Rooful.

Boy I tell ya these kids today...

- A few weeks ago, J and Sprog and I made a trip to a wardrobe supply place in Midtown (well, sort of right between Chelsea and Midtown) to pick up a roll of white gaffers tape for babyproofing/cord control around our apartment (and because gaff tape fixes almost everything.)

It was a gorgeous day. As we strolled towards 8th avenue, we noticed a bit of a procession underway-- two girls, maybe seven or eight, were sitting in a battery-powered plastic convertible, styled like an Escalade. They had Sade blasting, and were kicked back, looking properly bored.

They were fabulous, and under their carefully cultivated coolness, you could tell they knew it.

Across the street, a group of young guys were grinning at them, calling out, "Aw, yeah! That's the way to do it!" and "Man I wish I'd had one of those!" and "Looking good, ladies!"

They were.

It was a sweet moment.

- In a far less sweet example of children acting older than their years, a twelve-year-old boy hit on me.

I was jogging in the park with Sprog in the stroller, and I came to this section where the path is cut away from the lawn above, revealing rocky mini-cliffs, about fifteen feet high. Sometimes, adult climbers practice there, with equipment. But you often see kids climbing there, without.

Anyway, there were five or six tween boys, sitting at the top of the cliff or hanging monkeylike just below, as I passed beneath with my stroller.

Well, most kids like to call out in that scenario, and generally I ignore them in an adult manner. But they were calling out compliments to my kid: "That's a nice baby you've got there!" and "Aw! What a cutie!"

They found my weak spot. "Why thank you!" I turned and shot them a grin as I ran.

"You have a nice ass! It's round, and jiggly!"

Well!

For the first time in my life, I found myself fighting the urge to say, "Young man! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! I'm old enough to be your mother!"

And I am! Easily! No sad teen pregnancy scenario required.

I shook my head and kept running.

When I told J about it, he said, "He never would have said something like that if his friends weren't there. "

"Harrumph."

"But you do have a nice ass."

Yeah. I've been told.

Maybe it's just as well I live across the country from this kid.

Stories your family tells that are crap.

I was just reading an article about stuttering, which reminded me of my own adventures in speech therapy when I was little.

To this day, my parents like to claim that the classes did nothing to cure my lisp-- it was all thanks to my orthodontia.( My godawful orthodontia-- I had this retainer-type thing that was designed to make my lower jaw grow. Yes, I was super-cool in every respect.)They like to say that my retainer forced me to stop speaking with a lisp, because it held my tongue in the correct position when I spoke.

Well. I find that unlikely, since I took the damn thing out every time I needed to say something (I became expert at this surreptitious hand-swipe across the mouth to spit it out or put it back in.) And, I remember the Henry Higgins moment with my speech teacher when I finally said "Santa's sleigh" correctly.

"And where was that soggy sleigh?"

"In Spain! In Spain!"

Commence flamenco dancing.

Not really.

Anyway. My parents were (are) wrong. But I parroted their version of events for a long time, before I started consulting my own memories of my past.

Some other assessments of theirs that were completely whackadoo:
1. I'm an anorexic.
2. I have Dupuytren's contracture in my feet.
3. I'm short-waisted.
4. I've always been near-sighted. And I've always needed reading glasses. Both.
5. My sister had a hard time socially, but I was always popular in school. (Ha!)

And now my mom is claiming my son has red hair and either green or "navy blue" eyes.

Yes. This kid:

I don't have any other kids lurking, so she must be talking about this one.*

* -- This actually ties in to a story I may tell, if I get it together to tell any story on purpose these days, about my sister, who has joined in with my family's bizarre creative re-memory-ing regimen and is now claiming that I was blonde when I was little.

I wasn't. Not that there's anything wrong with being blond, as many friends and my son would attest.

Of course, when someone says, "I get a lot of mileage out of telling folks you were born blonde. Hur hur hur!" you could be excused for inferring differently.

Sigh.

So, I'm opening up the comments! Have some crazy lies your families tell that you want to share? Little mythologies you've begun to question? Post 'em!

Sorry! It was all in good fun, I swear!

Yesterday I was waiting for the subway elevator with Sprog.

