Monday, August 27, 2007

In Bed with Paul



I had a sex dream last night involving Paul Giamatti. I think he is one of the least attractive men in the world. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a great actor. Sideways is currently one of my favorite movies of all time, and his performance in Cinderella Man is just so damn fine, it gets me every time.
But these movies came out years ago, and I did not have sex dreams about PG back then, so what is the deal? I guess the only thing I can chalk it up to is my recent viewing of The Nanny Diaries, in which PG starred in as Mr. X. However, his role (unlike Sideways and Cinderella Man) was the most unappealing, chauvinist-pigish, gives-you-the-creeps human being you you could possibly ask for.

I was utterly sick to my stomach when his character tried to cop a feel off Scarlett Johanson's character in the movie. So..... WHY AM I HAVING SEX DREAMS ABOUT HIM? Does it mean I am attracted to Assho**s? Does it mean I have a fantasy about being homewrecker? Or does it mean that I am just desperate to get some and even the slightest on-screen incident (as gross as it was) turns me on?

Whatever the case may be, I am a little ashamed of myself, but definitely more turned on overall by Paul Giamatti. I hope he visits my dreams again, hopefully as Richard the Bellman from My Best Friend's Wedding, or Joe Gould from Cinderella Man. He was pretty hot in American Splendor too :)

Thursday, August 23, 2007

The Warden

Yesterday was a doosy. I volunteered to help out with our brand spanking new after school program and realized that keeping it from simply herding the kids from one place to another turned out to be almost impossible.

in the space of three hours I:

  • Stopped up a bloody nose
  • Put Ice packs on a jump-rope whipped eye
  • Had a parent call the cops on me because her daughter was in the bathroom unattended
  • Had to do everything to keep the woman in charge from quitting

So all in all, not bad for the first day right?

HA

The kids were awesome though. I had a 9 year old come up to me and this occurred:

9-Year old: Do you have kids?

Me: Yes I do.

9-Year old: Well you look like you do.

Me: What do you mean?

9-Year old: You just do.

Me: Well how old do you think my kids are?

9-Year old: (thinking really hard) about 2, I'd say.

Is this kid psychic?

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Thoughts on parenting


This is my boo boo. She is turning 15 months soon. Still barely any hair as you can see, and only 3 teeth. I keep thinking she is going to start preschool with mashed potatoes and apple sauce in her lunch box while everyone else has peanut butter sandwiches and carrot sticks. She's also going to be wearing hats while all the other girls have braided pigtails.

Ok, so not really. Most people keep telling me their kids were bald until age 3. I'm sure LB will follow in their footsteps and she's got tons of redeeming qualities to make up for her hair and tooth lackage.

I recently netflixed an HBO documentary called "Thin" about 4 females who commit themselves to a treatment center for Eating Disorders. Really disturbing stuff, but familiar, as I haven't met a female YET who is at peace with her own body image (myself included). After watching it, my mother (who got her degree in psychology) turned to me and said "So how do you raise a girl in America WITHOUT an eating disorder?"

Um.

My philosophy on this issue (and believe me, its a terrifying thing to think about, now that I have a daughter of my own) is that there is no way to protect your child from everything bad in the world. Exposure to television, movies, music, and the general media has proved to be a major influence on the selves of America's population.

My mother's solution to this evil was to hide my sister and I away from all the media she could find. We moved from urban Los Angeles to extremely rural Vermont when I was seven years old, and promptly lost all contact with the outside world. Ok, by outside world I mean, she refused to connect any form of television to our home, only letting us watch highly monitored films, enrolled us in an "alternative" school with a very progressive, creative, hippie-based curriculum, did not buy us a computer till high school (and then only hooked up the Internet when I was a senior).
When I asked to subscribe to "Seventeen" magazine when I was in middle school (like all my friends did) she immediately did research on which magazine was the least offensive to her, and readily decided that they ALL were not appropriate.

Now my mother is not one of those crazy, super-religious, wait-until-marriage types of women, who was trying to protect the sanctity of her daughter's soul. She was (and still is) a die-hard feminist who simply did NOT acknowledge the need for socially acceptable femininity. When I told her I wanted to be a flight attendant, she quickly rebutted my dreams with a scoffish "Be the pilot instead." When I wanted to be a ballerina, or the Ariel the Little Mermaid, I could see her cringing deep down, hoping this was just a phase that would develop into a more realized career as an accomplished, politically-driven Artist or Actor.

Now all parents want the best for their children, and my mother was just doing what she thought was best. She has given me some incredible tools to live my life with, but I am still dealing with a lot of resentment from how she brought me up.

I believe many ideas of the feminist theory, but definitely not all of them. I believe in equal wages, and Title IX, Roe v Wade and non-gender-based parenting. But I will not rule out a whole world of femininity the way my mother did.

I love my mother. I respected and loved her so much that I was afraid to defy her. She has an uncanny psychic ability too, which has always thrown me off gaurd, She knew I was pregnant before I called her weeping from Louisiana. She knew I would get accepted to college on a scholarship, which I did. She always seems to be one step ahead of me, and I have hated her for that.

As a child, I knew my mother was always right, and if she didn't agree with my decision-making, I was crushed. My opinion was never the right opinion unless she agreed with it. You could say I was spineless, a wimp, a push-over, or just showing many qualities of a Pisces child, but either way, I found it very hard to make decisions on my own, without her consent.

Once I moved away from home, I started making my own choices and living my own life, but I also started resenting her TREMENDOUSLY. How come I could never stand up for myself? How come decision-making was a PAINFUL process. How come I felt so guilty every time I wanted to buy Cosmo or thong underwear? I wanted to be a feminist, and be strong, but I was weak and shamed instead.

