TWILIGHT: Rock Stars Never Age

What is it with Twilight?  I got a couple friends who want to understand what the big deal is.  The world doesn’t need another blogpost about it, but I’ve read the saga and have arrived at my own theories so what the heck.  

 

It’s about teeny-bopper infatuation.

 

When I was 14 or 15, I was obsessed with INXS and believed with a fair amount of certainty that Michael Hutchence and I belonged together.  He was, at the time, 24.  Nine years older than me.  That seemed like an eternity back then, an uncrossable chasm of wisdom and experience that would separate us forever.  I was just a girl.  He was a man.  Any man worth his weight in salt would want to be with a woman.  It was unfathomable to me that with any choice in the matter he would elect to date somebody so much less knowledgeable, less complex, less evolved than himself.  Wouldn’t he get bored with a fifteen-year-old?  And if he didn’t–how interesting could he be?  If he wasn’t bored with me, then I’d probably be bored by him. 

 

So it seems to me that Twilight is a love story written for teenage girls (although read by girls of all ages) who have ever wondered what on earth their favorite rock stars would see in them. Because (see an earlier blog), vampires are, after all, rock stars.  In this novel, the teenage girl is Bella Swann, a 17-year-old heroine with whom Edward Cullen, a vampire, falls desperately in love.  

The problem is, Edward Cullen is old.  Really old.  At 15, I would’ve felt weird dating a 24 year old . . . so it strikes me as a little, ahem, odd that one of the most beloved heroines in current pop fiction, a teenage girl, is dating a man who, for all intents and purposes, is 104. It’s like a man falling in love with a girl the age of his great-, great-grandaughter, at least.  Do you have any tiny nieces?  Small children of your own?  Imagine them just finishing puberty when suddenly they find themselves inextricably attracted to somebody the age of George Bush, senior, for example.  Weird, right?  Or is it just me?

 

If you haven’t lived under a rock for the last two years, you probably already know that Twilight overcomes this potential age weirdness by freezing Edward’s biological age at 17.  I’m prepared to accept that being 104 years old in a 17-year-old’s body makes it easier to ignore chronological age than if Edward were a shrunken, pruney thing, but still . . . .it requires a certain sleight of hand to make this work.  First of all, you have to be an exceedingly cool 104 years old–none of that social awkwardness that usually besets senior citizens when they sit around with a gaggle of teenagers and try to be one of the gang.  It also helps if you’re a spectacularly attractive 17-year-old boy with a great body, a good haircut, and a knack for clever, adolescent repartee.  None of that “Kids these days!  What are you complaining about?  When I was a kid, I had to walk uphlll in both directions, in the snow, to a damn outhouse to relieve myself.” 

 

So that’s what Twilight reveals about the benefits of aging and the virtues of wisdom.  In the world of Twilight, there are none.  Aging is something your body maybe does, but hopefully not your mind.  And if your body doesn’t make you look older, than you get to live an age that exists beyond the reach of time.  And that age is 17, apparently.  Look at it this way: on the outside Edward is 17, but on the inside he could be aged anywhere from 17 to 104.  He comes across as a perfect 17 years old.  The implication is that a mature, wise, kind, strong and loving man of a mature age should and does behave & feel like a 17-year-old boy.  The 17-year-old masculine pysche, with a couple adjustments and tweaks complements of a tortured soul, is the psyche that the ideal man matures into. 

 

Well, that explains a lot of male behavior I’ve observed in my short lifetime.  

 

But I digress.  There are two types of vampire plots.  In the first type, most recently evident in 29 Days of Night (or in Buffy, for every vampire but Angel), being changed into a vampire empties you of all humanity, compassion, and reverence for life.  You become something akin to an intelligent zombie, frenzied for blood and utterly disdainful of humans.  In the second type of vampire plot, being changed into a vampire changes only one thing: your body.  Your body will not age or die, and you crave blood like a junkie craves heroine.  The smell of it can drive you mad with desire, but your feelings don’t change, nor your spiritual perspective, nor your capacity for connection with others (remember Louis and Claudia?).  The only thing that really changes is your biology.   And, if you’re a sensitive poetic type, your angst levels. 

And one of the things that’s always fascinated me about this second type of vampire plot is how it divides a person into two.  The vampire is defined as such by his physical body, aspect #1.  Aspect #2 is his soul (which is also his mind and his heart).  Nothing splits the essence of personhood into immaterial subjectivity and the physical container for that subjecitvity so neatly as this type of vampirism, which turns its victims into bodies at odds with the souls who inhabit them.  Desires, urges, hungers, outbursts are all triggered by the biological need for blood; our higher selves, our feelings, thoughts, and hopes, are represented as the vestiges of humanity that must be nurtured by abstinence from human blood.  For this reason, Twilight is a very religious text that presents the body as corrupted by an original sin that can only be redeemed by the control, punishment, and suffering of the soul in defiance of the desires of the flesh.  That’s the deal with the Cullens, anyhow–it’s not easy disciplining your desire, but you gotta do it or you’ll go to hell.  Or alienate cute little 17-year-old girls. 

 

It’s funny, though, how for all its religious conservatism Twilight ends up giving the body (not the soul) the highest significance in love.  The body may be corrupt, but it defines you.  Bella doesn’t fall in love with Edward because he’s a nice guy, or a good guy, or has a sense of humor . . . au contraire . . . she is completely, utterly and head-over-heels in love with his physical beauty.  One blog catalogued all of Bella’s descriptions of Edward in “Twilight,” and here’s how it broke down:

Face: 24
Voice: 20
Eyes: 17
Movement: 11
Smile: 10
Teeth: 8
Muscles: 7
Skin: 7 (Note: This only contains accounts of Edward’s skin being beautiful. I didn’t count references to it as “pale,” “cold,” or “white.” If I had, this number would be about ten times large
r.)
Iron Strength or Limbs: 5
Breath: 4
Scent: 4
Laughter: 3
Chest: 2

 

Note the paucity of commentary about his, ahem, personality.  Again, in Twilight, biology is destiny.  You are your body.  If your body is 17, then your subjectivity is 17.  If your body is beautiful, then you are a beautiful person.  

 

The other thing I remember from being 14 or 15 is wondering what the hell an experienced, attractive rock star who could have any woman he wanted would find compelling in me, a small-town fifteen-year-old bookworm with braces and eyeglasses.  What I fantasized is that, when I went to Philadelphia to see INXS at the Tower Theater, that the Hutch would look out in the crowd, our eyes would meet for a second, and SHAZAAM!  He’d know instantly and irrevocably that I was his destiny. 
 

