Watchin' some more TV - character studies

The library just got AbFab, so I just saw the first 3 episodes.  I don't know if I will watch much more.  I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I can't understand the Britishisms.  Plus, its a little too frenetic and physical-comedy oriented for me.  I don't find Patsy's character very amusing (which is ironic, since the only thing I knew about the series is that it starred Joanna Lumley), and the daughter is too perfect.  I do like Edy's character, probably more then the writers intended.  Even when she is horribly self-indulgent, I find her very sympathetic.  I think her essence is summarized in a fabulous line she delivers in the 3rd episode, "France".  Eddy and Patsy are mistakenly vacationing in a little cottage in a small village in France.  Edy's daughter, Saffron, says that she likes the cottage, it is so quiet and pretty and peaceful.  Edy agrees, "I should enjoy it, but I can't.  It's like some great cosmic secret that no one let me in on."  So I guess I want her to "win", and it is disappointing that every week, she just misses.

So I put in some "Friends" collection that I was given.  I generally enjoy "Friends", especially Matt LaBlanc and Matthew Perry.  There are so many great lines, it is a shame that the writers put in so many cheap sex jokes.  SO MANY, EVERY SINGLE STORY.   But in between are some really clever lines.  I saw some episodes I never watched before, and it crystallized:  I hate Rachel.  Why in the world would fans want Ross to get back together with this nasty, selfish, shallow baby?  Am I missing some amazing transformation somewhere, where Rachel realizes "Hey, I'm to blame for all the problems with Ross.  And I have cost him so much lost happiness. What can I do to make it up to him?" 

Okay, well I'm just at work to gather some boxes - life is moving on.  Imagine how fast things could move if I would stop watching so much TV.

Oh, a little post scrip to the No Recognition post a few days back:  I went and watched that Seinfeld episode, "Butter Shave", and it is amazing how in-sync I really was with it - George actually says that he gets "no recognition".  And even better - just as I started the blog by saying I wanted to take a break from "Sweet Pro's" world, "Butter Shave" opens with Jerry and George sporting mustaches because they had spent that summer "taking a vaction from ourselves."  Ironic, funny.

Fireflies

These amazing photos were taken in various places around Maniwa and Okayama Prefecture in Japan by photographer Tsuneaki Hiramatsu. http://inspir3d.net/2012/01/17/magical-slow-shutter-fireflies-by-tsuneaki-hiramatsu/

 

 

 

So it looks like I will be leaving my lovely new community, at least for awhile.  And although I am sad to go, I am actually excited about the future, which certainly hasn't happened in some time.  Now that I think about it, the last time I was really excited about the future was eight years ago, when the wasband finally got his teacher's certificate, and I expected him to look for a good paying job that he would enjoy - foolish girl! 

This early summer heat wave seems to have brought out insects aplenty, which would generally be a horrid situation for this bug-hater.  But along with the gnats, wasps, and swarms of carpenter bees, the *fireflies* are buzzing around like I have never seen before.  Every evening, I park my car, walk halfway up the driveway, and look around and around at all the little blinking lights.  On Thursday evening, the show was so amazing, I sat outside my door for 20minutes, arguing with myself to go inside and start the weekend cooking. This was the best firefly spectacle I have ever witness, better than I ever imaginged: the yard was almost perfectly dark, the area so wooded and secluded, the trees so tall, and I was right next to my house door, completely safe.  I could follow the individual flies, flying so fast and blinking at such short intervals that they almost looked like dotted-lines. And the glow was so bright, I could clearly see sparkles at the tops of trees that must be over 50ft tall.  I cannot possible describe how beautiful it was.  I kept thinking of the theme parks with little twinkling lights in the shrubbery, trying to make the surroundings "magical", and what a pathetic simulation that was compared to what I had outside my door.

This is a paradigm of what I particularly loved about the "new" neighborhood.  I have lived in the city (although not The CITY), all my life, and the only time I can remember really seen the stars well is when we traveled out to the "country" to go to the Renaissance Festival, and the view of the sky from the pitch-dark parking lot was superb.  Perhaps I saw stars as a child, but I certainly didn't appreciate them enough to have an image in my head.  So since then, I have wanted to go camping, mostly to be able to look up at night and just look at the stars (and start big fires, which is so cool). The wasband, to his credit, did try to arrange a camping trip, but it was cloudy most of the time.  I don't honestly think I will ever get a really great view of the stars,  the way all of humanity did for 5000 years.  I just don't expect to ever get any place so shielded from light-pollution.  But the fireflies...ahh, it is certainly a taste.

