In Praise of the Mundane

We're deep into summer now, and the iridescent fig beetles will appear in a week to gorge on the overripe fruit. Running lady has grown predictably tan and predictably outpaces me every time I circle the reservoir. The grass grows brown and brittle, and in the afternoons I hide in the shade of a palm tree while Dexter runs through community sprinklers. We punctuate the long, hot days with self-serve frozen yogurt, and reliably the moon comes up behind the hill of houses once the day sweats off its fever. We watch it rise from our chairs around the glass table in the backyard where we drink coconut water and white wine. I've hunkered down into the predictability of existence. Let's praise it. 

Cultivating a love or skill

Let's praise the likelihood that Dexter will ace his preschool skills and transition smoothly into kindergarten, already able to read simple sentences and perform very basic math. Let's assume we'll run into expected disciplinary problems in grade school, and let's expect a few trips to the emergency room for stitches. He'll discover a skill or love and pursue it because that's what we do. Maybe he'll torture us by playing scales on the piano. Maybe he'll need shuttling to swim lessons. Maybe he'll be a math wiz. Let's rightfully figure that middle school will be awkward and painful sometimes, but he'll get through it. We can probably imagine that high school will be both hard and easy, that it could come off without a hitch, that he'll escape unscathed with enough of an education to go to an approved college. We can reasonably expect a part-time job serving burgers at Red Robin or painting houses until graduation. Let's praise the admirable career, even if it misses greatness. Let's cheer for a nice wife and charming kids. Let's weep with gratitude for the boring expectedness of it all. Let's rightly anticipate my son watching me lowered into the ground, and let's suggest he might cry, not because it's tragic, but because he will miss his mother, whose love for him was bottomless. Let's cross our fingers and hope and pray for a simple rolling forward of the years. 

Boy in the Plastic Bubble

Those of us who have had children late in life are accused of helicopter parenting because we keep a watchful, nervous eye on our sons and daughters. If this is true, it may be because we have seen a thing or two in our already long lives that let us know how someone can be fully present one minute and taken away the next. We have been witness to stories of loss, and sometimes those stories are merely once or twice removed from personal experience. Maybe we recognize the ephemeral quality of existence even as we watch our kids swing from the monkey bars. Perhaps we know that parenthood begins and ends with that one little boy panting around the house, pretending to be a dog. Because something bad could happen, and I could go from being a mother to once having been a mother, and that's the saddest narrative I can imagine at this wise and infertile age.

Broken Leg Pouty Face

At fifteen months, Dexter broke his leg. At two, he had a severe allergic reaction. At two and a half, he had a febrile seizure. Add dashes to the timeline of his existence with croup-like coughs, fevers, and the usual bruises. Now, at three, he's had a few incidents that suggest something neurological, but they have been so few as to only be suggestions. And so I watch him closely. This morning he pretended to fall three times in a mock ballet dance. Maybe the other falls were staged, too. Maybe I circle him and whir like the police copters that churn the sky in the high heat of these dependable, ordinary August days. 

Raise your glass of white wine or coconut water with me, dear reader, and let's have a toast for boredom. Cheers to you and your loved ones. 

Never-ending Summer

Vainglorious Opinion and How to Avoid It

One more great comic from Toothpaste for Dinner

I am addled with imperfections and riddled with flaws, dear reader, but sometimes I get cocksure about my intellect and wisdom. Luckily for me, though, someone takes me down a notch and reminds me that I, in fact, don't know everything. These humbling experiences make me think further and harder, and let us hope they keep me from becoming an opinionated gasbag...

A friend asked me to read his poetry manuscript and offer some feedback, and I said I would although anyone who has ever done so knows that parsing a manuscript can be laborious. However, this is an old friend whose work I have admired in the past, and here was an opportunity to get yet another opinion on my own belabored manuscript since he agreed to an exchange.

I began reading his manuscript, and I found the poetry difficult. The poems were ciphers in many cases, and I became impatient with their inaccessibility. Then I found myself getting exasperated as I pawed through the poems looking for scraps of narrative, which function for me like yellow brick roads through the difficult terrain of verse. Then I got crabby about my friend's poetry.

