Keeping Time

I've been listening to Brian Fallon's Painkillers all week. It's a great album, and after a couple listens through, its easy to pick up on it being a "divorce album." It's so good, it makes the pain of separation sound like a journey sure to bring on emotions worth their weight, walking away from the experience having earned a sort of emotional enlightenment. I was about to google the details of his separation because of the tabloid culture I've been brought up in, but I stopped myself, having a moment of reckoning that it's not ok to look up his personal life to establish a frame of reference for his lyrics.

It was hard to fight the urge after hearing Fallon interchange Baby with Janie during the final chorus in Long Drives. Is it Janie who made his heart so fat and then deflated? He references Jane in "Here's looking at you kid" from the Gaslight Anthem. He could be using Janie like Springsteen uses Maria, a blanket name for vagina yielding companion who has a temporary presence in the life of a contrarian who can't control easy onset boredom. Besides if Jane is supposed to be Fallon's ex, then who is Elsie, Rosemary, and yet another Maria. 

It seems like female anthems after breakups are stories of becoming stronger or being broken beyond repair. But there aren't songs titled Samuel or Freddy spinning the tale of how on a beer buzzed night a man danced into their heart, making a lasting impression, then disappearing like smoke, the songs are more profound. Claiming recovery and strength, or casting shame for how poorly their heart was handled.

Dolly wrote Jolene about a woman who tried to snatch her man. Which reminded me of Lebron James and the string of tweets from Rihanna congratulating him for his victory, however, the praising photos were, in a very obvious way, sexual. Writing 23 in sun cream like a load of jizz on the belly. It's great that she fearlessly shows her love, but like, he's a married dude, with kids. So then I have to whisper a wish, Please don't try and fuck Lebron. Savannah Brinson doesn't need that to be the counterweight to this momentous success for their family. A fearful plead to not rip a family apart because of a celebrity crush.

Again, why I give a shit is really beyond me. Today I turned 34 years old, and I have invested energy in the lives of people who would feel nothing if I had my last breath. My birthday present was a fancy watch, another thing to examine. At least it is consistent. I went on Facebook and read a bunch of Happy Birthday wishes which was such a nice time. Facebook gets a lot of shit for its lack of depth, but it's totally necessary during modern times when we really don't have time to write long letters annually to each friend we've made throughout life. We meet too many people. It's an unnatural tether to the past, but it feels good for the most part.

I read through the timeline, and saw a heartbreaking post from a college classmate. I've been thinking of her since. Her post joins other news from last week, in direct opposition; where one person lost another person gained. The heart has chambers for a reason, there will be space for grief and more space for love. It can keep expanding, making room within the rooms. Like listening to Fallon's album birthed from his divorce, the pain is so much more than a moment, it's a life itself.

I think of the celebrities and their drama as the male told rock songs of short but impressionable loves. They can be the Janes and Marias. But the real relationships, the people I think of when I go to sleep at night, or wake up in the morning, those are the fem-anthems the "I Will Survive" or "Roar" because I'm rooting for them, for their heart to expand, and encase their pain in expectation. Like the consistency of a watch, when BOBO gets punched, she's going to pop back up, regardless of wanting to, or knowing if a fist will be greeting her again, and eventually she'll learn she's made of inflated plastic that can absorb anything.

One of the songs on Painkillers is called Honey Magnolia. I asked my husband if he thinks it's a nod to The Grateful Dead. He didn't know what I was talking about, and found my Dead knowledge a tad shocking. You can take the girl out of Tahoe, but can't take the Tahoe out of the girl. There are a couple givens from growing up amongst the hippies; an early introduction to drugs and booze, a nonjudgemental outlook, and basic Grateful Dead knowledge. Looking at the lyrics next to each other, I can draw some parallels. The Dead's Sugar Magnolia is about a woman whose always available, she's waiting, and ready, when he wants her, and Honey Magnolia is about a woman whose fed up with the waiting, and sends him back to the man's man's world.

I like Fallon's song better. The Dead's was from a different era, and although hippies are progressive on paper there is an awful lot of women taking on the burden for the comfort of their man. Plus Sugar Magnolia is a groupie appreciation song, and I can't think of a worse fate. Being a groupie is like being a prostitute whose paid in head pats. Although, Honey Magnolia tells the story from the woman's point of view, by the man who shaped her outlook, its empowering nonetheless. He knows that she's got a life, and it's not to be seasonal eye candy. Her life could be one page in his life, a Maria, but there is no expectation to stand around waiting, unless she's getting cold hard cash, or a nice watch out of it.

