I’ve read the highlights and I think people are too optimistic on the one hand and overly dramatic on the other. It’s not going to save too many in the short run but Americans count their victories one person at a time anyway. It’s always been “what’s good for the few the many should just learn to accept” in the land that thinks it’s the most free, the most advanced, the most civilized, the most compassionate and yet probably wouldn’t make the top ten in any of those categories.
I haven’t watched an empire’s sun set since the U.S.S.R faded like a pastel house in Florida, but let’s pause and give Obama his one shining moment, shall we?
I have a basically unread copy of Eat, Pray, Love that I will likely never read at this point especially now that there is a movie version. Reading a book that you can watch is just very not done in my homeland. Americans are practical in their quest of the lowest road that will not make them appear too lazy or uneducated.
I am probably one of only a handful of women in the western world who hasn’t read more than the chapter excerpt of Eat, Pray, Love which appeared in Oprah magazine sometime in early 2006. I bought the book because I wanted to use the O magazine version as a reference on my comps. We had to write a bibliography of all the books or magazine articles we quoted, or that influenced ,the gazillion mini-thesis papers that made up the examination at the end of the masters program I was just finishing in the spring of 2006. Unfortunately, I had reached my limit on the number of magazines I could use and needed books. So I just figured since I liked the chapter, perhaps I could claim to have read the whole book and then do so after the fact, in case I got quizzed on it during our Masters week in July.
As a matter of fact, or point of reference, take your pick, I was working on those comps exactly four years ago. Or I was trying to. My father was having surgery and Mom was freaking out. He had a growth that needed removing that could have been cancer but the doctor didn’t think it was overly likely. I was prevailed upon to come home for Spring Break and … step up? … despite the fact that I had a thesis paper to finish and comps to take.
Big memory of that week, being annoyed that I was stuck taking care of kids, sitting at the hospital with Dad and generally being expected to be strong and serene while Mom and DNOS went about their normal routines for the most part. It was like they didn’t notice that I had really important agenda items on my plate that I couldn’t delegate. Sigh, always the delegatee back then
Anyway, Eat, Pray, Love.
I’d heard about this movie. Investigated the author and novel’s premise a bit more. Decided she was a poser and dismissed it all as self-help garbage.
“Why do people need to travel to exotic locales to find themselves?” I asked Rob on our most recent lunch date. “Your self is inside of you. There is no need to go looking.”
“Well,” he said, ” I’m a little hurt by that statement because it’s kind of what I did after Shelley died and I took my trip down south to revisit places we’d been together and see people we knew.”
Which, to my mind, made what he did different from what Eating Author did. She was running away in hopes that the bad stuff about herself would be sloughed off as she discovered new things or cultivated new things or something like that. Rob was reconnecting with memories – the good ones that get lost sometimes after your spouse dies.
I remember at the time I read that single chapter thinking “wouldn’t it be nice to have such simple problems and be able to shed a whole existence and start fresh with someone else bankrolling you?” That just wasn’t my reality and never had been. When life needed overhauling, I had to stick around and do it and pay for it myself.
However, in a way, coming to Canada has been my mini-Eat, Pray, Love – minus the pray part or Yoda or getting to hang in India. Canada? Not India. I have put on weight though. Perhaps I am like Eating more than I care to acknowledge?
Since Rob would rather sledgehammer a toe than go to a theatre to see a chick flick with delusions of enlightenment no less, I will likely only see this if the universe nudges me to pick it up at the bookmobile but since the book hasn’t moved me to crack its spine in fours years, I doubt it.
Lora receives The Honest Scrap blogger award often, and I’ve enviously wished to be awarded this myself as I’ve read her scraps of self-truth.
Being a more interesting and less censored person than myself, it isn’t surprising that she is a frequent honoree. She does Gary Paulson’s creedo of “going there” proud via her blogging efforts. I don’t boldly go much anymore. Age isn’t a factor. Wisdom hasn’t come with wrinkles and fading hair follicles. I just live in the world more and am less inclined to be infamously known in my realtity.
Not that Lora is infamously known – that I know of – but more and more, people I interact with in real time read this blog. Honesty has become a hassle. Coy isn’t difficult to write, but it’s not all that engaging on a creative or personal level for me. So I don’t.
And I’ll bet you were thinking “she’s grown a conscience, chosen modesty or, at the very least, reconnected with her empathy bone”.
Silverstar blessed me with my very own Honest Scrap Award. It comes with the onus of relating 10 little known facts about myself, as if I have that many anymore, and the request to pass it along to other bloggers. Most of the blogs I read are written by anti-meme types, so I can’t bring myself to name names. I consider my readership to be go-getting self-prodders who will simply appropriate this award and write, or not, as the mood moves them. My blogging buddies are scrappy like that.
Little known? What does that mean exactly? Known to my readers – who are varied, sitting in front of screens that are thousands of miles away from me and whose faces I may not know if I were to encounter them somewhere?
I believe in destiny and fate, but I don’t think we are at their mercy. Though most of the time you are locked into a path until it plays out, you still have options. Your actions have effects. Where you are right now is still mostly your own doing because our difficulties in life are usually the result of fighting destiny rather than working within the confines of our predestined trajectory.
