Satisfying Sunday

Today I finished the granny square afghan I started crocheting for Wil back when he was 7.  He’s 17.  It could have been finished a lot sooner, no doubt.  I think there were even a few years in there where I didn’t touch it at all. 

This spring, I moved this work-in-long-progress from the master bedroom closet to the spot next to my seat in the family room, and seeing the squares reminded me that I had a project pending.  My strategy was to keep my hands and mind busy so I wouldn’t fret over work or play video games while the rest of the family was watching TV (I’m not very good at just sitting and watching TV, I tend to read or play simple games on my iPhone and just listen to the TV—so comedies are usually on at night so I don’t keep asking, “What did I miss?” “What did she do?” for the visual inputs.)  And now that I think about it, Wil doesn’t really “watch” TV either.  We sit in the same room doing projects, reading, sharing, on our computers or phones while the TV creates a background connection for us, voyagers in our own virtual worlds.  The TV is the life line that still connects us.

Today was really interesting on several fronts.  First, that I finally finished the afghan.  I have been picturing Wil taking it to college with him since he was 7.  Then I started to panic that he’s going off to college in a year and the afghan wasn’t done.  There’s a lot of love built into that thing.  He said he can picture it being in his family for generations.  Truthfully, it’s hideous looking.  Okay so for the 3^rd time, I started it 10 years ago.  So right away you know there are dye lot issues.  But what issues!  I must have thought I knew what color the squares were at some point when I went to Michael’s to buy more yarn, but apparently my “eye was off.”  Then there was never a plan for the size of it, so what would have fit him nicely as a twin blanket when I started out would never cover him at 5’7” and growing.  Plus, of course, I’m thinking now that it will cover at least a queen size bed and 2 people….

So besides the variations of colors where the color should be consistent, there are other consistency issues—tightly crocheted in some places, loose in others.  Overall I think I did a good job functionally, but, well, here it is on his bed, and there are lots of squares doubled over in the back—it’s 8x7, and each square is 10 rows with a row of trim.  It’s very heavy.  That’s another thing.  So many shades of “white.’  His significant other, wife, whatever , will want to hide it but hey, it will keep them warm.

But before I finished crocheting this afternoon, this morning I heard from Wil’s ex-girlfriend.  Sadly, they broke up about 2-3 weeks ago.  She was his first love, they were together for almost 2 years, but then her family moved away and the strain was, I think, too much for the relationship.  Great kids, tough relationship.  I miss her but support my son’s decision.  So anyway, she had texted when they broke up that it would be too painful to stay connected with Rachel and me, so I respected her wishes and didn’t reach out, though I’ve checked in on her Facebook page to see how she’s doing.  Then Friday she texted with Rachel, and I told Rach to let her know I would love to hear from her and was just keeping my distance to respect her wishes.  Today we texted back and forth and it was genuinely nice to hear from her.  She’s a great person.  Very talented musically, funny, sweet.  I never heard her sing before, but she shared an audio file of her singing a song she’d written for Wil and her voice was perfection.  She literally sounds like an angel, assuming that my idea of an angel’s voice is accurate.  I won’t be surprised if she does something professionally with those amazing musical talents—she just needs to realize that she has a gift.  So often people who are artistically gifted are also their own worse critics…I hope she discovers herself soon so others can too.

And while she and I were texting, I had another pleasant surprise of the reconnection kind.  One of my very favorite friends from my college days resurfaced on Facebook and connected with me.  His name is Rob and we were very close during my junior and senior years at Rider.  He was smart and funny, charming, a genuine pleasure to be around.  We lost touch with each other over the years, and strangely, I was looking for him and other people I knew in my early-mid twenties, found a few of them but not him.  Then, today, presto, there he is.  I hope we can reconnect in person—he lives in California and I’m going to be speaking at a conference there in a few weeks.  Would be great to see him again and to catch up on the 20 years that have flown by…

And on reflecting about the past, present and future:  I got a new computer at work on Thursday and a good part of Friday was spent getting it configured.  Today when it was slow getting going, I got impatient, though part of me thought it just might be “learning” some things in order to move quicker as it gets up to speed.  But I realized something about myself today.  While I was the kid that was always nice to the new kids at school, and while I have infinite patience young children and mentally challenged people, I have no patience whatsoever with my new technology devices. 

