I Really Am a Cranky Old Lady

[copied from dland]

When I was a girl ...

It still doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess in real time, it is. I've never been particular about rules or following them; I still like to believe that there's a lot of flower child still in here somewhere. Keep in mind that from 1969 to 1972, I covered the hole in the seat of my jeans with an American flag patch.

Having said that, here are the things that are bugging me lately about people and how they don't know how to behave in a public place.

Despite the Viet Nam war, I was taught that the American flag is always to be properly displayed and handled. I was a Girl Scout and a Girl Scout leader, and y'know, these flag handling rules are not so tough. A worn out or frayed flag is never displayed. Flags are taken down in the rain unless they are specifically made all-weather flags. The flag never touches the ground.

So all these flags everywhere since 9/11 are driving me crazy. Abby Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt made out of a flag. But now you can buy a flag thong, and there are flags flying from car windows in all weather, and they're blowing off onto the road and cars are driving over them, and by the time they're blown off your car they're practically hanging in shreds. So if we're showing the flag for whatever reason we've got to show it, can't we show it some respect while we're at it?

And why are people always clapping for themselves, huh? I was taught that this was BAD MANNERS. You can see it on Oprah, on anything. They introduce someone and say "Here's so and so, she did some terrific thing or another" and everyone in the audience claps (as they should) and then so-and-so CLAPS FOR HERSELF. This looks tacky, like so-and-so's mother never showed her how to behave in public.

Am I wrong here?

Or am I just old?


ENTRY #20

Crackers and HTML

[copied from dland]

So I haven't written in a little over a week, and I must say that there's something off-putting about writing and knowing that no one ever reads it. Not that I don't understand that IT'S A DIARY and generally people write in diaries without expectations of being read. Even so. An entry in the guestbook just to show that anyone has some idea that I'm doing this would certainly boost my self-confidence.

So I'm working on the school website and eating crackers, since I don't feel particularly interested in eating anything else. Husband is off teaching, as he does two nights a week, not that I would be making dinner if he were here. For one, I don't cook, almost never have. I used to like to cook. For two, since he's a vegan he makes all his own food, which I suppose is a good thing for me. So there you go.

I don't have an eating disorder, but I do have what I tend to call an extreme eating style difference. (For you fellow teachers out there, it's a like those learning style differences we keep hearing so much about.) I don't seem to eat like other people (except my sister). Meals are unimportant; I wouldn't care if I ever again sat down to eat a scheduled, or for that matter, complete and balanced, meal. If I'm hungry, I'll eat.

Which begs the question, am I hungry? The answer: rarely. And if I am, it doesn't generally bother me enough to make me want to eat. Most of the time, anyway. I have days when I can eat all day, one little bit of junk after another. I can never eat a lot of anything, but I can keep snacking -- noshing -- on and on. That's when I'm eating. Other days, I can have a cup of coffee in the morning, a slice of cheese in the afternoon, and a bowl of Lucky Charms at 11 pm, after I've slept for an hour or so and gotten up again. So my diet is pretty fucked up.

So I must be skinny, right? Sadly, not right. According to the charts and body mass index crap, I'm overweight by ten to fifteen pounds. How this happens I cannot imagine.

6:45 pm and I'm having Arizona iced tea and Ritz crackers. Since I'm trying not to have macaroni and cheese every night (my most favorite of foods, not that Kraft crap, and I can eat a lot of this food) and not more than once a week, that's out.

Maybe I'll have a fluffernutter again. I had two last night. Hmmm.


ENTRY #19

Groovin' to the Beat, On Medicare

[copied from dland]

Haven't written in several days, even odder since I had Thursday and Friday off and had a lot more time. One of the tasks I accomplished -- and accomplishing tasks is probably my most favorite thing to do -- is that I re-organized all the .mp3 files on my computer. I have about 900 files, god knows how many gigabytes. I like my music.

Not great music, mind you, and a pretty strange mix. Most all of my .mp3s came from my own CDs. In my earliest memory, the music I remember is pop rock'n'roll, what my big sister listened to on the radio in 1958, when I was five (songs like "Running Bear" and "Tall Paul") and show music. My parents brought that home. By the time I was seven or eight, I could sing all the songs from The Sound of Music.