What followed was an e-mail exchange that I will paraphrase here in the interest of blog brevity. I wrote to him to say that I was not a good judge of experimental poetry because I'm a slave to the narrative. Then I said that experimental poetry is to blame for alienating the general reading public from poetry as a whole. (I know, right? What a dick.) Then I admitted to intellectual laziness, which did not prevent me from complaining about how I didn't get this or that in his manuscript. My e-mail was not very generous. It was kind of critical in a non-constructive way, in fact.

To paraphrase his reply, he said that he understood if it was not my type of poetry, but he was hoping for some insight into ordering the poems. He said don't worry if you're not moved, but that there is room for all types of poetry. Furthermore, he pointed out that the poems I was most critical of were the ones that were published in their current form, which confirms poetry's "rich diversity" to quote him. He finished by saying that he liked reading to be a process as much as writing and that interpretation was open for debate.

So there you have it, dear reader. I shot my friend down because I didn't get what he was trying to do with his poetry. And his response made me wish I could back-peddle when I'm generally one who will continue to support my opinion. In this case, however, my friend showed me rather quickly that my opinion had no merit. And here's why:

I did to his poetry what I accused his poetry of doing to the reading public, and how can I lament the intellectual laziness of the reading public when I was dismissive of his work because it was too challenging? How absurd and hypocritical. Bad, Sonia, bad.

If I've managed to keep your interest until now, perhaps you can imagine how this post about poetry can be extrapolated to apply to other matters of judgement and taste. Who am I, who is anyone, to judge what one likes and dislikes in matters of the arts? How different we all are, how different are the circumstances of our upbringing, how different is the arrangement of our neurons and synapses, how differently we think, how different are our intellects. Of course there is no accounting for what one appreciates. Furthermore, all sensory and aesthetic experiences are acquired tastes. And my friend is right; there are so many of us out here looking for truth and beauty that there must be room for all of it.

As for judgement, kind reader, we should be more sympathetic to what others love. This is not to say, of course, that all artistic pursuits merit respect. There will always be bad art, music, and poetry, but it's reasonable to say that if an artist, musician, or poet has garnered a following, a contract, a show, or a label, then we must acknowledge that people like it in ways that we will not understand. Therefore, instead of using negative language to disparage, say, contemporary country music or Thomas Kinkade, I will simply say that it's not for me because I'm not really drawn to it.  Moreover, what draws us to an aesthetic, sensory, or intellectual experience is something we're often hardwired with.

If you don't like something, you have the right to avoid it.

Let me disclaim a little bit here when I say that we should not let ourselves off the hook too easily when it comes to matters of intellect and leisurely pursuit. We should not always take the path of least resistance when it comes to how we spend our leisure time, or we risk squandering it. For example, how many episodes of Big Bang Theory can I watch before my eyes glaze over? A richer experience might be worth the extra tender. So, bright reader, go and read a poem. Whatever flavor of verse you prefer. I won't judge.  

As for me, now that I have shamed myself into open-mindedness, I must return to my friend's manuscript because I owe him further commentary. 







  

The Third Behavior: On Breaking Up With Facebook

In my first post for July, I mentioned that I was working on changing three behaviors that had turned into bad habits. The two I had written about were careless eating and drinking, but the post had grown too long to elaborate on the third. As I write about each of these behaviors, I'm confident that it's not just my own dirty laundry I'm airing. I think you, too, dear reader, must share at least one of my questionable habits, and that's why I'm taking the time to spell it all out. It's all in the name of empathy, collective guilt, and rejoicing/self-berating in the joy/pain of too many at-home vodka martinis or whatever the vice. You're welcome to choose an appropriate reaction.

At any rate, I wanted to save the last behavior for its own dedicated post...

About a week or so ago, with the help of my husband, I broke up with Facebook and told it that I only wanted to be friends. I said, "It's not you; it's me." My admission of fault is absolutely true; Facebook has so much to offer in terms of outreach and connection. Nevertheless, it also poses great risks, I think, to individuals like me who communicate best with writing, appreciate wit, struggle with social connection, and succumb to repetitive behaviors and lapses in attention. It seems that each of the things that make Facebook a wonderful place to hang out can be exaggerated so that one becomes a grotesquery, a Facebook troll, and a parody of a Facebooker.