I always expect technology to be perfect right out of the box.  Is that because I’m a notoriously impatient person (it’s actually documented on my kindergarten report card), or is it because technology pretends to be perfect and then I’m disappointed that it’s not?  When we get to the point where we have robots doing our chores for us, will they be perfect or have imperfections, and how much imperfection will we allow?  Maybe you will be nicer to them…I will no doubt be rolling my eyes when they wash the reds with the towels and everything turns pink.

Well, it was a very nice day.  The sunset was even pretty too. It was a very nice day by any comparison.

Day One--Gone

I updated my MacBook Air to Lion the other day.  I wanted to update my virus software and upgrading was the only way to protect my Mac. 

Today, I discovered that when I opened Day One, a journaling tool, that all of my entries for the past year and a half are gone.  It either happened when I upgraded to Lion or when I updated Day One (and a number of other apps) after upgrading to Lion.  Either way, it shouldn’t have happened.

I don’t take photos like other people do.  I record what’s going on in my life through the feelings that I express through my writing.  Some of that, like this blog post, go live to share.

Others, I keep to myself.  And that’s what I trusted Day One to do for me:  to keep my thoughts and expressions as a journal that lived on my MacBook Air.  But they’re all gone.  Vaporized. 

Day to day recordings of what I was feeling, how I interacted with people, what I was concerned about, how things worked out. All gone.  My only diary for the last year and half. Gone.

I know other people have suffered much greater losses, many are experiencing them right now.  This is just a little thing in the grand scheme of things.  But it doesn’t mean that it’s nothing.

It’s a loss.  A small one.  But a loss nonetheless.

Creativity Is In View

Today is Mother’s Day. 

It’s 8:39 a.m. and as far as I know, everyone is still sleeping.

I’m taking a little me time in a week that had very little of it.  This week I was in New York Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  Tuesday was for a business event, traffic and timing were off, and I decided not to go to the event as I was missing a good part of it by the time I would have finally parked, etc.  Instead I took Rachel to dinner.  I was frazzled and she was trying to get through her last week of finals.  We chatted and enjoyed a meal but it wasn’t our best night.

Thursday, on the other hand, was one of my favorite nights so far this year.  I’m new to New York Women in Film and Television and took Rachel to the Designing Women event, which honors make-up, hair, and costume artists.  The emcee was Kristen Schaal and presenters included 2 of my favorites, Tina Fey and Steve Bescemi.  The forum was mid-sized;  I think there were about 300 people there, and we were able to talk with Tina Fey briefly, which was fun.  We were able to talk with Kristen Schaal for a bit longer when Rachel opportunistically stopping her to chat in the hallway.  Kristen was, by the way, truly lovely.  Rachel had seen her at the UBC and was a big fan, referencing her favorite joke that Kristen had told.  We snapped some photos, and would have had some good ones had I not spazzed on the iPhone (again) and only came away with Kristen talking with her head down to a nose and some blonde hair.  (Kristen seems to be about 5’10’ and Rachel is about a foot shorter.)

Kristen Schaal with Rachel's Nose

I was so energized being around all of those creative people.  The award recipients are all amazing artists with such passion for their work and the world around them.  The creative high lasted well into the next morning.

Friday afternoon I talked with a business owner who is starting to do more with WebTV.  I was really jazzed up about his ventures and excited for him. 

Friday evening, after lots of commotion and more traffic than predicted, Marc and I had dinner at The Left Bank on Perry Street in the city with Ruth and Len.  It was a truly wonderful evening.  They are a delightful couple--the conversation was all over the place and fun, the drinks (sidecars for me) were perfect, the food was delicious, and we even shared desserts that we passed around the table until they were all gone:  rhubarb crisp, olive cake, and maple syrup tart.  With a parking garage right across the street, really, it couldn’t have been any better.

Saturday was uber stressful.  We had to move Rachel out of her dorm and there was a street festival on 2^nd Avenue, which made navigating to her street tough.  When we finally go there, we parked in a no-parking zone and what I thought would be one trip down the elevator with a cart turned into 3.  Thankfully Ali and Marc came in his car and were great in helping get it all done.  I stayed with the cars in case we were forced to move them.  I was very agitated the entire time, between the cryptic skywriting going on over head, the angry yelling (that I later learned was for a movie being shot up the street--out of view but not out of earshot), and being in a no-parking zone (good girl syndrome).

