Blythe Spirit

Little Boxes

We’ve spent the past few days visiting my dad and his wife at their retirement community in the great American Southwest. It’s been eighty degrees every day and we can take a golf cart anywhere we need to go, which apparently includes a swimming pool, pharmacy, stock brokerage, and hair salon. Who needs Starbucks when you’ve got CVS? The houses all look exactly like and even the garbage cans are underground. It’s kind of like Disneyland for over-55′s. And people like me who enjoy order and silence and golf carts. I’ve even started imbibing an afternoon cocktail (I’ve discovered black cherry vodka and its tasty marriage with caffeine free Coke).

This place represents all the American stuff I said I wouldn’t miss when I left – strip malls, wide highways, big cars, and cookie-cutter houses. And while I’m not quite ready to retire (or maybe I’ve already retired?), I do feel soothed by it all.

It’s time for my afternoon toddy, I guess I’ll be on my way.

HELP ME

I’m making a Life List. Go on, call me woo woo, an Oprah-lover, what a total girlyblogger thing to do. Creative visualization and all that.

I’m having a hard time getting it going, though. Maybe because I’m still trying to decide whether I should put on makeup today or not. And it’s currently 1:52pm.

Can you help me? What’s something you would recommend doing before I die?

BOO

I had no idea that Halloween is the best parenting day of the year. I’ll bet it even beats Christmas morning.

Last year Theo was old enough to wear a cute pumpkin get-up and visit Daddy in the office cafeteria, and that was about it for our celebration. Outside America, Halloween is gaining in popularity, but it’s more about teenagers and twenty-somethings wearing a bunch of black eyeliner and fangs and drinking a lot of blood-themed beverages in dark bars. That happens here too, but here it’s still mostly about the kids. Though I’d been led to believe that trick-or-treating had been moved to the malls or eschewed for backyard parties, and that in the big cities and evens small towns like my hometown, the pint-sized ghouls no longer haunted sidewalks on October 31st.

Boy, did I get some bad information. Maybe it was because of the gorgeous fall weather or because it was my first time out in about 25 years, but trick-or-treating was even better than I remembered it. The houses were decorated with pumpkin lights and chattering skulls, and kids from Theo’s age to teenagers were decked out as Harry Potter characters and baked goods (the three pre-teen girls dressed as cupcakes got my vote for best costume). And they were all so delighted to be there. The residents of the neighborhood were fantastic and kind, and we only encountered one cranky old guy who snapped, “I WILL DOLE OUT THE CANDY MYSELF, DON’T GRAB.” He probably saw some toilet paper in his yard the next morning.

Theo, dressed as a little green turtle, clutched his plastic pumpkin and toddled behind a gaggle of cousins from house to house in Nana and Grandpa’s neighborhood. He teetered up steep driveways and pressed doorbells and stood next to Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and the Snow Princess as they shouted TRICK OR TREAT (he never quite got the hang of that, but it didn’t matter). Then, when the bigger kids had each taken a piece of candy, he reached into the bowl, smiled up at the generous soul who had answered the door, brightly said “Thank you!” and scooped as much loot into his bucket as he could. One of his parents then leapt to his side, returned all but his share, and scooted him off the steps as he waved bye-bye.

Best of all was his wonder and thrill at every stage of the process. He loved his turtle shoes, he loved his pumpkin (in fact he keeps asking to sleep with it) and he LOVED the candy. No matter that he hasn’t really eaten any of it. CANDY CANDY CANDY he said as he peered into his plastic pumpkin. RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING he said as his short legs churned along the sidewalk behind his cousins. And HAPPY, he sighed, as Jeff picked him and carried him home from the last house on the street.

Must Post

My screen is blinking on and off and the last time I shut down the computer, it wouldn’t power up again until I had UNplugged it from its power source. I fear this is the death knell for our beloved laptop. Please light a candle for us.

Must go back up everything so that our family photos and address book aren’t lost in the ether.

This is what it’s like when you get to hear from me every day for a month. You’re loving it, I know.

Corrected

A few of you guessed at which book I evicted from my shelves. It’s significant to me not because it was SO TERRIBLE but because it was the first time I remembered giving myself permission to just quit in the middle and start spending my time elsewhere. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started, no matter how much I disliked it. I still have a few books I’ve been “reading” for, oh, a decade or more just because I can’t quite admit defeat. Most of them are titles I chose because I thought they might make me feel smart (if you’ve read any Lawrence Durrell, you know what I mean). Still not smart enough, I guess. Or maybe I’m getting smarter as long as I’m still reading them? Anyway, there they sit, with bookmarks slid hopefully between their pages.

Anyway, the offending book was The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Many bright and interesting people love this book and it has won a bunch of awards. But I feel about it like I felt about A Confederacy of Dunces: Why read a book without a character I can, if not like, at least sympathize with? Why voluntarily spend my time in a place with a bunch of people who make my skin crawl?

The answer is, of course, because it might teach me something or because the writing is beautiful, or because there’s a payoff at the end. And most of the time I’m on board with this argument. I loved Lolita, whose hero is a child-molester, for goodness’ sake. But that’s the genius of Nabokov, that he could make a pathetic excuse for a man also a funny and interesting hero of fiction, using language in a way no one before him ever had.

