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I Vant To Be Alone

Truth Thursday

Last week I was cleaning up some piles of old books in the attic. Among them was a sweet book I had bought for my kids a few years back. It’s called “Five Minutes Peace,” and it’s all about a mama elephant who just wants … you guessed it … five minutes peace. Her three young children show up everywhere – when she’s on the phone, when she’s making toast for breakfast, in her bath. 

Anyone with children can relate. And of course, the runaway best seller among parents of small children in 2011 was “Go the F—k to Sleep,” which, while I’m not sure I would actually have chosen to state it so publicly, is a sentiment to which I definitely adhere (and anyone who read my “Potty Mouth Mama” blog knows that I don’t even really object to the profanity.) Those quiet nighttime moments, after small children are finally asleep, are a parents’ sanity savior. 

As my children get older, they are no longer appendages of my body, accompanying me wherever I go. I remember feeling like I wanted to scream when I would take a shower in the morning when they were younger, and sure enough, as soon as I stepped into what I hoped would be five minutes of child-free, hot water bliss, someone would inevitably knock on the door, needing something important like scotch tape. Surely their father, calmly sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper and oblivious to the dire calamity of tape necessity, could help them? 

Nope. It had to be mom.

The Allure of the Past - A Reflection on "Midnight in Paris"

Truth Thursday

I went to see "Midnight in Paris," the recent Woody Allen movie, for a second time last week.There are so many reasons that I am so drawn to this love letter to Paris in the 1920's – the city's utter beauty, heightened by the gorgeous cinematography, being the first. As one character says of this city of my dreams, "every street is its own special art."

The conceit for the movie is that a young, blonde, California screen writer has dreams of becoming a novelist, heads to Paris, and every night at midnight, winds up being hurdled back in time and hanging out with the his idols, the literati of the era – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (played by the great Kathy Bates), Cole Porter, even Djuna Barnes. In conversation heavily laced with alcohol, Hemingway muses about being brave and true.

There are smaller story lines featuring Picasso and the surrealists - Dali and Luis Bunuel. Man Ray shows up to drink Calvados. We encounter T.S. Eliot, and there is a great line about measuring out contemporary life with coke spoons. Josephine Baker shimmies in an early dance scene.There is a detective who for all the world is reminiscent of Sydney Greenstreet's Ferrari  in "Casablanca." The modern day characters spend time contemplating both Rodin's sculptures and Monet's water lilies.

As a romantic, as a writer, as someone who has always thought of the 1920's as a golden era for its new freedoms, its sartorial coolness, its attitude and its intellectual and artistic output, this film is an aortic line to my heart. But I have been wondering about how it has become been such a hit with the more general public. Seeing it a second time has helped me understand.

A Road Trip to Mexico, Perhaps?

Family Friday 

So far this summer, my family has gone on a camping trip and made plans to visit New York City to see  my sister and extended family. Both excursions will only last the weekend, unlike our week-long stay at the beach. That trip will serve, as it has for the past several years, as our main vacation for the summer.

I think it’s about time we start planning more adventurous excursions.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no plans to give up our week along the Delaware Shore. But my boys are finally old enough where expeditions no longer have to be planned around nap schedules or strict meal times or even bed times. They also are old enough to appreciate the places to which they’re being dragged. Heck, I’m willing to finally take them to Disneyworld because they’re old enough to remember the fun they would have there.

My elder son has even expressed interest in visiting places abroad. A student at a Spanish immersion school, he has said he’d like to go to Mexico one day “because I love their food and speak their language.” He also wants a trip to Hawaii, a state his aunt has twice visited and speaks of often. And both of my boys have talked about going to Yellowstone to witness the geysers they learned about in their summer camp’s science class.

Of course, part of me starts waxing nostalgic for the vacations I took as child. Our family always took one long road trip every summer. My dad would lower the middle seat of our station wagon, line the newly-elongated luggage compartment with blankets, and then wake me and my sisters up to load our bags. Once the car was packed up, my sisters would snuggle in the back seat and resume our morning sleep as my dad would begin a drive that would seemingly last forever.

Go See Mike Daisey's New Show

Image via Wikipedia

Technology Thursday

Many of us love our gadgets. However, as with many first-world consumption patterns, they don't come free of guilt. There are ongoing questions and challenges regarding the environmental impact of manufacturing computers and electronic gadgetry. And there are also concerns about the sheer amount of energy required to power these wonderful Intarwebz and all the geegaws connected to them. There's a reason big companies like to place datacenters near rivers (hint: hydroelectric power).

So, while we can all feel a smidge of anxiety knowing that every Google search we do and every email we send kinda' sorta' maybe sends a little puff of carbon dioxide into an atmosphere, that, in the immortal words of engineer Montgomery Scott CANNA TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS, CAP'n, another guilt-inducer is labor. Specifically, the labor practices used in the places that manufacture our pretty, pretty iPads.

Mike Daisey is an amazing monologuist, story teller, and solo performer. Last year I saw his show "The Last Cargo Cult" at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C. and it was amazing. I have been remiss all these years in not seeing his earlier work. I also read the book he wrote about working at Amazon in the 90s called 21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale. His most recent effort is a show called "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." Here's a snippet of a review:

In this freewheeling theatrical essay, he doesn't just hold Apple CEO Steve Jobs' feet to the fire. He doesn't just question the morality of capitalism. He forces theatergoers to take a hard look at the glowing screens in their pockets and ask where they came from and at what cost.

Only a true believer, a man who fieldstrips his MacBook Pro down to its 43 components parts to unwind, could be this shocked and heartbroken to find that the gadgets he adores, those glossy pieces of electronic sculpture known as the iPad and the iPhone, might have been produced under brutal working conditions in China. Eager to investigate for himself, Daisey traveled to Shenzhen, a city of 14 million people crammed together under a "poisoned silver sky," at a time when workers were hurling themselves off the roof at Foxconn, one of Apple's key manufacturers.

Another, explaining why Apple Fanboys should see the show: (I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt this time and let's all assume Apple Fangirls should, too)

You Can Go Home Again

Sharing Saturday

I love where I live – just outside of Washington, DC. I have access to an enormous array of cultural activities, plenty of outdoor adventures, and wonderful urban life all around me. I live in a great community which is politically active and very liberal, and neighbors here look out for one another. I am fortunate enough to have a beautiful house, a great family, a loving spiritual community, a bounty of good friends and satisfying work. I feel very lucky that I have a place where I belong. This is my little niche in the world.

But I never really thought I would leave my hometown, and I still miss it. There's a part of me that feels like I am doing my children a disservice by not raising them there, and another part that can’t believe that my children's hometown is going to be different from my hometown.

My home "town" happens to be New York City. I was born in Manhattan, lived in Queens until I was seven and then moved to Brooklyn where I lived until I left for college, returning for five more years after that. So I was both a child of 1970s New York (bankrupt city and public schools, crime ridden and graffiti-strewn streets and subways, and dirty, grimy, 42^nd Street as hooker heaven), as well as a young adult making my way during the early 1980s (crack galore, muggings, sky high rents with low salaries and multiple roommates, liquid dinners, rampant homelessness and no chain stores yet infiltrating downtown.)