The Tip

The bottom of an ice cream cone

The first two weeks of teaching have been great. We flipped our family schedule upside down, and even though I never slept in, for the first time in four years, I started using an alarm clock. I wake up at the crack of dawn, 5am and run on the treadmill. 

This week I opted to watch TV rather than listen to music while I ran. I started The Age of Adeline. I am not sure why because it's a movie I knew I wouldn't like, and sure enough, I had to stop watching it after putting in one hour, two runs. Whats appealing about this movie is the attractiveness of the cast, Lively is a living Barbie doll, her man, Michael Huisman, oozes sex, and Ellen Burstyn is the definition of gorgeous. I had to quit it when I realized Adeline was going to be cured from her disability after deciding to be in a relationship, the moral of the story being, a woman will become normal, living a happy life, after allowing a man to take ownership of her.
After realizing I couldn't make it through another thirty minutes of The Age of Adeline I picked out The Man In The High Tower. It's interesting to see that in an imagined world where the US was taken over by Germany and Japan, Americans still refuse to learn another language. I won't commit to the series because I need something a little more lighthearted than shoot outs and torture chambers at 5 am. After the run, I get ready, play with the kids for a bit, and then leave for work.

In my first class, there is one student who is so kooky I can only smile when I see his bruised and tired face, he's had a black eye this week. Our class starts at 7:30 am, and when we all pile in the room he lets me know how tired he is. Then he takes his seat in the front row where I can see his running shoes that look like gloves for feet. After five minutes of lecture he puts his head on the desk and takes a nap, during intermission he gets a coffee and usually stays awake the rest of class. The information must be going into his sleeping head because he got a hundred percent on the first exam. Maybe it has to do with the shoe gloves.
In my next class there is a group of men in the back who are engaged and smart but they can get a bit obnoxious because of their running criticisms. So yesterday, when one of them came up to me and said, "I have a tip..." He followed it up by telling me that I should make a handout explaining a deck of cards instead of verbally explaining it to the class, since its a waste of time to the people who know about cards. He is at least twice the age of average student in my class. We're covering basics of probability, and many examples deal with a deck of cards. In these times, where people use idle time to surf Facebook or play candy crush there is a lot of people who don't know cards. When I ask, what's the probability the second card you pull is a queen given the first card you pulled is a two, some of them look at me like I'm speaking Swahili. So in the beginning of class we take two minutes to talk about a deck of cards.
His tip was so condescending, I didn't know what to say, except, "Thanks for the tip," in an equally condescending tone. What I wanted to say was, "Get the fuck out of my face, man. If you were half as smart as you thought you were, you'd have known just how stupid you sound." I was mansplained, and I got the look from a couple of the women in the front of the class that said, "been there!" Oh, the joys of having a grown man explain to me how things ought to be done.
Regardless of his superiority complex, I still like this student because he participates in class. Another student came to me after getting a D- on the first exam, and with a doe-eyed expression and a shaken voice, asked me if she'll still be able to get an A in the class. She frequently comes to class midway through, and told me a few days before she wasn't able to do the online homework because her computer acted weird. I didn't know what to tell her besides "a weird computer" isn't a legitimate excuse for not submitting what amounted to 14 assignments.
Was it her pretty face clouding her judgement? I'm not pretty-person shaming, but does she get these passes in her other classes? In this case, anyone would realize getting an A requires turning in homework and demonstrating a strong understanding of the material, and at this point getting a B would require a hard-work-hail-Mary, not a quivering chin and stream of tears.
There's another girl who has Woody Allen levels of anxiety. She forgot her TI-83 one day, and apologized, saying she'd never do it again. I said, "don't worry about it." I didn't let her know there are probably a couple people who will try to take this class with a Casio table calculator, and their final will look like a Basquiat painting, each paper filled with number and symbol scribblings where they hope the answer is somewhere in the chaos.

When I picked up George from preschool yesterday, Dr. Diane, the lady who runs the ship, said, "George is getting more comfortable. He's still rowdy at times, but he's talking a lot more and enjoys doing his jobs." I think as the weeks pass, there will be some more interesting personalities that emerge. People will get more comfortable. I'll also find a more suitable show for my 5 am viewing pleasure. I will look into a nice light hearted comedy. Thats a helpful tip, start the day out laughing. Well, maybe coffee, then laughing. Either way, I can count of the people in my class to entertain.

What About The Hieroglyphics Painters

Who says TV doesn't make you think?

I watched Master of None last week and it's easily the best show I've seen this year. Funny, thought provoking and feel-good. During the finale Aziz Ansari reads a quote from The Bell Jar about the fig tree and how each fig represents opportunities in Ester's life, non-overlapping opportunities, and her indecisiveness, leads to these opportunities being taken away from her, so she is left with less and less, eventually having nothing to choose from.