Which brings me to the other rock-star-fantasy element of Twilight.  Sure enough, the moment Edward walks into the high-school cafeteria and catches a whiff of Bella,  it’s a done deal.  Why is that?  Well, in the film, she’s Kristen Stewart, who is awfully attractive.  But setting that detail aside, what makes Bella into Edward’s destiny is . . . the smell of her blood.  It’s not her intelligence, or her innocence, or her personality on any level, or the fact that she wears bootcut jeans or isn’t a snob that attracts Edward . . . She was just fortunate enough to be born with blood that smells a certain, special way to Edward Cullen.  

 

Lucky bitch! 

But that’s adolescence . . . we’re supposed to outgrow these fantasies, right?

 

Well, that’s where I get stuck.  I’m not sure I know a lot about love, but there are certain things that I need to believe about it.  First and foremost among these is that this life is what John Keats called “The Veil of Soul-Making,” and that–to the degree that love is one of the most powerful experiences in this life–you are most connected by love to those who help to grow your soul and whose soul you help to grow.  Growth is not easy, and therefore neither should be intimacy.  If love were easy and automatic and physical–like it is in Twilight–then it wouldn’t be worth much.  It’d be about as virtuous as shooting heroine.  No, love is a struggle, an adventure.  

 

Why are so many people averse to this idea?  Why do thousands upon thousands of us–if Twilight’s success is any indication–prefer to think of love as a fated addiction to another person?  What’s the fun in that?

 

Against my expectations given the author’s Mormon background, the Twilight saga forwards a despiritualized myth of love as that which reinforces our idealized versions of ourselves.  In Forks, romantic and erotic love function pretty much to affirm the ego as it is.  I’m perfect, you’re perfect just as you are, say the two lovers.  Edward lies to Bella and abandons her.  Bella lies to her parents and her friends all the time to cover for Edward.  Edward is (arguably) a pedophile.  Bella loves being dominated by an indestructible, mind-reading, life-threatening alpha male, to the point where she happily wakes up the day after her wedding covered from head to toe in bruises.  But Edward and Bella never ague about ethics, never get on each other’s nerves, never (in spite of the dishonesty) doubt the other and learn to overcome that doubt.  Above all, they never teach each other anything, other than how to have sex and how to hunt deer.  If you ask me, they stagnate.  No wonder Edward is stuck at 17.

The puppy that almost was.

Ours, I mean.

Her name was Bella and she was (well, still is) an English bulldog puppy born on February 20. 

Thank goodness the girls didn’t know.

What happened was this.  My beloved Betty, whom many of you had the privilege of knowing during the short 8 years with which she graced us with her presence, died last summer.

She was a French bulldog.  And once you’ve owned a French bulldog, you can never go back to life without one.  It seems to me.

But they cost upwards of two thousand dollars.  Rescued Frenchies are in such high demand that they’re impossible to procure; it’s easier to adopt a human baby.   So I’d broadened my options to include almost any small, non-frou-frou looking dog without too much terrier.  The problem was, Djuna was attacked by a dog while in Paige’s care, and so the new dog probably should be a puppy.  But rescued puppies for small breeds are generally rare, too, and possibly unpredictable as to what they’ll grow into.

ANYWAY.  On Craig’s list yesterday I stumbled upon an ad: owner needed for an Englishbulldog puppy.  The foster mother had purchased her from the owners for $1800 three days ago; they were going to do something drastic with it, and she wanted to save it so she bribed them.  She had no interest in re-couping her losses; she just wanted a good home for the dog.  Enter me.

We talked and she decided the girls and I deserved this dog. She sent me a picture and there was Bella.  Have you ever seen a bulldog puppy?  Well, I’ve included a picture, so you get the idea.  I was done for.  The plan was to get the dog that night, so that when Djuna and Poppy came home the next day . . . . surpirse!!  We agreed to meet at the Feed Store at Topanga Canyon and Sunset; I would give her some money to cover her suppiles, and she would give me Bella, crate and all.  I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

So I drive happily through one hour of Friday rish-hour traffic to meet her in Malibu.  I get there first, and I’m in the store looking around, when in walks this woman whose tear-stained face is empited of all color and strained with anxiety.  Not what I was expecting at all–I rather liked to think that the foster mother would be happy to see me, the nice person giving Bella a good home.  But instead she was clearly grief stricken and conflicted.  “Are you Leilani?” she asks me.

 ”Yes!  You’re Lizzie?” I ask cheerfully, hoping my enthusiasm is so blindingly bright that it burns away Lizzie’s doubts. 

Her expression doesn’t even remotely change.  She just nods like I’ve just pronounced her death sentence.  She leads me out back to meet Bella,in her truck.

Bella is beautiful.  I give Lizzie my measly check.  Lizzie is holding back tears.  “I almost turned around 3 times,” she said, “but I thought, that would be mean, to just leave you waiting here for your bulldog that never showed up.”

Yes, it would have been very sad  I agree.  “Well, I suppose there’s some comfort in doing the right thing and kept my word to you,” she said, clearly uncomforted.  Meanwhile, her Great Dane Jay-Jay is dancing around Bella like a reindeer around a mouse.  Bella poops while standing between us.  We clean it up.  We finish the transaction.  I assure her that Bella will make two little girls and their mother ecstatic, Bella will be very loved, and everyone will live happily every after.

But Lizzie’s acting like she’s mad at me.  Like I forced her to advertise the dog, offer it to me, drive here, and give it to me.    “Ok, well, you’ve done a beautiful thing,” I say.  “Thank you.  Bye!”

We part ways.

I get Bella home.  Bella is sad.  Bella is tired.  Bella is confused.  Bella won’t come out of her crate.  I understand that this is her fourth relocation in her short 12 weeks, but still, she’s a puppy, and I know puppies.  A spark is missing.  I think about Jay-Jay and wonder if Bella’d started to feel like part of the pack in three days over there at Lizzie’s.  Of course she had.  She’s dog.  And I remembered how, after three days with Betty, I was already prepared to throw myself in front of a truck to protect her.

I feed Bella and then sit down on the floor to play with her.  She just ambles over and climbs into my lap like a little child and, like a child after a bad fall or disappointment, curls up in my arms as if to cry it out.  Then she puts her little snout on my forearm and sighs, a sigh that trembles through her whole body.  She is the softest little thing, with hug paws. Her ears are like little silk purses.

