When the POTUS Made Me Rethink My Escape Plan to Fiji

So, I'm in the middle of reading this Japanese book about tidying up, and I'm in the middle of doing a smash-up job of purging my home of crap -- books, papers, clothing, vases from florists, cheap jewelry, the stuff of the bourgeoisie. While it feels good to be so constructive, so diligent, it also makes me terribly emotional. Yes, I open up photo albums and flip through Christmas cards that I've saved from fifteen years ago. Sure, they're photo cards of people whom I love dearly, but what the hell? I put them back on the shelf. I had difficulty ridding myself of 30-year old paperbacks that I'd probably bought used but that stand for --- what? Youth, I guess, and beloved academia. My UNC days. My old boyfriends. My old husbands (relax, there's only one).  Here's a photo of a box that I put in the back of the car and then parked in the lot next to the Goodwill and bided (or is it bode?) my time unloading:

I read that Pocket Aquinas on a plane on my way to Europe for a grand backpacking tour with my friends Louise and Jan. During the summer of 1985. We had graduated from college. That's the kind of weirdo I was, apparently. That Aquinas was not a light-hearted guy. The Turgenev was from a Russian literature class I took my sophomore year -- back in the last century! I never took philosophy, so I imagine the Plato was me trying to educate myself. Good Lord. I felt emotional and maybe even a tad bit insane in my nostalgia.  There were a few books that I couldn't remember the reason why I had saved them. For instance, why Erich Fromm? If ever there was a boring class, it was Psych 101 which I'm assuming assigned this.

Even the title is enough to make you shudder and lay your head on your desk in defeat. The only thing interesting in that book was what was in the flyleaf -- written apparently by one of my Spanish-speaking lovers:

Funny, but I totally don't remember any Spanish-speaking lovers.

Maybe it's all the going through the childhood stuff of mine and my three children that is giving me the blues (the toys in the attic! I'll confess here, too, that I saved many of their teeth. Yes, teeth. When the tooth fairy took them, she deposited them in little bags in my underwear drawer) -- all that time passed and passing, how it's a flash of lightning and then again, in some respects, so very, very long. I don't miss the days when I was young or even when my kids were young because -- well -- because my life is a good one, and each stage is terribly interesting, if sometimes very difficult. I'm glad to be alive in 2015. That being said, the purging was also exhausting. Frankly, it made me want solitude, to be alone with my thoughts and not badgered by teenagers or obligated to change a diaper, take the girl for a walk, go grocery shopping or even wash my hair. I texted one of my best friends that I wanted to run away from everything and everybody. He texted me back that I had missed my chance robbing liquor stores with him and living a life on the lam. I told him that I was more interested in Fiji than a life of crime. My friend lives as austerely as a monk and is not tied to possessions in the least, so I wanted him to be proud of me, proud of my purging. Here's what our texts looked like:

Anyhoo.









I just watched the President rock the country in his State of the Union (is there anything more ponderous than that title?). My only caveat to his otherwise glorious speech was that while listing all the citizens of the country who deserved equality, he neglected the cognitively disabled. I know it was a slip -- at least I hope and think it was a slip -- but it made me wince and mumble under my breath. I hope it's not emblematic of the already extremely low status that the cognitively disabled hold. As for the poker-faced Tan Man and his White Man colleagues "across the aisle" -- well, who gives a flying foo foo for them? At best, I'll give them a charitable bless your heart. Despite my dread of listening to the droning Mitch McConnell and the Tan Man for another couple of years, I might put the Fiji trip off to watch our President hopefully rock through them with us.

Saturday Three-Line Movie Review

Begin Again

It took a sold-out afternoon matinee of another movie that I really wanted to see and had driven too far to see, that propelled me toward buying a ticket to a movie with the ubiquitous Kiera Knightly (whose acting chops, in my opinion, are minimal and who has that irritating quality of seeming always to be projecting an aren't I a beautiful and thin Actor?).  The presence of Mark Ruffalo, one of my favorites, and Catherine Keener, who makes me glad to be middle-aged,  looked to be redemptive, so I plunged in and was delightfully surprised by this quiet and not-always predictable little gem of a movie. As a down and out alcoholic music producer who drives an old beater Jaguar and lives estranged from his wife, struggling to be a decent father to his almost-lost teenaged daughter, Mark Ruffalo's character gave me that weak-in-the-knees feeling, and even Kiera's reedy singing voice was charming enough that I was lost, lost, blessedly in other people's stories.





More 3-Line Movie Reviews

The ImmigrantChef
Cesar Chavez
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Gloria
Labor Day 
Philomena

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

We sit here, stranded, 'tho we're all doing our best to deny it

At risk of same old, same old, all I've got this morning, Monday-style, is a desire to climb in a car with my friend Christy Shake of Calvin's Story and if not fly over the desert to oblivion, then over the sea to Bora Bora and never come back. There's nothing wrong in particular same old, same old, and visions of Bora Bora  never 'scape my mind. There's a song in there somewhere, but I think Bob Dylan already wrote it. But these visions ... they make it all seem so cruel.

I think I've included enough cultural references in three sentences; I have oodles of laundry to do and children in foster care to tend. Reader, what are you up to this Monday morning?

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

It's time to dig into the old posts and pull one out. I'm especially fond of this one and admit to periodically yearning to pack it up and go. Where would you go and what would you take?

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011

Go Bag

I have a very good friend who has what he calls a "go bag," a large backpack filled with all the items he deems necessary should he ever want to pick up and just go. Granted, he's single and middle-aged, unencumbered by small children, a spouse, family that lives nearby -- and the expression is one part fantasy and three parts how to stay sane when you're approaching the age of fifty and perhaps a little closer than you might imagine toward being utterly bored at your work and desirous of something different. For all my talk of living in the moment, and being grateful for what I have, etc. etc., I, too, fantasize about living a different life, starting over, picking up and going. Naturally, I don't wish to abandon my children but there's a frisson to be had imagining the release of all one's cares and possessions, hitting the open road, waking up to a truly different day. As I drive around Los Angeles, a city that I definitely love, as I stop at the post office to mail the catalog return, as I turn up the radio to drown out Sophie's constant humming, as I turn off the radio to better hear where the siren is coming from, as I watch my boys tumble out of the car and into the parking lot and on to sports camp, as I pull up my driveway, get Sophie out, bend down and pick up the circulars that litter the path to the house, step over the errant cleats and into the house -- well -- I imagine what might be in my go bag beyond the basic living necessities.

I'd bring a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I think, and a copy of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, maybe The Collected Poetry of William Butler Yeats and something by William Carlos Williams -- Asphodel, that Greeny Flower -- but then there's Emily Dickinson and William Blake, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje -- my go bag would be too heavy -- and anyway, where would I go?

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, via Gratefulness.org

What I think about

when I think about Ms. Chavez.

In all seriousness, I'm loathe to write this letter -- it hangs over me, though, like an obligation, not so much a sword of Damocles, but weighted with all the symbolism I put into it. I've said it before, but I need to go somewhere by myself for a bit, escape to a tropical island, sit on a lounge chair in front of sparkling, clear turquoise water, read several novels, have crazy sex with a kind stranger who then leaves me alone to my books and occasional dips in the water, interspersed with good food and citrusy vodka cocktails.

Sigh.

I guess I'll go and write that letter.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

Gustave Flaubert