For the rest of us

So, here we are again.  The Holiday Season is upon us.  Depending upon who are you are, this either means a great deal or almost nothing at all.  Whatever your traditions or affiliations (cultural, religious or otherwise), there is no escaping the Holiday Industrial Complex in this country.  Every year I struggle with the very mixed emotions that accompany my identity as a secular, Jewish but nostalgic and kind of sappy person.  I yearn for rituals and moments in which to touch base with family, consider particular stories/lessons about humanity, make special foods.  This year, as the matriarch in a new family, I am confronted with decisions about how to integrate “Holiday” traditions into our lives, for our daughter’s sake. Although in 2012, we say “Holiday” in reference to things that might take place in December (to include Chanukah, Kwanzaa), what we really mean is Christmas.  All jokes referring to paranoid conservatives spouting off about the "War on Christmas" or the "War on Jesus" aside . . . the popularization of Chanukah and Kwanzaa have always been simply a response to Christmas (and a pretty woeful one, at that).  Let’s face facts: Christmas will never not be a really huge deal and one that takes the cake.  Christmas is so embedded in our culture, our calendar, our winter and so beloved, there is no extricating it.  Beyond the gifts, music, food and décor, Christmas is also a Holiday onto which everyone’s personal psychodrama is superimposed.  The way in which families gather or don’t, the traditions people had as children or didn’t . . . the powerful dynamics at play during this time of year call up some of the deepest feelings of joy or longing for many Americans.  Oh and also, reverent people consider it holy and significant.

I grew up in a home that was very culturally Jewish, but didn’t really give much credence to Holidays, per se.  We typically belonged to a Synagogue, but mostly only went on the High Holidays, which, incidentally do not include Chanukah.  For Jews, the major deals are Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (New Year and Memorial Day-ish).  Tragically, our High Holidays don’t involve gifts.  And let's be honest---they aren't really all that fun.  Rosh Hashanah tries hard with apples and honey and talk of renewal, but is sort of a downer what with the stern warnings about being inscribed in the Book of Life.  Even the dressed up version of Chanukah has un-sing-able songs in minor keys and potato pancakes (?!).

Chanukah was a bit of an afterthought in my house and my parents often grumbled about how it is actually is a very minor Holiday, bastardized in this country to compete with Christmas.  As far as I know, we are the only culture in which Chanukah is celebrated with gifts.  The Americanized version of Chanukah can often look like a “Jewish Christmas,” with crass commercialism at the core.  Despite my profound yearnings as a child, my parents weren’t buying it or buying it, although some years they managed to go beyond the candle lighting and chocolate coins to bestow socks, pajamas or books.

While, as an adult, I can totally respect their philosophical stand on this front, as a child, I desperately wanted what I saw most other kids having---not just an embarrassment of gifts, but a whole season devoted to them.  I would spend time at friends' houses during December and watch as the tree was trimmed and all the rooms filled up with sparkling trinkets, bright parcels and the fragrance of cinnamon sticks.  The promise of this sacred time when everything got so cozy and everyone gathered together from far and wide (particularly salient for me, as my siblings were much older and lived all over the world) felt impossible to resist.

I also knew people growing up who were Jewish, but just threw in the towel and celebrated Christmas.  This was always sort of sad to me.  It spoke to two unfortunate realities---that Jews in this country feel so overwhelmed by the power of Christmas that they feel compelled to participate in another religion's Holiday and/or they feel their children can't tolerate December without the Bacchanalia.  Meanwhile, I totally get this.  I won't mince words, Christmas wins.  It is friggin’ awesome for kids.  And let’s not even consider families in which there is only one Jewish parent and they “celebrate both.”  I SAY AGAIN, CHRISTMAS WINS.

So how to make sense of it all now?  The fact is that my parents were consistently generous throughout the year with their love, their time and many of the material things we desired.  Just because I didn't score a payload at Christmas, doesn't mean I didn't have a wealth of toys and games.  I had way more than I needed, as so many of us did.  And despite my desire to be like the other kids, I never had to watch my parents grow anxious or irritable about shopping for a bounty of gifts or spending money they didn't have.  They also made it clear that it was highly inappropriate to develop a sense of entitlement about gifts, especially as a child.  These lessons were swallowed hard, but remain valuable.

I think this is what want for Isadora, ultimately.  I hope she feels loved beyond belief and that she lives with a sense of joy throughout the year.  I hope that she relishes how our family is different and feels confident and comfortable with who we are.  I hope we celebrate important milestones with good cheer and delicious foods in each season and take great pains to be together with extended family as often as possible.  I also plan to spoil her with frivolous gift items and possibly spend more money than is reasonable on things like a long sleeve t-shirt with a bulldog silkscreen.  And certainly most important, I intend to teach her about giving to others and being of service because we have so much relative to most.

(Images: Marco Ghitti via Flickr)

I'll take today.

I have many guilty pleasures, including the queso from Torchy's Tacos in Austin, The Real Houswives of New York, and, most importantly for us here today, the British miniseries Lost in Austen. It's a sort of wish fulfillment version of Pride and Prejudice, in which a plucky, modern-day heroine named Amanda Price finds a portal to Austen's England via her bathroom wall. The show plays into what is, admittedly, a pretty widespread fantasy of women (and likely some men) the world over: slap on an Empire-style dress and a bonnet, and you, too, will no doubt be irresistible to Mr. Darcy. As a bonus, you'll get to live inside the world of your favorite novel, surrounded by the insufferable Mrs. Bennet, the kind, understanding Jane, and the tragically hands-off Mr. Bennet (revealed here to be graced with the Christian name Claude).

But it's Amanda's present-day roommate who, in the final moments of the series, reminds us of a cold, hard truth: while those women in flowing gowns and men in knee-high boots might seem impossibly elegant to us when viewed from a comfortable 200 years' distance, the reality differs somewhat. When Amanda asks her to come along with her to 19th century Longbourne, Pirhana (her roommate) says, "Amanda, I'm black. And what's more, I can't live without electricity, chocolate, or bog paper."

When (major spoiler alert) the miniseries ends with Amanda swapping places with Elizabeth Bennet (in time, space, and Fitzwilliam Darcy's affections) the implication is that while Lizzie was clearly too modern for her own time, Amanda belongs to it.

It's an adorable and satisfying conceit for a TV show meant to be consumed along with obscene amounts of chocolate, no doubt. On reflection, though, is anyone served by this kind of sentimentality about the past? Especially a pastiche of time gone by? After all, it's the Republican spin machine's treacly version of a 1950s paradise (one which, let's be clear, never existed, except on TV) that's used as a reason to roll back the rights women and people of color have spent the last 60 years fighting for.

By dressing up the past in our own expectations for it, we do those whose dedication and hard work has brought us this far a disservice. Nostalgia for one's childhood is understandable, but nostalgia for a time in which slavery was commonplace worldwide (though it has yet to be eradicated, even today), women were treated---by the law as well as by men---as property, and there was little to no access to things like Charmin and Vosges?

No thanks. I'm too busy making sure it doesn't reassert itself in the here and now---a place which, incidentally, is looking pretty good these days, what with Obama's reelection, New Hampshire sending an all-women delegation to Congress (plus a female governor), more women than ever in the House and Senate, and the first openly lesbian and bisexual members of Congress headed to D.C. Yup, I'll stick with the era I was lucky enough to be born into, thanks. Pass the chocolate.

XIV. Picardie

With Clémence’s parents and sister, I drive a couple hours to the neighboring region of Picardie, where the extended family is having a large reunion. Some are French, some are German; either way, the beer and wine flow excessively. After a few glasses I find that my French does, too. Even Roger, usually so quiet, smiles at my chattiness.

The next day, moving slightly more slowly than usual, I lace up my shoes and announce that I am going for a run. Clémence and her family have gotten used to this, not even looking up in astonishment anymore when I come back into the house after a long workout. Indeed, I think the entire country neighborhood in Normandie has come to terms with my athletic eccentricity; familiar voices shout Bon courage! as I run by, the cries bouncing off the thatched roofs across the lane and following me down the road.

But today Pauline is worried about me being alone out on these different roads. She enlists the help of Guillaume, Clémence’s cousin, who is tall and bony-thin and doesn’t look like he has ever run in his life, at least no more than the distance to the tabac for more rolling papers. Even so, Pauline insists that he accompanies me.