I have no music in me at all. I cannot sing, although I like to. I sing when I’m alone, or I sing to babies. I’ll sing the national anthem if everyone else in the stadium is singing it, too. But I can’t carry a tune and I have no sense of pitch or rhythm. I can’t play any musical instrument despite a few years of piano lessons. And I absolutely cannot dance. You can ask, but it won’t make any difference.

I almost never listen to music in the house, maybe because I’m so rarely alone in the house. I’m all alone right now, and listening. Mostly I listen when I’m in the car. When I listen to my music, I sing along, and dance, if you can call it dancing. It’s chair-dancing, or car-dancing, to be more accurate. I’m moving, but I still have no rhythm.

Here’s the thing: most of my music is 60s and 70s pop. It’s crap and I know it is. Right now the song that’s playing is “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Next up: the Captain and Tennille.

God I love this stuff. Does it make me feel like a kid again? I don’t know. It makes me feel good. And the best of all is Motown. About a half hour ago, when “This Old Heart of Mine” by the Isley Brothers was blasting through the house, I got this picture in my head of a whole floor of rooms in an assisted living facility, say, 2025, when those of us riding the crest of the baby boom are all there. In each room, some geezer blasting Motown, or, in secret, wearing headphones and grooving along with the Carpenters. Or Springsteen. Or, most likely, the touchstone of our music, the Beatles.

I get so pissed off when I hear a Beatles song, or even Neil Sedaka, in a commercial. It’s not just that schmuck Michael Jackson who’s getting all the money for the Beatles songs; it’s that this is my youth, my soul, selling crap on TV. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when there were commercials in the 50s using Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman as their music.

I’ve noticed lately that the muzak in the supermarket is Creedence and Clapton. Can’t help but notice. Is it because there are more of us boomers than there are of anyone else? Have we got all the money? Are we the only people at the supermarket at 7:30 on a Saturday morning? In 2025 are we going to hear Kurt Cobain on the muzak on Saturday mornings, and on commercials?


ENTRY #18

On Racism, and Racists

[copied from dland]

In the spring of 1999, I was enrolled along with my sister in a graduate class in Education called Principles of Curriculum Development. It was no such thing. It turned out to be a class, perhaps the only one I’ve ever taken, that cause me to challenge and examine my own beliefs and thoughts about things that I had become cynical or complacent about. The professor was an unusual and fascinating sprite of a man, who challenged us at every opportunity.

One evening he showed us a short video in which a young woman, an undergraduate at the school I was attending, had spoken at a seminar about racism. The seminar had been conducted by a member of the university staff. Both of these individuals were of African-American heritage. Afterwards, we were asked to react to what we had seen, I said that I was saddened because the young woman was in so much pain. At this point, two women in the class with me, the only two individuals in the room (in which all the students were working teachers) who were also of African-American heritage, took me to task for my reaction. A discussion followed. Later that evening, at home, I wrote this reaction to what had happened and later gave it to the professor to read.

“I am angry, and because this is an emotion that is not comfortable for me, I want to intellectualize it, to resolve my anger by having an objective, clear discussion about its cause. But that does not appear to be possible.

Perhaps I was not clear in my response to the video we saw in class. In no way did I mean to negate the repugnancy of racism on any level. I only meant to say that, when I saw the speaker, I saw primarily the personal pain that racism caused her, rather than the social issue of racism itself.

To quote the fictional Ferris Bueller, 'isms, in my opinion, are not good.' I do not tend to see things in the greater societal context; I am more likely to see how individuals are affected by the conditions that surround them. To observe that each person is motivated primarily by his or her perceptions is not to say something especially radical or even strange. It is true on its surface. These individual perceptions can be based on 'isms,' on our sense of how others perceive us and treat us based on those perceptions. As clearly evidenced by the speaker in the video, racism is an insidious, pervasive horror. Certainly the Muslim peoples in the Balkans would agree.

