wrath of the Titans. I could not believe his super-grouch insistence but whatever, yk, marriage.

Oh, he was driving us to the drive-in!  Surprises! The children did not remember ever having been to one, but Mari & I have not been to a drive-in since the kids were small enough to conk out in their carseats, which was a time that ended many, many years ago. 

When we were in Chicago, the kids had 115 channels to pick from & they were always watching the Stooges. I was so proud.

So most of us thoroughly enjoyed The Three Stooges, Mari saw Wrath of the Titans, and I went to sleep.  Fille & I just curled up together in the passenger seat & zzzzZzZzzzzzzzzzz.  Not at the outset, just after a while when it seemed like we could watch it better with our eyes closed. 

Everyone: happy!  Yk, marriage.  xox

snips + snails

 

My little baby is a teenager.

I don't even care about this kid anymore.  I don't care because he doesn't care. Garçon does not want to hear the benefit of anyone's life experience, and I am tired of being generous with the fruits of my labors.  I will keep my goodness to myself and good luck to him. 

Mari quails every time I have conveyed this to him, but I don't care about that, either.  You know what:  if he were a million other kids, he would be bar mitzvah this year.  The law says that [child] is then responsible for the fulfillment of 613 mitzvot without the nagging of the [father].  So, I am pretty fucking sure my actual kid can handle the fulfillment of the 12-15 chores on the 7-year-old chore chart without the nagging of his mother.  Let him be responsible for his own deeds & misdeeds.  Mari can use up his voice talking, talking, talking so that child can't hear any of it.  I am going to accept the things I can not change.  It's time.  It's acceptance!  It's supposed to be good, right?  Otherwise, they wouldn't say it in the serenity prayer.  Serenity now! 

This is the first day of the rest of my life.  13! 

when morning comes twice a day.

 

I was lying in bed this morning, before dawn, actually experiencing true anxiety about April 1st coming this weekend and my calendar guy here being on the previous month, and what is there to tread lightly around on April Fools' Day and what a day to avoid the whole internet, anyhow, right? Not as if there is anything to say, anyway. Except everything. Every day, there is something new for my head to swim around -- shootings, beatings, fires! -- and what is there to say anyway? Plus, so many have said so much about so many things, and there is nothing to add.

 

 

It's funny: I started shying away from my blog back in January mostly unintentionally -- there were some dirt-world happenings, events & goings-on which I wanted to document, but more abstractly than filing 15 or 18 inches because I did not want to reveal too much about us, in a geospherical way, to the whole wide world. The things which were happening were important, and specific, but I was waiting for my feelings to distill to their true generality in our life. (see: roman-fleuve if never you have.)

Because I never wrote them down, they started to be the things I was talking about, when people were calling to find out what they were. So in a way, for a little while, I lost my voice here because I was using it to whisper right into the ears of the people for whom I write.  During this time, something happened which was eminently bloggable, the actual stuff of this blog since time began. It was nothing, except to me it was everything. It was a precious little flame nurtured along from the speck of a hard-to-find ember that I had not realized was there. I was protecting it so it would blaze into something truly useful; it was a secret, it was private, I had not told Mari, I had spoken of it to no one, and actually I was not confident I had the language to express it as part of a dialogue, without it being accidentally blown out.

 

On the phone with the Israeli, just in a regular send-and-receive catch-up, I opened my mouth & breathed fire. There was no preamble, it was very matter-of-fact, and if I can mix the metaphors, I realized as I started speaking that this is a song we know by heart, he & I. 

So, that was weird. Just to me. I mean, if my husband doesn't know anything about me, he knows that I am secretive, and he doesn't care, but to me it was so strange -- it was emblematic of a thing that does not exist between us at all, so far away from who he knows me to be. It is like I have written before, during a snowy time, how I will think, "Oh, that is how I was," but in truth, this is who I am. But, really it was nothing. I mean, when I told the Israeli, there was no revelation implicit in it. It was like, "Well, of course you did, cookie."  The whole episode & its interplay chewed up tons of mental bandwidth -- the knowingness, the being known, at the same time there was no infrastructure for this part of me in my actual marriage, but oh, so with the guy Mari calls "my other husband" -- and I had to stay in the gym; it was bananas. 

 

February came. I rebelled against everything I know. One morning, I laid in bed, sulky & sullen, filled with resentment. Other people, I complained to myself, do not have to get up in the dark every morning to trip over roadkill and go to the gym and come back from the gym while it is still dark outside just to keep things on an even keel. They do whatever they want. They drink coffee! They eat Pop-Tarts! They never drink water! Well, I am going to go back to sleep!

 

Back to sleep turned into late-sleeping. Days and days in a row of sleeping until 7:30 or 8 and then sulkily indulging myself all morning in the tub. Scandalous morning-naps. This did not make things any better. In fact, as is reasonable to predict, it only made things darker and became a classic case of how people feel so good when they are doing the right things, they forget why those things had to be a habit in the first place.

 

 

Everything felt too hard and the simplest things were beyond my ability. For example, one day I had to go to the bank to withdraw a lot of money (in our cashless society!) to be able to pay our mechanic. Then I had to take public transit to pick up the car on the other side of the county. It was almost more than I could handle: the form-fillerism of dirt-world banking; the taking public transit on a route I had never run; plus the worry of having $1100 in real green cash on my person. Also, the children along with me, blabbering incessantly. But it was manageable. I had faith in myself! We were 25 feet from our house and I remembered I had the dollhouse rent checks back at the house, which I could take to the bank. I paused, and thought about it, but it made me feel like I had cartoon birds circling around my head, so we continued. 

Of course, I had to explain pitifully to Mari why I had not done something so easy. I had to make a second trip the next day to finish the work I could not manage the first. This led to more self-indulgent sleeping, instead of going to the gym. Everything remained too hard, sulking continued. The kids were fine, everyone was fed and things were cleaned, but ugh. Halfway between Charlie, I almost went crazy when Mario got busted and Ah, lunch! I think I am going crazy!

  

  

Then there was Lent and its Action, which had the effect of clarifying things, if nothing else. At the end of February, Mr Fox called to ask me about something. I was putting lunch on the table at the same time I was listening to him. He was not having it, the interruptions I was tolerating while he talked. I protested that I had to feed the children, think of the children! He asked what was for lunch, I told him (soup) & invited him over. He told me he would come over, but put a ban on multi-tasking.

What? Yes. He arrived and I was enjoined to sit in my seat and eat lunch. I would do one thing and that was eat, civilized, no going around, no filling glasses, no checking one more thing.

"It's exhausting to watch," he complained. "You're always doing, like, five things at a time." I mean, really. Exhausting to watch? Walk it off, dude! Every time I started to do a bunch of things at once, he redirected. There was a lot going on. There is a lot to do! But I never realized how many things I do at one time.

At the very end of February, its final days, a sequence of events ended with having some work done at the dollhouse. You know, the dollhouse that is not my project. But anyhow, it was 2 days of work. "Work," I mean, I was not replacing the HVAC system myself. I was on-site to answer questions, shape & guide, and write big checks. But it was like work in that it was an all-day endeavor and the dollhouse is income-generating, and a source that I tend to manage.

 

 

It was tedious, mostly, and for 2 days I had to scramble for dinner and had not seen the kids all day, but whatever just like a billion other going-to-work moms on the planet. On the first day of March, I had to get the kids up & fed & out the door to get to their dentist appointment on time. When we got there, precisely 10 minutes early and not-on-empty, I felt like Jonas Salk, Emperor Xerxes, and Jack LaLanne! At once! I was heroic! This job I do is hard! The way I do it is exhausting to watch! It isn't just that it feels too hard, there is a difficulty about it I have failed to respect!

 

 

 

Why is it -- this occurred to me for the very first time in this way -- that I don't take better care of myself and so eliminate long stretches of sulking in the tub every day? Or why do I not sulk in the tub more often, routinely? And I know, I know, you're like, "You don't eat garbage! You go to the gym! You drink a lot of water every day!" Yeah, ok, whatever. Eating like a bird and skipping meals and going to the gym for two hours before the sun comes up after sleeping for 6 is no way to take care of myself. We all need to remember that I have a complicated and dysfunctional relationship with appetites and stoicism and denial and self-discipline and wanting and self-restraint. For me, for years, I feel like not pouring in a fifth of whiskey and 2 packs of cigarettes and two liters of coffee is award-winning self-care. And it is, if you are a self-destructive personality like I am. But when you see things clearly, you can change.

 

 

 

Change is what that Mayan prophecy is all about, you know. I read about it, at the end of last year. It is not about catastrophes and John Cusack – evidently it is about a paradigm shift, wherein the weak will be strong and the boots on the throats everywhere will be lifted, bonds will be cast aside. Everything will go topsy-turvy! Like, for example, how it is 2012, and Lillo is freed from his psycho girlfriend because she got tired of us texting each other daily about the weather and while she was reading all of his text messages on his phone she saw how I called her a name because of that day she called me & hung up about 87 times.  You know, like what happens when you snoop through someone's things & see someone calling you a nutter because you are acting like a nut where they can see. 

That girl was so odd, like if Fatal Attraction were reprised with her playing all the parts from that movie -- even Michael Douglas's! --  and then Lillo, Mari, and I were in some kind of other kind of movie. Like ... if you could imagine a movie with Jason Statham, Seth Rogen, and, yk, Debi Mazar. So, then, if those two movies were in a mash-up and then it would be just exactly, totally like that. Anyhow, now she’s gone & he is free, is the point. I felt bad about it, for about an hour, and then I was absolved by Lillo, which, ok, obviously because I'm still awesome.  2012!

profusion

We stepped out last week to take a trip to view Washington's Peak Cherry Blossom Show.

