A Post from the Very Worst Actress in the World
I’ve been considering self-hosting the blog, mostly so I can upload audio files and bore you with numerous recordings of myself playing the Irish Penny Whistle. I rock that whistle hard. In fact, I keep it on my desk so I can play myself a little Tchaikovsky when I’m trying to think. Have you ever heard Tchaikovsky played on a whistle that can only range 8 notes? It’s really an amazing sound.
In debating the pros and cons of this (remember, I move very slowly. I only got a header a year ago, over two years into blogging. It could take me three more decades to get to self-hosting status), I told Josh that we could finally have our contest and ask all of you to be the judges of which one of us does the best British accent.
I think it’s me.
I can (1) keep it going a lot longer without dropping it. As in, I can spend the whole evening pretending I’m part of the British royal family, a cousin who just happens to have moved to the Washington, D.C. suburbs and (2) keep it softer. I don’t go for Liverpool or the brogue of the Fens. I go for a very light London accent–nothing flashy, nothing too far off the beaten path.
I was climbing into bed, excitedly telling him that we could finally put our long-running debate to rest when he dryly reminded me that my mother had told him that night at dinner that two children were cut from the hundred who auditioned for a performing arts camp when I was little. As in, 108 children audition and 106 children were accepted.
And I was one of the two.
Methinks I don’t like those odds so much anymore.
And I made an exclusive dance troupe when I was older that performed in many places including the Kennedy Center. I wasn’t one of the principal dancers in the troupe and I was often shunted to small roles in infrequently performed dances, but still, I made that troupe.
So can you imagine how G-d awful I must be as an actress to be able to sing and be able to dance and still be one of only two children cut from a performing arts camp?
I was given a single chance in the dance troupe to perform one of the main numbers when another girl was going to miss a performance. I took over her role and practiced my part incessantly, usually wearing her pink and grey costume that went with the dance as I practiced in front of the mirror. I was in love with myself.
The performance was held at the Kennedy Center. They had set up a stage in the main lobby, the one where people mill about near Kennedy’s head snacking on overpriced M&Ms during intermission. We were performing as part of a cultural celebration type thing…actually, I’m not really sure why we were there or what else was going on. My information was to show up at this particular stage, go on, dance my dance, and exit.
There was no orchestra pit between the stage and the audience as there is in the main theater. Which I thought was a good thing because I’ve had trouble with disorientation and orchestra pits in the past. I did piano guild for a few years when I was little and an assessment I went to at age six was held at a university campus. I played my pieces on the stage with the judges sitting in the audience. I was supposed to enter from the side stairs, play my pieces, bow, and exit from the side stairs. Instead I entered from the side stairs, played my pieces, stood up in confusion, peed in my underpants due to fear, started walking towards the orchestra pit while the adult judges jumped up waving their hands and shrieking “no,” stood on the edge and started crying because I couldn’t figure how to get off the stage, and then went home to change my dress.
Despite the lack of orchestra pit, I reminded myself several times not to pee in my dress at the Kennedy Center performance.
So, I’m in the wings at the makeshift Kennedy Center stage and the music swells and I trot out on stage, pausing to execute a gorgeous cherkessia in unison with the other girls. It is this wonderfully raucous dance, and I was getting great height with the jumps, the skirt of my dress billowing out like a sail as I flew through the air. And the other girls were floating by me, leaping and turning, our arms like the bare branches of a pomegranate tree.
We fell into a line and what should have happened was that my body dipped down, my arms held aloft behind me, birdlike, for a count of four. Instead, while all the other girls did that, I ran forward to the edge of the stage, jumping directly to the step that would follow–four running steps forward, kick, and four running steps back.
That, obviously, wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to be back with the other girls who were still counting their four seconds of bird arms instead of dancing alone to the front of the stage. My foot was also not supposed to connect with the little boy’s face that was beaming at the edge of the stage.
I remember thinking to myself as I kicked, “where is everyone else?” my body twisting instinctively backwards to check where my co-dancers were on the stage. The boy screamed in pain and the audience gasped in shock because to everyone else in the room, it appeared that I gleefully left the line of dancers to break off on my own and kick a small child in the face. I ran backwards, still following the next part of the dance while the other girls ran forward, bird-arms over, to complete the real next step while simultaneously checking on the child who was sobbing on the floor.
