Bitchfest

Since I wrote my post about my expanding waistline, NPR featured a story that explained the relationship between aging and weight gain. Here it is: You get older, you eat like always, you get fat.  Put down the bagel and pick up a bar bell. Fat is bad.

A day after that, I heard this oddball story on the radio, which made me reconsider the bar bell theory, pull into a bagel joint and order a dozen plain with extra schmear. Fat is good.

The good news is my Lycra spandex blend pants fit. Another nice thing about Lyrcra spandex pants? Those schmear smears wipe right off. Life is good.

Two weeks ago I tweeted:

That morning, when selecting what to wear, I considered the following:

• I’ll be in a dark theater.
• I’ll be with a bunch of kids.
• I haven’t worn this shirt in two years. (I know there is a reason, but I cannot remember what it is.)

During the performance, the reason came back to me in a whisper of cold air up my spine. I do not wear this shirt because it does not fit properly.

It’s one of those crossover V-neck shirts that looks really cute when you first put it on and even retains some level of cuteness for the first hour of wear. It’s also striped in shades of red that flatter my hair color and skin tone. After a few hours of wear, however, it stretches and sags in the front, forcing constant adjustment to prevent, er, wardrobe malfunctions, particularly in the neckline area.  Also, I’d forgotten to wear a tank top or camisole under the shirt. By the end of the performance, I’d tugged and twisted the shirt so many times it had stretched to almost twice its size.

Like this, only with more sag. Via Treehugger.com

Shortly after the show ended, I thought I’d just slip into my jacket and slink on out of the theater. But this wasn’t just any show. It was the first U.S. tour for this traveling troupe of musicians and dancers from a university in Hubei Province, China. We heard the call for students in the audience to head onstage if they were interested in a meet and greet with the troupe.

Being the mother of a four-year-old Girl from China who loves, loves, loves all things Chinese, it didn’t take long for me to find myself being pulled by one hand toward the stage by my eager daughter while the other tugged at my malfunctioning top.

Once the college students made eye contact with my girl it was all over. I don’t now who gushed and giggled more: my girl or the pretty young women. My girl was passed around from student to student for photo opportunities and even rode on the shoulders of one of the male musicians. No amount of backing into the shadows stopped the inevitable, “Mom, how about you get into a few of these pictures?”

On the way home it occurred to me that I shouldn’t ever dress myself with a dark theater, it’s just kids, who cares attitude. You never know who you’ll bump into, and when you do, you’ll be judged by what you are wearing, like it or not.

When I got home I did two things: I tweeted my revelation and then I tossed that saggy shirt into the trash.

Lesson learned.

So this thing happened in the airspace over my city. Yet, I was blissfully ignorant of it for most of the day it happened.

I saw a quick headline online that said something about a problem on a flight.

It was Christmas Day. I had Christmas stuff to do. I have two children. We had to get on the rain-slicked roads to grandmother’s house in mid-state Michigan. Even over dinner that evening, the conversation barely touched upon the disaster averted. We were too busy debating political correctness at the holidays, Obama’s first year in office, and if striped cats are gassier than solid-colored ones.

By orvalrochefort via Creative Commons

It was not until our long, dark, rainy drive home that we switched on the radio and learned this airplane thing was more like a failed suicide bombing and it was here in Detroit. The next day at my mother’s house we talked at length about cheery things like if the plane exploded in the air, how big an area would the fallout cover? What was the typical incoming flight path of a Northwest/Delta plane? Are there parts of the area that are under flight paths more than others? We realized that no matter where it happened, if it had happened, it would have affected someone we know.

Beyond the bounds of family walls, I’ve heard squat. I mean the news media is squeezing every drop out of the story. But around town, the one that was in the would-be bull’s eye, as far as I can tell, not so much. I asked friends who traveled by air over the holiday if the incident affected their psyches or boarding experiences. Not much, they said. However, they traveled domestically. I didn’t talk to anyone who traveled overseas.

Huh.

