Category: Columns

Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a Gen-X everygal loves to dish about.

Tweens 'Dating' Tweens

Published on May 13, 2010

I always thought kids hated to practice. It’s an easy assumption to make if you’ve ever plunked down payments for piano lessons, then had to beg, badger, and bribe your kids to crack the “Teaching Little Fingers” songbook just once a damn week.

I’ve recently realized, though, there are some things kids love to practice. In fact, they spend much of their childhoods willingly rehearsing for life as a grown-up. They practice parenting by caring for baby dolls. They practice working by donning plastic stethoscopes and lugging toy briefcases around the house.

And when they hit sixth grade, it turns out, they practice dating. My son has informed me that suddenly, and on an almost daily basis, girls are “asking him out.”

I try not to snicker, but the semantics alone amuse. Out … where? It’s a funny proposition for a child whose notion of “going out” still means hopping on his bike and cruising the cul-de-sac to spy on neighborhood cats.

“Where, um, do they want you to go?” I inquired the first time he told me.

“I don’t know,” he replied dubiously. “So I said, ‘No, thanks.'”

He has since informed me that “going out” simply means you like someone. “Not regular ‘like,’ but sixth-grade ‘like,'” he explained. “It means, ‘I’m attracted to you.'”

Should Marriage Expire?

Published on May 6, 2010

Couplehood is laid out in chapters. One chapter is rife with romance as your peers get hitched. The next is replete with pride as your peers have babies.

The next — the one I’m in now — is saturated with shock, anxiety, and discouragement as your peers bicker, cheat, and surrender their once-happy marriages to the life-hacking bandsaw that is divorce.

It’s ugly. Though my marriage feels sturdy, it’s hard not to wince and take cover, whimpering, under the storm of blame lobbing, heart wringing, and estate dividing that so many friends are weathering.

With national divorce rates around 50 percent, are half of us doomed to betray or grow apart from the partners we promised to have and hold? Are we damned to disillusionment for failing to cherish ’til death do us part?

Our grandparents managed to stay married, either through a stronger commitment to wedlock or a greater tolerance for misery. But if splits are inevitable in today’s live-for-the-moment culture, then can’t they be — shouldn’t they be — less painful?

What if, when our spouses’ faults begin outshining their favors and that irresistible yen for newness comes a-knockin’, we could gracefully excuse ourselves from the union with no hard feelings? What if marriage were a temporary construct? What if it simply expired, like milk?

Enough for Two

Published on April 29, 2010

You know the best thing about being an only child? There’s no math involved. No fractions required to divvy up the last piece of cake. No pie chart needed to see who got the most TV time.

Sibling-free, I got it all. All the love. All the attention. I got praise for the academic subjects I mastered, like French, and even those I didn’t, like trig. When there’s no competition, you get kudos for succeeding at arithmetic as simple as this: Love divided by one is one.

It wasn’t until I was an adult — and pregnant — that it first occurred to me that love might have a numerator and denominator. My husband and I worried how our beloved dog would cope with having a cooing, pink love-hog in the house. Isn’t it a crime to lavish affection on something and then ask it to share that affection with someone new? I asked our vet.

“Love grows,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked with a seriousness that should be reserved for conversations about heartworm and distemper.

“The heart expands,” he purred cryptically. He was one of those hippie earth-father vets with tons of his own kids and a fluffy, wisdom-indicating beard. “Love multiplies.”

Damn it! There would be math.

No More Meanies

Published on April 22, 2010

It’s a futile exercise, but once in a while, I do it anyway. I indulge in a little nostalgia for things that used to be. New York Seltzer. Grunge fashion. The theme to The Larry Sanders Show. These things made me genuinely, stupidly happy until, like gnat carcasses, they were wiped clean from the windshield of our whizzing culture.

But when I take my deliberately slow and doubtlessly ill-advised stroll down Reminisce Road, there’s something I find I miss more than anything else, something I never truly appreciated until it was gone — the asshole.

Have you noticed it doesn’t exist anymore? In bygone eras, they were everywhere you looked. The guy who refused to leave a tip, the boss who dumped work on your desk at 5:15, the driver who pulled in front of you and slammed on her brakes.

Different generations had different names for these loathsome blights on common courtesy. Shakespeare called them knaves, pignuts, clotpoles. Early Americans denounced them as scalawags and reprobates. Your grandpa may have cursed the neighborhood lout, heel, or cad.

Home School

Published on April 15, 2010

I teach writing to college students. I school them in story structure and tone, coach them in voice and diction.

My students teach me things, too. I’ve learned, for example, how ridiculous the phrase “Professor Starshine” sounds. I’ve learned that making literary analogies to Ghostbusters — no matter how clever it seems to me — is inscrutable to people who were born in 1992.

But the most important thing I’ve learned from my students is this simple fact: When a four-year old pees on the floor, he ought to clean it up. You’re looking at me as though I just made another impenetrable Ghostbusters reference, but let me explain.

Parents are working harder than ever to get their kids into college. They start saving when their children are born, help them choose college prep courses as early as middle school, and schlep them to transcript-dazzling extracurricular pursuits throughout high school.

But from where I stand — at the front of a classroom of legal adults who show up at a writing class without a pen — I fret their efforts may be off the mark. In fact, some of my campus colleagues and I agree that while today’s parents get an “A” in Getting Their Kids Into College, they get an “F” in Teaching the Entitled Little Buggers What to Do Once They Get There.