That was my last performance with the troupe.
who can’t, teach”?
I shouldn’t even be allowed to teach.
Though I still am considering self-hosting so we can give you two samples of our terrible British accents for our accent throwdown. And despite my mantle as the worst actress ever, a face-kicking dancer, and a mostly on-key singer, I am actually a very good drawer.
No, really, I am.
September 23, 2009 43 Comments
The Savages' Wrong Embryo Transfer and What We Can Actually Learn About IVF
The headline on MSNBC read “Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo,” which begs the response: “Media Distracts with Wrong Headline.” It’s not just the misuse of the word “implant” instead of “transfer,” which overpromises science’s capabilities (and regardless of the you say to-mah-to, I say to-may-to debate we’ve had over the years about improper vocabulary, my stance is that this is important because it is just one more way misinformation about infertility is spread to the general public. Embryos can only be transferred, not implanted, hence why IVF is not a sure thing despite what some people believe when they tell you that “you can always do IVF!”), it’s that once again, the general public isn’t getting a story about what has been happening in clinics across America 364 days this year–what they’re hearing is the one case that happened instead of the thousands of success stories.
My heart goes out to the two couples at the center of this situation. I cannot imagine the position the Savages are in, going through IVF, emotionally focused on creating a life that they would raise and discovering that through someone else’s mistake, they were pregnant, but their two choices were to either terminate or carry to term for another couple. It’s literally impossible to imagine.
Yet I take issue with this thought: “They are telling their story in the hopes that no other couple ever has to go through what they have endured.”
The reality is that telling their story does not prevent human error. This could happen again. Every clinic across America could think about it every second of every day and it could still happen again because humans make mistakes. Even machines make mistakes. It isn’t the happiest thought in the world when you’re trusting your body to a doctor, but prior to this point, clinics never operated in a willy-nilly fashion, leaving unlabeled vials on the counter.
My clinic was merticulous, labeling everything with a number and cross-checking every gamete that exited the body with the owner. My husband had a number on a card he held, the semen sample had a number on it, and they would read off the numbers, over and over and over again, triple checking that even with an IUI, the correct sample was used. And my clinic is not special. This is happening every day in every clinic across America. They have protocols, they have safety nets, they have systems.
And with every safe guard in place, it still happened.
It’s not that I don’t believe that Americans should hear this story and discuss it. By all means, it is newsworthy because it is outside the norm. The problem is that the average American isn’t having that thought drilled into their head. With IVF barely on their radar, they hear yet another tale of IVF gone wrong, treading on the heels of Nadya Suleman. The message they will take away from this is not that IVF is a godsend for millions of Americans (not all of the 7.3 million American diagnosed with infertility will utilize IVF or even IUI, but those who do are thankful that procedures exist that can circumvent medical issues that impede conception), but that once again, IVF is dangerous. This is what y’all get when you go playing G-d and messing with nature.
If I owned the airwaves, I would tell Americans this:
Procedures such as IUI, IVF, and ICSI, are necessities–not choices–for people with certain medical limitations who wish to build their families. That fertility treatments are not evil or selfish or prone to error any moreso than medical procedures such as blood transfusions, organ transplantation, or hernia surgery. When humans are involved, mistakes can happen, as much as we hope and pray that they don’t and have every right to ask for compensation when human error rather than medical realities affect our lives.
That 7.3 million Americans are currently diagnosed with infertility and while it may not be life-threatening, it is certainly lifestyle threatening. Infertility is not caused from waiting too long to procreate or stress or not praying hard enough–infertility is an umbrella term for a series of medical issues that can affect men or women (infertility is about 40% male factor, 40% female factor, with the remaining 20% comprised of a combination of factors or unexplained infertility) who wish to build their family.
And that while other options for family building do exist, it is no one’s place to tell another person how they should build their family any moreso than it would be appropriate for you to decide or even suggest to someone else where they should live, who they should marry, what job they should hold, or any other lifestyle choice. No one enters into treatments lightly, without having researched options and weighed choices.
That there are around 3 million children created via IVF walking around on this earth right now, and that if we’re going to tell the story of the Savages, we need to also balance out the news by reminding the public that in all but a handful of cases, IVF fails not due to human error, but to the body’s error. And that when it succeeds, it creates children who have even gone on to build families of their own.
