Yes, I know I'm a shit

There is one reason and one reason only that I enjoy March Madness, and it is the fun of mocking sports fanatics on Facebook.

It brings me an endless amount of pleasure to gently prod people's insanity over men in shorts bouncing balls.  I tend to not have any interest in any kind of team competition.  I don't go ga-ga over the Olympics or school academic teams, either.

I know I carry on about my own obsessions on Facebook at times, like my frustration over snow days, and I'm sure that drives my friends nuts.  It tires them to read one.more.whine about listening to my kids scream at each other for 8 hours or how snow days fuck with their routines. Of course, snow days only occur once or twice a year normally.  This one year has been an exception.

For those of us who don't follow basketball, we have to put up with the salivations of our sports-following friends every.single.spring.

I try to keep my posts witty and light because I really don't intend to insult anyone.

I am merely a person on the fringes of basketball-obsessed society who really and truly doesn't understand any of it.

I'm not as smart, funny or acerbic as Dorothy Parker, but I imagine she was hated for her commentary too.

Things falling apart

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote this poem about life after WWI, and as I learned from reading Kevin Smokler's book Practical Classics, the phrase and idea of "things falling apart" has been the subject of much art, literature and music since this poem was published.  

I might argue that this stanza could be an analogy for the implosion of a marriage. 

I am reading the novel What Alice Forgot, which is about a woman who falls, hits her head and forgets 10 years of her life, including the fact that she is in the midst of a divorce.  Gwyneth and Chris announced their split.  A friend of mine told me this week she and her husband are breaking up.

So, of course, my mind is on marriage and "conscious uncoupling" (whatever the heck that means).

The funny thing about this much-made-fun-of phraseology by Paltrow is that it is the exact opposite of what happens in a marriage that makes things fall apart.  While D and I are as happily married as two people can be who have lived with each other day in and day out for 16 years, when I think about our rough patch almost 2 years ago, it was due, in some measure, to unconsciously being married.

Being married, especially after multiple children come into the picture, becomes like driving in one's car to work.  You arrive but you haven't the foggiest how you got there.  It is an automatic that requires little to no effort on your brain's consciousness to make it happen.  I think the same thing happens in marriage.  Suddenly you've been married a dozen years and have no clue how it happened, where the time went, and how you got to be the person you are right at this moment.  It is, essentially, unconscious coupling.

Some people say marriage should be easy, while others say marriage takes a lot of hard work.  I wonder if marriage was easier to swallow and endure when life, and therefore marriage, was cut short due to disease, starvation and the perils of childbirth.  Perhaps this is why so many people I know who have divorced or needed marriage counseling do so around the 14-18 year mark.  Nature is wanting someone to kick off, but modern life makes us just keep.on.going.

Plus, a focus on survival tends to make one not terribly interested in or aware of happiness.  Happiness is a luxury we can afford these days, and sometimes happiness does not coincide with the rigors of marriage.  And when I say rigors, I mean dullness, monotony, and annoyances.

I am always saddened when marriages end, even if they should end, even if they started out on the least solid of footing.  It is a death.  Even when there is relief that the marriage is over, as there would be if a loved one had been gravely ill and in terrific pain, there is grief at the loss of something you had, a way in which you lived, an identity that had been with you for many years.
Marriage is much like parenting, or at least the rigors of marriage become very similar to the rigors of parenting once you become a parent.  Insert the word "marriage" and this clip pretty well sums it up.

Like with parenting, I used to feel pretty smug about marriage.  There is nothing like raising an actual child (or children) to force one to eat tremendous amounts of crow, and there is nothing like living through a rough patch to knock one for a bit of a loop.  My experience has helped me understand better what it might be like for a couple that isn't just going through a temporary blip but has years of prickliness and fighting and resentment built up and cannot find a way to reconcile.  A couple that has long lost the ability to like each other.

That has to be a special ring of hell unto itself.