A word or two here about the kinds of words we use when discussing these issues. I do not care for the words 'race', 'color,' 'black' and 'white' in this context because I believe that all of them are used inappropriately. I don’t know exactly what 'race' means; I thought it meant species, and all humans are of the same species. I don’t think it means distinctions made purely on the grounds of skin color. Similarly, I use the expression 'people of color' because it sounds charming; I don’t know if it actually means that much. I prefer not to think of myself as a colorless person. I certainly do not think of myself as 'white.' Not only does this imply being bland and colorless, it also lumps together all those individuals who are not perceived as people of color as if they were the same. No more than all people lumped together under the meaningless term 'black' are all people designated 'white' the same. When I am asked to indicate my ethnicity on a form of some kind, and I am offered several options, including African-American, Hispanic, Native American, White, or other, I feel that I am a victim of racism. What I perceive as my race doesn’t even rate a line on the form. I get the message that I am not a member of a race that counts for anything at all. When I can, I check other. I am not any of those things, and I am not white, either.

I was challenged in class on the grounds that I am not discriminated against based on the color of my skin. This is also clearly true on its surface, and I agree with it now as I did in class. I must also agree that I do not have the capacity to perceive personally what it would be like to experience such discrimination. However, I found it most curious that the individual who said this to me had also stated that she could never understand how the Jews in Nazi Germany could be distinguished from the other people there, the Aryans. Yet this is a perception that has been clear to me from birth. I always knew that the Nazi organization had been able to make this distinction with no trouble at all, and I always knew that I would be perceived as easily, should that time ever come to pass. (In essence, the message I got here was that all 'white people look alike.) Just as I am unable to experience the perception of discrimination based on skin color, this member of the class is unable to experience the perception of discrimination for being Jewish. I imagine that neither of us is capable of experiencing the perception of being an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo. Part of my anger of the moment stems from the fact that I am unable to explain to this classmate (I don't know her name) that this is something we share in common, this inability to feel another person's pain. Yet I sensed very strongly that it is her perception that my sense of being discriminated against in society is not as valid as her own. Certainly it is not as valid in this particular time and place in world history. Yet it is my perception, and so it is as valid as her own, on those grounds alone.

I recently attended a faculty meeting at which the guest speaker was the professor who appeared in the video we saw in class. I found him quite interesting and articulate (as opposed to most of the guest speakers we have at faculty meetings.) He spoke about the perceptions of students 'of color', and indicated that it should be clear to everyone why, because of the situations in which they are raised, we should understand when students 'of color' choose, for example, to sit together in a class. He gave a few other examples of why students 'of color' would choose to group together in various circumstances. I asked him if he would agree that, when students who are generally recognized as 'white' make this same choice, it is perceived by those 'of color' as racism. He agreed that it was. I asked him why it should be perceived as racism on the one hand, but normal social behavior on the other hand. He did attempt to explain his reasoning, which I was unable to understand. He further explained that, for example, when teenagers are at a mall, those who are 'of color' are treated differently than those who are, for example, Jewish or Italian. Incredulous, I asked him after the meeting if he actually believed that, at the mall, he could distinguish between those teenagers who were Jewish or Italian or anything else. I expected some equivocation here, but to my amazement, he replied that he absolutely could tell the difference. When I asked how, he said something about credit cards which show names. (Did this imply that all Jewish teenagers carry credit cards?) This was nonsense. Most teenagers do not carry credit cards, and even if they did, they wouldn't carry them openly. He claimed to be able to distinguish the ethnic identity of teenagers walking around the mall.

The only answer, of course, is that he is very much a perpetuator of racism himself, which he denied quite definitely. The truth is that, although he can see the very real possibility that I might be a racist, he cannot begin to conceive that he might be one himself. The reason for this, I think, is that, just as I am unable to know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of skin color, he is unable to know what it feels like to be discriminated against for any other reason. There is one chief difference between us, and it has nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity. The difference is that I can see that his perceptions are the lens through which he sees the world, and I can understand his right to do so, even though I can't see things through his lens. He, however, cannot understand the possibility that my perceptions cause things to appear to be different to me. He can neither understand this, nor can he acknowledge my right to do so. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, he believes that he knows racism when he sees it. To him, I am wrong, and possibly -- perhaps even very likely -- a racist. I don't think that I am. He, however, is.”


