OK, there really isn’t a list. Are you kidding?
Whenever I virtuously sit down to compile a tidy list of groceries, chores, summer clothes, Christmas presents, video game strategies or my five favorite spaghetti sauces, I can just feel the light and happiness leach out of my soul.
I once thought it was the content of the lists; nobody gets excited about a list that includes "pick lint off cat." Nah, I hate 'em all. I never read The Onion's funny lists, I yawn through David Letterman's Top 10 ... I can barely read my own resume, one of Life's Ultimate Lists.
But I was determined. I started searching online for The Perfect List and stumbled onto a frightening site called motivatedmoms.com. This amazing household planner listed everything from “sort shampoo bottles” to “clean toaster.”
The latter item included “and empty crumb tray.” I didn’t know there were people who cleaned their toasters’ crumb trays. I didn’t know toasters had crumb trays. I thought toasters just absorbed everything until they spontaneously exploded in a shower of bread crumbs.
And “sort shampoo bottles?” I have enough trouble keeping them upright. The last time I visited my sister, I kicked the shampoo bottle over and spilled the entire contents down the drain.
OK, Forget the Internet. Maybe I could spice up my lists, stop scribbling "diapers, window cleaner, whiskey bottle" on the back of ripped envelopes. After all, there's a cottage industry of cheery, decorated list pads. Pick your poison: teddy bears, kittens, hot-air balloons, baskets of fruit, ancient maps, leering snowmen -- yikes, that was a list!
No good. Broccoli is still broccoli, no matter how much cheese you pour on it, and a list is still a numbered Pit of Despair, even if it’s ringed with dancing bunnies.
##
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Monday, May 09, 2005
Constant Vigilance!
[This entry appeared in Ron's newspaper and two others in Kalamazoo and Lansing this month.)
Hey, don’t bother me, can’t you see I’m busy? I’m busy building an invisible fort around my child, brick by brick.
Some parents treat their kids like fancy new cars with factory warranties and plastic covers on the seats. The babies arrive all pink and perfect, but they’re really doomed, you see, doomed to be scraped and scratched and corroded by that nasty world out there. This must be stopped at all costs. Constant vigilance is necessary – constant vigilance!
So the parents break out the disinfected pacifiers and the six-packs of antibacterial wipes and they drive their little cars on smooth, straight roads, bringing them back to cozy garages and wiping away any speck of dust or grime with a cloth diaper. They avoid the bumpy streets, the dark ravines, the rickety bridges, the dusty dirt paths. And they certainly don’t want anyone else driving the car; not unless they’re part of a select group. Why, someone might adjust the rearview mirror or take a turn too fast or drop Cheetos on the floor. You spend weeks vacuuming up the little orange crumbs under the seats and vow never to loan the car to Cheeto-lovers. It’s not worth the hassle.
And then the children get bigger, and the parents realize that sanitizing the toybox and screwing the dresser to the wall with a half-pound, 125mm heavy bolt just isn’t enough. Minds must be sanitized and bolted out of harm’s way, because if you don’t, then little specks of grit might get through and affect the machinery, and then that’s it, the warranty is invalidated, the child is corrupted and the next thing you know, you’re driving a rusty heap with a dented door and windshield wipers that won’t turn off.
Constant vigilance! So you shut the doors and close the windows and install parental controls on the DVD player and firewalls on the computer and buy specially sanitized versions of popular movies so your kid won’t see Private Ryan’s combat or Leonardo’s butt.
You strap your kids into your tidy home-on-wheels and drive them from supervised schools to supervised sports and supervised playgroups and supervised outings. And you can’t share driving with other moms because they’re on different schedules and anyway, Freddie’s mom drives too fast and Flossie’s family van doesn’t have a DVD.
To me, this seems a soulless (and exhausting) way to live, like eating chips on a brand-new sofa, breaking each one over the bowl and picking every tiny crumb off your pants.
When I was 10 or so, somebody gave me an abridged, illustrated copy of “Little Women.” Except I didn’t know it was abridged. I thought it was the whole story. I read it again a few times in the next five years, assuming that this little book about four cloyingly virtuous sisters was all there was.
Then when I was in high school, I saw the complete text in the library. It was a big book. There were whole chapters I never knew. Painful conversations had been cut in half, and difficult scenes deleted altogether. Meg’s fights with her husband and Amy’s victory over nasty gossips had been axed. I started looking up all my childhood books, wondering which ones had been tampered with. I didn’t find any others, but I tell you, I’m still bitter about that book. I felt deceived; like there was a hole in my life I didn’t know was there.
And I wonder, will this generation growing up have many such holes? Will they spend their adulthood saying to themselves, “ “Wow, I didn’t know ‘Psycho’ had a shower scene” and “Nobody told me that cheaters really DO win a lot” as they compare the real world with the prettily pruned reality they grew up in? Like animals exquisitely adapted to a rarified environment like an ocean floor or Arctic tundra, I wonder if such people have difficulty functioning anywhere else.