 

It was a fun trip.  There was a Living Social deal for a Potomac River Cruise, so I snapped it up and the four of us + Sal went one evening.  Honestly, how many times can you see the blossoms from the sidewalk, right?  They are the same every year.  Pink & snowy and really lovely.  You can't really lose, so why not see them from the water?!

 

 

It was thoroughly enjoyable and as I have written previously, it feels so, so good in this era of constant, diluted, elective digital contact to be able to say to a friend I will see you.  And then to see them, and do something together ... to have so much fun that you are actually unable to take the time to tweet about how much fun you are having.  Imagine!

I do not think I had ever been on the water in Washington.  It is flattering to its features!

 

The Watergate!  Is on the water!  Yes, that Watergate!  I knew that, but never thought about it, zooming along Rock Creek Parkway to get to & from the dentist.  It's in the name: water.

I do not love boats, but I think I have been on more freaking boat rides & tour cruises in the past 2 years than all the years prior. 

I liked that peak bloom was so early.  I liked thinking of all the people who were just here for depressing sales meetings or for firing people or getting fired or putting their grandmother to sleep or working on their dissertations, and to think of how they were just here when the cherry trees bloomed a week-and-a-half early, and they got to see it, by chance.  Maybe it prodded them to believe in something, to think that the luck could be theirs -- maybe they will propose or make a change or feel propelled forward by this beauty -- what fortune!  What cheer!

This is the Potomac River spider. 

It was first discovered at Mt Vernon in the anteroom of Martha Washington in 1925.  Later in the 20thc, it was relocated by U.S. Park Service Preservationists to Lady Bird Johnson Park.  Winters, it shelters itself in the river cruise ship's window flaps under the protection of Rangers.  Yes.

Then we came home & had a birthday. 

 

That was nice, too.  Á bientôt, see you!  xoxo

 

 

 

hold

I texted the Israeli Monday afternoon, asking him to call when he had a minute between lectures. "Recipe help," I added, in light of what happened around this time last year. 

God, remember last year?  When my house was filled up with charity cats and I was a cat pusher?  God.  And a big shoutout to my sweet friend Charlie for taking two of them.  I hope they still have soft fur; I was missing their mom & her soft fur the other day.

Anyhow, back to the Israeli.  He called, later, while I was rattling around the kitchen like a old ghost.  I told him I wanted the perfect chicken recipe: I wanted a recipe that would turn something out which was creamy & unctuous after braising; something tender & toothsome. 

"You are asking me for a lamb recipe," he said.

"No," I was confounded. "Didn't I say chicken, honey? Oh."  Yeah, he was right.  I did want lamb.  I hate chicken.

He asked, then, "You don't even like chicken; why are you cooking chicken?" 

I started a long answer, in the way of the long answer which is characteristic of any conversation with the Israeli, full of vulnerability & confusion, outlining all of my distress, there might be a little whining, generously lighting up the way for him to be a hero.  It is how Mari says he can always tell I am on the phone with the Israeli in three notes or less. 

"Well, I had a chicken in the freezer I was ignoring, but I took it out, because ... there was this recipe, but I was having cognitive troubles with it ... hey!  Wait!"

Then he interrupted me.  "You know, the Dining section had a chicken recipe last month --"

"Yes, yes, that's the one!  The one that we both know to be a lamb recipe!  Omigod, yes!"

We chorused a little in the affirmative, and I got to the kernel of my late realization, "But they put cauliflower in it!  And olives, did you see that?  I didn't recognize it!"

The dish is Greek, it is called kapama.  Like most of the Greek stews, you can make it with whichever animal you prefer.  But not with cauliflower, wtf?  Yuk!

 

 

I used ricotta salata for the cheese.  I have a refrigerator uncharacteristically full of cheese.  It's all about matzo brei, cheese, and Weeds lately.  I don't know but my jeans still fit so that's all I care about.  When I opened the cheese-drawer the ricotta really appealed and I found out Fifille ate all the feta, which was the French kind anyhow, a little butterier, so eh.  I passed on kasseri and myzritha because, yk, a. melty and b. too much to get involved in.

I know, right?  Cheese.

But then this was so disappointing!  I mean ... Mari really liked it.  I cooked it in the oven in the old Le Creuset for a couple of hours at 300-ish.  It was OK; it was no lamb.  If Mari had not enjoyed it so much, I would be back to quitting chicken.  Yes. 

Bonnie Raitt has her way with ol' Gerry Rafferty's "Right Down the Line" on her upcoming cd and it is ridiculous, the way she works it over.  It starts out making it, yk, just because she is Bonnie Raitt and you can't say no, even though you aren't really sure of the arrangement, but then by the bridge, you realize she is just killing it and you have to pull over to listen.  That last part is not a metaphor; I really did pull off of the road.  À bientôt!

Mk 9, 49

We were in Washington's Ridiculous National Harbor Resort Area for President's Day weekend. I know, a week ago.  It was a horrible destination, I would not recommend it ever for anyone's getaway weekend, and that is even as I know that you probably would not be visiting during a Katsucon.

Looking back, that was its only charming feature, and girls dressed up like that one blue Jedi girl -- same sort as the dancing girl with Jabba the Hut, but blue and more awesome -- are not a permanence on the National Harbor's landscape.  

The Woodrow Wilson Bridge isssszzZzzZzzzz.  We had a great, old, Old Town dinner with old friends & their same-aged children, so that was the favorite + best.   

 

On the way down & back, we listened to Angela's Ashes.  Since then,  now any complaint from a child is managed by shaming: 

"Think of Jesus, hanging on the cross, suffering, his hands and feet torn to shreds, the wound in his side, bleeding?  Don't you think he'd like to have the troubles you have?  The folding of your own clothes & washing the dishes you ate from?  WELL?  Think of the Virgin Mary, with her only son hanging from the cross, her suffering.  Don't you think I would rather have you complaining and whining than hanging from a cross?  Well, right now, it pains me to admit to you that I don't know."

Then, conveniently, it was Lent.  Nice timing, that, since I was already thinking deeply of Jesus & the way he was bleeding from his side, what since I dislocated two ribs getting it on.  Right.  So, I went to my guy.  OK+ ow. 

Then it was erev Ash Wednesday & I turned myself toward Lenten introspections, about which I do not feel ready to hold forth.  This morning I was dreaming about doing regular things, yk, making breakfast & chatting in the hall about laundry, and in my dream it wasn't Lent.  When I woke up & realized it was, in fact, Lent, I burst into actual tears & sobbing.  I know.  It's supposed to be hard.  It is.

 

 

I bought this necklace while we were away, browsing with Fifille at a store called Charming Charlie.   

 

Shopping there made me realize I have a lot of nice jewelry that I really love but I rarely wear.  Necklace-wise, half of it has been gifted to me by Mari.  It made me feel unsettled, this realization, and reminds me of what I always tell Mari:  If ever you leave me, make certain it is for an heiress.  You will be requiring of her personal-security employees.  I require she has a helicopter.  Please only leave me for Veronica Lodge. 

Then he always grabs me up & says, "Baby, you are so Veronica Lodge."    I see his point. 

I did not feel like this necklace was Veronica Lodge -- not compared with all the real metals and gemstones I have at home.  I walked around the store, clutching it anyway, and bought it in the end, along with a headband for Fille.

I wore the necklace last Wednesday, the first day after I saw the chiropractor that I felt well enough to stand up straight.  I love it.  First of all, it is sparkly.  Second of all, it is noisy.  It reminds me of those clankety charm anklets from the headshop that a number of us wore all around summers in ol' barefoot Madison.  Kowalski once said, "I can hear you coming."  (I just wanted him to be ready for me!)  But because it is around my neck, not my leg, it isn't so relentlessly noisy.  Just if I change direction quickly, or maybe if I spin.

OMG this necklace is a gateway necklace!  Yes!  All my other necklaces are super-appealing to me now!  Friday, I could not wear the clankety necklace, but I knew there was another necklace more suited to what I was wearing & the occasion!  Exciting.

 

I mean, you know, the necklace gate is wide and the road is broad, and crowded.  No one cries big, raindrop-sized tears there.  Also, if ever Jesus or even the Franciscans call me up to walk with them, I'm going to have to get rid of them.  Heavy.  OK. 

 

This song has nothing to do with Lent, but I think it hits our high points in a summary, thusly:  is the season; Veronica Lodge; plans for living like so; promised lands.  Also relevant(!) because The Zombies were on World Cafe Live late last year, and Rod Argent told a story about Elvis -- about the privilege of knowingness and upon whom it is bestowed -- that took my breath away.  It was exactly as written in Matthew 13. 

 

Je t'embrasse.  Enjoy yr wkend.    

pie; maybe pancake

 

bears all things. believes all things. hopes all things. endures.

Remember how I was writing about split-sole ballet flats?  They need sewing, they come incomplete.  It is not the biggest deal, but it is something to be done.  Another thing on a long list of things.

 

 

Pointe shoes need elastics and ribbons sewn on.  Just stop because I will not even.  Her flats are leather, so it is pretty easy to sew to the lining without going through it.  Satin shoes are an entirely different thing.  Also, 4 sewn-on things per shoe.  No. 

