There will be no posting

Anytime soon. It's going to take me weeks to recover from all the socializing Judybat is making me do. First, the family was in town. Then we had a Hannukah party. Then we babysat for our neighbor's kids. Then we went to a Hannukah party that made ours look like a quaint little gathering of lost souls. (Our party: 15 people. Their party: 150 people.) And now the nice lady who controls my life expects me to take her out for New Year's. And not just to a movie! She wants to go be around other people!

It's more than my little introvert's heart can take. By the New Year's Day brunch we're attending tomorrow, I may be incapable of speech. There could be drooling. Seriously.

She may not be making any resolutions, but here's mine: More time alone. Humbug.

Stop!

Last year I decided to give up making New Year's resolutions. Or maybe I just forgot to make one. Or maybe I did make one, but I forgotten what it was, and

Anyhoo, this year I've decided to give up on giving up New Year's resolutions, and resolved to give up something else. The only succesful resolution I've ever made was to stop doing something; years ago I decided to quit being so mad at my sister for whatever grievances I'd been hauling around since we were kids, and it worked great. Letting go of all that meaningless crap allowed me to concentrate on why I'm mad at her in the here and now.

Just kidding. We get along great now. My point is that instead of trying to spend more time writing or doing yoga or being charitable or, you know, productive in some way shape or form, I will not try to do these things. And not only will I not try to do these things, but I resolve to stop feeling like such a loser for not doing them.

Cause here's the thing: I spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy worrying, fretting, stressing, agonizing about my lack of personal achievement and overall contribution to the world. I mean, it's not like I'm a drain on society or anything - why am I not content with what I've got? I think I'd be happier if I stopped beating myself up about not doing more, and I think happy is as good as it gets in this life. And who knows - if I'm happy, I might be more productive!

Dang. It's not even New Year's Eve and I've already broken my new resolution.

The top 10

Best gifts I've ever gotten for holidays, Xmas, birthdays, etc., not counting the Barbie dolls my paternal grandmother gave me at every possible occasion between ages 3 and 15 . . .

(In no particular order, except for the last one.)

1. The Commodore 64 I got for Christmas in 19 -- oh, let's say '84 or '85. I don't remember how many levels "Lode Runner"
actually had, but I'm sure I reached them all.

2. The Atari Atari I got for Christmas circa 1982.

3. The iPod Judybat bought me for my 31st birthday.

4. The guitar, plus lessons, Judybat bought me for my 32nd birthday. Even though I'm not very good.

5. The Montblanc fountain pen my sketchy boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks surprised me with for no particular reason my sophomore year in college. (OK, so maybe there was a reason, but I'm not sharing that much with you people.)

6. The complete New Yorker on DVD that my mother-in-law bought me last week at Powell's. My only problem is knowing where to start: Do I just begin at the beginning, or do I pick random spots to dive in? What to do, what to do??

7. The completely used, 1977 Ford Mustang my mother and stepfather gave me after my first car got stolen my junior year in high school. (I'm sure I didn't leave the key in the ignition and the door unlocked. That would have been kind of stupid.)

8. The brand new Ford Escort my mother and father gave me just before my junior year in college, three years after I wrecked -- and totaled -- the Mustang.

9. The ceramic cows my mother gives me every Christmas. This year's version: A meditating cow.

10. My brother-in-law's old Cannondale bike, fixed up to fit me, which he and Judybat gave to me for my 30th birthday. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I do now, especially each evening when I reach the last true hill on my ride home.

And now, the best, most amazing and memorable and wonderful gift I've ever gotten . . .

11. Actually, it's a two-fer: The year I turned 8, Santa brought me a replica University of Georgia football uniform, complete with helmet AND shoulder pads, and a regulation basketball goal. In the picture from that morning, I'm wearing my little girl nightgown -- I believe Strawberry Shortcake is indeed on the front -- and beaming at the camera as if thinking, 'Oh my God, they've finally got it right!"

And my grandmother wondered why those Barbies never took.

