I just had a realization this evening; every single woman I’ve had a relationship with (that lasted more than a weekend :-), every single one of them, without exception, has an epically fucked up relationship with their mothers.
All of them. From High School Girl (hi P!), to That Other One, to the Flautist, to the Polymath Pedant, the Artist, a few summer flings, the Amazon, each one has their own torturous and frustrating set of issues with their mothers. Hell, I’ll even throw in a couple of girls that I’ve only had as really good friends/crushes that have been entirely platonic; also deeply fucked up relationships with their mothers.
I’m certainly not trying to select for this characteristic. I mean, it’s not like I’m trolling at the strip clubs for damaged little girls with mommy issues. Every single one of those women are/were fiercely smart, capable, talented (and sexy!). Exactly the sort of people you’d like to hang out with, work with, or have guard your back. Fabulous people, each in their own way.
And yet, there’s that pattern. Weird. I’m sure there are some women out there with loving and supportive mom relationships; heh, maybe their mommas warned them away from boys like me.
Merely the latest example – I know a girl who drove four-ish hours, each way, on Mothers’ Day weekend, to have dinner with her mom, and then breakfast on Mothers’ Day itself. The mom picked the restaurant, the daughter picked up the (not-inconsiderable) bill, and a nice hour and a half dinner and chit-chat was had. MD breakfast was at her mom’s house, made by mom (her own mom’s idea!), was nice and slow and friendly. Afterwards, there was a walk through the yard looking at recent gardening efforts and ooohing and ahhing over her lovely yard and the fruits of her labor. Then there was an hour and a half walk through a nearby park, alongside a lake, with lots more friendly chatter. And then the four-hour drive back home. The girl even brought flowers! I said to her, “Damn, you scored major Good Daughter™ points this weekend!”
Instead, she got a long, painful phone call from her parents tonight complaining about how the food at the dinner restaurant wasn’t very good, and she should have spent more time with them, and how rude she was to rush away after breakfast, and her mother didn’t even get a card! Not just in a passive-aggressive whining fashion, but a full-on, chastising, scolding, “you’re a bad daughter” lecture. Unbelievable! I hardly know what to say, except to sympathize, and to try to reassure her, “It’s not you, it’s her.”
It just boggles my mind. As an outside observer, I can’t help but wonder, doesn’t this mother know that’s the kind of behavior guaranteed to drive a child even further away? If you were specifically trying to discourage a daughter from making an effort, I can’t imagine how you would pick a more successful strategy.
I’m just gobsmacked. I guess I will continue to be for a few more hours. Or days.
Thanks to the weird hyperlinks that my brain follows from one reference to another to another to the next, this afternoon I flashed upon a memory of my grandparents.
I hadn’t thought about this in ages; I can’t tell you since when. It’s certainly the earliest memory I have of my grandparents, and one of my earliest memories at all, period, full stop. And I only recall little chunks.
I was a little bitty wog. Four? Maybe five? Red hair, painted with freckles, small for my age. My grandparents (mom’s parents) were a southern couple, both raised on farms; he’d done his time in the Army in WWII and they started the family as soon as he was back home. I was their first grandchild.
My grandparents had taken me on a car trip to meet some older relative, I think perhaps my grandmother’s grandmother. She lived in this very small Southern town, the very model of Mayberry, with massive graceful shade trees dominating the neighborhood. I recall going out to a diner to eat with the family, and accidentally walking into the restaurant bathroom where my great-great grandmother was *ahem* using the facilities. My grandfather pulled me out toot de suite.
I also recall coming to my grandfather all worried one afternoon, because I had been eating watermelon and had swallowed a seed. With all due seriousness, he told me that I might very well grow a watermelon in my stomach, and that he’d had a friend who swallowed an apple seed and the next day the fellow had a tree limb growing out of his ear!
I slept on the couch in the parlour of whoever’s house. I remember waking up abruptly at dark o’thirty in the morning, trying to make my way to the bathroom in the pitch dark, bumping into strange furniture, getting scared and crying. I woke someone up, who led me back to the couch and urged me to go back to sleep before I woke the whole household.
