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Ready or Not, There she Goes

07/14/2011 By Kate Geiselman 12 Comments

It is a worn out story at my house: the one where I confess to the crying jag that occurred when my first child was three days old.  My husband came in the room and asked, “Are we happy?”

It was hard for him to know during those first few days of parenthood whether I was crying from joy, exhaustion, frustration, or some mysterious cocktail of all three, so he knew to proceed with caution.

“She’s going to get her driver’s license!” I wailed, sobbing anew, holding all 7lbs, 12oz closer and staring at the curve of her impossibly perfect and inconceivably fragile head. In the midst of worrying about a healthy pregnancy, a safe delivery, and a predictably happy outcome, it had never occurred to me that something could happen to her once she was here.  Or, more accurately, it hadn’t occurred to me as anything but an abstraction.

But now here she was, utterly dependent on me and her father for food, shelter, and safety.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to protect her from the small dangers that loomed ahead in childhood: the massive bump on her forehead she earned while learning to stand right before her first birthday, the stitches in her elbow when she was ten, the broken heart when the coveted part in the musical didn’t come her way.  But how could I possibly protect her from the big ones?  SIDS.  Leukemia.  Genetic disorders.  Getting behind the wheel of a car.  For the most part, the “big” dangers were amorphous and hypothetical; possible, but statistically unlikely.  But driving had hard edges of glass and steel.  Imagining her getting into a car and driving away from me was emblematic of everything that terrified me about parenthood.

My husband smoothed back my hair and kissed my forehead.

“Yep,” he said with a soft chuckle.  ”If we do this right, she’s going to do lots of things.”

I soon learned that being a parent requires living in that odd space between holding on and letting go.  “Life is,” as Linda Loman famously said, “a casting off.”  I remember the first time I got in the car and drove away from my daughter–when she was three days old and I left her with her grandmother for less than an hour.  I also remember her marching away from me to preschool, riding away from me on her bike, getting onto a plane without me.  Soon, I will watch her drive away.

Fortunately, I have made friends with that nearly imperceptible tightness I feel in my chest when she’s off doing something new or with someone I don’t know.  Often, I don’t feel it until it eases:  when she walks in the door and flops onto the couch, or ditches her backpack on the kitchen counter, or leaves her shoes at the door and tosses a “Hi, Mom,” over her shoulder as she pounds up the stairs.

As I sat in the waiting area while she took the test for her temporary driver’s permit last week, I didn’t know what to hope for.  Part of me wanted her to fail so I’d have proof that she wasn’t ready, wasn’t mature enough, didn’t know as much as she thought she did.  Then I would have an excuse to make her wait.  But as I sat there, I found instead that I had started to hope she would pass.  When she did, she didn’t stop grinning for the next two hours, and I found myself grinning along with her, right through my terror and worry and love. Besides, she’s not going anywhere just yet–not without me or her father beside her.  When she does, she’ll be ready, even if I’m not.

Photo by Ingrid Hofeldt, used with permission.

Filed Under: MISC, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

The Uneasy Sisterhood of Bridesmaids

05/25/2011 By Kate Geiselman 6 Comments

Like the rest of the world, I went to see Bridesmaids last weekend.  I loved it.  It was smart, funny, well-acted and surprisingly moving.  Full props to everyone involved, especially Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo for the script, and Melissa McCarthy for stealing the show.

Since I was so pleasantly surprised by the movie, I went online the next day to see what other people were saying about it.  Here are some rough paraphrases of comments I read:

  • It was funny, but not that funny.
  • I’m tired of the all “Oh, look! Women can be funny too!” Why can’t it be discussed on its own merits?
  • Why does the movie present a wedding as a goal to be attained, and portray the entrance into matrimony as the end of authentic female friendships?
  • Is a wedding with a laser show really the happy ending?  Really?
  • What, now that she finds a nice guy her problems are all solved?
  • Aren’t we beyond laughing at the weird, fat girl?

As to how funny the film is, it should come as no surprise that men probably found Bridesmaids just slightly less hilarious than women did.  If you’ve never been on the receiving end of that oh-so-subtle “I’m waving my penis in the general direction of your face just to see where that might lead” move, perhaps you cannot fully appreciate how hysterically apt Wiig’s pantomime of same is, although you might chuckle at being called out for having dangled it thusly yourself from time to time. Different things tickle different funny bones, regardless of gender.  I have yet to hear anyone say that the movie wasn’t funny, so let’s call that one a draw.

But as for the rest of the criticisms, I’m ambivalent.  Yes, I am irritated by the pervasive and patently false assertion that women are not as funny as men (thanks so much for that, Christopher Hitchens.  I’m still holding a grudge), or that they can’t be funny on their own terms.  I’m irritated that we still have to talk about gender in filmmaking at all.  I am annoyed that at least two reviews I read before seeing the movie remarked that Kristen Wiig was pretty–as though that were somehow surprising or remotely germane.

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s fair to fault the movie because its characters are not feminist enough.  The movie I saw was about real women:  flawed, conflicted, complicated, and funny women who sometimes suffer the cognitive dissonance that comes from wanting to be happily partnered but wondering what they might give up in the transaction.  Men have been asking that question in films for decades; it is refreshing, for once, to see women asking the same thing.

For once, there are frank and funny conversations between women about men who don’t satisfy their sexual needs or who are frigid or unavailable–stereotypes that have been foisted on the “little lady” since the dawn of filmmaking.

For once, the “big girl” is not funny because she’s fat; she’s funny because she is totally self-assured, and because her intense physicality has little to do with her size.

For once, the nice guy is the one who gets his heart broken, and who points out that Annie is not the only one suffering but is also capable of causing real pain herself–because that’s what real people do to each other, both male and female.

