weekly challenge: pick the best pictures from your 2012. have the pics tell everyone about your year.
I shot all of these with my iPhone 4S and a few I tweaked with filters on instagram.
The event of a thread is made up of many crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer’s hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag… – Ann Hamilton
The exhibit at the Armory on Park Avenue and 66th is hard to explain.
There are pigeons, swings, talking paper bags, a writer, a reader, a listener, more…
The kids did not want to go but were glad they went.
It must be experienced. Laying on your back watching the billowing silk above. Hypnotizing.
I had one insight which is this: it is not work that makes the world go (the curtain lift), it is 
play.
Play is the engine.
H. discovered that our swing was not pulling the curtain alone. He spotted this when we were looking down from above. Our swing was inextricably, almost invisibly, connected to someone else’s swing who was also making the curtain dance.
Through play.
I found out about this exhibit while scanning my Facebook feed. Thanks, Yris Bilia! You made it look so fun. And it was.
I didn’t really like the Hobbit. Like everyone else in the world, I loved the earlier Lord of the Rings.
I loved the book. I have memories of sitting on my father’s lap and listening with my brothers as dad read to us on the back patio in Skokie, Illinois on a warm summer night.
But the movie left me with one burning question:
Do orcs, dwarves, hobbits, ogres reproduce through spawning? This movie was like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves without Snow White.
I know men rule the world, but really. Really?
No wonder Middle-earth is so violent. There are no women with whom to partner, make love, reason, journey alongside, learn from, share.
Last I checked women and girls made up half of the world’s population and half of the movie-going audiences. Why dis us this way?
The only woman in this film was the lovely Cate Blanchett who is really more of a spirit than a body. While the men can eat and travel and fight, her special talent is that she disappears. Perfect for this movie.
The movie was clearly made for and by men and boys. It unfolds like a video game — now that you’ve surpassed the scary tiger level, you move on to the orc level, and if you move on from that level, you may proceed to the next level. Blah. Blah. Blah.
I do like a subgenre of movies where the hero (always male) doubts himself and then finds he has within him what he needed all along. (Like Glory! An all-male movie too, but brilliant!) And I guess this journey towards courage in the face of self-doubt motif happens for Baggins on his journey. But I was hoping for something more.
Even Skyfall had a few juicy women characters like Dame Judi Dench and Naomie Harris.
If you are looking for a holiday blockbuster, go to see Les Misérables, a fun adventure for girls and boys, men and women.
Yesterday I posted on Facebook:
putting together paperwork for the kids to get on Child Health Care Plus, NY State health insurance — forms are so lengthy, so complicated! It’s confusing for the two of us, both with advanced degrees. How do people do this?
A few friends suggested I blog about the experience. I would kind of first like to see if we got approved, before I offer any summary of my experience. It’s not unthinkable that I messed up something. But until I hear if all of the paperwork’s in, let me tell you: The application is 17 pages long!
There were opportunities on the application to provide more than was asked for. For example, if your child has no Social Security number, you have to provide proof of residency. Or maybe you needed to provide proof of New York State residency any way. Being the overachiever that I am, my instinct was to throw everything at them for fear of not providing enough. I provided a utility bill as proof.
I did call the number on the application to get clarification on another question. No one answered the call after 25 minutes on hold and a promise of “a customer service representative will be with you in a moment.” I tried another number and got to ask my question.
Could I walk the application in somewhere to get it in by the 20th of the month (today)? (The 20th is the cut off date to provide coverage on the 1st.) No, it turns out, I had to overnight the application to Albany. I dreaded going to the post office less than a week before Christmas, but I used the automated machine. It was fast and easy.
There are agencies and communities centers listed on the application where one could turn for help. But, rugged and proud individualist that I am, I thought I should be able to handle the paperwork on my own. Besides, I have a Master’s degree, how hard could it be? Hard.