This is science

Today has been a true stay-at-home day, which is something I both need and hate.

A day of not running any errands tends to be very productive, as I get all sorts of little things of little consequence to anyone else done (like putting EOBs in the healthcare binder or scrubbing the drains).  But around mid-day, I also start to go a little bonkers, especially since M begins to tire.  At four years old, though, he is tired enough to be whiney and needy, but not tired enough to actually nap.

I am long past being the stay-at-home mom who tries with great abandon to "do things" with my child.  With N, I was forever doing projects that would stimulate her brain.....arts, crafts, playing grocery store with her fake food.  I was smug about how she didn't really need preschool because we did lots of things at home to help her learn.  And that was true, even if it was smug.

Child #3 needs preschool.  I have never taught M his letters, numbers, done arts and crafts or anything with any pre-planning or sincere concentration.  There is too much laundry and cooking and other stuff to do.  When I feed him marshmallows (which the first child didn't eat until she was 6 or something), I do ask him to count them, so I'm not completely useless.

I did have a moment, though, today when I realized that me being a mostly preoccupied stay-at-home mom on my true stay-at-home days is not such a bad thing.  I don't need to go all Pinterest-y on myself  and be the same kind of mom I was when I just had a singleton.

As I was piddling around, M grabbed his dinosaur and bug toys, parked himself at the dining room window and started playing in the sunshine.  He called me over to look at their shadows, a game he plays regularly.  I watch and give him suggestions on how if he turns the figure this way and that way, its shadow looks bigger, longer, more detailed, etc.

This is preschool science.
He is learning.
I am hanging back, watching him, moving between what I have to do and being present with him for the few minutes that my brain can stand it before I get bored with this preschool fun.

And that is good enough.

Why my book club hates me and why everyone should read all sorts of classics

I volunteered to host book club in July, and I feel fairly certain that attendance will be poor.  In addition to family vacations, I have selected The Grapes of Wrath, a 400+ page classic, as the book to read.

Two years now my selections have been voted "Least Liked Book," an honor that gains me guardianship of a lovely paper bowl.

There are at least three reasons why I select classics.

First, I really and truly do love reading classic literature.  After college, when others swore never to read a book of any kind at all as a way to decompress from the rigors of study, I launched into a full-blown classics course of my own making reading Somerset Maugham, Pearl Buck and almost everything E.M. Forster ever wrote.

Second, they are easy to find and cheap.  Libraries have tons of them, and you can find all sorts of editions at Goodwill or Half-Price Books (mostly because college students have sold theirs and sworn off reading for years).  While I don't mind reading modern literature, I really dislike paying $15+ or only being able to find them in hardbound copies.

Thirdly, classics are full of much more than action and events.  Maybe it is the busyness of modern life, but I find that many contemporary novels are about interesting stuff, but there is a dearth of metaphors, similes, personification and other literary elements that make a person think beyond the action.  Perhaps this is why I forget most of them within 3 months of reading?  There is nothing beyond the plot to help me remember, there are no footholds in which to store my recollections.

With all that being said, I think there are all sorts of classics that people should read, not just the big high school or college required reading classics.  If you've never read Eric Carle books, you are simply missing out.

A mom and her homeschooled daughter recently visited the cottage school where I teach.  The mother explained that she wanted to place her incoming 6th grader in my 9th grade literature class because she has an IQ of 160 and would be bored in my middle school class.  While I have no control over who gets placed in what classes, I wish I had told her why her daughter should read the middle school classics I teach and sit in with her age-level peers.  (When I asked the girl if she had read any of them books I've taught, she had not.  Her mother said she is reading The Iliad now.)

I wish I had told this mother that even if her daughter could read a middle school novel in a day, in an hour, she needs to read every Newbery Winner and Honor Book because even if they don't challenge her intellectually, they will emotionally.  She is, after all, only 11 years old.