Guillaume smokes one cigarette before we head out, another during my stretching break, and then two when we get back an hour later, his lungs heaving with the effort of inhaling the tobacco. I just stand there and watch, curious, and I feel my heart rate return to normal.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Emily Matchar is the author of Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity (Simon & Schuster, May 2013), which explores our current mania for "new domesticity"---the knitting, the Etsy-ing, the backyard chicken-keeping, etc. etc. She writes about culture, work, food and women's issues for places like The Washington Post, Salon, Men's Journal, the BBC and others. She lives in Hong Kong and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran I just finished this, inhaling it in, like, 15 minutes. Moran, a British music journalist and columnist, is 1,000 times cooler and more hilarious and foul-mouthed than your most cool, hilarious and foul-mouthed friend. She gets drunk with Lady Gaga. She talks openly about her abortion. She goes to strip clubs and pronounces them bullshit. She rails against things like bikini waxing and butt-floss thongs without giving a damn about whether she sounds like a “strident feminist.” She IS a strident feminist. We should all be strident feminists. In Moran’s world, there’s a lot less guilt and uncomfortable underwear, and a lot more rock n’ roll and cake and tickle fights with your kids.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman Shulman is a feminist activist who achieved fame/notoriety for publishing her 1969 “A Marriage Agreement,” a contract formally dividing up housework between her and her husband. She’s been mocked for it ever since by people who think it’s petty or humorless, but given that we still don’t have a fair divide of housework in this country, she clearly had a major point. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is a novel, a very 1970s novel raging with anger at possessive husbands and no-good lovers and rapey high school football players, full of lines like “Even in a separate bed I would be trapped under his ego.” It’s a bit hard going, but makes me feel really good that a lot’s changed in the past 40 years when it comes to male-female relationships. I interviewed Shulman about housework and gender for my book (Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity, out this coming spring), and she’s a real trip (to borrow piece of 1970s vocab). “We didn’t want to abolish housework!” she cried. “We just wanted men to do their fair share.”

O, The Oprah Magazine I’m not always a big fan of Oprah. I mean, she’s an amazing woman and entrepreneur, but her fondness for pseudoscience and “The Secret”-type power of positive thought crap is idiotic. Still, I love her magazine. I’ve never been able to read aspirational glossies like Vogue or Vanity Fair without feeling terrible about myself (why don’t I have a “great friend” who is a Duchess? Why don’t I have “the new wool pant” in my wardrobe? Why aren’t I at a book party in Brooklyn fending off advances from Salman Rushdie?). Oprah understands that everyone’s life is messed up in some way or another, and her magazine’s all about working with what you’ve got and having a good attitude. My punkrock 14-year-old self would kill me for admitting this, but I eat it up. My mom just sent me her back issues of O along with a bunch of Halloween candy, and I’ve been enjoying both in the bathtub. So sue me.

The Passage by Justin Cronin Ever since I picked up Steven King’s Carrie as a morbid and bookish 9-year-old, I’ve loved literary horror novels. Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic? Even better. As an adult, I’ve branched out into mystery (Tana French, Kate Atkinson and Gillian Flynn are some of my recent favorites), largely because a lot of horror novels are real shite in the prose style department. So I was super-psyched to start The Passage, as Cronin comes from the non-genre side of things and really knows how to write. I’m 23 percent of the way through the story (yes, I usually read on my Kindle), a tale a government-sponsored trial of a modern-day vampire virus that goes out of control (naturally). There’s a rogue FBI agent with a broken heart. There’s a little girl with superpowers. There’s a nun from Sierra Leone who talks to God. It’s so good I’m not getting any work done.

The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby Speaking of apocalyptic horror stories involving dreadful viruses: this is about a real one. The yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878 sickened 20,000, killed 5,000, and turned the city into a giant morgue. Everyone with means (ie, wealthy whites) fled to the highlands, while the poor and black stayed behind. In a lot of ways, the city never recovered. As a Southerner (I grew up in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina), I’ve always been fascinated with the ways the region is haunted by its past.

On that cheerful note, thanks for asking me to participate! I hope everyone’s eating leftover turkey and lying on the couch with a good book (or, let’s be honest, a backlog of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” episodes).

Flashing the Audience

Can I tell you one of my least favorite things? It’s that moment—you know the one—when you’re watching a trailer for such-and-such action movie, and there’s EXPLOSIONS, and there’s CAR CHASES, and there’s sweaty close-ups with a tough-looking guy muttering something cliché like “here we go again,” and all of a sudden there’s a brief, almost subliminal flash of a female actress taking her shirt off, and you’re like “what?” but they’re already to the next shot and/or the graphic title of the movie.

Sometimes the woman’s face is shown; sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a recognizable, hot actress, a Zoe Saldana or a Scarlett Johansson. Sometimes it’s a love scene. Sometimes it’s T, sometimes it’s A. But it always feels incredibly gratuitous, like a really transparent non sequitur. It’s like a big, “HEY! Hey guys! There will also be hot women wearing very little clothing! Just in case that influences your decision to spend money on this movie.” (Operative word being “guys”: I don’t discount that this marketing might also appeal to queer women, but there’s a definite exclusion happening in the message that both ignores and potentially discomfits and alienates the female demographic.)

So I was reminded of this when I saw this week that GQ’s Man of the Year issue, which has multiple covers, will feature one cover with Rihanna completely naked save a very open leather jacket, while the other two covers feature very clothed, close-cropped male actors (Channing Tatum and Ben Affleck). Seeing as how GQ is basically the journalistic equivalent of an action film in terms of its gender appeal, it’s not entirely surprising.

But, as Jezebel puts it: “Just imagine a little girl who looking at the three covers and wondering why the lady is the only one with no clothes on. What message is she getting about her body? What has she learned about a woman's worth?”

As I mentioned in a previous post on pretty comediennes, it’s disappointing that women in entertainment, no matter their talents or personality, are expected to play sexy on magazines, in movies, on red carpets. Rihanna may be more in control of her hypersexual image than most—but the juxtaposition of her “Obsession of the Year” cover and the two male-dominated covers is revealing. It’s that wink at the audience, that barely coded message to men that says, “Hey! We have women in this issue—and those women are not wearing any clothes.”

Watch for it next time you see an action or thriller trailer. They think they're being sneaky, but it's easy to spot if you're looking for it. What I'm hoping is that . . . that moment, that shirt-taking-off moment, will more and more seem like a harsh dissonance, a “where the hell did that come from?”, and will be less and less employed. Or hey, at the very least, let's have a little more male objectification to keep things equal. What's good for the goose is good for the gander! (I kid. Kind of.)

XIII. Provence

I am walking along the Mediterranean coast with the groupe des randonneurs that I joined as my required extracurricular activity from ACCP. What I had expected to be rigorous hiking turns out to be a group of mostly retired people who amble through woods every Tuesday afternoon. I convinced Leah and Bridget to join as well, and we’re laughing at how ridiculously slowly we are moving. We hadn’t fully comprehended the meaning of the verb randonner when we signed up for this. We thought it was hiking. This is ambling, maybe. Strolling.

We are the only ones wearing shorts and are obviously American, and so the other walkers are delighted to meet us. At the break halfway through the walk, we are plied with treats and spécialités personelles of every sort from our fellow randonneurs — homemade cake, figs stuffed with almonds, provençal cookies. I finally have to say no to coffee. Leah, Bridget and I tried so hard to be friendly and gracious that after the break we feel a bit nauseated.

Wild rosemary grows everywhere in this dry climate. As I walk along the cliffside road back toward the bus, the clouds rolling in over the sea, I pick some and crush it between my fingers to release the sharp, woodsy fragrance.

“Try eating it,” says one of the smiling women walking near me. “It’s good for the digestion.”

What Are You Reading (offline, that is?)

Hilary Halpern's lifelong affinity with the sea took her to Santa Cruz for her college education. Here is where she learned how to sail and realized her dream of circumnavigation. Meanwhile, she is working on careers in teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow her writings of inner monologues ranging from dating to tales of her experiences on "the high seas" on her blog: hiladil.blogspot.com. Sailing and my love of the sea have quite the influence on the books I pick and the books that are gifted to me. Maiden Voyage and Dove have been my favorite stories thus far.

Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

Sailing around the world became a dream of mine a little over a year ago; however, I would prefer to do it in the company of crew, unlike Tania Aebi, who at 18 years-old embarked on her quest to circumnavigate the globe alone. Upon her graduation from high school, Tania's father gave her the choice of either a college education or a sailboat. He is an adventurous man and a seasoned sailor who already had accomplished more than one ocean passage with his daughter in tow; he wanted to give her the option of pursuing her own adventure. The catch: she had to sail it around the world by herself within 2 years and break the record as the youngest woman-sailor to do so. Tania picked the boat: a 26-foot sloop Veruna. She writes of her voyage in 1989,  four years after she set sail from New York Harbor. This true story is captivating for sailors and adventure seekers alike. Aebi peppers her exciting tale of close-calls, mile-stones (literally), romance, and self-discovery with tidbits of her dysfunctional upbringing and rebellious youth. Her writing is beautifully descriptive and relatable. I found it fascinating to read her reflections on how a life-changing voyage can bring bittersweet feelings of newfound wisdom as well as a nostalgia for her innocence. After reading her accounts I craved embarking on my own adventure.

