Tag Archives: life

The other Mother’s Day

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I was reading that it is never ever St. Patty’s Day on March 17. But, today is March 15, and Patty’s Day it is, the erstwhile day of birth of my old, and not quite sainted mother.

Erstwhile, perhaps, because can you celebrate birthdays when the guest of honor no longer stomps the earth?

So many reasons to think of my mother, Pat, today. Not the least of which is being there for the funeral of M.’s mother. The ceremony, the prayers, the food, the people, the rituals so different. Yet the similarities so deep.

Both M. and I grew up with just one parent. My dad died when I was four. His dad and mom split when he was a kid and then dad died young. Now we are both orphans together.

Like for my mother’s wake, a wave of older people came by for M.’s mother. So many people identifying as friends, explaining who they were, where they lived, how lives intersected. For both women, the presence of these mourners spoke to affections and warmth and relationships that we, as children, did not know. Shading into depth the women we knew only as mom, but they knew as a friend.

Comic relief: My favorite old broad who came by to say goodbye to M.’s mom, walked up to him, and I’m told said to him, “If you don’t remember who I am, I will slap your face.”

I hope a long line of people drops by my remaining body to call me friend in the end. Of course, I hope more to have more years of partying it up and making and having friends.

M. and I have talked about our mothers. It seems to me that they were both gentle people bruised by unexpected circumstances and tragedies big and small. Each woman was shy and reserved, sometimes too passive, sometimes just bound to get the smallest piece of pie, shortest straw or dealt the unlucky hand.

Each of them squirreled away pennies, sacrificing their own wants, for their kids.

Consequently, M. and I each rail against an imagined fate, louder, stronger, more resolute than the women who raised us. We don’t save money for cake tomorrow. We buy cake today and enjoy it with gusto.

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Holy shit, I wanted this one to be funny and light. As the kids say — FAIL.

Here’s the manifesto to put the morose and melodramatic bullshit behind.

Every month of March, every year, hell every freaking day, I want to remember and climb on the hand offered to me. Our mother’s didn’t die in vain. Our mother’s didn’t live lives of privation for no reason. Precisely because our mother’s didn’t have every opportunity and real life undercut their dreams, we will live ours.

Don’t wait. Don’t stop. Don’t allow worry and anxiety to be roadblocks.

Dream and more importantly act.

Hate your fucking job? Leave.

Landlord sucks? Move.

Tired of the cold and snow? Relocate.

Today, and I hope every day, if I don’t fucking laugh at least once, I haven’t done it right.

For both our mother’s, who weren’t given the chances to do it all, we will try to cram in the fun we can in the days we have left. Misery is not an option.

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

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I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.

What a week, what a world

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There is absolutely too much to write about.

Saturday was a big bash. Along side local friends, some of my family and some particularly fabulous friends got into planes to celebrate with us. From different places on at least three continents and both the east and west coasts, a bunch of others tuned in to watch us actually do the “I dos.”

The week started on a high, and it ended on a low. Morgan’s mom, Leong Fik Yak, finished her stay on this mortal coil. She was a try gentle and warm soul. We are currently participating with more and different family on sending her off to celestial planes.

When my uncle died, Morgan experience for the first time how the Catholics say goodbye. Now, I am Margaret Mead, trying to stay out of the way, make the right motions and help however I can with the Buddhist way.

For now, my only observation is Catholics and Buddhists both have chants, bells and incense. There is time for old family, friends and associates to talk and remember and in remembering it’s part party with the guest of honor quietly in state.

Maybe I will sort out something wise and insightful about the human condition and death. For now, I’ll go with the flow.

It ought to be a holiday

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Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

Another year older and deeper in debt

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Here’s my overdue musing on yet another birthday. I can’t believe I’m completely easing into total decrepitude, but 49 is a grown-up, fucking age anyway you slice it.

On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Maybe it’s the baby boomers, of which I think I am one, tail end of a generation and all that. After all dear old dad was in Fort Lee, NJ during the big one, WW2. But, perhaps the baby boomers and their clinging to the old ways of listening to electric guitars, hot-tubbing and refusing to give up capital F Fun really are making a dent in how aging is perceived. 60 is the new 30 and all.