I am not the hand-stitcher in the family, Mari is.  I mean, I like the dainty stitches required in hemming and finishing exterior seams, but honestly, anyone who lives here will wait forever for me to sew on their buttons.  When we got the note from school about the handwork-demo, I told Mari he would have to go.  He did, but somehow I wound up being the stitchery supervisor this weekend.  I mean, the meeting was mostly about where to fasten.

I think it was when I broke it to him that he would have to use mattress stitch -- invisible from either side -- which Fifille knows perfectly well from her knitting times.  But maybe he did not want to deal with her sulky attitude, which was a factor, definitely.

"Why, Mommy, why do I have to sew them on myself?  You have always sewed my elastics.  Why me, whyyyyyyy?"

Honestly.  Earlier this year, there was a day where I thought, from about two rooms away, that I would have to strangle her.  The hair-tossing, the eye-rolling, the foot-stomping, the kicking little kicks at the pillars and columns and staircases of the world.  The mumbling little mumbly, grumbly complaints under the breath.  Oh.  Oh, no.

Lucky for her, on that day I was awash in the satiny-pink afterglow of some heavy (metaphorical) lovin' the Israeli had laid on me.  So, I was watching her give the dishwasher's kick plate tiny little kicks, reeling, kind of analyzing how she was wicked, wicked, and I stopped. 

You know, and I know this is well-known -- even if you have never said it to my face -- I was wicked as a girl.  Not a 10-year-old girl, either; a 20-year-old girl.  When I was 20 (and 21, and 22), I was unspeakably wicked to my favorite + best, the Israeli, at intervals from the minute he began serving his compulsory, from 7,000 miles away.  In case you have never considered this, let me assure you that in the 20th century, it took an incredible amount of dedicated ruination to get a message across at that distance, but I succeeded by either epistolary action or default.  Sometimes I let other people do my dirty work for me -- everyone loves to gossip.

When he returned, I was not measurably better.  Things were much worse before they would improve, but all along the way, I have to admit he never killed me.  He doesn't just take it, but mostly he just waits it out, until I am who he knows me to be at my best.  In the meantime, he would never deny me a thing.  So I felt like, yk, OK, this is a minimum standard I have to achieve as the actual mother of this child.       

But Mari did not have this whole cathartic time with his present + his past, and plus he was not interested in showing her something he did not know at all when I was available to direct her.  So I did it. 

 

I explained to her that I have been sewing on her elastics as a courtesy because she was more comfortabe in shoes which came unfinished.  The other girls wore shoes that came finished.  Now that everyone is in shoes that come unfinished, she can be one of the everyones taking care of the business.  There was huffing in futility.  I waited, pleasantly, while playing upon her familiarity with the work because of a different project which she had enjoyed.   

She remembered how to do the stitch, and agreed, so I got things all pinned for her elastics.  Pinning, basting, try-ons.  Fine.  That was yesterday.  The funny thing that happened between Mari telling her she would be doing it with me (she had been hoping to get her way from her Pop, seeing as he is more malleable than I am in this way) and her getting the first shoe's elastic sewn on was that she realized Zomigod I can do this myself!  Me!  Not a baby!

It was just like the time Charlie & I watched her go all the way down the block all by herself (all! by herself!) to see if the neighbor had an ice-cream scoop.  She was bounding and smiling and so happy & so big.  It was huge. 

 

Look, sewing & smiling!

She did a great job -- careful, tiny, even.  Right now she is clomping around upstairs in them, trying to learn to walk while wearing them.  She is so pleased with herself.  "Mommy, everyone else's mom or grandmother is sewing their shoes for them!"

 

I mean, I told her, I don't know, maybe she will grow up & look back & think, Jesus maybe my mother could have sewed my shoes for me because I was only ten years old, but we will have to see.  Je t'embrasse.

differences

In a departure from my usual methods, wherein I let my husband preserve his schema in which everything for sale in the world costs $27.99, I alerted him to the impending cost of a pair of pointe shoes.  Yes.

Yesterday was kind of a day like no other, and I am not a weather-baby, but tromping around rain-wise is different.  In yet another departure, I skipped the gym this morning and slept until 10.  Yummy. 

Also yummy:

 

This delicious kind of quinoa-oat porridge lately.  I love it, in spite of the fact that I mostly hate quinoa. What I do not like about it is that it is so granular in the mouth; the way you have to chase it around with yr teeth to chew it.  Stay together, quinoa!  But this is pretty good.  Whole grains and protein! 

 

I finished a book today, finally -- Emily Rapp's Poster Child.  It was really well-written, but the whole time I was totally distracted by her current predicament and the reverberations of her past in her present -- her mothering and her own mother's mark on her.  Man.  It took me so long to finish the book because ... man.  What is her soul here to learn?  Bless her.

Ordinarily, when I finish a readable book which is not too taxing -- and it has been years, I hardly read books anymore -- I forward it along to Lillo.  This time, I will refrain, since his girlfriend is obvsly out of her mind.  Mari & I are waiting in a grim silence for that to run its course, same as we did with the last.  She is certainly doing her level best to hasten its end (much the same as many of the last).  I saw a teevee show like this once, so shhh.  I would hate for him to fall through some ice somewhere far from home. 

 

I let the kids make some kind of terrible-seeming brownie from January's Everyday Food which used black-bean puree in place of some of the butter.  They turned out fine. 

 

Every day that I need to wear my waxed-canvas jacket, I love it more.  Yesterday, I decided I might need a waxed-canvas bag.  You know, it rains & then you need, yk, gear.  So I am shopping for that.  Expect the search to be terribly pinteresting.    Update:  most boring shopping ever.  I googled & this was a steal, so now I'm done!  Mari will not be impressed by its low, low cost, because why would it cost more, ever?  All the purses cost $56.  Except the ones that are $27.99! 

 

sleepy

Mari has been home since Thursday, hanging around.  I have been mostly lying around, usually in bed, knitting.  We went to a hockey game on Friday & again on Saturday.  Overtime periods galore.  

 

 I am not sure if this scoreboard is a message about the Mayan prophecy or maybe something regarding Lunar New Year, or even perhaps the Father + Son & Holy Spirit.  But I took a photo, just in case we need to refer back to it. 

 

Mari & the kids were supposed to go to NYC yesterday, but just could not extricate themselves from the cocoon of our home & all of its food in the fridge.  Yawn.  I thought he was going back to the office Wednesday, but he said he goes back to the office, yk, sometime.  Like in the olden days.  Yum.

 

I took some of my knitting time to work on a sampler-stitch swatch for the Granny Square Knit-Assembly.  An actual swatch is being knitted.  I mean, I think this is the first time I have ever swatched.  No, wait: I swatched a long time ago for Kowalski's first pair of socks, because I was not sure how the yarn would knit up in the round.  I wound up not using that yarn, nor that pattern.

Usually, I just start knitting the thing & then check the gauge when there is a fat lot of fabric.  If the gauge is off, I rip it back.   I know I am not the only one.  But this time, with the pieces and parts & all the sewing, I want to make sure that I know how many stitches to cast on for my finished size. 

Valentine's Day is out there, on the horizon.  I am longing a lot, as is normal & usual & well-documented at this time of the year.  At least no one has almost died yet in 2012.  Jesus. 

I was doing the holiday cards in December & Mari said to me, after watching for a while, "Are you really going to write a personal note on each card?"  (There were 75 cards.)  

I said, "Yeah, I'm sending a card, right?  It's personal, honey."

He shook his head and rifled through the pile of already-personalized cards.  "You have really got to send valentines."  He just can't let that go!

 

After a slow & grating beginning, I am loving Pinterest.  So much, yes. 

 

Mrs Israeli & my Favorite Youngest Son are on their way to Tel Aviv right now, so safe travels to them.  Bisous for you all.  2012!        

reformation

We had oatmeal pancakes for the first time in a long time for New Year's breakfast.

I am notorious in my pancake-hatred; it is as nearly renowned as my ketchup-hatred.  My instant appreciation of these made the rounds fairly quickly, with some pretty significant people rushing to their griddles to find out what had wooed me thus. 

They are not a pretty pancake.  In fact, the greatest feedback I received was complaints over their failure to turn, their breakableness, which led to v many a-ha moments with old friends regarding an invitation to consider their ideal coloration of a cooked-pancake.  It was one of those things that lingered with me for a while, this kind of knowing about a guy's ideal pancake.  It stood there, taunting me, a testament to a thing I had long tried to sidestep and sidle by.  Anyhow.

Anyhow, we like them and they meet our needs.  Mari made bacon to go alongside for the two of us, but meh.  Pancakes are enough already.  Now oatmeal + bacon:  that is breakfast high-rolling. 

À bientôt, j'espère.  Also:  Fuck 'em, Bucky.  xox

liege

2011 started off extra-strong with not having to secure babysitting to attend a rock concert.  Let's look at that again.  I'll make it bigger.

 

2011 started off extra-strong with not having to secure babysitting to attend a rock concert.

 

It was just that huge, that first time.  I mean, we would leave them to go to the supermarket or the post office, but to go out?  At night?  Not until that day.  It is still pretty trippy, every time we do it.  Bye, love you.  Don't use the stove, no fighting, no biting. 

Wow.