Dove

by Robin Lee Graham

This is another autobiographical solo-circumnavigating tale and is the inspiration of a cheesy 1970s flick by the same name. I recommend Robin Lee Graham's personal account. In 1965 at age 16 Robin set sail from Southern California on his 24-foot sloop Dove - hence the title of the book. His enthralling voyage took him a total of 5 years. As he sailed from one destination to the next, he would often stop for as long as several months at a time to explore the land as he repaired his boat and collected provisions. It's interesting to get a young man's perspective of the world as it was in the mid 1960s. Robin gives insight to his thoughts on society in the United States and how being away from it has an extreme effect on the way he will live his life upon his return. During his laboriously long ocean passages, particularly in the Doldrums, he writes of the downward spiral his mind takes after being with only his boat and the eerily quiet sea for so long, and how easy it can be to waver on the brink of insanity. He writes of his care-free times in tropical paradise as well, allowing us to escape in his exquisite, euphoric descriptions of island life.

I read Heinlein's suspenceful novel soon after James Cameron's Avatar debuted in theaters. This fantastic piece of science fiction, written in 1961 has many similar themes to Avatar and makes me wonder if James Cameron drew inspiration from Heinlein's story for his movie. It was gifted to me by an acquaintance who warned me that "grokking" would soon become a part of my everyday vocabulary.

Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

To "grok" something, is to deeply understand it. In the context of the story, it is to appreciate its role in the universe and realize how it relates to one's own role which is a huge part of this story. It takes place in some unspecified time in the future, as projected from the 1960s. World War III is over and life is discovered on Mars. On one of the early expeditions to this foreign planet, Valentine Michael Smith, or "Mike" is born and unfortunately orphaned as an infant by his space-exploring Earthling parents. He is adopted and raised by the Martians and as a result, acquires their psychic powers; the ability to mind-read and to make people disappear with thoughts alone. Another expedition 25 years after his birth brings him to Earth and in captivity of the government due to legal implications and planetary politics. This brilliant science-fiction novel begins with his escape by the aide of a brave nurse and a political reporter with a passion for social-justice. As the story unfolds Mike learns the good and bad ways of his physical counterpart and also tries to impart his own Martian wisdom on the human-race. Heinlein eloquently delivers an outsider's perspective of the multi-faceted behavior of humans and our social and political constructs. He narrates the plot in a way that creates a reflection of how strange it is that we are the only species with such an unquantifiable range of emotion . . . or so we think!

I'm sure this famous novel needn't an explanation for itself. It is one of the stories I have enjoyed reading more than once.

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

I first attempted to read this classic in high school and had a hard time getting passed the language that I now love getting lost in over and over again. I am fascinated by this time period of the early 1800s and how different life was for women and their relationships with men; yet how the love and tumult between them remains the same as it is between true loves today, some 200-plus years later. Jane Austen's words never cease to fulfill the hopeless romantic within me and fuel my own love of writing.

And finally…

Charlotte's Web

by E.B. White

My Mother first read this book at age 8.  She has a vivid image of reading the final chapters late at night with a flashlight so as not to disturb her sister sleeping next to her.  All for loss as she sobbed along with Wilbur and the other farm friends in their grief of losing Charlotte.  Eighteen years later in my mother's, or rather Miss Dowd's first year of teaching, she still couldn't stop the tears from welling up as she read the ending of Charlotte's Webb aloud to her second grade class. The life and friendships between the animals on the farm Miss Dowd loved so much influenced her to create a similarly warm environment in her classroom. Every year of her teaching career she read E.B. White's story to her students. One year, after failing to control her tears at the book's ending yet again, one of her students walked up to her afterwards to comfort her and said, "It's okay Miss Dowd, it's just a story."

Lessons from Cabaret...

Image Credit: Time Out London

Dear Clara,

I’m in London again for work; it seems like the opportunity is coming up more often these days.  I was able to schedule in an evening in the theater, courtesy of my best friend, for one of my most favorite shows, Cabaret.  While many musicals often aim to stay above any kind of disheartening fray, Cabaret introduces both social and political commentary, without removing any of the fun---in fact, I would argue the fun is even taken to a whole new level.  I absolutely adore the music and pace of the show, and I’ll even admit that I might have spent a Halloween or two as Sally Bowles.  The thing though, is that the Cabaret comes to an end, tragic every time.  It's getting harder and harder to watch, since you know inevitably what happens not so long after the show ends.  A few things always stick with me:

• “In here, life is beautiful…”: Everyone should have a place, cabaret or otherwise, where life is at its best.  Whether it’s wine, song, dance or nature, quiet and tea, look for spaces that are the best representation of what’s good in this life for you.   Just remember that you can’t live exclusively in those places; the outside world will always come in and you need to be prepared.
• “And it just so happens I do paint my fingernails green, and I think it’s pretty”: All of the characters have their eccentricities, personalities and even character flaws, yet for a time they all manage to be a cohesive group.  It doesn’t last of course, but focus on differences in people as something interesting, something to be learned from, and something that compliments those things that make you yourself different.  It’s a quality not many people have.
• “I thought I should know something about the politics”: When Cliff arrives in Berlin, he immediately starts to read the literature of the day, much to the confusion of Sally, who is caught up in the moment.  Different travels and places offer us adventures, but we should also take the time to know something about the location, and what’s happening in current events and what that means for all groups that live there, not just the glimpses we are given when we’re visitors.  It might just change your perspective.
• “A pineapple? I am overwhelmed”: I think one of the most touching scenes in the entire show is when Frau Schneider is gifted a pineapple by her gentleman caller.  Not only is it a tremendously sweet display of romance amongst two people who thought they would remain alone, but it also captures how something rare can really touch you.  Lately, I notice that people always laugh during this scene.  No one seems to realize that at the time, pineapples weren’t that readily available, were extremely rare, were a symbol of the exotic and were incredibly expensive.   Now you could walk into nearly any supermarket, probably one that’s open 24 hours and buy a pineapple anytime you feel like it.  It’s good to appreciate where our fruits and food come from, and how long they traveled to get there, and what a gift it is truly to have such fresh items full of flavor and vitamins for ourselves at any time.
• “What good is sitting alone in your room?” Come here the music play . . . Make time for music and for enjoyment with others.  There is so much in life that can drag you down,  don’t waste your opportunities when times are better.

All my love,

Mom

Dressing

Wine colored jeans. An eggplant hued henley. Chocolate brown leather ankle boots. The elements of my favorite fall outfit are best described through the language of food: wine, eggplant, and coco. In these last few weeks, with the weather turning cooler and the days darker, I had expected to find myself retreating to the warmth and comfort of the kitchen. What I didn't expect, however, was that my wardrobe would also do the same.  That cheerful looking orange pumpkin I roasted in the oven last night? It made me long for a bright soft scarf of the same color. Or what about that deep, blue-green kale? Perfect for a cozy v-neck.  I find myself wanting to eat as I dress and dress as I eat: In a spectrum of colors and flavors. In different styles, but with a similar taste. My dinner plate is my fashion muse, apparently.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this appealing connection between food and clothes. In flipping through a Lands End catalogue recently I came across a slew of vegetable and fruit named garb. There was a  "spinach leaf" sweatshirt and an "aubergine plum" turtleneck. A "boysenberry" pea coat and a "brown spice" t-shirt. My favorite descriptions might have been of the boozy variety: punch, claret, merlot, mulled wine, wine berry, bordeux. So many different names for so many similar colors.

I wondered what these names are meant to convey about these products? A turtleneck that is both the color of plum and eggplant must be very purple, yes. Superficially this naming system tells us what a product looks like. But I think the food language is meant to add something. It adds truth and authenticity, maybe, by connecting the wise earth to the piece of clothing. A turtleneck is just a turtleneck. But food is different, it is memory and nourishment, it is flavor and experience. And food is also, apparently, selling us some clothes.

XII. Savoie

I take the TGV, train de grande vitesse, from Chambéry to Paris, and then another smaller train to Bernay to stay with Pauline and Roger. Clémence now lives in the neighboring city of Evreux, where she is taking classes for university. I see her a few times for the week I am there, back in that small attic room. Then I have to go back south, ostensibly to attend the language classes that I have been skipping for the past few weeks, bored with repeating lessons that I went through just a month before. On the ride back, I spend most of the three-hour trip holding back tears, hiding my face against the window as the country blurs by. In French, the way you say “homesick” is avoir le mal du pays. You could literally translate this as “to feel the pain of your country.” But it’s not quite that. I am mostly feeling the pain of being in this country.