"I want more"

Forget the discomfort I felt every time my child mentioned Santa Claus this morning; what I found truly disturbing, was that the more presents he unwrapped, the more he said (whined, actually) "I want more."


I had been dreading Christmas morning, because of what I felt was an excessive amount of gifts under the tree. (Call me a Grinch, but I feel less is more.) Even so, I must admit it was a lovely moment when The Boy found his first four (!) gifts laid out for him under the tree. His enjoyment combined with Grandma's pleasure over of his enjoyment warmed my cold little heart with what I can only describe as the Christmas spirit.

That lasted about five minutes.

The Boy started to play with his new toys, and normally that would have kept him occupied for ages, but when he realized that there was more to be had under the tree, he started discarding each shiny new treasure almost before he had seen what it was, and his plaintive bleat for more presents made my heart shrink three sizes that day.

I don't want my kid to feel deprived, but I also don't want him to grow up with the expectation that whatever he wants is his for the asking. I'm not sure how to strike that balance, but I do know that the less he gets, the happier he is with what he's got. Of course, all that will change once he discovers the wonders of commercial t.v.

a little more on that

For someone who writes for a living AnnaRay sure can shy away from a story. Of course you can get the complete coverage from Lisa and Jacob, but where's the local angle? The reaction story? The woman on the street interview?

Actually, I hate that man-on-the-street crap, but here's my six cents: The last time we saw Lisa and Jacob was a little more than a year ago on the first leg of our East Coast Farewell Tour, which we embarked upon before moving to Portland. We met them for dinner and Jacob told me the big news. I knew they had tried for some time to get pregnant, and even their in vitro attempts were unsuccesful, so I was pleased to hear that they were moving on and embarking on their own journey to adopt a baby girl from China.

They were clearly happy and excited about it, and I tried to match their enthusiasm. I was (and continue to be) thrilled that these two smart, loving, generous people were going to be parents, but I'm sure I was also horribly patronizing, as only someone who already has a kid can be. I couldn't help thinking about all the early stages of their daughter's life my friends would miss out on and how lucky AR and I had been to get knocked up on the second try.

So I must thank Lisa and Jacob for sharing their experience on their blog, because here's what I've learned: it doesn't really matter how you get the kid; that moment when you see her face for the first time is going to be a powerful and transformative, even if it's only in a photograph. After all the anticipation heightened by beaurocratic delays (they thought they'd have a baby in August, but won't be bringing her home till February,) even I got a little emotional when I saw the pictureof his baby daughter Jacob posted early this month to announce that her adoption was finally official. And subsequent posts about her baby report, complete with details about her personality (outgoing and active) and feeding schedule (frequent,) seemed no less revelatory than when we learned about those kinds of things with The Boy.

Oy, now I'm getting a little ferklempt. Congratulations Jacob and Lisa - I could not possibly be happier for you three!

A Christmas miracle, of sorts

While we're busy bathing in angst and stress, our friends Lisa and Jacob are in the midst of their very own life-changing, world-affirming experience. To sum up, they're having a baby. Rather than tell the story poorly and in snippets, I'm just going to suggest you go read their blog and find out all about their adorable, soon-to-be-U.S.-bound daughter.

Seriously, it's much better and more interesting than anything we have to report right now. And if you'd leave a comment, Jacob would appreciate it.

Hulk annnnngrrrrryyyy!

We media types get a lot of flak for going out of our way to make politicians look bad -- the recent NYTimes decision to run the comic-strip-like series of photos of Bush trying to leave the stage in China being one good example.

But sometimes, the politicians do the work for us. Case in point: Was this really the tie Ted Stevens wanted to wear the day his Arctic drilling stuff came up for a vote?

Was this really the tie he wanted to wear any day on the floor of the U.S. Senate???

Vote my way, because you don't want to make me angry.

I have been remiss!