The car arrived, but I saw an elderly woman headed towards me, so I stood in the doorway to hold it. She was a few steps away, and a few other people were coming, so I stepped in. The doors were really fast, though-- a serious-looking young man wearing a yarmulke kept the doors from closing, gestured her in. A pretty young woman stepped in and moved to the back. The doors closed, and the young man pressed the button...

"Aren't we going?" said the old lady.

"I don't think it's working."

We stood for a moment and looked at the closed doors. Then he hit the open door button, and we all filed into the staffed elevator two doors down.

When we finally got to street level, the young man held the door for the old lady, and me. As I walked down the hill, I could hear him talking to the pretty young woman.

"So... are you Jewish?"

[awkward pause.]

"Yes. I'm Jewish."

"Well... that's good, because... you look Jewish. But sometimes these days you see people who look Jewish, but they aren't."

"Hm."

There was some silence, and I figured he'd split off at that point. I saw the girl coming up past me, and smiled at her.
"I think what he was really asking is Are you single?"

She gave a slightly mortified, conspiratorial grimace and said, "I hope not!"

I grinned at her, and turned to cross the street. Which is when I saw the young man, pointedly not looking at me, doing one of those straight-armed run/walks to get across the street and away as fast as he could.

Ah, well...

Fitness.

I nearly collided with a woman walking her dog when we reached the intersection at the same time.

She glanced down at the stroller, smiled at Sprog. Then she shot me a wide-eyed look, and said, "Wow! Good on you for pushing that baby in a stroller up the hill while jogging!"

I smiled, panted, nodded, panted, and considered some responses:

Oh, believe me, he was wayyy harder to push the first time.

Yeah, the old crib doesn't need all this upholstery anymore!

Trying to see if I can finally birth his little brother, Lardbaby.

Instead, I just grinned at her. "Have a nice evening!"

"You, too."

The light changed, and I finished my run.

Blossoms.

Come see our tour of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
this past Saturday.

This tree won our prestigious "Tree of the Day" award!

It was very pleased.

(And so was I.)

Do you remember the first time you caught the scent of lilacs?

I'm glad I'll remember his.

Beforeskin.

A history of my early thoughts about foreskins (!),
continued from here.

I grew up in a sex-positive family-- back before that was a thing to be. There was nothing shameful or dirty about nakedness at home. I shared bath-time with friends that were girls and friends that were boys. I enjoyed skinny-dipping (still do.)

By the time I reached puberty, I'd developed, among other things, a sense of personal modesty that meant I was less likely to want to be naked around people of the opposite sex. Still, even when I was quite young I had a good idea what penises looked like, and had seen a number of them.

But they were all circumcised.

I remember looking at Roman statuary, and coming to the conclusion that the Church must have forbidden carving penises in all their naughty detail, since none of them had visible glans. I figured it was the Roman version of a Ken doll's amorphous plastic junk.

I had no idea what a foreskin was, or what it looked like. I remember my family, sitting in the car in the driveway, listening to Dad trying to explain circumcision. All three of us females (my mom, my sister, and I) were rapt-- fascinated and confused, and full of questions.

"But what does it look like?"

"It's a hood, that protects the end of the penis."

"A hood?!"

"Yes. And it can trap dirt, and be hard to keep clean. So it's trimmed away."

"But it's a hood? Like a monk?"

"No. It comes up over the head of the penis from below."

"But how do you... how do you have sex with something like that?"

"It retracts."

"But how?"

Dad kept talking, to little effect. I decided an uncircumcised penis must look like a jack-in-the-pulpit, or a calla lily.

Well, that's just ridiculous. Of course they cut that off. How could you fit it in your pants?

I couldn't picture how men managed before they figured out circumcision. I couldn't imagine anyone not being circumcised, unless they they lived in some benighted land and had no choice.

If the internet had been around back then, I'm sure I could have set myself straight much earlier. As it was, I was in college, and had a handful of notches on my proverbial lipstick case, before I encountered an uncircumcised penis in the flesh-- a nice guy from Dublin that I used to work with. Actually, I've only personally encountered two uncircumcised penises, and the other was attached to a guy from Dublin as well (no, not at the same time.)

I was a little taken aback, at first. Sort of a "Huh, so that's what that looks like. Should I do anything different?"

