Archive for October, 2010

Do kids make you boring?

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

I have a ton of photos and videos of Tin this weekend. He’s been walking around with his drum stick on his shoulder getting down to what he imagines is his TROMBONE. We watched a bunch of YouTube clips of Trombone Shorty, who started playing at 4 years of age, and he gets so jazzed when he sees Troy that he cradles his drumstick right on his shoulder and starts his imaginary playing.

My computer crashed so I can’t post any of these pics or movies right now.

My neighbor who is a musician and a music therapist and was watching Tin watching Troy and she said, “No doubt, he’s got it in him.” I watched him running around the house, hearing music in his head, running his fingers up and down the drumsticks and here’s what I thought – someone wrote kids make you boring about bloggers and writers whose kids become their subjects – but I have to say that bearing witness to this little boy as he becomes who he is, grow into the man he will be, and find his talent is possibly one of the most exciting things I could testify to.

Call me boring.

Lighten up

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

I’ve gotten so many replies to the entries I did back when I had that TCA Peel, you’d think I should blog about that – most everyone is so pleased that I exposed my skin peeling off my face and what it looked like – it’s interesting hardly anyone comments on the other exposure – the one where you turn inside out. It’s like internal exfoliation is run of the mill, but external, now that’s a different story.

Well I’m here to tell you that the layers being peeled off inside of me is a never ending process – I could stuff mattresses with the stuff and stack those end to end and might never touch ground if I walked to Georgia, and I don’t mean Atlanta.

I woke this morning before dawn with the ruminating thoughts again – this constant processing and coding and filing and discovery that is going on in my brain NONSTOP. Pity the fool who asks me, “how ya doing?”

So I’m trying to lighten up.

Back in the day

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

I’ve spent a good deal of today trying to get over three evenings out last week and Friday night in with friends and for the life of me, that used to be nothing, but now it’s like I was running a marathon and just stopped. I lay in bed this afternoon instead of going to the acrobatic workshop at Swan River, the bootcamp at NOAC, the bike ride to the lakefront – I was paralyzed by ruminating thoughts – all overwhelming in scope and then a friend called and she had a brilliant idea – brilliant.

I’m not the woman I used to be as far as stamina to go out and cut a rug and beat the bushes with my stick, but I got somethings going on for me that you can’t shake a stick at and that is drive. I don’t know where it comes from and when it is stopped in its tracks like it has been recently I get the shakes and the shivers and the quivers and the WHAT AM I GOING TO DO anxiety attacks, but when I have a plan, well, now that’s a different story.

I spoke to an old colleague of mine on the phone late yesterday, it made me think of things from the past – back in the day – back in the day.

Be the goat you are

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

I was reading about this woman who went to work on a farm so that she could unplug from her harried world and one thing she learned was that goats are divided into followers and leaders, and if there is not a leader in the group then they run around like chickens with their heads cut off. I’ve been doing some reading recently trying to uncover who I am and what I am good at doing. One thing that is a hands down given, I’m the leader. I saw E recently because of my anxiety of late and was telling her about a dream I had whereby Blekica kept jumping in the river and I kept having to bend all the way over and get her out. This scene kept playing itself out until suddenly Tin was falling out of the bed, head first, and I had to bend the other way and grab him before he hit bottom only to learn he had a helmet on, but the strap wasn’t tight enough and then I found myself running across Canal Street buck naked except for a skimpy white towel around me. Lord today – there are some stresses in my life right now.

But Michele said we should all get the bumper stickers that say TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED and I’m trying to think that way because that is a good mantra to have. The question is when you’re playing the game of Simon Says and you’re Simon and you don’t know what the next command is, you get, well, a little anxious.

Simon says: Be the goat, Rachel.

Cleaning out the closet

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

We’re soon approaching that day when the skeletons come out of the closet and dance while their bones clank together. It’s a reminder to clean out your own closet – the one filled with your own skeletons. You know how you get in those moods where you think what if I hadn’t, what if that hadn’t happened – well that’s called the past. The past is best left in the past, because if you don’t leave the past there, then you can’t be present.

So tomorrow night at 7:30, there is a ceremony on the Magnolia Bridge to invite you to leave the past behind and move on into your bright new day.

You’re money baby

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

The conference ended yesterday and I had dinner with a guy I’ve been speaking to for over ten years now. We’ve only known each other on the phone but I’ve followed him through several companies. What both of us agreed was having the jobs we have has been wonderful because of the relationships you form along the way. Isn’t that what life is all about?

The other day in yoga, two teachers in training with Michele taught our class and as they were closing out their teacher training they decided to co-teach in the spirit of Shiva and Shakti, at the end while we were in savasana, Sarah sang to us a haunting song – Nature Boy – with the refrain that the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and to be loved in return. That is what life is all about.