Then, yk: kittens, growing; kittens, facing mortality.  Then whatever to all that cat stuff because Kowalski's mother was dying, and there were the unyielding reports filed, every night, many mornings, there were a lot of confessions and solemn agreements made. 

By the late spring, my favorite + best, the Israeli, wandering in the haze of the untreatable, was promised a way out and that was resolved in its entireity and whoa, so many people are happy.  It was touch & go at the start of recovery's road, but for months now he has been so great and I am so glad. 

We had a great trip home & I no longer -- if ever I had -- believe that old saw about how you can't go home again.  You can, and it will still be every moment the right hometown for you.  I am still glad not to live there, but never for the reasons people think.  It is my secret. 

Things reached a head in our family dynamic this summer, and 2011 is the year of useless pediatricians, but now we are going to turn the page on every single one of them.  It is so strange, because, yk, we talk to people, we are processors & confessors and I am a confider in a few people, and every time, with the twatty health-care providers, I have had to review -- am I making something where there is nothing? -- and it's always, "No, no, their behavior is outrageous." 

Although, the Israeli did say, very recently, when I called him about Mental Hospital Detail, limply putting my metaphorical self into his metaphorical hands, "You know, cookie, when you go to a carpenter, they generally use a hammer."  Ah. 

So who knows where that will go in the weeks and months to come.  I pretty much still feel very whatever-y about him, but he is my son and not my husband, so I do not actually have to work it out.  Take Michael and Fredo, right?  Shake it up with Fermina Daza.  Shoot! See?  Snake-eyes.  Yes.  He is a lovely child, until you ask him to do something.  But on travel, anywhere?  He is fine.  So, we will just never be at home again.  Or, more likely, I will simply bribe them more with trips to get what I want when we are home.  We no longer have pets in our care, so E-Z. 

We were in NYC yesterday, site of much delicate-lounging during 2011, to go to MoMA.  You have to know that I was going to perish if I did not see the de Kooning exhibit.  It was so good.  So! Good!

 

(So crowded!)

There were no photographs allowed in the galleries, so there are none here, but it was such a grand scale.  It was completely thorough, and Fifille was excited about a lot of process discussed in the curatorial exegesis from the audio tour.  I love the MoMA audio-tours.  I am not really an audio-tour person, but anyhow.

Also, at the de Kooning exhibit?  Stanley Tucci.  He was taking a photograph of the two women with him flanking the canvas of de Kooning's Two Standing Women, which I had just admired before doubling back to see another thing again. 

He had his camera right out!  Using the flash!  Even when photographs are allowed, flash is never!  In no museum!  I sidled past him & said, whispery-y -- if you know, you know exactly how this came out -- "You are going to get into trouble!" 

He was wholly conspiratorial in response, "I know, I am, shhh, I have to hurry!" 

Mari, of course, was all, "Did you just chide Stanley Tucci?" 

I did.  Know why?  He was doing bad behavior.  Duh.  But he is really very handsome.  Also, as with many people from the audiovisual world?  Smaller than you'd think. 

Then we had dinner in the 2nd-floor museum cafe, naturally.  Flourless chocolate cake is back on the menu, bliss, and the coffee is still pretty good.  Garçon had been at a portion of IFC's Studio Ghibli revue with Algren, but they turned up toward the end of dinner for the hand-off. 

Then we all went to the Diego Rivera exhibit. 

I was flattened.  There is really not v much more to say about it.  His work has a reach & a relevance thematically that I feel is really something to see at this moment, in particular, so there was that, but also -- Rivera is never really highlighted as an innovator, or a problem-solver, in his work.  He is almost always presented as the leading North American Communist who was a muralist and  who was sought out to diversify the human collections of people like Ford and the Rockefellers, who refused to take any shit off of anyone.  And, yk, dayenu, but then to find out that he constructed a way to make his work, murals, portable ... it just blew my mind.  Man.    

In conclusion, before we can all look forward to a 2012 full of sports-journalism blogging, I offer the traditional 8tracks thingo of my favorite tunes from 2011.  I think I try to keep it to 10, but last year I could not whittle it down at all, two years ago, there was an A-list and a B-list, and this year is 11.  Or 12.  I think.  I LOVE THEM ALL. 

This is a pretty-exciting piece of media from 2011, also.

I pronounce 2011 pretty great, even as (especially as?) it ends with my total-laryngitis, which harkens back to so many ways in which I try to improve my self -- with the needing to ask & the reliance and the willingness to be helpless, but also the shutting up the endless yammering.  Like now.  Have a safe evening and a restful pair of holidays, whether you are near to me or far.  xox

 

serendipity. synchronicity.

If you might be taking your sensitive child along to see Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes endeavor, work in a trip to fully take in the Holocaust Memorial Museum's special exhibit on Nazi propaganda a few days prior. 

 

Because Moriarty's casual sadism has got nothing on the designs of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels.  I looked over at her during a scary part -- when Holmes was in a bad way & Moriarty was being super-madman -- just to check in, and she was enraptured -- totally secure in the knowledge that this was made-up.  Superb.  Phew.

 

Hanukkah is just somehow going the fuck on and on -- practically to the New Year! -- and it is getting me down.  Then it was on Christmas (unrelenting!), and I had some cake-issues -- two cakes went down the Nigella road.  We can get back to that, because I love to talk about fucking it up.  But, anyhow, in spite of the elation of fucking it up endlessly, I decided that I could withstand any kind of disappoinment and so I tried again -- for the first time in many years -- with the Hanukkah doughnut.

 

I grew up with latkes being on the periphery -- fried dough was the main event.  Just plain yeasted doughnuts -- bimuelos -- and when I met the Israeli, my eyes were widened to the jelly doughnut -- sufganiyot -- which are way less intensive than a bunch of grating of potatoes, with a bigger payoff, obvsly. 

I tried to adapt a doughnut our first gluten-free holiday, and it was te-he-herrible.  Not even filled with jelly were they edible.  When I made pão de queijo in the summer, it got me thinking.  Pão de queijo batter is, mostly, just pâte à choux, I mean, in its bones.  The oil, the eggs, the whirling.  Hm.  I substituted tapioca flour for all-purpose in the boilerplate pâte à choux sketch.  Et voila. 

 

I felt like Louis Pasteur.  You have no idea.  No idea. 

 

What happened with the cakes was too much sugar, two times.  I did not take a photo of the actual failing, but it looked just like the last time this happened, with a volcano of cake.  Blech.

The first time, I thought it was that I had subbed in blanched almond flour for the wheat flour.  That was some of it, because in the second cake I used starchier flours and it was at least cake-like in its crumpled-up way, if not an actual cake.

 

The problem was mostly too much sugar.  I had subbed -- besides the flour -- granulated sugar for brown sugar 1:1.  No.  Down with cooking by volume!  Brown sugar weighs 6 ounces to a one-cup measure and granulated sugar is 8 ounces.  So, I used a third more sugar than the recipe called for.  Now I know.  Live & learn. 

But: doughnuts!  Dude!

blabbity-blob

I'm not actually blogging because I do not actually feel like the endless narration.

The black cakes came out great, if in need of a little breathing/evaporation of the post-baking brushing of rum.  After the last trip to the pasticciera -- I am not being insufferable using the Italian, it's just that otherwise, in our house, if I just say Going to the bakery! there needs to be qualification, but if I say On my way to the pasticciera! I am only speaking of one place. 

 

Or maybe it is insufferable, for example, if one is illiterate.  But in that case, you were neither invited, nor are you valued generally as reader of this space.  Capisce?

 

Anyhow, after the last trip to the pasticciera, I could hardly stand firm against the wrapped-up cakes anymore and even though I was saving every single one of them for a Dec 24/25 experience, I caved.  It's fine, the lapse in discipline.  I am happy about chewing through a slice, now & then, with a hot cup of tea.  I see the need for the peel I chose against; it's awfully sweet & peel would bring it up in flavor.

See, how the endless narration just slips out?!

Let us cling to the lifeboat of a list, ok?

• I think I could take the contents of all the neighbors' recycling bins and strew them through our house, on the floors, and my children would never notice.  Or, if they did notice ("Jesus, what a dump"), they would never reach down to place anything into a refuse container with their own hands.  OK.
• I settled on $75 for the children's guitar instructor, attending a heartfelt note commending his meritorious attentions to my son, in particular.  Mari still frowned at me, while I was assembling my heartily-overthought denominations into an envelope.  He choked similarly when I gifted Fille with a crisp $20 bill for a perfect-perfect dental checkup.  Honey, I told him then, rolling my eyes.  $20 every 6 months is comprised of a nickel every time she brushes.  This is a similarly-cumulative payout, less than $1 per lesson.  Everyone is happy.
• Am listening to Christmas radio, wondering how "My Favorite Things" became a Christmas song when the context it attends is not and also, trying to work out what would happen if Joe Jackson came upon Katherine Jackson in a clinch with Santa, in fact.
• The psychologist -- we like to call her Dr Vajazzler -- conferenced with us about her report in the first week of December, still recommending immediate inpatient admission for Garçon .  The following day, I went through a long list of every psychiatric facility with a pedes ward in the region and every one of them replied to me -- kindly & filled with the weight of their credentials -- by saying, essentially, This is an inappropriate recommendation for the child in this report.  What the hell?  I called Dr Vajazzler & said, "So, everyone says no to your recommendation & can you reconcile your urgency & their apathy?"  She railed at me for a long time, extremely defensive, super-bitchy, and that was the last I heard from her or anyone in her facility. 
  
