displaced housewife seeks a kinder, simpler age

Last night I made meatloaf. Granted, this was meatloaf made of ground turkey and a host of other similarly modified healthy ingredients, but it was meatloaf nevertheless. And meatloaf is the provenance of housewives the world over, a Depression era staple, a Midwestern culinary rallying point (voted Good Housekeeping's seventh favorite food in 2007!); it is surely not the meal a twenty-something New Yorker makes for her boyfriend after boxing practice. Right?

I've always been a product of the wrong decade. If I had my druthers (see? I use words like "druthers"), I'd wear nothing but t-straps and pleated skirts, ride around with notebooks and loaves of bread stashed in my bicycle basket. I'd write letters. I'd keep a trousseau. I'd misbehave famously. This anachronistic fantasy of mine harvests the better parts of womanhood—subject to personal taste of course—and splices them together in defiance of their generational relevance. This works for me.

So I go to Whole Foods as if it were a market in the town square. I lovingly select vegetables I cannot afford, take them home, and mutilate them. I rattle about the kitchen listening to WCBSfm because they play songs I recognize from a time when I thought listening to Simon and Garfunkel made me "edgy." And I make things.

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy like this: separating the whites from the darks, folding shirts, making beds, writing grocery lists, planning parties, planting flowers...provided there were some other element to my life to keep me engaged—no one wants to go out with their head in an oven. But I want to learn to properly fold the bottom sheet, how to mold marzipan, how to keep my plants alive. Perhaps it can be so simply explained as the need for control in my home, but what does that word even mean nowadays? Do we still hold by those needs or have we outgrown them?

It has occurred to me that these simple skills should not number among my goals and aspirations. Sure, everyone wants to write mystery novels in a cottage by the sea, labrador retreivers underfoot, whole bean coffee brewed at sunrise, but the pursuit of domestic happiness seems to have been rendered irrelevant to our postmodern lives. We are conditioned to want something else, something faster, especially us girls. Women in the wake of feminism are no longer presented with two equally valid choices: to stay at home or to go out into the workplace and seek our fortunes alongside the menfolk. We are now expected to do the latter and are judged only by our fellow seedbearers when we fail to also accomplish the former.

Many women have suffered and sacrificed for this to be the case. It is on their shoulders that we wear pants and vote and even burn our bras in protest. But sometimes I wonder if we haven't backed ourselves into an even trickier corner by disregarding some of the finer points of our natures. Listen, ladies, I have every respect for those of you who would rather eat mulch than bear children, wear a dress, or bake a pie. It should be your choice. I just wonder if that choice isn't being made for us?

I probably ask too much of the world. Because I want to wear pants. I want to curse and drink grown men under the table. I want to be a high-powered career woman just like everyone else. I just also want to wear lace every once in a while and be appreciated for the antiquated rituals I keep alive on special occasions. And someday, if I have babies and I want to stay home and actually watch them grow up, I want to do that too.

and I quote

Our country is: "bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction..."

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it)."

America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009.

And probably will be for life

Never have I felt so adrift.

I look at this picture and I ask myself, "What the fuck?" Mostly I wish I lived there: closer to my mother, further from this icy tundra, and able to stretch to my full wingspan in the grocery store without decapitating the elderly. But part of me is convinced that if only I could cut the mustard here, where I am now, I would not need so desperately to escape.

Somewhere along the line I must have gone incredibly, irrevocably wrong.

I hate my job. I'm cold. I'm claustrophobic. I want to change directions, but I'm exhausted. And I know that I'm going to have to make a running leap at something soon, but what...

post mortem

So Christmas is over. We've covered that. But now there appears to be some kind of hooligan marauding about greater SoHo attaching these snarky tags to all the abandoned Christmas trees waiting on the curb for the Sanitation Man. Son of a bitch.

now I lay me down to dream of Spring

In this weird hinterland between Christmas and New Years everything is possible and yet there is nothing to do. I'm at work because I have to be, perched at my desk feeling leftover queasy from my holiday bug, but I may as well be anywhere else for all the work I'm doing.

Being this idle leaves scads of time to sit in the bathtub of myself until pruny, just thinking. This week is always a good—albeit obvious—time to redress the vagaries in my life, to do a systems check, plug up the holes, and recite to myself a little State of the Union address slash pep-talk. For the most part, I think I have 'me' under control, but I can't seem to shake this omnipresent feeling that something is wrong.

And life is too short for that feeling.

So I've set a few Plan Bs to boil on my back burners. And while they bubble, I'll start taking my own advice. Today is all I've got.

2008, I wish you farewell. You were a lousy mistress, but you weren't all that unkind, and for that I am grateful.

I wish I had a river

And now the world has to take down its twinkle lights and pay their taxes.

in the bleak midwinter

As an unabashed fan of Christmas I realize that this year 'tis not the season. The economy is toilet-bowling, people are hurling their footwear at lame duck heads of state, and New York City has decided to do everything but chase its wanton citizens into the suburbs with a budget full of absolutely criminal tax increases. Meanwhile we've pissed off enough world leaders that I won't be half surprised when some nation, rogue or otherwise, points a nuke at us and calls it a night.

Not to mention the bills, the debts, the rising costs, and the families who can't afford to feed their children. Or the insurance companies who drive up the cost of basic procedures and then refuse coverage. Or the lack of jobs that pay just enough to afford apartments that cost just too much.

To top it off, the weather oscillates between seventy and seventeen degrees. All snow promptly turns to sleet. The streets and stores are filled with shoppers who plod through by rote. We do this because we've always done it; we cut down trees, drag them into our living rooms, try to keep them alive until New Years... We drink too much, we overindulge on cookies and cocoa, and we spend our feebly accrued savings on gifts. Lather, rinse, repeat. And we grow lonelier by the year. Is there not a Cindy Lou Who in all of us wondering "Where Are You Christmas?"

Meanwhile, sensible people turn away from all this pageantry. They don't deck their halls, they don't wrap their presents. They say the whole holiday is just a greeting card frenzy, an annual offering made to appease the retail gods. So they spare themselves the sadness of trying to recapture their childhood suspension of disbelief. Cheers to them; I wish I were that sane.

Humbug. This is the season of hope. Of twinkle lights. The summer of the soul in December. When we try to be the people we wish we were. We owe it to ourselves once a year to be as good, as generous, as kind as we can be to the people we love. To let ourselves feel a little smaller. To remind us that we are more than mere mammals.

Christmas has never been easy for me. I've always had my heart broken by my own bungling hand in trying to make myself believe: in Santa, in flying reindeer, in brass choirs. In mistletoe and love triumphant... but more than that, in the human capacity for goodness. It's not even about Jesus—I'm not particularly religious and anyway his birthday would be in April—it's about us. And we're in trouble.

Every year our illusions are peeled away until, aging gracelessly, the world is bare and we become lost in it. Here I am, twenty five years old (and not particularly thrilled about it), living in a city I hate, a flop of an actress. My father just came out of ball surgery and my mom is hundreds of miles to the South living in a swamp with a bunch of senior citizens. My family fell apart, my dog died, and I've made so little of myself so far. But, goddamn it, there is still this resurgent effervescence once a year. I still am overcome with the urge to spoil the world rotten, come ruin or rapture, and that gives me hope for myself. I am a good person at Christmas. That much I have.

So I hang my socks on the fireplace. I watch cheesy movies. I cry at the same old swells in the same old songs. I leave cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve and I pretend I'm not aware of who makes the bite marks and drains the eggnog. And someday when I have children of my own, I will make sure they never feel this way.