And if you really think the laser show and puppies were supposed to be part of the happiness package, then you didn’t get the joke at all.

By virtue of being a Judd Apatow (produced) movie about women, Bridesmaids is shackled unfairly with a double burden.  Not only is it expected to be side-splittingly funny, bold, irreverent, and gross (because that’s what Apatow fans want, that’s what he does, and that’s how the movie was billed) but it also has to carry the weight of expectation that its characters “represent” for us women.

Personally, I’m getting worn out by this whole sisterhood bit.  Pulitzer prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan implores women to write smart and be brave and gets slammed by other women for being a hater of chick lit (more on this another day).  Tina Fey writes about motherhood (and virtually tiptoes around the subject) and is criticized for taking sides in the Mommy wars–or for stooping to have the conversation at all. Women write a movie that is honest and funny and are criticized for what the movie doesn’t do?

It is times like these when I find my own feminism very confusing.

Love it, hate it; see it or don’t. Maybe we all just need to lighten up a little.  Watch the movie.  You’ll laugh.  I promise.

*photo courtesy of acobox

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, MISC, Opinion

A Close Approximation of an Almost True Fact

05/10/2011 By Kate Geiselman 8 Comments

In the wake of the news about Osama bin Laden’s death, I found myself in a messy swamp of emotions.  As impressed as I was with the operation itself, from those who planned the mission to those who carried it out, I had no sense of euphoria.  I was puzzled by the images of people chanting “USA!” in the streets.  I experienced a rekindled sorrow about the losses of 9/11, and I was relieved that the villain behind it was no longer a threat.  Like many, I was in a state of disbelief (did I read that right?  He’s gone?) that caused me to stay up too late to hear the news straight from the President’s mouth. In a word, it was surreal.

It was astonishing how quickly we were forced to process this information, and how quickly the narrative has changed–not just the official one, but the virtual water cooler discussion that was raging by Monday morning.  Still sorting through my ambivalence, I had resolved to stay out of any such virtual opining.  But then I saw a sentiment on Twitter that perfectly summed up how I felt at the time:  “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”  It was attributed to Mark Twain.  Perfect.  It was English teacherly, a little wry, and telegraphed my relief and ambivalence without playing into the weird pseudo-patriotic fist-pumping that I was seeing everywhere.  I couldn’t resist, so I copied and pasted it into my Facebook status.  Besides, it was “tweeted” by a novelist, so it never occurred to me to question its authenticity.

Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone to check the authenticity of the other oft-repeated quote that made the rounds on Monday either, this one attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and questioning the ethics of justifying violence.  When my husband saw it, he immediately went to Google to find its source, only to discover that Dr. King had never said exactly that.  It was a rough paraphrase, spliced onto a real quote.  By Tuesday, the Atlantic and half a dozen other publications had written about the phenomenon of the propagation of the fake internet meme.  The articles I read did not mention the Twain quote, but suddenly paranoid, I fished around.  Sure enough, the only exact matches were from the past day or two–and none prior to May 2.  Buried underneath page after page of recent posts on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, I finally found a rough approximation of the quote:  “I have never killed a man, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”  Its author was Clarence Darrow.

So, I had committed the cardinal sin, the one I preach to my students about:  the hasty, careless, cut-and-paste plagiarism I see in their writing all the time.  The “I saw it on the internet so it must be a legitimate source” trap I thought I was immune to.  The willingness to trust the accuracy of a quote because it “sounded” about right and was said (and then re-said) by a writer (and another writer) that I like.  And so, the teacher was schooled.

I have a hard time getting across to my students how important it is that they become critical readers and savvy consumers of information.  I trot out a corny metaphor about the internet being like a garage sale–there are treasures, but you have to know what you’re looking for if you’re going to wind up on Antiques Roadshow learning that the vase you paid five bucks for will fund your retirement.  That doesn’t happen by luck.  It happens because the people buying that vase can read the marks on the bottom, and because they have seen enough fakes to know the real thing when they see it.  But with information, this is getting harder and harder to do.  In my haste to find the right sentiment (which has changed at least half a dozen times since then), I grabbed something that said it for me, and I was fooled by a clever imitation.

In hindsight, I can blame the aforementioned swamp of emotions, the odd pressure to say something pithy and to say it in a timely manner. But then, that’s not much different from what I have my students do every day.  I force them to grapple with subject matter that is difficult.  I require them to articulate their ideas succinctly, and I make them do it under some time pressure.  I won’t excuse them, in the future, for sloppy attributions or rough paraphrases.  But I will better understand what made them do it.

The narrative has changed again.  Now it’s about the White House’s decision not to release photos of bin Laden’s corpse (thank God).  But more than the ethical issues of whether or not the pictures should be seen, and whether or not we should appear to be, in the President’s words, “spiking the football,” is the issue of the photos’ authenticity.  There is already a quite disturbingly convincing photo making the rounds.  It is Photoshopped, of course.  But only people who know a whole lot about Photoshop can discern the real thing from a close approximation.

Filed Under: MISC, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Facebook Saved my Birthday

04/25/2011 By Kate Geiselman 4 Comments

I was an early adopter of social media.  Well, not really. But early for someone my age, which is a newly-minted, very solid and foreboding 45.  Halfway to ninety.  Firmly middle-aged.  A bonafide grownup.  Sort of.

Anyway, I was among the first of my contemporaries to have a Facebook page.  (Ref: “sort of” above.)  For months, I had only about a dozen “friends,” but my paltry list grew exponentially when the rest of my demographic caught on.  Like most people my age, I am “friends” with people whom I have not seen in 20 or 30 years.  Some, I have never seen at all (weird, right?).