I think about how LIzzie lives on a ranch, with ten acres for Bella and Jay-Jay to romp through together, Jay-Jay prancing around little Bella who shuffles in that bulldog way.  All I’ve got is a little open front yard the size of a parking space.

Gosh darnit, I think.  Why can’t people make up their minds?

But I know the feeling.  Kevin and  I once bought a puppy, a Lab, and brought it home, thrilled to pieces.  Then Kitty freaked out so bad she wouldn’t come out from under the bed, and this went on for a few days, and Kitty was old and decrepit, so we found a home for Walter (that’s what we named him).  When we got home from his new residence. Kevin say down on the living room floor and cried, his heart fit to break, immediately regretting having let Walter go.  But what could we do?  We’d given him to new family, and he wasn’t ours to take back anymore.  Poor Kevin.

I sat with Bella for a long, long time, looked into her eyes a lot, and finally picked up my phone.  I dialed Lizzie’s number.

“Lizzie, this is Leilani.”
“Yes?” she asked.  She sounded horrible, like she’d done nothing but cry since I last saw her.
“This is going to sound crazy . . . “
She held her breath.
“. . . but I really think Bella belongs with you, not me,” I told her.  And held my breath. 
“Really?” she said, like it was too good to be true.
“Yup, she’s sad, and you’re sad, and I’m not too attached to her yet, and the girls have no idea, so let’s get this over with.”

I met her at the Skirball this time.  She was beside herself with relief.  Bella was asleep in her crate.  Lizzie gave me some costume jewelry for my girls and told me she’d keep an eye out for Frenchies.  She couldn’t believe I’d called her back.

“And to think, I almost stood you up,” she reflected, “and I would’ve had Bella, but I would’ve felt horrible.  Now I get the best of both worlds.”

“Yup,” I said.  “You two belong together.   Good luck.”  I got in my car and drove away, so comforted by having done the right thing that I didn’t start crying until I was on the 405.
.

Poop Incident at Trader Joe’s

At Trader Joe’s this afternoon, around 5 pm when the store is calamatously congested, Poppy put her hand in the back of her pants and pulled out two fingertips smeared with poo, then smiled devilishly before wiping them on her shirt. Djuna, observing this, announced in her sing-song tattletale voice, “Mama!  Poppy just touched her bootie! and wiped her poopie on her shirt!”  Unbelieving of what I had just seen, I grabbed Poppy’s fingers and sniffed for affirmation.  A passerby bumped into me so that my nose made contact.   This whole performance purchased us a wide berth in the cereal aisle at rush hour.  But otherwise had few redeeming attributes.

Song to the Siren

    

Tim Buckley – Song to the Siren

This Mortal Coil – Song to the Siren 

 

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
‘Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you

I am troubled at the tide:
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with Death my bride?
Hear me sing, “Swim to me, Swim to me, Let me enfold you:
Here I am, Here I am, Waiting to hold you.”

 

There are some interesting ideas surrounding the sirens.  They were either half-bird or mermaids whose irresistible singing lured sailors to their deaths.  Why they lured sailors to their deaths is unclear.  One thought is that the sirens didn’t intend for the sailors to die; it’s just that the siren song was so irresistible that sailors who heard it would languish away from starvation because they would refuse to leave.  To my mind, even beyond the sailors’ slow deaths there’s something kind of tragic about that idea.  The siren means no harm.  She is only following her nature in singing so beautifully; to do to otherwise would be to die to her nature.  The siren is compelled to sing and helpless over its effects.  Her gift of song is a curse, of sorts–especially if she should fall in love with a sailor.

 

One of my very favorite things about this song is the unexpected inversion of roles.  The singer of the song is the sailor, not the siren–a song “to” the siren, not “of” her.  The sailor is singing to the siren of his desire to join with her, but for some reason her “heart shies from the sorrow.”  What sorrow?  It’s as if she loves the sailor and fears his inevitable death if he remains entranced by her song, so she is sending him away now.  There’s another idea about sirens here that might relate, too: one version of the legend is that the sirens appealed to one’s spirit by singing of prophetic truths — full knowledge of the past, present, and future that would end in death because, with that knowledge, there was nothing left to live for (akin to eating the apple from the tree of knowledge and dying a death of the spirit, right?).  So maybe the siren divines the sailor’s death at her song and, loving him, wants to send him away to save him (and to save herself from sorrow), so she stops singing.   

 

Or maybe the siren is crafty, after all, and only appears to be the innocent artist fallen in love with the sailor and sacrificing her song to save him.  Maybe she’s just a wily seductress who sang him into love with her and then withdrew her song, abandoning him to the pangs of unrequited love.  Killing him softly with her song, as it were. 

 

  

John William Waterhouse, The Siren. 1900.

 

 

John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens.  1891.

 

 

Herbert James Draper, Ulysses and the Sirens.  1910.

 

 

Gustave Moreau, The Sirens.  1876.

Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you hare when I was fox?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, O my heart shies from the sorrow

I am puzzled as the newborn child

My niece Nova was born at 1:06 am on my 40th birthday, and here’s how it happened.

Nova

     My niece Nova was born at 1:06 am on my 40th birthday, and here’s how it happened.
    My birthday was Saturday, April 11.  On Friday, April 10, my sister called in the morning to let me know that she’d been having regular “pressure waves” all  night.  “Pressure waves” are contractions in hypno-birthing parlance.  My sister had been practicing self-hypnosis for months now, in order to anesthetecize herself during labor.  From what I could gather from the reading she gave me, this involved closing your eyes, imagining a nice place, and breathing deeply while your birth partner patted your forehead.  Noe had successfully used her self-hypno-birthing exercises to alleviate her back pain through pregnancy, she said, so she had confidence she would feel little pain through labor and delivery. When she would say this, I would smile and pat her on the forehead.  
    So Noe is in mild labor and imagines that things are getting started but there’s still plenty of time, she says, and she wants to labor quietly and privately for now. So I spend the day doing stuff—Good Friday, it was, and I had lunch with a friend and took a nap and thought about turning 40.  I call to check in, and things are settling into a pattern, but she’s going to stay at home for as long as possible.  Okay.  My mom is over there cooking her brains out to keep herself busy and Joe is very busy patting foreheads.  There’s not much else to do, Noe says, so I go on with my birthday plans.  
    Which included the most fabulous dinner of my life with my dear friend Mark Morales.  Right as we were ordering dessert my phone rings.  This was about 10pm.  I answer, and it’s my Mom, sounding annoyed.  “I’ve tried to call you once already,” she scolds.  “They’re leaving for the hospital, so you better get over there.”  I hear, in the background, a low rumbling moan, kind of like a train coming from a long ways away, then a voice talking like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons – then my mom says, “Well, Noe says to finish your birthday dinner and then meet her at the hospital.”  I hear another one of those trains passing through Noe’s house, and then we get off the phone.
    Mark and I finish dessert.  We high-tail it to the hospital.  We zip up to labor and delivery, past the waiting room, past the nurse’s station – “My sister’s in labor and I’m here to help her!” I announce as we whiz by – and then we’re there, in front of the door to her room.  I look at Mark, Mark looks at me – we’ve both been through this before, the natural child-birth thing, and know there could be hours of waiting involved before anything else happens.  Should he come in and say hello?

