The late Benazir Bhutto
There’s something about turning 50 or being close to it that allows you to benefit from your hard-won experience. [Read more…]
The Power of Maturity – Bring It Home, Baby
Fifty Shades of Blue
Click picture for Ellen’s reading of on Fifty Shades.
Fifty Shades of Grey is about a girl learning to deprive, limit, and change herself to hang onto a man. Anastasia, who is a virgin, of course, wants to please Mr. Beater because he’s so sad, boo hoo, and maybe she can fix him if she lets him beat her and tie her up enough.
When it first came out, I bought the book because I misunderstood what it was about, but then I figured, hey, millions of happy readers can’t be wrong.
Right?
Wrong.
It was such drek. If anybody really bit her lower lip as much as Anastasia, it would be hamburger. Also, I tried looking up from under my lashes but I didn’t look seductive. I looked like Lurch.
I tried reading it twice but gave up after about twenty pages. Then my friend made me promise. She’s like, twenty years younger than me and really smart, so this one time I thought, okay, let’s see what the young ‘un might be on to.
God. Back to ageism (wherein youth suffers.)
The sex scenes were okay, but holy crap (as Anastasia likes to say, thereby stealing my favorite expression), it’s just mindless. Basically, you’ve got a girl getting beaten regularly (oh, call it what you will, it’s brutal), and then a guy loving on her after that, all skin ointment and candlelight. He’s a stalker and a control freak, and I don’t give a shit if he was tortured and abused as a little kid. How many of our girls buy that barrel of swill, thinking they can heal a bad guy who isn’t really bad, he’s just damaged, poor thing.
I did. I put up with years of mental, if not physical abuse, because I felt sorry for a guy(s). It took me years to mature my way out of the idea that a man’s history of suffering meant he had some kind of credit coming, in the form of, say, not working while he “found himself.”
Anastasia tries to analyze whether she really wants to pay the price for her association with Grey, but she keeps losing her perspective because he is so pretty. Seriously, should looks earn the bearer that kind of power? It’s just a temporary outward appearance, girly. What if he were middle-aged and ugly? Nobody would think this story enticing. And I kept imagining my granddaughter, twenty years from now, being treated this way – maybe it’s stupid to say that but it grounded me. Of course, if it were my granddaughter I’d get a SWAT team and rescue her, then send her to counseling and therapy.
Aside from the fact that I hated the “beat me, I love you” message of this stupid book , millions of readers are hooked, because they want to know what happens next. I admit, I do too. But I think I’ll just ask somebody how it ends.
PS: To all the youngsters reading this, continuing jealousy in a mate is not a good thing. My fave advice columnist, Carolyn Hax, recommends reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.
Are Aging Rockers Irrelevant?
McCartney then
I saw that headline atop this story a few days ago and of course my first reaction was anger. But then I read the article, and this comment by the writer, Lee Zimmerman, touched me:
McCartney now
Young people don’t have a monopoly on zest, enjoyment, adventure… Sure, energy and enthusiasm may wane as we get older, but the primal urges that stir our psyche — especially when it comes to the music that moves us — continues to create a bond. At a certain age, it transitions from a rallying cry into nostalgia, allowing the music of our memories to exert a powerful grasp… Perhaps more than ever.
Heart, then
Heart, now
Do you ever find yourself next to an elderly person and wonder who he used to be? Do you ever take a minute to think that behind that crevassed face and stooped posture is a person who once leapt for joy, cashed his first paycheck, fell in love, and maybe raised a family?
Behind the looks, implies Zimmerman, is an artist whose years of experience could only yield greater depth of creative expression, topped by the sweetness and bite of nostalgia. How could their music be any less wonderful than it was in their youth?
Don’t poison what is with regrets about what was.
Is that even possible? Sure, looks aren’t everything, but they’re a lot. The beauty of youth suggests power: strong backs, flexible knees, supple dendrites, powerful voices. (Did you know the reason elderly folks’ voices get high and thin is because the collagen in their throats dissipates? Yep. Like everything else.)
Thing is, you can’t let it get to you. You’re still here. You have to respect your life! Wring the value and the blessings from it.
Besides, trying to judge yourself on society’s standards is a game you can’t win. Here’s an article about how fashion designers are now using 13-year-old models. Seems the 16-year-old girls were too big, what with having passed puberty and all.
When our culture declines to the point of preferring a little girl’s body over that of a normal, grown woman, I’m opting out of the fashion zeitgeist. Declare victory and go home. As the computer said, the only way to win is not to play.
I mean, I get the concept of “aspirational.” I don’t necessarily want to see a model who looks like me. Where’s the challenge to improve myself? But 13?
Stevie now
Stevie then
I make fun of More magazine once in a while (“This is what 4o+ looks like!” Right.) But I like the editor, Lesley Jane Seymour. If you read between the lines of her monthly editorial letters in the magazine, you definitely sense her frustration in trying to serve us. Her readers want to see real models, but they also want to be inspired by what might be possible. It’s a thin line to walk.
Aging is a bummer, no question. Bodies break down. My mom has been through so much in the past 18 months. Broken leg, follow-up surgery when the pain wouldn’t stop, cataract surgery, removal of a basal cell thingy on her face that required reconstructive surgery. I drive her to all her doctor appointments, and after surgery I usually stay with her. We’ve experienced it together, for better and worse.