The good news is that the cost, if all goes well, will be about $45 per child per month. This is wonderful and much more affordable than the $1,700 or so that COBRA would cost to cover the family. We would only need this Child Health Care Plus coverage for a couple of months until my small business gets off the ground and one of Chris’s unions, Screen Actor’s Guild, kicks in for the family.
My husband Chris is on disability because of his Parkinson’s Disease and he is covered with Medicare, so that just leaves me. I have no health insurance for a couple of months.
On Tuesday, one of my creative writing middle school students got close to say, “Look! I have Pink Eye.”
“Hey,” I felt like saying, “Stay away from me if you are sick. But just for a couple of months.” Now, I’m wondering if my eye’s looking a little red. Yes, so it begins, two months of hypochondria until I get back on a family health insurance plan. Let’s hope I got the kids on their plan.
Today’s daily prompt is Write a letter to your mom. Tell her something you’ve always wanted to say, but haven’t been able to.
A few days ago, the prompt was:
A writer once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
If this is true, which five people would you like to spend your time with?
My five people include dear ole mum, so this blog post fulfills two daily prompts.
I know many wives would put their husbands on their top five people. And Chris and I do have a great thing going, but, let’s be honest, the Parkinson’s Disease has really put a cramp in our romantic lives. We still are great co-parents and movie-going comrades.
Speaking of movies, next week our Screen Actors Guild special screening, Chris and I will see Les Mis and the Hobbit. How does anyone ever work full-time when there are so many amazing movies to see every damn week?
I have three persistent worries. And these are:
My sources of optimism:
2012 is drawing to a close (3 weeks left!). What would you put in this year’s time capsule?
I would put:
handful of sand from Siesta Key beach. The kids and I had such a restorative time hanging out at the prettiest beach in the world last spring. Great times, too, with my bro, Nicole, dad, and Marty.
All of the cousins. Being with my four siblings and their kids for Thanksgiving was definitely the highlight of 2012.
2012 was a very good year.
The boys were fishing and my creative writing students were supposed to be writing. It was a surprisingly gorgeous December Day, balmy.
We were discussing plot. This is tough to teach, especially for me. I like to meander in my writing. For guidance I consulted my trusty NaNoWriMo young writers’ curriculum guide. There, the teacher offered a suggestion to start the discussion of plot with a viewing of the final few minutes of an episode of SpongeBob Square Pants. Apparently, SpongeBob does plot well.
But instead of watching the cartoon, we went for our neighborhood walk to our secret spot in Central Park, a most beautiful little cul de sac where rock meets pond meets beauty.
This is where we met our young fisherman.
They waited.
They waited.
They hooked a big fish.
My eight Middle School writers stood in a circle around the two little fishers. They reeled a fish in. It was a mighty big carp.
I would not have known the kind of fish, but one of the boy’s babysitters told me.
“How old are the boys?”
“Eleven,” she said.
We watched the boys pose for camera phone photo shots with the fish. The fish seemed to be tiring.
One of my writers yelled, “Throw it back!”
“We will,” the boy said.
And he wrestled with the hook in the gaping mouth.
“I’ve never seen anyone fish before,” another of my writers said.
“Hurry! Throw it back!” the girl said.
“We will!” The boy was getting angry. The hook was not coming out of the downcast mouth.
Up to this point, students, you are witnessing, in literary parlance, “Rising Action.”
Now, we have reached the moment of “Climax.”
My creative writing kids yelled, “Throw it back!” I offered to help remove the hook. Thank God, the boys ignored me. But the boys could not ignore the yelling. And one boy, attempting to remove the hook from the carp’s mouth, looked up and spit out a load of curse words at my students, including a line about how my kids were making his life “a living hell.”
Then he went back to work, finally freeing the fish from the hook.
He set it free. The fish wagged itself back into the murky Central Park lake or pond.
The boy asked the nanny for a napkin to clean his dirty hands. She had none. I handed him a tissue from my pocket.
“Thank you,” he said, “And I’m sorry I called your kids so many names. I apologize.”
“It’s okay,” I said. (And I later told my kids that he’d apologized.)