September 21, 2009 42 Comments
Paring Back
One night, my freshman year of college, I went to hear a Buddhist monk speak. Part of the talk was about the freeing quality of owning less. It made no sense–the less you have, the more you’ll feel in control? Except that my life felt quite out of control at that point, so I was willing to give it the old college try.
I went back to my dorm room and dumped most of my possessions in the trash room down the hall. I removed every picture from my wall, gave away any book not necessary for my studies, and tossed out dozens of small items I had accumulated in the first six months of college.
I had a lot of regrets afterwards. I also did feel more in control in my life, less cluttered. There was thinking space.
I can’t make myself get into one of these decluttering states–they mostly come to me when I’m very anxious, but when they come, I always ride out the impulse, using it to reorganize, pare back, give away anything unneeded. I accumulate so much stuff. Drawers of tiny play-doh samples and twelve pairs of scissors and used birthday candles. I have dishes we never use, broken measuring spoons, a can of mandarin oranges we will never eat. I have more books than a library. I literally have several thousand books, a large chunk of which could be donated and put to better use.
I have been decluttering for a few weeks now. In the process, I’ve also been redecorating. One of the strange things about this house is that there are no doors on the closets. Every closet opening is a strange size and we need to get new doors cut to fit the space, except we’ve never gotten around to it. It occurred to me that I could put up a curtain in place of a door and buy myself more time to work on that project.
So Lindsay and I headed to IKEA for furniture and decorative items. We were debating between two choices–a white curtain with a black pattern that would have been safe in my white and black kitchen or an orange curtain that would make me happy every time I looked at it. Even though my head was telling me “white curtain white curtain don’t be a fool, Melissa, white curtain” my very loud heart simply said, “orange.” I went with orange.
It is not perfect, nor does it look very grown-up, but as Josh said, “it is whimsical and therefore, it’s you. And the orange is us. It makes me happy when I sit down to eat.” It does make me very happy. We all just like to sit in there now and talk at the table.
On the theme of decluttering, we went to the river for tashlich, which is part of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We stood at the river’s edge and figuratively threw into the water all that we didn’t wish to take with us into this upcoming year. A soul’s decluttering. Gone is the jealousy, the self-doubt, the bitter feelings. I mean, until they bubble up again. You know, since clutter usually returns.
In addition to telling us what has happened in your life in the last month, if you could grab an uninterrupted day to declutter and reorganize one room of your house, which would it be? Until this week, it would have been my kitchen. Now it’s my living room. What I would give to get rid of the huge pile of papers in the corner…
As always, it has been about a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.
I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.
So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar as someone who found this space through IComLeavWe), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.
For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.
So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.
September 20, 2009 57 Comments
Friday Blog Roundup
I think I’m becoming more grouchy in my old age. Someone sent me a blog post about Internet safety and I got all crotchety and up-in-arms, spewing and sputtering and was about to email the author of the blog because her book was on my to-read list and now it is off my to-read list because I’m just not impressed with her lack of actual discourse and her argument-style of name-calling when I realized how I’d feel if I got that email (and I have gotten that email). The “I’m not going to read your book” or “I’m not going to read your blog” because…
And it made me click away from email and look at pictures of puppies because life is just too short and nothing can be gained by telling someone why you’re not reading them anymore. Usually.
(I mean, what is the point? Do I think in writing it that she’ll gasp and say, “Mel won’t read my book now? I should change the way I view the world and write about it because I must be a terrible person if I don’t agree with her.” Truly, if you don’t like something you’re reading, just click away).
Which brings us to a post from Citizen of the Month this week that started out about one thing and then swings into another but then really, without verbalizing it, comes back to the first point which is that when someone unfollows you, are they making a statement about YOU, and how well do they actually know you and what are they basing it on?
As I walked through BlogHer, I constantly heard from people, “you are exactly as I imagined you would be.” I am like a skin-and-bones version of my blog, except perhaps shorter than you expect. And I always smell like shampoo because my hair takes so long to dry that it’s usually still damp when I go for my next shower 24 hours later. What you see is pretty much what you get except that I’m probably a bit more brash on my blog than I am if you meet me face-to-face. I mean, on my blog I’m like LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY VAGINA! And in the face-to-face world, I’m more like let me tell you about my vagina. Please?