  Until I sent an email yesterday which asked, essentially, once you cut through all the duplicitous civilizations of it, Does my kid need acute psychiatric intervention or not?  Are you totally unprofessional, or are you just completely incompetent?  Check 1 for yes, 2 for no.  Write me back!  Then the reply-to-all shenanigans commenced.  If you know, or if you are a close reader in this space, you know that these missteps were like the suediest handbag ever.  There was actual glee, with tiny, mincing, clapping.  Also, squealing.  Then I proceeded to fuck with them.  They must have figured out they were all emailing me in error, because today there is total radio silence.  Wankers.  Also, WTF about standards of care?  We recommend surgery!  Oh, well, but the surgeons don't, so ...  So I still recommend surgery!  I do!  Surgical!  I'm right!  This is your fault because you homeschool!  What?

Oh!  Accidental narration!  A spill!  Argle-bargle!

 

Mari found a sweater in a put-away pile of winter clothes I never wear, up in the attic.

"Is this Fille's?" he asked, reasonably. 

"It's mine!"  I said, snatching at it.  Then I inspected it closely.  It is a Michael Kors half-alpaca, half-merino sweater & I adore it, but have never worn it because it is never cold enough here to have even thought about wearing it.  I must have clutched it to my heart in the store without looking at it, and then somehow purchased it without realizing that it would only fit me if I were to keep my breasts in my pocket.  But my child is cold all the time and we have a similar kind of severity in our fashion aesthetic (french cuffs on the wedding gown, people), so alors.  Bonne chance, pretty girl.

I guess I should get back to comporting myself as a person who operates on a Holiday Open House paradigm, baking & procuring & all.  Hm.  I miss sports-journalism blogging already.  À la prochaine. 

moonlight. firelight.

I hustled my family out of the house on Saturday afternoon, bustling them in hats & scarves down to the highway and then beyond the wall, marching along the Queen of Hearts landscaping to the Ivy-League ice rink.  The weather was clear and crisp and just-right. 

Mari was the whole time shocked by my initiative & leadership role, as passive deferment rooted in a kind of agoraphobic tendency is usually my family-outing way.  It is just that all the other days in the week I am timekeeping & bustling and bicep-gripping, so when he is home & available to go with us, let him ... you know, there is a nautical metaphor that means take charge of it which I want to use here.  Maybe pirate-y, even.  Use it if you know it, because that is what I meant. 

I give all the credit to Twitter.  Sometimes, there are these event-related tweets that come at the right time, right when the mental ground is fertile for the seed of a plan, when anything seems possible.  Right when I will fiddle with my handheld out of nervousness or indecision, there it will be, positively serendipitous.  This is the second or maybe third time this has happened -- I know one of the other times was a call to attend the Executive Order 9066 Day of Remembrance, when all we had on our docket was a trip to Mt Vernon no one was too excited about.  Anyhow.

I shoved the children into their orange Hobey-seats one row behind ours.  "Hockey: it is like football on ice," I told them.  They stared at me.

"She means soccer," Mari explained.  The children nodded, relieved, because they know how to play the game English-only Americans call soccer.  I threw my hands up and turned toward the ice and its warming up + pre-game kibbitzing.

Fifille loved hockey -- which, of course: dudes wielding sticks are smashing into each other and a hard thing is hitting the glass with a scary cracking noise at random moments, producing ambience -- pronouncing it to be one million times better than baseball.  Garçon thought it was fine and fun, which, coming from him, is an accolade.     

It was fine & fun, except things were touch & go for the redhaired, sophomore goalie from British Columbia.

After Princeton tied the game in the last minute of the 2nd period, scoring two goals 10 seconds apart, everyone was so! excited!  Early in the 3rd, the Crimson scored easily to lead again.  Mari came back from the snack bar, asking what happened. 

"The puck went by the goalie," I told him.  "He seems really frustrated."  We were sitting right behind the cage.

"No, but what happened?"

"The puck, honey," I was patient, since my tendency with my mouth is to overly-reduce. "It slid past him on the large portion of ice he left open on his right."

"No way, that sucks."  Then he ate a hot dog.

Halfway through the third period, Harvard scored again.  I think this time the puck bounced off of the goalie a little first, but still.  He seemed crushed.  Crushed. 

 

Lookit how you can see how bereft he looks, even from the rear, even in a shitty cameraphone photograph!  Twenty seconds after I took this photo, Princeton scored and his relief was palpable, even through the plexiglass.  I still felt sad for him, especially in the last couple of minutes of the game, when he went off the ice so they could bring 6 men forward.  Sad! 

I was explaining the ditched-defense manuever to Fifille when "I don't even know you," is what Mari said to me.  What does that even mean?  Before that, he was all not-unlike the first time he found out I could really do math; for example, while I was shouting to the referee heavens not to remand cutie-cute Crimson #13 to the penalty box for holding.  That guy was wholly focused on the puck!  He never even saw the dude who tripped on his stick!  That dude tripped! 

But I do not even see why Mari would say that.  Chicago has a NHL team!  One of my college roommates is married to her Badger Hockey beau!  Just because I am not always going on about something doesn't mean I can't work it up when the cause presents itself!  That is what he should know after all these years. 

Princeton lost, in the end, but it was a highly-enjoyable game.  Harvard has a formidable team; it was a pleasure to watch them skate & shoot.  This concludes my sports-journalism blogging.  You're welcome.

Speaking of one ought to know and sporting:  someone has finally figured out she can use the banister on the 2nd floor landing as a barre. 

 

Goodness, I got her this book.  We are now in our house on a first name basis with Agrippina Vaganova.  As in, "Agrippina says that your knees should always be in line with your toes during [whatever zzZzZzzzz]." Or, "Do you know that Agrippina says that when you practice so that  [whatever zzzZzZzzzZzzz] your arms will become automatically so?"  This is all a kind of excited honing & polishing in readiness for her audition.   

 

 

She still made time to visit with her BFF and eat gobs of candy.  Sunday they had kits from IKEA + the inventory procured during a $9 trip to the supermarket with the bulk-candy bins.  I made royal icing in my new KitchenAid mixer which, I am happy to say, is not better than my former Sunbeam/Oster stand mixer of 16 years, now bequeathed to Mr Fox.  But I will get the KA meat-mincer attachment and then it will be better, empirically so. 

You know there is a lot of candy-consumption when you go and find a new toothbrush in the cabinet so you can make your child and her guest stop playing and brush their teeth.   

Holiday weekends are for entertaining!  Mostly. À la prochaine.

wetwork

We were in Washington for the holiday, visiting with friends.  It was nice, I hope the same for you and your family + friends.

 

Jupiter has been on such an unbelievably bright display all month.

Before we left -- like while I was sitting in the freaking driveway, idling -- the nurse from the hospital with whom we had been dealing called.  She had seemed sensible right up to this moment, when she called to try to renege on a previously-set meeting date to get us to come in sooner for a meeting.

As discussed, all around, everything is cake right now on the Garçon front.  I don't ask him to do anything except take care of his own self and he doesn't destroy anything by throwing it at me.  E-Z. 

The kids had a hippie homeschoolers' participation -- Garçon had a huge role, in fact -- in a community theatre production that ran last week, then we had the holiday, obvs, and now we are turning our fullest attentions to The Nutcracker and this weekend's run of 6 shows in 3 days.  Wonderful.  Exhausting.  And, frankly, all of it using up all the time we had for Extra Anything.

As to which result, we told these hospital people that unless he was hearing voices (which she had intimated he was & then recanted while I stood in the cold on Mari's cell phone in front of a mental hospital that could not screen him nor see him, asking her holy what the hell?) which he revealed only to them (entirely possible, sure) our first availability to dive back into their obviously disorganized waters was the first full week in December.  Because we are reasonable, see, plus also organized and they are obviously needful of a lot of flexibility while they sort things out as they go, so we wanted to make sure our family calendar is clear enough to sop up their freaking bullshit.   (Fool me twice, shame on the Luiseño.)

Anyhow.  On the phone, the day we left, Nurse Ratched was demanding a new date for the meeting with the two of us, the doctor who sent us on a wild goose chase, her resident, and the senior person in their department.  That date was earlier by a full week than what I told them represented our first availability, after which there was a meeting already set.  We thought.  No backsies!  So I told her no, while leaving, "WTF don't you understand English?" unsaid.

Because I am a fucking classy broad.

Then Nurse Ratched persisted, telling me that the senior physician in their department was available on this day but not on that day and our son needed to move forward with this care, blahblahblah, and after a while of exchanging sweet-yet-firm conversational demurrals, I cut her off.  The end.  I mean, seriously.  Because when do you want to die?  Tomorrow?  The day after tomorrow?  Bitch?

"You know, I don't have to go to work, but what I do know is that if the day should come that my husband needs to be at a meeting because he fucked up the lead direction on a project, he will not tell anyone he doesn't have meetings on this day or that day, no.  He will make the meeting happen when the  people want to see him. 

"Also, let me put this to you bluntly, because I have implied it without elucidating it:  I don't care at this moment what any of you think about our son's care.  Your outfit has lost the privilege of professional discretions due to the colossal disaster engineered by you just last week.  Let's get all on the same page, in the same room, and my husband and I will evaluate whether or not you are the professionals we want leading the project of our family.  Then maybe we'll be happy to go forward.  Hmm?"