Now, students, this part of my story is, “Falling Action.”
The boy set to baiting another hook.
“He’s very polite,” I told the nanny.
“Yes, he has some anger issues, adopted from Russia and all, but he’s a good kid.”
“Yes,” I said. And I was thinking, he’s a good teacher too. He has taught me and the kids about rising action, climax, and falling action.
And he did it far better than even SpongeBob could.
Just in time for the holidays, there are two awesome new films about mental illness.
I just saw Silver Linings Playbook and The Master. Both of these films show the journey from destructive madness to precarious sanity. The films show the impossible internal tide as Pat, Bradley Cooper, and Freddy, Joaquin Phoenix, descend (ascend) into their altered states and try to get back to life again.
The movies made me wonder about something I read a long time from Carl Jung. I am paraphrasing, but the idea from Jung, is that: Maybe it’s not these individuals who are mad, but their societies are insane.
Maybe madness is the only sane response to an insane society. Coping is hard enough in life, without the stigma and consequences of mental illness, brought on by intense stress or some biological deficiency.
Both lead actors in these films chew up the scenery. Oddly, during a few intense moments in Silver Linings, the director cuts away from the Bradley Cooper character, a manic-depressive, to get the reaction shots of Jennifer Lawrence (from The Hunger Games).
The title of Silver Linings refers to the benefits of positive thinking to overcome difficulties. I am fan of optimism. Here are my other take-aways from Silver Linings.
Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams are incredible in The Master. There is never a cutting away from their faces during intense scenes. If anything, the close-ups just get closer. Tormented minds reveal themselves through dialogue and action. Actions have consequences.
Here are my take-aways from The Master
Overcoming mental illness is no joke, although, turns out, these two films depict the efforts to overcome mental illness as entertaining and compelling.
After the characters of Freddy and Pat slide into their dysfunctional moments, they seem always at war with themselves, trying to reign in their destructive sides and crawl back to lives with family or community. They look for a state of grace. Or at least, they seek connection with others and a state of normalcy. Balance eludes them.
Just in time for Christmas and New Year’s, you can see these movies and contemplate having more compassion for your family members who may have diseases or mental illnesses.
Even though I loved these films, I hope to see a mainstream movie about a woman with a mental illness, preferably depression, which is far more common in women than men.
In the newly-released Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln denies her depression. Her mental illness is only viewed as an impediment to her emotional closeness to her family. For women in films, like Mary played by Sally Field, relationships matter most. For men, it is the journey to wholeness. But surely, Mary’s depression could be a fascinating feature-length film, not just a subplot in Lincoln’s life.
Maybe I’ll write more about Lincoln later. I just saw it yesterday and am still reeling from those performances and the immersion in a time of history when men and women fought to knit the country together rather than to pull it apart. To unite us.
PS I modeled this blog post from my previous post on 2 great new movies about alcoholism
What better way to celebrate a rough week than to get a colonoscopy?
No one wants to get their colon checked. But my wonderful primary care doctor, Dr. Etta Frankel, told me that I’d hit the age where I needed to. Besides, I’m losing my health insurance in a couple of weeks and wanted to get all my preventative care procedures done. Nothing like the thought of impending doom to get your house in order.
In early November, I got a postponement on my first colonoscopy due to Hurricane Sandy’s reshuffling of patients in New York City hospitals. All elective-type surgeries were canceled or rescheduled that week.
Happily, no NYC hurricane hit this week. Although the concoction I had to drink the night before the procedure worked like a Hurricane Sandy on my digestive track.
Here’s my recipe:
I mixed my concoction in a pitcher and in under two hours, I finished it. (Much like the 5K!)
Everyone warned me, and so I was prepared, that this was hardest part of the colonoscopy — the drinking of the concoction. That, and the endless time in the bathroom to clean your bowels. To get through the evening, I reminded myself that, “If I can run a 5K without stopping, I can drink 64 ounces of some sugary mix and spend an evening on the toilet.”