But no, it worked pretty much the same. And it wasn't gross, or smelly, or any of the awful things I'd heard about uncircumcised penises my whole life. Honestly, beyond the appearance I didn't really notice any difference at all.

I'm reminded of an encounter with an English girl who worked at a crafts studio with me, here in the city, one summer about ten years ago. She was only in the States for a few months, so she was trying to squeeze every drop from her New York experience by going out to the clubs every night after work. She'd met this nice guy, and they'd gone dancing a few nights running before she agreed to go to his place.

He was circumcised. "I had no idea what to do," she said the next day. "All my tricks for foreplay involve playing with the foreskin. Are all American guys circumcised?"

The rest of my coworkers agreed: "Most of them."

That's when I started to realize that people from other parts of the world, certainly those that hail from the British Isles, have a very different attitude about foreskins than Americans do.

Still, it didn't seem to me to be much of a big deal either way. I figured it was like the differences between British and American tailoring-- do you like a snugger sleeve? A roomier crotch? It's all just a matter of taste.

Isn't it?

Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

A conversation when I went home for my baby shower:

"So are you circumcising Tweedle?"

"I told J that since it's a boy it's up to him. If it were a girl I'd decide. And as for female circumcisions, well, I'm foursquare against."

"Heh. That's what we did, too."

"Did you hear they're trying to make circumcisions illegal in San Francisco?"

"Except if you're Jewish, right?"

"No, that's part of the hubbub-- no religious exemptions."

"That's ridiculous."

"I'm not sure I'd go so far as to make them illegal."

"No religious exceptions?"

"No. The thinking is that that'd be like allowing clitoridectomies to be performed for traditional Muslims or whatever."

"People say that all the time. But it's not like a clitoridectomy. Clitoridectomies are like removing the whole penis."

"Yeah. It's not the same. Men who've had circumcisions can still enjoy sex."

"We sure can!"

"I'll second that."

"Actually, I've been doing a lot of research on this... to help out J... anyway, I actually had a chance to talk to a few men who'd had circumcisions as adults, who were willing to talk about it. And they said that sex felt just as good after. Well, one guy said masturbating wasn't the same..."

"Why did they have it done?"

"Phimosis. Both of them had it."

"That's what [my nephew] had! Wait. I think that's it..."

"Phimosis is like if you were wearing a turtleneck and it was too tight to pull down over your head."

"Yes! That's it."

"I wasn't sure-- Mom said something about adhesions. And I wasn't sure... I read that you can cause those if you try to retract a foreskin on a baby..."

"We never did that!"

"...because that's like the worst thing you can do..."

"We know!"

"...but sometimes doctors tell patients to do that because they're ignorant."

[mildly offended silence.]

"You know, back when we had [my nephew], in Berkeley, they were already on the anti-circumcision crusade there, and he'd already been through so much, and I just didn't want to put him through anything painful. I'm so glad we waited until he was old enough to remember the surgery, and can point to the hospital and say that's were he got his penis chopped."

"Oh. Poor kid. He's fine, now, though, right?"

"Yeah!"

"You know, back when you were having him I was going to say something but I thought It's none of my business, I should keep my mouth shut. But I was going to recommend you have it done. It's healthier. Given how things turned out, I wish I had. But now I'm telling you, get your son circumcised."

...

I didn't.

I flew right in the face of my father's explicit advice and my family culture, not to mention my husband's initial feelings on the matter.

Why?

Perhaps more to the point, why bother writing about my why, when the Internet is well-nigh glutted with accounts scientific and personal and somewhere in-between, arguing that people who circumcise their children are ignorant butchers, or that people who don't circumcise are intolerant wingnuts who have no respect for religious or cultural precedent or the possibility of medical benefits associated with the procedure...

And there you have it-- I'm writing about my decision-making process because I think supplying some points between the two poles of a deeply divided discourse could be a worthwhile endeavor.

We'll see.

continued...

Blogher 2006.

I've been reading references to this conference, here and there, for years now. It seems to have gone down in the annals of women bloggers of a certain stripe as "The Year that Was." Which is gratifying, since I was there.