So Mari was sitting in the passenger seat, kind of shaking his palms-upturned hands back & forth, as if they were pans sauteing at a high heat.  This is a gesture we cribbed from the preschool Fifille which mostly conveys a silent astonishment akin to Wait, what is happening?  Why are flaming chunks of the ceiling falling down all around us?  Whoa! 

I mean, I made the case clear to Mari weeks ago that we had to come out swinging with the hospital in every interaction because they have the weight to go to the state and claim we are neglectful and fuck that since they are not bowling us over with their qualifications.  However, Nurse Ratched had -- in all previous interactions -- been not a pain in the ass.  Until this phone call.

I made a show of gazing past Mari's gesturing, wrapped up the call with the nurse and rang off.  He asked me why I'd had to be so mean.  It was an accusation.  In my ongoing work to create my Wife of the Year portfolio, I did not respond to the bullshit in the charge, but instead looked at him, pitiably, and said, benevolently, "She told me that sometimes when she has an appointment, she just takes an early lunch.  Maybe you could just do that, is what she said."

I mean, first of all, how incredibly ridiculous, to offer such kindergarten, junior-intern's advice to any grownup person at all who has made clear that they are not available?  Secondly, what the fuck?  I should have my husband adjust his work schedule so we can meet up with you at your workplace?   Get yr client-service priorities straight!  But then, the killer is, as you are likely to know, to offer that as yr homespun, R.N.'s solution to the man in my husband's position?  OMG.

Anyhow, Mari barked up laughing around a mouthful of orange juice, immediately revoked his charge, and snickered intermittently all the way to the big bridge over the river.  I mean, right?

Then, we had pre-Thanksgiving, erev Thanksgiving, and actual Thanksgiving.  A zero-makework turkey, slathered in butter, roasted itself without fuss or bother while we took in the National Museum of the American Indian, which we thought was the place to be on Thursday.      

NMAI is my favorite museum, ever since they showed me Fritz Scholder and he stole my heart.

Also, James Luna. 

James Luna, The Artifact Piece. First performed in 1987, San Diego's Museum of Man.

 

If you can only know one piece of Luna's oeuvre, it has to be this.

 

But even probably without those guys, it would be my favorite, most important museum.  I forget what we were looking at, exactly, when I looked at Mari and said, "Every time a child tells me Indians used to live here long ago, I want to ssssssssslap them across the face."  It is so true and the only thing that stops me is that I know they are never told better, but OMG, does no one have parents?

 

Friday, we were at the American History museum, sitting in the cafe, visiting with Selene and checking in at intervals with our four at-large children at intervals, meeting up in Julia Child's Kitchen.  Speaking of no one having parents. 

 

I just desultorily chose the Child's Kitchen exhibit because it was close to the museum cafe, easy to find on the map, and hard to miss,  but I was drawn in, a little. 

 

Mostly, I was drawn in by the hordes of people who were so excited to be there.  Their excitement was contagious!

  

Then I got an email from another g.d. hospital professional -- the lead psychologist.  What the hell?  It is like they love the abuse.  I read it aloud to our table and Mari said nothing, but Selena chimed in with a fat lot of what to say about an experience in her family with a silly behavioral health professional.  Later, Saturday morning, I sent a perfect, perfect email which reeked of gasoline, one which came right up to actually calling her incompetent without actually saying, "OMFG, wtf are you so incompetent for?"

It did feature the accelerant-perfumed sentence, "Do you even know what you are doing there?" and the underlings whom she had copied on her outgoing message were included on my reply, so, yeah.  Because right in the email I gave her a matter-of-fact chapter & verse recap on how she fucked up.  Then, in a metaphorical way, I reminded her that she did not want me to strike any matches. 

It was a literary thing of beauty and even if you have known me for 20 years or more-- and seen me in nuclear action over & over, just laying waste to shit & going back to salt the rubble -- you would still say "Jesus Christ" when you read it.  And then you might have to sit with it a little while, admiring.  Honest.

The thing is, her reply to me was so fucking beautiful and the smartest thing she has done yet, wherein she came right to the fence of saying forget about it without actually writing "OMFG, Jesus, fucking forget it."  So things might be looking up, with that!  I think we are learning so much about one another in this dynamic.  Yes!

 

Oh, also, this, speaking of what is said & unsaid, omigod:

I was leaving the Willard Hotel on Friday night, on my way to get a bowl of Corner Bakery's fabulous lentil soup, and the man in his sleeping bag on Pennsylvania Ave-- on the sidewalk at the edge of the pool of the Willard's exterior lights -- stopped me & asked if I could help him.

"Sir, can I bring you a bowl of soup?" was my rejoinder.  He said yes, so I proceeded to take his order for dinner.  He flip-flopped on a sandwich and told me plaintively he could not get warm.  I assured him I would return shortly.

I did, with a large bowl of soup, a grilled-cheese sandwich, and a hot chocolate.  I set all of it carefully next to him and went inside of the hotel.  A while later, I was waiting outside for Mari to come with the car, nursing a cup of hot tea from the Starbucks on the opposite corner.  A doorman from the Willard approached me and said something I did not understand, mostly because he was finished talking by the time I realized he wasn't uttering some kind of boilerplate obsequiousness.

I invited him to repeat himself.  This time I heard him fine.  He said, "You gave food to the man?"

Reader, it was an accusation. 

I was thinking a lot of things, but said nothing.  I mean, if they didn't want dude laying on the sidewalk soliciting assistance and possibly picnicking then why the fuck didn't they man up and call the police on him?  At the same -- possibly incongruous -- time I was thinking OMFG I'm sitting in front of this 4-star hotel blinged-out like Carmela Soprano and an employee wants to get it on with me?  Is the world still turning?  Uh-uh.   

I stood up.  Doorman wanted to be in a confrontation and so I rose to meet it.  I said to him, only, "Yes.  I did."

Then I stood there, placidly.  I did not even raise my eyebrow in that come-and-get-it-I-dare-you invitational gesture you know I love to do, because there was nothing else to say besides Yes and  I did.  I waited, silently, while the light of rightness shone from my fingertips and my eyelashes and the ends of my hair, blinding him with the truth of humanity.  He said nothing more, which is too bad, because besides all the truth and the light and the rightness, I was thinking, deep inside, Say something else.  Anything else will do because brother, I am going to blog about you.

Then he walked away.  Because there was nothing for him to say.  And this is the lesson in which Roosevelt competently instructed us:  Speak softly and carry a big can of gasoline. 

     

prescription: lobotomy

It is hardly ever -- as in almost never -- that I make a new dish which is not a dessert and both children receive it with enthusiasm.  One might gleefully review the dish and the other will say, "Well, I ate it because I'd rather not starve."  Or they both will express concerns about some strain of flavoring/texture and offer advice on its next execution.  But this, this they loved. 

You could make it, too. 

Beautiful people are all, yk, What is up with Garçon?  And I make a grimacing mouth noise and say I don't care.  Which is really the key, the not caring.  I was talking to a beautiful gal on a ship-to-shore call a week or so ago and she posited that she often wondered if she could "do it all again" with her kids, she wondered about what she might change.  I said, "I would send my children right into the arms of a professional caregiver and have a wonderful job. Good-bye!  Take what you can, give nothing back!" 

More or less.

I was not thinking in the front part of my brain about her wonderful job and hired assists when I said that, and then she laughed and said she'd thought about homeschooling and staying home.  I told her that was nonsense. 

But I thought more about the question, since the time we talked, and I think that what I do think is that if I could do it all over, I would focus less on the long-term with him -- because what in the bloody fuck do I care if he has meth teeth?  We have insurance!  Never brush! -- and more on just having a pleasant day every day.  Which was of course unthinkable when he digs his heels in about everything, but now I don't give a fuck what he does with his days.  Demands are as goes:  chore chart; positive fucking attitude.

It's funny because people often react as OMGHZ, chore chart!  Abusive, horrible, Cinderella!  Perhaps they are boiling their children in brat juice. 

The children's chore chart is just:

• make bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, wash up after breakfast. 
• fold household laundry (dishtowels, napkins, etc, which I have laundered) and put away.
•  practice musical instruments. 
• tidy up playroom and/or bedroom for a quick 15-minute pickup.  go around the house and find yr belongings you have left laying around in common areas and put them away. 
•  Help wash up after lunch and dinner. 
•  Shower, brush teeth, wipe down the sink, tub and mirror after yr ablutions.  Go to bed. 

Three times each week they are called upon to do their own laundry, one of those days weekly involves changing the sheets on their bed.  Once a week, I ask them to together climb around on the kitchen floor, each with a brush, and scrub it clean.  Our kitchen has less than 100 square feet of flooring, so whatever.

Maybe it seems like a lot, but they are here all day, with time, oodles of time.  So, it is all self-care, toward the mastery of which all children should be applying themselves, but especially those who are in their own home all the livelong day.

Anyhow, so as long as that is all taken care of by the end of each day, and no one hits me or thrown anything at me, or destroys my house, I'm fine with it.  He is free to play with string or whatever other analog pursuits he enjoys.  Whatever.  He can read and write better than most adults writing commentary on the internets; he can solve for x.  Good.  His long-term is not my problem, because his adulthood is not my concern.  It has been relaxing and removed the endless tension under which we all labored from the house.  Things have been remote for all that time, but it beats bared teeth on both sides. 

