Earth Tones

I'm a primary-colors sort of person, drawn to kitchens done in black and white with splashes of red or bright blue. We, however, have a Craftsman-style old house, complete with original wall stencils, and so decided to stick with earth tones to reinforce the "in harmony with nature" feel of the building. Somewhat to my surprise, then, I'm comfortably ensconced in muted olives and forest greens, rich browns, dusky oranges. It's all good, except for one eensy-teensy detail:

Cat poo comes in earth tones.

Cat poo, therefore, blends in perfectly--is, in fact, indistinguishable, even invisible, when resting on our rugs and even wood floors.

This has become A Problem.

Our once shy but affectionate and completely litter-box oriented kitty has taken to pooping all over the house. Because we can't figure out what's wrong, I now call her Menopausal Kitty--I figure I blame everything weird about my physical, mental, and emotional states on menopause, so why not the kitty, too?

Meanwhile, I'm adapting. Evolving, really. I now step with such lightness, such tentativity (there is no such word, but there should be), that my foot can hit poo and rebound so quickly that not a speck of poo adheres to my sock. Perhaps over eons I could pass this adaptation on to my offspring, and womankind and pooing kittykind could live in ecological harmony.

But I don't have eons and the males in the household remain their primitive stomping selves. Oblivious to the squish and stink, they track kitty poo around the entire house and are utterly amazed when I point out the fecal footprints.  Do men never look down? Is there something in testosterone that prevents the neck from bending? Given this male intransigence and my own growing impatience with scraping cat poop out of the rugs, Menopausal Kitty's future as an indoor cat looks limited.

Which makes me a bit nervous. Now granted, I have yet to poop in odd places but I do find myself and my body doing the strangest things. How long, then, before I'm mewing pitifully on the back porch, wondering why no one will open the door and let me inside?

And suddenly I get the point of male obliviousness--this wonderful evolutionary adaptation, this remarkable means of ensuring ecological harmony between the male species and menopausal womankind.

A Full Plate

Oh hell. I am such a Bad Blogger. I meant to be regular. I really did. But I've just been too exhausted even to think about typing a coherent, let alone interesting or God forbid I aspire to such a thing, meaningful sentence when I return home in the evenings. Which gets me to wondering, why am I so friggin' tired all the friggin' time? Here are the answers that spring to mind:

1. I've loaded way too much work on my plate.

This obvious answer, however, begs the question:  Why did I do this? I actually used to be extremely good at time management, at realistically assessing my schedule, at saying no. So why have I, in my second half-century, suddenly lost those useful skills?

Which brings me to

2. I have this sense of "if not now, then never," this new urgency, this fear that the sand is plummeting through the hour glass at an ever-escalating rate, and there's just so much I want to do, to finish, to start, to try. I have no delusions about myself. I'm not one of those scholars whose work will change the way people think. But there are courses I'd like to devise and techniques I'd like to try and curricular reforms I'd like to help make happen and yes, books I'd like to write. There are questions I'd like to answer. Shoot, there are questions I'd like to ask.

But I don't have time to ask those questions because I've loaded so much on my plate that all I can do is keep cutting and biting and chewing and swallowing, no time to savor any textures or flavors, no pause for digestion, just keep forking it in in hopes that eventually the plate will be bare. Except instead it gets ever more crowded, gravy seeping onto salad, bread rolls piled high atop the grilled tofu, as I keep on taking more and more helpings, ever more anxious that if I refuse, I'll never ever have the chance to try that particular pasta or taste that sort of chocolate mousse and I will die, encumbered by pasta regret and dreams of deferred mousse.

A Miracle for 2013

So here's The Question: Do we trust Dr. Oz?

I ask, because Dr. Oz has identified the Keranique Hair Regrowth System for Women as one of his "13 Miracles for 2013."

The thing is, I'm not actually sure who Dr. Oz is. But my hair is definitely thinning, so I clicked on this ad alongside my Facebook messages today, and voila, it tells me that Dr. Oz says, here's a miracle.

I'd like a miracle. Science is so boring. I'd like some whipped cream-like substance that I can rub around my scalp and then squirt on top of my ice cream and a few days later (I don't need instant gratification; I can wait a bit), yes! I'm back to my normal head of thick, frizzy, unruly curls.

Normal, of course, is the key word here. It is normal for me to have lots of hair. This thinning hair stuff, this horrendous skin-like substance now peeking through, this is not normal. Dammit. This is Not Allowed. I signed no permission slip, no invoice, no receipt. I am not asking for Julia Roberts' hair. I just want my hair. Normal hair.

Oh dear God. When did I become abnormal?

Still, there's always Joan Rivers. Yes, indeed: The Joan Rivers Great Hair Day Fill-In Powder. Evidently, on those days when you need "Great Hair" (aka Normal Hair), you just dust on this powder. And hope it's not a windy day, I imagine. Or wet. I would think the powder would just clump up, which  wouldn't be great or normal. But I guess if you're Joan Rivers, you don't have to think about rain or wind.

