The Straw that Broke The Race Horse’s Back
Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under My Better Half, holiday fun, homeownership, snark, suburban joys | 10 Comments
Today is the beginning of April break and, as is always the case here in New England, the first Monday of the week long vacation is Patriot’s Day.
Having grown up in these parts, Patriot’s Day has always just one of those holidays that is part of a long weekend, a long weekend in which my parents always did copious amounts of yard work and rototill-ed the garden and planted spring peas. But My Better Half, never having heard of Patriot’s Day before moving to Massachusetts a few years ago, insists there must be something more than gardening to the regional affair, something that has to do with Miles Standish and Paul Revere and the Red Coats, or, at the very least, Tom Brady’s being beautiful. I just nod my head and say, “Sure, honey. You must be right,” and return to raking out the garden bed at the base of the front stoop. It’s not that I’m too lazy to google the origins of the holiday, it’s just that there are a zillion yard-related things to get accomplished before the lilacs pop and the leaves flush out on the trees. I assure him that I can properly celebrate the heroes of The Boston Tea Party and the Patriot’s Offensive Line while working the leaf blower.
And while this regionally observed holiday may strike outsiders as odd or, at least, undefined, I suspect that every area of this country has its own unique celebration noted and observed by its endemic people. It’s what makes us so diverse, these different celebratory occasions. For example, while Massachusetts has spring peas and the Boston Marathon in mid-April, Kentucky has the Derby in early May. And, because I embrace differences and appreciate a good holiday as much as the next person, I’m planning a dinner party to coincide with this year’s Run For The Roses.
And even though I am, through and through, a Yankee, I plan to mark the occasion with some good Southern cuisine. My friend and neighbor, a Louisville native who will be attending the event, has loaned me her Kentucky Heritage Recipe Book for menu planning purposes. As it turns out, within its dog eared pages is some sort of secret code to the workings of the South.
All people embrace a holiday with good old over-eating. Each regional celebration has a menu so purposeful and explicit that outsiders can’t possibly understand or fully appreciate the significance of the cuisine to the inherent importance of the event. I know this with certainty after pouring over the pages (mouth open, eyes wide, stunned and amazed), of every recipe in the Kentucky cook book; all of which contain some iteration of bourbon, cheese sauce, pecans, mayonnaise, coconut and lard. Apparently it is the unique combination of these six ingredients by which a dish earns its revered status as truly Southern fare.
And while I know that the British have Spotted Dick, which, as an adult I have come to realize has less to do with a sexually transmitted disease and everything to do with dried fruits and suet (which may be just as gross), I did not know that the South has Bishop’s Whipple which, surprisingly, is not a major surgical endeavor designed to circumnavigate a clergyman’s intestines but, rather, some sort of dessert with dates and pecans and, of course, bourbon flavored whip cream.
The Derby dessert course apparently must also include the requisite Bourbon Macaroon Mold with its layers and layers of coconut cookies doused in bourbon and served chilled with bourbon whip cream. And, just in case the guests are having trouble keeping their party on between the mint juleps and the sweets, there is the Beer Cheese spread which is made with two pounds of “rat” cheese and garlic “pods” and a forty of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon. While I think guests are encouraged to spread this Beer Cheese on crackers, the recipe leaves the exact purpose for the cheese open to interpretation. Perhaps Beer Cheese is used as sauce for the mysterious main course called Scrapple which is made by boiling an unidentified cut of pork down to a state of utter gelatinouity. The meat falls away from the bones, the fat is skimmed and cornmeal is added to the unidentified pork broth and allowed to thicken into a porridge like consistency and then is poured into a mold and allowed to congeal. Once solidified, the unidentified pork porridge is sliced and fried in lard and served hot to guests who are so freakin’ sideways with Bourbon and Beer Cheese that they fail to see this Scrapple as possibly the most disgusting culinary invention of all time.
