Posts from — August 2012

I cleaned out the twins’ book bags at the end of the last school year. After I emptied their binders of their contents, I told them that I was going to put them back in their bag and they could reuse them the next school year. Because I’d feel like an asshole putting these perfectly good, albeit scuffed binders in a landfill even though I totally understood their crushed faces. One of the sole joys of school is decorating your Trapper Keeper.

Which is why I always wanted a solid coloured one (vs. one with a picture) — so I could write all over it in Sharpie. (I also wrote all over my Keds with ballpoint pen, starting with that rubbery ridge around the side of the shoe and slowly moving onto the canvas when I ran out of space.)

I usually started planning out my binder decorations in the summer. All binder decorations began with a solid base of a 50/50 split between inside jokes with friends (you know, the sort that you hoped someone in class would read on your binder and wonder what it meant and just how much fun you must be to write such crazy, amusing things) and song lyrics. If you planned early enough, before anyone had touched pen to Trapper Keeper plastic, you could coordinate the inside jokes across your binders. The same went for song lyrics. You didn’t want to have the same song lyrics — that would be stupid. But it was nice to have similar song lyrics. Such as two different Violent Femmes songs. Or maybe I’d go with The Smiths and another person would go with The Cure.

You never never never wrote the name of someone you were dating on your binder because (1) your parents wouldn’t buy you a new one if you broke up and you’d be stuck looking at that person’s name all year and (2) even if your parents were crazy enough to buy you a new binder because they felt sorry for you, you’d have to redo all of the song lyrics and inside jokes. So no names of boyfriends/girlfriends.

The other rule of the binder was that you never wrote on someone else’s binder. Writing on their pink rubber eraser — totally within the boundaries of decency. But never on their binder. Your binder was like your face; it was the face of your school supplies. (Secondary only to the paper bag book covers our mothers made for our textbooks which were also decorated within an inch of their life. I cannot even explain the horror of the year my mother purchased book covers instead of folding them out of old grocery store bags. The paper was glossy and everything smeared.)

No one wanted to save their binder because so much changed over the summer. The inside jokes changed. New songs were released. You saw movies and wanted to write a new list of actors and actresses names on the inner flap. Which is why I threw out the twins’ classroom dividers (in their school, each child gets a manilla “wall” to put up between desks during exams) that they had decorated with Junie B. Jones quotes and proclamations of love for the Beastie Boys. I knew they would want new ones come September to decorate with… something else. Who knows what will be classroom divider or binder-worthy this year? It’s been a long summer.

The twins’ binders are the sort with a plastic sleeve over the vinyl front, providing a small gap in which to slip a decorated piece of paper. I saved last year’s decorations and swapped them out for a new piece of blank paper (that I predict will be covered in doodles by October).

So sorry kids, you’re stuck with the same damn binders for a second year in a row. Get used to it. I suck.

How did you decorate your school binder/book covers/locker when you were little?

I love falafel in small quantities, but I hate the smell of fried foods, so I’ll never make them in the house.  It’s been over ten years since I fried something.  But my friend had a post on her Facebook wall about a baked falafel recipe and said they were fairly decent, so I decided to give them a try.  I made hummus and tehina and Israeli salad.

And homemade pita.

And then I pulled together her baked falafel recipe which turned out to quite good and barely made the kitchen smell.

The perfect moment actually came with the chopping of the salad. I was telling Josh a story about making salad with my aunt while in Israel, and the next morning, I woke to a friend request from her on Facebook. Which made the universe feel incredibly small and cozy; that you could think of someone halfway across the world and tell someone else a story about them, and that person would somehow sense that and friend you on Facebook.

For other perfect moments, visit Perfect Moment Mondays.

For people who want the recipes, the Israeli salad is just cucumbers, tomatoes, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper (amounts are fairly meaningless; it’s all done to taste).  The pita bread is King Arthur flour’s recipe.  The baked falafel is a modified version of this one.

And just to see if this food quirk is weird or common: do you like or dislike the way your kitchen smells after you fry food?

It has been summer of the fallen hero.

A few weeks ago, Jonah Lehrer resigned from the New Yorker after admitting that he had fabricated quotes said by Bob Dylan in his recent book which explored the concept of imagination.  This act of fraud followed on the heels of other acts of self-cannibalization, a sort of greyish writing crime that matters more and more in our pouring of Google juice.