The second I arrive back in Chambéry, I call Pauline, begging her to let me come back. She calls me nénette, her pet word I’ve heard her say to Clémence so many times before. I am on a train back to Bernay the next morning.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Katherine explores grief and loss through her blog Helping Friends Grieve, which she founded in 2010 as a tool for friends and loved ones supporting someone in the grieving process.  Currently, as a graduate student, Katherine studies community healing in post-conflict environments.  Her work in international development and passion for justice and human rights has taken her to diverse regions of the globe, including the Peruvian Andes, Mexico City, Northern Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Katherine’s interest in grief, memory, and healing is reflected in her desire to explore the role of community and inter-connectedness in healing. When she's not working, you'll find her outside: rock climbing, hiking or backpacking. Grief, loss, and mourning take hold of us. They become tides that come and go throughout the day or rollercoasters that catch us off guard, plunging us into undiscovered emotional territory. Loss leaves us bruised and, yet, curiously open to the world as we re-imagine and re-create our lives. We mourn the loss of place, home, youth, loved ones, and ability; the mix of emotions and utterly human trials exist in a web connecting our individual experience to our community. Our country continues to experience and heal from the devastation of hurricane Sandy; a thread ties together survival, loss, and resilience within our individual stories and communities.  We seek safety, interconnectedness with each other, and real, literal moments of joy that anchor us to our everyday lives.

The world of grief and healing is full of stories. Stories that make our hearts ache and bring tears to our eyes. Stories that touch us deeply, resonating with our experiences, bring our losses closer to the surface, and in their own way, heal us.  A belief in the power of stories is why I share (link to Helping Friends Grieve) and encourage others to share. The stories I look to this week, offline, that is, weave together the personal and community elements of grief, mourning, and healing across cultures and experiences with loss.

this i know by Susannah Conway The moment I laid eyes on Susannah Conway’s subtitle, notes on unraveling the heart, the warm book cover beckoned me in. Yes, I thought to myself, that is what I have been trying to say, loss and grief unravel your heart. Susannah vulnerably shares her experience with layers of grief, emotions, and self-doubt, ultimately, leading to much deeper questions of identity.  Her journey becomes one of self-creation. Susannah began her journey writing about grief after the loss of the love of her life, through blogging (link here: http://www.susannahconway.com/2006/04/a-few-beans-to-spill/). This i know, her 2012 book, re-lives her beautiful, tentative steps towards healing, “When we survive a traumatic event or transition in our lives, there’s a point when the healing really starts to take hold and we feel suddenly invincible.”(pg 39) Beyond words, her camera lens captures grief and healing in a moving combination of self-portraits and the world around her, which she claims give us clues on how to re-create our own worlds after loss.  Her writing and photography show grief settling and her creative, passionate self-emerging from an unraveled heart. It is breath-taking and inspiring as we weave our own stories of grief.

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke Why do we write about grief? Why do we tell stories about loved ones?  In a 2011 New York Times piece (link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html), Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke explore the public and private sides of grieving through personal emails that they later share publicly. In The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke jumps headfirst into her journey through the loss of her mother and openly shares its vivid, intimate details. She refers to grief as a nearly universal act with exquisitely personal transactions. (page 57) She opens up these personal moments for the reader to experience and grieve with her, thus blending their own stories of loss with hers.  In her own words;

I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother’s death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends and colleagues, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. (page 12)

She bookends her story with chapters on love and healing, tying together childhood memories, anticipatory grief, the cracks in her relationships, the rollercoaster of caretaking, and the lack of rituals to shape and support her loss. She gracefully tackles the experience of saying goodbye, allowing the reader to join her and glean insight its messy mechanics.

Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen The Chicken Soup for the Soul series pulls me back to memories of weekends as a young girl, curled up on the couch of my family’s cabin in Colorado, reading stories of teenage love. This scene was nearly repeated after the loss of my father, as I dove back into other people’s stories. Only, this time I found comfort in their stories of loss and healing. I wove their stories into a safety net around my own emotions, allowing me the space to experience my own loss and journey. Wrapped in blankets, sipping cups of tea, I cried over the words I wasn’t brave enough yet to put on paper - a father’s portrayal of the loss of his son, a young woman’s loss of her mother, and a wide variety of other stories written by people who, I assumed, once had also curled up on a couch, searching desperately for meaning in the throes of loss. Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul, is a compilation of stories written by authors who have lost loved ones. It beautifully walks the line between sharing in grief and inspiring readers with stories of healing and understanding. It connects us, showing our resilience as humans.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder In the first few years after the loss of my father, I referred to my life, or rather the life I had known as the pieces. By pieces I meant little bits of strength, memories that let light into my life, and relationships with friends and loved ones that sewed me back together. During this time, I moved abroad and sought to re-create a sense of community spanning countries, regions, and cultures. During the months I spent a truly magical place, Mexico City, a friend gifted me Strength in What Remains. I have read and re-read this book over the past few years, scribbling in the margins and always throwing it in my blue backpack before boarding the next plane. I fell in love all over again with Deo’s story as I crossed the border from Rwanda to Burundi this summer. At 22, his devastating story of survival during genocide and his strength span his harrowing experiences in Burundi, his improbably escape to New York City, and ultimately the fulfillment of his dream – returning to Burundi to build a hospital. Through Deo’s journey, Kidder shows us the pieces of loneliness, pain, grief, and displacement from home, but ultimately the resilience of the human spirit that echoes within elements of our own narratives. The essence of Deo’s experiences are rooted in Wordsworth’s graceful words, which lend the perfect title to the book. From the poem, Strength in What Remains;

“Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind…..”

…..

My experience with grief is no longer just a memory of my own experience, but a mix of the stories I have loved, savored, and wiped tears off my cheeks while reading. These are just a few of the stories that sustain me.

Curating the internet

Recently, I came across a brief news article offering up a study as evidence of what I’ve already known for a while: Facebook is depressing. The Utah Valley University study showed that of the 425 students who were interviewed, those who spent more time on Facebook were more likely to feel that life was unfair and that others’ lives were better than their own. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we tend to curate the best pieces of ourselves on the internet. We tend to share the sweetest, most photogenic aspects of our lives, polishing them up before sending them out into the world. You’re more likely to share a photo of your puppy in the brief, glowing moment when she’s sleeping than when she’s simultaneously tearing up your socks and pooping on the floor.

And if you’ve ever drowned your sorrows in your Facebook news feed while you’re in a funk, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as you’ve broken up with your boyfriend, everyone in your feed seems to be blissfully in love. Circumstances or biology are preventing you from procreating as you’d like to, and suddenly it seems as if everyone else in your feed is popping out babies by the dozen.

The problem with the feed—which is not very nourishing, by the way, but often rather draining—is that it’s missing a holistic view of other people’s lives. When you bond with your real-life friends, you share in their triumphs and their sorrows. Most of our hundreds of Facebook friends are actually acquaintances or strangers, and although it may seem that they are sharing aspects of their private lives online, these glimpses have been selected from among many others for public consumption.

Of course, there are a number of ways to respond to a study like this: ignore it, cut back on Facebook usage, stop using Facebook altogether. My own experience of Facebook has been very conflicted. On the one hand, I find it to be so very useful as a directory and as a sort of social memory. I use it to look up contact information or to find a friend’s friend’s spouse’s name that I’ve forgotten. On the other hand, I arrive to look up a bit of information, and then find I’ve lost a couple of precious hours after having fallen down the rabbit hole of the news feed.

This problem certainly extends beyond Facebook to other social networking sites, Twitter, blogs, etc., and there have been many interesting responses to it across these platforms. Some have chosen to regularly prune their feeds by cutting back on people they follow. Others have taken a cue from Jess Lively’s “Things I’m afraid to tell you” post, sharing some of their own flaws and challenges as a balance to their otherwise optimistic and upbeat content.

For my own part, I’ve taken the “regular maintenance” approach to managing my feeds and overall internet experience. My Twitter bookmark is set to a list of people I actually know. I’ve trimmed my Facebook feed by taking some time to block updates from people I’ve lost touch with beyond Facebook. I’ve used Feedly to craft a reader of content that’s consistently thoughtful and inspiring. It makes sense that we curate our public personalities online, and in response, I’ve tried to curate my own window onto what I encounter when I first open up a browser. It takes time, but it feels like a method for encouraging healthy content consumption, without having to feel like I’m fasting or binging on internet “junk.”

So long, Vogue

By Rhea St. Julien After several years of an admittedly tumultuous relationship, I am breaking up with Vogue.  My subscription is up, and I am finally pulling the trigger and not renewing.  If this blog were a movie, I’d segue here into a montage of me + Vogue in better times, reading sandy articles on the beach, discovering Claire Dederer and Cheryl Strayed, ripping out amazingly curated spreads by Grace Coddington and Irving Penn to create collage art.