The quote is inspirational because it highlights the importance of being proactive, and choosing a life path. There is a supremely optimistic message, you can have anything you want, but then a bitter reality, these aspirations have expiration dates. The lie in this quote is, and I think this is mostly told to women, that "choosing one [fig] meant loosing all the rest..." What Ester wasn't able to understand is that she can eat one fig, and then after finishing it, pluck a fig that hasn't expired, or perhaps a fig that grew from her new position in life. After a person achieves one greatness, what else is there to do, but achieve another.  Only being able to eat one fig seems a worse fate than not eating any at all because of maturation of dreams and growing a deeper relationship with living.

I haven't read The Bell Jar in 10 years, but I'll go and dig it out of the garage this weekend and read it again. Sylvia Plath is one of the most famous American writers, and she died before ever reaching critical acclaim. Her mind, her brilliance, was exposed to the world after putting her head in an over. I liken her to Van Gogh, another artist who was plagued by mental disease and died before receiving any acclaim, but became one of the most prominent artists in the world. Their lives both share this ironic twist of fate, having unfulfilled dreams of acclaim fulfilled to astounding heights after death. Their afterlife had me thinking of their mental illness, their consciousness and subconsciousness.

Our reality is fed to us in linear time, second by second, but if our existence is whole, and our entire life is known to our subconscious, then there is an innate understanding of personal greatness or achievements. Maybe Plath and Gogh were driven mad by this lack of acclaim. They felt their importance, their influence on the world, but reality did not match up to these feelings. Plath, living as a single parent with two small children, a supreme isolation understood by anyone who has stayed home with young kids, easily sending someone with depression into a deep canyon of despair, unknowingly tormented by due praise.

I corresponded with my friend who renewed her subscription to The New Yorker. She mentioned how it's disheartening to see successful writers in their twenties on the pages of this publication, to the point of causing self doubt. I told her my thoughts on how in the arts, a field where a practicing person only gets better with time, it is far better to receive acclaim later in life because otherwise, it's all down hill from there. And in regard to being able to eat more than one fig, I mean, by "famous writer" being their first fig, then they will have to choose another fig next, that would most likely send them on a different trajectory.
Professionally peaking at 25 doesn't seem so great. I'm more fascinated by people who slog through life, and then hit it big after living through a wide range of experiences. People like Bukowski, David Sedaris or Wayne White, all above 40 before becoming widely known. Watching Beauty Is Embarrassing, Wayne White talks about his mental breakdown, and that added more evidence to my theory, because he was tortured by his lack of acclaim. Eventually he became the big artist he always knew he would be. Why I didn't buy one of those paintings on the wall in Fred 62 when I lived in Los Feliz 12 years ago is a question I can't ask myself again, since it would probably have bank rolled one of my kids' college education, or at least paid for a couple summers of Space Camp.

Then how does this explain tortured artists who strongly believe their success will come but don't end up with anything. I don't know. Maybe their fame has yet to come. Who knows whats going to get dug up in a thousand years. Even though David Foster Wallace is perceived as a better writer than JK Rowling, the truth is, there is a far greater chance her books will still be circulating in a thousand years. Regardless of modern popularity, there is no way of knowing if fan fiction e-books self published by a nobody becomes the Shakespeare of our time.

The point I'm making is that opportunities need to be taken when ripe, that more opportunities arise, but they're different, adapted to current phases of life, but deep down there is a calling, and our subconscious knows the greatness to come, even beyond the scope of physical existence. The depressive hieroglyphics painters of Egypt must have been completely unhinged.

The Grass Is Thirsty

George's first week of school ended.  It was a rocky start. When I called in between classes on Monday, the head of the school told me George was "testing his boundaries," and really giving them a hard time, screaming and not listening. George's tantrums are on par with a nuclear bomb going off, so I went into the week worried he might cope with the lifestyle change by acting out.

The week before, we were at a pool playdate. We've had these pool playdates frequently over the last couple months. It started out as fun, I enjoyed listening to the mom grumpily complain about everything in her life. Her gripes was generally served up with high doses of sarcasm, so I found her funny. Then it became draining, she is much more a curmudgeon than a comedian.
George was in fine form that afternoon, not listening to me and being a terrorizer in the kiddie pool. He's in his element when he's playing with a group of older boys, but he is a bull in a china shop when surrounded by babies or girl gangs, and I have to act as a George buffer. I take his abrasive play time as him getting his ya-yas out rather than being an uncontrollable beast of a child, but my playdate mom felt the contrary, and spent most of the time making judgmental faces, and moving her head back into her neck like a shocked turtle.