This thing. It didn’t happen as planned. If I understand the story correctly, by the description of things, it wouldn’t have happened even if passengers hadn’t intervened. The guy didn’t have his chemicals mixed properly or something. He didn’t have all the details straight. Thank god. Most likely he terrorized his man parts. Oh, he did terrorize some of the passengers. I cannot minimize that nor will I make light of it.

Two things come to mind in the wake of this:

First, Jeez, can we ever get a break here? Must every bad story, losing sports team, failing industry, worst educational system, all emanate from the Mitten State and specifically from the base of the thumb of the Mitten? I know the situation was random, that it was not specifically designed to make Detroit look bad. One populated American city is as good a target as the next if you are the enemy and on a mission, right? Still, I had a Rodney Dangerfield moment in which I bemoaned “Why can’t we get any respect around here?”

Second, news about heightened security and full body scans horrify me. Are you among those who think nothing of it? Or, are you like me and shudder at the thought of some Dwight Schrute type sweating and giggling as he scans your bits and parts in search of weapons and hidden contraband?

Via NBC.com

I’m still creeped out about the jaw X-ray my dentist gave me a while back to “hang onto, please.” No further explanation. I took it home and looked it over and felt kinda itchy and twitchy afterward. Don’t count me among those who find skulls and internal organs and neural pathways to be interesting viewing.

via FOX News

However, we are a nation of entrepreneurs and mavericky rogues or is it roguish mavericks? I wonder how soon before an independent contractor sets up shop at the airport to sell copies of your scan as a vacation souvenir? You know how you can ride a roller coaster or go whitewater rafting and at the end there’s a booth with a picture of you all bug-eyed, mouth agape and you wonder where in the heck the camera was and then you pay $25 so you can have it as a memory of your experience?

Who doesn’t want a key chain or a framed collage of the family body scans from the Christmas 2009 holiday vacation?

While I love to travel and I’ve never had any fears of flying, I have come to detest airport security. My worst experiences were traveling both into China and around China. Aside from the trashing of my luggage and the suitcase searches were the confiscation of things that were in compliance with the posted guidelines. As baggage screeners dangled my stuff over the trash can, I’d point to the signs at the gate illustrating the 3-oz containers in small Ziploc Baggies and then wince as my Baggie was tossed into a trash bin anyway.  ”You cannot have” was the only explanation. I seethed as I had to continuously shrug out of both a backpack and a baby carrier and unload my purse. Apparently baby wearers with backpacks are No. 1 on the suspicious list.

Since then I clench up like a sissy boy in prison every time I approach security. Give me turbulence and crazy takeoffs. I can handle that. But don’t come at me with the latex gloves, Dwight.

By Howieluvzu via Creative Commons

To: Sibling in town for the holidays

From: Your stressed-out sister

Re: Our lack of any quality time together other than over pre-Thanksgiving dinner cocktails and post-dinner mumblings between pie and coffee

Relationships are a two-way street. While you are the out-of-towner, remember it is your vacation time and not mine. You happened to visit during a time of absolute chaos. Not only did I face a huge project deadline, but also a major holiday, two family get-togethers for which I had to cook food,  and ongoing volunteer commitments. I know this is hard for you to understand, that you accuse me of having “excuses.”  I don’t think of work, a home and a family as “excuses.” But, seeing as you choose to keep your life as commitment-free as possible, at least allow for the possibility that the world does not revolve around you. Perhaps some advance notice of your visit would have allowed me to carve out time, schedule a babysitter or at least warn you of my crazybusy life right now.  So, stop with the damned guilt trip. It’s so ’70s.

To: My dear, sweet daughters

From: Your well-meaning mother

Re: My lack of attention

There is nothing more cutting to the bone than mommy guilt. It was my painful awareness of your various needs that drove me to take on work that now keeps me from paying the attention to which you have grown accustomed. I’ve slacked on nightly bedtime reading sessions, have left you unattended with scissors (Spunky’s whiskers will grow back), forgotten to pick you up from school, and let the Halloween pumpkins blacken and implode on the front porch. In my effort to be everything to everyone I ended up being nothing to anyone. In the future, when you are speaking of me to your therapist, please refrain from using too much profanity.