But our relationship has not all been Happy Days with scissors.  Like everyone else on the planet, I was appalled by Dara-Lynn Weiss’s article about shaming her child into losing weight.  I have grown increasingly tired of the pieces on Connecticut garden homes refurbished by gazillionaires, and the lack of diversity reflected on the pages.  However, I was willing to overlook all of this, because Vogue isn’t pretending to be anything else than it is.  The magazine is sold as the flight of fantasy of a particular Manhattan woman, and if I don’t like their point of view, I can just skip those articles or join the conversation surrounding them to shift the culture.  Somehow, what pushed me over the edge from giving them a pass to writing CANCEL on my invoice was a subtle message in an otherwise innocuous, seemingly empowering article.

I was drawn in by their profile of fascinating congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a woman who manages to balance motherhood, congressional leadership, and extracurriculars such as softball teams and fundraising for cancer awareness.  The tale of her own breast cancer battle was riveting, but then they slipped in this absolutely ridiculous paragraph:

“By 2011, the only lingering effect of her treatment was weight gain brought on by the drug tamoxifen.  Having ‘never gained an ounce in my life,’ she found herself 23 pounds heavier.  ‘Like every woman who goes through weight gain, you’re just not happy,’ she says.  ‘You’re not comfortable in your clothes, you’re mad when you walk in your closet, you hate going shopping.  I didn’t feel good about myself.’  After a press event in her district promoting a small business called the Fresh Diet, she decided to sign up.  Seven months later, she had lost the 23 pounds and dropped from a size 8 back to a size 2.”

First of all, I’m sorry, the only lingering effect of surviving cancer was weight gain?  What about the scars from surgery, the months lost to recovery, the strain on your family, the emotional damage from confronting mortality in such a raw way?  If you fight cancer and win, and you’re worried about your dress size, CANCER WINS.  You learned nothing from your brush with death, and I just can’t believe that a woman so intelligent and powerful really feels that way.  I suspect they took her comments about her body image struggles out of context in their attempt to trivialize and glamorize the congresswoman.

Also, what’s so terrible about being a size 8 (ahem, ahem)?  The fact that they even put the sizes in there shows that it was a nod to diet culture rather than a well-rounded portrait of a woman’s experience with cancer.  I realized I needed to stop giving money to a publication that was insulting me.

It really bothered me that this blatant body-shaming message was slipped in to a profile of a political leader, a piece that was well-written and interesting.  The subtlety of it was what shook me, left me thinking about the lasting effects of such a paragraph, like when, in the 90′s, they found all those messages about sex in Disney movies.

Recently, my review of Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture was published on the Equals Record, and in my piece, I say that I’m going to try to keep my daughter away from the princess craze as long as I can, and to expose her to different forms of what it means to be a woman than the overwhelmingly narrow cultural ideal.

Well, if I’m going to do that for my daughter, I need to stop “playing princess” myself, and reading Vogue is a way that I, monthly, escape to a world where women are saved from the effects of aging (The Wicked Witch of Wrinkles) by state-of-the-art surgeries and creams (Prince Botox), I dream of having a Fairy Godmother that will bring me a $3,450 biker jacket for the ball, and my confidence is boosted by how modern day royalty (celebs) are really down-to-earth, just like me.

It’s time to put down the princess wand.

I am searching for a new way to be feminine.  Am I a woman because I paint my lips red, wear a dress on the daily, shave my legs and flat iron my bangs?  Of course not.  These are the ways I am fashioning my body right now, and I have chosen other forms for it throughout my life---letting my prodigious body hair grow in college (my husband and I got together, actually, when my leg hair was so long I could French braid it), wearing the same pair of dusty Carhartts for months, forgoing make-up even in the face of period zits.

Right now, my look is very traditionally femme, but, my love for fashion will not die with my Vogue subscription, and I could see myself dressing like one of my icons, Patti Smith, or Georgia O’Keefe, my hair a wild mass of black and gray, my pants pegged and baggy, my white shirt crisp enough to cut a fingernail on.

There is so much power in womanhood---this is one of the major reasons I chose to have my baby as naturally as I could---I wanted to experience that feminine power running through my body in the most primal way possible, to let it change me in the process.  And it did.  But now, despite Operation Rad Bod, I feel crappy about that amazing body that brought me a baby, about two weeks out of every month (if you guessed that those are the week before and the week of my period, then ladies, you are correct).

Vogue is absolutely not going to help me with my quest for a learned experience of the deeper meaning of femininity, beyond waist size and wardrobe.  So, I’m taking this whole experiment to the next level, and trying to limit my own exposure to damaging cultural messages about women, especially since I’m going to limit my daughter’s.  I can’t be wresting the Bratz doll out of her hands while I’m filling my own with pictures of Kate Moss’s wedding.

Perhaps, I’ll spend all the time once consumed with Vogue reading things like this, an excerpt from Dear Sugar’s column entitled Tiny Revolutions:

“You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be ‘hot’ in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?”

So long, Vogue.  It has been fun.  But it has not been real.

Republished with the author's permission from Thirty Threadbare Mercies, Photo:  Some rights reserved by JeepersMedia

Fashion's Ethnic Problem

I’ve been thinking about how fashion---which, side note, is one of my favorite things---tends to represent the worst in our superficial, looks-obsessed culture. For one thing, there’s the whole skinny, stick-thin, pound-obsessed, weight-watching, calorie-counting, only-one-body-type-is-acceptable thing, which marginalizes the beauty potential of all body-type-deviations.

For another, there’s the whole woman-as-canvas thing, where models seem to forgo personhood to become agency-less, blank-faced, silent background scenery.

And then there’s that whole ethnic representation thing. The continued premium on Eurocentric notions of beauty, and the exoticization of those outside of it.

Aaaand now we get to the subject of this post: racist fashion. Yes, there's such a thing, and it's such a thing.

It’s been almost two months since New York Fashion Week and its European counterparts, but there was more than enough fuel for some racist fashion ranting. There was Dolce & Gabbana’s “mammy” motif including some very Aunt Jemima-ish earrings. There was Jeremy Scott’s neo-Orientalist take on Arab punk. And there were the romantic adaptations of traditional Indian garb by Marchesa and Vera Wang, with Wang telling E! reporters she didn’t want to go too far with any of that “belly dancer” stuff. So much problematic-ness, so little time.

I’m not sure what made me think of this now---maybe it’s the way every major clothing store from Urban Outfitters to Target has suddenly been all over the Native American print trend. Navajo-panty-gate caused an uproar a while back, and yet the trend has continued to diffuse through all retail chains. You can buy bags, hoodies, or what have you emblazoned with traditional native-style prints, and UO even has T-shirts with skulls wearing native headdresses.

The prints are often beautiful, but they’re also an uncomfortable example of cultural appropriation. Meaning, the hegemonic culture, for all intents and purposes "white" though of course participated in by a range of backgrounds, appropriates the cultural heritage and imagery of a minority group without their consent or direct participation. Just this past week, No Doubt pulled its new video after a wave of complaints about its representation of Native Americans. For more on the issue, I recommend you check out the Native Appropriations blog, which does a great job of breaking down indigenous images in pop culture and even succeeded in getting an apology from Paul Frank for their “powwow” party a few months ago.

None of this is surprising, I suppose. Racism and sexism are embedded in our culture, and fashion is just another art-slash-entertainment form from which they can poke their ugly heads. (Favorite racist Project Runway: All-Stars judge quote last week: when host Carolyn Murphy asked derisively upon seeing one contestant’s design, “Where are we, Spanish Harlem?”) My only consolation is that noticing it and not simply accepting it, we recognize that those ugly heads are still a problem. And this is where my somewhat jumbled assortment of thoughts that is this week's post comes to a head.

I love you Fashion, but you can be a real jerk sometimes.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Ashely Schneider has slowly but surely made her way from one coast to another. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, she left her hometown to attend college at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.  A month after graduation and with her sights set on new territory, she ventured off to the wild west settling in Jackson, Wyoming, where she lived for 4 years. Currently, she and her husband live in Portland, Oregon. Ashely prefers bikes to cars, hiking trails to shopping malls, and she likes to document it all from behind the lens of a camera. 

Jim Minick, The Blueberry Years

Ever wonder what life on a farm is like? I daydream about it all the time!  After reading Jim Minick’s The Blueberry Years, that dream doesn’t seem so impossible. I was drawn to this book for two main reasons. First and foremost, it’s a memoir about organic blueberry farming, which for me doesn’t get any more idyllic. His pursuit of a simpler life is one I related to within the first few pages. Second, the book is set in Virginia, the place where I was born and raised. I couldn’t resist reading about life in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Minick, both farmer and poet, writes about food, family, and the choices we make as consumers. He chronicles not only the joys but the frustrations of running one of the mid-Atlantic’s first organic, pick-your-own blueberry farms. While everyday brings him face to face with challenges such as weather and pests, Minick finds his work gratifying, and he focuses on the soulful and physical rewards it yields.

