Archive for October, 2009

Halloween is here and it’s time to get crafty.  This is when all of us, except Art Majors and ILM employees are humbled by our inability to progress from our third-grade level pumpkin face designs from those days of yore, (and mine).  Since there are only so many ways to be scary and cute, I thought I would try a new angle:  Pumpkin Signs.  That is, universal symbols with clean, carveable lines, that evoke clear concrete ideas and emotions.  I encourage you to try the following.  Seriously.  You can drag them on to your desktop and enlarge them via a copier to make a full-sized template.  (I know you know this.):

For a scary themed décor, or to indulge your fantasies if you have a lot of astonishingly rude teens in your neighborhood:

If you are wise and stable enough to attract bees with honey, and would like to bring about the best Halloween behaviors in teens, then I suggest the following:

Any self respecting peace sign never stands without one of these close by:

Or these:

And for you skinny tire and skinny booty people:

And for those of you who want to anger some self-important, organically fed, free-range PTA moms, I give you this, which will inspire more dirty looks and letters-to-the–editor than your telling them directly that you will slay all their children, key their 2 year-old cars, and insult the size and shape of their crown molding.  Use with caution and only to incense.  The kids are too young to get it, and aren’t enticed to smoke unless the Marlboro man or a flat-butted super-duper model with big hair and nice eyes is sucking away at a Capri on an air-brushed page, in an air-brushed world:

However you carve your pumpkin, I wish you luck in achieving your desired effect, be it to spook, uplift, caution, humble, amuse or annihilate.  Above all, be careful with the knife.

I spent 48 hours last week doing a combination of the following:  vomiting, sleeping, sleeping, vomiting, agonizing over body aches, not sleeping because of body aches, tossing, moaning, fearing I would die, hoping I would die, sipping Sprite 2 teaspoons every 10 minutes for an hour, crying at thought of leaving my children (without any respectable life insurance policy, I might add), getting better, talking too much on the phone, checking Facebook 5 times, returning school related email and, the grand finale, doing a sudden late eve, manic, frantic, angrily loud and clanging clean-up of the neglected kitchen and living room.  No one tidied-up much while I was sick, but my husband did take good care of the kids:  he picked up the phone, called my mom and drove them straight to her house (so he could rest up and go to work, but still…).

The flu is no fun and on occasion is so impossibly painful that you are forced to mentally compose the first or second line of your obituary, especially with the background noise of channel 5 broadcasting the “breaking news” of the latest Swine Flu death in your area.  The worried expression of my 5 year-old made me especially sad, though I’m glad to see the compassion since her display of fledgling sociopathic indifference during our dead doggy episode a couple of weeks ago (See Dog Blog:  Do They All Go To Heaven?) had me quite worried.

I must say, it’s great to be back, with the energy to take in life and my tribe cute people (cute to me, anyway).  When you feel physically bad, you haven’t the stomach for even the littlest, most innocent of smiles and cutest sayings of your wee 2 year-old.  Even the blue paint in the bathroom, which I normally delight in, sent me in a crazed state of sensory terror.  All I could think was:  I’m nauseous, the room is spinning, and the blue walls REALLY clash with the caramel tiles, and IT’S TOO LATE TO CHANGE EITHER OF THEM.  What if I die like this?

Rest assured these thoughts have gone with the painful vomiting, body aches, and sleeplessness.  There will be no remodeling anytime soon, but I do wonder how people survive spiritually in the face of chronic illness, when the only light at the end of the tunnel is the final exit into oblivion.  A blogger, whom I follow regularly, is a woman named Carla struggling with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Obviously, her ailments are vastly different than the flu I just described, but I imagine the panic of feeling that your body is turning against you might be, in some ways, similar.  What is even more nightmarish, is that her symptoms are chronic, worsening, and terminal.  How does she do it: stay wise, happy, and manage to pose for photos in her sexy ALS calendar?  (Yes, she has started her own sexy ALS calendar, which will be available for your 2009 holiday shopping.  Check for updates and her blog, at the following link:  carlamuses.blogspot.com.)