I remember my grandmother taking me out for a walk early one morning, probably trying to get me to burn off some kidlet energy. We walked to a elementary school, brick, two story, where I played on the swings and see-saw in the playground.
Even with fuzzy, vague memories, I have a very positive impression from the memory. My grandparents were loving, sweet, and playful, with me and each other.
The thing that really struck me about the memory as I thought about it today, was seeing it as an adult, not as a kid. While I thought of them as adults beyond mere measures of age, as I think about it now, they were probably about the age I am now. They started a family young, and mom was their first kid. Mom had me (stupid) young, so my grandparents were probably in their mid-to-late forties in this memory. I can so identify with my grandfather’s awkward embarrassment at pulling his grandson out of the bathroom while trying not to look at his wife’s granny on the can. I can picture him teasing the little kid about ingested seeds. I can hear my grandmother’s patient exasperation as she tried to will me back to sleep. I would love to have a better memory/view of what they were like at that age, as real people, not as my mythologized elders.
Winter be damned; Spring has hit my yard with a vengeance! Here is today’s set of flowers, blooms and blossoms.
The canopy of cherry blossoms from the trees in the front yard.
Long ago, I picked up the habit of shopping for kitchen wares at restaurant supply houses, rather than the usual department stores (Target,Fred Meyer or K-mart, etc) or specialty stores (Williams Sonoma, Sur Le Table). The selection is larger, the prices better, and you know you’ll get equipment that will stand up to long years of abuse.
So it wasn’t a surprise that my search for a bread peel took me to my local restaurant supply store, a place that happens to specialize in gear for asian restaurants. When I entered the store, an older Asian gentleman approached, “You need help finding something?” I quickly said, “Not just yet, thank you”, and proceeded to roam the aisles. Even when I know what I’m looking for, I still like to wander around a bit first, like a kid in a toy store, examining all the familiar gear and pondering the uses of some of the more exotic items. I finally found the stash of bread peels, and fretted again about the “wood vs metal” question. After looking them over, I settled on a wooden peel and headed to the counter.
The same man was at the register, and smiled at my selection. “Is this for your home, or a restaurant?” “My home,” I replied. “Ahh. You make pizza with it?”
And I swear, I don’t know what possessed me.
“No, it’s for spanking.”
His eyes got large, but his smile only dimmed the slightest amount. I paid and left, feeling overly happy with myself.
Well I did, duh.
I finally got around to seeing the movie Watchmen tonight. Assorted thoughts, in no particular order.
- I’m a fan of the original graphic novel the movie is based upon, so I approached the movie with some apprehension. When the credits rolled, I was satisfied. For me, the movie captured the mood of the book, and was faithful to many of the iconic images and intentions of the original. Several things were omitted, or changed out right. None of those particularly irked me.
- I commend Zack Snyder (the director) for not hacking the material down to the traditional 1 hour and 45 minute movie. The story warranted the longer running time. But jeeze, movies that long should come with a catheter.
- I was especially struck with how the actors in the movie matched my memory of how the characters in the book looked. That was one of those nice touches that made the movie especially satisfying.
- Apparently, IMAX versions of mainstream films just means they’re showing the film on a properly large screen, rather than the typical mall cineplex postage stamp screen. It’s not even remotely the massive dome/immersive experience you get in a proper IMAX movie.
- It was obvious that Snyder decided to use large swaths of the comic as storyboards for the film. I think this was an excellent decision. Dave Gibbons (the artist) doesn’t get enough credit for his part in making the Watchmen comic.
- Big Blue Penis! Sorry, “Penises!”
- I was tickled to see Veidt’s computer was a vaguely period Macintosh SE, dolled up in black, running some variant of System 6. Cute. But you’d think the World’s Smartest Man(™) could pick a better password.
- When movie theaters are a thing of the past, you can lay some portion of the blame on 30 oz “medium” sodas that cost $5, and 15 minutes of ads and trailers before the movie itself begins. (Yes, I timed it.)
- The budget for the soundtrack of the movie must have been staggering.