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

I picked up Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur a few days before traveling to Big Sur, California. A little cliché, I’ll admit. I was familiar with Kerouac’s work and writing style, so I felt prepared for another alcohol-induced stream of consciousness narrative. That’s exactly what I got. Kerouac recounts his three trips to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s remote cabin in Bixby Canyon, just south of San Francisco. There he seeks solitude after gaining fame from his novel, On the Road. But the wilderness takes its toll on Kerouac as he travels that road inside his head, and his mind and body begin to deteriorate. He struggles to identify with both his natural retreat and the city life he wants to escape. While there are lucid moments in between these struggles – during which he documents sights, smells, and sounds and their effect on his soul – Big Sur is the story of Kerouac’s emotional breakdown at the moment of his rising popularity.

Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood Bones & Butter

As a self proclaimed foodie and amateur cook, I had Blood, Bones & Butter on my menu of must-reads for a year. Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir is a modern day success story.  Hamilton’s journey was an unconventional one filled with divorce, drugs, and theft. But after a tumultuous twenty years of what seemed to be personal and professional confusion, she returns to what she always knows to be right – cooking. Seeking some direction, she gets a taste of the restaurant industry by working its range of gritty jobs from waitress to caterer to line cook. Eventually she musters up enough strength and confidence to open her own kitchen. Her restaurant, Prune, proves to be difficult at times, but Hamilton recognizes that she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.

 Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Joan Didion’s most recent novel, Blue Nights, is a heartbreaking account of the unnatural order of things. Her daughter’s untimely death forces Didion to reflect on her role as a parent. She weaves together stories and memories of her only child, Quintana Roo, who died from medical complications at age thirty-nine. Reflecting on her daughter’s life, Didion struggles with decisions made as a mother, and she finds herself constantly dwelling on those things she might have done to make their time together more rich. At the same time, Didion worries about her own age. Blue nights – the long evening light in the sky that leads up to the summer solstice – serves for Didion as both a symbol for life and a warning that seasons are changing.

Frida Kahlo: Survivor. Communist. Mexican Icon.

Everyone’s familiar with Frida Kahlo’s face, at least as she painted it. The dark, somber eyes. The brightly-colored dresses. That inescapable unibrow.

But Frida Kahlo is much more than that famous face, with its ugly beauty and its unconventional emphasis on female facial hair. She’s also a fascinating figure who lived through some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting events, who was attached to some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting people. And on top of that, she really put the “pain” in “awesome painter.” (Sorry. A stretch, I know.)

Frida was born in 1907 in Mexico City, just before the Mexican Revolution, to an immigrant Hungarian-Jewish father and a Spanish-Amerinidian mother. She suffered from polio at a young age, resulting in a permanently withered leg. But the seminal painful moment in Frida’s life was in 1925, when she was in a horrific bus accident that left her with spinal fractures, multiple broken bones, a crushed foot, and, the one that gives me the biggest heebie-jeebies, an impaling by a metal handrail. She wasn’t expected to survive.

But survive she did—albeit with an enormous amount of pain that never really left her. She went on to have over 30 surgeries in her lifetime, the last of which may have left her with the pneumonia that killed her at age 47 (though it’s also speculated she killed herself).

Despite the immense pain that was to haunt her and characterize her relationship with her body—or maybe, in part, because of it—Kahlo went on to do great things. She began painting while in bed, recovering from the bus accident, starting with her most famous subject: herself. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she said, “because I am the subject I know best.”

At age 22 she married famed muralist Diego Rivera, who was two decades older and two hundred pounds heavier than her (!). Their relationship helped her to develop her own work, while also being one of those Hollywood-style tumultuous marriages with tons of affairs on both sides and even a divorce thrown in the middle (after which they remarried, each other). Frida, for her part, had affairs with many famous figures, both men and women, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Leon Trotsky, whom she and Rivera put up in their home after his flight from Russia. (Ironically, after he was assassinated she became a Stalinist.)

Meanwhile, Kahlo’s work was feted in New York City and Paris, and she was the first 20^th-century Mexican artist to be featured in the Louvre. I can just imagine her mingling in that most romantic of settings, 1920s Paris (think Midnight in Paris), at an art showing, being toasted by Picasso and Miró and Andre Breton, a Parisian anomaly in her long, bright, traditional Mexican dress.

But as it were, Frida rejected what she called those “artistic bitches of Paris.” Her heart remained in Mexico City, where she lived most of her life in La Casa Azul, the house she was born in (which today houses Museo Frida Kahlo-- a must on my world tour list!). She and Rivera were also involved in a movement called Mexicanidad, aimed at preserving an essential, traditional Mexican culture in opposition to the encroaching cultural dominance of “the West.”

Kahlo attempted to live this Mexican ideal in her dress, in the symbols and colors of her art, and, also, in her rejection of conventional beauty norms. In fact, it’s reported she even darkened her unibrow and mustache to emphasize a kind of pre-Columbian femininity— where in this case, pre-Columbian means “before tweezers.”

Because of this, Frida Kahlo remains to this day a shining symbol of feminism and Mexican culture, and her art and celebrity have been completely embraced by the mainstream. But it’s easy to overlook the ways in which Kahlo’s art, and life, were less about empowerment and more about suffering, about the visceral experience of bodily pain and the social and political difficulties of being a woman. One of her most affecting works, My Birth, was painted after her miscarriage, depicting a bloodied Kahlo-like head emerging from a woman’s body.

Additionally, it should be recognized that "authenticity" movements seek an essentialized, pre-modern, sometimes imaginary past; in this case, a pre-Europe Mexico. Kahlo's embracing of "authentic" Mexican culture must be understood as a kind of political statement, rather than a representation of the Mexico that actually surrounded her.

In my opinion, the complexity of her personal and political life and the tragedy of her experiences, as well as the diverse vitality of her influences—which range from street artists to Catholic votive paintings to images of disasters to pre-Columbian folk art—makes her work all the more fascinating. There's so much beauty in what she created. Beauty in the attempts at authenticity; beauty in the expressions of human suffering; and, perhaps most surprisingly, beauty in the ugliness. I'm not going to grow a unibrow out in solidarity, but doesn't mean I don't appreciate what that unibrow represented.

On The Way To Palmyra

Palmyra greeted me wrapped in a mist of a spring late afternoon, years ago.  The Syrian desert surprised me as quite different from other desert landscapes I had seen before. It’s a dry barren wilderness, suddenly covered in green patches that gather in small oasis, where for no apparent reason water breaks through the ground surface. What I am sharing here is a memory of the country of Syria as I remember it, and I wish that soon it will be possible for me to visit those amazing places again. Most importantly, I wish people peace and happiness. I wish children to grow in harmony and equanimity.

***

April 2001.

The trip from Damascus is hard---cloudy sky, stubborn winds, and oppressive heat.

Mamma, papà, brother. All of us accompanying my grandfather in a business trip throughout Syria, and occasionally taking time to explore.

We are only forty miles from Palmyra, but a sudden Jeep breakdown risks to jeopardize our family adventure. Two hours stop in the middle of the unmerciful desert, without food, only cans of delicious mango juice for lunch.

We sit by the roadside, on our right and left only an endless road, starting in the capital and ending in one of the most ancient cities in the center of the country. Our driver, Amin, blue eyes, brown skin and four children at home, lies under the car, occasionally breaking the silence by muttering words whose meaning is easy to guess.

The emptiness of my stomach matches the emptiness of my cultural background---I don’t know much about Palmyra, I only imagine the ruins from the Roman Empire, surrounded by desert. I know of an oasis. And I have seen pictures of a big castle on a hill, which dominates the valley like a severe guardian.

Finally Amin the hero fixes the Jeep, we feel relieved and begin to drive the road towards our destination.

As we reach Palmyra with great expectations, we can’t see a thing. The wind is blowing hard and the landscape appears like a pink thick cloud. We opt for a half an hour break at the hotel. And while we rest, a heavy rain starts.

When we step out of the hotel, a miracle has just happened.

The sky is ocean blue, and the wind has calmed down, becoming a pleasant warm breeze.

The desert in front of us is rich, full of past, enlightened by the sun.

There it is the old Roman ruins from long ago---right next to the road. No fence, no guards, and not many tourists around. Only a couple of local Bedouins at the beginning of the column road, waiting to give foreigners a ride on their camels.

We stood there for a long while. The light and the colors of the columns were amazing---the sun still strong in the sky produced an amazing spectacle in different shades of yellow and pink. And that is when we know that the trip was worth the effort.

 

by Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904)

A weary waste of blank and barren land,

A lonely, lonely sea of shifting sand,

A golden furnace gleaming overhead,

Scorching the blue sky into bloody red;

And not a breath to cool, and not a breeze

To stir one feather of the drooping trees;

Only the desert wind with the hungry moan,

Seeking for life to slay, and finding none;

Only the hot Sirocco’s burning breath,

Spangled with sulphur-flame, and winged with death;

No sound, no step, no voice, no echo heard,

No cry of beast, no whirring wing of bird;

The silver-crested snake hath crept away

From the fell fury of that Eastern day;

The famished vultures by the failing spring

Droop the foul beak and fold the ragged wing;

And lordly lions, ere the chase be done,

Leave the black desert to the desert-sun. 