    I crack the door open to see what’s up.  Immediately there issues forth from the bed, over which my sister is bent, naked, mooning me, “I need to poop.  Ooooooooooh.  I need to poop.”

    Question answered.  I turn back to Mark, whose eyebrows are frozen about 3 inches above his eyes, like sideways exclamation points.  ”You better wait in the waiting room,” I tell him.  He nods enthusiastically, thoroughly convinced by the sounds emitting from beyond the door, and I re-enter a room that is now resounding with Noe’s rumbling voice, “I need to poop.  Ohhhhhh, I need to poop.”
    And the fun begins.  Kathleen, our nurse, is strapping a second monitor around Noe’s waist, and Noe is not too happy about this as she struggles to find a position that’s comfortable.  I don’t know how to tell her that there is no such thing, when you’re laboring, as a comfortable position.  She lies on her back with her knees up in her air.  She rolls over onto all fours.  She stands up and leans forward over the bed.  Kathleen is studying the computer screen next to the bed and keeps nudging at the monitor belt around Noe’s contracting belly.
    “Please. Stop. That,” Noe says gruffly.  “Please take it off.”
    Kathleen won’t take it off without a doctor’s consent, she says, but no matter.  Noe has bigger things to worry about.  Like trying to poop, apparently.  Another pressure wave ripples through her belly, setting off Noe’s soon-to-become-standard incantation.
    “I need to poop.  I need to poop.  Why the f——–”
    —–Gentle readers, be warned.  The language from here on out, until the baby is born, is pretty raunchy.
    “Why the fuck can’t I poop?”  Noe wants to know.
    I take a look at her nether regions.  I don’t know how to tell her this, but she already has.  I decide to leave that, um, little morsel of information for the nurse to discover and focus my attentions instead on getting Noe through her contractions.
    “You’re doing great, Noe,” I murmur.  “Breathe.  Breathe.  Ride the wave.  Surf that wave.  Don’t fight it.”  Stuff like that.  I don’t even know half of what I said over the next three hours.  Helping your little sister give birth is so intense that there is no brain room left over for storing the experience in your memory banks.  It was extraordinary.  I’ve done it twice, given birth naturally, but the thing is, when you’re giving birth, you’re so focused on just getting through it that you don’t (or I didn’t) really reflect on the event with your mind; your body takes over, for the most part, and you enter into some paranormal mental zone.  Guys got it good, I discovered this time around, because watching the experience of somebody you love giving birth is the best of both worlds: you love her so much you are very much in the experience with her, but without any of the pain. 
    Finally Noe settles onto a big bouncey ball at the foot of her bed.  From her perch there, she clutches towels wrapped around the grip bar over her head and, using them for support, sways back and forth on the ball.  Then Noe’s eyes kind of glaze over, she rocks forward and rests her forehead against her palms which swing from their grasp of the towel, and goes,  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!  Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!  I still need to poop . . . . “
    Once the contraction passes, I stroke her back with gentle undulations and tell her she’s amazing, etc.
    “I just wish I could take a fucking shit,” she tells me.
    This goes on for about an hour.  I’m fanning Noe to help cool her down and Joe is continuously either stroking Noe’s forehead with a cool wet cloth or patting it.  And the bane of Noe’s existence is apparently the large, unmoving turd plugging her up and creating intense pressure.
    “Noe, that’s the baby,” I tell her.  “Giving birth feels like you’re trying to crap out the biggest bowling ball ever known to man.”  We had talked about this before today, but talking about pooping a bowling ball and actually trying to poop a bowling ball are clearly two very different things in a laboring woman’s mind.  This is especially unfortunate for Noe, who would rather have bamboo stakes shoved underneath her fingernails or the bottom of her feet beaten than suffer from irregularity.  Several years ago she had to have her back cut open to have her spine fused and was laid up for weeks.  Did she complain about the pain?  the stiches?  the immobility?  the helplessness?  the boredom?  Nope.  The only thing she complained about, and quite vociferously, was how constipated the morphine made her.  “Noe, how you doing,” I’d ask her.  “I’d be doing a lot better if I could just take a shit,” she’d say.  When Noe’s 70, she’s going to be one of those septgenerians who judges the quality of the day by how regularly her bowels perform.

    Anyway.  Where were we. 