As Facebook functions as a place to write things down to be read in as wide a public setting as we choose based on our number of Facebook friends, it becomes seductive to air thoughts and offer comments or advice. Furthermore, given that Facebook is essentially text-based, I found it tantalizing that I could craft responses and status updates that did not rely on real time. In real time, when someone says something to you, you have x amount of time to respond in a clever or thoughtful fashion whereas on Facebook you can take as much time as you need. You never have to say, "I wish I had thought to say..." or "Why did I say that?..." In this regard, Facebook provides a kind of functionality that appeals to individuals who either communicate best with writing or who like to think before they speak. This becomes grotesque, though, when the individual overspends time crafting responses and status updates to the detriment of spontaneity and face-to-face conversation.

Similarly, Facebook is a great place to work on one-liners. The humor I have regularly seen on Facebook is clever and acerbic. I found myself coming up with one-liners all the time. However, this became grotesque when preoccupation came at the detriment to deeper and longer thought processes. Status updates can not take the place of real work when it comes to writing.

Regarding the social connectivity of Facebook, I have found it both uniting and isolating at the same time. On the one hand, Facebook functions as a digital time machine so that we can move rather fluidly throughout the history of our own lives, connecting and reconnecting with the people who help keep our memories alive. I have had incredibly meaningful interactions with friends from every place I've ever lived. This is why I'm unwilling to abandon it completely. On the other hand, relying solely on Facebook for social interaction is sad. Yet, as a stay-at-home mother whose closest friends live nowhere near Los Angeles, it becomes too easy to revert to introversion and avoid the work required to make new friends in a new town. But how much meaning and depth can be milked from the fly-by-night, brief interactions that Facebook affords? Sitting alone in one's underwear in front of the computer, no matter how many Facebook friends you have, does not a social life make.

Those brief interactions and bits of approval that we get from Facebook are what causes the most trouble, though. We get caught in a hunger for feedback, which leads to repetitive checking and posting. I found I had become stricken with borderline OCD. This is not a joke. Furthermore, the preoccupation of the feedback loop affected my ability to concentrate. It also affected my parenting. When checking Facebook became more important than spending time with my one and only beautiful son, it was time to dump it, or to at least establish a healthy distance. I don't want to look back at Dexter's childhood and think, "If only I had paid attention to my boy instead of chortling about political memes that over-utilized pictures of Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka."

Like anything else, moderation is key. If you can drink your one glass of red wine each night for health purposes, good on ya. If you can log into Facebook once every couple of days to time travel, I commend your restraint. For the rest of us, though, us bacchanalians who would turn our teeth purple with Cabernet with even the slightest provocation, we need to proceed with extreme caution. In fact, sometimes we even have to relinquish our log-in passwords to spouses even if we hate to create a power play like that in our relationships. Although sometimes our spouses are really kind and sympathetic, too.

Poetic Interlude

Febrile

He seized on the interchange

as late sunlight glared off game-day traffic

and I just stopped, mid-lane,

and punched the hazards

as he bucked against the car seat.

But I wouldn't say I watched, couldn't say

I stared, won't say now I saw

when his mouth went slack

and his eyes rolled white

as if I could have recorded

those sights. And today his fever

lingers on his face the way

Vermeer's light loved milkmaids.

His brown eyes brimming like a heifer’s;

His beauty like a doomed

consumptive. He clings like August

clutches the Valley, and I sit

and let my own sweat rise.

How could I do otherwise?

In two days he’ll push away my arms,

so I hold this moment in my gaze

the way I spot heat mirages

wavering off the asphalt.