I predict that 15 years from now, we'll have this crowd of socially inept, painfully unprepared young adults who expect someone to yell "Good job!" every time they rinse a glass or seal an envelope. Who will have trouble with some of the most basic lessons of adulthood: that life isn’t fair and people often suffer without relief and you can’t be special all the time.
I know children need more protection in some ways. You can’t toss your eight-year-old out of the house and tell her to come back when the streetlights come on. Marketers so ruthlessly target children that moms are pulling SpongeBob-covered boxes out of screaming babies’ hands at supermarkets. Sometimes it feels like everything you see, hear and touch in this world is trying to sell you something.
All the more reason to explore those bumpy roads, those steep ravines, away from the smooth roads with the shiny billboards. A car often drives better with a little dust in the tires and wildflowers on the windshield.
##
Hey, don’t bother me, can’t you see I’m busy? I’m busy building an invisible fort around my child, brick by brick.
Some parents treat their kids like fancy new cars with factory warranties and plastic covers on the seats. The babies arrive all pink and perfect, but they’re really doomed, you see, doomed to be scraped and scratched and corroded by that nasty world out there. This must be stopped at all costs. Constant vigilance is necessary – constant vigilance!
So the parents break out the disinfected pacifiers and the six-packs of antibacterial wipes and they drive their little cars on smooth, straight roads, bringing them back to cozy garages and wiping away any speck of dust or grime with a cloth diaper. They avoid the bumpy streets, the dark ravines, the rickety bridges, the dusty dirt paths. And they certainly don’t want anyone else driving the car; not unless they’re part of a select group. Why, someone might adjust the rearview mirror or take a turn too fast or drop Cheetos on the floor. You spend weeks vacuuming up the little orange crumbs under the seats and vow never to loan the car to Cheeto-lovers. It’s not worth the hassle.
And then the children get bigger, and the parents realize that sanitizing the toybox and screwing the dresser to the wall with a half-pound, 125mm heavy bolt just isn’t enough. Minds must be sanitized and bolted out of harm’s way, because if you don’t, then little specks of grit might get through and affect the machinery, and then that’s it, the warranty is invalidated, the child is corrupted and the next thing you know, you’re driving a rusty heap with a dented door and windshield wipers that won’t turn off.
Constant vigilance! So you shut the doors and close the windows and install parental controls on the DVD player and firewalls on the computer and buy specially sanitized versions of popular movies so your kid won’t see Private Ryan’s combat or Leonardo’s butt.
You strap your kids into your tidy home-on-wheels and drive them from supervised schools to supervised sports and supervised playgroups and supervised outings. And you can’t share driving with other moms because they’re on different schedules and anyway, Freddie’s mom drives too fast and Flossie’s family van doesn’t have a DVD.
To me, this seems a soulless (and exhausting) way to live, like eating chips on a brand-new sofa, breaking each one over the bowl and picking every tiny crumb off your pants.
When I was 10 or so, somebody gave me an abridged, illustrated copy of “Little Women.” Except I didn’t know it was abridged. I thought it was the whole story. I read it again a few times in the next five years, assuming that this little book about four cloyingly virtuous sisters was all there was.
Then when I was in high school, I saw the complete text in the library. It was a big book. There were whole chapters I never knew. Painful conversations had been cut in half, and difficult scenes deleted altogether. Meg’s fights with her husband and Amy’s victory over nasty gossips had been axed. I started looking up all my childhood books, wondering which ones had been tampered with. I didn’t find any others, but I tell you, I’m still bitter about that book. I felt deceived; like there was a hole in my life I didn’t know was there.
And I wonder, will this generation growing up have many such holes? Will they spend their adulthood saying to themselves, “ “Wow, I didn’t know ‘Psycho’ had a shower scene” and “Nobody told me that cheaters really DO win a lot” as they compare the real world with the prettily pruned reality they grew up in? Like animals exquisitely adapted to a rarified environment like an ocean floor or Arctic tundra, I wonder if such people have difficulty functioning anywhere else.
I predict that 15 years from now, we'll have this crowd of socially inept, painfully unprepared young adults who expect someone to yell "Good job!" every time they rinse a glass or seal an envelope. Who will have trouble with some of the most basic lessons of adulthood: that life isn’t fair and people often suffer without relief and you can’t be special all the time.
I know children need more protection in some ways. You can’t toss your eight-year-old out of the house and tell her to come back when the streetlights come on. Marketers so ruthlessly target children that moms are pulling SpongeBob-covered boxes out of screaming babies’ hands at supermarkets. Sometimes it feels like everything you see, hear and touch in this world is trying to sell you something.
All the more reason to explore those bumpy roads, those steep ravines, away from the smooth roads with the shiny billboards. A car often drives better with a little dust in the tires and wildflowers on the windshield.
##
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Christine Vows Revenge
Well, I’m working on a revenge play these days. And the thing about writing a revenge play is that it puts you in a very touchy mood.
Generally I write comedies and walk around chuckling to myself, dissolving into giggles at the supermarket deli counter. Now I’m glaring at cell phone users and plotting exquisitely calibrated punishments for doofus drivers. Then I go home and eye my 15-month-old son, murmuring darkly, “I wouldn’t throw that block if I were you.”