Quick update

In case anyone was really nervous about yesterday's post - well, I'm still sinking into debt, but I am trying to decide between to seemingly great housing options.  But let's not mess this up...so that's all for today.  Quick.

Oh and I picked up my new shoes!!new shoes new shoes new shoe la la new shoes.

No Recognition

I am feeling especially aware of my material poverty this month.  I am on the very edge of gong into the pit of debt, and if I fall in, I can't imagine how I will climb out.  Meanwhile, I need look for a new apartment, and I so desperately want to better my living space - cramming into two teeny-tiny rooms over the last year was really tough, and I certainly did NOT imagine it being an indefinite situation.  I have to send the kids to camp so I can go to work, but I'm going to be spending my entire salary on camp tuition. Meanwhile, I keep sending checks to the lawyer......enough, I'm not going to catalog all my expenses.  The point is: I'm poor, I'm getting poorer, I don't see this turning around any time soon.  I want a break from "Sweet Pro's" world, but there isn't really any acceptable escape.

I recently bought a bunch of comic collections at the library book sale, including some of the later "For Better Or For Worse."  Not my favorite, too full of herself, but I will read almost any comics, and the kids like them.  So I see that a minor character was added as a school-friend of the youngest daughter.  The new character is a special needs student with trouble speaking.  Perhaps the idea from this character came from  a real person in the life of the cartoonist, but I thought about the attempts to extend the "diversity" in the strip. What popped into my "pity me" head was, "There are no poor characters in the strip."  Okay, that is not completely true - very young adults are shown having a hard time with finances, but this is clearly just a stage, a rite of passage. One of the son's friends lives over a garage from the time he graduates high school through his first couple years of marriage.  But soon enough he becomes one of the most successful business men in town.  And even his alcoholic parents seem to have had a nice house in which he grew up.  Okay, okay, she is documenting the world she knows, but it still gets me down.  Everything I grew up with on TV, in books, in comics, etc shows American life as rich by default (I know, Johnston is Canadian, but you get the point). It's not so much that I dislike my circumstances as much as having my kids (and myself) wondering why we can't just be like everyone else.  Isn't there already enough "less then average" about us?

While trying to think of a title for this piece, I considered "No handicapped Plates", as in no special accommodations for the working poor, the fat, the skinny, the bald, the ugly, the dysfunctional family member, the insecure, etc; basically the emotionally crippled.  A scene from Seinfeld jumped into my thoughts, where George has the same analysis: the world owes him for all his hardship.  I can't even figure out exactly which episode, I think it is in "The Butter Shave", when he gets the job with Play Now, they think he is unable to walk, and give him all the "perks" of being "handicapped".  George tells Jerry that he intends to take full advantage of the situation, since he has just as many problems as anyone with a physical impediment.

So I'm even more pathetic now: I'm kinda' siding with George.

This week's epiphany

This is one of the wasband's favorite comic strips:

Actually, he never reads comics, so he must have heard me reading it to the kids, but anyway, it always made him laugh. The wasband is big into lists, unlike your blogger.

This weekend started awfully: just another case of the wasband pulling out the worst in me.  End of story, I was without the boys for shabbos, feeling cheated and disgusted and all kinds sorry for myself.  As I came home Friday afternoon, I have a flash of how many things the wasband DID NOT manage to take away from me. 

This was like suddenly understanding the expression "to find yourself."  I would imagine most teenagers have very little understanding of this idea, though they are told that this is a possible benefit of college or the postponement of college for several years.  So too, one is advised to think about all the things wasbands [cancer/ financial crises/ adversaries in general] cannot take away from one.  (I'm reading "The Uncommon Reader", and it makes me want to use the pronoun "one".)

Shall I give an abbreviated list?  Okay, these are some things that are actually on the upswing since last summer:

• Shul attendance
• Lovely shabbatot in general
• Connections with friends
• Connections with family
• Exercise/ frolicking with the little guys
• Desire to get out of bed most mornings (well, I think it is most. not this morning, but most mornings)

I feel that I have to say, he DID take away a whole lot, not even considering the material items.  I can't get beyond that wall of awful.  But occasionally I can turn my gaze to the other direction.