What I realize, as I refuse to go gentle into that good night, is that people really do have strong ideas or pictures in their heads of what middle age looks like. In the golden oldie days of my hitting comedy clubs night after night, I had a joke about being 40 and it not being a compliment if someone tags a remark with “for your age,” as in “You look great! For your age.”

In other words, I’m not sure I’m completely digging all of the times that folks say to me (and to M.) that we don’t look our age. Baby, this right here, this chubby body and all, this is what 49 looks like.

I know it’s meant well and maybe it’s true. After all I know a chick about 6 months younger than me who rocks the mom jeans and acrylic sweaters. But, if you look at her face, she’s not actually decrepit either.

For fuck’s sake, I don’t really know anyone under the age of 90 who looks like the Crypt Keeper, so why is that our image? I would totally make out with Helen Mirren.

And with all of that, my secret will be the launch of the upcoming “Forever 49,” a store for normal people. My jeans will be old school, the way jeans were meant to be, with zippers that are not so short and low they end at your clit. T-shirts will be long enough to not just cover your belly button but reach your hips. More simply, clothes will go back to fitting you well and covering your muffin top, not create a whole other roll.

Here’s to another fucking decade of living. And, when the wrinkles catch up, I’ll just wear my sunglasses indoors.

Maybe it’s because another birthday is a-coming

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I thought I had a thought about something to write about here. The jump was a Facebook status I saw with a quote that boiled down to whether you could call yourself an artist.

I usually don’t. Sometimes I do. It’s usually when I am melodramatically claiming insights and wisdom and sensitivities I don’t actually possess. Recently, I did gesticulate and gesture broadly while declaring “Fuck them all, I’m an artist,” to a work friend (he is beleaguered as I am by those people who cannot discern wit and sarcasm from assholic behavior).

Generally, I’m more unsure. Although, as M. will shout at me, ridiculously so. If I don’t trust my words or my way with words, why the fuck should anyone else?

It’s a baby step that I now tell people that I’m a “writer” (yup, note the quotes and do the little airy double-fingered gesture) or admit to blogging or working on a book, now with M.’s sage advice an admitted collection of essays. Essays I can manage; a book creates a dry heave kind of thing in my brain. Hmm, not a great visual that – a retching head.

It’s important, I think, that you have to at some point say “fuck it, I’m in the club.” I’m tired of waiting for permission to decide what I am.

I never or rarely call myself a stand up comedian. I say (admit) I’ve done stand up comedy (and suppose I might again).

At night in dim clubs and bars, there was a mostly unspoken hierarchy, and there was a definitely bitched about gripe of who got to call themselves a comic. I think I took the atmosphere too much to heart, too personally, and I couldn’t bring myself to compare my meager offerings to people who made money and gigged madly and got auditions.

In retrospect, I wish I had brassier balls to front myself as belonging, even if I didn’t feel it inside. After all, I drank beers (and retro-shamefacedly even slept) with clowns who cashed checks built literally on fart jokes. Fart, fucking, jokes.

(Cue the smoke and vaselined lens with swirling colors, I feel a nostalgic memory coming on….

Back in old Boston, there’s a dingy room in a basement of what was once a bank. The tiny tables behind the stage, where comedians impatiently wait there turn, is adjacent to the black, iron wall of the bank’s vault.

I chatted and fiddled with my list of jokes in front of me and nursed a beer. A guy who at the time got paying gigs and took a shine to me, leaned over me to whisper sweet nothings of advice, and no doubt peer from above my head at the fun bags in my blouse.

He explained that I was too smart, and audiences don’t like that. My success, it would seem, would best be served by following his lead. He suggested I stand up from where I was sitting and watch his carefully calibrated performance unfurl.

Woman that I am, because I do sadly believe woman are a bazillion times more likely to politely follow these kind of orders, I got up to watch.