I've written of this often enough that I'm consciously self-cannibalizing, but bear with me: I started blogging in July of 2005. After months of reading blogs, I wanted to be part of the community I could see through my computer screen. More than wanted-- I yearned. Eventually, I was. I had a small but expanding circle of blog friends. We all read each other's work regularly, let our own writing, our styles and subject matters, be shaped by each other.

Bit by bit my readership was growing-- and my confidence in myself as a writer with a unique voice, and thoughts that others might want to share. I was doing work I genuinely thought was worthwhile. I wanted to take a spin at putting myself out there. I wanted to be read more.

What better way to do that than by going to a blogging conference, where so many of the bloggers I admired would convene, along with many of my new internet friends, who knew me in some ways better than anyone in my Real Life?

There was a rub, of course. I wrote, then as now, anonymously. I don't know if I'd even posted pictures of my face at that point.

Writing anonymously... it's a sort of mental jujitzu I perform, to allow myself to write the things I care about without self-censoring.

Putting my face, and my real voice, up alongside my text, was a risk.

I went anyway, though one of the ways my fear of being revealed played itself out was that I made no business cards, or did any of the sort of work to really capitalize on the self-promotion that was arguably one of the main reasons I went.

Still, I met some wonderful women, and had those searching, connected, insightful, magical conversations that happen when you meet people who really get you, and you drink and smoke and stay up too late together. The sort of connections that become harder and harder to come by, the further you are from your early twenties.

I'm so glad I went.

Despite my subconscious attempts to sabotage my own self-promotion, I did make new connections at Blogher. I came back from the conference to a website that was getting hundreds of hits a day, and comments by the dozens-- a geometric increase in the traffic I'd had before the conference.

It was a little terrifying, actually. I found it really hard to write, knowing so many people were watching-- particularly since many of them knew who I really was.

I was trying to find a new balance. But I came back from Blogher just days before starting my big new job at the Opera. The job that consumed me. The job that left me, three years later, reeling from political intrigue and long hours and poor health, primed to dive off the deep end.

I had to take down my old blog. I felt like Abraham, minus the angel.

Well, that sounds melodramatic. I broke my own heart, taking down that blog. But I did it anyway.

I wandered blogless for a while. But I felt unmoored. Strange. This particular form of writing and socializing is part of me, part of my life. Even though it's so damn unfashionable these days.

Because that's the thing-- a personal blog... It's just not done, anymore. At least, not much, and not by many.

It's taken me a long time to get back into the swing of blogging on a semi-regular basis (and I do fear that typing that sort of thing will frighten the writing part of my brain into hiding-- but I'll risk it.) I don't think I write as well as I used to. I'm working on it-- and maybe I'm just experiencing some sort of shift in style-- but when I read through my archives, I'm forced to confront the fact that what I write now is simply... it's not crafted, the way my work used to be. I write, and I put it out there, because if I don't let myself just crank it out without too much judgement I'm afraid I won't write at all.

Which brings me to the other big shift since those halcyon days of Blogher '06-- so many of the bloggers I love, that I looked up to, simply aren't writing anymore. I've dropped some links from my blogroll, but others I've kept up, for reasons of stubbornness and denial and... wistfulness. Where did you go, Mama Tulip? And Nancy, the best commenter in the Blogosphere-- I miss you and your goofy humor and your girls. Meghan, at I'm A'Blogging-- I still remember the connection I felt with you, over Toklas cookies and shared childhood trauma. And some other ladies I met at the conference still have blogs, but lives that don't let them write much-- which I understand (boy, do I understand), but I still miss their virtual presence. (I hope you all know who you are!)

My circle of blog friends is small, and in some ways is getting smaller. I treasure the readers I have now (that sounds overstated, but I mean it sincerely.) But it's harder to branch out these days, to find new people to get to know. I suspect that people who keep personal blogs aren't as likely as they once were to venture beyond their established traffic patterns. And I think most people who might once have kept personal blogs now hang out on Facebook.

I don't have a Facebook page. Maybe I'll eat these words one day, but at the moment I feel active contempt for Facebook. I think it's creepy and totalitarian. And the Facebook policy on posting images of breastfeeding women enrages me-- particularly when, from what I hear, pornographic images, though also against the rules, frequently get a pass.