Bravo Maureen

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

NEW YORK TIMES – OP-ED COLUMNIST

Making Ignorance Chic

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 19, 2010

Casanova’s rule for seduction was to tell a beautiful woman she was intelligent and an intelligent woman she was beautiful.

The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.

She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope. Men who were nervous about her erotic intensity could feel superior by making fun of her intellectually.

Marilyn was not completely in on the joke. Scarred by her schizophrenic mother and dislocated upbringing, she was happy to have the classics put in her hand. What’s more, she read some of them, from Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400 books.

Miller once called Marilyn “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

“Fragments,” a new book of her poems, letters and musings, some written in her childlike hand with misspellings in leather books and others on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria and the Beverly Hills Hotel, is affecting. The world’s most coveted woman, a picture of luminescence, was lonely and dark. Thinking herself happily married, she was crushed to discover an open journal in which Miller had written that she disappointed him and embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers.

“I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”

Her friend Saul Bellow wrote in a letter that Marilyn “conducts herself like a philosopher.” He observed: “She was connected with a very powerful current but she couldn’t disconnect herself from it,” adding: “She had a kind of curious incandescence under the skin.”

The sad sex symbol is still a candle in the wind. There’s a hit novel in Britain narrated by the Maltese terrier Frank Sinatra gave her, which she named “Maf,” for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Naomi Watts is planning to star in a biopic based on the novel, “Blonde,” by Joyce Carol Oates; Michelle Williams is shooting “My Week With Marilyn,” and another movie is planned based on an account by Lionel Grandison, a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide instead of murder.

At least, unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and be friends with intellectuals, even going so far as to marry one. But now another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable.

You struggle to name Supreme Court cases, newspapers you read and even founding fathers you admire? No problem. You endorse a candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat who is the nominee in West Virginia? Oh, well.

At least you’re not one of those “spineless” elites with an Ivy League education, like President Obama, who can’t feel anything. It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose guards handcuffed a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in Tea Party Land. Michele Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley.

Sharron Angle sank to new lows of obliviousness when she told a classroom of Hispanic kids in Las Vegas: “Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”

As Palin tweeted in July about her own special language adding examples from W. and Obama: “ ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

On Saturday, at a G.O.P. rally in Anaheim, Calif., Palin mockingly noted that you won’t find her invoking Mao or Saul Alinsky. She says she believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be — as Palin, O’Donnell and Angle keep saying — just like you.

In Marilyn’s America, there were aspirations. The studios tackled literary novels rather than one-liners like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and navel-gazing drivel like “Eat Pray Love.” Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” paired cartoon characters with famous composers. Even Bugs Bunny did Wagner.

But in Sarah’s America, we’ve refudiated all that.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 20, 2010

You can teach an old dog new tricks

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

I have been thinking a lot about the other day when I was at my acro yoga class, I got there and it was a whole new batch of people and Aaron wasn’t there and I had this feeling like I should just turn and go and this was after walking there after leaving my bike with the flat tire hooked up to a restaurant gate. But stay I did and I found some interesting things about myself – faced with a difficult position and unfamiliar (read: untrusting) of my group, I wanted to say no, but they all encouraged me to keep going and so i was able to get through some pretty scary moves – helicoptering on someone’s feet, backbending into a headstand, and even my initial handstand had me in cold sweats.

I remember when I first started managing people a million years ago and I wanted everyone to be like me and couldn’t understand when they weren’t. Since that time, I’ve grown more accustomed to recognizing different abilities in different people and I would only hope that I give them enough encouragement to break their neck when they’re stretching beyond their comfort zones.

In my regular yoga class at NOAC, we were told to do a forearm handstand and up I went and was surprised at how much I’ve advanced after being with a group of people who have helped me push my boundaries. It’s hard to trust a complete stranger, but sometimes when you do, great things happen.

Be thankful for the little things

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

I was reading about a centenarian once who said that what she was most grateful for in her life was indoor plumbing. I remember when I was a toddler going to the outhouse at my grandmother’s before there was indoor plumbing there. And I have especially fond memories of her bathing us in the big aluminum pot in the kitchen. So the other morning when the water went out for the third time this month, I started thinking about life without indoor plumbing – and then I couldn’t. Even though I have such fond memories of being at my grandmother’s and sleeping with her in the big feather bed and my aunt taking us out to the outhouse, honestly I like hot and cold running water.

After Tin tornadoed through his oatmeal, we were all wishing the water was on. And had I not just come from walking the dogs perhaps I could have conceived of going ahead to the conference without showering, but as it was humidity was back in town and I felt yucky from top to bottom.

Today I am thankful for running water and indoor plumbing too.

If wishes came true

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Cree – who designed and made my hat for my 50th birthday extravaganza and Mardi Gras costume – has a tee shirt that says “God I wish I were a nutria.”