And if the Scrapple fails to get their attention then the Scotch Eggs are sure to rock their inebriated worlds. I will let the recipe speak for itself, just as it is written on page 18 of The Kentucky Heritage Cookbook:
Boil desired number of eggs hard. Peel and cut into halves. Remove the yolks, mash and season lightly. Refill the whites and press halves together firmly. Cover tightly with country sausage meat. Roll in egg and crumbs and fry slowly in deep fat. Drain and place on rounds of toast and surround with cheese sauce. (I shit you not – deep fried sausage coated deviled eggs on toast with Beer Cheese sauce.)
And if, after all this culinary celebration, there are a few stout and hardy people still standing on two legs rather than squatting on piano benches and crawling to refill their high ball glasses, there will be a refreshing Reception Salad (involving cream cheese, pimentos, pineapple, jello, celery, pecans and, of course, bourbon whipped cream), that is sure to be the straw that broke the race horse’s drunken, lard-heavy back.
Interested and Interesting
Posted on April 17, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, kids, milestones, parenting | 12 Comments
It’s spring and it’s All Red Sox All the time at my house these days. I’ve had to warn the kids that baseball is the kind of sport that is played round-the-clock, each and every day until November and if we don’t fight the compulsion to watch every bleeding game we will lose some important variety in our lives, totally ignoring the need for bathing, eating, or sleeping; never mind completing homework assignments and furthering our reading abilities.
Somehow Spring and baseball and my inquisitive six year old who has recently begun peppering me with questions like, What’s your favorite adjective and What’s your favorite feeling remind me of a dear college friend with whom I’ve sadly lost touch but who wrote me a remarkable letter just before the birth of my son. This friend was a really gifted baseball player and is still, I’m guessing, a darn good athlete and a terrific pal to those he hangs with in Santa Monica. I’ll share his sentiments of my impending parenthood that he sent me way back in 1999 because he seemed to know a little more than I did about what I was getting into.
“Congratulations, CCE. You’re going to be a great Mom. I think you remember when my little sister, Phoebe, was born our freshman year in college. Well, Phoebe is growing up. She’s six now. She takes piano lessons and attends the same Kindergarten I went to. She plays softball and soccer on the same fields on which I played. But the coolest thing about Phoebe is, well, how cool she is. Now I can sit down with Phoebe and have a conversation with her. I crack jokes and she laughs hysterically. I show her pictures from around the world and teach her about different places and she’s able to listen. She’s interested and interesting. And at the coffee house where my family gathers every morning, after she applies way too much cream cheese to her bagel, she sits back and watches people and makes small talk with strangers.
I’ve gotten carried away talking about my sister Phoebe but my point is that to create a little person that will someday, not too far off, sit across the table from you at a coffeehouse and ask you repeatedly about your favorite color and your favorite song is just awesome. Until that day, good luck with all the diapers. I mean, if it wasn’t for diapers, I’d be having kids tomorrow.”
And while I couldn’t quite imagine what he was talking about at the time, (as predicted, the two infants that I produced shortly after receiving his letter in no way resembled this Phoebe-character he described, no small talk with strangers, no soccer or softball or Kindergarten or bagels, but there were an awful lot of diapers), suddenly, right on schedule, I find myself spending the chill spring evenings kicking a soccer ball around with a team of six year old girls. I rush two children through homework assignments and piano practice and try mightily to set realistic limitations for television and video game consumption. I make breakfast, lunch and dinner to the constant banter of two developing little people who are exploring the reasons for everything in the universe, things as profound as poverty and as banal as public swimming pools and belly buttons.
And while I’m not too sure that I’m all that good at tackling these important topics, my answers to their queries are mostly inadequate, I’m still amazed by the little thinkers that have recently sprouted from toddlers of the chubby cheeks and the downy hair and the flat, flat Flintstone feet. And while each afternoon is a challenge akin to a final exam, a defended thesis, I can honestly say that they are now interested and interesting little people, even if they do exhaust me with their almost academic pursuit of knowledge.