Didn't the site start as a way for entitled college douches to rate the looks of coeds?

Maybe not. I've decided that that's true, and added it to the hopper-full of reasons to hate Facebook.

Another is that I value longform writing (some might say that's just a cover for rambling, but... there you go.) Blogs allow for the whole panoply of writing formats-- from tweet-like updates to chapter books-- and graphics and video, to boot. They're flexible. They're not prescriptive. They can accommodate whatever level or breadth of thought you want to commit to them.

This last bit reads like the sort of inspirational encomium to blogging I might have heard at that conference six years ago. I feel like there's a little version of me in the back of my mind, with her hair down to her waist, wide-eyed and eager, secure in her sanity, holding up a cigarette lighter and swaying in the dark by the pool.

Well, hey. I've quit smoking since then. That's something.

More things you don't know about me.

At least, I don't think you do.

1. I was born in the city where the smiley face was invented.

2. Once I sang in Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris.

3. I love grapefruit. According to my mother, my uncle fed me pieces when I was an infant, before I was supposed to be eating solid foods, and I loved it then, too.

4. I also love lima beans. I don't understand all this lima bean hate.

5. When I was eleven, I leapt from a rock ledge twenty feet up into an off-shoot of Lake Powell, under Rainbow Bridge. I was operating under the influence of a middle-aged hippy woman my sister and I met on a tour boat, who enjoined us both to seize the day.

It was thrilling.

I'm glad I did it then, because now I'd be too aware of how stupid a risk it was. And because I don't think that part of Glen Canyon is still filled with water, or accessible to tourists.

6. I've never started a campfire with flint and tinder, or by rubbing two sticks together.

7. That being said, I build a good fire. Growing up in an old colonial, where the fireplace was actually used as a source of heat, lent me some skills.

8. I used to fantasize about going back in time, so I could tell people how to do things, like indoor plumbing, or cleaning wounds, or...

9. Generally, the dreams ended when I realized I'd probably be burned as a witch.

10. Maybe I'd deserve it, too. I mean, talk about some serious plagiarism.

11. I don't really think plagiarists should be burned alive.

12. When I was in third grade, I copied an article about Pasteur straight from our World Book Encyclopedia at home, and turned it in.

13. The teacher caught me when I couldn't tell him what "ridiculed" meant.

14. That's when I learned what plagiarism was. (And "ridiculed.")

15. As I've mentioned before, my mom was a school librarian. Which is probably why we had two sets of encyclopedias at home in the first place.

16. You'd think she would have told me about plagiarism herself.

17. Nope. She sure was angry at me for it, though.

18. I used to have a burning hatred of copycats. (Huh. See #11.)

19. The older I get, the more I realize we all copy. It's our nature.

20. We have some pretty intricate rules for which copying is acceptable, and which isn't.

21. I think about this sort of thing a lot.

22. There's another post in there. I'll come back to it. Maybe.

23. My favorite book in our World Book Encyclopedia set was Volume H.

24. H is a great letter, don't you think? Strong, upright, with a pleasing symmetry side-to-side and top-to-bottom.

I'm sure there are specific words for those two varieties of symmetry. But sometimes perfect words are less direct.

25. The H was in gold leaf, set in on the binding.

26. I liked that volume because there was a whole section of acetate pages under "Human Body," where the different systems were illustrated in layers, like the "Visible Man" in two dimensions. You could flip past the muscles to the organs to the veins to the nerves to the skeleton, then pile them back on again, watching the development from nothing back to flayed person.

27. I guess it was sort of like what little I saw once of one of the Hellraiser movies, where a man grows from some spilled blood or something. But I didn't like that.

28. I enjoy medical illustration. I've even enjoyed the little bit of dissection I did in science class back in the day.

29. But I don't like horror movies.

30. Psychological thrillers, sure. And yes, the occasional zombie film-- though "Shaun of the Dead" was my favorite of those, and I don't know if that counts.

31. I was thinking the other morning about times when I screwed up, back when I was a child.

32. I often got hit with the remark, "I wouldn't have expected this of you." Or varieties on that theme. Extra disappointment.

33. I think it's one of the real downsides of being a smart kid that usually follows the rules-- sometimes parents and teachers and other authority figures forget you are in fact still a kid.