No lie, it was painful. Scampering and dancing on stage and a solid gold bit that if my dim mind remembers culminated in the comic gold of not being able to tell if the farts were coming from his dog or his grandmother sleeping on the couch. GOLD!

People do laugh at that shit, I’ll give him that. Although, sometimes it’s the uneasy laugh of watching someone fall spectacularly or the cruel laugh at the handicapped or maybe the giggle from watch monkeys flinging poo at the zoo. So, indeed the room had laughter in it.

A couple of people later, it was my turn. He returned the favor to study my set and give me notes.

It was one of those nights I only sort of remember. My best moments on stage are the ones where like a trained athlete it’s all muscle memory, mechanics and flow. Everything rolls out instinctively, not held up by my conscious (and self-concious) thought of what’s next.

I ripped it. The audience was listening and laughing exactly where I planned. They were silent on my words that would lead to revelation and release. But, in my game, in that ultimate zone, I don’t remember the details.

Admittedly, those nights were rare for me. I could measure my success by the astonished smiles and back pats from my friends and acquaintances back stage.

In a comedy club, a cold handshake with no eye contact tells you your fellow comics are embarrassed for you. In contrast, there’s a warm spread of people reaching out to touch you, pat you, congratulate you, smile when you’ve just nailed it in the end zone.

My would be suitor, smiled and offered the perfunctory hand shake and “good set.” He didn’t try to sleep with me again after that night.)

Those moments are the ones that make me want to sell myself harder. I only wish it didn’t take negative stimuli for me to feel the need to conquer.

There’s a bit more in my head. Stuff about what happens into the next decade, now that I’m about 10 years deep in M.’s and my relationship, just shy of that many years into my California dream, and looking down the barrel to 49, knowing it was 38/39 when it all last shifted seismically. And, as they say on Madison Ave. and Cupertino, wait there’s more.

But, for now, I’ll have to consider a part 2.

The not so great pretender

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The above depiction is my little foot ensconced in the finest of paraffin wax. From the ankle down, I occasionally look as pampered and fine as any lady in the court. Above the ankle, I am’s who I am, which is more Popeye than Lucretia Borgia.

In the passing of age, and in the passing of various and sundry jobs to pay the bills, I now find myself side by side with the hoi polloi. For reals, I don’t just work for the one percent, I work among them. People who pay people with calluses to remove their calluses.

I swirl glasses full of fine wine and make decisions on morsels and settle expense accounts. The thing about experiencing luxury on someone else’s dime is that it starts to make sense to set aside a couple of centimes to buy your own comfort.

And, so we do.

Yet, I am’s who I am. And, as I took an apple and a honey stick from a very nice spa that dipped my feet into the above-depicted wax, and I drank their proffered champagne, tea and infused water, I considered survival.

So, here’re some tips for fine living on a shoestring budget, especially if you ever find yourself maybe getting a room on an expense account but otherwise needing to pay for food and survival and whatnot.

First rule of the one percent: Turns out their lives are cushier than ours. They get 800 count sheets, pristine logs in their fireplaces, real honey and a lot more snacks. A lot more snacks.

Corollary rule to live like the one percent: Take your share, everyone else is. Also, take another share. Live as they do. More is more. The rich don’t want, because they take what they need (and maybe a wee bit more).

(And, you know what? They get more. Wee little shampoo bottles are bigger the better the hotel. Bars of soap approach full size, not the bare little wafers lost in skin folds at the lesser establishments. Two-ply to clean your unmentionable crevices not industrial strength sand paper in single ply is how the other half lives.)

At hotels I can afford on my own, there is occasionally a card table set up with a carafe of lukewarm coffee, non-dairy creamer in powdered form, and maybe, just maybe, a box of doughnuts purchased, you hope, that same day.

At fine hotels, there is usually coffee you can brew in your room and coffee service, freshly brewed and monitored frequently, in the lobby. Better yet, fresh fruit is often freshly placed daily in a sparkling bowl somewhere for the guests’ enjoyment. Sometimes there is fresh fruit lovingly place on every single damn floor. Pass by, take an apple. Pass by, take a tangerine. Pass by, take another apple. Go to another floor, see what they’ve got.