Someone told me that my family must be too happy for me to enjoy The Corrections. Maybe that’s true. One more thing to be thankful for, I guess. And, incidentally, Oprah liked The Corrections but disinvited the author from her show because he dissed her. Say what you will about Oprah, but I would probably have done the same thing. Who wants to spend time with someone who doesn’t want to be there?

I’m sure The Corrections is as grateful to be out of my presence as I am to have it gone.

Turn it On

Back in the days when I had a “work wardrobe” and a “weekend wardrobe;” when I didn’t wonder whether I should just wipe the drool and chewed-up graham cracker off my shoulder instead of adding another shirt it to the laundry basket; when I didn’t know the topic of every Oprah episode for the past three months; I had an entire evening television lineup in my head. I followed several dramas and a couple of reality shows and looked forward to prime time comedy every night of the week.

I’m not sure exactly what happened while I was away, but TV is different. Yes, my life is different (I was not trying to split my attention between complex plotlines on “Lost” and blog writing on my laptop, for example), but I swear it’s not just me. When did the cool series start showing up on channels I’ve never watched? (“Project Runway,” I’m looking at you. Bravo used to be for Inside the Actors’ Studio on Saturday afternoons.) And when did the season extend into the summer and across the holidays, and how come I’m hearing about season finales in November (Um, “America’s Next Top Model,” anyone?) And who talked Lisa Bonet back into series television?

There’s DVR and HD and BluRay and Alec Baldwin in primetime. And the only show I can seem to watch consistently, the only TV appointment on my calendar these days is, wait for it…

Dancing with the Stars.

I’ve officialy become a new demographic. The OLD LADY demographic.

I don’t understand my TV and I’m currently watching Lionel Richie performing “Dancing on the Ceiling.”

Somebody come and confiscate my remote. I can’t figure out how to use it anyway.

Our Projection

Theo’s Election 08 from Blythe on Vimeo.

Vote

I remember going to vote with my mom at the courthouse or the lobby of my elementary school, and standing behind the curtain with her while she filled in her ballot. It seemed like a big deal. I’ve only once ever voted at the polls, getting up in the dark, driving to the polling place in my work clothes, then dropping off my car at the Park-N-Ride before boarding the bus downtown to my first job. After that, my state encouraged absentee ballots and eventually went to vote-by-mail. I think we’re the only state in the country that won’t have a single in-person polling place.

There’s something a bit sad about that, but I’m all about progress. I miss the grey-haired ladies checking off the signatures and handing out the ballots, but this is the way of the future. And I still get the satisfaction of a paper ballot and a pencil, but I get to use them next to my laptop and my voters’ pamphlet at my kitchen table (well, actually, at Panera Bread, while eating a bacon spinach souffle).

Now if someone would just give me an “I Voted” sticker, everything would be perfect.

Go out and vote tomorrow. And eat some bacon for me too.

Bookish

We finally bought bookshelves yesterday, after living for almost a month with all of our books in a big pile on the floor. It looked like an art installation; I thought of it as my life, there in a huge mound on the carpet.

Because I, like many readers, see my books as my life story. I saunter over to other people’s bookshelves and stand there imagining where and when those books were chosen and read, and why they are still hanging around the house. I used to keep each and every book I’d ever purchased, whether I’d finished it or not, whether I’d loved it or hated it, even the textbook from my 8am Anthropology class freshman year. I liked the story they told, I liked it when people would strike up conversations after seeing certain books in my house, I liked loaning them out.

But soon the bookshelves started to take over our home, and when I married Jeff he brought about a half-box of books along with him and I felt a little self-conscious about my book hoarding habit. And then, for the first time I started and did not finish a very popular book that everyone raved about. In fact I hated it so much that I stopped halfway through and decided it need to be gone from my house. So I gave it to Goodwill. And that was the first step. I gave away my old textbooks and sold some other books I never liked anyway.

I still hold on to more books for longer than I need to (just ask Jeff how many I brought to Germany and back with me – he’ll tell you, ALL OF THEM). But I’ve gotten rid of a bunch as we’ve moved around the world, so I’ve winnowed down my collection to the ones that matter to me, the ones I either loved or that I know I’d like to loan to friends.

Our new shelves don’t hold all the books we own, so I had to choose which ones to stack there, and where to put them. And it took me almost all day to figure it out, to decide what face I would show to my visitors, and in what order. In the end, more of them fit that I’d anticipated, so there are a few out there that I’m not exactly sure I want in public (Robbie Williams’s biography, anyone?), but then again, I’m still hanging on to them, so that must mean they’re part of me.

What do you do with your books? And any guesses about the book I couldn’t stand to keep in my house? (Hint: Oprah chose it too.)

Keep on Blopping in the Free World

Due to overwhelming demand (well, OK, just one fellow blogger who is looking for company in her misery), I’ve decided to participate in NaBloPoMo again this year. Remember last time? When you learned about Theo’s breakfast soundtrack, and my shoes? I believe there might even have been some swimsuit video.

I can’t wait to see what flies out of my keyboard this year. Let me know in the comments if you have any requests.