What Are You Reading (offline, that is?)

Rhea St. Julien was absolutely certain she would grow up to be a Fly Girl, but had to rethink her life goals when In Living Color was cancelled in 1994.  Since then, she's been trying to find a comparable life goal, trying out teaching Pilates, becoming an Expressive Arts Therapist, and a work-at-home Mama/children's programming consultant.  In the process, she's become one of those wacky San Franciscans her grandmother always warned her about.  In her spare time, she can be found rocking out with her husband in their band Him Downstairs, shaking it in dance class, or reading a stack of library books.  Her personal blog, Thirty Threadbare Mercies, focuses on parenting, spirituality and pop culture.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of The New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein

Just after my daughter's Where the Wild Things Are themed 2-year-old birthday party, I found myself sitting in a pile of pink, sparkly gifts, worried that perhaps I would be smothered by all the tulle and sequins. It hit me: the princess craze was right around the corner, and Olive had just been issued her uniform. I needed to heed my friends' suggestions, and read Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, before the fate the book's title warned became reality.

I was a charming toddler, and was told so often, by strangers as well as relatives, who made up funny nicknames for me like "Reebeedee", "Ribbit" and "Pumpkin", that they felt reflected my free spirit and but also my cuteness. However, I do not recall ever being called "Princess." It would not have fit my tendency to come home covered in dirt every day from the playground, or the way that I dressed, which was mostly in overalls or corduroys.

Since having my daughter, however, I have been disconcerted by how many people call her "Princess". Far from a castle, we live in a cramped urban apartment, and as the child of a pair of artist/social workers, she has anything but a royal pedigree. When she plays, she’s aggressively physical: running, jumping, dancing, singing. We dress her mostly in primary colors, rather than the ubiquitous pink pastels that take up the girls’ section of any children’s clothing store.

However, no matter what she’s doing or what she’s wearing, people say, “Oh, look at the little princess!” Well, why should it bother me that people are bestowing this moniker on her? Isn't it a compliment?

Orenstein, journalist and mother, breaks down why the princess title gets under my skin: “Let’s review: princesses avoid female bonding. Their goals are to be saved by a prince, get married . . . and be taken care of for the rest of their lives. Their value derives largely from their appearance. They are rabid materialists. They might affect your daughter’s interest in math” (p.23). She goes on to explain how the princesses-on-everything phenomenon was created by a Disney exec a decade or so ago, a marketing strategy rather than something girls started doing on their own, which led girls away from creating crowns out of felt and gave them perfectly scripted play to follow, word by word.

Don't get me wrong. Sequins, wands, and big dresses are attractive, and your child of either gender may be drawn to them. However, Orenstein’s book shows how girls today are being told that if a toy, like a toolkit, or a ball and bat, are not painted Pepto Pink and adorned with a picture of a skinny, smiling girl in a tiara, then they are not suitable for girls to play with, and if they do otherwise, then they are not really a girl but . . . something else.

For toddlers that are engaged in the brain-building task of sorting their world into categories, not knowing where you stand is not going to make you feel like a cool misfit, it is going to negate your existence entirely. So, young ones seek to proclaim their gender through engaging in whatever their culture considers appropriate play for either girls or boys.

This is not in and of itself a problem, but if all the options for girls are focused around how they look rather than actively doing something, they equate being a girl with looking pretty. And that creates a never-ending urge to define yourself as beautiful externally, which can lead to the myriad of problems women have with body image.

Princess play, and what it turns into in the tween years (The Hannah Montana/High School Musical/Cheetah Girls industrial complex), is largely focused on appearance, rather than accomplishment or inner growth. Orenstein asserts, "Girls pushed to be sexy too soon can't really understand what they're doing. And that, (researchers argue), is the point: they do not---and may never---learn to connect their performance to erotic feelings or intimacy. They learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality" (p. 85).

This is perhaps the strongest argument of the book, for me. I want my daughter to understand pleasure as something derived not from how others perceive her, but from actually experiencing it. If I praise her only for how she looks, she will become so used to objectification that she will seek it out in order to feel loved.

Reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (with its deceptively pink sparkly cover) on the playground while my daughter used dump trucks to push the sand around, led to some interesting conversations.

"LOVED that book," one mom intoned passionately, which quickly turned to sheepishness when her daughter, decked out in a pink-and-purple Princess gown, ran up to us to get a snack.

"Oh, I just finished that book!", a Dad covered in tattoos told me. "What did you think?" I asked. "It was great . . . but she doesn't really offer any practical solutions." So, several parents I knew and respected had read this book, but didn't feel like they were doing things any differently now.

However, that may be just what Orenstein wanted. She makes the case in her book for parents finding their own personal threshold for gendered toys and activities, but that, at the very least, it is "absolutely vital to think through our own values and limits early, to consider what we approve or disapprove of and why" (p. 182).

Which is why I suggest picking up a copy of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, as a good first step to figuring out what your boundaries are going to be around Bratz, Barbies and Beauty Pageants, before you find yourself in the toy aisle at Target, hemming and hawing about your child’s request. I recommend it for parents of both boys and girls, as Orenstein reviews the research on whether nature or nurture defines toy choice and play attitudes for children of both sex.

Orenstein’s tone is engaging, funny, and suggests a journey rather than a checklist of “shows to ban” and surefire ways to protect your child from materialism and objectification. Her book is an invitation to the conversation about girlie-girl culture, rather than a hard and fast indictment of it. I may not be able to keep my daughter completely from the lure of Princess play, but I am going to counterbalance it with stories of strong women, and relationships with adults who are non-conformist in their gender expression, so that she will have more choices, not less.

A Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

Ever since the end to the Harry Potter book series, fans have been waiting with baited breath to learn what JK Rowling's next step would be. When she announced A Casual Vacancy, a novel for adults, her Goodreads page blew up with animated GIFs that expressed the internet version of a collective orgy of anticipation.

A fan of the Harry Potter series myself, I dutifully pre-ordered the novel to my Nook, and looked forward to being transported by Rowling's words once again. A few days before A Casual Vacancy was released, The New Yorker published a rather nasty portrait of Rowling, in which the profiler took cheap shots like saying she was wearing heavy foundation, or bringing up her troubled relationship with her father in revealing ways. My back went up: why can't writers be quirky and not exactly perfectly likeable?

But then I read A Casual Vacancy. And I realized, the New Yorker writer was simply furious at Rowling for wasting her talent and our time by writing quite possible the least redemptive, most depressing novel of the past decade.

To understand why Rowling wrote such a soul-crushing novel, let’s go back to where she left off with her readers. Personally, I was disappointed by the end of the Harry Potter series. Harry and his friends end up in safe jobs, with happy marriages, and everything is tied up with a neat little bow. It seemed like Rowling had really phoned it in, giving children an unrealistic portrait of adulthood, which was out of character with the series, which often showed adults as complex figures, capable of both betrayal and loyalty.

Perhaps she felt she needed to atone for wearing the kid gloves with Harry and co., so she wrote her characters in A Casual Vacancy with a razor-sharp lack of compassion for the reader, or for her storyline. She spends the first thirty pages describing all the characters, save one, as unspeakably ugly and savoring the death of what appeared to be last person with a soul in Pagford, the stultifying English small town in which the novel is set.

"It must get better. There has to be some emotional resonance and redemption in here somewhere. It's JK Fucking Rowling!" I told myself, as character after character that I thought could perhaps be an interesting anti hero turned out to be a baseless tweeb, only concerned with their own petty desires, which mostly centered on jockeying for position for the council seat vacated by the Last Good Person in Pagford, which is the outward premise of the novel.

I got the feeling that the hidden premise Rowling sought was to show the raw underbelly of life, to stick her reader’s noses in it and say, “THIS is real life! Not magical train rides and children defeating death with a flick of a wand!” But . . . the world that Rowling created in A Casual Vacancy was not that realistic to me. Sure, people are petty and small-minded and self-centered, but they are also capable of change and of sacrificial love.

The question begs itself: who did Rowling write this book for? Certainly not for Harry Potter fans of any age. And that is fine---artists should not have to pander to their past work as they keep creating. However, the new work she has presented is so unlikeable, so devoid of truth and beauty, that my only hope is that she wrote it for herself, because it was a story inside of her that just needed to be told.

Want to know what Rhea thought of every book she read last year? You're in luck---she reviewed all 58 books here.