The way things differ is mostly the stories I tell which are fit for the Internet and the stories I tell in the face-to-face world because I have no filter. By which I mean that my face-to-face friends and family tend to get a 360 degree Melissa and the Internet gets a 180 degree Melissa because there are things I can’t share online because they cross into someone else’s privacy or because they’re not thoughts I want to live on forever in the archived crevices of the blogosphere or because you would think soooooooooo much less of me if I told you things like how I tried to trade time with my Kitchenaid for a friend to come over and catch the cricket in the laundry room this week.
So, the online me isn’t the total me, but it’s somewhat close. So when people unfriend, unfollow, deblogroll me, should I be offended that they rejected me? Since a blog (or Twitter or Facebook) is like seeing a memoir written in real time? On one hand, there are so many reasons why someone would unfollow, reasons that have nothing to do with the person at all (time, a desire to avoid a certain topic, the fact that the person’s blog continuously crashes another person’s computer). Would you want to know why someone stopped reading your blog or is ignorance bliss?
If I’m not close with the person at all, my tendency is to simply stop reading. If they asked me, I’d give them an honest answer, but I don’t believe we need to tell every single person why we do every single thing. If I’m close with the person, I do explain why. I’ve never stopped reading a person’s blog, but I did have to unfriend someone on Facebook because they were crossing my privacy lines and after sending two emails about it, sent a third apologizing and saying while I’d love to remain in touch with them off Facebook, they weren’t making me comfortable on Facebook.
In the case of the original blog I mentioned, I wondered if I could like the writer and hate the blog. And really, the answer is sort of no. I thought she came across as an idiot on her blog and I’m fairly certain that unless she is only a poor writer and can formulate arguments verbally, I’d also dislike talking to her in the face-to-face world. Which is to say, that if you like a person’s blog, do you think it extends that you would like the person? And is picking which blogs to read sort of the same as picking friends in the face-to-face world? Sometimes we have something in common, sometimes we admire the person, sometimes we have a shared history. So here’s another question: Do you read anyone you think you wouldn’t like in the face-to-face world?
So, to sum up because I ask a lot of questions:
- When someone unfollows you, are they making a statement about YOU, and how well do they actually know you and what are they basing it on?
- Would you want to know why someone stopped reading your blog or is ignorance bliss?
- If you like a person’s blog, do you think it extends that you would like the person? And do you read anyone you think you wouldn’t like in the face-to-face world?
Oh, and one more question:
The Weekly What If: What if I met you in the face-to-face world–would you be like I imagine you to be from your blog, or does your writing only reflect a small element of your total personality? How close is the skin-and-bones you to the online you?
On the other hand, this month’s IComLeavWe list is set to close on Monday because that’s when the commenting extravaganza for the month kicks in. So if you haven’t joined along and wish to, here’s your last chance for this month.
An Offering of Love has a powerful post about how the words of others can mix with that heady cocktail of pregnancy hormones, set against a backdrop of personal loss, to create a pool of fear. She writes: “As much as I try to fight it and to enjoy this pregnancy, the raw memory of losing my first pregnancy is always there, lurking, waiting to cripple me. What would it be like to be one of those women who gets pregnant easily and never doubts for a minute that she will deliver a healthy baby 9 months after seeing those double lines?” It is a post that many will be able to relate to as they read her words.
Baby, Borneo or Bust has a post about a roadside memorial.
She writes: “Somebody spent a lot of time and money building this green memorial, with its blue garden ball cross. It meant quite a lot to someone, to build it so slowly, to tear things out and put new things in, to make it just so.” It is a bizarre little story, one that begs a longer short story to be written about it, imagining the life of the person both creating the garden and perhaps, if there is one, the one that was lost.
My Pathway to Motherhood has a post about hope. Namely, the cycle that almost wasn’t and now is and writes: “I could have dealt with no transfer and a complete lack of hope, but with this hope seeping in.. I really don’t think I can handle a negative, and I’m so scared of this hope.” It is a beautiful post about the ebb and flow of hope; what that little flame can do to your emotions.