To: My adoring husband of almost 10 years who somehow still loves me

From: Ice machine with frayed cord

Re: Our poor, neglected relationship

When a stay-at-home mom feels guilty for not contributing to the household bottom line, when she feels it is partly her fault for the bottom line’s disintegration due to the fact that she outright quit a job that most certainly would have dumped her butt on the unemployment line within a year anyway, but then at least she would have collected unemployment rather than be told repeatedly that “quitting a job does not qualify you for any sort of sympathy or assistance” and could feel less guilty about not helping out. (I don’t think that was a sentence.) When she decided to try to restore that contribution she realized the only job she knew how to do was housed in a shack built on stilts over quicksand and –hello! it’s gone forever. So she came up with a different way that maybe helps out a little but now she’s the one needing help because she gets no sleep and is an irrational witch half the time and deliriously distracted the other half.

To: My two faithful readers

From: Determined-but-frustrated blogger

Re: Lack of posts

Thank you for sticking around, stopping by once in a while and commenting. It is greatly appreciated. I wish I could be the wind beneath your wings, the fire in your furnace, the hot knife to slice your butter. As much as it would seem the logical thing to do, I won’t quit this blog. I maintain it now for the same reasons I started it. I’m stubborn like that.

By Bearn via Creative Commons

It is almost impossible to fathom how I earned that little black and white NaBloPoMo badge down on the right sidebar of this blog. That widget means I posted every day for a month in November 2008. Thirty posts in 30 days. I posted seven times this November.

Does it matter? My philosophy is post as often as you have something quality to share. That is now at odds with the conventional wisdom that in order for a blog to matter it must have traffic and be findable by search engines. My blog is now in competition with other things in my life. Where it once filled a void, it’s now moved near the bottom of my to-do list.

I’ve taken on quite a bit in the last few months. I’ve committed to things that are for the greater good. Except sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m being crushed under the weight of responsibility and promises and commitments. I am determined to find a way to make it all work. There are other unfathomables right now:

I heard on the radio today callers bragging how they maybe worked three hours on Cyber Monday, devoting the rest of the paid work day to Christmas shopping online or gabbing on social media sites. I had a hard time swallowing this information given the number of people out of work right now, the number of people just in the last few weeks who’ve either lost medical coverage, had one of their utilities shut off or were forced to leave family and friends for a less-than-stellar job out of the state.

In some ways, the very idea of a day set aside for the pursuit of spending money is almost beyond my grasp. This will be our second Christmas under very tight budgetary constraints. Last year we were caught off guard and I was devastated. This year, I know how it will be and almost welcome it as an opportunity to put the holidays in proper perspective. I long for a simple, meaningful holiday that reflects the true nature of the season.

On the subject of jobs and tight budgets, we had a strange spectacle in our town that barely registered on most people’s radar screens but for those in the know, it was a seismic jolt. It’s unfathomable to me how two people can blow into our town  and convince another group of people, many of whom were the best and brightest in their field, to join what sounded like a fool’s errand.

Over the last few months I listened as former colleagues and friends wrestled with their decision to jump on board or walk away from this crazy scheme. Part of me — my heart, my pride — was sad and angry that I was not among those hand-picked to be a part of this wild idea. Another part — my gut — told me that to listen to these promises, to throw caution out the window was something I’d walked away from three years ago. I would not, could not go back to what I suspected would be more of the same.

In the end, those of us who stood back with our doubts and concerns watched the worst-case scenario play out. We felt for those who ultimately were duped or blinded by a crazy hope and desire to get back that which is lost. It’s one thing to hear the king is dead. It’s another to touch his rotting corpse.

While I survived the first round of the holiday season, I’m not sure I came out in one piece. The amount of anxiety that preceded this week was self-imposed for the most part in preparation for what I imagined to be a very stressful few days. I know I overindulged in food and drink in an effort to keep my mouth occupied and out of trouble and my vision blurred enough to avoid reality.

But damn you, Facebook, and your photo tagging that blasts though the fog of denial and thrusts the truth in my face.