I wish I had told her that just because a child (or an adult, for that matter) can read a certain level of book doesn't mean that child should.  I am able to read books about chemistry and physics and understand it to some degree. I am able to pronounce the words fluently.  But that doesn't mean I really and truly get it.

I wish I had told her that her daughter needs to be culturally literate with her peers, and that means reading books that her age-level peers read.  I am 40 years old, with two degrees under my belt, and I can read middle school novels and get a lot out of them.  As much as I consider myself a book snob, I am not so much of a snob as to think there is nothing of value for me in reading books "below my reading level."

To some degree, it is valuable and even necessary to read "bad" or "poorly written" literature.  If you only read fluff, you lose your sense of it being fluff.  It is through the stark comparison between really well-written, deep literature and the stuff that isn't to know just how vastly different they are.

I've read Fifty Shades of Grey and a Tucker Max book, so I'm speaking from experience.  

Wrestling with lack of sympathy

Our neighborhood is very quiet, so the police cars, ambulance and blocking off of the south entrance with police tape this past week was cause for much discussion.

During the night, a guy and gal in their early twenties were apparently riding a motorcycle/motorbike down the parkway that parallels our neighborhood, doing excessive speed (I've heard suggestions of 120 mph).  The driver lost control of the bike, his passenger hit the sound barrier and died instantly (we are told).  He continued on the bike, knocked over a small evergreen tree as he drove behind the sound barrier, was thrown or fell off the bike (which then continued on until it, too, fell over).

The neighbor noticed the bodies early the next morning.  No helmets.

The site of the accident, specifically the sound barrier and the destroyed evergreen, have become the homes of makeshift memorials.  Cemetery flowers, small balloons, homemade crosses.

People have been visiting the site, parking along the entrance of the neighborhood.

This morning the friends and family of the victims will be participating in a funeral ride of ATVs, motorbikes, motorcycles on the way to the funeral home, which will include passing by and stopping at the accident site.

And I know this is wrong, I know my feelings are not charitable or sympathetic or kind, but the whole thing really aggravates me.

First, the shallow thing.

I hate, hate makeshift memorials that I see lining highways and expressways.  Aside from looking tacky, they are a distraction to drivers, as if drivers need any more distractions besides their cell phones.

Second, the annoying thing.

In general, even in circumstances that are not this particular one, I'm not sure I understand the need to see the accident site of fatalities.  When family dies in the hospital, it is not customary to visit the hospital room in which the person died.  We have funeral homes and cemeteries for this purpose, to pay respect to the dead and to support the family.  I suspect it is the shock of the event that causes people to feel the need to see "where it happened."  Having never experienced this, I have a hard time understanding this need.

The annoying thing, for me anyway, is that the site of this accident is not a highway or expressway.  It is a neighborhood.  People parking right at the entrance and wandering around is both distracting and dangerous to the drivers who are pulling into the neighborhood.  As much as I hate that I feel annoyed by these folks, who are doing what they feel they need to do to assuage their grief, I feel annoyed nonetheless.

Third, the "this just makes me an asshole" thing.

If there is anyone for whom I feel great sympathy, it is the child of the motorbike driver, whom I believe is 4 years old.  Not only do I feel sympathy for her because she lost her dad, I feel sympathy for her because I wonder how secure her life has been up to this point.  Her dad was 18 when she was born, and I don't think anyone is ready for the responsibility of parenthood when still a teenager.  I'm 40, and I have many times when I think I am not ready for this responsibility.
It makes me angry that this guy did have a daughter and yet was running around on a Monday night in the wee hours with his girlfriend, driving without a helmet on a motorbike, using excessive speed.  I can't muster a whole lot of sympathy for the victims.  It was an accident waiting to happen.

And I feel guilty for thinking all this stuff.

A series of new projects

My first project should be finishing and filing our taxes, but that is some boring stuff.

(One of the ways I know I've calmed the heck down about a lot of things is that I used to file taxes in January.  Of course, maybe it isn't I've calmed down.  Maybe it is that taxes are now just one of 8 million things I have to remember to do.)