    The thing is, Noe wants to push, but Kathleen discourages this because there’s no doctor in the room.  I understand Kathleen’s concern, and at the same time, I think it’s incredibly cruel to tell a laboring woman not to respond to her urge to push.  It’s pointless.  So I tell Noe, “Sweetie, if you gotta push, you gotta push.  Everything’s okay.”
    I don’t know if she heard me–she was clearly in transition, and baby was coming on down the line.  But she moved on to the bed, onto her back with her knees up, and started preparing herself for what was coming.
    Kathleen paged a Resident, Dr. McAllister, who was amazing.  The doctor introduces herself, puts on scrubs, and pulls up a chair at the foot of Noe’s bed where the big bouncing ball was before.  And remains blessedly quiet, letting Noe’s body take the lead.  I like this woman.
    “I need to—-” here we go again, I think, but I was wrong–”push!  I need to push!”
    “Then push,” says Dr McAllister calmly.
    And Noe starts to push.  The contractions are coming fast and furiously now.  Kathleen is at Noe’s left shoulder whispering into her ear; Joe is at her right shoulder, soothing her, and I’m next to Joe, at Noe’s side, marvelling at the fact that a big baby head is about to come out of my little sister’s vagina.
    “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! Fucking!  Fuck!  Fuck!” yells Noe as another pressure waves seizes her.  Kathleen and I talk her through it.  Our main concern is getting her to curl her screams into her belly, chin to chest, rather than let them loose into the sky–they do no good up there, but down here they can help her push.
    “Here comes another one,” Noe says, and pushes.  She decides she wants to lie on her side, so we help her.  This position, however, requires her to hold onto her own thigh.  Holding on to one’s own thigh, curling in for a scream, pushing, and trying to get your baby born: too much multi-tasking.  Noe asks to be put back on her back.
    She pushes on her back for about an hour, and then I go to take a look.  I stand next to Dr. McAllister and peer into Noe’s nether regions.  I see a canal, an actual birth canal, but no baby’s head.  “It’s still going to be a while” says the doctor.
    But eventually the doctor says we’re getting close, and the next thing I know, I’m cradling Noe’s right thigh in my right arm and her head and neck in my left arm, saying I don’t-know-what as she screams I don’t-know-what, and I look down at her vagina, and there, right there, in the middle of the push, I see a dome of dark black hair emerge . . . .and then, as the contraction subsides, disappear.
    How frustrating!
    So now the trick is to get Noe to push so hard that the baby is moving out during the contraction more than she is retracting after the contraction.
    “Oh, Nova, C’mon!’ yells my sister.
    Black hair peeks out; black hair hides again, leaving a swatch of black grass poking out like fringe.

    This goes on for a few minutes.
    Suddenly a Dr. Lee appears.  This is not Noe’s regular OB.  Her regular OB (as luck would have it) is on vacation this weekend.  This is the regular OB’s associate, Dr. Lee, who even while donning her scrubs is already barking orders at Noe like we haven’t been at this for 3 hours already.
    “Noe, when you feel a contraction I need you to push, push hard!”
    You think?  I want to tell her how grateful we are for that directive.  It helps immensely.

    A few more contractions, and the baby starts to crown.  You know how I know?
    All of sudden Noe’s eyes open wider than I’ve ever seen them (and if you are familiar with Noe’s expressiveness, you appreciate how widely that must mean they were open) and she goes, “Yeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooow!  FUCK that hurts!”
    Dr. Lee: “She’s crowning.”
    You think?
    We tell Noe to push through the pain, and she does, but, well . . . . I’m reminded of Bill Cosby saying something about pulling your bottom  lip up over your head like a hat if you want to know what childbirth feels like.  My vagina hurts just looking at Noe’s at this point.
    “Push, Noe!” barks Dr. Lee.  “C’mon, you can do it!  Push!  Push! Push! Push harder!” 

    I don’t know what she thinks Noe’s been doing for the last three hours.  Maybe holding back?  Maybe savoring an experience akin to a man expelling a pumpkin through the tip of his penis, trying to make it take as long as possible?  Maybe she thinks Noe’s just been (ahem) pussy-footing around, and unless somebody gets tough, darnit, she’ll keep us here all night! 

    We ignore Lee and keep on with what we’d been doing.  Except after a few minutes more of what we were doing, Dr. Lee has another helpful announcement to make.
    “Okay Noe, it’s really important that you push very very hard on this next one, or I’m going to have to use the vacuum forceps.  So push or it’s the vacuum!”
    That does it.  “She doesn’t need to hear that!” I snap.  “She’s pushing as hard as she can, she doesn’t need to be threatened—”
    Dr. Lee starts to defend  herself.  Noe tells us both to shut up and help her push.
    We help her push.
    All of a sudden, the doctor has in her hand a contraption that looks like a little rubber beanie or a deflated whoopie cushion attached to a long plastic tube, which connects to what appears to be a mini-bicycle pump.  They put the whoopie cushion on Nova’s head, hold it there, and then Dr. McAllister starts to vigorously work the bicycle pump.
    “We have to vacuum suction her out, Noe,” explains Dr. Lee, expecting resistance.
    “JUST GET HER THE FUCK OUT!” shouts Noe.
    After some furious pumping, Dr. Lee starts tugging on the cord that is attached to the whoopie cushion that is now sealed airtightly to Nova’s head, the majority of which is still in my sister’s vagina.  Lee pulls . . . easy . . . . a little harder . . . .her brows furrow . . . she throws her upper body into it in order to pull a little harder . . . then it’s like Lee and Nova were playing tug of war and Nova  suddenly let go of her end of the rope, and Lee almost falls back onto her butt when suddenly the whoopie cushion pops off of Nova’s head.  So much for the vacuum suction. 

    Uh oh.  Wearing the startled expression of someone caught dropping expensive china in a store underneath a “You break it, you bought it” poster, Dr. Lee quickly checks my sister’s face for signs of alarm at the elevated beanie imprint-in-reverse left on the top of Nova’s soft head.    Noe’s too busy to notice — and her eyes are squeezed shut–so Dr. Lee chooses to pretend that nothing happened and immediately puts the beanie back on the baby.  I guess now that the beanie has a handle to grip onto–the shape left by the last attempt–it sticks better.  After pumping this time, and tugging on the cord this time, the baby’s head starts to emerge ever so gradually but surely out of my sister’s now immense vaginal opening.
    Dr. Lee lets go of the cord, leaving the rest to Dr. McAllister, who now takes hold of Nova from under her head and pulls gently.  Nova’s shoulders are sliding through, and then, with a twisting motion–not unlike coaxing a dry cork from a wine bottle–she eases Nove’a shoulders out of my sister and—
    VOILA — NOVA IS BORN.
    Nova lets loose with a cry while her feet are still inside of my sister.  Wasting no time, Nova lets us know she is here.  So she is definitely her mother’s daughter.
    The next thing I know, I’m kissing my sister, who is beside herself with joy, and then I hug Joe and then suddenly I am bursting into tears.  Nova’s wailing, Noe’s weeping, I’m weeping.  Joe’s not weeping, but I can tell he’s close to tears.  Nova is absolutely beautiful: thick dark hair, a sweet warm brown face, eyes like almonds toasted by the sun.  Her bottom lip quivers poignantly when she cries for her mother, my sister.
    We look at the clock.  Dr. McAllister says, “Time of birth, 1:06 am April 11, 2009.”
    Happy Birthday Auntie Leilani!
    Thank you Noe.  Thank you Joe.  Thank you Nova.  Thank You God.

 

See you later, I hope.

Dear Readers,

This blog has helped me get through a lot.  Thank you for participating. 