So I do my best. Here is a typical fifteen minute conversation with my G who, now six, has officially become the Phoebe-character of my friend’s letter,
G: “What’s you’re favorite adjective?”
Me: “Well that’s like having to pick your favorite font. It’s just impossible to say with any absolute conviction. It’s so mood dependent. Today, my favorite adjective is ‘winsome’.”
G: “What’s your favorite feeling?”
Me: “Unequivocally – happiness.”
G: “Why do we have belly buttons?”
Me: “Because that is how you and I were attached when you were floating around in my belly waiting to be born. There was a long cord that connected us via your belly button.”
G: “So that’s how you kept track of me, with a leash?”
Me: “Well, not exactly, it had more to do with nutritional exchanges and blood flow and all that good stuff.”
G: “Well, how did I get in your belly anyway? How are babies put in bellies?”
Me: “That’s a conversation for another day. Okay, sweet pea?”
G: “When was the last time you ate whip cream?”
Me: “Oh, I don’t know. A month ago. At Starbucks when I forgot to order my Frappuccino without it.”
G: “When do you think I last had whipped cream?”
Me: “Last month at Fuddruckers, on your milk shake?”
G: “Wrong. Today. I had whipped cream today on my jello at school.”
G: “How was the first person ever born? The first person couldn’t have had a mother, right?”
Me: “Right, people evolved from apes. Kind of changed over time and became human.”
G: “So the first person was a monkey?”
Me: “Yup.”
G: “So where did monkeys come from?”
Me: “Well, all creatures probably evolved from one basic organism that inhabited the earth a long time ago and differentiated over time into things like frogs and rabbits and monkeys and eventually humans.”
G: “You mean I was once a zebra?”
Me: “Not exactly.”
G: “I didn’t think so because I don’t have hooves or stripes or a tail.”
Me: “All sure signs that you were never a zebra. Correct. Bedtime. Thank God. Bedtime.
G: “Okay. Bedtime. Can I read a little?”
Me: “You can do whatever you want as long as it’s silent and doesn’t involve another question.”
Today, after school, I think I should bring her to the local coffee house and let her exhaust perfect strangers with her ceaseless curiosity because I am clean out of answers.
Today in Poetry
Posted on April 16, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 5 Comments
Your Music
An emotional turn of phrase
With all its own inexplicable reasons,
Dancing out from dark to light.
It’s joy from sorrow.
This one swift surprise
That moves me.
Gustav Klimt’s Embrace
Something beautiful
Posted on April 15, 2008
Filed Under homeownership, kids, milestones, suburban joys | 9 Comments
Spring in New England is tumultuous; up and down, back and forth, driving rains and shrieking winds followed by the kind of sunshine that can make a person weep for the poignant return of something good. It feels appropriate, this riot of weather all tumbled up with the raw and unpredictable fluctuations of me. I feel that I have earned the tulips and the wild hyacinths just popping through the cold, dark soil just as I’ve earned the moments of clarity and the pleasant but temporary bursts of happiness that can color a day.
Sunday was steel gray skies and raw winds and sudden spitting rain but it was decent enough to be outdoors dragging the brush and the twigs out of the adjacent woods and burning the fallen limbs of winter on the driveway.
G sat close, absorbing the warmth of the popping fire. She crouched, rocking back on her rubber garden-boot heels and asked questions about the invention of fire and the purpose of stars and the reason for the strange colors she sees on the back of her eyelids even when her eyes are shut tight against the flames. She barely took a breath between queries, a stymieing slough of innocent wonderments for which I had no absolute answers. I just stood quietly off to the side feeding the hungry fire, one limb after another. I added a large severed branch from the old beech tree that lines the drive. The gnarled tree-arm was still holding on to all its paper thin leaves. Like delicate black butterflies, they quickly darkened and broke free of the fire. Floating on warm drafts of rising air, they spiraled and danced, filling the sky with their funereal confetti, the burn of one dead tree rising like hope and then falling about our shoulders like the end of something beautiful.
