natural beauty

What would I have looked like if I lived in the 1800's...before the invention of contact lenses, professional hair straightening, eyebrow waxing, anti-aging cosmetics?  I would have been not so cute, me thinks.

I suppose by age 33 I'd already have nearly grown kids...I could even be a grandma....so I'm attractive for an early elderly woman. I'm an 8 out of 10 in the Gold Rush Grandma circuit.

If I think about how I looked at age 15, which is sort of a poor-girl married age for the early 1800's (I'm thinking Jane Austen's times, maybe), I would not have married with any land holding aristocrat. I'd be Charlotte Lucas, begging the weird guy to take me off my parents' hands. Ouch! Maybe not so bad. I'd probably be the governess falling in love with all the mysterious, emo older men. I'd end up in unmarried, spinster disgrace, selling apples to sailors on the wharf and coughing. Or maybe I'd be the clever, non conformist political suffragette type. It wouldn't be a bad life.

I don't mean to berate my looks. I'm just saying that much of my cuteness is strictly 21st century. In the future, will everyone be very cute, making cute...well...ordinary?

It's all relative. I mean, obviously beauty standards are constructed by the times (ie, no one is Jane Austen's England tweezed their brows even if they looked like chubby inchworms; my ridiculous hair was perhaps made for the ten thousand hairpins required for a Victorian pompadour thing.)

I can't shake the notion that it just plain sucked for women before the invention of modern beauty products like clever razors with shaving soap stuck to it. I know, I know: they had much more important things to do then worry about their legs and hairy legs probably were just as natural as unpainted toes.  Their lives were an endless rotation of labor and children and keeping the house together and pleasing their husbands and, most likely, had few pleasures besides needlepoint, reading, and family. When they washed their hair on Saturday nights in preparation for church the next day, did they think, "aaaaaah, finally some 'me' time!" or did they simply not think of themselves at all? 

Their world was small, but it's not like they thought of it like that. Did they?

Into the Garden, Out of Africa

Stanley Kunitz writes in one of my favorite poems, "the longing for the dance stirs the buried life/one season only, and it's gone." He's standing in his garden staking down plants, admiring the intricate world of crickets.  He's thinking about getting old and how fast time goes: the first lines are summer is late/ my heart. 

Simple ideas stated with such magnificence.  As we tie down delicate things for the certainty of storms, it's hard not to think on the metaphor of the garden and the life.  My husband noted the timid blooms of our flowers this week in the unseasonable warmth; he had to say it three times because my head was a jumble of details like calls I needed to return and things I needed to buy at the store. And those pesky birds are back, poking, talking, foraging in the dawn outside my bedroom window, waking me up a bit too early.

Here comes another settled season. What stirs in the buried life?

I'm laid up this weekend with a neck sprain. Trying not to be crabby about it.  It was at least a good opportunity to curl up with a heating pack and painkillers and Out of Africa, a movie I never saw until today.

It's an epic tome, totally in my wheelhouse. Loosely based on the life and stories of Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep),  it's all sweeping landscapes of Africa. Mountains, veldts, waterfalls, picnics with camp chairs and wine and marauding lions, Masai warriors. Rugged, poetry-reciting Hemingway hunter Robert Redford sensuously washes Meryl Streep's hair with river water and a jug. Love found. Love lost. The inevitable destiny of colonialization ruining everyone's fun. The protagonist learns that her deep passion for free spirited Robert Redford and desire to claim him is, predictably, about as easy as taming Africa herself. 

Of course movies, like books and poetry, stir that buried life. I find myself thinking, why can't I have a coffee plantation in Africa and go hunting with Robert Redford?  Where's my safari picnic?  I find myself Googling "teacher trips to Africa" and "scholarships for teachers, international travel." Uh-oh. I'm supposed to be saving money for a new kitchen. Because, you know, my kitchen is old and creepy.

Feeling the same sort of ennui, Dan has been scouring the internet looking for reasonable ways to road trip out west.

Kunitz asks, What is it that makes the engine go?  He answers it:
Desire, desire, desire. 


 
 

hoarders

I listened to a surprisingly touching radio interview with one of the guys who works for the show Hoarders, Matt Paxton. He heads a special clean-up crew who go into those horror show homes and rake through nests of rats to find things like dead cats and pristine newspapers lamenting JFK's death.  I was struck by his rather kindhearted desire to help people by mucking out their homes.

What was especially fascinating was his revelation that doing this work suited him nicely, since he's a recovering addict and perhaps isn't easy to shock and unlikely  to judge anyone. Even more interesting: he prefers to work with recovering addicts and people fresh from jail, out on parole. He said some of his crew are convicted murderers.