You could wake up to gratis arabica beans, but you can live a day on free fruit with no gout to speak of.

Similarly, fine hotels dole out water, like it’s water. When you see a tureen, crock or glass dispenser of cool, cool H2O, often infused with fabulous fruits, juices and petals, grab a cup and drink long and deep. Hydration is easy in four-star hotels. No need for feeding a wrinkly dollar bill into a humming vending machine next to the ice machine.

Second rule of the one percent and of access to water: Fine hotels are an oasis, even if you don’t have a room. The key is acting like you belong.

Clean toilets off the lobby with real towels! Cold and dirty from a harsh walk in the grimy streets of a major city? Listen for the whistle of a uniformed doorman, pass through the doors and the cleanliness that is next to godliness awaits you as the mean streets recede into hushed tones of opulence.

I still own a hand towel I stole one cold winter night, drunk and seeking refuge at the lovely Charles Hotel in Harvard Square.

More snacks — head to hotel bars at nice places. When the well-off drink, even if it’s the same bottled beer or glass of modest wine as schmoes like me imbibe, the bartender passes snacks. In the olden days, a lot of bars were generous with salty treats, but now snacks are left for the elite. I’ve had prosaic Goldfish and gilded, gourmet Chex mix and the humble peanut.

And, then there’s wifi for them that is bold enough to ask. I’ve yet to have a front desk turn me down when I’ve asked for the password, even as I was nursing a glass of wine at the bar not planning on spending the night.

And, thus, in that last little bit is my ultimate survival tip — Even with the rattle of coin in my pocket, I will remain more like the peoples behind the desk than the ones in front of them. They are my people, my allies, my friends.

Event planning has reminded and taught and refined for me to always be nice, fair and generous to the staff anywhere and any time. Your brother, your friend in arms, your contact to the perks the wealthy demand.

Back about a thousand years ago, I scooped ice cream for my job, when a small cone cost a mere 63 cents. (Total tangent, I still remember the price scale of small and medium cones — 63 and 79 cents respectively. Ice cream sodas with a single scoop were $1.19.)

Some of the clientele were demanding, entitled and willing to push a full-court press to get their penny’s worth of frozen sugar and cream. They got no more than exactly the training manual allotment of cream into their cone and a quick swish in the dish of what Bostonians call jimmies with an extra shake to make sure not too many sprinkles clung.

Manners and attitude, a friendly smile or the humility of a hand digging deep to count out the change penny by penny got you a heaping helping. The small cone teetered into 75 cents worth of ice cream, and the medium might require a cup to handle the excess weight.

The same philosophy holds in the upper echelons. The masters of the universe, they need people like us, and people like us help each other out.

Go ahead, put on your nice shoes and your company manners and mingle in the corridors of the well-to-do. They have snacks.

(By the way, all of the above is part of my ultimate retirement plan. You’ll catch me in a pressed suit, skipping from fine establishment to another with high-end retail adding extra spice and cookies to my day.)

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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Ah the holidays. It doesn’t matter the decade, the age or the location, but I get that bluesy feeling that’s best summed up by The Animals or Nina Simone.

But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, it’s all self-inflicted anxiety. One year maybe I’ll just not give two shits about whether the gifts I get are well-matched and well-received. Maybe I’ll just receive all gifts at face value and not morn the lack of connection.

(Truth be told, that’s one minor complaint at the end. There’s only one thing I received that I thought, “Really?” since it seemed so cookie cutter and impersonal.)

This year, though, was a new chapter. M. and I celebrated at home and hosted. California menu, no snow, fresh produce, avoiding travel all pluses all around.

I have to admit, I have more fun with M.’s family and Chinese New Year. Although, he points out that could be because many don’t speak English, the only language I do. I guess being misunderstood ain’t so bad, if it’s done in Chinese.

In this week’s episode

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There’s a line in the movie “Auntie Mame” that always resonated with me. If I remember correctly, it’s “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

I was obsessing about that line for the better part of the week after my Spanish lesson.