Gardenias – the NC 17 version
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under fiction, marriage | 7 Comments
I’ve been told I need to sort of elaborate on the sexual climax at the center of my story Gardenias; that I abandon the reader to their imagination when I should show them the very thing that occurs. So it has been revised with a little help. See the original bit here and come back and read the racier version. Let me know what you think. This is new for me. I tend to shy away from explicit. God only knows what kind of traffic this post will attract. Taking all comers.
She talks to herself in the bathroom mirror. Her lips damp with rum, her cheeks glowing with drink. He is only sharing the truth with someone, anyone. There is no harm in this. She manipulates her shirt back into the waistline of her denim skirt, she smoothes her hair and purses her lips. She stares at herself long enough to discern the slight difference between her two eyes, one just a hair smaller than the other. And she returns to the kitchen where Ted offers her another full drink that he has busied himself with in her absence.
He brings it to her, setting it and himself close again at the island counter. He touches the side of her face, which, to Kate, feels like a minor triumph, his saying he finds her adequately attractive. Then his mouth covers hers, like the hand before on the counter, completely, confidently, as if he does this often, seduce married women in empty houses.
And when he clears away the glasses to the far end of the counter top to make room for their groping, she is relieved that at least they can do it here, in the kitchen, without the protracted migration to the bedroom where there is sure to be photographs of grown children in their likeness to Marilyn, perhaps a photo of Ted and Astrid, their lighter lustier selves. She would feel criminal in front of that sad audience. She needs no witness to the culmination of this thing that they have been working towards for months.
It begins almost perfunctorily. Efficient is the word that occurs to her, and she finds herself oddly and inexplicably pleased by this. The way he accomplishes seduction like it is just another task on his long to-do list.
His hand traces the swell of her breast from the rise of collar bone to the stiffening nipple. He draws at her shirt, dragging it up and over her head. He takes a nipple tenderly in his mouth. She weaves her fingers through his hair, her thoughts drifting. She wonders whether every mouth on every nipple the whole world over feels exactly the same sense of ownership, so powerful an exchange established between one small nibble of flesh and the rub of a tongue.
He surprises her by withdrawing from her breast and kissing her strongly on the mouth, pressing in hard against her, an act she finds more invasive than intimate. He kisses her in a way that is surprisingly different from the kisses she has exchanged with her husband of ten years. There is a deeper yearning, the earnestness of need.
And for a moment he has taken her breath – quite literally. He is not kissing her so much as inhaling her, an act that leaves her dizzy and resistant.
She is so busy maintaining her balance, so intent on restoring breath that she misses the exact moment he removes her panties, bunches up her skirt and enters her. Quickly, without warning, he explodes within her. And just like that he has transformed a kiss into possession, as simply as if he has swallowed something she once held on the tip of her tongue.
She leans forward, uncertain about whether she is pursuing the open kiss or the thing that he has taken from her. But he has withdrawn, panting with the effort expended having staked his claim. He does not hold her in a long embrace, he does not kiss the top of her head with marked tenderness, he does not whisper profound thoughts that elicit torrents of great relief.
She thinks of Amy, she thinks of God, she still misses the idea of him.
As he stands and stretches, she is exposed, her face like a diary accidentally left open to a particularly awkward passage. He turns to fasten his pants, to re-button his shirt and she feels just the slightest surge of gratitude because he has not noticed her disappointment.
She quickly straightens the hem of her skirt and tucks in her own shirt. She lets her hand rest on his shoulder briefly before she lets herself out. He is back sipping at his drink, now mostly dilute, all melted ice and mint leaves.
Surprisingly, despite the fact that she will not shower off their damp, salt sex until the following morning, she feels less an adulterer than just one of two people working through their own separate but equally pressing needs to feel someplace other.