It's true. My apologies for neglecting the blog. But here's a little update: I have been a bit crazed of late, baking cookies and gingerbread to give to people, (like The Boy's teachers, our neighbors, the mailman, my accupuncturist,) and addressing holiday cards to our loved ones. AnnaRay points out that I'm acting like someone who celebrates Christmas, and I get mad, then I realize she's RIGHT, and no wonder I've been cranky. Christmas is so much more fun when you're a Jew and all you have to do is watch it on t.v.

But here is our tree:
I'd like you all to note the prominent placement of The Boy's first homemade ornamet: the star of David (upper left.) I'd also like to thank my mom, without whom we would have gotten a needle-shedding bean pole of a tree. AR was no help at all at the tree lot, but lucky for us, the nice Jewish lady knew all the right questions to ask.


I've also been a bit preoccupied with the bathroom, which keeps not being done. It looks lovely though, doesn't it:

Please note the fabulous skylight, (moonlit shower anyone?) and the generous tiled shelf space in the shower, (you can just make it out beyond the chrome door frame,) and the combination toilet paper holder/magazine rack, (I really don't have anything to add to that.) There's also a nice little shelf nook beyond the sink, and did I mention the wainscotting?

What you don't see is the door, but only because it's not there. We got a great paneled door at the Rebuilding Center with a crystal knob to match the doors in the rest of the house - it had great history too; it used to hang on a closet in some downtown Portland hotel that was turned into a homeless shelter before being torn down - and I spent the better part of the week trying to strip it of its eight layers of paint. Finally, I asked our build, Ivan (who ROCKS!) to just please take it away and bring it back nice and clean.

So there you have it.

Oh, one last thing: AR wants me to mention that it snowed* in Portland. Here's the proof:


*(The funny thing about snow in Portland, is that nobody really accepts that it's snow. They keep insisting it's an ice storm, because Portland doesn't get snow. So even though there was only an inch or two on the ground, things got canceled and closed early. This amused my mother, who is visiting from New York.)

Radio silence

We're all a little out of it this week: Judybat is finishing the work on the new bathroom -- literally, at the moment she is on her hands and knees scraping down the door so our contractor can paint it tomorrow -- and I've been working like mad. But you'll note that it's her turn to post, right? So I'm off the hook for any guilt about our lack of blogging?

Or perhaps I should be feeling guilt over the fact that she's pouring herself into household chores to have something to focus on besides the fact that my dysfunctional family arrives in a week?

Hmm.

TheBoy genius

We had our first ever parent-teacher conference last week. It felt a little odd, both because two seems a little young for such academic pressure, and because Judybat and I both felt anxious. Would we measure up? Was OurBoy learning? Had we failed him already?

Turns out we had nothing to worry about. The kid is apparently learning and speaking Spanish at his Spanish-immersion preschool, even though we rarely hear him say anything in it at home. He isn't shy and clingy, even though he often seems that way to us when we're all out of the house in the big, bad world. He loves to work, or at least the tracing-letters, drawing-not-quite-circles that serves as work for the preschool set. (Suddenly, we have become the preschool parents who ask for homework.)

There was one thing his teacher wanted to ask us about: His emotional state. She never sees him smile or laugh at school, and has taken it as one of her missions in the coming few months to try to provoke the least little giggle.

At home, of course, TheBoy can't stop giggling and smiling and running into walls and chasing the dog and demanding his mothers chase him and provoking the Tickle Monster even when all the Tickle Monster really wants to do is read the paper. This made his teacher feel much better. Personally, I'm just so happy that he loves to work that I'm not going to worry about anything else.

Little pitchers

TheBoy has a new catchphrase. Or rather, what would be his catchphrase if we decided to pimp him out as the next Emmanuel Lewis or Punky Brewster or that guy from Diff'rent Strokes whose name I'm not going to mention because I don't really want us to come up in random and probably scary Google searches for him.

It goes like this: "That's kinda crazy."

It's sweet and cute and usually quite appropriate. (Mommy is riding her bike home when it's 30 degrees out. Dr. Seuss animals are accidentally sitting on cacti. Ima is asking him eat his salad.)