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Then came the trip to Caldwell to Lisa Palombo’s studio, no easy task when your navigation system has a sense of humor.  After a few loops on the GSP we were finally there.  I had wanted to purchase paintings of hers for a long time and now she is working in acrylics and doing some smaller pieces, so I purchased a large poppy painting called Desire 2, and a smaller print, Independence.  Lisa is getting the larger one framed for me and I can’t wait to have it in my home.  Marc bought me a beautiful framed print of a blue vase with red poppies in and around it.  I’m looking at the prints now, they’re on the desk across the room from me here in the study.  It will be great to look at beauty every morning even when the view outside isn’t nature at her best.

Today Rachel, Wil and I are going to Monmouth Park, a family-friendly racetrack near the shore.  It’s a beautiful day, and I love watching the horses run.  Hopefully the weather will hold up—when I was younger and scientists were predicting the climate change we’re now experiencing, I remember them saying we would have highly changeable skies, and now we do.  When I was younger, it would be beautiful for days on end, not a cloud in the sky.  Now it seems that no longer is the case…sunny one minute, clouds and rain the next.

It was a challenging week from a work and scheduling perspective, but a wonderful one in terms of renewing my spirit and energy by being around creative people who share their ideas and passion.  I need more of that, much more!

P.S.  It’s 9:57 now, they’re all up, and it’s chaos!  My brother called to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day and I couldn’t even talk to him.  See previous post about it getting quiet around here.  J

It’s Getting Quiet Around Here

As a woman with more than a career—I run an interactive marketing company—raising two children has been bit of a challenge, and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of it.  But lately, as things get prematurely quiet, I find myself projecting ahead to when they’re going to be even more silent.

The spring before my daughter, Rachel, went off to study at NYU Tisch in NYC, I was admittedly very anxious about her going off to school, and living in the city “alone.”  My nervousness seemed very out of portion to what was coming, and I assumed it was a wicked combination of the normal, first-child-off-to-college-my-world-is-going-to-change blues AND that my 4’11’ not-really-aware of her surroundings little love was going to be living in the city on her own.  It seemed just when she and I were getting along so well, she was heading off without me. 

For the weeks approaching her graduation, I went on quiet crying jags when no one else was around.  I thought I’d be blubbering at her graduation ceremony, but, strangely, on the drive to the ceremony, everything came flooding out in a monologue that gave Rachel and Wil some great material to cart out whenever a laugh is needed.  In a 5 minute straight rant, that started with sarcasm, ramped up to yelling, spurted out in a string of 4-letter epithets, and concluded in all us laughing as tears streamed down our faces, I let it all go.   From that point until I dropped Rachel off at NYU in August, not another tear was shed.

I cried a bit on the way home from New York, but that was to be expected….

The surprises started soon after that.

The child who had announced with believable bravado (she was an actress before a writer, after all) that she was not coming home until Thanksgiving, though I was welcome to visit her in the city if I wanted to see her, suddenly started showing up at the train station every weekend, homesick, sad, and having a really hard time adjusting to the city.  Not only did she stay all weekend, she came home during the week, too.

So the time I thought would be spent with my son, just mom and Wil, suddenly was being split, again, between the two of them.  And it wasn’t fun time.  There was a lot of angst in helping Rachel to be brave, get back on the train, and suck it up.

And then, in the midst of all of that, Wil suddenly had a girlfriend.

And the time with him that was already being taken up by his friends, now was stretching out and being consumed by time with his girlfriend too.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved having Rachel around, though I did my best to keep her focused on staying in NYC and toughing it out so she could build a life and her own network of friends there.  And don’t get me wrong about Wil—I’m mature enough to know that he’s doing everything a now 17-year-old guy should be doing, and his friends and girlfriend are really wonderful—I love them all.

Well, the next surprise was that Wil decided to get a part-time job.  So my time with him has shrunken even more.  Down from 50% of the time due to shared custody in the divorce to 50% of that because of friends and girlfriend, and now another 50% of that gone because of his job a the local grocery store.

So, as I said, it’s getting kind of quiet around here.  And what everyone who had kids before me told me is absolutely true.  It all goes soooo fast. 

One minute they’re clinging to you and you are their whole world.  The next minute they venture off on their own and they circle back to you as home base.  And the next minute, they’re living the lives you prepped them for all along—all the sacrifice, all the lessons, all the examples, all the love—and, well, it’s suddenly kind of quiet.

It’s Just Not Funny

When I was younger, I thought I had a great sense of humor.  Not that I was so funny, though from what people have told me, I guess I was.  But I mean that I could find humor in so many situations, and appreciated a wide range of humor, from the very physical to the most wry.