Which is why, about six months ago, I swore off sending happy birthday wishes via Facebook.  They seemed a little silly to me, both obligatory and meaningless at the same time.  If I don’t know you well enough to wish you happy birthday (or even know when it is) without the aid of Facebook, then you shouldn’t miss me.  And if I do, then a Facebook wall post is a poor substitute for a more thoughtful card or phonecall or personal greeting.  There was always the angst induced by having to catch everyone.  What if I wished some people happy birthday but neglected others?  What if mutual friends noticed and thought I was being selective instead of just negligent?  Meh.  It was too much trouble.  So I made a small personal rule:  no Facebook birthday greetings.

I had to add this to a list of other tacit policies I had adopted over the last couple of years:  No status updates about the weather.  No bragging about my kids (well, minimal bragging, anyway).  No bitching about Mondays.  No writing “LOL,” “u,” or any other non-language (obviously).  No self-promotion. (Hahahahaha.  Right.  Just kidding.)  No “apps” or games. It’s not easy being me, having to keep track of all these arbitrary rules.  But that’s another rant.

For birthdays, I decided Facebook would serve only as a reminder to wish those nearest and dearest to me a happy day through more traditional channels.  I admit that this new policy set me up for some additional problems.  Occasionally, I’d have the urge to spontaneously send a bday wish through Facebook, but then would have to stop myself due to my new rule.  What if a Friend A saw that I’d wished Friend B a happy day, but I hadn’t done the same for Friend A? I’d like to say I could rise above this nonsense, having navigated Jr. High Social Politics with aplomb over 30 years ago.  But no, it bugged me. I figured as long as I was consistent and stuck to my guns, though, no one could find fault with my equal-opportunity Facebook birthday shunning.

Except this year, I changed my mind.

Because this  year, my birthday was sort of gloomy. The weather was bad, I was in an inexplicably foul mood, and despite the sweet attentions of family and friends, I was sort of glum.  And then I logged into Facebook–stupid, vacuous, meaningless Facebook–to find that some 70 people had wished me a happy day.  Many were just simple greetings.  Some were hilarious.  Others were deeply nostalgic.  I heard from my sixth grade boyfriend (who gave me a stick pin for my twelfth birthday); the girls I babysat in high school; my nieces  and nephews; nearby friends, who, despite their proximity, I don’t see nearly often enough; college roommates; former students, who inexplicably still like me; two guys I had crushes on in high school; one girl who was mean to me one thousand years ago, and who has since proved to be a perfectly lovely human being; and hordes of other acquaintances and pals and honest-to-goodness friends I have somehow managed to accumulate over the past four decades.

So no more Facebook birthday shunning.  And maybe no arbitrary Facebook policies at all.  If I have learned anything at all in 45 years, it’s that life is too short for absolutes.  And while on some days, it seems too short to spend diddling around online, today I felt like my one-word Facebook bio, posted way back when:  “Lucky.”

Filed Under: MISC

Lands’ End Jumps the Shark

04/14/2011 By Kate Geiselman 18 Comments

The long wait is over. The forsythia have had their turn, the daffodils are riotous, and the hum of lawn mowers is already punctuating the long evenings when the sun stays up well past 8:00.  Finally, Spring has arrived.

And so has the Lands’ End bathing suit catalog.

Crap.

As if it’s not bad enough that the spring clothes come out while I’m still packing an extra ten pounds of winter flab.  As if it’s not bad enough that my legs look like bluish white road maps, my varicose veins resplendent without their summer tan camouflage.  As if it’s not bad enough that my ahem personal grooming has been neglected to the point where unsightly hairs are creeping south with an alarming rapidity that is sure to require professional intervention.  As if all of the indignities that the winter has wrought on my middle aged body weren’t bad enough…in six weeks, I’m going to have to put on a bathing suit.

Crap.

There was a time when the arrival of the Lands’ End catalog in early April provided some succor to the reluctant bathing suit shopper.  The leg openings were slightly more modest than designer suits and the cuts slightly less impossible.  Some of them had a little extra lycra for the trouble spots, but in general, they weren’t so bad.  I have bought a couple of them over the years, and I have not felt like a frump or a prude.  I felt pretty cute in my Espresso Faille Tankini with the flattering halter top.  Apparently, so did lots of other people in my little suburb.  At any given time, there were at least six women with the same suit on at the neighborhood pool.  Clearly, Lands’ End had hit on something with that design, so props to them.

But this year, when the catalog arrived, I opened it with some hope of finding something tolerable, only to find…

A Grecian Swim Dress???

Huh?  The caption at the top of the page reads, “All-over control.  ‘Have you lost weight?’  Our Slender Suits make you look a whole size smaller!”

Well, yes.  I’m sure they do.  You could also look a whole size smaller if you wore a nice paper bag with the words “I’ve given up” stenciled neatly across the front, because really, isn’t that the same thing?

But wait!  There’s more!  Exclusively at Lands’ End:  “New!  Shapewear you can swim in!”  One might wonder whether this statement has actually been lab tested, because it seems to me the amount of yardage in that thing could drag you straight to the bottom of your nearest community center pool.

Or, try the “high-waist SwimMini,” which might be more aptly named the “high-waist SchoolMarmWrapSkirt,” neatly spanning the area from just above the belly button to about three inches above the knee.  There have certainly been times when I bemoaned the fact that there wasn’t a swimsuit made that hid my particular problem area, but wow.  I’m a little disturbed I was wrong about that.