You see, if I write a post for a site and they publish it, part of that contract says that I cannot publish that work elsewhere.  So if I lift my own copy — something I wrote, mind you — from site A and then repackage it with a few new sentences here and there for site B, I am self-cannibalizing, self-plagiarizing.  A long time ago, it was frowned upon in creative circles; a magazine paid for an article and they expected to receive and retain an original article.  But in this day-and-age, Google might punish a site for having duplicate content, so the self-cannibalism becomes not just a regurgitation of the mind but a mark against a site.

Publications stopped working with him.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is recalling his book.  And people everywhere asked why.  Why would someone who was clearly talented derail his own writing career?  Jonah Lehrer’s writing still would have been impressive if there had been less of it.  If instead of regurgitating an article, he had simply said, “you know what?  I have nothing to say at the moment.”  Or if instead of fabricating quotations from Bob Dylan, he had simply shaved off the fat lies in that book.  I’m sure Imagine still would have been an enjoyable and fascinating book to read if it were a few quotes shorter.

It really makes you wonder what makes someone take a risk like that?  Especially when he had the talent — he had it in excess — just perhaps not to the exact level of excess that he was aiming to present to the world.

*******

I used to enjoy teaching Knut Hamsun books.  He’s sometimes called the Father of Modern Fiction, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t heard of him.  People get squeamish when it comes to Knut Hamsun.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.  And then he became a Nazi sympathizer and wrote articles in support of Germany and sent his Nobel Prize to Goebbels.  He wrote a eulogy for Hitler after his death and there were treason charges which were later dropped.  And now people don’t totally know how they feel about Knut Hamsun.

He is clearly a talented writer.  There is probably no book that will affect your mood more than Hunger.  Reading that book is literally an interactive experience; there is nothing else like it.  And yet he has this craptastic personal life that extends beyond his Nazi affiliation.  How much should you care about the artist himself if the art is that good?

I mean, is it unethical to love a piece of art created by a murderer?  Or does becoming a murderer render your art anathema?  And where do we draw the line: what crime can a person get away with and we’ll still love their work, and what crime is too hideous to ignore in order to enjoy their art?

Even as a Jewish woman, I teach Hamsun because he clearly illustrates all the hallmarks of modern fiction.  I think it’s impossible to talk extensively about modern fiction without mentioning Hamsun, even though I’ve been in plenty of classes where I’ve seen it attempted.  I know plenty of people who refuse to read him.  But in the case of Hamsun, I’ve been able to separate out the writer from the book.  I’m not sure I’d always be successful in doing that; and I’m not sure how I feel about myself excusing Hamsun just because his books are so damn good.  I mean, I can think of plenty of actors who do not get a free pass to shitty things they did in their personal life, and I refuse to see their movies.  And yet I drop all that lofty ethical reasoning when it comes to Hamsun.

*******

I heard on Thursday night that Lance Armstrong wasn’t going to fight the doping charges anymore, and he would be stripped of his Tour de France wins and Olympic medal, barred from ever coaching in the Olympics or racing again.  As far as I know, he still maintains his innocence; it’s the antidoping agency that states he is guilty.  The refusal to fight could be a silent admission of guilt, or it could be an exasperated throwing up of hands in the air as if to say, “no medal is as important to me as my time and sanity.  Do what you choose, but I’m going to go live my life.”

If Lance Armstrong did dope, he’s just another Jonah Lehrer; a man with obvious talent, who would have excelled anyway, though perhaps not to the level he did excel by cheating.  And I’m thinking that there must be some pretty good evidence that he doped.  I’ve yet to read an article that maintains that he’s innocent.  Most are approaching the discussion from the fact that he is guilty, but it then asks the reader to disregard the doping and look at the bigger picture of what he has accomplished beyond biking.

Because unlike Lehrer, Lance Armstrong is symbolic of a movement, one that extends far past the individual.  No one can deny that his celebrity and success in bike racing raised awareness and research money for cancer.  He has made such a huge difference in the fight against cancer.

But what happens to Livestrong when the leader of the movement both lived strong through some moments in life and lived… well… maybe not so strong perhaps through others?  Wasn’t he inspiring because he had cancer and then won 7 Tour de France titles?  Would we have been drawn into his story if he had cancer but then placed twentieth in the Tour de France?  I’d argue that it would be just as impressive a feat, but I could see the general public needing the win in order to glom onto the story.  But who can really hold him up as a role model anymore?  The antidoping agency says that he cheated in order to get ahead.  Unlike magicians who let the audience know that while they’ll never reveal their secret, we’re all in on the fact that we’re watching a trick, Lance Armstrong maintained for years that what we were seeing was reality.  And it probably wasn’t.  And that sort of sucks.

