Monthly Archives: September 2011

Nostalgia and almost-birthdays.

Posted on by

I know this past weekend was a tough one for many of you, and so please accept my virtual hugs and kisses.  I did not watch the news all weekend, and I largely steered clear of the Internet, but I did think about those of you for whom this past weekend was very, very difficult.

The past few weeks have been unseasonably – I mean, really, truly, unseasonably – hot, and I’ve been loving every second of it.  Tank tops in September?  Who knew that such a phenomenon was possible?  It all came to a crashing halt today, which is fine because I’m gearing up for a busy week.  I have no time for such mundane things as enjoying the weather.  My husband is heading out of town, I have the first school council/ parent association meeting of the year, it’s Jake’s birthday, and I must procure many, many items of a baked goods nature.

This time of the year always seems very busy.  I have no time for reminiscing about Jake’s birthday, it seems.  Six years ago today, I was wallowing around like a giant panda.  Six years ago today I was eating such quality foodstuffs as Cheez Whiz on toast several times a day.  Six years ago today I felt as if the baby’s head might actually pop right out of my vagina if I walked too quickly.  Six years ago today I wondered why everyone in the world was so annoying, and why they were all out to get me with their annoying voices and mannerisms.

It’s probably better NOT to reminisce too much.  Who wants to live in the past, anyway?

I did see a woman in the grocery store today with a small girl, perhaps she was three years old.  The little girl was adorable, shrieking with excitement in the produce section: “Carrots, Mama, we’re getting carrots!  They’re orange!  Carrots!  Peppers!  I have little tomatoes!”  I was reminded of my days of grocery shopping with Jake.  I spent the rest of my trip awash in nostalgia until we got to the lineup.  The lineup that had a trifecta of incredibly slow and inefficient people: the cashier, the bagger, and the little old lady with what appeared to be several hundred coupons and who wanted to pay with every single penny she had in her little vinyl purse.  I took the opportunity to read US magazine and catch up on all those people who I have no idea a) who they are or b) why they are famous.  The little girl and her mother were in front of me, and the little girl was restless.  She asked to get out of the cart, she tried to help put groceries on the conveyor, she lay down on the floor, she got accidentally stepped on by her mother, she started sobbing for all of humanity.  I smiled at her mother, who looked frazzled and tired, I tried to make up for the crabby comments I could hear from the woman behind me. 

And just like that, my nostalgic feelings dissipated and I went to pick my big, big boys up from school for lunch.

"Pa Ingalls Was Such a Massive Dickhead"

Posted on by

Few things, I find, are more offensive and soul-destroying than trying to find parking in the busy Costco lot and then finding some spots, only to discover at the last minute that there are several giant carts stranded in the vacant parking spots, the vacant parking spots that are mere steps from the parking lot cart corral, which is totally devoid of carts.  Quite honestly, it makes me sad for the state of humanity.  Can we not all walk five metres to return our giant Costco carts to the cart corral?  Why?  Why is this an issue?  Are Costco shoppers just completely depleted after their trips and the extra steps are just too much to take?  Does Costco just destroy people’s souls so much that they cannot return their carts to the corral, but instead leave them where they lie and rush home to consume recently purchased extra-large bags of potato chips?

I still managed to return my cart to the corral, although I did feel like my soul was being swallowed when I was in Costco, as usual.  For one thing, I sustained an arm injury while attempting to lift a giant box of San Pellegrino.  The very tender skin of my inner forearm got stuck between two of the boxes, which was very painful and also led to the unfortunate result that I couldn’t actually move one of the boxes, since my arm was painfully stuck.  Moreover, after this debacle, I discovered that Christmas decorations and other assorted Christmas-related items were on display.  On September 7.  As if I didn’t feel like time was fleeting enough.  Not half an hour prior to witnessing this early Christmas display, I had dropped the boys off at school after lunch.  They insisted that they could get to their door by themselves, so I watched as Mark led Jake through the playground, placing his hand so gently on Jake’s shoulder.  And then I cried.  I did not need to see the Christmas display, Costco. 

So I felt a gloom permeate the air as I narrowed my eyes at the Christmas display, but then fortunately remembered the most cheering remark I had heard – possibly the most cheering remark I had heard in my entire life – after my last blog post.  Beck can be credited with what is, most likely, the greatest Little House on the Prairie quote of all time:

“Pa Ingalls was such a massive dickhead.”

I cannot help but feel that she has summarized the entire series quite admirably.  From my friend at Hodgepodge and Strawberries came this fabulous quote about Ma Ingalls:

“His wife was either a laudanum addict or a saint.”