I think my mother instilled amazing and thoughtful values in me, but I don't think she gave me the weapons to carry those values out in a world that has not completely come to terms with feminism. She sheltered me from ideas she thought would ruin my self-esteem, but instead I wanted to be involved with those ideas and didn't know how to integrate them into my life.

She took away all the media she could find, but didn't realize that perhaps I might grow up to want to be apart of it (I went to film school). The important things in life: politics, science, math, revolution, idealism, history and social change were the things I decided NOT to pursue.

I wanted to LIVE in the world she thought was so evil, work for a corporation that she claimed was taking advantage of its employees, and create media that she thought exploited women and demoralized peoples' souls.

I guess this is the underlying gap in our mother-daughter relationship, and has molded what I want (or don't want) for my own child.

I think the world is an exciting and staggering place. It has bad and good elements, things that will make you laugh and cry. It has people that will hurt and take advantage of you, but ones that will be your life-long friends as well.

I want my daughter to be able to navigate this crazy life with skill and confidence. I don't want her to hide from confrontation like I did, or become bitter with the way her idealism has failed (the way my mother views life now). I want her to take life in-stride, ride the tsunamis with courage, knowing that she can weather the storm. I want to give her all the tools and objects she can use in the battles she is going to face.

My sister thinks I want to throw my daughter to the wolves and see if she can get out of it alive. I don't think I should expose LB to EVERY evil to make her skin tough as nails, but I do think that she should know that evils to exist and there is a way to defeat them like everything else. My sister lives in Alaska, where she is getting her masters in geology. She is a full supporter of my mother's manifesto, and has succeeded very well with it as her guide.

As far as eating disorders go- I think its something that every girl struggles with, but when your coping mechanisms become so extreme that you start to literally kill yourself, that is when a problem becomes out of hand. I think all I can do is to try to prepare LB for life by dealing with it in a less destructive way.

This is hard. Because women are set up to always think they are fat, even if they are skinny. How do you reject this, or at least cope with it in a healthy way? You can't rewire someones brain to turn off the voice that says you are fat. You can't stop advertising companies from carrying out their businesses.

My hope is that in the next decades our society will become more multicultural and will have many different ideas of what is considered beautiful, or sexy. I believe that the classic "thin, white female" is still considered the major icon in our ideas of beautiful and sexy. However, with the minority population growing, and the numbers of interracial families growing, I think this idea will fade. I think that in 50 years those morons who got their entire bodies recreated on "Dr. 90210" will look like complete freaks and someone else will be considered the new beauty.
Someone who looks the exact opposite of their pasty, stretched, bony bodies.

In the mean time, I will let my daughter play with trucks and shovels, dolls and make-up. Let her watch television (when I can afford it HA!) under supervision, and perhaps flip through a magazine or two, cause honestly, If we can't have the freedom to gossip over what a bad mother Britney Spears it, I don't think we could live with the guilt of all the mistakes we've made in our own parenting lives. Ok, in my case at least (sorry mom).

Friday, August 17, 2007

Dummy hurt her hand

I haven't been blogging mostly cause I've been reading all the other fabulous blogs out there, but also because I've sprained my right wrist. How did I accomplish such a feat do you ask? I guess its an issue every single parent (or any parent) faces at some point in their life:

THERE IS A LIMIT TO YOUR MULTITASKING ABILITIES

I think I get this from my work in fast food as a teenager. I was a super employee at KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut (where I was the fastest delivery driver for 2 year running). I hardly ever got an order wrong, and beat the drive-thru timer on a regular basis. I prided myself in efficiency, speed and customer satisfaction. These skills, however, do not always translate smoothly in my world of mommying.

So I was getting out of the car after work, knowing in the back of my mind that I had to pick someone up in a few hours and I wanted to de-infant my car a little before then. This was no small task, as there are masses of Cheerios, goldfish, empty grocery bags, onesies and beer boxes (FOR MOVING!) in my POS Ford Escort.

This kicked off what usually happens when my multitasking skills begin to fail: my brain starts moving faster than my body is capable of.

I released LB from her car seat, and set her down on the driveway, telling her "Mama's gonna clean a few things up really quick, so hold on." I gave her a random toy to play with while I frantically tried to shove all the trash within arm's length into the empty grocery bags. This is typical mode for mommies I understand (do as much as you can while child is entertained).

Sadly for me, there was too much trash to pick-up in the little time before LB spotted my mother's cat and took off in full toddler sprint, gushing "KIGGY KIGGY". By this time I had my arms full of god-knows-what, and the sensible thing would have been to:

PUT EVERYTHING DOWN

Before running towards LB and scooping her up with my right hand. Honestly I was more afraid she might run into the road, and almost forgot about everything I was holding, but as soon as I picked up her 18 1/2 lbs, my wrist decided that it had reached maximum capacity and gave out.

I am happy to say I did NOT drop my child in the process, and managed to clean my car before feeling slightly sick and realized how badly my wrist was throbbing. 3 hrs later, the ER doc told me that this happens a lot with mothers of young children, mostly to wrists and fingers. She said she wore a splint on her finger after her 3 year old jerked his foot away while she was tying it.

So now I have a damn splint on my damn right hand, and I am definitely NOT a lefty. My writing has been reduced to a 4 yr old level, and I am the laughing stock of the school district. I seem to be getting a combination of "AHHHH yes" and "What an idiot" looks from the women who have kids around here.

Needless to say, my typing ability is slightly marred.

P.S. I am in the process of getting my application for income based housing reviewed. I should know in the next couple of weeks. Keep your fingers and wrists crossed for me.