To put myself in the proper frame of mind, I’m reading Dante’s “Inferno.” When I first read the Divine Comedy in college … well, actually I never read the whole thing, the whole Hell-Purgatory-Heaven trilogy. I’d read Milton’s Paradise Lost during a summer seminar, which kind of turned me off of hanging out in Heaven with genius poets.
So I never did read all of the Divine Comedy, but I did read the Inferno. In the book, a pilgrim is lost in a wood and Virgil the Roman poet leads him down to Hell, because only through Hell can the pilgrim reach Heaven. I don’t know why; they don’t mention a Dark Wood-Heaven express bus, so don’t ask. So the pilgrim travels through the nine circles of Hell, where all sinners receive their just punishments.
When I read this at age 21, the Inferno seemed like a simple adventure story – sort of a Wizard of Oz with more screaming. Now, reading it 15 years later, it takes on more ominous tones. I find myself wondering, in Dante’s universe, which circle I’d end up in. There’s no question I’d be there; Dante set the bar too high for an old sinner like me to enter Heaven. He puts people who eat too much down there, for crying out loud. (They lie buried in stinking mud.) From all the articles I’ve read on obesity in America, that would cover half the country and all the Midwest states.
All right, back to my play. It will have roughly the same theme as Dante’s, namely “The Bad Guys Get Theirs,” but it a little more complicated. I tried to explain the themes to Ron after he put Benny to bed, and gave us both a headache. This is the first time I’ve started a play with the theme. Usually I just make up weird characters and let it rip.
But this technique completely failed with my last play, “Wake Up Winslow,” which collapsed during the third scene and now refuses to budge. That play is a murder mystery/comedy about three siblings who run a talk show on cable access TV. One brother disappears and the remaining two are forced to continue the show. Then the show’s guests start dying off after appearing on it. Soon the only people who will appear on the show are a psychotic heavy metal guy and a fear management specialist.
Well, how can anybody lose with that, you ask? Death, sibling rivalry, fear management experts wearing masks, what else could one want? I tried to entice the play with plot outlines, character worksheets … nothing worked. So now I’ve abandoned it in disgust and I hope it’s happy.
But this new play, oh it’s going great guns. I’ve got a great theme that I half-understand. All I need are characters, setting and a plot. Now if you will excuse me, I must banish my son to a prison made of alphabet blocks.
##
Generally I write comedies and walk around chuckling to myself, dissolving into giggles at the supermarket deli counter. Now I’m glaring at cell phone users and plotting exquisitely calibrated punishments for doofus drivers. Then I go home and eye my 15-month-old son, murmuring darkly, “I wouldn’t throw that block if I were you.”
To put myself in the proper frame of mind, I’m reading Dante’s “Inferno.” When I first read the Divine Comedy in college … well, actually I never read the whole thing, the whole Hell-Purgatory-Heaven trilogy. I’d read Milton’s Paradise Lost during a summer seminar, which kind of turned me off of hanging out in Heaven with genius poets.
So I never did read all of the Divine Comedy, but I did read the Inferno. In the book, a pilgrim is lost in a wood and Virgil the Roman poet leads him down to Hell, because only through Hell can the pilgrim reach Heaven. I don’t know why; they don’t mention a Dark Wood-Heaven express bus, so don’t ask. So the pilgrim travels through the nine circles of Hell, where all sinners receive their just punishments.
When I read this at age 21, the Inferno seemed like a simple adventure story – sort of a Wizard of Oz with more screaming. Now, reading it 15 years later, it takes on more ominous tones. I find myself wondering, in Dante’s universe, which circle I’d end up in. There’s no question I’d be there; Dante set the bar too high for an old sinner like me to enter Heaven. He puts people who eat too much down there, for crying out loud. (They lie buried in stinking mud.) From all the articles I’ve read on obesity in America, that would cover half the country and all the Midwest states.
All right, back to my play. It will have roughly the same theme as Dante’s, namely “The Bad Guys Get Theirs,” but it a little more complicated. I tried to explain the themes to Ron after he put Benny to bed, and gave us both a headache. This is the first time I’ve started a play with the theme. Usually I just make up weird characters and let it rip.
But this technique completely failed with my last play, “Wake Up Winslow,” which collapsed during the third scene and now refuses to budge. That play is a murder mystery/comedy about three siblings who run a talk show on cable access TV. One brother disappears and the remaining two are forced to continue the show. Then the show’s guests start dying off after appearing on it. Soon the only people who will appear on the show are a psychotic heavy metal guy and a fear management specialist.
Well, how can anybody lose with that, you ask? Death, sibling rivalry, fear management experts wearing masks, what else could one want? I tried to entice the play with plot outlines, character worksheets … nothing worked. So now I’ve abandoned it in disgust and I hope it’s happy.
But this new play, oh it’s going great guns. I’ve got a great theme that I half-understand. All I need are characters, setting and a plot. Now if you will excuse me, I must banish my son to a prison made of alphabet blocks.
##
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