And that is nearly all one needs to know about Little House on the Prairie.  There have been some questions regarding the appropriateness or otherwise of reading these books aloud to small children, and I would say that, despite my sarcasm, they are great reading.  Some things to note that may need editing/ teachable moments/ beforehand preparation:

1) As mentioned before, Pa throws the family into financial ruin by building a fancy house – with glass windows and a stove, my stars! – on credit, to be paid back with the lucrative wheat crop which never materializes.  This right there could be used as a teachable moment given the state of the world’s economy.  Stay in the damn sod dugout, Ingalls family. (On the Banks of Plum Creek)

2) When the Ingalls family moves from Wisconsin to Kansas, they are moving into Indian Territory.  The government is supposed to give them the land that belongs to the Indians, but in the end it doesn’t.  There is a lot of racism, not subtle, in this book.  This could be used as a teachable moment regarding past attitudes towards non-whites in North America.  (Little House on the Prairie)

3) Several older boys plan to beat the new teacher and break up the school, and are supported in this endeavor by their parents, who are bragging to the community that their sons are going to give the teacher a beating of a lifetime.  Previously they beat a teacher so badly that he died of his injuries.  Oh boy!  Manslaughter!  Happily, Mr. Wilder – a gangsta, for sure – provides the new teacher with a bullwhip which he unleashes on those boys.  Revenge, Little House style.  (Farmer Boy)

4) Bored with the quietness of their lives, Pa and his cronies dress up in blackface and put on a show for the whole town.  The townspeople think this is the greatest thing ever.  Much time is spent applauding this showcase of talent.  (Little Town on the Prairie)

5) Laura – who is fifteen and forced to work as a teacher, which she hates, so that her blind sister Mary can attend the College for the Blind – is billeted at a house where the wife is driven insane with hatred for her husband who forced her to move from civilization to some god-forsaken shanty in the middle of the prairie.  This woman pulls a knife on her husband in the middle of the night, threatening to stab everyone in the house right then and there if he doesn’t let her move back to her home.  It’s a little creepy.  (These Happy Golden Years)


Despite all this, the books are definitely worth a read.  Little House in the Big Woods is an especially cozy family book.  After reading it as a child, I kind of wished WE would have a pig slaughter just so my dad could inflate the pig’s bladder and I could play with it like a balloon.  And if six year old me could feel that way, imagine how delightful these stories truly are.  Despite the manslaughter, insanity, racism, and poor economic choices.

The grasshoppers are going to eat all the wheat!

Posted on by

Did you read the Little House on the Prairie books?  I was delighted by them as a child.  As a child I could just imagine the sheer joy of finding an orange, a stick of candy, a tiny homemade cake – made with WHITE SUGAR – and a penny in my stocking at Christmas.  I could imagine sleeping in an attic with all my possessions in a little box and my dress hanging on a nail.  I was completely charmed by these books. 

As an adult, though.  Can you even imagine feeling that the home in the woods of Wisconsin, where all your family resides, is just too populated, and so you think that the optimal plan is to pack up your wife and kids and start a new life in Kansas?  And then – THEN – when it turns out that white settlers are not allowed there, you get back in the covered wagon and head to Minnesota, where you go into incredible debt building a fancy big house with the idea that you will pay it back when you harvest your first amazing wheat crop?  But then the amazing wheat crop never materializes because it keeps getting eaten by grasshoppers?  And so you have to walk two hundred miles just to get some work so that your family won’t starve, but in doing so you are leaving them alone and possibly you will never come back, leaving your wife a widow with three children at the mercy of the elements and neighbours?

It kind of makes parenting in the modern world seem like a cakewalk, no?

I mean, what’s my biggest concern here?  Gee, this unseasonable and wonderful heat is not going to last forever.  Guess I better order some snow boots for Mark.  It doesn’t really have the same urgency as we had better harvest all this extra hay in case there are blizzards every three days that will prevent the trains getting through with supplies and we have to twist the hay into sticks to burn it so that we don’t freeze to death! 

Looking back at those books, I wonder about Ma Ingalls.  Talk about vulnerability; if anything had happened to Pa, what would she have done?  How would she have coped?  I suppose she would have had to marry a neighbouring bachelor with the hopes that he would be kind to the children.  Pa Ingalls and his disregard for socialization, along with his insatiable wanderlust set the family up for poverty and lack of opportunity.  It makes for a good story though.

Don’t it make my brown eyes bluuuuueeee.

Posted on by

So I’ve been blue, due to a number of factors, the most pressing being disappointment over not being offered a writing contract that I had my heart set on.  I’ve been in mourning about it, wallowing and eating all manner of bad things, and reading my most favourite comfort book, Diary of a Provincial Lady.  That book never fails to cheer me up.  It’s like chocolate cake and macaroni and cheese for the mind.  It is possibly the wittiest book ever written, and contains such gems as:

Move about after dinner, and meet acquaintance whose name I have forgotten, but connect with literature.  I ask if he has published anything lately.  He says that his work is not, and never can be, for publication.  Thought passes through my mind to the effect that this attitude might with advantage be adopted by many others.

Right?  Mark said “I’m sorry you’re sad you can’t write for those people.  But you can still write at home!  On your computer!”  True. 