First, probably makes sense to explain the Spanish lesson part. I work in a place that among its benefits is some dough to pay for edumacation. Like many a place, on account of the IRS not minding, I’m offered for them to pay for me to get me get my learn on. Only thing is, you can’t just learn anything, so I opted away from belly dancing (IRS no likes) and into language (everybody likes lingual ed, right?).

Besides, they say that old people learning shite like languages helps to ward off the old dementia. We’ll see.

So I take one-on-one conversational Spanish. Miguel comes by and for an hour and a half listens to me butcher his native tongue while awkwardly trying to utter something akin to a coherent sentence. Mostly I fumble around for adjectives, destroy verb tenses and using what feeble few words I know to describe something kind of like, but not really, communicating.

Miguel. Él es muy paciente. Soy un tonto, pero lo intento.

Believe it or not, I actually learned the word “tonto” on Wednesday. It’s not “friendly Indian guide,” like the Lone Ranger might think. It’s idiot or fool.

I was trying to explain to Miguel, again with my infinitesimal Spanish vocabulary, what it meant to be kooky or quirky. We whipped out our phones and language apps and tried to figure out the equivalent expression. We failed. But, I did learn that the Three Stooges are the “Los Tres Chiflados.”

In this week’s episode of my Spanish class, I tried to tell Miguel about our fiesta de el psíquico, where Felix the psychic medium came to our house and gave readings to our friends for a modest fee.

We chatted about talking with the spirit world and psychics. I learned that Miguel believes los muertos no hablan. I gotta agree. I don’t really know whether the dearly departed are up for chats while we drink red wine and/or tea. Wouldn’t once you are dead you would kind of figure, hey, no more mundane chit chat for me?

I learned that Miguel believes in demons, and it could be they, the bad’uns that Felix is actually chatting up. It’s a mysterious thing this existence and life and death and all.

But, I also learned that Miguel kind of thinks I’m nuts. Or maybe he admires me. Nah, probably thinks I’m nuts, which brings me back to Auntie Mame, and the banquet and starving.

In the movie, and in the musicals too — by the way, it’s a toss up between Angela Lansbury and Rosalind Russell as better Mames, sorry Lucy, I love you, but not the same league — Mame is an eccentric “free spirit.” It ain’t always pretty, there are bankruptcies and pregnancies and pissing off people, but she has fun.

I think Miguel thinks I’m like Mame, only I’m almost certain it probably wasn’t a big cultural touchstone in his native Ecuador. So, he doesn’t know that he thinks I’m like Mame.

Maybe I am.

We chatted some more in a mix of Spanish and a little bit of English to get a point across, and he tells me that every lesson he is surprised what I’ve been doing. In his words (and gestures), most people do kind of the same thing all of the time or maybe stick to a few things. For me, and for M., though, the cluster of activities seems to be a bit wider than most.

His example: this week I told him about la fiesta de el psíquico and awhile back it was how both M. and I became ministers in order to marry our friends. And, there is my renewed vigor, as a new season is upon us, for crabbing. And, writing. And, comedy. And, then there is the actual real job.

I gather my list is eclectic.

Of course, old Miguel is one to hablar. He’s a Spanish tutor. But, he’s really a math teacher. His math students are reformed parolees. He also spends some free time writing short stories. Incredibly short, I think he keeps them to 100 words. He read me one and made me try to sort out the meaning as a Spanish lesson. It was about a crab (see above interests).

But, I wonder, why not spend weekends on adventures? Why not try everything? Why shuffle alone in the expected course?

In my head, life’s a reality TV show, and I want to see what’s going coming up in next week’s episode. I want to make sure the team of writers that live in M.’s and my heads comes up with interesting new adventures. I want to order a la carte so I can try a little of this and a little of that and then get seconds on what I like.

How else will I ever find anything I like, if I don’t try everything else?