Also, I had a good book, Allegra Goodman’s Cookbook Collector, to keep me company.
The night of my internal storm in the bathroom, my son was very caring. Holed up in the bathroom for hours, occasionally, there’d be a gentle knock on the door, “You okay in there, Mom?” I truly loved that kid then. (I know I’ve complained about my kids on this blog, but they are basically kind and wonderful souls.)
Earlier that day, I’d fasted, which made me very crabby. (Yes, this is where the kids get their low-blood sugar crabbiness!)
The procedure itself was not a breeze. Everyone told me, “It’s the easiest part.” But I remember twice, half in a twilight sleep, coming to, in order to complain, “That hurts!” It felt like someone was poking me internally with a pool stick. Irksome, but not deadly.
Also, last night, the night of the procedure, I was very crabby. I felt my husband was not solicitous enough. Yes, he has his own health concerns. And yes, when he did ask, I told him, “I’m fine.” But when will a man realize that when a woman say, “I’m fine,” the day of a surgical procedure, what she really means is, “Please baby me the way I baby you when you’re sick! Bring me soup in bed and say, ‘Poor baby! Good that you’re taking care of your health!'”?
So, to reward myself for taking care of myself and surviving the storm of a colonoscopy, I went to a fun, girls’ night out, a jewelry sale to benefit a public high school. I bought some pretty little earrings. I giggled and had deep discussions with my girlfriends. That indulgence made the whole crappy week and day of the colonoscopy a little brighter.
It went badly.
I told all family members that for one hour on this Sunday afternoon they had to turn off their phones, computers, television sets at 3:15 pm. They could do anything they wanted — nap, eat, clean, anything.
At 3:15, they begged for, “Five more minutes. Just until I finish this episode.”
Hayden’s hooked on reruns of Prison Break and the girls on How I Met Your Mother. So I relented. At 3:20, I collected their phones and laptops and put them in a sealed, secret box.
My husband (who may have some OCD tendencies) began counting playing cards to get a Gin Rummy game going. The girls began to clean their room. So far, so good. Then my son began foraging in the fridge for something to eat and came up short. It’s true we’ve been gone a few days and the cupboards are pretty bare.
“You can go grocery shopping,” I suggested.
“No,” he said, flopping on my bed. “I’m hungry.” I began making him some frozen Trader Joe appetizer thing, left-overs from a party months ago.
“Mom, I have to turn on the computer to check what homework I have,” my son said.
“No,” I said.
“I think he should be allowed to do that,” my husband piped in.
“No,” I was not going to give in. “He knows he has to read the Odyssey. Just crack the book open.”
“I already read it,” he said.
“Then do something else,” I said.
“You’re such a jerk,” he said. Nice, right?
“You’re not allowed to call me a jerk. Or say I’m crazy,” I said. Last week, he called me crazy. Yes, I’m crazy. But a good kind of crazy. And that’s not what he meant.
Then the girls started bickering about a shirt they both claimed. And Charlotte was goading Catherine to quit lying on the floor.
Charlotte was exasperated. She said, “I’m the only one who does anything around here.”
And that naturally, got me yelling. Because that’s my line. I’m the only one who does anything around here.
My husband asked, “Who wants to play cards?”
“Not me!” the kids said.
“Get up off the floor,” Charlotte told Catherine.
“I’m hungry, Mom,” Hayden said.
I tried to keep it together by remembering the article on sibling rivalry from today’s NYTimes by George Howe Colt. He points out that when kids argue over food maybe what they’re really arguing over is mother’s attention.
That idea that mothers are powerful got me through the awful hour without technology. The other realization that pulled me through was knowing our social media sabbath was only going to last another 15 minutes. I served the kids that appetizer-y thing. People calmed down.
At 4:20, I went into the secret box and handed them back their phones and laptops. Okay, I didn’t hand them back. I threw them back. I said, “Here you go! Now we don’t have to talk to each other any more today.”
But we did talk later — at dinner. I suggested that we try this brief digital sabbath every week. They didn’t argue.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 