It makes sense, what they have in common: people on the fringes, people who've hit near-bottom, etc., have strong stomachs and are hard to disturb (more practically, hard to employ in other professions perhaps). Also, as these guys stand in these terrible houses and fill up trash bags with moldy dishes and roach-eaten pillowcases, they seem close to a sense of redemption. In that one specific space of their rebuilt lives, they are practically saintly. 

 

little things

Little Things 

Little things in my coat pocket. detached purple button from the Union Square farmer's market where it popped off. How I wanted to buy flowers but couldn't. They will wilt on the train, lose their remarkable ballet necks, shed petals underfoot.

Some little things make me nervous.  I can't swallow sometimes. Driving alone on a road with no shoulder. Crying babies, long awkward silences at dinner parties when everyone looks at me for help.

Little things, such quick happiness, like flickering rainbows gone before you can call someone to say you saw a rainbow. How it lit up the sky and no one saw it except you and some guy at the softball field who barely cared. 

A little foolish thing: a blouse from Anthropologie that costs $128.  If I buy this blouse I will look so thin, so put together. Everything will fall into place like fingers flying through stacks of paper.

A stone is a little thing. Everyone knows women who fill up glass jars with shells and things. They seem to say, "I'm putting a stone in here, for no reason, just because it's so lovely and quirky." If only it was that easy, a stone in a jar.

Date Night

I impulsively bought a Groupon last weekend for a "chocolate making course" for two at an Italian heritage center in Scotch Plains. I thought it would be a sexy and romantic couples thing for me and Dan. You know, licking chocolate off each other's faces etc. and maybe having impulsive, sensual encounters on a private kitchen counter in a restaurant kitchen. Like that scene in Ghost with the clay only with fudge.

We ended up in an Episcopal church hall with about 100 other people, carefully chopping up marshmallows and sticking red sugar on each bit, then squishing it into frosting for a rose-petal themed cupcake. I was immediately impressed with Dan's skill with candy making, and felt the spark of love ignite when I licked each marshmallow so the candy would stick to it.

"I am going to do such naughty things to you later," I declared.

"Oooh, I can't wait!" said Dan.

"I was talking to the cupcake," I replied. (insert sitcom laughter here).

The room was filled with quite a few other random couples of various ages, undoubtedly lured to this strange night out by the Groupon. I tried not be to overly threatened by the very sexy, thin young Italian woman, Francesca, who circulated around, offering frosting-piping advice with a caramel accent.

No worries on that front; my husband was focused on the candy workshop with the same precision and attention to direction that he probably has doing client service support at work. I also disturbed him by eating sprinkles off the table.

Still, it was a good time. I was thinking about The Bachelor and how the whole premise of the show is adrenaline and novelty; the contestants participate in ropes courses, bungee jumping, and African safaris together...no wonder they fancy themselves in love after one day. Then they come back to reality, back to work, back to the United States, marooned together in normalcy. No wonder they never stay together. I could find myself loving even the most ordinary moron if we'd spent two days tribal dancing in the Brazilian rain forest.

So it's better to work backwards. Shipwrecked together in real life where sometimes the most interesting thing we have going on is Battlestar Galactica coming in the Netflix queue, we have to inflate the ole life raft and sail away.

I think I'm too hard on myself, too hard on life and what it should be. It's probably enough to sneak away every now and then and see yourself and your mate in a new context. It's not an African safari; it doesn't even make a great blog posting, really. It's just life. A little messy and a little sweet and little random. Sometimes I get rebellious and try to lick the table. And there's always my husband, shaking his head and handing me the most impressively imperfect truffle he rolled himself in cocoa powder.

shame

Something weird happened in school yesterday that I only thought about when I crawled into bed late last night.

In class, we were talking about a segment from Primetime Live, which I showed in the context of helping the kids understand the Milgram experiments. The series showcased a recent news story in which a McDonald's employee, a female high school student, was cruelly tricked into being strip-searched by her manager and the manager's security guard boyfriend because the girl thought a cop on the telephone was ordering her to do it by proxy.

As it turns out, it was a scam perpetuated by the security guard, who wanted to humiliate the girl and intimidate her into giving him oral sex, which she did, because she terrified and thought it might get her out of trouble. The "cop" on the phone was some kind of accomplice; the manager, who was a woman, claimed to not know it wasn't a real cop and got fired. The security guard got five years in prison.

The angle of the story was an exploration of how people are so afraid of authority, they find themselves doing all kinds of things they wouldn't "normally" do...that even the idea of a cop, not even in the room, could have a girl disrobe and do a degrading act without even questioning it. It's very disturbing.

At first, a lot of the kids dismissed the story, saying the girl was abnormally stupid, that no one of average intelligence would tolerate those outrageous orders. "It's just McDonald's. She could just say, I'm leaving, I quit," they all said. That led the discussion towards the idea that our fear of authority is so deeply ingrained it overrides those logical notions, that maybe this girl decided at one point she'd do anything to not lose her job for whatever psychological or economic reasons, etc. Typical class discussion pattern, but a few levels up in intensity.