Folks on both sides of the aisle were surprised by the recent selection of President Barack Obama as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.  The Right cited this move as evidence of the sinister plot of Poor People Lovers to deify this crusader of left-wing ideals, and the Left was, well, pleasantly surprised, in the way one is when the grocery store forgets to ring up an item that ends up in the canvas tote.  I really do not care one way or the other, as I didn’t have a better idea, though I, too, was a bit surprised.

It did strike me how socially awkward it will be at the international bargaining table for anyone to not kill their impressive nuclear program at the request of the Homecoming King of Peace.  This will certainly cement Ahmadinejad’s position as that mean Goth kid, who hates football, loves skinny jeans, and has Morrisey stickers and angry sayings plastered all over his 15 year-old Toyota Corolla.  Moreover, the fact that the loveable leader of America gets a high-five from that dynamite dynasty of Swedes should not surprise us. It is just high school all over, which no one, even heads of state and the people who love them, ever has the luxury of leaving.

What no one can nor should ignore is the likeability of Barack Obama, which has been dissected and anatomized on every publication, blog, and dining room table of planet Earth.  Couple that with his very impassioned denunciation of American captors aiming their jet-streaming garden hoses at the mouths of nude, imprisoned terrorists and you have a recipe for success.  Bottom line:  If people like you, you win.

This all reminds me exactly of the way that Cassi Ferraro lost the honor of holding the Winter Princess scepter, a symbol of spirit and service at our high school, to me.  She, who before every school dance, tied balloon after balloon, and stapled thousands of shreds of tissue paper onto countless pirate ships of cardboard, so that our gym would be transformed into a multi-colored make-out heaven/drunk tank, lost to me, who could be counted on to regularly disrupt biology class by making funny faces for the entertainment of my academically superior classmates.  My contribution to the school was tension relief and unfailing annoyance to my long-suffering teachers.  I was also, most of the time, pretty nice to everyone.  (Not that I had much of a choice.  Had I been blessed with a superior mind, body, and sports car, I would have surely enjoyed wielding unkindness at every turn.  These are the simple joys of fitting in.)

I don’t mean to liken my questionable merits to those of the fearless and peerless Barack Obama, but in the case of holding important titles, like Winter Princess for the ’88-’89 school year, you have to be popular.  And though the titles are always conceived in some concrete, relevant, and meaningful criteria, in the end there are going to be those who win for their boobs.  Usually, though, that’s the first runner-up, as was the case with Janie Hessinger.

If you believe the right guy won, rejoice.  If not, think back to the elections at your own high school.  Did the person who won Best Partier really earn it?  And the person who won Most Likely To Succeed now works as an adjunct math professor at a community college and makes only a fraction of your quarterly bonus from your sales gig.  Right?

When toying with the idea of being raised by my children full-time (that is without the excellent Mommy-N-No One Else program that employment provides), I was panicked at the idea of how to afford it.  Cutting a household’s earnings in half is a drastic move.  Our figurative family hand was forced when my position at work was cut back, making the expense of working (day care for 3 kids, 3 average-looking, over worn mix-and-match work outfits, and the McDonald’s drive-thru 3 times a week) became prohibitive.  I had no choice but to join the force of Stay-At-Home Moms, and my husband and I were terrified at being deployed to the front lines of single-income living.  I was, somehow, not comforted by the reassurances by my top-tax bracket friends (one of whom let it slip that her husband makes exactly $237,000 a year) that the budget situation “always works out.”  When you have cushions of trust funds and incomes that send the AMI (annual median income) into orbit, dropping a cute little teaching job that pays for vacations is not a big deal. However, when your teaching gig is the bread-and-butter and perfectly mirrors the amount that your hard-working husband brings in via his retail management job, it is a life-changing and possibly devastating undertaking.