Mom, then
Mom, now
Yesterday she chipped a tooth. I said, “Thank God you didn’t need a root canal.” She said if that had been the case, she would have sat down and shot herself. I told her it would have been a murder suicide. We laughed so hard we had to hang up.
Boomer Broad Scores! (and you can, too)
A few weeks ago I wrote about saving $50 because I took a chance and negotiated, even though I’m not that kind of girl. [Read more…]
A Contemplation on Mortality
Just before dawn on a cold October morning in 2008, I boarded a puddle-jumper out of North Dakota after my father’s funeral. Mom, my two siblings and I were returning to California, and it felt like we were abandoning Dad. As I listened to Rainbow by Jia Peng Fang and looked out the window at the dots of light representing isolated farmhouses of South Dakota, then Wyoming, then Colorado, the song burned a powerful memory into my mind. Every now and then I hear it, and it reminds me, and I’m flattened, stunned stupid with grief all over again. So then I wonder,
Why the hell did humans have to get stuck with knowing they’re mortal?
It’s such a burden, and it’s a special gift to humans alone. Animals have no concept (although sometimes I wonder about elephants). Think how comforting it would be to have the limited consciousness of a dog, for example. You eat, sleep, poop, and watch for opportunities. You don’t think about your eight missing litter-mates or parents.
And then this is amazing: we humans adjust. I can go a whole month or two without feeling bad about Dad. What an underrated coping mechanism! We not only get used to the idea that we’ll lose our loved ones, but once we do suffer such a loss, we adapt and move on. The drive to survive wins out over grief, and even allows us to repress the knowledge that some day, we’re going to deliver that same blow to our loved ones.
Recently I noticed Bill was moping around. He was missing his parents, he said, but when I tried to comfort him, he declined. “The pain reminds me of the love I felt for them. They were good parents.” Bill, who doesn’t believe in a God or afterlife, believes he will live on through the people he’s influenced positively.
I get fearful sometimes in the wee hours, when the arithmetic seems more stark and life more of a crap shoot. Like you, I’ve survived tragedy; I’ve dealt with situations that made me feel almost mentally ill at the realization of a horrendous truth, or some kind of great loss. Sometimes it seems we humans know too much. One way to alleviate that burden is a form of denial: you stay busy and productive, enjoy the sun on your face and the fragrance of new-mown grass, and try to ignore it.
I finally told Bill about my existentialist woes. I didn’t want to bum him out, because he’s always such a Pollyanna and I didn’t know if he could handle my dark side. He shrugged and said, “Life is wonderful, but it IS a ticking bomb.” Cracked me up. I felt relieved. We know we will die. The choice is what we do with that knowledge.
I’ve pretty much decided to ignore the fact in favor of energetic productivity, and let the chips fall where they may. What about you? What’s your strategy for dealing with this?
My Name Is Lynne and I’m Addicted to Ancestry.com
My friend Jan D. turned me on to Ancestry.com and now I am totally messed up. I don’t sleep, I don’t bathe, I just keep filling in my family tree and clicking on that stupid little waving green leaf. If you’ve seen the website, you know the leaf means somebody on Ancestry has turned up another tidbit of fact – and I use the term loosely – about a long-dead great-aunt.
Battle Station
But I click on it because it might be important. Proof, finally, that yes I am descended from Catherine the Great.
More likely, one of my cousins in Rushville, Indiana (you know who you are) misspelled a name, which appears to Ancestry.com’s voracious, data-crunching computers to be an interesting new fact. My neck and shoulders hurt, and I think I’m getting tendinitis in my right elbow.
And when I fill in my own little boxes, including my three marriages, my part of the tree will look like it got doused with Miracle-Grow.
But my mother is so excited. My God, after decades of schlepping around a shopping bag containing little slips of paper with the approximate names of unfamiliar maybe-relatives, her computer-adept daughter will finally use her talents for something worthwhile.
Like finding out what Mom’s long-dead mother-in-law was hiding all these years.
Seeing all those connected boxes spread out across the page, those names representing whole lives and generations, is kind of sobering, though. This is my family! All those great-great-great grandmothers and fathers and kids and their offspring, lived and died – you see it, and you can’t help but feel a bit melancholy. Their stories are poignant. Life was hard. Like in Austria/Hungary, my great-grandfather’s family couldn’t offer him any land on which to start his family. The land had run out. These farmers were forced to choose between conscription in the Austrian army (and serve as cannon fodder for the Turks), or leave their parents and grandparents forever and move to the great unknown America.
Hah. One ancestor said the winters in North Dakota were so terrible, they would have been better off in Siberia.
I’ve unearthed ship’s passenger lists that show my ancestors immigrating from Germany and Hungary (I think we’re Transylvanian). Long lists of families. Typically, you see the names of the father (occupation: farmer), mother (occupation: spouse), and eight, ten, twelve kids. Holy hell, can you imagine traveling across the ocean in steerage with that lot? What guts. What strength. My relatives were powered by dreams and desperation.
I feel humbled. All those lives, come and gone. Born and died. Geboren and gestorben.
The span of human existence is short, and right now I am keenly aware of my mortality. I want to savor every minute, before somebody fills in the gestorben date on my Ancestry box. So I’m hanging up now. You, too. Go out and play, and enjoy your precious life.
Homestead in North Dakota c. 1850
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