 

A few weeks ago, in the used bookstore, I saw a copy of the David Kiersey book about the Myers-Briggs/Jung temperament sorting.  I paused and remembered how we came across the book in high school, all of us testing and temperament-sorting, in our junior year, memorizing each others' types, chiding or lauding one another for being so SJ or rather NT, or whichever.    

Mari and I differ by one letter (J/P), the qualifying of information endemic to each causing a lot of confusion in our newlywed years.  The book -- picked up at the library because I spotted it and remembered it being a gas -- cleared that up quickly + permanently, to our great delight. 

After all that positive memory, I realized that maybe some of the issue with or son was one of native temperament this book could illuminate.  I mean, I am tired of him, but leave no stone unturned.  I administered the sorter thingy, during which time he surprised both of us with his immense capacity to be self-reflective.  Um, excuse me:  All of this child's letters are backwards from ours.  Who sent this changeling to us?

 

But that in no way explains everything and in the way that we leave no stone unturned, we took him for a new evaluation by a group of pediatricians he had never seen in this capacity.  Yk, the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of Pediatrics, over the river.  I mean, you know, he has been evaluated long before this, at children's hospitals, with no outcome other than purple-faced people outraged that a child stonewalled them (I understand) or a different sort of pert appreciation of his sly refusals combined with his great appeal (am familiar with that, too).  Not to mention all the aborted therapies, which may or may not be his fault but in any case mystify me because what kind of social skills group expels a child for acting like Helen Keller?  I mean, did you want to only rehabilitate the easy children?  Unprofessional.  Like that stupid twat we wasted our money on this summer.  But OMG, listen to this.  Crazy in a new dimension.

 

We took him in for a regular, old, boilerplate psych evaluation.  It was billed as a Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation.  In August -- after everything with the running away, etc, the stupid twat, etc, destroying, there was a lot going on -- I made the appointment.  November was the first date, don't you know?  (Whatever.)  In the meantime, I crafted my new I Don't Give A Fuck method of childrearing (this child).  It has been peaceful here.  There has been talking.  Most of the time, expectations are met after one reminder, instead of 17.

We showed up, prepared for our 4-6 hour exertions, everyone mostly sunny, fine.  We filled out our parent questionnaires, had lunch with Garçon, sent him back, met with one of the purviewers and our completed forms.  We gave her a little history, way back to preschool, but mostly told her our concerns boiled down to [this], and the rest you know.  (Or don't, if you are a hideous, lumpen jackal of a voyeur.)

Things were winding down and Mari & I were sitting with Fille in the waiting area, wondering what we would do about dinner, when we were called back for the day's closure with the entire evaluating team.

"We absolutely agree with your concern and we think that he needs to be taken in to a psychiatric hospital for an evaluation and possibly an admission.  You need to do it now," is what the lead psychologist told us.

Ok, so you already know (unless you are a hideous, lumpen jackal with her hands in her panties right now) that I wanted that to happen.  That during the summer I called around to hospitals to find out who could admit him.  He can keep it together pretty fine for a 4-6 hour evaluation:  he is a lovely child when you want nothing from him, but I thought that over time, things -- the kind of behaviors about which I raise my hands heavenward -- would become clearer to professionals. 

So, that part was fine with me, like, Thank God we could try for some answers.  But what was weird -- and it was Mari that intercepted this -- was the way she was so urgent -- You have to do it now.  Do it today.  Go here.  DO not stop at home, do not collect belongings nor $200.  Now.

Mari asked, "Did he threaten one of you?"  She said no.  So I asked what was it that came up in the eval that created such a immediate concern.  She was vague in her response.  You know, concerning things made her concerned.  And also, things beyond her ken, more in the field of psychiatry. 

I kind of shrugged, yk, because OK.  Mari had some more questions about remanding his son to an inpatient psychiatric facility and then I asked questions, most of which were procedural and about the facility. 

I specifically asked if they would have a bed.  Those words actually came out of my mouth.  "You want us to go here, but will they do the intake evaluation even if they do not have a bed, because if we are going right there, I want to be sure this is where we should go."

Go, go now.  Go.

Whatever.  We weren't doing anything anyhow.  You know, except eating dinner and planning for a long weekend of Nutcracker shenanigans.  So we went.  It was actually quite near our house, on the other end of the world from the Children's Hospital.  We were nervous, but OK.  I feel better about committing my child while I am not super-fucking pissed-off at him, because this way it is a hospitalization, not an imprisonment; assistance, not exile.  While we waited for the valet to take our car, I texted Mrs Israeli to let her know.

 

 

The hospital to which we were told to go, go now -- even after we expressed mild procedural concerns -- go, go now-- even after Mari expressed a wanting to know of a vague idea of some kind of hint about the DSM, some shred of information that might bear us aloft on this trip , even after I checked & double-checked that we did not need any paperwork from the one hospital to go to the next -- go, go now-- OMG, DO YOU KNOW THAT A. THE FACILITY DOES NOT PERFORM PEDIATRIC INTAKE EVALUATIONS and B. DOES NOT HAVE A BED FOR THIS CHILD IN THEIR PEDES WARD, EVEN IF THEY DID??????

And the admissions director was super-great, even as he was stupefied by who sent us here and why the hell without calling to make sure there was a bed and what the hell because anyone that answered the phone would have told anyone who called to make sure we could get in there that they do not do pediatric intake?

He asked us to wait, mostly so that he could figure out how & where to straighten this psychologist out, and also because why not?  He was most perturbed by the fact that we had no idea what her findings were that sent us to him.  I offered -- in an uncharacteristically diplomatic way -- that it seemed reasonable to me that she did not want to make a psychiatric diagnosis, as she was not a psychiatrist.  Mr Admissions Director scoffed.  I shrugged.  He took the appropriate numbers from us to investigate and invited us to sit in the reception area.

I spent the next few minutes asking Garçon how things went at the other hospital, during the eval.  He said he did some puzzles, did some math, nothing happened.  I took out the Parent Fact Sheet she gave us while she was telling us about the urgency of remanding him tonight.  I asked him if he said he was going to hurt himself, or any one, any of us?  He said he had not.  I asked him if he said anything delusional or talked about wanting to die or feeling dead?  He said he had not.  I gave him the Parent Fact Sheet, entitled, In A Crisis, with the homicidal/suicidal, delusional, depressed/anxious bullet points, and I said, "Honey, did you say anything that would make them think any of these things?"

He was like Beaver Cleaver.  "No, Mom.  Why would I say those things?"

Time went on, the sun set, finally Mari was on the phone with the psychologist.  She was telling him about how she has just -- since she got his beleaguered voice-mail message -- made arrangements (fool me twice, shame on Tallahassee) for us to go to a different facility, four towns over.  I saw what he was writing and said nothing.  He asked me, cupping the phone, if I had any questions for her.  I asked him if she told him what it was that had her so spun up about him.  He frowned & shrugged.  "Not really," is what he said.

I vowed to get an answer from her & held out my hand.  He said later he knew it was on when I stepped outside.  I asked her why on Earth we were there, when they can not service us, because of all the reasons they could not, when I specifically asked her questions, the accurate answers to which would have prevented this waste of my time.  She told me -- same as she had Mari -- that since Mari called her she made arrangements with this intake person at another psych facility, and I cut her off. 

"You need to tell me why it is you think he should be admitted and you need to be specific, because I am not driving all over tri-state, based on your vague concerns.  I gave you the courtesy earlier and now I am wasting my time, and you blew it."

I swear to God, sometime in the next two minutes, the words "Seeing as he is not at this time in crisis" came out of her mouth. 

What did you just say?

I mean, really?  Since we have been home, I asked Mari, did I hallucinate the part where she told us we had to go right away?  To have him evaluated right away?  He said, waving the Parent Fact Sheet at me, "It says In A Crisis right at the top of this!"

 

Man.  I swear to God.  I should have been motherfucking Black Mamba. 

"You are telling me he is not in a crisis, which is something we already knew, because we live with him, but knowing that, especially, we took you at yr word and believed that something dark was revealed which was truly awful and now I am out here, wasting my time, and we are all tired and my daughter is dancing in the goddamn Nutcracker in two weeks and Thanksgiving is in a few days and we should all be in bed and you think this is going to help our family thrive?  Are you serious?"

She tried to turn it around on the facility to which she sent us, and told me that she could not believe that they could not accommodate us.  I was so mad, it was like, yk, Incompetent Boob, please meet PMS. 

"They do not even have pediatric intake eval here.   Even if we'd had a psych eval done in your office before we set out -- they do not have a bed in their facility at this moment.  They are full.  And we are not having a crisis!"

I mean, it was like she prescribed prime rib and then sent us to an ice-cream parlor.  What the hell?  Then she started with a lot of bluster about this other facility and their policies and blur blur and mercifully, because God is so good, Mr Admissions Director came out to smoke a cigarette.  And I said, "Would you like to talk to him, Dr?"  and she said, "Yes, because I had information from -- " and I cut her off.

"Don't tell it to me, because I don't care about it.  Shhh, good-bye."

Then I gave him the phone.  They sorted it out, procedurally, and we are going to have Thanksgiving and The Nutcracker and then rendezvous with the psychiatric hospital.  We are going to do it civilized, with a packed bag and things to take, and pick some time where we can come visit a lot.  Garçon has never even spent one night away from us.  And then we will see.

There is so much more, but honestly, we still have telephones in this world.  