In the spirit of David Letterman, who seems to be embroiled in a bit of scandal, I offer you my Top 10 reasons why I haven’t been and may not be posting much in the next week or so:

10. The default font on my WordPress theme makes my eyes cross.

9. Our household Internet service is like Montgomery Burns: slow, spotty and ruthless.

8. The cat keeps jumping on the keyboard and hitting the delete key.

7. My drafts folder is brimming with half-written posts but none ready to go.

6. My youngest has started preschool, which gives me a few hours a week of me time. When she is home, she wants all of me, too. Not conducive to blogging.

5. My oldest is going to homecoming this weekend and the planning is endless.

4. Both a door knob and a window crank on our house have broken simultaneously, coinciding with the recent drop in temperature. Neither of these original hardware items in our 68-year-old home can be fixed quickly or affordably.

3. I have members of  a committee coming to my house in two days to inspect it as part of an application process I am in. I am on a cleaning and organizing frenzy. Not sure how to steer attention away from open, broken window.

2. My childcare for the week is mostly nonexistent.

1. I have found temporary work, which is my No. 1 priority.

by alessandraelle via creative commons

Aside from fine lines and dark circles and loss of muscle tone, there’s one thing that really deflates my over-40 self-esteem: the underwear choices for the typical middle-aged body.

Gone are the days of  itty-bitty pretty things in bright colors, accented with lace and beads and bows. Now, it’s all plain and dark and thick. Now, it could double as body armor in a combat zone.

More than anything else about this age, I’m embarrassed of my underwear drawer.

A few weeks ago at a picnic with a friend — who has not yet crossed the threshold into fortysomething – we cursed our big appetites and what it does to our bodies. Then, she revealed a secret to me. She raised the hem of her pink ruffled sleeveless blouse to reveal a heavy-duty bustier that stretched from her rib cage to her hips. She made a fist and rapped her knuckles against the reinforced siding to demonstrate its figure-controlling power.

Wow.

I was floored. I assumed her smooth lines were the result of genetics. Some women are lucky. But for us, pregnancy turned a slab of granite into a bowl of mush. She bought it, she whispered to me over a bowl of Sun Chips we were sharing, because someone had asked her if she was pregnant again.

Ouch.

I feel her pain. As a former member of the itty-bitty bikini club, the crop top and low rise pants club, middle age has forced me to relinquish my membership. I hang with a different crew now, the ones who shop for what at worst can be called granny panties and at best are called figure shapers.

Ugh.

I have discovered some things that make this transition tolerable:  Spanx, or anything Spanx-like.

Shopping for this type of underwear, however,  is a different experience. No longer can I go to the cute  lingerie boutiques and grab a handful of candy-colored “fundies” in my size and pay for them. Now I need to go to stores that have senior discount days to buy something to return my body to what it once was, to smooth and redistribute flesh, to conceal and reshape.

So imagine my horror on a recent shopping  trip when the dressing room clerk plucked the Spanx out of the bouquet of try-on items in hand and waved them overhead.

“No. No. No.” She admonished, shaking her head to and fro rapidly for added emphasis. “You aren’t permitted  to try on undergarments in a store!”

She used words like exposed crotch, and hygiene and public health threat. Suddenly I felt like Borat in his man-thong.

Um.

Well, I wasn’t going to take everything off and put them on, I retorted. I was going to put them on over my own underwear and see how they worked with this rather clingy dress I just bought.

More nos from the dressing room monitor. More head shaking. More talk of dreaded diseases and H1N1 and health department crackdowns.

I know I’ve tried on these body shapers before at other stores. In fact, I clearly recall a dressing-room attendant at a very upscale shop helping me find one to wear with my wedding dress. I’ve tried on bathing suits in stores countless times.

I’m not a germophobe, so much of what this attendant was talking about flies under my radar. I’m also not a shopper. I do not enjoy it. Least of all do I like trying on clothes or having to return them if they do not fit properly.

I looked at those Spanx waving over my head like the flag of doom. I talked of the price tag. I suggested that it was a lot to spend on something if it didn’t fit.

The attendant offered a solution: Buy the underwear, try it on at home, then return it to the store for a refund.