On a side, definitely tangential but possibly relevant, note, I think this philosophy drives a constant source of amusement in my life, and in M.’s. Apparently, we don’t act our age. To a lot of people that’s admirable, to quite a few it’s puzzling, and to still more it’s evidence we are childish or some how naughty. Near as I can tell, pushing 50 is meant to be a rather serious affair, somewhere between an IRS audit and a trip to the morgue.

I very much risk dying a dilettante. But, by all that is holy, I’d rather have grabbed a plate for the banquet then gone hungry.

If Nixon could have an enemies list, why can’t I?

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I’ve written about it before, and if I weren’t too lazy, I could find it and link it. It is my mother’s knack for sorting the good eggs from the bad’ns.

This skill has been on my mind, because in today’s universe, or maybe it’s the California-tinged corner of the universe where I now reside, I’m not sure that’s considered a skill anymore. Somehow, it seems, it’s not politically correct or otherwise not cricket to call a person who whiles away their days behaving in a douchey manner a douchebag.

It used to be that if you called someone who stole your lunch money, called you names, pulled your hair or otherwise fucked you up in the schoolyard, a jerk and said you didn’t like him, you’d be an astute observer of human behavior. Now, there are bullying programs to try to reach the behavior and educate the assholes to stop being assholes.

The good guys, the victims, they are exhorted to not be judgmental, to examine their own behaviors, to show compassion and help teach the wayward fuckwads.

Yeah, here’s another idea, can’t I just tell you to fuck off and leave me alone?

Probably not hard to surmise that even as I approach half a century and think about how I want to live the waning minutes I have left, I still want to call a bully out for his horseshit. (By the way, my iPad just spellchecked that last word with an option of horses-hit. Trying using that in a sentence.)

Back to my mom, Pat. She was in many many many ways extraordinarily shy and/or reserved. She ate cold steak rather than “cause a scene” and send poorly prepared food back at a restaurant.

I witnessed her getting taken advantage of by the more sly and calculating and assertive in the world. For years at the school where she taught, a cadre of politically well-connected and outspoken teachers ruled the hallways. The rest of the teachers had extra bus and lunch room duty and no chance for any of the work that might garner extra pay. The power elite kept those gigs to themselves.

Over the years, she lost pooled sick time to slackers, while she herself literally never took a day of leave. OK, there was the one day, when my brother had appendicitis in Moscow, but that was only on account of the time difference for the frantic phone calls with our Russian-speaking family dentist to the embassy.

But, all at the same time, she was outspoken about injustice and bullshit when it was pervasive and hurt others. No underdog could have a stronger advocate in their corner to stare down anything from serious evil (like testifying in court for a student scheduling and physically abused) to petty misdemeanor.

In the latter category, I think she won this battle, but the memory is hazy.

For a school awards banquet one night, she was one of the teachers on the set up and decoration committee of parents and teachers. A couple of local moms, wanting to gussy up the auditorium had a brilliant idea — beautiful fresh flowers arranged in sprays and bouquets around the area. The source of the posies was none other than the neighboring cemetery. Their rationale, and by god it was the definition of rationalizing bad behavior, they wouldn’t be missed since the funeral was over and people had gone home.

Not being down with grave robbing and desecration and just general shittiness, I think old Pat succeeded in shaming them to put every stem back where it came from, in the dark.

Ironically, I wrote all of the above the day before M. was an invited speaker at a local high school tech club. In a swanky auditorium at the swanky community center in the swanky town, it appeared that the students had done everything themselves — from professional looking brochures, queuing up all A/V in advance and executing it behind the speakers and behind the scenes, and getting snacks catered by a local restaurant. At the end, they presented M. with a gift, a lovely orchid that was clearly alive, thriving and not stolen from a graveyard.

Anyway, I wish we could go back to the days of not pretending that we are all on the same page. Some people are not bothering to use facts when they argue factually. Some people like to blame and finger point. And some people are just fucking assholes, and we should be allowed, nay encouraged, to call them out.

Big asshole (Karl Rove) or small (line cutters and annoying colleagues), I know who you are and I’m not above calling a spade a spade.