I feel very strongly that it’s time to move on.

So this blog is taking a rest. 

After a good rest, maybe it’ll restart, or maybe it will pass away peacefully in its sleep and be reincarnated as something different.  

until then,

with gratitude,

Leilani

The key to my heart

So last Monday I left work to pick up the girls from their ballet class.  I got into my car, drove my car out of the parking lot, and turned my car westward onto Olympic.  Ordinary departure at the end of the day.  Except . . . on this day my dashboard computer erupts into a shrill beeping that sounds, to my ears, like there’s a small monkey in its death throes in the backseat.  Either that or the car’s getting ready to automatically eject me.

Irrationally, I find myself hoping it’s the latter as that would make the car, not me, the guilty party.

I always feel guilty when my dashboard sounds off, and now I realize why: elementary school fire drills.  There I’d be, daydreaming about the next Scholastic Books book-order day or the upcoming issue of Tiger Beat, tuning out the teacher,  when  wang! wang! wang! would descend upon us like falling bombs, startling me into the feeling that I got caught doing something naughty.

Same thing yesterday.  My car starts wailing at me and my first thought is that if I’d been paying closer attention none of this, whatever this is, would have happened.   My eyes race around the interior of the car and, with the psychological equivalent of the trombone shot in JAWS , land on not one, or even two,  but a sequence of flashing lights that start with:

PLEASE REFUEL

Duh.  Then:

RIGHT FRONT LIGHT NOT WORKING

Old news.  This can’t be why you’re having this hissy fit.

STOP!

Really?  Right here, right now?  Just halt here in the center lane of the westbound Olympic at rush hour?  Do I have to?

UNABLE TO MODERATE ENGINE TEMPERATURE!

Notice that the car used an exclamation point.  I kid you not.  Maybe this means I really do have to stop.

CHECK OWNER’S MANUAL

That’s helpful.  When my car is not in motion like a two-ton bullet, that’s the first thing I’ll do.  That’s a promise.

REFILL COOLANT!

Another exclamation point.  Turns out my car is a drama queen.  All this ruckus because I’m low on radiator fluid?  Surely I can keep driving and surely I will make it to pick up my daughters at 4pm, as planned.  If I don’t run out of gas, first.  I’ll worry about the coolant after that.

(Please note.  Volkswagens require a special purple coolant that cannot be purchased at gas stations.  The coolant available at gas stations will cool the engine, but you’ll later spend hundreds of dollars having your lines cleaned as a consequence.  Also, whenever my car begins to malfunction or run out of gas, I operate on the assumption that I need to get to where I’m going as quickly as possible, as if I can beat it to my destination before she gives up on me.)

Needless to say fifteen minutes later I’m stuck in traffic  on the westbound I-10, my car issuing large clouds of billowing smoke.  I white-knuckle the steering wheel, hoping against hope that I won’t become the stalled car in the middle of the freeway at rush hour that ruins everybody else’s commute.  To make that hope a reality, I have the heat and fans on HIGH blasting me with the engine’s excrescense,  my logic being that if I take onto myself the burden of the car’s pain, it will forgive me and hang in there a little bit longer.  I am also praying.  And I am calling Ursula to warn her that, ahem, I’m running late to get the girls from ballet class.  I get her voicemail.  Then I see the policeman’s flashing siren lights behind me . . .

Kidding.  But it would have been perfect at that point to have been pulled over for breaking the hands-free cellphone law.  I should have been checking my owner’s manual instead.

I manage to get to Brentwood Gardens, where I zoom my smoking car into valet parking (it’s all valet at Brentwood Gardens) and quickly disembark.  “She’s overheating as we speak,” I tell the man taking my keys, “so please don’t let her idle.”  I’m twenty minutes late.  I dash up the three flights of escalators to the dance studios, only to find that . . . . there are no little girls left.  Everybody’s gone.  Strangely, even though I know Djuna and Poppy are safe with the other mothers somewhere, I start to panic.  It’s just feels sad, not finding your children where you expected them and then having no idea where to find them.  I try Ursula again, and this time she answers, and of course the girls are perfectly fine and having a blast with all their friends at Azita’s house.  Azita is also making everybody a Persian feast for dinner.  And the mothers are more than happy to continue watching the girls while I smoke over to  the Volkswagen dealership to get some purple coolant.

Well, it turned out I needed a lot more than purple coolant.  I won’t bore you with the details.  Let’s just say that by the time they told me I would have to wait another hour for the Enterprise Rental Car rep to rent me a gosh-darn vehicle, and when I thought of having to make yet another phone call as that lame working mama who’s always rushing around and is always late and is always the last to pickup her kids, and when I thought of having to ask one of the other mothers yet again to cover for me (which they have always done with grace and generosity, but still), I went into the bathroom and had a bit of a cry.

Then I got over it.  When I emerged from my private hissy fit, there was waiting for me outside a little white Chevy Cobalt.  The Enterprise Rep handed me the key–that’s right folks, a bona fide key.  As in, a thumb-sized piece of metal with a hole in the top.  After a quick refresher course in how to open car doors and trunks with such an antiquated relic (by inserting said key into keyhole and turning!), I was ready to go see Djuna and Poppy.

When I got to Azita’s, Djuna and Poppy ran at me hard with arms wide open, jumped up into my hugs, and knocked me over.  As I lay on the floor under them giggling and smelling them and squeezing them, Tara, Claire, Olivia, Tilly, and Kayla joined in, and it was a Leilani pile on.  I was laughing so hard I was crying, tickling every  belly I could get my hands on and making those inchorent tickly noises most of us, I’ve noticed, make when we’re tickling children.

We hung out.  The food was amazing.  The mothers were amazing.  The children were, of course, amazing.

Then it was time to go. Djuna, Poppy, and I walk to the Cobalt.  I’ve got to put their stuff in the trunk, so I whip out my car key, insert it into the trunk’s keyhole, and turn it.  The trunk snaps open.

“What’s that?” Djuna asks.

“What’s what?  This?”  I hold up the key with the Enterprise tab on it.  She nods.  “It’s the car key,” I tell her.

“And you have to put it in the lock like a house door?”  She does a little twinkle toes maneuver.  “Neat!”

“Hey, you’ve never seen a car key that actually has to touch the locks to unlock the car, have you?”

“Nope, mama.  They’re always buttons that beep.”

Wow.  I am really growing up.  There is a list of inventions populating the world that replace things that my daughters will only read about in books or see in movies: phones that plug into walls, CDs, answering machines, and car keys that are literally rather than just metaphorically keys.