Then — and get this –she said with great pleasure that if the underwear is returned to the store, employees will have to put on protective gloves, render the garment useless, and ceremoniously dispose of it.

Whoa.

Do they have a HazMat team on duty for underwear and bathing suit returns? I ‘d love to see that in action. Do they use big tongs and drop them in airtight biohazard drums? Do they set a granny panties fire behind the store?

I suppose this all makes sense. I know it does. But something about the way this moment played out seemed hysterical and over the top. And now I feel as if I’ve been living in a cave on this matter.  After conducting a bit of online research, it seems that this is a health code rule. It turns out that people are pigs and do horrible things in dressing rooms and to clothing.

There are a lot of Borats out there.

image by runningkate

I’ve lost things lately:

• my favorite plastic sports bottle, a souvenir of my snow camping experience
• my sterling silver hoop earrings
• my mind

Also, I’ve lacked focus:

• Literally. I need bifocals. I’m pretending I don’t. The faking it isn’t working anymore and it’s making me look feeble. I hope that explains all the typos in my comments around the blogosphere. I hope that explains all the pasta on the tablecloth at lunch the other day.
• I’m job hunting outside my field of work. Where to direct the confused self when the forest trails are marked either Overqualified or Underqualified? Some days I’m resigned to signing on with Merry Maids or dressing in red and khaki and enlisting in the Target army. Other days I feel a strong desire to go to grad school and follow dreams. Some days I just shop for a roomy refrigerator box to call home.

Job hunting sucks. I’ve had it too easy all my life. I’ve almost always slipped seamlessly from one position to the next. Even during the rare times when I had a gap in my work history, I filled it with temp work.

Now I’m a woman who is halfway to 90 (as one of my drama queen contemporaries likes to say) and almost three years gone from the workplace. My line of work is no longer an option. I have a young child and outside help one day a week. This job search is like riding a bike up a mountain with one leg.

As Dr. Phil would ask: How’s that working for you?

Not so well, Phil. It’s hard to keep the momentum when you have six days between efforts.Until I find work, I can only use FREE babysitters. So far, I’ve found one who’s willing to give one day a week. I’m grateful for the day but one day does not a job search make.

I live in the state with the highest unemployment in the nation. I’m trying not to let that get me discouraged. Much.

I remain hopeful. I joined a babysitting co-op. My little one starts part-time preschool next week. Something has to give.

Job hunting in 2009 is not the same as it was in the late ’80s and early 1990s. Then, it involved typewriters and telephones. It involved pieces of paper, bulletin boards, classified advertising sections of the newspaper and talking to friends and family.

No one I know seems to have any clear answer for today’s big hunt. Get a Web site, they say. So I did. Create your own personal brand, carve out your niche, they recommend.  Still working on that one. Get on social media and work that bitch daily. I do. Although sometimes it feels as empty, cold and meaningless as, well, working some bitch. Networking? I’ve got a steep learning curve on that one. Remember, I worked as a copy editor for the last decade.

Don’t even get me started on the frustration of online application processes. Do you know what happens when you spend 45 minutes completing an online application for a specific position and then the free Wi-Fi zone drops your Internet connection?

For the first time in my adult life, I’m not sure what my role is in the world. It isn’t enough for our bottom line for me to be a mother and caretaker of the family and home. It won’t be enough for my children if I’m gone all day and tired and stressed when I get home. I’m not sure I can return to the workaholic career treadmill I ran on for almost two decades.

Does society smile upon the mother who cares for her children at home? What about the mother who decided to put her family first for a while and now seeks work? Is she given the same chance as the mother who put her career first but lost her job for economic reasons?  The workplace seems to frown upon the mother who chooses her family over her career. Society also frowns upon the mother who does not take care of her children.

There are no easy answers to any of this. One day a week I try to figure it out.

This I call frustration.

Sing, dance and shout little prairie dog, you cannot compete with electronic toys.

I’m not in the habit of snapping pictures of strangers in public and posting them online. But this one, when I found it with my downloaded shots, just begged to be shared with the Internets. The reason I have this picture at all is because I was balanced on a railing, finger poised over the shutter button on my camera, waiting for my little Girl from the East to pop up in one of the viewing tubes.