Toward the end of the day, after I chased George around for the last hour, she said, "Do you think he'll get kicked out of school?"
Right after she said it, I gave her a cold stare that said, "your-dead-to-me bitch." I answered, "I hope not," and then followed him off into the playground, and nonchalantly acted disinterested in her laundry list of complaints.
It was that moment when I had my reckoning. The weeks building up to this were spent reflecting on how I spend more time with this miserable person than any other adult, and it's time to say, "Adios!" A friendship breakup. The thing with unhappy people is they're like poison, and make the people around them unhappy too, and I don't need to hang out with someone who makes me feel like doo.

When I called the school on Monday, and found out George was not getting in-line, I stressed that he could get kicked out, and I'd need a back up plan. I devised one quickly. I figured we could take him to the Catholic school we moved Kiki from for being too sensitive to fit in their ridged curriculum. George would fit in well to the Catholic school if the calming sensory based learning of Montessori doesn't vibe well with him.

He did better throughout the week. Monday was rough, Tuesday was an improvement with a minor incident at the end of the day, and Wednesday and Thursday he did well. We went out to dinner Thursday night to celebrate the end of our first week. Kiki didn't completely chew her tortilla chip, swallowing the equivalent of an indian arrowhead, coming close to giving herself a reverse columbian necktie, and cried hard long after the chip dissolved. After a while, she curled up on her dad, repeating, "I want to go home."
The new schedule took it's tool on her too. Later that night she cried as I put her to sleep saying her friend was mean to George in the sandbox, and threw sand at him. I assured her that she doesn't ever have to worry about George backing down from a challenge, and a sandbox challenge is one of his favorites. "Don't worry about your brother, Kiki. He can take care of himself."
The sandbox battle was probably his favorite part of the week, and just might have been what made him want to listen to his teachers.

I have to take my own advice, and not worry about George. The truth is, the school sees this all the time. Kiki cried for the first month when we dropped her off at preschool, even her Montessori. I guess I just stress that I look like a shit parent, and I'm not sure why, since George acts like a normal 3 year old boy.
Today we kick started our weekend. George resumed his pants-aren't-an-option rule and spent an hour roaming around the yard looking for bugs and chasing his dog around shouting, "I want to to hug my brother-dog!"
I sat in the lawn chair drinking coffee. George went from pants-not-an-option to underpants-not-an-option, and after I saw him start to pee on the grass, I said, "George!! Come on! Use the toilet!"
He strolled up to me and said, "The grass is thirsty." Then I privately laughed to myself, wondering how someone could not be amused by the craziness of a little boy.

Weekending

The Gorilla Baby Snatcher

Not really

All week I've been forced to watched the video of a gorilla dragging a toddler around his Gorilla Kingdom pen. The video is quite the topic on the morning talk shows, plastered all over the flat screens hanging from the gym celling. The TVs are on mute, but I've pieced the story together through the ticker tape running on the bottom of the screen.

The gorilla was killed for dragging the baby around, and today I watched the backlash from animal activists. I think its fucked up the mom is being blamed for "looking at her cell phone." Gorilla Kingdom has displaced the blame onto the poor mom. Why not build a fucking exhibit where a toddler can't crawl over the wall, because guess what, sometimes mom is going to tie her shoe, or read a text message, or even take a selfie.

My friend wanted to rail in on the mom. She said, "There were accounts of the child saying he wanted to climb over, and she wasn't listening to him."
"Really? That sounds a bit convenient. The witness is probably a Gorilla Kingdom employee whose getting a gigantic Christmas bonus."

I went on, "This is a clear case of assisted suicide. If the gorilla really wanted to kill that little kid, he'd have crushed his brain the moment he grabbed a hold of him. Instead he dragged him around, hoping to get a dart to the neck. He was probably saying, 'Put me out of my fucking misery.'"

I don't think the animal activists are too keen on just how awful it would be to live in a zoo with the intellect of a primate. Trapped in a contained pen, littered with his doodoo, having nothing interesting to do, and then getting probed and rape/jerked-off all the time so your sperm can be used to make many more animals to live in cages. If they believe the gorilla prefer to live, it means his shitty existence would have only become shittier, since he'd probably have to go through his normal life of suffering but without his only pleasure, getting to go outside in his tiny jungle themed pen.

Even though these morning shows are on mute (thank goodness) it's obvious they're missing the point; zoos are fucked up, and the animals would probably prefer to be dead than live in them. Instead they run their mouths on how moms who read their cell phones are terrible parents who don't care about their kids safety.