Today is our 38th birthday. I have no idea when I got so old, or how it is Betty has managed to remain so much younger.
38
What is it about upcoming birthdays that makes you reconsider every decision you’ve ever made? Betty & I, despite our protestations, are getting a little too close to the big 4-0 these days for our own comfort. I can’t speak for her, but for me the past couple of weeks I’ve felt torn about everything in my life: the writing, my sense of home & family, work, money, you name it. The only things I feel sure of are Betty and the kittoi, all of whom bring me joy every single day. They all make me laugh in ways that do my serious soul some good.
Whenever people complained about getting older, my father has always said, “well, you only have one other choice.” Some days that’s not so funny, but other days it reminds me of the deep & abiding pragmatism I was raised with: either you bellyache about it & bore yourself & everyone else, or you just get older & get on with things. But then, peace is easy for a man who is happiest eating hot dogs & watching baseball. Some of us don’t find joy as easily as that.
There are days I wish I could, & other days when I am convinced I could be that way – if, if only, if only something. But that’s not what the Buddhists tell me: they tell me it’s mine if I want it. Because I could moan & whine about the nerve.com interview that was supposed to happen but didn’t; I could complain about the marathon bookkeeping sessions I’ve done in past months; I could curse whoever’s in charge of this universe for their bad administration.
& I do, oh, surely I do. But eventually I get bored of that & find something to do, even if that something simple is cleaning out the litterbox for the umpteenth time.
Anniversary
Betty & I met nine years ago today. Who knew? One silly reading group meeting, me being impressive about Hemingway’s portrayal about women in his stories, and then him, very much him then, leaving coyly just as I was about to ask him out.
Our 1st date was two days later. The 2nd two days after that, and two days’ long. The third two days after that. & So on & so forth, till we got to here. (& What a long, strange trip it’s been. But a beautiful one, too.)
April 10
30 years ago today, I received my first Holy Communion.
24 years ago today, when I was 14, I saw my first rock concert. (Adam Ant with INXS opening, at St. John’s University, thanks to my brother Joe.)
I remember the one because I remember the other: I was given a charm (for a charm bracelet) commemorating the first event, & happened to still have it when the 2nd happened. For whatever reason, the date just sticks in my head, even now.
I don’t know what happened on any of the other April 10ths that I’ve lived through, though.
Just a Shy Young Woman
In an interesting review of the book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now
She arrived (at the University of Wisconsin, 25 years ago) with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a ‘tough-chick persona.’ I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright.
Ugh.
But then in the next paragraph:
Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class.
Which strikes me as about right. The review is overall good but it’s the quoted bits that Peril wrote about herself that have my interest piqued; it’s not often I read something about women in college with shaved heads and punk wardrobes that mirrors my own experience at all.
No Kidding
I love when the weather people tell me the pollen count is high, as if that’s news. Anyone who is allergic can tell you your nose stops working long before they get around to telling you about it. & I think the pollen count should be measured by somebody’s Uncle Albert’s congestion that day: Uncle Albert is experiencing 45% congestion in his left nostril, 95% in his right.
A Little Rant
Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.
& I’ve always wondered why magazines – especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be – give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.
& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.
Nightmares
I’ve always expected I would die in my sleep of a heart attack, sweating bullets, outrunning some cauchemare of a beast.
Tonight, in the dream, Betty & I went to see a Shakespeare play, in a park. Maybe in England, maybe at Jones Beach. & My dream came up with a kind of Shakespearean joke, dreamt lines that were in the play we were seeing, in which one character asks another, “Where are you going?” and the other responds “To and fro, here & there, somewhere & elsewhere.” (There were seven words to the answer, but I don’t know which seven, because those six could have been “north and south, whence & hence” etc.) By the time we were leaving it was dark out, & we were being followed by a man, except Betty couldn’t see him, even though I could hear him asking me, “Where are you going?” just like in the play, except terribly ominously.
& I felt like a cat or a dog that’s gotten wrapped up in something that makes a terrible noise and that it can’t get off of its body no matter how fast it runs like the devil away from this thing that’s always just right behind it.
I did learn how to dream lucidly as a result of my nightmares, at least, and so in the dream we ran to the house I grew up in, & kept shutting numerous garden gates after us, into the back door (which we always left open, though we locked the front one) & finally into a house that was nothing like the house I grew up in on the inside, but inside, there was my niece watching television & my sister, her mother, chatting on the phone amiably. & We were fine.
But of course all that running woke me up.
42 Days
Someone remind me, next time around, never to publish a book during tax season – at least not when I’m still bookkeeping as my day job.
Fait Accompli
For those of you who know why we’re in North Carolina, the deed is done, & all went well. Thanks for your good thoughts & well wishes.