- If you’re planning on doing cosplay as Dr Manhattan at some con, you better have the proper build for it. You’re running the risk of being mistaken for Papa Smurf.
- I noticed one of the video snippets on Veidt’s bank of monitors was Apple’s famous 1984 commercial. Cute.
- The best aspects of the Dr Manhattan special effects were the most subtle ones. For instance, close-ups on him seemed to include little dust motes hanging in the air around his body. Other-worldly.
- The movie is riddled with great details. The Batman poster. The smiley face crater. The bloodstain/inkblot in the snow. Moloch’s ears. I’m looking forward to the eventual DVD release, with the obligatory “behind the scenes” and “making of” material.
- I strongly dislike a lot of action movies today. It’s as if directors assume spastic cuts and extreme closeups and loud noises and explosions will convey the energy and violence of the moment. Mostly, it just makes my head hurt. I’m pleased Snyder didn’t fall into this cliché. In fact, he used periods of slow motion in his action (did Guy Ritchie popularize that?) to excellent effect.
- I don’t know if I can say whether Watchmen was a good movie or not, or whether someone else would enjoy it. I’m a little too close to the source material to have that kind of objectivity. But I sure dug it.
Okay, I’m done now.
Kauai seems to have a fairly large population of chickens that roam wild around the towns. Roosters with flamboyant combs and proud curving tail feathers, and the slightly less flashy hens.
Someone has decided we could make our fortune by forming a tourist outfitter on the island for hunting chickens. With crossbows. “Nail a chicken to a tree, and that chicken is free!” Tee-shirt sales with little cartoon chickens, have your rooster’s head stuffed and mounted on a banana wood plaque with carved painted figures of chickens along the border, slingshots for the kids to hunt pullets, rubber chickens impaled on rubber arrows. “We’d make a fortune!”, she chortles.
Names have been omitted to protect the clearly deranged. But at least I have it documented for her doctors.
As soon as we arrived, we hit a local market for provisions. I could not convince myself to indulge in Boone’s Farm Blue Hawaiian…
… but we did buy all sorts of tropical fruit. We got rambutan, which is a relative of the lychee, but looks like an overgrown strawberry with curled spikes …
… and these cute fingerling bananas which I’ve grown very fond of. This may be the first non-Cavendish banana I’ve ever had, aside from an occasional plantain. They have a delicate taste, but the sweetness has a slightly sharper edge, almost a hint of citrus. I wonder if I can find these in Portland?
Here is Magic Sands Beach, a tiny little spot in Kona, but the first opportunity we had to plunge into the Pacific on this trip.
One night we did a tour in a glass-bottomed boat, where I caught a brief shot of a manta ray.
The next day we hiked the Kilauea Crater. The hike starts up on a 400-foot rim surrounding the crater, …
… and then descends to the floor of the caldera.
The ferns growing on the crater rim hike are amazingly lush and large.
On the drive back towards Kona, we stumbled upon a tiny, rustic, rural graveyard dug from a lava-riddled hillside.
Tomorrow, we catch a shuttle to Kauai.
Quick notes:
– Satisfied the immediate “look, an ocean, must jump in!” impulse.
– What kind of nutjob uses a leaf blower on a sandy beach?
– The eyecandy is first rate.
– Which tourist injury will strike me first; sunburn, or acute foot abrasion?
I was recently lured to another social networking site, and discovered a community for my high school graduating class. Skimming the profiles of the members, I am flabbergasted by the number of them that are still in the exact same city, and the number that self-identify as deeply conservative Christians. It has served as a vivid reminder of just how much of a freak I was by the standards of that time and place.
One member of the community (hence, one of my former school mates) friended me and said, “I see you managed to escape!” Umm, well yeah. It’s not like I had to carefully time the guards’ patrol and sneak out between the sweeping searchlights. I didn’t have to tunnel under a barbed wire fence. There are maps that show all the major routes, you know. Maybe I should send her one. 😉
I can still remember the dissonance I experienced when I went from being considered a total mutant by the standards of the bible belt, to being considered almost boringly vanilla in my new home on the west coast. It was disconcerting at first, and then I learned to really appreciate it. Liberating.