“These are all they had when I was growing up,” I say, holding it out to her on the palm of my hand.  She fingers it like you would a pet cricket or a seashell.

“Neat!” she says again.

I’ll say.

Facebook Nostalgia

I thought nostalgia was longing for the past.  And connotatively it is, I guess.  But the word comes from the Greek for “return home” (nostos) and “pain or suffering” (algia).  So in our longing for the past is our longing for something that feels like home.  Facebook is a nice thing in that it helps me to feel at home in the world.

Home is an imaginary place: not just an arhictectural structure or an address or a site on a map, but who you love and where you have loved them.  As you get older, you have loved more people and you have more homes.  When I was in the middle of that bad stretch in 2006, people I hadn’t spoken to in years came out of the woodwork to comfort me.  It was like being brought home after having misplaced the map and finding myself lost: like crawling into somebody’s lap and being hugged while I cried, being made to feel safe, like I’d been carried to someplace familiar and warm.  Thank goodness for all of you.

One of the many useful things I do with my PhD in English is get paid a nominal amount of money to lead a book club through novels that are usually about things like mother-daughter relationships, lost love, the immigant experience, and family history.  Last night I led the ladies, as I call them, through “Forever” by Pete Hamill.  For some reason, Facebook came up.  The ladies have college-aged kids, and they said this about reporting status on Facebook and Twitter: who cares that so-and-so just made a sandwich or yaddi-yada has just seen the last episode of Lost? 

I said, I cared. 

The question got me thinking about my imaginary Facebook community.  It got me thinking about the relationship between my past with all of you Drew folks and your presence in my present.  I remembered when we would eat 1 or 2 meals a day together, when my girlfriends hung out with my boyfriend and knew what I had to deal with without my having to lay it all out, when I was aware that MB had a paper due the next morning, when we knew collectively whose heart had just been broken, who was nursing a hangover, whose father was terminally ill, who was nervous because their play opened that night or they were about to find out about med school admissions.  We had an  easy shorthand with which we understood each other, and because we understood each other we were less judgmental, less critical, kept our senses of humor about ourselves and each other.  In short, I guess, we were more like family.  There was freedom in that: freedom to fuck up and still be loved.  The stakes weren’t any lower than in the years that followed, but our hearts were more open to loving and being loved in spite of our potential to hurt each other.   Few of us had known a pain that seemed insurmountable, and if we were lucky we were emotionally fearless.  And we loved each other accordingly.

One of the reasons I’m glad to hear that MB got a new kitten and needs to name it or that Jill is snowed in reading “Turn of the Screw” is because it is like that same old shorthand of intimacy.  I don’t think we post these things because we’re self-important or expect that others find us particularly fascinating.  The opposite.  I think we post these things to Facebook because they’re not important, they’re not dramatic, they’re not “news” . . . these things we post in our status reports or say to each other on the Wall are the mundane details that constitute the fabric of a life as it is lived from minute to minute, rather than from dramatic event to dramatic event.  Things are not inflated in significance, but instead, returned to their proper proportions.  My daughters playing in the yard or the fact that I just cried over a movie or the news that Ron’s kids are sick become, on Facebook, all contextualized by the same ordinary stuff happening to every other Facebook friend.  My life’s daily comings and goings are put into perspective like they should be, one of any hundreds of tidbits that float across a homepage on a  given day.  

I like it.   I appreciate having a sense of the fabric of your life, the domestic trivia and the career sludge and the little things you find funny or what you’re going to watch on TV.  The getting a degree, getting married, having kids, getting divorced are the things that can happen to everybody; knowing these Big Events doesn’t necessarily make me more intimate with you than knowing that you can make a joke out of your sinusitis or that you’re really good at punning.  These kinds of unglamorous trivia make up the experience of living right now, before the experiences are organized into categories of significance and then ordered into a narrative that, however compelling it may be, is a story like a movie or a novel and not the life you live with both hands, the phone ringing while the kids laugh in the background and you struggle to send off that last stupid email so you can help your roommate or spouse get dinner on the table or WHATEVER.  That’s life, in the details.  I like hearing your details.

So thank you.  It’s nice to be in touch with you all again and to hear all the news, little as well as big.

The married dogs of Djuna.

So today the girls and I went looking around at various Petcos and Centinela Pet Feeds for a little dog to adopt.

“Just a little dog, Mama.”  Djuna is very clear about this.  Ever since she got “knocked over” and “scraped up” by Paige’s boss’s English bulldog (I wasn’t there), she is easily startled by big dogs and sometimes little ones, too.

We start talking about what kind of dog we might like.

“I think a pug or a frenchie like Betty would be best,” I say.

“Dadja said Obama got a dog that sounds like an oodle.”

“That’s a labrapoodle,” I told her.

“What’s a labrapoodle?” she asks.

“It’s when the father is a poodle.  You know what a poodle is, right?  The dogs with the curly hair?”

She nods. I continue.  “And when the mother is a labrador retriever.”

“What’s a labrador retriever?” she wants to know.

“Yellow dog was a labrador retriever.”  Djuna’s face lights up.  We watched “Adventures of Yellow Dog” a while back when we were all sick.

“So the mother labrador retriever and the father poodle have a puppy, and the puppy is a labrapoodle.”

“Oh.”  She ponders this and gets excited.  “And if we had a chihuahua and a French bulldog, and when nobody was looking they  got married, and they had a baby, it would be a Frihuahua!”

She ponders some more.  “What if a labradoodle married a poodle?  What would it be called?”

“Labradoo-doodle, of course,” I tell her.  She loves this.

“A doo-doo dog!” she sings out.

Mad Men and Nostalgia, the ache from an old wound

I’m obsessed with “Mad Men,” and what clinched it for me was the first-season finale, which included a presentation on something about which I was already obsessed and had been for some time: nostalgia.

Until recently, nostalgia to me was what old people felt for the past of their prime.  I mostly associated it with my grandfather, who felt about the 1950s the way some of us feel about Santa Claus–oh, if only we could have that magic back again.  What exaggerated this association for me was the Reagan Right’s worship of the Eisenhower period as the pinnacle of American culture and power, right after our victory in WWII but before 1960s counter-culture shot it all to hell.  Then there were my parents’  favorite entertainments when I was a kid: Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and the megablockbuster Grease.  I didn’t like the Fonz, or Danny Zuko, or Reagan, and I liked questioning everything, so for me this nostalgia for a period when men were men and women were women and Family Values reigned unquestioned was highly suspect.  Not because I have any issues with men being men or women being women or with Family Values, necessarily: what made nostalgia suspicious to me was its perceived hostility to questions, challenges, and criticisms of the past. 