For a short time, she wears the effects of it like a school girl with a secret. She is less curt, given to sudden bouts of laughter and warmth. But the secret fades and each day becomes more ordinary as she slowly lets go of the hope she long held for the thing between them. As she suspected it might, her life goes on much as it did before, without the romance, without the new fluster and flush all bundled up in her wish for love.
She returns to her husband, to her young family because she knows her children think their father hung the moon. She assumes her role as their mother, bolstering this quaint notion for at least a little while longer. And, in his own way, the way that would rather see forward than back, Paul forgives her the trespass.
Kate returns to 61 Alfonso Court only one more time. She chooses a day when Ted’s car is not in the driveway. She sets to restoring order to the garden, gently trimming the spathiphyllum and the begonias, coaxing the gardenias at the front door to remain deliciously fragrant conveyors of sweet southern gentility until the property is sold.
Flamin’ Mamie
Posted on April 10, 2008
Filed Under bitching and moaning, marriage, suburban joys | 11 Comments
Another day, another loss on the tennis court. I know, I know, two weeks in a row. How will I manage to go on? How will I ever earn back my blog audience’s awe and admiration.
During the match, I said ‘Fuck’ out loud, a lot, but otherwise managed to keep my temper under wraps. (Is there worse language she could have used, you ask. Well, yes, of course, but I can’t type it here for fear of the spam and internet stalkers such language might attract. Use your imagination. ‘Fuck’ is benign.) At the very least I did not slam my racket into the net or hit a ball at the opponent’s head after the losing the second set. So there’s progress, at least in my on-court etiquette. So you may not want me as your tennis partner next year, now that I’ve been defeated and have proven to be a very bad loser, but I promise you can still invite me to a mixed doubles social event and I won’t mention how I can see your thong through your tennis shorts or spill gravy on the tablecloth.
As a team, we knew this four week stretch was going to be difficult. Since we’ve held top position in the league for much of the year, we were scheduled to play the number two and three teams consecutively before the playoffs.
So today we ceded our first place position to a worthy team that has been chasing us by two points for the past five months. They caught us, they beat us, and I want revenge. Especially because one of our opponents donned a pair of blue tinted wrap around terminator sunglasses (which I found hilarious considering we are playing indoor tennis). I giggled and lost my focus and now feel all the more resolved to go get those forearm tattoos before next week’s rematch:
A series of tough looking townie women with cross hatches through their startled faces, like the old score keeping of aces across the nose of their planes in World War. Four is a good but credible number. And below their faces, written in that thick, faux-medieval font popularized in prisons, “Bring it bitch.” (Thank you, Ron. I’ve always sort of wanted a tattoo but have felt nervous about the permanence of the whole thing. I’m actually kind of uncomfortable with bumper stickers even. But now that you’ve given me this excellent idea for a permanent marking, how can I resist? Because if sunglasses can startle and fluster, I’m quite sure the taunt and bluster of a few well executed tattoos would nearly insure a win. And I seriously looked for pics of aircraft nose art to go with this post and found a lot of painted nudes with names like Memphis Belle. So Flamin’ Mamie’s the best I could come up with.)
If you define yourself in terms of tennis and then start to lose, your feelings of invincibility are challenged. If you define yourself in terms of your success as a writer and receive yet another grad school rejection in the mailbox, you are all the more convinced that you must suck. If you define yourself in terms of all the weight you bear admirably and with aplomb on the home-front only to hear from your partner that you’re not doing your share, then you’ve come up empty in this category too. Such is the week I’m having.
Cocktails and a male escort service couldn’t cheer me up at this point. But my windows are beginning to sparkle and, apparently, Mother Nature has forgiven me the tennis skirt comment because the sun shines and that’s something.