Please, ladies.  Don’t do it.  Do not succumb to the notion that the very sight of your flesh is so abhorrent that you have to swathe youself in a Victorian swim dress just to enjoy a little fun in the sun.  Modesty is great, but wearing a swim dress isn’t fooling anyone.  Lands’ End claims to have “solutions for every body.”  That phrase sort of grosses me out a little bit.  We all have imperfections. Every woman I know has early-Summer-induced body image problems, but hiding really isn’t the answer. Are our imperfections really problem to be solved?

As for me?  I am planning to lose 15 pounds in six weeks. Either that, or wear an honest to god bathing suit, and let the chips fall where they may.

Photo courtesy glamoursurf.com

Filed Under: Humor, MISC, Style Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Any Other Name

03/16/2011 By Kate Geiselman 12 Comments

My maiden name was Kate Bradley.  It had a certain no-nonsense practicality to it that suited me.  It was easy to spell, impossible to mispronounce, and had a manageable number of syllables.  So when I fell in love with and decided to marry a man named Geiselman, I had to give some serious thought to whether I would change my last name to his.  It’s not a decision to be taken lightly by anyone, I suppose, but the fact that I loved my name and that his didn’t exactly trip off the tongue complicated it for me.  Hyphenating seemed out of the question.  I was a high school teacher at the time, and could not really ask my students to call me Ms. Bradley-Geiselman.  I could have just kept it, of course, but we hoped to have a family some day, and (call me old fashioned, because that was a big part of it) I just wanted everyone in my house to have the same name.  So Kate Geiselman I became.

It took me a full two years before I could introduce myself without stumbling, and once in a while, I’d still goof.  I had to spell my name for people all the time, but I could more readily screen sales calls.  I got used to being Kate Geiselman.  Still, I privately imagined when thinking about some day when I might put my name to a public piece of writing, that the name would be Kate Bradley.  When our first child was born, we gave her a middle name that could serve as a last name if she ever became a writer or musician or artist.  This wasn’t intentional, of course, but I secretly thought about this advantage when we settled on her moniker.  Long after I was used to, even fond of my last name, there was still part of me that didn’t think it was the name of a writer.

It took me almost twenty years to publish my first story; not twenty years of laboriously drafting and submitting and being rejected, but twenty years of procrastinating and perseverating and making excuses.  I prostheletized to students all the time about the power of writing, and I wrote all the time, but still, I was afraid.  On the rare occasion that I’d put anything in print (in a newsletter, or a letter to the editor, or even the dreaded Christmas card letter), people would respond by telling me I ought to write more.

The loudest and most insistent of these fans was my husband. He had listened to my vague ramblings about writing a book someday, but he had also heard all of my excuses.  He didn’t buy any of them.  One Sunday morning, he shoved the Life section of the local paper in my direction and jabbed his finger at and announcement for a short story contest.  “This is it,” he said gently.  “It’s a deadline.  All you have to do is finish something and send it.  Please.”

Over the next few weeks, I pulled up some half-stories that had been languishing on my hard drive for months.  I read them to my husband.  I edited and deleted and did the hard work of turning exposition into plot.  With his help and sharp editing skills, (who knew?) I finished one.  And then I wrote another one, just for good measure.

I knew the odds were pretty good that both stories would wind up on the slushpile, but when it was time to put my name on the cover sheet, I had to consider the possibility that one of them would wind up in print.  I typed Kate Bradley, the name I had for so long envisioned on the cover of my first book.  As I looked at it on the page, though, it seemed wrong.  It wasn’t my name anymore.  And more importantly, it didn’t reflect the truth, which was that I wouldn’t have written either story without the encouragement (sometimes nagging, sometimes exasperated butt kicking) of my husband.  I was sure he had confused love of the writer with love of the writing, but finally, after twenty years, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I backed the cursor up over my maiden name, typed Geiselman, and clicked “print.”

Filed Under: MISC Tagged With: , ,

Not a Francophile

03/01/2011 By Kate Geiselman 8 Comments

I love the Oscars.  I grew up watching them with my mom.  Well before I was old enough to see or understand most of the nominated films, I loved the glitz and glam, the montages of eras gone by, the tributes to the Hollywood legends who’d died that year.  Even in my thirties, when I was too surrounded by babies and too broke to go to first-run movies, I would brave sleep deprivation and my husband’s eye rolling to watch until the bitter end.  It would never have occurred to me not to.

As a somewhat blind devotee, I’ve been an apologist for plenty of boring hosts over the years.  I may have been the only person on the planet who didn’t notice how bad David Letterman was.  It was the Oscars.   I couldn’t not love it.

So last night, I snuggled up on the couch with my whole family and settled in for a night of snarking about dresses and cheering for underdogs.  The opening montage with the much-ballyhooed fresh-faced hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, was clever enough.  But when Franco came out shooting video with his iPhone, I should have known that things had nowhere to go but downhill.

I am not a crabby old traditionalist.  I appreciate the fact that the Academy is trying to woo younger viewers.  I was game for a change in format.  I think both of the young hosts are talented, and I wanted to like them.  But really, James Franco?  Did it have to be all about you?

I get that he is the talk of the town, a Renaissance Man who writes fiction and  gets his PhD and acts and paints and experiments in performance art. But apparently, he was so busy shooting video and Tweeting backstage and making everything very postmodern and ironically detached, he couldn’t be bothered to be entertaining. I think Annie was just overcompensating, poor thing.  She came across as silly and cloying and trying too hard, but I can hardly blame her.  I think I knew how she felt.