Platitudes and National Tragedy

I was at the gym yesterday and inundated with television news coverage of the shooting in Colorado. To say that the coverage of the event took the wind out of my sails for the day demonstrates exactly how packaged language fails to express the gravitas of what happened in that movie theater, but because this post gives me the breadth to say as much as I want in as many words as I want, without Twitter-like limitations, let me elaborate:

I began the day worried about Dexter, who had two falling spells in twenty-four hours. The day before yesterday, for no reason, his legs crumpled underneath him and he fell over backwards and banged his head against the pavement. He looked like a marionette gone slack. Then, yesterday morning, he tipped over off his potty on to his side, again while in a still moment, so I was scared. Something was disturbingly wrong. We made a pediatrician appointment for the same day.

Add to this the anxiety and sadness that Dexter has begun to express as he tries to transition from baby to big boy, particularly as it relates to preschool, and I was already feeling blue. Then I learn about this shooting in Colorado, and I felt deflated. That's what I meant by "wind out of my sails." I had no loft. I was dragging like a balloon losing its helium. It felt like I was pushing against an environmental resistance, like walking into a strong wind, but without the obvious presence of wind. I felt boggy with emotion. That's the problem with cliches and platitudes; they often have a wealth of good intent and rich description behind them, but the easy words that come to us, if they are too easy, fail to express the complexity of our reactions to events, be they personal or universal.

As I was reading the news at the gym (IPod on, TV volume off, closed-captioning on), I was struck by the preponderance of platitudes and cliched expressions of remorse and solace that played on the screen. Furthermore, I saw more of them as I logged on to Facebook. Maybe they sound familiar to you:

Our thoughts and prayers...
Our hearts go out to the victims and families...
We'll hug our children a little closer...

And after being inundated with such expressions, it's hard to believe that I was tapping into real sincerity. Cliches become so because of their reiteration. However, in the world of social media, where brevity is expected, such expressions are stock, even if the Tweeter or status updater is dealing with a complex and confounding flood of emotions regarding recent events. Furthermore, finding the real, unique, personal words to describe that in a limited space would be hard for anyone, so we use words like "prayer, heart, children."

In some ways we're flattened and rendered dumb by such senselessness. We want to leave articulateness to issues regarding women in the workplace or political ideologies because they're debatable subjects that stir the intellect whereas a senseless shooting of random people turns us, rightly so, into weeping empathizers. If we could really just package the feelings and send them out into the world attached to the flighty words, like the living, breathing carrier pigeons attached to notes they carry, then we could make people understand how stricken we are by random acts of violence. However, we're often left with platitudes as we just try to choke out something.

Our thoughts and prayers: This means that you're wishing speedy recovery for the injured and you're hoping that the families who have lost someone dear to them somehow find a way through and out of the pain. It means that you're trying to figure out why as if some kind of answer will make it better, and you're trying to send those thoughts across the miles to let the victims and victims' families know that you have the same questions and that you're nearly as heartbroken as they are. It means that you're turning to your belief in God as a way of finding comfort and answers even if He doesn't provide them for you because it's often the community of belief and prayer that collectively heals wounds. Even as the shooter was completely divorced from any sense of divinity. It means you've put aside your own personal problems to consider how much worse someone else has it.

Our hearts go out to the victims and families: This is a more secular version of the above platitude, but it essentially means the same thing, although without the presence of prayer to a higher power. What it means though is that when we're lying in bed without the warm down comforter of divinity, trying to make sense of senseless violence, and we're absolutely reeling with emotion, our hearts, some heaviness in our chest, keeping us from sleeping, we're hoping to send out the collective spirit of human empathy. We recognize that we leave the mind out of this. And here is where that repetition does well to uplift: so many of us sending our hearts across the miles.

We'll hug our children a little closer: We mean we can't imagine what it's like to lose a child, and here are all of these families who have just lost theirs. How absolutely devastating. One minute you're doing something as pedestrian as watching a movie, the next thing you know, you're watching your child die. And in the moments of national peace, we're just a bunch of nuclear families protecting our own, occasionally bumping up against another. But the kinetics of such a national tragedy make us bump up against people we don't even know. We say, "we'll hug our children a little closer" because we hope that such attention will prevent such an event in the future. We also hug our children closer because we recognize that they can be taken from us when we least expect it.

So there you go: a little background.