Timing
Posted on April 9, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, Blogroll, My Better Half, bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, career, debt, marriage | 11 Comments
So what does a twice rejected nascent writer do after the receiving the latest in a series of loud and echoing No’s? Well, of course she gets right back in the saddle and fires off a few short stories to five different literary magazines and makes sure she enters a couple writing contests and decides that she didn’t really want to go to creative writing school anyway because why should she have to pay some published professor to allow her to write in their esteemed presence? Instead, she will find someone to pay her to write which, while not the point of this writing thing, would be nice and might save her having to go back to landscape design or waitressing or prostitution. (She will get around to being this kind of optimistic and assertive just as soon as she’s finished licking wounds and taking a full moment to recover from her disappointment because right now it’s all coming down around her shoulders. And while she feels like making absolutely no decisions in her current fragile state it would seem that Her Better Half would pick this very week to discuss refinancing the house and her need to go back to work and otherwise kick her while she’s down because what’s a little disappointment without someone around to say,
“Okay, are you satisfied NOW that you’ll never get paid to write? Because it’s good time to give up that pipe dream and go get yourself a real job that starts at 9 and ends at 2 and allows for teacher-work days and sick-kid days and whole weeks off while I travel to glamorous places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and gives you the summers free so we don’t have to pay for childcare and of course offers dental and benefits because, after all, such a job that pays more than $9 an hour must exist, you just haven’t looked hard enough, in fact you haven’t looked at all.”
From her defensive crouch, she shot back,
“Right, sorry, I must have been too busy preparing meals and supervising homework and completing Ben Franklin projects and schlepping our kids to piano and baseball and tennis and coaching soccer and making sure there’s food in the fridge and paying all the bills on time and shoveling the back porch and mowing the lawn and stripping wallpaper and painting the interior of the entire fucking house and posting five days a week on my blog and writing a novel and volunteering in the each child’s classroom and helping Gladys pay her rent to have properly looked for a job that could fit nicely into the 15 minutes of me-time I enjoy on the couch each night post-8 p.m. when the kids have been bathed and read to and tucked in multiple times and the cat has finished vomiting up a hairball on the carpet and the five loads of daily laundry are folded and put away because that’s exactly when I feel like kicking it into high gear and getting off my lazy ass to go out and earn myself a living because all this other stuff is just joy and sunshine, hardly a day at all.”
She can tell that today is going to require some serious house cleaning therapy. The Windex is out, the murky glass just asking for a good spring shining. Did she mention that all of her friends, neighbors and acquaintances pay $300 twice a year to have their windows cleaned? She’ll let that fact speak for itself.
Deaf Ears
Posted on April 8, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, dogs, marriage | 11 Comments
As they say, it’s got to get worse before it can get better. (Remind me. Who the fuck is the ‘they’ who said that. I’d like a word with them and those choice mots would be sharp and scolding.) As is typical of Monday, today was a shit storm of a day. (Can you tell by all the cursing and the parentheses?)
I’d like to hit the start over button and if I were to do so I would choose not have a vituperative fight full of insults and finger pointing concerning the personal finances and the state of the Madmarriage union over lunch. I would not go to the mailbox and receive my annual rejection from the BU Writer’s Workshop and I would not pack myself into the car and drive over to public housing to coax Gladys into paying her April rent. Actually, to be honest, Gladys was the highlight of my day. I called her to tell her I’d be there just after 1 p.m. She made coffee. She was dressed and pert and waiting for me at her kitchen table. I needed a cup of black coffee (she claims the neighbor’s stole her milk) like a jumpy, caffeinated, nausea inducing bullet to the head but I couldn’t say no to Gladys who had brought out her silver plated sugar bowl and set the table in anticipation of my visit. I brought Gladys a nice thick slice of the chocolate cake I made on Sunday. It was a desperate and shameless attempt to curry favor and, I hoped, a way to deter her from cursing at me and accusing me of stealing her china.
