St. Patrick Isn’t as Irish as I Am


My daughter was asking me today about St.Patrick and why he needed to drive away snakes. I was getting her ready for school at the time, selecting the proper combination of green to ward off pinches. I keep forgetting that her in Canada it is not verboten to discuss religion in schools, so Katy is often reciting to me the public school version of my own Catholic school education. To tell the truth, I don’t remember the circumstances that led up to Patrick’s expelling of the snakes. Patrick was not Irish but a missionary from Britain trying to convert the heathen Irish. His snake trick has more ties to the paganism in practice there at the time to anything he may have actually done. I told Katy I didn’t remember why which prompted another question. Ignorance is not an out. She just keeps asking questions until I know an answer.

 

“How did he drive out the snakes?”

 

“Magic.”

 

“Who helped him?”

 

“God.”

 

“So God was his assistant?”

 

I had to smile. It’s an odd way to put it but in a way she is right. God is just there for the assist. Everything else is up to us.

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Who is God?”

 

“He’s the one who created the universe.”

 

“How’d he do that?”

 

“I have no idea.”

 

This time she let me off the hook. Perfectly green and sure of her Irishness, she bounced off.

 

I’d forgotten that it was the 17th.  St.Patrick’s isn’t one of those holidays I paid much attention to even as a child. As a teacher, I took care to remember the days when I was expected to wear specific colors, but the emphasis on drinking that is so heavily associated with the day where I grew up and where I settled as an adult, really turned me off to marking the holiday beyond color coordination. One of the things that struck me about today this year was that Katy knew she was Irish. She is more Irish in ethnic heritage than she is any thing else thanks to me. But, this is relatively new information. When I was a child and a teen, I wore green not really knowing if I was Irish in any part at all. Being adopted, I did what I had always done which was to adopt my parents genetic make-up as my own even though I was clearly different in most aspects from the physical to the intellectual to personality. I was in college when I learned that I was indeed half Irish though I suspected from my red hair and fair skin that I likely was. Still, it was such a big deal to be able to say that my ancestors came from Ireland. Mine. Not the ones I borrowed. People who gave me a true genetic link to that far away island.

 

It’s just an odd thing that came to me today in an innocent moment with my child.

Playlists for Wankers


Nowadays I am a playlist girl with my beloved iPod and my click and drag iTunes catalog, but back in the day when Walkman still ruled I was all about mix tapes. I didn’t even know that there was a word for what I was doing then. I would sit with my tape recorder positioned next to the radio to catch my favorite songs as they came up on American Top Forty countdown every Sunday afternoon. I am not even sure where the idea to first do this came from either. I don’t think anyone showed me or told me what to do. It was an instinctive pre-teen thing. Popular music and adolescence have a long history. As the technology, such as it was in the 1980’s improved, I eventually had a boom box with a double cassette deck, which allowed me to tape tapes and capture singles as best I could from FM radio. I was good at that too. A quick finger, I seldom missed much past the opening bar or two of any song I wanted to record. But, I wasn’t much of a mixer. My tapes were eclectic to say the very least. Even when my next upgrade to a boom box with a CD player and a double cassette allowed me to organize, I didn’t often take the time. I wasn’t someone who made tapes for her friends or crushes. Until I met my husband Rob, I’d never been the recipient of someone’s musical taste either. Sharing music is an intimate thing you know. It is revealing of those things about you that no one suspects. Your passions. Your odd sense of humor. Where you find meaning and where you were at different stages of your life.

 

During my new hobby of periodic trolling for interesting blogs to read and share, I sometimes employ the tag surfer. It will bring up the latest blog entries that correspond to the many tags I have checked off on my search page. One of these searches revealed a piece on play lists about songs that refer to masturbating. That is something I have frankly never thought needed a soundtrack, but I recognized many of the songs the blogger had listed. 80’s songs, a lot of them that took me back to college days: She-Bop by Cyndi Lauper I remember was such a big deal because it was about a girl and even in our twenties, none of my friends at the time would admit to doing such a thing. We were all such prudes really and this in spite of the predatory sexual attitudes that were just becoming the vogue for young women. We would talk all racy and raunchy about sex and guys, but couldn’t talk about ourselves anymore than we could ask for what we wanted from the guys we dated. As I remember it, unless we were drinking (heavily) we couldn’t even sing songs like She-Bop and I Touch Myself in the company of anyone. Songs about guys doing themselves were different. Dancing with Myself and Turning Japanese were double entendre enough we could ignore what they meant because, well, they didn’t mean us anyway and everyone knew that guys did nothing but jack off, right?