Anyway, I have been finding new more-fun-than-taxes projects, further adding to my "to-do" list.

The first project will be done by Spring Break (so help me).  I wanted to do it last fall, but teaching took up more time than I expected, and fall seems to be a very busy time of year anyway.

I am making little sit-upons for G's kindergarten class so they can go out to the Reading Garden at school and not get their bottoms damp or dirty.

A small project I just finished was to add small tiles to border the kids' bathroom mirror.  I had painted around it, but I never liked it.  I still had some grout left over from other tiling project, so I bought a $4.99 sheet of tiles at Home Depot and voila!

Also on my to-do list:  Clean the kids' mirror.  Ew.

My final indoor project is repainting the table and chairs that used to belong to my mom and dad.  They bought them used when I was little for $350 (this price included a hutch and sideboard, so I got the frugal gene TOTALLY honestly).  Mom and Dad still have the hutch and sideboard, but they bought a bigger dining set which matches the dark shade of wood.

We had had the set as our kitchen table, since we have a matching hutch and table/chair set in our dining room.  But the top of the table had completely lost the varnish, so everything was staining it, and I couldn't help but wonder how clean it was actually getting even when I took heavy-duty sanitizing products to it.  It was more disgusting than my bathroom mirror.

I decided to switch Mom & Dad's table/chair into the dining room and paint it, and to use what has always been our dining room table as our kitchen table.  (We didn't have a formal dining room in our first house so we bought a casual, informal set which looks fine in the kitchen, and even better than Mom & Dad's because it is a lighter wood.  Plus, the top is a veneer so we could almost blow-torch it, and it would be fine.)

This is what Mom & Dad's table/chair set is looking like:

I think it will end up looking nice and even matching the rug underneath(which can't be seen under the paint-splatter sheets.

It felt like victory

Every year, the kids' school has a Character Parade in the late winter.  Students dress as a character from a fictional book.

In the past, N has been Junie B. Jones, Brittany Chipmunk, the Mad Hatter, and Frannie K. Stein .  This year she was Opal from Because of Winn-Dixie.

G decided he wanted to be Wall-E, so I checked out a variety of library books so we could actually read about Wall-E.

And then he began explaining his design for the costume.

Anyone who is a fan of Peter Jackson's films has heard of Weta Workshop.  Apparently, even though my son has never heard of Peter Jackson or seen his films, he knows that such an amazing company exists.  G also thinks his mother works for said company.

G has vision and is detail-oriented, which are great qualities to have.  They are also maddening in a 6-year-old boy who really and truly expects me to somehow weld together a Wall-E likeness using the welding tools and the steel I don't have.

After much discussion, frustration (mine) and tears (his), we came up with this:

He wanted the wheels to look real, so I had to find bulletin board edging.  He wanted the eyes to look real, so I had to destroy a pair of sunglasses.  I used almost an entire roll of duct tape on this costume.

But he was happy in the end.  I was just glad it was over.

G insisted that he have the boot and plant that Wall-E saves.  Since he was more or less immobilized, M served as "the cockroach" of sorts, holding the book and boot.

As G walked through the halls, the kids around him marveled at his costume.  At one point, the halls were filled with the sound of kids chanting, "WALL-E!  WALL-E!  WALL-E!"  Kids were trying to smack his hand (in high-five fashion) as he walked among them.

As goofy as it sounds, I felt so stinking proud of my little dude, my obsessive, detail-oriented kid whose vision had driven me bonkers but was wowing the kids in his school.  It made me feel like he will end up ok, despite all my worries and worst-care scenario stories I play in my head.

After the parade on our way home, I asked him how he felt hearing the kids chant "Wall-E!"  He responded in his characteristically G way, "I thought it was kinda ridiculous, and I thought they'd try to kiss me."

The victory, I guess, was all mine to savor.