ENTRY #17

I Believe That

[copied from dland]

It’s almost eleven years. It all started around this time of the year, autumn, eleven years ago. It sounded like I had an ear infection all the time, a rushing sound in my right ear. Actually the sound had started during the summer, but sometimes I could make it go away. By October, I had it all the time, and sometimes the throbbing noise. Not a throbbing pain, in fact, no pain at all, but the sound of throbbing in my ear, especially when I would lie down at night to go to sleep. Sometimes I would get up and watch TV, because the sound of the throbbing in a quiet room would drive me crazy. When I could hear the throbbing, it would drown out other sounds, but in and out, in and out. It was like a heartbeat, and whenever it would beat, I could hear nothing else.

It was the throbbing that finally made me ditch the allergist who was treating me for an ear infection and go to see an ear specialist. There were tests, yada yada yada. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving that I went to get the results and while we were waiting for the doctor to come in, sister and I looked at the x-ray in the light box on the wall. There was a silver spot about the size of a quarter, but not quite round, right in the middle of someone’s brain. I saw my name on the x-ray and said “Oh shit, they’re gonna make me go back and get another x-ray. There’s something wrong with that one. There’s a big spot on it.” She didn’t say anything, but I think that was when she figured it out. But not me.

So he came in, the doctor, and took my hand in one of his. Odd, I thought. He said, “It’s not good.” I looked at him. He said, “It’s a brain tumor.” I thought – maybe even said – “You mean that silver thing in my brain is really there?” He nodded. I said “Can you get it out?” He said “Yes.” So it was okay.

I went to see the neurosurgeon the next week, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. He said it was a tumor, one of three possible kinds. One, he said, a glioma, always malignant. I didn’t want that one. Next, he said, a meningioma, maybe malignant and maybe not, but taking it out would have consequences. I didn’t so much want that one either. Remotely possible, he said, was an acoustic neuroma. Never malignant and would leave me deaf on one side, maybe a little facial paralysis. I was rooting for the acoustic neuroma, even though he said they almost never happen as deep in the brain as my tumor was. “I can have it done after the holidays, right?” I asked. “After Christmas?” “No,” he said.

Nasty day the next day, all the pep rally crap going on in school and me thinking that everything I saw I wouldn’t ever ever see again. I was having Thanksgiving dinner at my house on Thursday like every year, and I figured this was going to be my last one of those, too. Cousin was coming in from Colorado with her new husband. Maybe I wouldn’t ever see her again either.

I came home from school, half day before a holiday. The kids would be home a little later. They really were kids then too, only ten and seven years old. Maybe they wouldn’t even really remember me when they were all grown up.

I sat there, wondering about all kinds of shit. I thought, this will be okay if I can only think of something to hold onto, something that I can plan to do when this is all over. Something that would make me happy.

I said out loud to no one else there, “In April, when spring vacation comes, I’m going to DisneyWorld.” Just sister and I, just the two of us. No kids. “I’m going to DisneyWorld.” And then I was okay.

Went over that afternoon with the kids to see Jack and Shirl, and cousin, and all the assembled family, including my two girls and my sister’s three kids. Nephew #1 was a senior in high school then, in my high school, and going through a lot of crap times. Everybody in the room was depressed except for me. They weren’t sure that I was as okay as I seemed to be. I assured them all that I was fine, because I was going to DisneyWorld. There was a heartbeat’s worth of pause, and then Jack said he’d pay for us to go. So then everybody was okay, pretty much.

On December 17 I went to the hospital at about six a.m. Husband and sister came with me, and stayed while they got me all set up before the operation, with tubes sticking out of everywhere and hooked up to all kinds of equipment. Then I was in for about eight hours while they cut a hole in my head about an inch behind my right ear and took out what turned out to be a rather large acoustic neuroma that was leaning against my brain stem. They almost never find them there.

I could write all kinds of other things about my surgery, and in time, I probably will. It seems pretty bizarre that after being exposed to the wonderful Grandpa Sam for 18 years, and being raised by two goofy people with solid values, and after dedicating myself to reading and literature and learning and writing, not to mention an amazing abundance of popular culture, the defining experience of my life is that one of my nerve cells went nuts and grew a great big lump right in the middle of my brain, and someone had to cut open my head and take it out.