I had a boyfriend in college who was Mr. Cool.  He was good looking and aloof and shunned anything remotely trendy.  Why he wanted anything to do with me (trendy sorority girl, good student, former show choir member, slightly gawky) I’m not sure.  But watching poor Annie Hathaway with the reluctant (or vacant?  or absent?) Franco on her arm, I was reminded of the handful of times I took Mr. Cool to a sorority function, or to a family event, or well, basically any time when we weren’t alone together or with  friends of his choosing.  He’d be rude to my friends or make snide comments about the event or whatever, and I’d get exhausted trying to apologize for him and make everyone see what a great guy he was.  (This begs the question why, if he was so great, he acted like such a jerk, but as every young gal with a Bad Boyfriend knows “he was different with me.”  The grownup me cringes.  I digress.)

Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Franco is talented.  Perhaps I should blame the producers for selecting someone so ill-suited to the task.  The fact that Billy Crystal, a 94- year-old stroke victim, and a digital Bob Hope were the highlights of the show pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?  Still, I find that I’m slightly irritated with Franco anyway.

What I loved about the Oscars when I was a kid was that it celebrated everything great about movie making.  I would watch actors accept their awards and imagine doing the same one day.  Last night, I watched with my 15-year-old daughter, who is just back from her first trip to New York and completely in love with the theater.  I wonder if she imagined the same.  Say what you will about Academy politics and Hollywood cynicism and promotional campaigns and whether the most deserving “art” wins.  The Oscars, at their best, are a lovely fantasy, and they honor good work.  For Franco to make the evening about anything other than the honorees was colossally self-indulgent.  On Oscar night, I’m not interested in performance art or sly meta commentary that blurs the lines between audience and host, breaks the fourth wall, blah blah blah.  I just want to be entertained.  For the first time in my Oscar viewing years, I wasn’t.  But then maybe I’m just grumpy because I stayed up too late, True Grit didn’t get a single award, and not even Annette Benning could stem the Portman tidal wave.  Sigh.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, MISC, Nostalgia, Opinion Tagged With: , , ,

Earning Spring

02/07/2011 By Kate Geiselman 9 Comments

I’m home today because everything in my city is encased in a half-inch-thick coating of ice.  It’s beautiful, really.  The tree branches shimmer and click in the wind.  Rows of tiny icicles adorn the edges of every roof and railing, like lace at the edge of a prim lady’s collar.  Last night, nearby transformers exploded and lit up the night sky.  We bundled up and went outside to listen to the sounds of the ice storm:  branches cracking and crashing to the ground, ice crackling and tinkling like glass, wind howling.  It was eerie and magical.  We lit candles and put on layers, thanked our stars for our gas stove as we made popcorn, hauled out the board games and cuddled up.

This morning, the heat came back on.  My husband ventured out at great peril to drag branches off our lawn and out of the neighbors’ driveway.  When he came in, I said,

“I sort of like winter.”

The noise he made when I uttered this nonsense was somewhere between a snort and a guffaw.  For twenty years, he has tolerated my seasonal moodiness, my griping about February, and my profound loathing for March, (which, in Ohio, reminds us relentlessly of just how far away spring is, no matter what the calendar tells us).  It’s not until April, when the warm days outnumber the cold and Spring finally takes hold, that I feel like myself again.

What I meant to say this morning was that I like winter in the extremes:  the days when the weather is too ridiculous to permit anything but staying indoors and cooking.  Snow and ice is the natural order of things in February.  In the winter, our bodies crave sleepy cocoons and hearty food.  It’s time to get fat and hunker down.  On a snow day, I can do what I was programmed to do this time of year:  hibernate.   The blissful cancellation of routine is like a gift.

But for the most part, winter is a hard time of year.  I’m not one to complain much about the weather.  It’s not the cold that bothers me, or even snow.  It is the relentless grayness of the Ohio Valley at this time of year.  There are few evergreens here.  The woods and countryside are completely devoid of color.  The sun can disappear for weeks at a time.  Until a rare sunny day intercedes in the endless stretches of gloom,  I sometimes forget that the sky is supposed to be blue, or that sunlight is gold and not flat and filtered.  It is during these times that I resent obligations that make me get out of bed in the pitch black dark.  Tasks that I take on happily at other times of year:  driving carpools, taking kids to appointments, even feeding my family, feel like overwhelming and unreasonable demands.

In spite of my wintertime discontent, I can’t imagine living someplace without seasons.  It’s not that I don’t fantasize about a day on the beach from time to time, but I can’t imagine missing the thrill of the first really warm spring day when life seems to be bursting everywhere I look:   in the promise of a blooming forsythia, in shoots of daffodils pushing up through melting snow, in a robin’s song.  Winter is the price I have to pay for Spring, for fireflies, for Indian Summer.  It’s not a bad trade.

*photo by Lily Geiselman, used with permission.

Kate blogs about teaching and writing here.

Filed Under: MISC Tagged With: , , ,

The Spider and the Writer

01/18/2011 By Kate Geiselman 9 Comments

The first time I read Charlotte’s Web, I was six.  My first grade teacher had pointed it out to me in the Scholastic Book order form, and when I begged my mom to order it, she smiled, disappeared for a few minutes, and returned with a worn hardback she had been saving for me.  I grinned and headed straight for my favorite wingback chair in the living room.

I don’t know how long it took me to read it, but one evening not too much later, my mother found me in the same chair sniffling and wiping away tears.  I had had no idea that a book could have anything but a happy ending—Charlotte’s death was just too much to bear.  It was the first time I had been utterly transported by reading.  I must have read it half a dozen times over the next few years—my own effort to resurrect my friend Charlotte.  I could recite the first three lines from memory.

Almost thirty years later, my four-year-old daughter picked up the animated video of Charlotte’s Web at the library and wanted to check it out.  I couldn’t stand the idea of having her see it on screen before reading the book, so I promised to read it to her instead.