But it's also troubling, because it means we're firmly into the age at which we can do real damage. At least to our reputations.

Take the other night, for example. He had just gotten into bed, and I was gathering the paper recyclables to put them outside. The bag I was carrying them in broke, and let out a fairly moderate curse. Suddenly a tiny voice popped up from the bedroom: "Mommy say 'damnit?' Mommy say damnit. Damnit. Damnit."

Well, yes. I shouldn't have. And I won't again. At least, I hope I won't.

It could be worse. A friend and former coworker came home one evening when his son was somewhere in this age range to find his wife alternating between furious and off-her-rocker amused with him. She'd overheard TheirBoy getting very frustrated with his toys. Finally, unable to contain his anger any longer, he let out a loud and very clear version of what he thought was a curse. She was pretty sure he'd gotten it from Daddy:

"Buckit!"

I'm figuring y'all can figure that one out.


(On an unrelated note: Blogger spellcheck really, really wanted to turn 'catchphrase' into 'switchboards.' I'm not sure what the hell to make of that. There is good news, however. Spellcheck didn't recognize 'Google.')

Pants on fire

Can anybody believe a word that Condoleezza Rice says? Just the fact that she says that the United States does not ship terror suspects around Europe to secret prison camps makes me believe that the United States ships terror suspects around Europe to secret prison camps. But then, what difference does it make if we do or don't, when we torture suspects on our own bases like Guantanamo Bay (where we hold detainees indefinitely without charging them, which seems just as underhanded as shuttling them around to secret bases)?

Rice says the U.S. does not countenance the torture of terror suspects at the hands of American or foreign captors, but that is a documented LIE LIE LIE!

And then she says - and this is my favorite - that Europeans shouldn't criticize the U.S. about secret jails (that don't exist) for terror suspects because interrogations of these suspects have produced information that has saved European lives. OK, putting aside the fact that interrogations of these subjects also led to information about WMDs in Iraq that misguided us into war, it sounds to me like she's saying, "Quit complaining about that thing I didn't do, because by doing it I was able to help you out."

Seriously, if the woman walked up to me and said "Nice day, isn't it?" I'd run for cover.

A Christmas quandary

When I was a kid, Christmas meant going over to my grandparents apartment for a turkey dinner, which I started looking forward to the day after thanksgiving. Sure, we got presents, but my sister and I knew that it was just stuff Mom held back from our eight nights of Hanukkah so she could put something under the ficus that served as a Christmas tree in a concession to my Pop, (Dad's dad,) who was Italian. We never said Catholic; we just said "we celebrate Christmas for my Pop, because he's Italian."

I never felt like we missed out on anything by being Jewish. In fact, I must admit to feeling a little superior to my friends who believed in Santa Claus. I mean, what else did we have over the goyim? (At this point, I must also admit that I still believed in the tooth fairy. But that's like, reasonable, you know? Because it's not like every kid in the world is going to lose a tooth on the same night.)

When I was in college, I got caught up in the whole Christmas giving thing and started to stress about what to get for people, until I realized it wasn't even my holiday and promptly gave it up. That left me free to enjoy Christmas time, which is especially nice in New York, because people are in a good mood for a change and are actually nice to one another. Also, the lights are pretty.

But there's nothing like living in the Bible Belt to whip the holiday spirit right out of you, and after just one Christmas in North Carolina I was disgusted with the whole enterprise. First of all, the freakin' music starts the day after Halloween, and no joy can survive six weeks of Jingle Bell Rock. What's more, there's no recognition that anyone could be thinking about anything other than Christmas for the entire month of December. It becomes tiresome. And oppressive. Try saying, "Oh, I don't celebrate Christmas," in my old stomping grounds of Gastonia, NC, and I'll be damned if you don't get the same response as if you had just said, "Oh, I eat babies." Of course, I'll be damned anyway, but I digress.