Enter “Mad Men.”  One of the things that hit me over the head about “Mad Men” was its rather un-nostalgic view of nostalgia.  Influenced by that movie “Far from Heaven,” “Mad Men” has an angle on early 1960s prosperity and innocence that only post- postmodernism could have produced: it says yes, these were innocent and prosperous years, but only because we didn’t know better — or, more accurately, because we needed to  pretend to ourselves that we didn’t know better.   ”Mad Men” is about that need.

The rampant cigarette smoking and all the conversations about it in “Mad Men” are the metaphor for this attitude toward the past.  Smoking is sensual, satisfying, and deadly.  When you smoke, you both enact the death-wish (I am killing myself slowly) and deny it (the pleasure of smoking now makes me feel alive).  As such, smoking is a fetish like I used to read about in grad-school theory: that which provides pleasure not in spite of, but because of knowledge that we possess and, at the same time , want to hide from.  The fetish (thecigarette) is  both an object of substitution (it fills in a hole left by something lost) and an object of denial (that it fills in a hole acknowledges what we seek to deny, i.e., that there is indeed a hole needing to be filled, that beneath pleasure lurks the spectre of soul-damaging loss). 

Don Draper, the protaganist, is riveting because he embodies this contradiction on many levels.  On the surface, he’s a perfect specimen of American manliness: confident, successful, powerful, sexy, dominant over women and (more importantly) other men.  An alpha-dog.  That he is a pioneering genius of the new culture of advertising makes perfect sense in the most obvious way, then: he is what all men desire to be, so he knows how to generate, sell, and satisfy that desire. 

At the same time, Don Draper is a phony.  I spent most of the first season expecting to learn that he was a Jew passing as a Goy (which I think was intentional), when in fact it turns out that he is instead a class phony, a backwoods and emotionally starved orphan who, during the Korean War, got the chance to commit a “Retour de Martin Guerre” and ran with it.  So in essence, Don Draper is the perfect ad man: at the core he is not Don Draper, he is an absence, he carries around inside himself a spiritual and emotional hole that can never be adequately satisfied, that hunts restlessly for the magic object that will fill it once and for all . . . . but  neither the beautiful blonde wife, the country house, the perfect kids, the sexy moll, nor the heart-searing extramarital affair with a soulmate can fill it.  Because filling that hole is at the same time the acknowledgement that there is a hole needing to be filled. . . . and the momentary illusion of completion vanishes again, leaving him hungrier and lonelier than before. 

So, to return: “Mad Men” conveys how the early 1960s were innocent and prosperous years, but only because we didn’t know better–or, more accurately, precisely because we needed to  pretend to ourselves that we didn’t know better.  All that jovial male-bonding over the objectification of women is another example of this.  These men exult in sexual inequality because they’re afraid of their powerlessness.  (Nothing new here, but it’s nice to see it so unapologetically represented.)  Exercising their economic and professional dominance over women  masks that fear but, again, that any masking is required only makes them more terrified and therefore more brutal.  That’s why I’ve spent more than a few minutes over the season wondering if Peter Campbell isn’t going to go postal.  That’s why femme fatale Joan, the red-headed office manager, seems so poignant, even poetic in her sell-out to sexual politics: she gets it.  In her wisdom, she sees beyond the bravado to the lonely little boys hiding behind it.  Then there’s Peggy, the new girl who can follow the social rituals and rules but doesn’t understand the human natures that forged them, so that she becomes kind of an actress.  She’s therefore the embattled female couterpart to Don Draper, role-playing around an inexplicable emptiness at the core that makes her kind of a marketing genius, the first female copywriter in Sterling-Cooper’s history. 

And then there’s all the infidelity in “Mad Men,” and, as we know, infidelity is a topic close to my heart.  What puts a lump in my throat while watching this show is that none of the men blame their wives for their affairs.  They all have affairs, many of them have more than one, but they are pursued as a matter of course, as as natural to men’s natures as liking liquor and cigarettes even though they’re bad for you.   These men love their wives, but these men are so unhappy, so starved internally that nothing satisfies completely or for very long, and they eat women like candy.  Yet they don’t blame their dissatisfaction on anything or anybody–it’s just the way things are.   They may hate women on some unconscious level (Don must, given his history), but they don’t expect women to solve their problems and don’t blame them for failing to do so.  These men are unhappy, but they don’t seem to feel especially entitled to happiness; they don’t rage against the universe or love or God for having failed their egos in some existential way.  Neither do the wives.

Is this a good thing?  If “Mad Men” were to answer this question ‘yes,” then it would be old-school nostlagic, indeed: ah, the good old days, when people didn’t whine endlessly about their traumatic childhoods and psychological baggage .  But I don’t think “Mad Men” judges the inchoateness of its characters’ longings as better than the 21st-century’s self-aware verbosity.  How can you be nostlagic for a time when, whatever privileged white men suffered, black men appeared only as janitors and elevator operators, and watching a woman think was, as one character in “Mad Men” put it, “like seeing a dog stand up and play the piano”?  We are a long way from “Happy Days.” 

If “Mad Men” is any indication, maybe it can be said that our culture has finally stopped romanticizing the past.  This is a beautiful thing, especially in light of Obama’s swearing-in and inaugural address.  Maybe it can also be said that our culture has stopped using the past and some reductive myth of progress to make itself feel better about the present, as well.  This too is a beautiful thing, and a little trickier.  It’s not an innocent or very joyous place to live, here in contemporary therapeutic culture where everything is questioned and therefore so much, maybe too much for comfort, is verbalized, debated, and analyzed.  There is little glory in self-examination, whether personally, culturally, or nationally, little glamour in the “obscure” labor of articulating the longings, questionings, and sorrows within ourselves, each other, or our societies.   This “obscure labor,” however, is essential to any application of justice that aspires to be more clear-eyed or fairer-minded than what was possible before.  It’s such a painful undertaking that often we can’t resist the temptation to project outward and blame others, blame history, blame enemies  for what we suffer.  Bush sure couldn’t.  But if we’ve travelled any distance since the era of “Mad Men,” then (according to the show) we should.  And . . . . we can.

“