The good news, ladies and gentlemen, is that the savings on day care and other work expenses has made the monetarily unimaginable somewhat imaginable.  And I’m now committed 100% to the game (and I do call it a game) of stretching dollars.  Additionally, not being employed by “the man,” I now actually have the time and energy to play the game, which takes innovation, training, and a fair amount of stupid optimism, which is tough to employ when you’re weary from work.  I’m even, believe-it-or-not, finding the fun in trying to live as richly as possible, on a not-so-hefty income.  Since I am audacious enough to believe that EVERY human being deserves to FEEL wealthy, this undertaking is, to me, the pursuit of justice, to prove to myself and the world that we can all live abundantly, though not wastefully, by being mindful of our choices.  Rest assured, my quest is not in the name of virtue, but decadent, self-satisfying indulgence.

Here are some of my latest discoveries (which you undoubtedly have already discovered, but you might appreciate some reminders).

• Buy good shoes, but less of them, for everyone in your family. They will last longer, redeem the mediocrity of any bargain-bought outfits, and will save you lots in of money in co-payments to the podiatrist.  I learned this after 3 pregnancies and 11 years of working on my feet as a teacher.  My husband made me buy those expensive Danskos.  The sense of pampering and indulgence goes for miles.  Make up the price difference by owning fewer shoes.  Carrie Bradshaw lives too indulgently.  Don’t try to keep up with her or Chase Manhattan will come to get you!

• Get a good haircut, less often.  I don’t know if I would have Suze Orman’s blessing to spend a lot of money here, but you need to go to a high-end salon and drop some cash.  You will not get a good style, but a great one, which is important since you’ll be wearing it every day.  Of course, don’t spend too much, as there is still a price disparity in the high-end salons.  Shop around.  Please don’t keep going to your “lady who works out of her garage” or you’ll be wearing your 70’s perm or 80’s claw a full decade into the new millennium and trying to fix it in the Nordstrom’s handbag section.  Now THAT is pricey!  Of course, there are always exceptions and hidden treasures anywhere, so if your “lady in the garage” does a great job and takes pains to keep her skills current, please support her or him, even though he or she probably doesn’t pay the taxes that you do.

• Let Martha in.  Martha Stewart is famously hated, not so much for her felony trading behaviors, but because she and her staff of 1100 shame us, the women of industrialized societies, into believing that we are losers for not baking, lacking holiday spirit, and absolutely sucking at decoupage.  What we lose, in this mire of intimidation, are the many low-cost, fussy nuggets of wisdom that she can offer us.  The good people of the wealthy class are miners and stewards of fussy detail, only they have others provide it.  Indulgence is in the details.  So if we can get over the fact that every task in her magazine will not be present in our poorly designed homes, we can take a few, attainable, inexpensive elements that make us feel indulged:  snowflake-shaped marshmallows, vanilla paste instead of extract (which is like a spa treatment for the taste buds), or tissue paper bat garland.  If you exploit Martha’s exploitation of your dollar in small, manageable doses, she will kick your home-life into high gear, as she does her under-loved minions.

Nothing says harvest like a colorful and flavorful medley of HEIRLOOM TOMATOES. Gifts this good don’t last long, so I make sure my October is full of them.  Grab a few and color coordinate to your liking (our eyes need to have fun, too), along with some FRESH MOZZARELLA and FRESH BASIL.  From your cupboard, bring out the OLIVE OIL and BALSAMIC VINEGAR. Layer these ingredients and top with KOSHER SALT and FRESH CRACKED PEPPER. Find a good source of bread (my newly engaged friend brought over some fresh-baked focaccia) to accompany the salad and mop up the drippy, delicious mess, and you can call it a square meal.  (Or are we married to that triangle now?)

My biggest cooking secret: Don’t measure.  It’s oppressive and annoying and reminds us all why we hate to cook.  Go easy, a little at a time, and you will find success, satisfaction and confidence in your reckless freedom.  Now, I think they say, “Mangia!”  So, Mangia!