The story of Lance Armstrong falls somewhere between Lehrer and Hamsun, somewhere between the individual and the collective.  Lehrer’s actions affect pretty much only himself (though obviously also affect individuals who read misinformation or publications who received regurgitated content) and Hamsun’s actions affect the whole of the world aching from a massive war.  And somewhere in between, Armstrong’s possible actions are both a statement about the self as well as the destruction of a hero; and the world’s psyche can’t really afford to lose its heroes even though it happens again and again and again.

Do you think you could still wear your Livestrong bracelet after this, or does the word seem a bit hollow now when you consider the possible actions of the founder?  Do the actions of Armstrong not matter when it comes to the bigger picture of encouraging strength, since the sentiment is good even if the speaker couldn’t follow it?

Personally, I think this is a Hamsun-like case for me.  Livestrong seems to be a great organization, and the actions of the founder shouldn’t get in the way of the important work they’re doing, which exists separate from Armstrong.  And yet I also understand anyone who is disillusioned, who feels as if they were cheated in buying into a story that wasn’t true.

It’s the end of summer; I can’t really deny that at this point.  We even have leaves crunching underfoot outside.

I am in the throes of “just one more.”  The ChickieNob always adds a few to whatever number I tell her is sufficient.  “We can stay for five minutes,” I’ll tell her, and she’ll counter, “how about ten?”  If I give her two cookies, she’ll ask for three.  She gets this quality from me.  If Josh is rubbing my back, I wait for him to stop and then I ask for him to get out just one more knot in my shoulder so I can extend the backrub by a few minutes.  If we are leaving an amusement park and I’ve negotiated one more ride, I also know that I will be asking for one more beyond that before we leave the gates.

I am a horder of experiences.  I always want more of anything pleasant.  And summer is pleasant; not having the twins at school is pleasant, having a loose bedtime is pleasant, dropping everything to go lie on the beach is pleasant.

Last weekend, we went to a baseball game.  I realized as we drove there that we were nearing the end of the season.  That we maybe had room for one more game, so I started campaigning for one more game, and Josh granted me one more game.  When we got to the park, it started raining and we crouched down in the food row, shelling peanuts onto a napkin and reading Harry Potter 3 aloud.  The rain kept coming down and the game was held off for hours.  Part of me wanted to go home, especially once this man dropped his damn container of barbecue sauce on my jeans and then insisted that it didn’t touch me (like hell it didn’t, old man, like hell it didn’t).  And then the other part of me was a mixture of cheapness (we paid a lot of money for those seats!) and moreness (just one more game!).  If they hadn’t played, that more I had just negotiated would be moved into ready position, and then I wouldn’t have gotten an actual one last game.

We stayed.  The Nats won.  We left the park with me trying to figure out how I could extend summer just a little bit more.  Like one more week, please?

*******

Can we speak for a moment about Chocolate Cherrios?  I bought them.  I became that woman who buys Chocolate Cheerios and then stares at the other pictures on the back of the box while she eats them, dreaming of Cheerio concoctions.  What would a bowl of half Dulce de Leche Cheerios and half Chocolate Cheerios taste like?  THERE ARE PEANUT BUTTER CHEERIOS.  People, there is a whole world of flavoured Cheerios that I never knew about until a fateful trip to the cereal aisle this summer.

Back in my day, there were two kinds of Cheerios: plain and honey nut.  Plain was your everyday Cheerio; honey nut was when you were feeling fancy.  But now there are something like 12 Cheerio flavours.  Do children today know how good they have it?

The twins actually won’t eat them.  The Wolvog doesn’t eat any dried cereal, and the ChickieNob isn’t willing to forfeit dessert to have them. (I’m not willing to let them be her breakfast.)  Good.  More Chocolate Cheerios for me.  I’ve been eating them as a snack before bed.  Oh my G-d, they are so good.  They are so insanely good.

I think they must put drugs in them because why else would a woman in her late thirties be writing about Cheerios in this manner?