Here's a twofer - An ironic list of annoying things the wasband used to that I have found myself doing this year:

• Going to the library multiple times per week, borrowing up to the limit
• Keeping Granola bars in the car for kiddie snacks
• Using minty liquid soap in the shower (mine is a nicer brand though)
• Taking kids out to do "stuff" in the evenings
• Shopping at pricier grocery stores (but I don't enjoy this, it's just that along with the pricier neighborhood comes the pricier stores)

Not some little Hotsie Momma

Few people who consistently wear their waistbands above their hips are less qualified to write an article on fashion than I, but I have one particular fashion peeve to share: shells.
I don't mean those calcium rich mollusk armor you collect on the beach (although those shells are also not my favorite embellishment); I'm referring to a tight bodice garment used for under-layering, to provide "modest" covering of arms, neckline, etc, under less concealing clothing.

The idea of under-layering is, of course, not new.  The past several decades have seen 1) popular fashion become increasingly revealing, 2) overwhelming expectation that clothing be available "off-the-rack".  Thus religious women have been asking "Uch, isn't there some easy, non-bulky, economical, and stylish way to make this years fashions 'work?'" 

And, like the Ronco in-the-shell-egg-scrambler, the SHELL was born.

No, maybe not like that... Anyway, although we have been wearing T's, cammies, long sleeve T's, dickies, "sleevies", or whatever underneath all these years, suddenly "shells" are the new thing.  But because they are "shells," they are now somehow appropriate to any occasion.  And even more unbecoming: now every article of clothing is appropriate if it has a shell underneath.

A couple years ago I was dragged into Brooklyn for the day.  I had way too much time to just watch the people at this "Jewish family event."  The place was crawling with young women, mostly young mothers, wearing the tightest, sauciest clothing I had ever seen at such an event.  And I thought to myself,  "there is no way I could ever really belong to the ****** movement, I could never be such a little hotsie momma."

How nasty a thought is that?  Well, sorry but it was just an awful day, and those clothes were the topper, along with a soft-serve chalav-yisroel ice cream cone that was so bad, it might as well have been tofutti (maybe it was! I hate Brooklyn.)

So here is my advice:
1) DO NOT spend $5000 on a shaitel, then wear it to your cousin's wedding with a sleeveless off-the-rack dress "enhanced" with some obvious shell.  You CAN still find a seamstress to either alter that dress you saw and loved, or just order a whole new dress, it is possible.  And if you really can't afford that - then keep walking and find a different dress or wear last year's.

2) Some tops are just plain inappropriate.  No matter what you do to them.  If it looks like underwear, don't use it as outerwear.  If it looks like a negligee, don't wear it as sports wear.  If it is so tight, strappy, notched, that it would be only be appropriate...well, you get the point, just don't wear it.

Good candidate for a shell

Poor candidate for a shell

I guess that's it.  I'm sure I will end up giving in more to this trend eventually. 

How to let go?

The wasband gave me a reprieve over Passover from the constant barrage of "more stuff".  But this week, he again emptied bags and boxes of mostly garbage onto the sidewalk next to my car (he carries it around with him so he can do this whenever he finds me, no kidding).  I did point out, fairly calmly, the boxes of true junk equally owned by the two of us, and told him I would not be responsible for disposing of it.  But the bag of clothes - obviously old run-down stuff he finally picked up from the laundry room floor, as he cleaned for/from Passover - I accepted, along with some assorted odd-and-ends from the garden - which was definitely MY project, as explained previously . Actually, I didn't so much "accept it", as slump down like I had lost all muscle control and start to cry.  Then I threw the stuff in the car, and drove off without doing any of the chores I had planned.  I went home and ate and ate and ate (luckily it was mostly the produce I have left from the holiday), and watched hours of videos.

I went back to the 1st season of Frasier, and the end of the very first episode clearly reflected my situation.  The finish of the pilot episode features a call from a woman (voice of Linda Hamilton) who broke up with her boyfriend eight months ago (*eight months ago!) but cannot stop grieving.  Frasier shares the "Lupe Valez" anecdote, telling the woman that she is in mourning for "what she thought her life would be," and advising her that she needs to "let it go."
 

Okay, this is obviously good advice, as far as it goes, but HOW DOES ONE LET GO?  HOW DO *I* LET GO?  It doesn't just happen because you say it will, anymore then the average person can just lose weight but saying "okay, now I will lose weight."  The clearest answer to both is "get yourself good professional help."  But at the moment I haven't the time or resources...

I'm gonna stop here.  I not really that bad, most of the time.  But it is still too hard sometimes, and I am really bad at giving up ideals - a topic for another day.  Right now I have to pick up the videos the libraryis holding for me.