What to Wear on Halloween

I remember when Halloween was just a trip to the thrift store and some face paint. You get dressed up, your mom approximates some whiskers on your cheeks. You go out with your little friends. And then, more importantly, you end up with a plastic pumpkin bucket full of fun, fun sizes of chocolate and candy. As girls become women, however, the candy takes a backseat to the costume—and costumes ain’t what they used to be. Sure, you can still dress as the cartoon characters, animals, and superheroes of your youth; you just have to precede said costume title with the word “sexy.”

It doesn’t really matter how ridiculous the result is, either, as demonstrated by this collection. Sexy cats sit on costume shelves alongside sexy Big Birds and sexy hamburgers. The main thing is, it needs to be short, tight, or low-cut—preferably all three. For many women, Halloween is an opportunity to show off your body without shame. It’s like a one-time-a-year free pass for even the normally reserved and modest: no one will call you a slut in the morning.

More power to every woman who wants to jump on the sexy costume trend, but I think there are many women who are more like me: uncomfortable with the objectification that the once inclusive, innocent holiday increasingly promotes. It’s okay to be annoyed that this pressure to be sexy exists exclusively for women. Men’s costumes tend to be funny, ironic, gory, scary—no sexy Freddy Kreugers for them. So why are we women inundated with the Sexy Costume trend?

For those who are asking themselves the same question, I’ve come up with a few ideas for costumes that are fun, topical, empowering, attractive, but not demeaning. (Disclaimer: I’m no Halloween costume-choosing expert, so feel free to add your own to this list.)

A politician with a sense of humor

Hillary Clinton, Texts from Hillary-style.

To apply: Sweep your hair behind your ears (or invest in a short blond wig), put on shades, wear a black pantsuit with a large brooch pin, hold your phone in front of you at all times.

An Olympic gold medalist

Missy Franklin or Gabby Douglas

To apply: Slick your hair back tight in a ponytail or bun. (If you’re Missy, might be good to apply enough gel that your hair looks wet all night.) Wear a black bathing suit or red, white and blue leotard. Put fake gold medals around your neck (choose the appropriate number per athlete). Feel free to add tights or a towel to cover up. (If you’re going as McKayla Maroney, add perpetual scowl and folded arms.)

A kickass superheroine

Catwoman or Black Widow. Yes, they’re both super-sexy, but they’re also powerful and take-charge. And what do you want to bet that somewhere out there are “sexy” versions of their film costumes (read: shorter)?

To apply: Tight leather-ish black bodysuit, boots, gun belt, attitude. For Catwoman, add black eye mask and ears. For Black Widow, add a red wig.

A female fantasy protagonist

Katniss Everdeen or Hermione Granger

To apply: For Katniss, find gray, earth-toned winter clothes—a parka, sweater, khakis, and boots. Sling a quiver of arrows over your back and carry a bow around. Put your hair in a long side braid. For Hermione, just pick up a long, dark Hogwarts-emblazoned robe at your local costume store, replete with starched collar shirt and red and gold tie. Carry a wand. And if you’re doing old-school Hermione, make sure your hair is big and frizzy.

A Strong Female Character

There’s plenty of others to choose from, some of which I’ve discussed on this blog: Olivia Benson from “Law & Order: SVU,” Zooey Deschanel, Brave, Buffy (who I dressed up as in tenth grade using only a leather jacket, a hair claw, and a wooden stake). Don’t ever feel limited by what’s on the costume store shelves—the possibilities are truly endless. In fact, don't even be limited by your gender! Dress as a male character you like. You get bonus points for defying gender expectations and upsetting the patriarchy.

As for what NOT to wear: My only advice is, don’t do the ethnic costume thing. Besides exposing a lot of leg, Halloween also has the tendency to expose a lot of racism, poignantly argued by this Ohio University campaign. If you’re going as a historical or notable figure of a different ethnicity or nationality, that’s fine—just be aware of the overall impact of your costume (is it respectful or caricature?) and NEVER, NEVER paint your skin a different color.

If all else fails, follow Oscar from “The Office”’s example: dress as yourself and tell everyone you’re a "rational consumer." Given the cost of some Halloween costumes, that might end up being the best choice.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Trina McNeilly is a mom to a brood of four, a freelance writer and a self proclaimed style scout.  When she isn't wrangling or writing she dabbles in design and is always looking for the lovely.  Trina has been blogging for 4 years and writes daily at her lifestyle blog, la la Lovely where she shares her lovely finds.  She's learned that the most lovely things in life are not things at all, and well, she writes about that too.  In her, very few, spare minutes she is busy making her childhood home her now grown up home.  I love books, almost every kind possible actually.  I love the way books look, always adding soul to a home.  I love the way books feel, there is just something about turning each page that is rather comforting.  And most of all, I love what is on the inside of books . . . words.  Words that, on their own, might not mean much but strung together form a story; a story once lived sharing a life to learn from perhaps just a story to get completely lost in.  Truthfully, that is what I look for most in a book . . . a way to get lost, a way to loose myself.  And yet, almost every time, at some point in the story, I am found and find more of myself than I knew before.  And when I find that I have been found in a book, that particular story always seems to stay with me.  Sometimes it haunts me with its grasping tale when I see specks of the story in real life days.  And, sometimes it reminds me of a truth I’ve needed to know and am trying to live and other times it is a teacher that helps me to string my words into a story of their own.

My own reading habits vary (as life does with 4 littles) but my regular and most familiar pattern is to read a couple of books at a time.  I love to always have a story ready at hand to escape to and I always find the need to be reading a book to help better me as person (which can have vast range of topics from motherhood to business).

These are the books you would, most recently, find making their home on my nightstand:

The Flight of Gemma Hardy

By Margot Livesey

If you were to ask me my all time favorite book I would likely reply Jane Eyre.  No explanation needed.  Any retelling of that story sparks interest, but also skepticism.  While running through the airport last month, this title caught my attention and when I read that it was a new telling of Jane Eyre I was curious.  I continued on to read that Gemma was from Iceland and resides in Scotland on the somewhat mystical Orkney Islands and . . . I was sold.  I had never heard of the Orkney Islands but I had to know about it.

Although The Flight of Gemma Hardy, for the most part, followed the story line of the classic, Jane Eyre, I inevitably knew what was coming next, but I didn’t quite always know how, and I found myself looking for how the story varied and the differences and uniqueness of each story.

I found Gemma’s story, although very sad at times, to really be one of hope.  Hope that your story can end well.  That good can come of bad.  And that in the midst of trials, when you can’t seem to find your way, or even yourself, if you keep moving forward, choose to be brave in the everyday and pay attention to your thoughts, it is there that you will be found.  Gemma ran, only to ask herself “Why had I left if I was going to carry him with me every step of the way?”  Yet in the running she was found.  And she found the one thing she wanted so badly, “to be well regarded and well loved.”  And isn’t that what we all want?

The Gifts of Imperfection

by Brené Brown

This is the kind of book that ruins you in all of the right kind of ways.  But I should confess, I wanted to get ruined when I picked this book up.  The subtitle goes like this, “Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.  Your guide to a wholehearted life.”   The truth is, I have a lot of ideas of who I think I’m supposed to be, and who others want me be but I’m still working on accepting and then embracing who I really am.   Brown starts off this internal journey by saying that “owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”

It’s chapter after chapter of defining words that we effortlessly throw around in our daily lives without knowing the true meaning or implication of that word.  For example the original meaning of the word courage is, “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”  And to become more courageous you have to practice courageous acts, “you learn courage by couraging.”  The idea that it takes courage to share what you really want or need or who you are, actually makes complete sense as it something most of us hold back from doing in fear of not being accepted.

The Gifts of Imperfection is a book that I’m sure I’ll reference for a lifetime.  If you aspire to live an authentic wholehearted life than I think you will enjoy getting ruined as much as I am.

The Tales of the Seal People

Scottish Folk Tales

Duncan Williamson

I have a thing for fairy tales and folklore.  I’m always up for anything that is a little magicky and requires a heavy dose of make believing.

After reading The Flight of Gemma Hardy and doing a little research on the fascinating Orkney Islands, I read that The Tales of the Sea People was a book that Margot Livesey used as research when writing her book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy.   When I read that these were a collection of stories from Scotland that were somewhat guarded and scared to the fishermen and people that lived by the sea, I was instantly intrigued.  My great grandma was from Scotland and I wonder if she ever heard of, or maybe even told, any of these tales herself.  Although these are folk tales to some, somewhere down the line they were very real happenings to the originator of the story.

The Tales of the Seal People is a collection of short stories, which are simply written and read as if someone is actually speaking the story. All of the stories are centered around Silkies (Seal People) who were part human and part seal.  Each story is an intertwined tale of a person who lived by the sea and their encounters with the Silkies.  It’s interesting knowing that these are likely common stories told among Scottish children and up until this point I had never even heard of a Silkie.  I love reading these stories to my children and I even love reading them all on my own.  I find that after I read one, I always want to read another.  And I’ll surely never look at a seal the same way again.