Over the next few weeks, I read a chapter to her each night at bedtime.  I had forgotten (or had I taken for granted?) how eloquent the prose was and how unsentimental the message.  Just like old times, (and much to my daughter’s puzzlement), I blubbered through the last two chapters.

Charlotte’s Web is a book about friendship, about wonder, and about the power of the written word. When I was a little girl, I was hooked from the first line:  ”Where’s Papa going with that ax?”  I worried about that sweet pig and hoped desperately that Charlotte would save him.  But now, it’s not the first sentence, but the last that stays with me:  “It’s not often in life that someone comes along who is a true friend and a great writer.  Charlotte was both.”  Indeed.

Wilbur may have made me a reader, but it was Charlotte who made me a writer.

Filed Under: Entertainment, MISC, Motivate, Nostalgia Tagged With: , , , , ,

Eating the Apple

01/17/2011 By Kate Geiselman 4 Comments

Did you ever have a crush on a guy who was just too good looking to be trusted?  One who was just a little too conscious of his looks?  One who possessed an effortless cool that probably required quite bit of effort?  And yet, you couldn’t help but blush when he looked your way, because well, shoot, he’s awfully cute; and gosh, he has a way of making a girl feel like she’s the only one in the room; and gee, a little harmless flirtation never hurt anyone; and what? Who, me?  Aw shucks. Giggle.

I know.  Me too.

But hanging out with one of those guys, my friends, is the sure road to heartbreak.  Eventually you’re going to find out that the package is too good to be true; that he relies on his looks too much, that his charm is only skin deep.  You are going to find out that he is not all that he is cracked up to be.  And then you will have wasted your time and your poor tender heart only to wish you had said yes to the cute guy from Ohio who didn’t care who designed his shoes and who didn’t have more hair products in his bathroom than you do.

Sigh.

My affair with Steve Jobs was just like that.  Or rather, that was how my reluctant love affair with anything adorned by a cutely bitten Apple started out.

It all began with the iPhone.  It was offered to me by my husband in a genius I’m-sorry-I-just-bought-a-motorcycle-but-maybe-this-shiny-Apple-will-get-me-out-of-the-doghouse move, and my first impression was, “Nice try.”  I was a little miffed that he’d spent the money.  I did not need bells and whistles.  I already wasted too much time online.

But wow.  It was so pretty.  I mean really gorgeous.  I mean, if it vibrated a little harder, my husband would be out of a job.

Just kidding, of course.  But by the end of a couple of weeks, I was in love.  I had thought that phone was just another pretty face destined to disappoint me with its shallowness.  But no.  It was better than I thought a phone could ever be.  True love at last.

But soon, that little phone wasn’t enough, and I moved on to the MacBook.  I knew that my novel lived inside one of those slim, silver beauties and not in the wonky old PC on my kitchen counter.  Surely the constant virus scans and ugly interface were thwarting my creativity.  It suddenly became critical that I spend twice as much on a laptop (never mind that I didn’t need it for much other than word processing and web browsing) as I strictly “needed” to.

Oh, needs.  I do have needs.  By the time the iPad was released, though, I had my guard up.  On a trip to the Apple store, I flirted with poked around on one for a few minutes.  “Meh.”  I pronounced.  All style and no substance.  I would not lose my heart again so easily.

Until my boss said, “I have some iPads for department use.  You interested?”

I know what you are thinking.  I should have said no.  But I went in with both eyes open.   I took that pretty little pad home and I loaded books onto it.  I downloaded free apps and synched my music and mail.  And I said, “Meh.”  Sure, it was nice to have one for a little while, but my resistance was perfected.  It did not, like its predecessors, wend its way into my heart.  I didn’t even bother to buy a case for it.

So when the email came from IT asking me to turn it back in after the trial period, I shook it off.  “Meh,” I said.  I convinced myself that the only thing I needed it for was reading.  Christmas was coming, so I told my enabler husband that I might like a nice Kindle or Nook to take its place.  Nothing fancy.

But you know what he did, don’t you?

So on Christmas day, I pledged my eternal love to my very own iPad.  Suddenly its beauty became more exquisite, its utility more indispensable.  I paid good money for apps.  I bought a case.  Now that I knew it was mine forever, I could love it the way it deserved to be loved.

Plus, my husband just got his third motorcycle, so fair’s fair.


Filed Under: Humor, MISC, Tech Tagged With: , , ,

Looking for Jesus

12/25/2010 By Kate Geiselman 7 Comments

The only item of holiday paraphernalia in my home that has anything other than decorative significance is a tiny, three-piece Nativity scene that was handed down to me when I got married. My kids call the baby “Little Peg Jesus,” since he is quite literally (due in part to the primitive rendering of his swaddling clothes) a wooden peg with a little gold wire halo. He’s adorable. Not kidding. Best of all, he is glued into a diminutive manger, less than an inch high and lined with real straw.

Mary and Joseph are wooden cones with spheres glued to the tips, also sporting wire halos. Unlike their offspring, they are not cute.  Joseph has two little stumps sticking out from his cone-robe, making him look as though someone has amputated his arms above the elbows. From one of them used to dangle a little acorn-shaped lantern, but the string that attached it broke a couple of years ago. Against all odds, the lantern, no larger than a chickpea, has spent the last several off-seasons in the junk drawer. It has now become part of tradition for the kids to rifle through batteries, screwdrivers, chargers, rubber bands, and tea lights to triumphantly emerge with this tiny bauble, the finishing touch to the Nativity scene. Joseph’s other stump clutches (or, more accurately, is impaled by) a shepherd’s crook.

But poor, poor Mary. Like her hapless husband’s, her gown is a cone, but no arms has she. Affixed to her front is a small spike, meant, I can only surmise, to be hands clasped in prayer. Like all good Madonnas, she is sporting a wimple (is that what it’s called?) and her little wooden head is bowed in prayer. She’d be quite lovely were it not for her fused, mutant extremities.