But the gesture was largely unnecessary as Gladys was in a much better place this visit. She had the calendar turned to the proper year and the proper month. She was coherent and full of stories about the life she once led in rural Vermont. She shared with me the fact that April makes her particularly sad as it is the time of year she thinks about the brother that she lost when he fell through the ice on a spring pond. He was her little brother. He was only seven when he died. And some of her tales were happily poignant, like the memories she shared of milking and herding the cows on her father’s farm. Gladys informed me that she likes cows. Gladys also added that she really loves dogs but can’t trust herself to keep one. According to Gladys, “dogs bark too much and mess their pants” and are otherwise a nuisance. She prefers other people’s dogs, stray dogs she encounters on her walk to the store to get cigarettes. Gladys enjoys dogs from afar. All the more reason for me to think that Gladys, in her more lucid moments, is very, very wise.
Because Gladys can’t hear at all, I just sat across from her and listened and nodded appropriately. When it came time to force Gladys to write her rent check I anticipated a battle, some struggle that included details about her imminent move to Florida and her good for nothing daughter and the biddies down the hall that steal her romance novels, but she was agreeable and pleasant and without any ado dashed off a check to cover April’s rent. I tucked the rent check into my pocket and gave Gladys a huge hug. I told her, “Gladys, you and the coffee and the important chat, have made my day just a little bit brighter.” She couldn’t hear me but it felt important just to say it aloud even though it fell on deaf ears.
All Sky
Posted on April 7, 2008
Filed Under bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, kids, marriage, parenting, snark, suburban joys | 9 Comments
Cathy Ladman is apparently funny. Who knew? I guess I’ve been living under a mossy rock for the past ten years because, until I googled her, I had no idea what I’d been missing. After reading the following quote attributed to Ladman: “Marriage is very difficult. Marriage is like a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle – all sky,” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry but the relief that someone else could nail the complexity of the thing in two short sentences made me feel inexplicably better.
Now that I’ve watched this clip of her stand-up routine, I feel quite sure I will become a Cathy Ladman stalker. Despite the fact that she is 51 and I am 34 and she is Jewish and I am not and she lives in New York and is married to a man and I live outside of Boston and am also married to a man, I’m pretty damn convinced that she and I are soul mates. I think we could be really, really happy together, that she is someone that could make me laugh and I am someone who could, well, chuckle enthusiastically thus improving her timing and delivery. I’m not sure what she’d get out of the deal but I know that just being in her space for half a minute would really perk me up. And if it doesn’t stop raining here I just might call Amtrak and schedule my trip to NYC because I could use a little comedic levity right about now.
I just want to issue a public apology. Mother Nature if you were in anyway offended by my suggestion that you might wear tennis skirts and that I might be able to kick your ass, I am truly, truly contrite and hoping you can forgive me my hubris and quick temper. Three fucking weekends of rain in a row feels like more than appropriate punishment for having made such a thoughtless and cavalier statement. So please, please don’t feel you have to continue the torture. I can’t be responsible for my actions should next Saturday dawn all dreary and damp and unseasonably raw. Have mercy. I have two small children who should not be made to suffer through another housebound weekend with their bat-ass crazy mother who has taken to cleaning the toothbrush holder with Q-tips out of sheer boredom and ennui.
The Science of Hot
Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under My Better Half, marriage | 19 Comments
So I missed this one back in February when a post on romantic love would have been more apt. So what if it’s April. Better late than never, right?
Ron over at RWorld turned me on to TedTalks and, particularly recommended this lecture given by Helen Fisher called The Science of Love. Head on over, give it your full attention and come on back because, if you’re like me, it’s been over a decade since you actually fell in love with your spouse or significant other or whatever and it’s been a long time since you’ve thought about the flush and flutter of new infatuation. It’s so fascinating and nostalgic to hear Fisher frame that now historic moment in time in her own scientific terms, outlining the way our brains actually behaved in order to effect romantic responses that inevitably lead to a long term commitment which is, by definition something entirely different than the initial phase of love when one person is rapidly and recklessly and beyond reason becoming the center of your world.