I'm happy to say that I overcame my Christmas loathing not long ago when I started celebrating the holiday with my inlaws. It wasn't the magic of a white Christmas that did it (AnnaRay's mom had moved to Florida, where the Christmas lights are set up in the shape of flamingoes,) or waking up to a pile of presents under the tree, (the excessive gift-giving sort of freaked me out, actually,) but participating in their tradition made me feel more a part of their family, and I resolved to embrace it - their strictly secular version of the holiday - as my own.

This year, in hopes of avoiding the cross-country schlep with kid in tow at the hight of the traveling season, I offered - I campaigned! - to have Christmas in Portland.We'd have a tree and everything, I promised, and my offer was accepted. But then I started thinking about what it would mean to have a big, beautiful Christmas tree on display in the street-facing front windows of my home, and I started having second thoughts.

Here's the thing about being Jewish: we are by definition a wandering nation without a homeland. We have settled here and there, but for the most part have not assimilated, and it's only by jealously guarding our sacred Otherness that we have maintained our identity in the face of oppression for 2,000 years. Not a small feat. Anyway, in spite of my largely secular upbringing, I've incorporated into my world view the notion that if we Jews don't stand out in our societies, we must have assimilated, and that smacks of betrayal.

So what does it mean if I brighten our little green house with Christmas lights? Nothing, of course, except that I'm honoring the traditions of my spouse, just as she honors mine. (We are raising The Boy to be a Bar Mitzvah, after all.) Still, it does not sit well with me emotionally. I always feel a certain solidarity around this time of year with the other few neighbors living behind darkened house fronts, just like I always feel a connection to total strangers driving down the highway with a rainbow sticker on their bumper. It's a symbolic manifestation that we are different, and therefore we few stand together. But now I feel like a teenage geek leaving her nerdy friends behind to run off with the cool kids, and I'm worried what everyone will think. I tell myself to get over it, but I know it's something I will just have to grow out of.

Branding

This is a family blog, so I'm going to resist getting all crude on you, despite the obvious temptation. But this Times article does prompt a question: What do lesbians smell like? (And how did they avoid putting this in Thursday Styles?)

Personally, I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'm ready to hop on board with my hard-earned dough as soon as HBO starts producing "Six Feet Under" urns -- no casket for me, thank you -- and "Sopranos" Italian sausages. Actually, I'm appalled.

An aside: We're almost done with the 2nd season of "The L Word," and I have a pretty good idea of what it smells like: Craaaaaap. Poorly written, overly directed, jarringly edited soap opera/soft porn. (Skinemax would have gotten this right!) And yet I can't wait for season three. That makes me a walking stereotype, right?

Status check

My company is switching health insurance plans, and so I had a bit of paperwork to fill out this week. I waited for the last minute, of course, and had to call home several times to get all the relevant details that I should have memorized for Judybat and TheBoy, such as their social security numbers. (We've been together 12 years, and I still don't know Judybat's. That's bad, right?)

Once I scrambled to get everything written down, I ran the forms up to our human resources office. The woman behind the counter took them and kindly checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

I had: Those little boxes marked "Married," "Single," or "Divorced," blank. I left them blank on passive-aggressive purpose, because I'm never quite sure what the powers that be will accept. It's not that I'm confused. I am married, at least in my own mind and the minds of those I love. But my government disagrees. And given the frequent visits we all make to the doctor, I don't want to screw up our health insurance forms by pissing off some file clerk in Omaha.

The woman behind the counter looked at the form for a minute, clearly noting that I'd listed my partner and our child. She stared at me for a minute. Then she looked back at the form and frowned.

Her: "You left this blank."
Me: "I didn't know what to say."
Her: "I don't know what to say either."
Me: "Why wouldn't they just have a box on there for domestic partner? Most companies offer them now, right?"
Her: "We could draw one in, but that might present a problem."
Me: "Maybe we should just leave it blank."
Her: "Maybe we should."

And that's what we did. I'm not sure how else to handle the situation, which really doesn't rise to the level of "situation," but does give one pause.

What the hell am I, anyway?