Oh! Did I mention that they do not have faces? It’s true. Like the people in that creepy episode of Star Trek, they are completely featureless. They do, however, have painted on gilt hair. Truly, the holy parents are a bit of a freak show.

Despite this, the peg people and their truncated limbs remain very much a part of our Christmas tradition. But this year, when I opened the little round box where I usually store them, Jesus and family were AWOL.  I felt a little like Mary Magdalene when the stone rolls aside and the tomb is empty. Except in this case, it was the whole family, and they were, of course, little wooden figurines as opposed to the actual son of god, virgin mother, and poor hapless carpenter who doesn’t know how he wound up in such a pickle.

Anyway, I was puzzled. All of the Christmas stuff is packed away in the same two boxes every year, in the same storage room in the basement, so I went through everything a second time, thinking perhaps I had stowed him with the ornaments. He was nowhere to be found. Frustrated, I called off the search, sent the kids to bed, and poured a glass of wine.

But the next day, I kept thinking about it as I was doing other things. Where could Baby Jesus be?

Despite the presence of the tiny crèche in my parents’ home, I was pretty much raised a heathen.  While culturally Christian, I am spiritually sort of an agnostic-universalist-yogi-honorary-Jew.  The Bible is a wonderful book.  I don’t know if it’s the word of God or a sacred text, but like every good story, it’s full of people and their struggles and their tragedies. I don’t know if Jesus was the Messiah or the son of God, but like every baby, his birth had the power to redeem and change the world. To me, Christmas is simply about a baby. That is all, and that is everything.

The next day, while going about my other business and passively stewing over the missing peg baby, I remembered a place I hadn’t looked. The minute I got home, I went straight to the basement, and there, in a box inside a box, was the little mutant family wrapped snuggly in tissue paper.

“I found Jesus!!” I yelled to the kids.

Little Daughter ran to the junk drawer and fished out the chickpea lantern. Big Daughter started in on how weird and stumpy and faceless the figures were. We admired Little Peg Jesus and exclaimed over how cute he was. Jesus was found, and Christmas was on.

*photo by David Lewis, used with permission.

Filed Under: Humor, Spirituality Tagged With: , , , ,

The Ink That Lasts

12/22/2010 By Kate Geiselman 5 Comments

My city is small.  My school is huge.  I teach fifteen sections of English Composition each academic year, and  I have been teaching at the same college for ten years.  There is math in there somewhere, but the long and short of it is that I see students everywhere.  Everywhere.  I see them in malls and doctor’s offices.  They wait on me in restaurants, ring up my groceries, and sell me shoes.  Also, they tattoo my husband.  (Well, one of them tattooed my husband one time, but I’m going for syntactic symmetry here.)

Not long ago, when I accompanied my spouse to a tattoo shop to get his first (discreet, beautiful, and certainly-not-midlife-crisis-induced) ink, I thought I recognized the young man who took the appointment. When he introduced himself, I was sure of it, and as he began to work, I finally placed him.

“Caleb!  Now I remember you.  You were in my comp class a few years ago.”  Truth was, it had been more than a few years—like maybe five or six.

“Really?  You remember me?  I can’t believe that.”  He looked somewhat stunned and mildly embarrassed.  “Yeah, school was not really my thing.”

There are plenty of community college students who would say the very same.  Many are there because a high school guidance counselor told them they were “not college material,” or because they hit the wall at a four-year institution.  Often they just have no idea what else to do with themselves, and taking some classes seems like as good a place as any to start.  So while most of them achieve their career and educational goals, it’s not unusual for me to see students several years after they’ve been in my class, in jobs that clearly do not require a degree.  Like Caleb, they often seem sort of apologetic, if they acknowledge our acquaintance at all.

“That’s okay,” I told him.  For some reason I wanted to reassure him that I did not take it personally.  “It’s not everybody’s thing.”

We exchanged pleasantries over the buzz of the tattoo gun, and as I watched him scratch the design into my husband’s right deltoid, I remembered the profile he had written of his best friend, more than half a decade earlier.  I read thousands of papers a year, many of them fine but forgettable.  One of his came back to me, though, in bits and pieces: his weird and wonderful style, his eye for detail, the vividness with which he captured his subject.  He was not only a good writer, but a talented one.

When Caleb was about halfway finished with the tattoo, he turned off the gun and sat up to stretch.  Then he took a big sip of Mountain Dew, shook out his cramped hand, and took a deep breath.

“This is the hard part,” he said.  “I hate circles.”

At the center of the design (a stylized sunburst with Icarus a little too close by) was a perfect circle about the size of a nickel.  I think the three of us held our breath as he traced it slowly.  He’d do part of the arc, stop and breathe, then bend to his work again.  When the circle was completed, we all let out a sigh and started joking and talking again as he finished the flames, put final touches on the wings, and filled in the silhouette of the mythical man.  It was perfect.

I wanted to ask him if he ever wrote anymore, but that seemed intrusive, maybe even insulting.  His English 111 portfolio probably hit the recycling bin years ago, but his ink on my husband’s skin is often the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night.

This piece originally appeared on Kate’s site here.

Photo is property of the author.

Filed Under: MISC Tagged With: , ,

Turnips and parsnips and roux. Oh my!

12/03/2010 By Kate Geiselman 10 Comments

Last weekend, my fifteen-year-old daughter had a few friends over.  I served them a delightful cassoulet on a chilly fall evening. When they had finished up, my daughter, the fruit of my very own loins, said incredulously,  “Mom!  My friends think you’re a good cook!”

