blue girl

Only One Constant

I am not rooted in the everyday. I move from place to place like a sybarite in search of pleasure, always thinking the final resting place will be just around the corner, at the end of this plane ride, behind the next door. I can never release myself from the mercurial aspects, can't allow myself to stand on some kind of ground. Instead I tend toward that which destabilizes and feels most like home; change, impermanence, a pattern of in and out, here and there, city to city, place to place.

Houses are temporary containers. Some walls, a roof, a bathroom. I have exchanged spaces more times than I can count. I transition easily from neighborhood to neighborhood, coast to coast. I unpack and pack my belongings, shedding some and picking up others with ease and economy. The Miles Davis disc stays, Squeeze goes. The Esprit pants go, the Levi's stay. The Diary of Anne Franks stays, the Derrida reader goes. Letting go and holding on, letting go and holding on, this is the only constant. Not the people I love, not the person I become in their arms, under their gaze. There is only this process I have that is familiar: putting the sofa there, the books in stacks against the wall, hammering the nail for the painting here.

From Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker, writing about the effects of moving back and forth between two worlds while growing up, after her parents' divorce.

Live and Learn

I have made my reading plans for the holiday weekend.  I ordered a book that will arrive by Friday.  Since I will be a golf widow most of the weekend, I figured I'll have a lot of time on my hands to learn a little more about myself and those around me.

The book is Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.  Saw it this morning over at Susie Bright's Journal and knew right away it was one of my have to have its.

From a reviewer at Amazon:

To err is human, to rationalize even more so. Now, thanks to this brilliant book, we can finally see how and why even the best meaning people may justify terrible behavior. Mistakes Were Made will not turn us into angels, but it is hard to think of a better -- or more readable -- guide to the mind's most devilish tricks.

In her post, Susie interviews one of the authors of the book about cognitive dissonance and how Larry Craig is affected by it.

We're all affected by it, though.

I still think about the time I sat in a room full of Republican friends that I knew had had affairs -- bashing Bill Clinton because of Monica Lewinsky.

I'm sure The Skimmer wonders about it because of how I can come home from spending a few hours at the mall with bags and bags of things I've bought.

"But, everything was on sale!  I saved 50%!"

"There's no savings column in the checkbook!"

I've heard that comeback for almost 18 years now.

Let me repeat.  Fifty.  Percent.

I remember walking into a family get together two years ago on Christmas Eve and my brother-in-law asking me, "Am I allowed to say Merry Christmas to you?  I know how you feel about Christmas!"

I just thought, What is he talking about.  We were all getting ready to go to church together.  And on top of that, you think it's a barren wasteland under my Christmas tree every year?  (See my second point above.)

So, I can't wait to get my book and start learning more about why we do that things we do.  But, I am a tad worried.

Back on January 1st of this year, I made a resolution to finish every book I start.  And I've made good on that promise.

Eleven times.

Out of about 4,212.

Not my fault!  I'm busy and don't have a lot of time.  And some of the books were hard to read.  The type was too small -- the leading was too tight!  And I think The Skimmer may have cleaned up the living room one day and put some of my books somewhere and now I can't find them.  I would never do that to him.  Ever.

I'm in the middle of several books right now and nowhere near the middle of one.  Not my fault!  Dan Leo's fault!  How can I resist wanting to read a writer who has written this...

Unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie — that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others — coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms.

Why do I continue to do this over and over?  Buy a book, read it for awhile, set it down and pick up another?  I know one reason. 

Because I buy books when I am brainwashed by atmosphere.  I'll be browsing a quaint, little cobwebbed bookstore in Greenwich Village and the romantic in me takes over.  I pick up a book and read a little about it...

Turning to the flip side of the '20s' flapper image, Dumenil looks at the darker side of the decade forming the "central motifs that have shaped the modern American temper."

And suddenly I am burning with a fiery passion to learn all there is to know about these central motifs. 

And I have convinced myself I will.

Go ahead.  Give me a pop quiz about any central motif you can think of.  I'd fail.  I think I got to page 122.

Sometimes my romantic notions do result in my completing a book though.  The last time I was in New York, I bought E.B. White's Here Is New York. 

Early on Sunday morning, while The Skimmer and blue kid were still sleeping, I grabbed my new book, (Yes, I already have two copies at home.  But, this one was 10% off.  Ten.  Percent.) left the hotel, stopped and bought some coffee, crossed the street and walked into Central Park.  While the early morning sun streamed through the large oak tree above me, I sat on a park bench, drank my coffee and read my new book, while a man beneath a bridge nearby played beautiful music on his clarinet.

And I finished the book there and then.

All I need to be able to finish a book is dappled sunshine in Central Park.  The sound of slow jazz carried on the wind.