Enlightenment is more often rejected than it is actually elusive, in my opinion. It’s probably completely possible to learn everything you need to know without ever stepping foot on this planet. Life is a choice we make at some point, and I think it is the physicality of it all that lures us here in spite of the fact that confining our true selves to such flimsy and frustratingly needy vessels can cause us pain in equal measure to joy and pleasure. Life is addicting.
I check the obituaries of the Des Moines Register daily to see if my late husband’s mother has died yet. Occasionally I will google the names of his aunts and uncles to check on their pulse status as well. If I never saw or heard from them again, it wouldn’t pain me one bit and I will be relieved when I am finally shed of the semi-annual sending of the photos ritual and their couple of Hallmark cards a year addressed to Dee – who has absolutely no idea who they are. She checks the cards for money. My mother and Auntie send cash. There is never money. I remind her of the sender’s connection to her. Her grandmother. She’ll frown. My mom is her grandmother and her grandmother sends money. Her Daddy Will’s Auntie Gem, who she hasn’t seen since her father’s wake four years ago. Auntie Gem solicits photos to distribute among the uncles. I haven’t heard from either of them since just after I wrote them in the summer of 2007 to announce I’d remarried and emigrated to Canada. Hmmmm. Okay, I should have said something prior but when I met Rob, I hadn’t seen or heard from any of them in 7 or 8 months. What I really wanted to do was not write. Just wait until they’d figured out I’d moved away and were forced to call my folks to find me. Or maybe they’d have called the police? One of the uncles had been a warden at the big state prison. He had connections. And it was evil but I didn’t do it simply because Rob thought I should write them at the very least. And so, the very least I did. And I look for(ward to) their obits.
I sometimes miss television. Bet that seems like a mild revelation after the last one, eh? Some evenings I don’t feel like reading or writing and it was nice to be mindlessly entertained following a show with recurring characters and stories that spun out over a couple of months. I’m waiting on season two of The Tudors from the public library. Sure, the history is faulty and it’s mostly bad soft porn, but not thinking in a semi-active way can be okay here and there.
For the first two years of Dee’s life, I let her daycare providers cut her finger and toenails because I was afraid of snipping her. Those women were saintly. I never changed a crappy diaper either unless it was a weekend or a holiday because Dee pooped once a day in the mid-ish afternoon. Kid is still fairly punctual though now it’s after she gets home from school because she refuses to do #2 in a public washroom if she can avoid it. Will was like that. Rob is like that. Not me though. If I have to go, I go.
I like living in J’berg. If it ended up that we were here for the duration, I would be completely okay with that though Rob? Not so much. I have mainly lived unseen and unnoted in larger cities or crowded towns and here, I am recognized. Maybe not as “one of them” because small towns are a bit weird about the whole “nativism” thing, but I belong after a fashion and it’s all good.
My favorite time of year is nearly upon us, sun days. Those longly lit days when the sun is up at 3:30 and barely dips below the horizon sometime well after 11PM. I would love to experience true white nights. I don’t think I could live there because it’s opposite are the night-days of winter, but maybe experience it one time?
I don’t believe every child can be educated. This doesn’t excuse them from the duty of trying, but I don’t think everyone is born with the same innate ability to learn. We should come with a label: skill level may vary. I don’t think its genetic. My oldest nephew is clever as hell and he didn’t get that from his parents. It made it hard to be a teacher. Correction, it made it hard to work myself up about kids who just didn’t get it. They worked hard, tried their best and just weren’t very smart. And I can’t even say that it’s sad because generally, they were sweet kids who grew up to be sweet, hard-working, lovable and loving adults. Nothing wrong with that.
I like Nickelback. I thought that pickle thing was mean. Keep your Nickelback hate to yourselves in my presence. It’s catchy. It pounds. The lyrics are suitably pop cheesy and I like growly voiced singers.
If you have animals in your home, I will try to avoid sitting down – or being without shoes – because I am conscious of the dander, the hair and the fact that kitty litter does not stay in the box; it is everywhere your cat has ever pawed. Don’t kid yourself. Last night we stopped by the home of one of Rob’s friends to pick up a few things he needs to haul away an old Volvo of Edie’s. They have three or four dogs running loose and about 2 dozen cats that run in and out of their house. Right now, they even have a mama cat and kittens in their upstairs linen closet because the mama sneaked in and gave birth there a week ago. They haven’t moved them but instead, threw everything out of the bottom shelves of the closet into the hallway. Rob’s friend invited me to sit in the family room to wait while he and Rob rummaged around in the barn. I smiled. Nodded and after they’d disappeared took Dee outside. If I’d sat, I would have been covered with hair, and more cats than I cared to be and my nose was already running. If you have cats especially, I probably won’t sit if the visit is a short one and I will avoid long ones, but if I can’t – the only way I’ll sit is if it matters to me if your feelings will be wounded because I know it will appear as though I am judging you and I’m not. I lived with cats here and there, but fur and itchy throat and running eyes and nose are not something I will do for many people. If I have done it for you, you are special indeed.
Well, I am sure that disappointed, but now I am done. Remember, you are welcome to take the scrap and run back to your own blog with it or just tmi all over the comments.
anniegirl1138 