Monday, September 17, 2012

Another Muppet Monday

First things first. My name is Julie and I'm a cookie-holic.  I have to confess that last night my addiction hurt some people.  Not only did I overindulge in high calorie cookies, but I stole from my children's lunches this week.  Because of my binge, they will have to have graham crackers for dessert.  Every day starts anew.  1 Day Cookiesober.

Ok, now on to something funny.  Sometimes when I get to spend some time with a friend for a nice, long visit, I identify another little detail about her that makes me happy.  Which is kind of a great thing to say about my friends, in that seeing them, or reading about their Facebook lives, or finding pictures of them, they always make me happy.  Something about them just strikes my funny bone.
Most recently, I hung out with my friend, SB.  She has this fantastic, cartoonish double take she does.  I don't know if she knows she does it, or if it's just a habit.  Sometimes she does it ironically when you say something obvious.  I love it.  It's completely comical.
It's...Muppety.
Last week our family movie was The Muppets Take Manhattan.  Which is a great movie, and one of the earliest I remember seeing in a theater.
It is still fantastic.  I love Muppets.  I love the completely dysfunctional relationship between Kermit and Piggie.  I love Rolf's moderate depression and Fozzie's mania, and Animal's anger issues.  I love that there's a Gonzo, which is an alien?  A monster? A Gonzo?  I love drug addled Dr. Teeth and his band.  I love curmodgenly Statler and Waldorf.
Awesomeness.  All of it.  And thanks to the most recent The Muppets, there is Muppetiness in the world once again.  I love listening to E still squeal (yes at ten years old) because he is so tickled, but so uncomfortable with the chaos created by the Muppets.
The world needs more Muppets--more crazy, zany red ones.  More emotional and sensitive blue ones.  More mellow ones.  More ones that love animals.  More frogs and dogs and chickens and things.  More ones that make us laugh and want to go find a Grover to hug.
I am feeling kind of warm and fuzzy this morning towards the Muppets I have in my life.  S is certainly a Muppet.  He is all wild hair and button nosey and freckle faced.  A human Muppet.  He does jointless Kermit arm routines all the time--the exasperated MAHAHAHAHHAHA that Kermit makes when both insanely happy and insanely frustrated.
I have a mean Piggie streak.  Of hitting people over the head with the obvious, and having a tendency to wear satin lavender gloves.
In any event, I thought I would share some Muppet Takes Manhattan memories with y'all on this not-particularly Muppety Monday:
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Nature and Nurture

Sometimes, intuition preempts news.  Your common sense, your prior experience, your instinct tells you that something is true even before some study or organization or poll confirms it.  Sometimes, you just know.

This morning, when M told me about a Johns Hopkins study that confirms a definitive correlation between mothers' mental health and children's short stature, I said within a heartbeat, "of course."

Here's the study

Of course, because S is short.  Of course, because I've always been depressed.  Of course, because, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to blame some one for something, that person will be Mom.  Thanks, Freud.

Of course.  Is there anything that isn't Mom's fault?

I have a laundry list of things that are my mom's fault, starting with a compulsive need to make laundry lists,  all the way to my gnarled, double jointed Gollum fingers.  Everything is my mother's fault: my unhealthy eating habits, my weight gain patterns, my weird skin, my horrible joints, my tendency to pile crap up in corners, my obsession with tidy manicures, my temper.  All of these things, my mother is responsible for.  Either genetically or environmentally, my mom completely messed me up.

On the flip side, she would probably argue that every good quality I can think of I attribute to my father, whether he deserves it or not:  my sense of humor, my keen insight into human behaviour, my uncanny ability to spontaneously sleep.

In fact, there is a longstanding family joke that my sister is a clone of my dad.  She is so adamant of her own perfection, that clearly she inherited nothing from her mother.  Phew--mom dodged a bullet there.  If there were anything wrong with my sister (in her own eyes), it would most certainly be my mother's fault.

Here at our house, of course, the pattern repeats.  My kids' temper, their messiness, their premature acne, are by the kids' accounts, all my fault.  They are a product of my personality glitches.  We can now add S's shortness to the list.

Recently, in a conversation when I suggested that perhaps some of these shortcomings might be contributed by their father, E replied immediately and (to his credit) completely straight faced:  "No.  Dad is the Immortal God of Perfection."