I may not have Central Park this weekend, but I'll have plenty of coffee and hopefully, a little bit of dappled sun.  And I intend to finish my new book because I have a fiery passion to learn more about why we do the things we do.

And if I don't learn why by page 122?

I know me!

I'll keep on trying to learn.  I've got a discount card and Barnes and Noble.

My Kind of Girl

I just finished reading Nora Ephron's book, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I loved it.  How could I not love a book where the chapter, The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less begins...

If I can just get back to New York, I'll be fine

Not that you can tell from that line, but Nora Ephron is funny.  From the way this book reads, she seems very normal, in that crazy, disorganized, neurotic sort of way.  My kind of normal.  I felt a instant connection to her for some reason.  Could've been her description of what happens when you get a new purse...

You start small.  You start pledging yourself to neatness.  You start vowing that This Time It Will Be Different.  You start with the things you absolutely need -- your wallet and a few cosmetics that you have actually put into a brand-new shiny bag, the kind used by your friends who are competent enough to manage more than one purse at a time.  But within seconds, your purse has accumulated the debris of a lifetime.  The cosmetics have somehow fallen out of the shiny cosmetics bag (okay, you forgot to zip it up), the coins have fallen from the wallet (okay, you forgot to fasten the coin compartment), the credit cards are somewhere in the abyss (okay, you forgot to put your Visa card back into your wallet after you bought the sunblock that is now oozing into the lining because you forgot to put the top back onto it after you applied it to your hands while driving seventy miles an hour down the highway). What's more, a huge amount of space in your purse is being taken up by a technological marvel that holds your address book and calendar -- or would, but the batteries in it have died.  And there's half a bottle of water, along with several snacks you saved from an airplane trip just in case you ever found yourself starving and unaccountably craving a piece of cheese that tastes like plastic.  Perhaps you can fit your sneakers into your purse.  Yes, by God, you can!

Oh my God.  Nora Ephron and I are soulmates.  I had this feeling she and I would get along great.  So much so that about 10 pages into the book (the excerpt above is from page 12), I decided I was going to write her a letter to let her know just how great I think she is.  As I kept reading, I made tons of mental notes -- funny little tid-bits I would include in my letter to make her laugh.  I was planning to craft the perfect letter.  You know, so that when she read it she'd be so floored by how much we have in common that she would immediately pick up the phone and invite me to her next dinner party.  In her Upper East Side apartment.  In New York.

And then further into the book, where she's writing about a book she just loves, she writes this...

I felt alive, and engaged, and absolutely brilliant, bursting with ideas...  I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I'll never write, much less send.  I wrote letters of praise.  I wrote letters relating entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author's subject matter.  I even wrote a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken.  But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude.

I'll never write that letter to Nora Ephron and she knows it.  And I bet she's okay with that.

She writes about being a parent...

Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways you'd hoped for when you set about to mold your child.  And you have changed too.  You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.

She writes about divorce... 

Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

I like that "from" there at the end.  Yep, we're two peas in a pod, Nora and me.  Well, not entirely.  I wasn't all that crazy about When Harry Met Sally.  But, I won't bring it up at her dinner party.  If someone else does, I'll just smile politely and sip my champagne.

That's another thing she and I have in common.  We both love champagne.  She writes about her love of champagne when she envisions it being served at the reception after her funeral.  Because it's so festive!

She includes imaginary talk about her funeral and the reception that might follow, because this is not only a book about purses and New York and parenting.  It's also a book about what it means to grow older.   Or more specifically, what it means to be a woman who is growing older.  She writes with humor and a lot of heart about becoming more and more forgetful, being as blind as a bat and about losing dear friends.  She writes especially funny things about going to lunch with her girlfriends, er, woman friends.  Women who are all wearing turtlenecks, or scarfs that make them all look like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond, because they are all trying to hide their old, wrinkly necks.

She said her neck started to go after she turned forty three and had she known, she would have spent more time when she was younger staring at it lovingly in the mirror.  She would have spent more time praising that part of her body that she completely took for granted.

She made a list of other things she wished she'd known...

Back up your files.

When someone says "Our friendship is more important than this," watch out, because it almost never is.

There's no point in making pie crust from scratch.

The reason you are waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.

There are no secrets.

You can't own too many black turtleneck sweaters.

I'm not sure about all of those things, (okay, okay, the backing up of the files is a no brainer that I still can't get my mind wrapped around.)  But, I completely agree with that last one.  I have a whole closet full of black turtlenecks.  They've definitely been a fashion staple of mine for as long as I can remember, and only because I like them.  I don't wear them because I feel bad about my neck.  Yet.