Sex Talk

Published on April 8, 2010

We modern parents are so enlightened. Unlike our Dark Age ancestors, who whacked through the child-rearing jungles with dull old saws like “curiosity killed the cat” and “children should be seen and not heard,” we encourage kids’ inquisitiveness.

We quench their thirst for knowledge by reading them books about disgusting insects and having long talks about thunder: “I have no idea where it comes from. Good question, sweetie! Let’s look it up!” My son’s favorite PBS cartoon always seems to be explaining why mold grows on sandwiches.

Because our generation applauds children’s curiosity. We reward it. We even brag about it. Until the day it turns toward our underpants, and then we freak the flip out about it.

That happened to a friend of mine last week. Another parent in her son’s preschool brought a newborn baby into the classroom, and the tots began asking her questions. One piped up with the inevitable, “How did the baby get in you?”

While curiosity may not kill a cat, it can do serious damage to a postpartum female. Caught off guard and loathe to decide for other families when — and, dear god, how — this delicate topic should be broached, the new mom explained that she and her husband had engaged in strategic “hugging.”

Unforgettable Mistakes

Published on March 25, 2010

Optimists think newspapers exist to inform us. Cynics think they exist to allow advertisers access to our discerning eyeballs. They’re both wrong. The primary purpose of a newspaper is to remind us that life is woefully, wickedly unfair. And to bring us Sudoku.

I read a story in this very paper not long ago that verified life’s injustice: A young woman was boozing at a local watering hole when some barflies began bothering her and she decided to drive home. She was drunk, and planned to find a spot where she could park and sleep it off. But that’s not what happened.

In the haze of drink, in the dark of night, she made a bad decision. She pulled onto the road and slammed head-on into another car, killing its driver — an innocent wife and mother.

It was horrendously unfair, criminally so. The young woman who caused the accident will pay $1 million in damages and spend at least a dozen years in jail. And after she has done those things, she’ll spend her life reliving the moment she screwed up, wishing she could do it over, do it differently. Her egregious error will define her forever.

Is that fair? Probably.

Breast Milk Canapé

Published on March 18, 2010

I can’t help it. I see the word “brasserie” and I think “brassiere.” It may be Freudian, but a controversial dish at a New York City eatery has — just this once — justified the slip.

Diners at Klee Brasserie in Chelsea recently got a taste of Mommy’s Milk Cheese, a delicacy made from (gulp) human breast milk. Chef Daniel Angerer whipped up the fromage-de-la-femme after discovering that his home freezer could no longer hold all the milk that his wife was pumping for their 10-week-old daughter.

The couple hopes to donate the extra milk to families in need, but the approval process takes months. So rather than waste the current stock, Angerer, who once defeated Bobby Flay on Iron Chef, conducted a culinary experiment. He liked what he tasted, and he soon began experimenting with the cheese at his bistro as a canapé in various incarnations: encrusted with caramelized pumpkin, coated in dried mushroom dust, accompanied by figs and Hungarian pepper.

Some foodies loved the idea; others found it appetite-curdling. Veteran restaurant critic Gael Greene said it wasn’t the mild taste but the “strangely soft, bouncy” texture that creeped her out.

Book Club's Dramatic Chapter

Published on March 11, 2010

It was morning when the email arrived, its subject line blaring like a Helvetica horn: “Emergency Book Club Meeting Tonight.” I hadn’t drained my first cup of coffee, and now I didn’t need to; there are few five-word phrases that set my adrenaline surging like this one.

It’s a laughable notion, I realize. What sort of event spurs a frantic gathering of book group members? An abominable mis-casting for the movie version of The Glass Castle? A global embargo of pinot grigio?

But the Emergency Book Club Meeting is not something to be taken lightly. In six years, our literature-loving girl gang has called just three of these urgent rallies, each time for a life-altering predicament affecting one of our members and thoroughly outraging the rest of our close-knit sisterhood.

“Ladies,” the most recent email began, “one of our own is facing a crisis situation and could use all the support and love we can offer.” The crisis: a cheating husband. More specifically, a self-involved man-child who navigated through his midlife crisis by using his wilson as a compass.

Panhandlers Beg the Question

Published on March 4, 2010

The guy at the off-ramp. The teen at the gas station. The lady in front of the market. Their stories, no doubt, are as different as their cardboard signs — “Anything helps.” “God bless.” “I’d rather be working.” But there’s an unnerving sameness about their demeanor: downcast eyes, slack posture, and clothes that haven’t seen a spin cycle in weeks. Maybe months.

There are more panhandlers than ever before, and it’s no mystery why. The mystery, for me, is how to respond. Sometimes I offer coins and wonder what good my 63 cents could possibly do. Sometimes I ignore them and feel bad about it. Usually I just smile impotently and wonder, as I pass, if there isn’t some smarter way to help.

My grandma once took a homeless guy to Denny’s and bought him lunch. She drove him there and — gulp — stopped by an ATM on the way. Prudent? No. Constructive? Unequivocally. He got to order the hot meal of his choice and tell his story to a great listener over bottomless cups of coffee. (He had to listen to her stories, too, but fair’s fair.)

Not all of us have my grandmother’s time. Or her huevos. Isn’t there something we can do beyond flicking nickels at these folks, and short of asking them on dates?

I talked to a guy standing outside Trader Joe’s on De la Vina Street with a sign: “Thank you for all your help.” “It’s my preference to technically not ask for anything,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name. He’s been, er, not-begging for seven months, trying to get out of debt. “Sometimes people give me food that doesn’t fit with my diet,” he said. “I’m vegetarian, on an all-raw diet.”

Only in Santa Barbara.