Do you have a comfort book?  I once dated a guy who had a comfort movie.  Whenever he was feeling ill or down, he would watch Rudy.  The thought of it makes me snicker, and not in the kindest way.  Remember the scene – if you ever had the misfortune to watch said film – when all the players brought their jerseys to the coach.  “It’s for Rudy, Coach.” 

It just occurred to me: maybe I’m like Rudy.  I do have a lot of heart.  That’s depressing.

It also occurs to me that perhaps I just need an excuse, at this time of year, to have an emotional breakdown.  Remember last year?  When I had a complete breakdown at the fact that my printer wasn’t working and ended up sobbing, on the phone for hours with the Dell representative who kept speaking in soothing tones and asking if maybe I should get myself a drink of water and not to worry, he was going to to take care of everything?  I’m a mental case.

Not helping matters is the fact that we are all a tiny bit sick.  Nothing full blown, nothing major, but the boys both woke up Friday morning with slight runny noses.  Two things: a) that was fast, normally the first cold of the year occurs within the second week of school, not the second day, and b) five years old is NOT too young for a man-cold.  Jake became completely indignant that he was going to go to school, despite a tiny sniffle and slightly watery eyes.  “I can’t BELIEVE this,” he said, “This is the SECOND TIME I’ve gone to school like this!”  I related this amusing anecdote to my husband but ended up having to explain the concept of the man-cold to him, which was somewhat awkward.  I tried to make the explanation as general as possible.

And how was the first day of school?  It was excellent.  Both boys are, as anticipated, in the same class at school.  The benefits of this arrangement far outweigh the negatives, not the least of which is that I don’t have to be room parent for two separate classrooms and, with any luck, I will only receive ONE copy of all the notices that come home from school.  Also the boys are ecstatic to be together, and their teacher is fabulous, one in a million.

On the way home from dropping the boys at school, I saw a woman with a very small boy, standing on the sidewalk watching a wood chipper at work.  That brought me back, intensely.  I don’t know how many hours I spent watching various large machinery at work, boys in tow.  I don’t know how many times I would take them outside to watch the garbage truck pick up the trash, or watch sidewalk repairs, or to the nearby construction site where a large office building was being built.  “Diggies!  Diggies!  Happy!  Happy!” one-year-old Jake would say from the stroller, clapping his hands.  A gas station in our neighbourhood was demolished, and believe me, I spent days watching the machinery tear down the buildings and dig out the contaminated soil.  It got so that the crew would wave when they saw the three of us walking up the street.  My jeans would be caked with mud from carrying Jake, his muddy rubber boots bumping against my thighs.  I would be tired, so tired, but would stand there with my fascinated boys, daydreaming about other things.  And now we’re in a whole new chapter.

  

“What grade are you guys in?”

Pretty Girls

Posted on by

I turned the furnace on today; it’s been chilly and pouring rain -it even snowed in the mountains – and seems fitting, somehow, for the end of summer vacation.  Frankly, it’s a bit depressing.  But not as depressing as this:

This t-shirt was for sale at JC Penney – was, but not anymore.  Someone at JC Penney, after a public uproar, decided that girls sized 7-16 should probably not be advertising that they are too pretty for homework; something about their core values.  Regardless, the shirt was for sale, and someone, somewhere in the JC Penney corporation must have felt that it was at some point appropriate, just as someone at Old Navy decided that this shirt was appropriate for boys:

Similar idea, but without the public outcry, and also without the focus on physical appearance.  There’s the rub.  Celebration of idiocy and underachievement is socially acceptable, it seems, until we bring the cult of the pretty into the picture.

We like to at least give lip service to the idea that appearances don’t matter.  It’s what’s inside that counts – that is what I tell my children all the time, and of course it’s true – but also true is that appearances DO matter.  When I was in university studying economics, I read an academic article about how beautiful people earn more money, are promoted more often and more easily, and in general are afforded more advantages.  I was appalled, of course, I was outraged and angry, but I also knew that the restaurant in which I waitressed part-time would not hire anyone for their front-house staff who did not have a certain look.  Any applicants falling short of that would be considered for a job in the kitchen.

The ugly side to this is that pretty and smart are frequently considered to be mutually exclusive, as in the JC Penney shirt, or this one from Amazon:

If a grown, female mathematician was wearing this, I would consider it amusing in an ironic way, the same way I considered that guy wearing a Vagitarian t-shirt to be amusing in an ironic way.  But the thought of children wearing a shirt like this, children who see things in black and white and who may equate smart with ugly and therefore may be less inclined to strive for high academic achievements, the thought of that makes me ill.
There’s nothing wrong with being pretty, or striving to be pretty, but passing along the idea that pretty girls do not have to be responsible for homework, or math, or anything else requiring thought or effort, is pathetic.
The day I defended my master’s thesis, I had a celebratory lunch with several of my fellow grad students.  I had a 4.0 GPA, I studied all the time.  I prided myself on my work ethic.  As we sat in the lounge, I mentioned how exhausted I was.  A male student smirked at me and said “Why?  Did you sleep with the defence committee?  Is that how you get A’s?” 
It is possible to be pretty and do math.