Lastly, Please Give Me Back My Heart has a post that asks an important, heartfelt question: “How can I wish for my first baby when I know that if she were here, my second baby would not be who he is?” It is a question that many babylost parents grapple with–the child that isn’t here and the child who is and how the two are connected sometimes. The post is the wish of a mother that her two children not be mutually exclusive; that she could have them both right here, right now.
The roundup to the Roundup: Eh…I’ll post all the questions here too:
- When someone unfollows you, are they making a statement about YOU, and how well do they actually know you and what are they basing it on?
- Would you want to know why someone stopped reading your blog or is ignorance bliss?
- If you like a person’s blog, do you think it extends that you would like the person? And do you read anyone you think you wouldn’t like in the face-to-face world?
- The Weekly What If: What if I met you in the face-to-face world–would you be like I imagine you to be from your blog, or does your writing only reflect a small element of your total personality? How close is the skin-and-bones you to the online you?
Last chance to sign up for IComLeavWe, Blogger Bingo pushed back a few weeks (and sign-up still open), and lots of great blog posts to read. With my new grouchy exterior, I’m going to go grrrrrrrrrrrrr a lot and move about like Frankstein. You know, snarling at everyone and anyone.
September 18, 2009 40 Comments
The 70th Circle Time: The Show and Tell Weekly Thread
Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.
Let’s begin.
Please don’t ask how the topic of Christmas came up in September, but it did and with it came out one of the truths–the only reason the twins want Christmas is for the cookies. “Cookies,” I said, “we could make Rosh Hashanah cookies. Christmas doesn’t have the monopoly on cookies.”
“Could we do it tomorrow?” the ChickieNob asked. “Do you know how to make cookies like that?”
“Of course,” I lied. And then I scurried downstairs to write my favourite Christian baker and begged her to save me. She sent me two recipes, wished me good luck, and sent me into the jaws of death–a Martha Stewart recipe–with only this advice: “you have to chill the shit out of it.”
The cookies may have taken over our life–stretched from 8 a.m. until almost 4 p.m. in terms of construction and decorating (seriously, I don’t know how Christian people do this year after year. Give me an unruly challah dough to braid any day of the week)–but the twins were so excited. And when we got to the end of the batch, their immediate question was which shapes we’d make tomorrow.
Er…
A recreation of Nietzsche’s nothingness? Does Wilton make nihilist cookie cutters?
When the twins were 4 1/2, I started permitting them to use my cake decorating and candy equipment on their own with my supervision. I filled their pastry bags and folded their hand properly around it and then they went to town. In their early minutes, the cookies looked like this…
But they quickly moved into a stage I loving called sugar chaos…
While they were decorating those, I made a few pomegranate cookies with the leftover dough. An old friend bought the mold for me during treatments. Maybe it was a few months before we started treatments? She knew that pomegranates were a fertility symbol in Judaism and that I loved the shape. It felt nice to remember her while I pressed these.
What are you showing today?
Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.
| 1. Weebles Wobblog 2. Infertility Podcast & Blog 3. Parenthood for Me 4. My Pathway to Motherhood 5. The Bear and The Comedian 6. Building Heavenly Bridges 7. Becoming Whole 8. SSV 9. Hobbit- ish Thoughts & Ramblings |
10. Birch and Maple 11. The Liminal Universe 12. Dragondreamer’s Lair 13. May I Say Something? 14. edenland 15. Delenn 16. Tales of my Thirties 17. In Due Time 18. Once A Mother |
19. Wistfulgirl’s World 20. Confessions of an (Infertile) Shopaholic 21. The Infertile Sushi- loving Princess 22. Our Journey, but not our plan… 23. My Life in Stirrups 24. human, being 25. In One Ear |
- If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Wednesday night (or any time between Wednesday morning and Friday night), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item. The list opens every Wednesday night and closes on Friday night.
- You must mention Show and Tell and include a link back to this post in your post so people can find the rest of the class. This spreads new readership around through the list. This is now required.
- Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink for the post via the Mr. Linky feature (not your blog’s main url–use the permalink for your specific Show and Tell post).
- Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week. And everyone loves a good “ooooh” and “aaaah” and to be queen (or king) of the playground for five minutes so leave them a comment if you can.
- Did you post a link and now it’s missing?: I reserve the right to delete any links that are not leading to a Show and Tell post or are the blogging equivalent of a spitball.
- If you want it…
I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to the archives.
September 16, 2009 25 Comments