34. I can see why it's effective from a disciplinary point of view, to hold the kids who tend to operate in a mature way to a higher standard, but I don't think it's fair.

35. Sometimes I worry about Sprog, because he's big for his age and making good progress, that people will be harder on him, or expect a level of accomplishment beyond his years.

36. I might be projecting. He's only six months old.

37. I think a lot of smart kids get damaged. They pull back from taking the risks that could lead to excellence because of that extra ration of disappointment they're handed every time they fail.

38. Well. I'll do my best not to inflict that on him. Or myself, for that matter.

39. I don't like to talk about certain projects I have in mind.

40. I wrap ideas like a furry papoose.

41. Do you ever wonder about papooses and other traditional back-pack baby carrying devices? I mean how mothers could hear their babies back there, in the wind and storm?

42. Do you think they ever just didn't?

43. I make up scenarios like these, where I break my heart thinking about an Inuit mother coming home to discover her baby had died (or some other situation, similarly terrible.) And I have to wonder, why? Does my brain just get bored if there's nothing sad to think about?

44. Well. I think about good things, too. But for some reason it seems I need to push my brain to be happy, whereas sadness is something it seeks out all on its own.

45. Speaking of which-- for the past half-week or so I've been feeling irritable and weepy.

46. And sure, there are life-events I could pin that on, but I was really starting to wonder about my mood.

47. I got my period today. Ohhhh, right. That.

48. My periods have only just started being regular since Sprog was born. And even before I got pregnant, they'd been a bit erratic. Still, you'd think I wouldn't find PMS quite such a surprise, me being a 36-year-old woman and all.

49. To be fair, back when I was on the pill I don't think I experienced PMS quite so much. I had some weird dreams, ate some ice cream, and that was about it.

50. And I wonder, is there a purpose to it? The emotional aspects of PMS, I mean? Are they adaptive, somehow? Or is Nature just an even bigger bitch?

Hmmmmm...

Peanuts.

I've opened our windows, sending Fee into paroxysms of kitty delight. Sprog is in his bouncy chair, and all is right with the world.

Well, maybe not. But we were able to go out earlier, in long sleeves and hoodies, instead of coats. Sprog came with me on my morning errands. Then I got coffee and a bite for lunch, and we headed to the park to enjoy them.

I had a thought, en route, feeling Sprog's weight in the carrier, resting on my hips. His legs brushing my sides as I strode along, shifting from left to right, made me think of elephants. I felt strong and steady, my feet meeting the earth with solid assurance.

I had a memory of riding an elephant, in a parking lot somewhere, or a zoo-- in one of those high-sided saddles that fit a small group. I remembered the crinkly feel of her skin.

I don't know if that memory is real. It could be.

There were daffodils, and crocus. We passed banks of purple heather on our way to the lower lawn. Not much grass yet. I spread a little blanket for Sprog-- one that used to be big enough to swaddle him. I sat on the carrier, to keep the wet dirt off my bum.

A little yogurt, a little ice coffee, a little bottle, a little rolly-polly in the sun. Then we headed home.

I got an email today, that warmed me from the toes up. (I'm looking at you, Ms. From Boston.)

I've had a disappointment. That's true. But I'm proud of the work I did. I finished something that started in a different life-- something left hanging, incomplete. I didn't win in the end, not because I can't do the work, but because I'm inexperienced.

I got to the final level of a fairly grueling process, competing against people that, so far as I can tell, all had years of experience working in the field I was just hoping to enter. That shows me that I must know how to paint. I have a lot to learn about professional practice, but I wouldn't have gotten that far if the talent wasn't there.

For the last few months, my tasks have been clear: take care of sprog, and work on my exam. Passed one stage? Time to prepare for the next.

It was comforting, having that script for my life-- knowing what I needed to do. Now I've finished that circle. I have to decide what's next.

What's my next dare-to-be-great situation?

J thinks that phrase sounds "a bit... grandiose, don't you think?"

Well, yes, a bit. I say it tongue-in-cheek. But not entirely.

I want my life to have a shape to it. I want to build something to be proud of.

I've got some ideas.

In the meantime, I have to say, I feel very lucky to have the Sprog, and sunshine, and readers like you.