As for us, the visit to the pediatrician offered no information. We were told to continue to watch Dexter for more spells. If anything came up, we were told to make another appointment at which point we would have to begin looking into something neurological or cardiac-related. Great. I'm hoping that these were odd, isolated events intended to make me hug my child a little closer. I know I would be devastated if anything happened to him.

 

On Cultivating New Habits

This post primarily deals with how much thought and care I must use when making choices, and it also elaborates on how poor decision choices lead to bad habits, and it, finally, talks about two of the three behaviors that I am proactively changing through very careful consideration of movements that have become unconscious and innate. But, let's start with an anecdote...

Silverlake Reservoir, circled twice, with detour: five miles

After dropping Dexter at preschool, I began my alone time today with a five mile run, which I made speedy time of, completing it in about fifty minutes. This is not surprising. I make a good habit out of regular, strenuous exercise. I would say, however, that although breathe and muscle did not balk, I was nevertheless uncomfortable during the last third of the run. I had chaffed my inner thighs through my running pants because my thighs had rubbed holes through the material. That's because they touch, dear reader, but here is why I'm still carrying around a good seven pounds of unwanted weight: I don't take any real care when I eat or drink. Thus we get to the first two behaviors that I am changing.

I worked a collective eight years in the restaurant industry as a server and bartender in fast-paced establishments that did not allow for dining breaks. I ate my meals furtively, ravenously, and almost always while standing. As a result of this, I have had a hard time eating slowly, even when out for, say, filet mignon with my in-laws. Furthermore, when I ate on my own as a instinctual necessity, I often just stood over the sink and shoveled food into my mouth until I wasn't hungry anymore. The problem with this, aside from pegging me as a bit of a savage, is that it's impossible to know how many calories I was eating. That was fine before I changed my body through childbirth, and it was fine when I busted my ass for ten hours behind the bar, working to the brink of physical exhaustion. But that's not my life anymore; now I'm a stay-at-home mom who enjoys more moments of stillness, more sitting, and this does not support willy-nilly eating. 

Too much of a good thing?

This role as stay-at-home mom also compounds the problem. I take care with Dexter's food, but I don't make any time or effort to prepare meals for myself. I just graze around the kitchen, eating this and that. And sometimes this is chocolate cookies. Sometimes that is random chunks of cheese. It's not that I'm gorging on french fries and chocolate shakes, but I'm just careless enough that all of the exercise I do simply maintains my slight paunch. So to change this behavior, I must put food on a plate. I must plan carefully. I should sit and eat with Dexter anyway as a way of setting good habits.

The second behavior that must change is related to the issue of eating because it involves caloric intake, but it's also fraught with other perils. And this behavior is the careless consumption of alcohol. I do so love to drink, although I would argue that I am not an addict.

In the restaurant industry, drinking is not only commonplace, it's also a behavior that mutates from conscious, good fun to regular, habitual sloppiness. There are a lot of alcoholics in the industry, but I would argue against the idea that the industry attracts individuals prone to alcoholism. Or maybe all the bartenders and servers I have known have an inkling of addictive sickness running in their blood, but the culture of the restaurant industry encourages drinking, and when an individual engages in a behavior that occurs regularly, it's very easy for that behavior to become habitual. The problem is when a habitual behavior first becomes unconscious and then becomes a physical and psychological necessity. That's when they/we/I must become conscious again of what we're putting in our mouths. It's important to weigh our every move to avoid transitioning from unconscious habit to addiction.

The pleasures and perils of the restaurant industry

So much gravitas in the paragraph above, you would think that I'm consuming a fifth of Wild Turkey every week. On the contrary, what happens if I don't tread carefully is that my one glass of white wine turns into three glasses of white wine. This is over the span of an evening, from about 7pm to 11pm. Not too risky in terms of habitual sloppiness, however the calories from three glasses of wine coupled with the aforementioned chocolate cookies, and any gains I made during the day from exercise are thrown out the window. Or down the gullet, as the case may be.