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “I Just Feel It” (For the Love of Baby Liam)
• “Another Sports Analogy” (Something Out of Nothing)
• “Deleting Your Blog is Like Going Back on a Promise” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, St. Elsewhere
• “Friday Night Leftovers” (Life As I Know It)
• “Irrelevant” (Mrs. Spit… Still Spouting Off)
• “Thank Yous” (Stumbling Gracefully)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Happiness at the Core has a beautiful post about being asked about her necklace which contains her daughter’s footprints.  She explains: “I began to wonder why I was so relieved when someone didn’t ask about my necklace.  I love talking about Maya so wouldn’t I welcome questions about my necklace?”  It is a post about holding her daughter, who died shortly after birth, close to her heart, and finding out that the right words came to her when she needed them.

Return to Go has a post about a trip to find a cabin that appeared in a book.  The book mentioned a cabin in the woods where people became pregnant, and she held this knowledge in the back of her head until this moment when they happened to be on a trip in the very same area where this cabin appears AND she was ovulating.  You’ll need to click over to discover if they ever found the cabin.

Writing for Life has a post that made me smile about meeting up with two bloggers and riding home feeling embraced.  She writes: “Again it’s about recognition, belonging, understanding and support. Also, we didn’t have to talk about all things infertility and loss all day long, we already knew each others’ stories. Of course it came up but we also got to know different sides of each other with a promise to meet again someday, hopefully soon.”  I love it when people pop through the screen, and you meet them in the face-to-face world.  Embraced is the perfect word to describe those connections.

Lastly, Something Out of Nothing has a post set on the nearby college campus.  As the campus springs back to life with the new semester, she writes, “It made me think, One day, Hubby and I will be dropping our child(ren) off at college, helping them get settled into their dorm room. They’ll be making new friends, coming home for the holidays, venturing into their adult lives.  And it felt so very far away.  But then, so does holding a newborn in my arms.”  It’s a post that while tempered by reality is filled with hope, filled with possibilities.

The roundup to the Roundup: My awful habit of “one more, please?” Chocolate Cheerios are insanely good.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 17th and August 24th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

We’re about two months away from breast cancer awareness month, which means that we’re starting to see those cryptic Facebook messages that ask women to place the name of a fruit as their status (BLUEBERRY=single; PINEAPPLE= it’s complicated; RASPBERRY= I can’t/don’t want to commit; APPLE=engaged; CHERRY=in a relationship; BANANA=married; AVOCADO=I’m the better half; STRAWBERRY=can’t find Mr. Right; LEMON=want to be single; RAISIN=want to get married to my partner) or write I am going to X for Y months or write their bra colour or…

And you’re confused right, which is sort of the point of this post: if you are confused, this isn’t raising awareness.

Awareness is by definition a straightforward disseminating of information in order to make one knowledgeable.  One cannot be knowledgeable if no knowledge is being imparted.  For instance, if I wanted to ensure that people do a self-breast exam, I would write a post like the one Dameazon wrote a few weeks ago after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  If I wanted to be coy and make people cranky, I would write a random piece of fruit as my Facebook status and get people to Google around and find a post like this which explains to them that their Facebook friend is participating in an offensive Facebook meme.  And yes, it is offensive because we’re talking about cancer and cancer isn’t something that benefits from games or coy memes.

And it’s offensive because the note itself excludes men (the point, actually, is to exclude men and drive them wild with curiosity!  “Two years ago we had to write the color of our underwear on our wall. Men wondered for days at what was going on with random colors on girls’ walls.”).  You know, men, who also develop breast cancer.  And because it’s treated as a publicity stunt. (“Last time, the underwear game was mentioned on TV, let’s see if we get there with this one!”).  Oh, and because the message always asks you to “send to all your girlie friends,” and by default, anything that calls my adult friends “girlies” is offensive.

By which I mean that I don’t take offense at the people who play, not really thinking about what they’re doing when they cryptically update their status; we all post things that we reflect upon later and realize were pointless.  I take offense at the people who create this meme year after year.

But please, don’t post.  Don’t write a fruit in your status bar or say where your purse is or the colour of your bra or that you’re moving somewhere or that you’re pregnant.  If you truly want to raise awareness for breast cancer this year,

• Post a link to Dameazon’s post and encourage women to do self-breast exams.
• Post a link to Toddler Planet’s post about the lesser known inflammatory breast cancer (Toddler Planet died earlier this year from IBC).
• Post a link to WebMD’s page on breast cancer.
• Post a link to the Mayo Clinic’s page on breast cancer.
• Or feel free to share this post if you want a link to all four sites at once.  And let me know in the comment section if there are other great breast cancer awareness posts out there that should be on this list that are written by people who have breast cancer and are using their blogs to educate.

Those posts have the potential to spread awareness.  Use your Facebook status wisely.