Remember that? Remember a time when sharing collective space meant something more than divvying up the to-do list and deciding whose turn it is to give your youngest child a bath? Remember when it had to do with whole afternoons playing hookie from school or work or obligation in order to just sort of inhale each other’s presence.
According to Fisher, the physical manifestation of this infatuation comes from the dopamine levels in the brain as they rise to create a great rush of energy and feelings of euphoria equivalent to the brain’s response to snorting a line of cocaine when around this person, talking on the phone to this person, merely thinking about this person. According to Fisher the dopamine response is even more powerful than sex drive which is a purely lust driven brain response and can’t quite compete with the complexity of romantic elation though the chemicals in our brains released during orgasm actually help promote the cause of romance, helping bridge the gap between physical and mental attraction. (Perhaps explaining why a person is, initially, willing to overlook obvious incompatibilities and impossibilities in the pursuit of love.)
Fisher makes a comment in her lecture about how a person’s world view, dictated by dopamine-colored glasses, can become so focused on their new lover that even that person’s car in a parking lot of hundreds of cars can inspire a romantic surge and feelings of elation. It’s a car for God’s sake. But it’s HIS car or HER car and it stands out as different and better.
This reminds me of My Better Half’s ride back in the day. He used to cruise around our college campus in a brand new Pathfinder (when Pathfinders were new on the scene and kind of ghetto, the Escalade of the 90’s). He had five-smoke tints, Miami Dade tags and those particularly offensive mud flaps with the naked ladies. He had sub woofers and a playlist that included De La Soul and 2 Live Crew.) And somehow all those incongruous messages about who he wanted to be versus the intellect that he actually possessed added up to something special and I loved to drive that car around, mud flaps and all, until the day I was driving it on campus and backed into some petite, manicured girl from Manhattan in her white and very delicate Infinity convertible. The Pathfinder completely crushed her hood with its attached trailer hitch. A female cop arrived on the scene to write up the accident report. When I explained to her that I couldn’t find the registration and it wasn’t MY car but my boyfriend’s car, she walked around to the back of the vehicle, pointed to those mud flaps and said, “Oh really, I’d have never guessed.” And then she wrote me a huge ticket and had the car impounded.
Before there was My Better Half, I had other boyfriends whose rides were also the embodiment of the persona they were trying to project. First there was my high school boyfriend who had, and probably still has, a car fetish. His mother bought him the VW Corrado when it first came out. And he would spend hours washing his baby, polishing the hub caps with a toothbrush, pampering the hell out of that vehicle in a way that suggested he might be capable of focusing a little more attention in my direction. He never ever let me drive that car and so, a few months post-purchase, we were finished.
Then their was another brief college romance with a sort of townie guy from Long Island who, of course, drove a muscle car, maybe a Mazda RX-something or other. He encouraged me to drive that thing all over town, back and forth, park it prominently in front of my dorm. He was really, really into me. My driving his car felt something like his version of possession. There is something to this playing hard to get thing and his over zealousness and availability eventually drove me away, but, for awhile, I did miss driving that car.
And of course there was the actor that was also a Superbike racer. I won’t get into how predictably attractive I found that particular mode of transport though it did make for bad hair on each and every date.
Now, as I gaze out at the driveway at my four door SUV with booster seats strapped into the back and enormous splat of bird shit on the windshield, I’m having trouble conjuring the days when a car was a simple projection of one’s sexuality. I’m trying to think, if I were back in college and my parents were willing to buy me a car (which they weren’t), what I’d be driving, leaving spikes of dopamine in my wake.
I think it’d be the Jeep Wrangler, four door, steel blue metallic exterior with leather and a mad sound system that will, sadly probably play Raffi or John Hiatt doing Thank Someone because it’s kid appropriate and soothing…Where or Where has my dopamine gone?
Ron has informed me that there is actually a soundtrack that should go with this post. So here it is, The Dresden Dolls doing The Jeep Song. I swear I had never heard this song before writing today’s post.
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