For now, what made me write this just today is that I came across something I wrote when I was in the hospital after my surgery. I was in for about a week altogether; I came home the morning of Christmas Eve, the 24th. I was in surgery on the 17th, and spent the next two days in the recovery room instead of intensive care. After that I went to a private room, so I wrote this on one of the days I was in there. I hardly slept when I was there, so I may have written it in the middle of the night. I had taken with me to the hospital a steno pad on which I had made notes about the surgery before hand, like what the doctors said to me, schedule dates and times, and so on. Now I was also writing down when they brought me pain medication, because I wanted to make sure they brought the next dose when I was supposed to get it. But I wasn’t in an awful lot of pain from the surgery. It was that they were taking me off the high does of prednisone, and each time the dose went down, I was being torn apart by muscle aches, mostly in my legs and back.

By this time, it was clear that I wasn’t ever going to hear anymore in my right ear, and that the right side of my face was never going to move of its own free will. But my face hadn’t “fallen” so I didn’t look all that grotesque. They were coming from physical therapy to teach me to walk without banging into walls all the time, and to go up and down steps. I remember that one afternoon Jack came to visit when I had to go to PT and he watched while I tried without much success to go up and down two steps. I think if I had to watch my grown child do that, I couldn’t.

So here’s what I wrote in my steno pad, and kept. A couple of years ago I typed it into a file on the computer so I wouldn’t ever lose it. At the top of the page I wrote

I believe that

-I will have some bad days. Most days will be good.

-On bad days, my neck and scar will be stiff and sore. I will have eye sutures removed. I will feel pain, and discomfort, and nausea.

-On good days I will have some stiffness and soreness but probably not much pain. I will not walk into walls or fall down or step on the cat.

-In February I will do laundry again and I will start to prepare to move around the kids' rooms.

-I am very happy that I am alive. I want to see my children grow up, and I will. I still want to go to DisneyWorld.

- It is okay to cry on bad days.

- Life is not all black and white. Mostly it is light gray.

- When I have pain-killers I feel pretty good.

- It is okay to feel good whenever you can.

- Sometimes I dribble.

And I still believe it, all of it, after eleven years.

ENTRY #16

The Purple Chai

[copied from dland]

Here's how I got the purple chai. Like most stories, it starts in more than one place and then comes together, the way streets come from all over the city and converge at a traffic circle. (Forgive me, I spent last weekend in DC).

First Avenue

When I was a kid, I wore a tiny little gold star on a chain around my neck. We were wearing, we said, Jewish stars. All the little girls I knew wore them, no more than a quarter-inch across, on a delicate little chain. All the little girls I knew were Jewish, like me. But back then, when I was small, I never knew anyone who went to synagogue or actually practiced the Jewish religion, except my grandpa. Grandpa is a story for another day.

But they sent me to Hebrew school for a while, in a scary old YMHA, in North Bergen, I think. The building looked like the original Jews who followed Abraham had built it there. I was about 6 or 7. We learned Bible stories and a couple of Hebrew alphabet letters. I learned to read one word in Hebrew: chai. This is pronounced like the word "high", but the first sound is the guttural "hhcchh" you hear in Hebrew or Yiddish.

If I remember correctly, chai is a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that is also a word and a number. The number is 18. The word chai means life. The Hebrew name for Adam, father of us all, is Chaim. The expression, used as a drinking toast "L'chaim!" means "To life!"

Sometimes I would see other Jewish people wearing not a little star on a chain (it is really called the Mogen David, which means the Star of David, and not a Jewish star), but a chai. In fact, I noticed, there was a small letter chai in the center of the little star I wore.

Second Avenue

I moved when I was eight, to a community, my parents said, where there were many more Jewish families. It didn't seem that way to me, I guess because my old home was in a heavily Jewish neighborhood within a larger Gentile community. My new hometown was much bigger, and much more diverse, so I thought. There were at least as many Catholic kids in my school as Jewish kids, and we were all in the same school together! There were kids in my school with Italian last names! I had never met any of those before.