Holy crap.  That's some serious stuff.  I mean let's examine that:  "Immortal--"  bad news, daddy-O.  You're not going to be able to age or croak.  Good luck living up to that expectation.  "God--" notice he is 'the' Immortal God.  Not an Immortal God.  Even more pressure.  Sheesh.  God, since we live in the same house, we should talk about some of the stuff you need to get done.  Can you work on global hunger, war, and, also, my Gollum fingers while he's at it. Also, I may need to rethink my atheism.  "Perfection--"  Well, that's not much room for error, is there?

So, wow.  Kudos to me for marrying a deity.

I hope the kids don't figure out down the road that traits like baldness are hereditary or imperfections.  That could set up an irreconcilable paradox.

In the end, though, I'm not sure I could handle the weight of the Immortal God of Perfection (IGOP) expectation.  I would not be good at immortality or perfection or deity-ness.   I'd be set up for inevitable failure.  I can't live with inevitable failure.  At this point, I may be the cause of a million shortcomings in my children, but occasionally, they recognize a positive contribution I've made to their lives.  I'd rather get the occasional surprise with a good quality, than disappoint them when they see my flaws.

Even S, despite his mom-caused shortness,  jumped to my defense after E declared Dad the IGOP:  "Mom is the God of Awesomeness.  She packs our lunches."

The road to holiness starts with small miracles.





Friday, September 7, 2012

Reality Shows

Today, Blogspot's photo insert tool thingy isn't working right.  I can't figure it out, and I'm SURE it's user error.  But, instead of inserting photos, I inserted links to the images I sort of wanted.  It's not as good, but it should work for today.  Or until I get smart enough to figure out how to insert pictures again.  Or until it's fixed.

Last year, we got a hummingbird feeder.  It's actually kind of a cool one, as it attaches with suction cups to the picture window in our kitchen.  It is stable and stationary (it doesn't sway when a bird lands on it or when there is a breeze) and so the birds actually come and sit and stay for a couple of moments at a time.

Hummingbird feeder

I put it out late last season, and only courted the last of the migrating stragglers with it.  This season, I put it out a little too early, and had to bring it in because we were out of town so much over the summer.  The sugar rots, ferments, or sometimes gets bugs in it, and I didn't want to be responsible for a rash of drunken hummingbird accidents.  A little hummingbird cop would be  perched right outside our bar, and would give out FUIs like crazy.  That'd be awful.  Little hummingbird court appearances.  Sorry, your honor, I had no idea.  The sugar was totally spiked.

I've put the feeder back out now, and there are two little birdies who frequent our watering hole.  One is a beautiful ruby-throated dude with an iridescent green back.  I didn't take this photo, sadly, but this is what he looks like:

ruby throated hummingbird

The other one has a black head and is much smaller, and though not as beautiful, s/he is much calmer and sits long enough for me to get a good view of him/her.  S/he may be a female ruby throated, or another variety, or a juvenile. I don't know.  But s/he looks like this:

Black headed hummingbird



So, I've been kind of suckered in to this quasi natural show.  It's natural, of course, as I don't have bionic hummingbirds.  But, it's artificial that they should come and drink my refined sugar water out of a plastic container adhered to my window so that I may observe them.  The whole Schrodinger's hummingbird thing, I guess.

As I am pondering the artifice of this natural mini-spectacle, I have Clooney in my lap.  He is like the epitome of quasi-natural.  His fuzzy, adorable, Ewok looking self is like a horrible genetic experiment.  As though some one took the face of a sloth:

Sloth face

And attached it to the body of a shih-tzu

shih tzu body


This is not a domesticated wolf.  This is about as far as a creature can get from a domesticated wolf and still claim wolf legacy.  This is a Jules Verne sci-fi novel.

Ridiculous fake nature.

Meanwhile, the cat is lying on the kitchen table.  He is the closest fake nature we have to real nature.  He can (without his bell) hunt.  (Which again evokes the ridiculous bison food that Clooney eats.  Can you imagine Clooney bringing down a bison in the wilderness?  HAH!) So, cat can sort of provide for himself.  It's not the fancy salmon food I buy him, but lizards and squirrels have protein.

Cat cleans himself.  Without the embarrassment of those ridiculous hair clips the groomer sends on the dog.  

Cat empties his bowel and bladder without commands.  Is there anything less "survival of the fittest" than me, standing out in the rain, holding an umbrella over Clooney begging him to "potty" in the middle of Isaac?  Supremely ridiculous.