I’m not sure I can convey in writing the tone of shock and surprise with which my darling daughter uttered these words, but it was clear enough to her friends that she was stunned.  They laughed and expressed some surprise that I did not, in fact, create such delightful and flavorful meals on a regular basis.

“I can cook!”  I protested to the giggling crowd.  “I just choose not to.”

And this is true enough.  I do cook; I just don’t do it all that often or all that well.  I can put a decent meal on the table, especially on the weekends when there is time.  My husband adores my meatloaf, my spaghetti sauce, and my pot roast.  But on a night to night basis, I truly loathe the task of procuring and preparing meals.  I am uninspired; I have not a single creative culinary bone in my body.  On most weeknights, I rely on old standards or takeout.

I have gone through domestic phases.  I have tried planning ahead, shopping ahead, and cooking ahead, only to end up with a freezer full of fossilized meals months later, or moldy leftovers in the back of the refrigerator.  Currently, my m.o. is to shop for weekly staples (breakfast cereal, laundry detergent, etc.) at the supermarket, but to make all decisions about supper late in the day.  We are lucky to have a specialty market nearby, so it’s easy enough to make all dining decisions ad hoc.  And since my husband has the palate of a teenager, junk food is always an option.

But here’s the thing:  when I do cook, I never get the right kind of reinforcement for my efforts.  This week, when I looked at the calendar and found one evening empty, I was determined to prepare an authentic Irish beef stew, complete with Guinness gravy and soda bread.  I went to the market and purchased turnips and parsnips, both for the first time.  I used fancy cookware that my mother foisted upon me last Christmas to braise the meat and deglaze the sauce.  (I think–I’m actually tossing terms about randomly here.)  I made a roue.  Yes.  A roux.  Or something.  All of this was well above my pay grade.  I had had a long day at work, but still, I was determined to wrest domestic triumph from the dregs of my day.

The house smelled delicious when the husband and kids arrived home.  But alas, dinner would not be ready until close to 8pm.  By the time I finished work; got home from the market; chopped, diced and sliced; and simmered the stew long enough to tenderize the meat, it was nearly bedtime.

And then?  There was nothing special about this forty dollar, 1.5 hour effort.  It was beef stew.  The turnips were a weird texture.  The cumin was overpowering.  The gravy wasn’t thick enough, roux or no roue.  I followed the recipe to the letter, spent extra cash on the best ingredients, and yet, the result was no better than the 30-minute, Tuesday night version I had served a million times.

So, it’s back to the old standards–and Chipotle–for me.  I will cook for company, for holidays, and for my mother, but on weeknights, I will keep the bar low and my sanity in check.  As Annette Benning said in American Beauty:  “Next time you prepare a nutritious and savory meal for your family’s enjoyment, then you can pick the music.”

Filed Under: Humor, Parenting Tagged With: , , , ,

The other side of Thirtysomething

10/26/2010 By Kate Geiselman 13 Comments

When I was in my twenties, I spent most Tuesday nights watching Thirtysomething, a network drama that neatly compartmentalized life in the decade between youth and middle age:  the happily married couple with a baby; the other, less-happily married couple with older kids; the single, quirky sister; the commitment-phobic bachelor, etc.  That the show managed to create something entertaining out of these stereotypes was largely due to good dialogue, well-delivered, by a very attractive cast.  (I’m talking to you, Peter Horton.)  Despite the fact that my then-fiancé called it Whineaboutsomething and teased me about my devotion to it, I remained faithful through the last episode.

Recently, a serendipitous combination of found time, a traveling husband, and a cable outage led me to search for instant gratification on Netflix.  Sure enough, I found my old favorite.  I chose an episode that I remembered as particularly poignant and profound, poured myself a glass of wine, and prepared to be transported.

Instead, by the time the 47 minutes (no ads!) were over, I was more annoyed than transported.  I watched dispassionately as everyone paced hospital corridors waiting to hear about Nancy’s breast cancer prognosis; I endured shot after shot of our characters gazing pensively out windows into the frigid darkness while an irritatingly repetitive piano score telegraphed their concern.  Will the children be motherless?  Will the best friend die?  When Elliot broke down in a bathroom stall and pleaded with God to save his wife, I think I threw up in my mouth a little.  And when the curveball came (loveable, charming Gary dying in an accident on the way to the hospital-room celebration of Nancy’s clean bill of health), my chief regret was that Peter Horton’s devilish grin would not be making another appearance.

When I was younger, these characters represented my future.  Sure, it was a reductive and incredibly photogenic future, but probably not too dissimilar from the real Midwestern suburbia, mortgage, and kids that were down the line for me.  When I cried over the episode in which Hope learned of the death of an old boyfriend, I did so from a comfortable romantic distance, perhaps thinking that could happen to me some day, and when it did, perhaps my husband would be as understanding as the almost cloyingly sincere Michael.

But there is just not a lot of romantic distance in my forties.  I’ve watched a marriage or two disintegrate, a career or two flounder.  I have been to the funeral of a young mother killed suddenly, and of a teenager who died slowly.  Three weeks ago, one of my closest friends–who has never so much as put a cigarette to her lips–was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.   Her treatments start next week.  There is no minor-key piano tune underscoring my worry.  If there is a sound track, it’s a noisy, angry scream I hear inside my skull from time to time.  It is possible that she gazes out windows when she is worried, but I doubt it.  Instead, she’s driving her kids to piano lessons and doing the laundry and going to the grocery store, just trying to keep her terror at bay. None of this would make very good TV.   I can’t fault Thirtysomething for trying, but now that it’s real life, I’m not sure I can watch any more.

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Filed Under: Entertainment, Nostalgia