I stopped wearing my star because I didn't like wearing jewelry anymore, and it kept sticking me, and none of my friends were wearing stars or crosses or anything. Some of the Jewish kids I met belonged to the synagogue across the highway, and most of the other kids I knew went to church somewhere. I went to Sunday school, in the YMHA in Paterson; it made the North Bergen branch look like it had been built that morning. This place gave new meaning to creepy, dark, and scary, especially on a Sunday morning when the only sounds in the building came from the old men going to and from the pool.

Still, no one in my house went to synagogue or seemed to believe in anything; my parents just wanted me to be culturally literate in my own background. After a few months they pulled me out of the Y Sunday School (Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!) and found someplace new. Some local organization had decided to open a non-religious (yes, that's right) Sunday school for the local Jewish kiddies, which would be held each Sunday just up the block in my very own real school. The Sunday school group rented the space, and once in a while I actually read Bible stories at my own third-grade desk. They didn't teach us Hebrew (feh!) but Yiddish. If only I had paid attention. We had big Purim parties, you know, the Jewish Halloween where every little girl dresses as Queen Esther. This Sunday school lasted for a year or two, I think.

In seventh grade, the big fashion trend among my set was the name necklace, we each wore a little gold plate about an inch across (depending on your name) in print or script, that hung from a chain attached to it at each end. Everybody had one. One day a girl showed up with a tiny cross attached to the chain at one end of her name. Within about five minutes, each of us found the appropriate symbol and got it soldered on. I found my tiny Mogen David and there it was. The correct fashion accessory. I was okay.

Third Avenue

When I was 16, I got the CHARM BRACELET from my parents, the fashion accessory of that age and place. Friends gave me charms for my sweet sixteen, one kind of another. Grandma and Grandpa, as befit their age and nature, gave me the religious charm, the one I would wear on my cool bracelet as a sign of my Jewishness: a tiny little Torah, gold with a white gold door that actually opened, showing the sacred scroll inside. This is called a mezuzah.

When I went off to college in the strange southern land of Maryland just two and a half years later, I thought I should mark myself somehow as a member of my particular group of people. So I went and bought a cheap little silver (at least, silver-colored) mezuzah on a cheap silver (colored) heavy chain. I think it cost about $8. I put it on and set off to college, Jewish for all the world to see. I had still never been in a synagogue in my life, except once for each of my two cousins' Bar Mitzvahs.

Fourth Avenue

Just after Christmas of my senior year of college, I broke up with a boyfriend I had dated for nearly three years, and whom I had fully expected to marry. I broke up with him, for all kinds of right reasons. His being not Jewish was not one of them, for this was irrelevant to me and to my parents. He was, however, a schmuck. For his last act as boyfriend, he gave me a check as a Christmas gift. He gave me $35. A week later, broken up and with $35 in my pocket, I went to the nearest Service Merchandise jewelry counter to see what I could get. Remember, this was 1975, so it's not as impossible as it sounds.

There it was: a chai. Gold, flat, a little less than a half-inch across, both from side to side and up and down. A charm. Lightweight, but substantial. I thought, this is life, this is my life going on. I am okay, I am strong. I should wear a symbol of life, and of who I am. Jewish is a big part of who I am, not religion maybe, but my ethnic identity, my roots are Jewish. I bought the chai. I began to wear it all the time, on a simple gold chain around my neck.

Fifth Avenue

I wore the chai off and on for all the years since. I made sure to wear it through both of my pregnancies. My husband -- not Jewish -- thought nothing of it; he knew that it was not religious and that it was a symbol of life and of my heritage. In recent years, especially since my mother became ill in 1995, I wore it all the time. The same gold chai I bought for $35 in 1975.

Sixth Avenue

So I'm on a class trip with about two hundred kids and a dozen other teachers in 1995 and I notice that a few of the younger teachers have -- gasp! -- tattoos! These are nice normal teacher-types, not Hells' Angels bikers, and they have tattoos! How terrible! How revolting! How intriguing!

So I ask the first idiotic question that everyone without a tattoo asks: "Did it hurt?" The answer, of course, is a derisive "Yeah." (Tone of voice here says, and rightly so, "What are you, a moron?") Yet my best chum and I remain intrigued. Not only do we begin to consider the amusing possibility of tattooing ourselves for our upcoming 50th birthdays, we begin to realize that there are a whole lot of other women our age doing the same thing.