It got interesting when one very bright girl pointed out that girls do all kinds of crazy things to keep the attention and approval of boys, and that men don't understand that women spend their whole lives in fear of them, because women can be raped by men (they have that one crucial thing to lord over us, their physical strength which can come out of nowhere and hurt us). In other words, for women, men have a kind of institutional "authority" that somehow enables them to issue orders that even the most intelligent women find themselves following.

It kind of blew everyone's minds, and everyone started talking at once. Everyone resisted her at first-- typical "I-don't-want-to-believe-the-world-is-like-that" denial. But I was pleased at the level of discussion.

So pleased, I found my tongue loosening, and confessed something to the class I never shared before with anyone, with the exception of my husband. Even with him, I hadn't really touched upon the long lasting and complicated effects of the experience.

I found myself telling the class a very general version of this story:

There was this guy I used to sometimes date; I was so enamored of the idea of having a boyfriend and keeping him as my boyfriend, that is, keeping his approval of me, that I tolerated certain behaviors there is no way in hell I would tolerate now. Not "abuse" in the very obvious, after-school special way, but the other kind of abuse, the subtle kind, the most scary kind, because they don't really know how to teach girls how to detect it, because it oddly overlaps with behaviors that don't seem, on the surface, to be abusive. He used to pinch me, for example, and when I would tell him to stop, he would keep doing it, and call me a baby, suggesting that it was my problem and not his. He used to hold me down and tickle me, which I always hated, and seemed to take pleasure in it. I look back on myself back then, and I'm ashamed that it went on too long before I broke up with him, that I wasn't self-actualized enough to understand that I don't have to be treated that way, that I own my body, and that I don't have to submit to anything that violates my own code of how I should be treated.

Like the McDonald's girl in the news story looking back on herself on the security tape--later used to convict the security guard-- I can't believe what I did (or didn't do) because I was...intimidated? Afraid? Weak? Vulnerable? I am in awe at her courage in the sense that she spoke openly to the media about her ordeal. She knew people would say, "that wouldn't be me, I would never be that dumb."

I told the class, looking back on my own experience, I wish I could go back and be stronger then, but I think all of us of capable of disappointing ourselves in that regard. The power dynamic of authority and submission is very complicated, but of course, being educated about it ensures that we can break out the pattern.

When the bell rang, I felt totally nervous. Had I gone far, gotten too personal? It just happened. Sometimes when you're teaching, you forget about the persona and become your "real" self, for better or worse. That story is something I think I sort of buried. How strange it should get unearthed in the classroom where I typically construct my identity in a very specific way: knowledgeable (hopefully), understanding, sometimes zany...but never the 'real' me.

I'm calling this posting "shame" because I think shame is what informs every source of angst I've ever had: the long and twisted history of my body, and how I usually loathe it. My stubborn refusal to believe my husband when he says I'm pretty. And always...the distrust and dismissal of men, whom I sometimes find, unfairly, to be sources of the world's injustices.

Last night, I had an allergic reaction of some kind. I got these irritating little hives and started scratching. Dan applied cortisone cream to my back with this wonderful, feather-light touch. With this tenderness so much a part of his nature, it was like his wife was made of paper.

Things We Find in Shopping Carts

My friend Tim found this in a shopping cart at Garwood Shoprite.
It is quite frankly the saddest little list I've ever seen. It says, "Metamusil, eggs, cat food."

Somewhere, a constipated cat lady is making an omelette and I hope she isn't as lonely as her list makes her seem.

The grocery list could be a man's, although I doubt it.

There is something oddly touching about how the 't' in cat and the 'f' in food are darker and outlined several times over. I can picture her on the phone with someone, idly tracing her list, maybe wishing she could buy Vodka and chocolate but knowing it's not good for her stomach.

Is it possible she really only bought those two things? Or are those the three things she was afraid she'd forget?

Sometimes when I'm food shopping I remember my mom practically crying in frustration while standing on a long line at the Matawan Foodtown. She said, "I feel like I've spent my whole life in this stupid store," with a subtle introspection she always surprises me with during ordinary moments. Isn't that a common fear...to be swallowed whole by the suburbs, your whole life swirling around displays of Cheerios and toilet paper?

What is worse, shopping alone for yourself and your cat, or shopping for your family, and going home, and thinking about the lady and her cat?

Right now I'm making chicken dipped in cornflakes and sweet potatoes for Dan. He bought the stuff on Sunday from our Shop-rite up the block where we both have probably logged already over five hundred hours of our lives so far. But everyone needs groceries, right?

I'm thinking about you, lady-list-leaver. All the people and things I can't know in the aisles of the world.