 

I have to admit that the idea of a self-wanking playlist isn’t on the top of my list of things to listen to as I mainly use the iPod for working out.  But the idea of a sex mix isn’t a bad one. Rob used to send me love songs during our long distance days. He would attach them to his emails. Desperately Wanting and Got You Where I Want You. Mark Knopfler’s Prairie Wedding is still one of my favorites. Our first weekend together at the Holiday Inn Express in Idaho Falls was soundtracked by A Perfect Circle primarily but also an interesting variety of heavy metal and rock. Nights on the sofa, before its lice infestation and subsequent banishment to the Clover Bar Landfill, were accompanied by the satellite music provider Max Trax, The Edge – mostly because the windows were always open and we are loud. I can’t say if any of the songs were romantic or even remotely related to sex or making love, because there is a difference. It was loud and pulsating. Like those long ago days of dancing until sweat drenched in the clubs of Iowa City. Primal and urgent and out of breath, knowing that the next day you were going to feel it in muscles you didn’t know you had.

 

Funny the images that music will bring to the forefront even when it’s just a list of long forgotten tunes.

 

 

Sex and the Middle-aged Married Couple


Not long ago I was reading article after article on women my age who thought sex with their partner was something to be devotedly avoided. They were simply not interested in physical intimacy. Explanations abounded. Low libido. Exhaustion. Emotionally empty relationships. But the bottom line was that many of these women seemed okay with the idea that they weren’t having much or any sex. Some of them even felt that this was the way marriages went after a time. Every time I read one of these pieces in the paper or magazine, I would ask my husband, “Who the hell are these people? Do I know women like this? Do I have friends, relatives or acquaintances with marriages like this? Underneath contented exteriors are there lifeless relationships swirling all about us?” And then yesterday, I ran across a review of a new book by Bob and Susan Berkowitz about middle-aged married men who would also rather not have sex to the point where they weren’t. Of course, that explains how women are getting away with not having sex. Their husbands are not interested either. They are impotent from all manner of medication: anti-depressants and Rogaine to name just two. Or they are angry with their wives for all manner of things and are with-holding sex – though I am wondering if their wives notice. And, of course, they are too busy with all manner of Internet porn (honestly, you should see some of the google searches that bring people here of all places -the ultimate in yuckiness) to bother with their fat wives. Yes, one of the top three reasons men shun their wives sexually is that they have gotten fat (the women, although I see a great number of men who should spend more time minding their own BMI’s). I could gloat and feel vindicated about my weight pieces from last week, but it would be a hollow victory given the overall orgasm drought. It almost makes climate change a less pressing priority.

 

When I read about the lack of sex in marriage these days, I am tempted to write about my own experiences. Why not? I hint about them enough. But I won’t. It’s just not my life alone. (And sometimes my step-daughter reads this blog and she would need a mind’s eye scoop after.) I will say that I have found marriage more sexually satisfying than my long ago single girl days. You remember those free-wheeling 1980’s? But there is nothing that compares with intimate sex. Making love should be more than a euphemism. It is the kind you can only have with someone who knows the real you. Can make you laugh. Finish your thoughts. Have in-depth conversations that range from the grocery list to string theory. In a single sitting. How can you truly let go with someone who hasn’t folded your underwear, endured the smell of your farts or understands that even though you can’t say the word “clitoris”, you definitely want him to give it his full attention?

 

According the Berkowitz’s, somewhere between 6 months and 3 years, sex goes bye-bye. It has to, according to them. But why? And what do they mean that sex “goes”? Does that mean it slows down? Becomes less frequent? Goes on a long holiday? Gets really bad? My personal opinion is that too many people buy into the notion that sex is spontaneous. A gesture. A glance. Ignition to blast off. People put more thought into where they are going to eat out, and what movie they should see than to what will go on in their bedroom (or on the sofa, maybe the kitchen counter, or in the shower).

 

Mr. Berkowitz remarks as well that most people spend only 3% of their time thinking about sex. I am going to assume that this includes people who are not having any. I wonder, how this can be measured? The Berkowitz’s apparently interviewed a multitude of therapists and surveyed 4000 couples who weren’t having sex. Kind of a skewed demographic, I think. I spend way more than 3% of my time having impure thoughts, middle-aged as I am. And withholding old farts hunched over their computers gawking at women who are much less likely to have sex with them than their wives are probably devoting more than 3% of their brain cells to the subject as well. What an irony that in a country that is sex obsessed, those legally and morally sanctioned to have sex – in accordance with Holy American Family Values as preached at us – aren’t getting any.