Chum comes back from summer vacation 2001, now age 50, with a lovely tattoo on the outside of her left wrist. I'm thinking, thinking. Older daughter gets a tattoo the minute she's old enough, a small five-pointed star less than an inch across on the inside of her left wrist.

What will I do? What WILL I do?

Seventh Avenue

I decide: I will get a tattoo. All I have to do is decide what it is I want to carry on my body for the rest of my life. What shape, what design, what meaning, what color?

September, 2001. What will I do? Suddenly I realize: chai. I have always worn a chai, so I will always wear a chai. I would like a tattoo that looks just like my charm: a small, golden, chai. My daughter points out that they will never tattoo something small that looks gold. Yellow, maybe. Hmmm.

September 11, 2001, and I am watching along with everyone else as the horror plays out on the TV night and day. New York is only ten miles from my home; two of the boys at school have lost their father in the attack on the first tower. Life is short.

September 25, 2001, and I have taken the day off from school to go to the dentist, do some errands. Driving down the road, I think, if only I knew what color to get my tattoo, I would do it today. I would do it now. I would be passing the tattoo place anyway. Looking down, I notice that I am wearing a purple t-shirt with a purple button down shirt over it. I've got this purple thing going on; I've been wearing purple for about two years now. It's from the poem "When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple." (That's not really the name of the poem.) It says that now that I'm older I don't have to care what other people think, I can just be me. I can wear purple, so I do.

Purple. Chai. Purple. Chai.

So I went, I got it. I wear a purple chai on my left wrist, where I can cover it with a watchband if I have to, but I haven't worn a watch since the day I got it. Each time I look at it I think, I did this for me. I did this because I wanted to. It says what I want it to say. It looks like I want it to look.

Thanks for taking the tour of the city, ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the traffic circle.

Chai.


WATCHING MASH :: ENTRY #1800

The Etiquette of Blog

[copied from dland]

I wrote in one of my first entries about how I had come to start keeping a web diary, and I continue to be intrigued by the process. Who reads these, and why? And now, a new question: what is the proper thing to do when the writer of the blog is no longer anonymous?

To recap, I stumbled onto this whole thing when I came across two web diaries that were being kept by students in the school where I work. One of these was the typical "Omigod I had a test tuday my teacher sux" and it was, thank god, written by someone I couldn't identify. The other turned out to be a continuing work of poetry by someone whose life I have become privileged to observe somewhat closer than I ever expected to. I read her writing and I look for her in the halls the next day, hoping to see that she is still happy, and still arm in arm with the sweet boy I know her to be in love with.

The mistake I made, I don't remember when, was in telling the SCM (Self-Centered Man) about it. I think I was just trying to demonstrate how this new search engine I'd found worked, and I told him that I had done a sample search on the name of our high school and that it turned up interesting results. The next day he asked if I too had begun to read S--'s web diary, as of course, I had.

I feel as if I have violated her privacy. Yes, I know she writes it and she posts it, but can she really expect that her teachers are reading it? I don't feel that I'm invading her space by reading it myself; oddly, this seems okay to me because I know I will never, would never, indicate to her in any way that I know what I know. But I cannot say the same for the SCM. He is curious and nosy. This is because he cannot estimate the damage that he might do by saying things, because if it isn't happening to him, it isn't happening. What if he sees her in the halls one day and says "Are you still seeing T--? Did you have a good time hiking at (wherever) last week? My wife and I like to hike there; when we went two years ago, we brought our dog, and she almost got sprayed by a skunk, although she didn't. But that was our old dog; we had to have her put to sleep last summer. She developed ............."

And so on. Because he really isn't interested in you at all, S--, he's just looking for a way to talk a little more about himself. And if knowing something about you gives him a hook to start talking, he'll use it. And he won't even notice that you are feeling open and exposed and violated.

So what's the etiquette here? If anyone knows, I'd sure like to hear your advice. I'm considering just telling SCM "You know, it's not polite to tell people you've been reading their blogs. It's really an anonymous kind of thing." Isn't it?


ENTRY #14