We were at the prairie dog exhibit at the Detroit Zoo, which is a popular stopping point for the children and a great photo opportunity for parents. The exhibit enables visitors to get close to the perky little rodents of the West and play peek-a-boo with them as they dart in and out of their tunnels. Children, if they are inclined to do so, can descend a set of steps to an underground vestibule with three viewing tubes that place them eye-to-snout with the prairie dogs.

While I waited and waited and started to worry about my girl, I noticed this boy — the one to the far right in the picture.  I saw him at two points earlier in the day. At each encounter, this child held himself in the same way: silent, intently focused on this electronic game device, seemingly unaware of his surroundings. He was with another child, maybe a sibling, and a caregiver who appeared resigned to his behavior.

Unlike the other children, this boy did not look at the prairie dogs. He did not wave to familiar faces in the crowd. He did not tap on the tube or stick out his tongue. He didn’t flatten his nose to the glass or smear it up like all the other kids took turns doing.

Mild panic over the disappearance of my Girl from the East made me forget about this boy. I found my child crouched on the steps, tears welling in her eyes, waiting for me to rescue her. I felt bad that I’d pushed her into this situation before she was ready.

But after finding this picture, I’m glad I nudged her out of her comfort zone just a little. I wondered about this boy. Did he have  a medical condition? Did this explain his withdrawal and seemingly anti-social behavior? If so, then any further commentary is beyond the realm of my knowledge.

If not, I wonder why he is allowed to behave this way in public? Are his parents/caregivers tired of arguing with him about his electronic device usage? Is he going for a Guinness World Record?

It makes my heart sick when I attend a choir concert or other live performance and see parents in the audience allowing their children to send text messages and play video games. This example, of a child so engrossed in a video game that he doesn’t care about the living world around him, scares me.

Are we giving in too much ? Giving up? Are they just following our example?

Image via CrunchBase

I love social media.

I have two blogs. Two Twitter accounts. I’m on Facebook.  I belong to countless online communities.

So I understand the lure, the pull, the sexy side of it. Even though I have all this stuff, I know I don’t always use it in a productive way. This has bothered me a bit more lately, as other matters push for my attention. I’m trying to strike the right balance between doing things that are fun, doing things for professional benefit, and living in the real world.

I’m trying to keep a firm line in the sand between online and real life.

However, lately I’ve noticed more and more folks hauling out the iPhone or some other model of smart phone for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with phone calls. 

My teenage daughter and her QWERTY camera phone are a thorn in my side. Just today she sent me a picture message. Of what? Some stupid candid picture of me doing yard work. Great. It’s probably on her MySpace page by now.

Sure, we pay the bill. If she pushes our buttons too much she knows she loses the privilege of having it. We’ve threatened it and we’ve followed through.

But what to do with all the adults out there who don’t have that behavioral threat hanging over their social-media addled brains?

Which brings me to today’s installment of Bitchfest:

Unless it’s a social media event or work-related, put down the damn phone.

At back yard cookouts, weddings, family parties, children’s birthday parties, time and again I see one or two folks checking out of the moment and getting lost in cyberspace. I used to be ignorant. I thought they were checking their messages or calendars. Maybe they were on-call for work? Nope. They are Tweeting away or Facebooking or browsing around. 

I’ve watched a guest at a cookout sit and stare down at his phone nestled in his lap while his children splashed in the pool and his not-so-social-media-savvy host sat nearby. Last weekend I was at a party where a guest just could not stop talking about and using his iPhone. It was a child’s birthday party. Obviously he was bored.

His rudeness paved the way for a few others to haul out their smart phones. Let the pissing contest begin. Meanwhile, who’s watching the kids?

Let’s put it another way: If I pulled the book I’m reading out of my purse and opened it and began reading while seated at a party, would I be viewed as rude? If I brought my laptop to a wedding reception so that I could compose a blog post or check Facebook, would I get a few dirty looks?

Put down the damn phone.