And of course, I am a human most finely attuned to an unnatural life.  I don't like to think about what my chicken dinner was doing last week.  I don't have the time or interest to grow and harvest my own veggies, unless, of course they are garnishes for cocktails--I do grow lemons and mint!  I don't wash my laundry in a river or roam the countryside like a nomad living off the earth.

Our house is definitely one that is remote from nature.  Our yard is manicured, not native.  Our location is slightly more urban than not (although it is still Alabama, so take that for what it's worth).  We don't commune with nature on a regular basis.  And I hate freaking mosquitoes.

Drinking cocktails on the porch is about as much nature as I want on a regular basis.

So it cracks me up when dog, cat and I are watching the hummingbirds.  Dog sleeps in my lap, oblivious to the birds.  Cat lounges on the table, aware of and annoyed by the glass that separates him from this challenging prey; but content enough to watch this reality TV.  I sit and watch all of it from the comfort of my kitchen table:

Nature, but in moderate doses.



Sunday, September 2, 2012

My Childhood Insomniac

Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?  Like Patti Hearst?  When kidnapped victims identify with their abductors and then join them?  Maybe it's crap.  Maybe it's a primitive, subconscious survival mechanism--if you can't beat 'em join 'em.  Maybe it's a byproduct of acute trauma.  I don't know.  I'm certainly not taking the time to Google it now.

I was thinking about this Stockholm Syndrome last night, and I was thinking about its mirror--if you're being taken advantage of or manipulated, and you appear to play along and join them, does that have the same effect?  Are the abductors mollified by your surrender?  Does everything play along smoothly until ATF comes banging down your door, and you throw up your hands and say, "I was faking it!!!"  How does that play out?

We put the kids to bed last night at 7:40.  Ten minutes past bedtime, in fact, so that they could (my good, red-blooded American boys) eschew the Michigan-Bama game and the Clemson-Auburn game and watch the last ten minutes of the underrated Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.  (Yes, M was physically twitching to get back to the football.)

We put the boys to bed, but heard S upstairs in his room, periodically digging through bins of Legos.  Those Legos make a distinctive sound when being sorted through.  Sort of like a rain stick.  Eight, eight thirty, eight forty five, nine...

S comes down and begs to be put  back to bed.  M, in surrender flicks off the TV, planning to watch the rest in bed.  Tuck S in for the 10,000th time.  I come up after a half hour on Facebook, and also tuck in S.  The Michigan game got out of hand in a hurry.  We flicked off that TV, too, and considered maybe.....

Knocking on the bedroom door.

At least he knocks, the other one just walks right in.

Yes?

Sobbing like you have never heard before in your life.  There is a near fetal S on the floor, trembling in fear, or at least a damn good recreation of it.

I again return him to bed, and lay down with him to sort out the issues.  He's afraid of ghosts.  (Also, he has a bridge to sell you).  He can barely even say it with a straight face.  His story is ludicrous, and he and I both know it.

"It's just that I need to be close to people.  It makes me feel.....safer...."  he sniffs.

Mmmhmmm.

I bring him into my bedroom, TV back on.  M and I put him in between us and smile knowingly over his head.  This kid is playing us.

M leans over and says, "it's good he's still able to smile despite his fear."

S comes back with the best line ever uttered by a child trying to manipulate his parents:

"It's not a smile of mischief.  It's a smile of LOVE."

He's a pro, alright.

After about 20 minutes, we try to pick him up to return him to his room (it's now near ten thirty).  A tiny voice, barely concealing a smile, comes up from under his too-rigid armpit "just two more minutes?  Please, I'll feel safe in two more minutes."  Eventually, ALL the games are over, Oregon is on and THAT game is completely out of hand, and M and I are still staring at this non-sleeping kid between us.  M rousts S and heads him off to bed.

We turn off the TV and attempt to.....

Crying.  Again?!?!  "What is it?"  And S, ever-committed to his family, EVER loving, EVER good:  "I don't want to disturb you.  Or annoy you.  I just HATE the night.  I hate sleeping.  I just can't do it."

I crawl into bed with S--his "smile of love" looking an awful lot like a "smile of triumph."  I fall asleep there for an hour or so, and return to my own darkened room.  It's cold in there.  M is long asleep.  Dog is asleep.  I'm awake now.  I was had.  Completely taken.  But I knew I was doing it.  I was complicit in my own duping.  Does that make me less a fool?  Should I have laid down the law?

Am I guilty in my own suckering?