But I don't know. Can Joan Rivers really guarantee Normalcy?

One of the Wonders of the World

Hugh is due back home in 24 hours. Hugh is 17. I am girding up my emotional loins.

Oh wait. Does "girding up one's loins" means preparing to run away?

As good as an idea as that may be, that's not what I'm doing. Forget the girding.

 I Am Preparing.

 I will be Zen Mom. I will be Gandhi, except with clothes. And without the hunger strikes. Maybe forget the Gandhi.

 I will be a fat, laughing Buddha, implacable in my joy, unmovable in my serenity, a pudgy pyramid of calm assurance. Birds can shit on my head, dogs can piss on my lap, adolescent boys can scream in my face, but I will smile resolutely on. I am going to be one of the Wonders of the World. Parents will whisper my name in awe-struck tones; mothers of teenagers will light incense before my photograph; high schoolers will bow before me.

It's going to be a great weekend.

Holding

It's early Sunday evening, Hugh has returned to boarding school for the week, and I am consoling myself with a too-large tumbler of Jameson's. Not because he's gone. Because the two days he was home were just so truly awful.

Oh GAWD. It's all so mundane. Fights with the teenager. I'm not sure if it's the fights themselves that are so soul-destroying or the realization that your life is playing out according to some clichéd script that's been acted out on countless stages so very very many times before.

Somehow it seemed so different when I was watching in the stalls rather than acting on the stage.

And yet-- I remember watching my cousin and her parents. Sue was something of a terror; she dared things I didn't even dream of and she drove her parents around the bend, over the mountain, into the deep. There was shouting. Now decades later my Auntie Jean is dying, and Sue faces the loss of not only her mother but her best friend, the person she talks to every day, the buddy she shops with and giggles alongside and trusts absolutely. And I watch her grief and remember what that relationship once was, and I am in awe at what time and just holding on can do.

I don't aspire to be Hugh's best friend but I have to believe we'll be better than what we are right now. And I'm good at holding on. I am, in fact, a bit of a maniac when it comes to holding on. So, please God, give us time. I'll hold. There will be (more) shouting. But I'll hold.

Fergus

I've written before about the geological processes of aging--the shifting of tectonic plates, the cutting of new valleys and the pushing out of hillocks where all used to be flat and smooth. And of course, as part of this process of formation and erosion, soil shifts, rocks tumble, cliff sides suddenly give way. This last month has seen lots of shifting and tumbling. Take my teeth: a typical morning; I'm chewing on my usual peanut butter-and-whole wheat breakfast waffle and CRACK, my tooth falls onto my tongue. Much choking and spitting ensues. Or take my skin: suddenly white bits shower down like stones and sticks cascading down a hill. For the first time in my life I have eczema patches because, well, why not? there's all this other weird shit going on, so why not massive skin flaking?

And then there's Fergus.

About a week before Christmas I notice this large black thing in my left eye. Kind of like a fly, with a circular body and a squiggly tail. I figure it's eye strain, shrug it off. But the fly won't leave. And then comes a 24-hour massive bout of pain in that eye. Scary. So off I toddle to the eye doctor. Turns out the pain was coincidental--sinuses? psychosomaticism? who knows? But the fly--the fly, the doctor tells me, is permanent: my eye cavity is deteriorating; bits and pieces are detaching. The fly will always be with me. "But it will only be really obvious if you're looking at, say, a white page." Umm, you mean like a book page or a computer screen? "Yes, exactly." Right. I'm a historian. Book pages and computer screens. There's my life. Hello, permanent fly.

So, I decided to make the best of it. I've named him Fergus. He's my new pet. Like many of my pets, he's incredibly annoying and won't let me alone. But he's mine.

New Year's Resolutions

2013. What kind of year is that? What good can come in a year named 2013?

I resolve not to make any New Year's resolutions. I'm still scarred by my experience from a few years back, when I wrote up my resolutions and ended up with a list of 31 Do's and Don'ts, ending with "Be less hard on myself." And it took me several days before I saw the irony.

So, this year, in this badly named year of 2013, I resolve not to resolve. I Resolve Simply To Be. Just to be. To be: to breathe and to enjoy breathing. To be: to see the divine in the daily. To be: to recognize and even to rejoice in the fact that the highlights of my year will be the new seasons of Downton Abbey and Doctor Who. To be: to invite friends over on the spur of the moment and not to worry about the state of the house or whether there's any dessert. To be: to be as anal about responding to social emails as I am to work emails. To be: to allow myself more time to cook and to bake. To be: to remember friends' birthdays. To be: to go for long walks and to find a yoga class that doesn't drive me nuts. To be: to call my mom more often and to enjoy the calls. To be: to. . . to . . . .

Oh fuck.