I didn’t laugh at quite everything though.  I remember when I was in 7th grade, the school put on The Pirates of Penzance.  Having no singing or dancing talent, I got to be the prompter.  The other kids were so good, I didn’t get to prompt.  But on opening night, I did get to see, from backstage, Mary Ellen Kennedy’s (name changed) face when, at the end of an difficult dance number, she jumped 4 feet into the air and did an amazing straddle, splitting her pants and exposing her butt (and, thankfully, underwear) to her whole world.  The audience roared. Her face turned beet red and her eyes welled with tears as she raced off stage.  I felt her pain.  I didn’t laugh.  It wasn’t a joke I could share, because she and her embarrassment just weren’t funny to me.

I never did get laughing at someone else’s misfortune.  I recently learned there’s a German word for it:  schadenfreude.  I knew someone a long time ago who seemed to almost take glee in bad things happening to other people (although he denied it).  It didn’t even matter if he liked them or not.  It was as if life was a see-saw and as long as it was happening to someone else, it wouldn’t happen to him.

When I was in high school, and my sense of myself was forming, I would sit and drink coffee with my dad, listening to Imus in the Morning on NBC Radio before I headed off to school.  I liked Imus because he was outrageous, yet intelligent.  I guess I saw myself that way too, though I’m 100% sure nobody else got outrageous and intelligent out of obnoxious and smart ass.  At this stage of my life, I was “in” on the jokes and got the adult humor.  I felt so grown up.

When my dad died the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, my sense of humor went into hibernation, but it wasn’t more than a month or so before my brother, sister, and I were back at our routines, skits, and impromptu busting on each other, often with the sole intention of making our mother laugh again, or at least smile.

My college years and well into my early years of working were all about laughing and having a good time.  My friends and I kidded each other constantly, and at work, I would jump out of closets to scare my colleagues, or pretend to snort cocaine (Sweet N Low packets) off my desk.  A lot of the humor was physical, with real belly laughs a constant companion.

I noticed the first dramatic shift in my sense of humor thanks to Howard Stern. I didn’t like him as much as Imus in the Morning, but I thought I was hip for listening to him during afternoon drive time in the early 80’s.  Until one afternoon when one of the news reports was about a nun being raped and crosses cut into her body by the attacker.  Stern found a way to make jokes about it.  I never tuned in to his program again.

And while I was still laughing and clowning around a lot, as my 20s raced by, I started to realize I was laughing at less and less.

At one point, around the time I turned 30, my then husband said I had no sense of humor. 

Rather than defending myself, I reflected on what he said, because I could see that my sense of humor had, indeed, morphed.  Life was getting harder and wasn’t really fun as much as it had been.  And as I got older (matured?) I just found humor in even fewer places. 

I know some of the change occurred because I was moving away from an emotional core and to a more intellectualized response to my surroundings.  I recognized that many jokes are at someone else’s expense. When the person is “in” on it and laughing along, that’s one thing, but so many comedians seemed to be targeting groups of people, often women.  And what they were saying just didn’t ring true:  I didn’t find women to be bad drivers, bad decision makers, or weak.  I didn’t find Mexicans to be lazy or black people to be stupid or white men to be boring.  So I just found the humor off-base.  I didn’t think dwarves or fat people deserved to be targeted because they were not taller or thinner.  In order for something to be funny to me, I had to see some truth in it.  I stopped seeing truth in what often passed for comedy.

Going back about 7 years when my daughter, who is a natural blonde, was about 13 and struggling with her changing body and the world around her, she found herself at the butt of dumb blonde jokes.  I’m sorry to say I was the one telling them sometimes, partly because she was a goofy kid who was a blonde (the dumb blonde jokes were just so handy) and partly because my family has a long history of finding the things about yourself that you don’t like--or don’t see--and using humor to make you deal with them.  Some call that merciless teasing, I call it love.  Note to self:  perhaps some therapy is in order…

Moving right along…

So one day Rachel said she didn’t think dumb blonde jokes were funny, because they were, at their core, objectifying blondes.  When I thought about it, I realized that she was right.  Every one one of the jokes positioned the blonde woman as an idiot, but when I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any blondes who were accurately represented by the jokes. So she was right, the jokes were perpetuating a stereotype that was working against women, in this case, blondes.  She formed a group on Facebook called BAA (Blondes Against Abuse) and while no one joined and she didn’t post more than once or twice, I got her point and haven’t told a dumb blonde joke since.