Remember back when I wrote that every fucking time we collide with one of these "experts" fucking it up, it is a galvanizing shot in our collective arm?  Yes.  So that is good.  People are prowling around the house, feeling a little quiet glimmer of camaraderie.  Good God.             

all is bright

Fille has a Monday ballet class that wears on until 8, so my children did not trick-or-treat this year.  While I must admit to missing my annual fun-sized Snickers bar, it is ok to just be sitting in front of the woodstove with Mari, smelling the Halloweeny smell of singed pumpkin.  Also, I do not have to have any gdmf conversations with any children who live here and are sugar-addled + obsessed with gdmf candy.  Did I write about what happened last year?  God Almighty! 

Happy Halloween!  I hope yours is safe and relaxing! xox

 

 

wheel in the sky

Last year, on the final Friday of October, instead of going to Ballet Town, we waited around the house for the vet to make her housecall and euthanize Iris, my spooky Halloween cat.  It was quiet & dignified, the very best use of an obscene sum of money that we have ever made. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, in bed, Mari shifted his ankle away from mine, kind of wound in the blankets, and it reminded me -- something about it-- of the way Iris would shift her weight around.  I remember the first night she wasn't here: Mari had just gotten home from the office and it was the right time for her to start fussing & yowling, reminding us about bedtime, but it was so quiet, and there were real tears.  It was funny, how we missed her.  We expected her and she was not there. 

Because God is good, by the end of the next week we had a whole family of cats, some of them spookily, Halloweenly, orange-and-black.  Some of them died, too, but not until closer to Valentine's Day.  

I was glad to have the Universe's loaner cats, to have the distraction, but equally glad to see them all gone.

 

Anyhow.  It is peculiar that she came to her end at the edge of Halloween, how Halloween will always remind me of her, how Halloween and all of its days around it & observances about it are for remembering the dead, anyhow.  I was reading something, I can not remember what, it was a magazine, I think -- someone said, The dead are not gone, they are here but they are different.  I thought that was pretty great. 

I hope you have happy memories of the people and personalities you most want to remember.  À la prochaine.

 

part of you pours out

I like to think that I would never use all-caps, but I kind of wish I would in order to graphically represent all that is afoot here.

• Mum-smuggling!
• New-car-learning! 
• Nutcracker-rehearsing!
• Husband-alluring!
• Locust-leaf-vacuuming!
• Apple-wrangling! 

There are a lot of apples this year.  So many, that we are kind of avoiding each other in the neighborhood so that, yk, "Oh, Femme, thank you so much for bringing those deeply-discounted mums!  Would you like some ap--" 

As they turn toward me again, there is but a puff of smoke where I used to be standing, holding a flat of chrysanthemums.  It is like what people talk about with zucchini season, which was decidedly not the case this year, with the squash blight, which I think extends to winter squash, because pumpkins seem quite costly this year; more money than I want to pay for food we will not even eat.   

I was actually going to just have an overflowing fruit-bowl still-life, but when I approached it, I was taken in again by the little bird I picked up at Anthropologie.  No, the other one ... discount Anthropologie ... whatsit?  Mmmmmmm.  No.  Well, it's from there.

I love it, so much.  You put little 3-inch pillars in there & it throws the speckly light all around, you know.  I wanted one of the concept for a while, but never fancied the reality.  Then: it was a little blue bird right before me. 

I keep choosing that same blue color in pottery over and over, like it means a thing.  Blue.   Omg, I love that album.  It reminds me of 1994, all of it, always.  Omigod, holidays!  Look at how you are still here!  Go, shoo!  You make me feel too reverberative!     

  

If you want me I'll be in the bar.  Just this morning I told Fille an excellent story to make the point of how her bedroom bears an unflattering resemblance to my apartment in one particularly memorable morning after a night of intensely commemorative + place-marking blackout drinking -- end tables all askew, phone off the hook, sheets of paper scattered everywhere, the fridge wide open, a kitchen table lying on its side ... but contact lenses cleaned & firmly seated in their case; I was miraculously unbruised.

It is funny to me, how I could wake up not remembering anything, but -- even when I pieced it together later --will never forget each morning after, every plush, vacant interval of know-nothingness. 

Somehow, both children knew what blackout drinking was.  I questioned this & they both shrugged, then stated plaintively, "We read about it."  I refrained from saying, OK, but no, really how?!

Fille did want to know, last week, Why is there a Columbus Day if he was so evil and stuff?  Which I have never said, that he was evil & stuff, believing wholly as I explained to her: If you want to live in a town with a great salumeria and a bakery capable of torta ricotta, you have to let it go, let the Columbus flag fly.  Never mind there are a million other reasons to parade with pride.

 

Let them sort it out amongst themselves.  

 

I know, you're all Wait, is Alex guest-blogging?  No.

 

parenthetically yours

Monday, Mari was home & some curious alchemy of him + our children got me encrossened (Cross out this family!) and I peeled out of here to go to the gym.  Bye!

On the way to the gym, I realized I could go to the Sadist's class, which I have not done in an age.  I first started skipping because I had some mysterious malady, remember?  For the past year, I have felt well enough (read: not too much like I would fall down) to go, but Mari has been away on Mondays and Sadist Class is scheduled at a weird, mildly-frantic time of day here.  On Monday, I walked away from all that.

I got nervous, ariving at the threshold of the studio, because, yk, Ow.  I weighed my independent-study options -- lap pool, rowing machine, StairGuy -- but told myself that it would all be fine, that Tuesday's time with Pilates Chick would work that all out.  Which it could have, in a way, but the Sadist had two words for us yesterday:  Bosu Balls.  I got through the class, but the jellified feel I was left with when we were done ... portent of doom. 

Then, Pilates Chick today was super-happy to display her merrily sadistic side, even as my locomotion could best be described as slithery.  Man.  It hurts my abs just to type this.  It hurts to brake the car.

However, I am not dead, so I will be stronger and thus, you know.  The Marines used to say, in their recruitment collateral, that pain is weakness leaving the body.  Ok.  I can not even muster up the energy to chew on a slice of cake, is how exhausted I am. 

It did not hurt me to take this photo.  All this baking and picture-clicking was Monday before delayed-onset muscle soreness set in.  I was still euphoric then.  Impervious to the louche charms of baked goods, yes. 

  

 

It is the standard yogurt cake.  I trust you -- fellas, you know who you are -- to all be able to find yogurt & pears where you are. 

Fille said, "Can you make yogurt cake with anything besides pears?"  I thought of this as a ludicrous question until I realized it was not.  It is not called yogurt-pear cake.  But my mother (and later, I) never made it with anything but pears.  It was like banana bread, for pears.  I hate banana bread.  I like yogurt cake.  This one was a little heavy on the fruit; I could have eased up.

Oh, omg, speaking of louche charm, Mr Fox came to dinner Sunday night.  Saturday?  The days are all mixed up to me now that my husband is on a different schedule.  Anyhow, love to dish, but I am not kidding, it is killing me to sit in this chair. 

Take three ibuprofen for me, every six hours.  Thank you.  One million kisses. 

à mon âge les miettes voguent sur la rivière

I made a honey cake for Rosh Hashanah, at the children's insistence. 

 
 

Sephardis are not big on honey cake, not big on honey for this holiday; honey cake was never around when I was a girl.  As I grew older, and dallied more widely at holidays, there was honey cake, lots of interpretations.  I do not like it.  I kept saying things to my children like, "Wouldn't you rather have a delicious cake?"  and "I have only once made a honey cake, let alone a specially-modified honey cake."  They were unremitting plus also flattering about their security in my ingenuity, so I went along and I made one out of nuts, ahaha. 

I used Elena Amsterdam's recipe, adapting it to include honey and exclude agave nectar, but not in the same exchange.  It turned out pretty tasty for a gluten-free Cake of Obligation.  I mean, ok, ok, it was really good.  I think if it were called something else, I could love it.  It does not actually belong on the Rosh Hashanah table, though, with the almond flour and all. 

After dinner, but before cake, the children got completely on about going over to the river for Tashlich.  Say what?  They were surprisingly knowledgeable (in the aggregate) of what was to go down.  Jesus, who taught these children to read?  I mean, look, I have a rich history of being all alongside the high holidays, but I was actually raised Catholic.  Family + close friends went to the river, but I stayed around the house & ate a lot of dates in anticipation, wrestled with seedy old pomegranates -- the kinds of things we do in observation now.   

At the same time, their hilarious quality-control is a direct reflection of ecumenical values we have expressed about the world of holidays, about the world in some measure:  Christmas is not the only game in town!  Halloween is bigger than candy! Purim is 100 times better than Halloween can ever be!  Diwali and Hanukkah and Moon Festival!  Down with ethnocentrism!  It feels really good to both of us, not just knowing they have heard us, but to hear that they want to expand their experience, to get a chance to grow along with them.

Also, they don't know everything.  Their cute determination was quickly degraded into the exhausting knows-it-all of their ages -- It's part of the holiday and we're late!  We were supposed to be there yesterrrrday, Motherrrrrr.   It was the motherrrrrr which made me pedantic and cross.  I crisply informed them that one has through Sukkot for casting, plus also told them they remind me of a joke. You know the one.   (I did not tell the joke to them.)  I have applied them to a slow, running start at the 10 days of repentance.  It is good, though, because of, yk, my son, his last year, and to put out this notion that we can begin again. 

Anyhow, who can say no to Fille now?  With her menacing, gangster's grill? 

 

 
 

Doesn't she look like Chamillionaire?  I know!  Yes.