As for the perils of unconscious alcohol consumption, I find it incredibly easy to drink bourbon on the rocks. For as many years as I have been drinking, I have developed a heroic tolerance. I could have three in a night, every night, and be little worse for the wear in terms of the morning after; however, this is not a habit one can develop that's divorced from the body. The body comes to need the effects of three bourbons a night, and if it doesn't get the three bourbons, it has the potential to get crabby. Regular habits affect our dopamine, and when we engage in them, we get a nice hit of feel-good juice. When we deny or resist the habitual urge, we feel bad. 

So the point is that when I decide to have a drink, it must come from conscientious choice-making. Not only because I can't afford the huge injection of empty calories, but also because habitual drinking, habitual anything, creates a physical and psychological need related directly to how our brains release the feel-good juice. And, look, I suppose this can happen if one is addicted to something redeemable, like running or crossword puzzles, but there's a saying I've heard. Something about too much of a good thing...

Ultimately, it's probably good to avoid habits that are related to pleasure-seeking. If one makes an unconscious habit out of flossing one's teeth, there's little danger that this habit will tap into something dangerous and addicting in the brain of the flosser because it's hard to imagine an injection of dopamine being triggered by oral hygiene. On the other hand, hygienists would be out of work if this were the case. 

My Elitism Problem

I lost my cynicism a few years back. I even support the adolescent ardor for Justin Bieber, who seems to earn all manner of derision and ridicule from those people who forget what it is like to be young and evolving. I loved Shawn Cassidy and David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider; go ahead and laugh at me.

How I’ve grown. Here is a list of shows I have never seen, except, say, when I’ve caught them over someone’s shoulder: American Idol, Survivor, Lost, The Bachelor, 2.5 Men, Desperate Housewives, Family Guy, and Sex and the City. And this is the short list. My personal time is limited, and I try and use it wisely. I read high-falutin’ magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Sun, or I read books and poetry. I also like to do the New York Times crossword puzzles, although I’m not smart enough for the Friday or Saturday puzzles. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy television, but I choose a show that I’d like to watch, like Glee—it’s campy, catchy and you can dance to it— and then I order it through Netflix. This prevents me from getting sucked into the brain-numbing black hole of popular programming.

However, before you label me as a cultural elitist, consider that one must disdain those who love easy entertainment to earn this moniker. On the contrary, aside from programs that reinforce gender stereotypes (such as Sex and the City), it is perfectly reasonable to watch any of the shows listed above. I support the urge to shut down one’s higher faculties and wallow in network muck. We all have to do it. However, all things in moderation, take the road less traveled, and whatever other aphorism expresses that if you let yourself off too easily, you’re going to end up with a flabby intellect. We do not begrudge the donut eater their one donut, but we’re appalled when the donut eater polishes off the entire dozen. Shouldn’t we be equally appalled when the viewer gorges constantly on the empty calories of pop culture and leaves no room for the fiber of brainier pursuits?

Often, the urge to label someone a nerd comes from the lurking suspicion that you’re not trying hard enough, and rather than change a personal behavior, it’s easier, and more self-affirming, to point the finger and say elitist, nerd, egghead, whatever. It’s the same drive that labels a slender woman as “anorexic” and a confident man as “cocky.” Because we’re unwilling to do the work to attain the same levels of commitment and success that the target of our disgust has worked for.

My interest in this whole topic is a personal one, and the point I’m trying to get to is this: It offends me that I have friends who couldn’t be bothered to pick up a book of poetry, because a rejection of poetry is a rejection of me. The labels that they might apply to poetry are “dated,” “flowery,” “boring,” “irrelevant” or some other derogatory term intended to let them off the hook since poetry often requires work. It can be difficult, not just because it’s cask-strength language, but it can also be emotionally vexing. So for some who resist poetry, it’s because they can’t be bothered to comprehend it, and for others, it’s because they can’t be bothered to feel difficult feelings. I can sympathize to a certain extent with those who resist for the second reason; I often avoid entertainment that pushes me to face despair. I still haven’t seen Schindler’s List. I never finished reading Sophie's Choice. However, blaming poetry for one’s intellectual laziness is a shame, and I wish more people would add it to their daily consumption of media.