A few years later, I decided to take the kids on a non-flying vacation to a resort in the Poconos.  The first night, wasn’t feeling great and didn’t want to harsh their fun, so I told them they could go to the comedy club without me.  They were 16 and 13 at the time.  They were gone for about an hour, coming back to the room way sooner than I expected.  They were both a little quiet and I thought something bad had happened.  “Why are you back so early?” I asked.

“Aren’t Polish jokes racist?” Wil asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the comedian just kept telling Polish jokes.  And Rachel and I didn’t get why he was doing that.  What’s funny about Polish people?”

Wow.  My head was spinning.  So here we are in 2008, the world is supposed to be more civilized and politically correct, and this guy is telling jokes at the expense of an ethnic group and a room full of people are laughing. 

We collectively decided we didn’t like the resort and checked out that night.

I think their dad would use this as an example of me not having a sense of humor.

I don’t know, maybe I do take things too seriously.  Maybe running a business and raising children through this horrible time in our history, where so much of what we were taught to believe in is just flat out wrong and in some cases, nothing short of evil, has made me too serious and hyper-sensitized.

Or maybe it’s just that I expect humor to make me laugh and not make me cringe.  Maybe too many comedians, in their never-ending quest to outdo each other, keep hitting the wrong nerve, making us cringe before laughing, so that laughing is the release of the cringe response, not a healthy laugh that is a direct result of the joke.

I like humor that resonates and pulls people together.  I like Chris Rock, for the most part, because he tells stories that are funny and real.  I like Christopher Titus and Kathleen Madigan for the same reasons.  They tell stories about their families, and you feel like, “Yeah, I’ve got those people in my world too.”  And then you laugh together.

I was never a fan of the Don Rickles school of humor.  Or Joan Rivers.  They poke fun at individuals and claim it’s in good fun, but isn’t someone, whether a person in the audience or a celebrity, hurt a bit, even just a little bit, by their barbs?  Their humor seems to single someone out and make him or her a “them” so that Don or Joan can be the “us” with the audience.  Singling someone out seems rude and cruel, no matter who the “them” happens to be.

My favorite comedian is Stephen Wright.  He doesn’t make fun of people, he just says funny things. 

And Jon Stewart, I can’t get enough of him.  He and his team nail it nightly.  They find the ridiculousness in the world around it and show it for what it is by making the lunacy so undeniable.  He never ever seems mean spirited, no matter who he’s lampooning. 

On the other hand, I find nothing funny about Daniel Tosh.  My ex-husband and son think he’s a riot. Maybe if I were back at 16 again, I would too.  But to me, he’s just not funny.  Wil was sharing a clip with me the other day, where Tosh is talking about which actresses older than him he would “do.”  Who the hell is he to say he would “do” anyone?  What sets him up as someone who can choose who to “do?”  The entire way he phrases it objectifies the women.  And who the hell would want to “do” him?  Arrogant asshole, let’s see the list of actresses who would do him.  Perhaps that would be funny.

That’s another thing about comedy.  I felt myself getting angry as I was writing about Tosh--it seems a lot of comedians aren’t really nice people.  “Comedy” doesn’t always come from a happy place, and it doesn’t always leave people in a happy place.  But given a choice, these days I prefer it to come from a good place and take me to a better one.

Six Months is a Lo’ o’ Time, David

I haven’t posted in a long time, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.  I’ve been writing, but not here…and not for me.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t use this space to talk about my company, and I won’t, other than to say a person still can’t, really, be in 2 places at once. DBE was requiring more than my full resources for the last six months, so any time not carved out for my children and immediate family was going to DBE and nothing else since October.  Growing a company in a recession is quite a feat, and I’m proud of my team for working with me to achieve our short-term goals that now have us well positioned for the next set of objectives.

Having managed through those challenges, the company is stronger than ever, with amazing team work driving even more really cool marketing services for our clients, a number of which are new to DBE and willing to innovate along with us.  Parmigiano Reggiano, Associated Press, The Journal Register Company, and MyTownVIP, just to name a few.  So, it’s been busy and rewarding, and now I can turn my attention to the blog for a bit.

There seems to be no reasonable segue from this post to the one I wanted to do, so this will be its own little self-contained BWE (by way of explanation) and away we go….