My Man-Crush Done Good
October 12, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
Call me an out-of-touch, over-the-hill, bleeding-heart, tree-hugging liberal, but I love me some Al Gore and always have, even way back before his VP gig. He’s like Clinton without the handsiness. Actually, he’s what a lot of us thought Clinton was.
I know he’s a little bit of a sanctimonious scold with the global warming thing, but you know, we need a little scolding. And he’s even kind of earned the sanctimony. So good work Nobel Prize committee. (I know, you were all waiting for my stamp of approval, right? Here it is.) Also very much love the implication that world peace and environmental awareness are linked.
Related: I feel a little bad saying this out loud, but am I the only one who finds Doris Lessing one of the most turgid writers on the planet? Am I a bad person for not getting so much as a single page of The Golden Notebook? I guess the feminist in me is happy, but yeesh. Tough read.
I do love what she allegedly said upon learning of her Nobel: “Oh, Christ. I couldn’t care less.”
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North Dakota Dreaming
October 05, 2007
Filed in: North Dakota
This past weekend in Medora, ND, it was a temperate 56 degrees. Perfect for working up a sweat mountain biking or trail riding, right?
That’s what I thought, anyway. Which is why, six weeks previous, I’d emailed my BFF in the whole wide world, N (who, among her many other talents, builds beautiful blogs and then kind of…wanders away from them), and tried to sweet-talk her into leaving her busy life behind and spending a long September weekend with me in North Dakota ("ur fabulous vacation!” the e-mail header read).
To my surprise, she said yes! and, because she is that kind of a girl (i.e., organized, motivated, etc.), we were already looking at flights and wondering if we should meet up in Philly or fly separately to Denver and take a puddle-jumper together from there (which is how, apparently, anyone from out of state gets to Medora), when a little piece of data tripped me up.
I’d been staking out the town for a while, trying to find a fun, cool, wildish place in ND that would really give me a good feel for the state, but it wasn’t till I was reading the issue of National Geographic Adventure that listed “50 Top Adventure Towns (One in Every State)” that I came across this fun fact: the population of Medora, ND, is 100.
Oooo, typo! I thought. I’ve lived and worked in enough seasonal tourist traps to know 100 people isn’t enough to serve the needy, greedy visitors from elsewhere. Even by North Dakota standards, that’s simply not enough human beings to man Ye Olde Western Shoppe, serve up the BBQ Meat d’Jour at the local Authentic Kitchen, park shuttle n’ fly people to and from the regional airstrip, and sing and dance in the local extravaganza (of which Medora apparently has a huge one).
So—and this is very unlike me—I actually did a little advance sleuthing. First I talked to the gung-ho woman at the local cyclery, who said, hey, sure, we’re open in September, and yes, you’re right, it’s not at all hot then (I’d been scared of the heat after reading an article in the New York Times that made riding in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park sound like hell, only with more rocks).
Okay, one down. It took my second conversation, with what can only be described as an authentic cowboy personage, to set me straight. The polite older gentleman who answered the phone at the trail-riding place, who said yes’m and no’m enough times to make me feel precisely 102 years old, explained that they don’t give trail rides in September because there’s nobody to give trail rides to.
Absolutely everybody clears out of Medora on Labor Day weekend, I was told (except, I guess, for the bicycle lady and maybe her 99 closest friends?).
“But why do you have September hours on the web site?” I persisted, foolish in my disappointment.
“Because Labor Day’s in September, ma’am,” said he in his best give-me-a-minute-hon-I’m-talking-to-a-dang-fool-Eastern-lady.
Right. I knew that.
So yeah, no gigantoid BBQ steam table, no puddle-jumpers, no head-banging mountain biking, no singin’ and dancin’ Medora Musical for me, leastways not till Memorial Day.
Kind of gives you something to look forward to all winter, doesn’t it?
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Are You Sure?
September 30, 2007
Filed in: The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now
Over at the Practically Perfect blog, Jennifer is remarking upon the phenomenon of magazines, now even men’s magazines, spending all their editorial energy telling their readers how to improve the little, improvable parts of their lives while pretty much ignoring both the Big Questions and the Stuff You Can’t Change So Easily.
I would like to second that observation and take it up a notch. Here in Swellville, there is a certain kind of person—not everyone by any means, but a sizeable sub-chunk of the population—that seems to me well and truly obsessed with the little, improvable parts of their lives while not, at least on the surface anyhow, giving a whole heck of thought to the other side and especially not to the Big Questions.
Which is to say, they hold strong opinions on a wide range of tiny topics I personally could not care less about. Not only is there a right time to take out your trash, there is a right way to store your trash before garbage day, a right place in which it should be stored, and a right barrel to take it out in (and guess what? This right barrel is frequently improved upon, necessitating the disposal of the old one and the replacement with the newer model).
There are right shrubs and ground cover, the right lawn (this is America, right? That should go without saying), the right colors for your house, the right way to load the dishwasher, the right number of guests to invite to a cocktail party, the right place to take your Volvo wagon for its 75,000 mile tune-up and a right way to spend the time while you wait for it to be done.
Me with my loosey-goosey, who-cares-about-the-f*cking-dishwasher attitude thinks it must be exhausting to have fiercely held opinions about so much minutiae. But I must admit, these super-sure friends and neighbors don’t seem exhausted at all. It’s the opposite, it’s as if their convictions energize them.
The way all this ties into the 50th State is this: from my vantage point here in my mid-40s, it seems to me that at midlife you’re either marching forward on a path you’ve chosen (or been given or worked for), living in a certain way, pretty sure of what the upcoming years are going to bring and working steadily toward the milestones (the raise and the second house and the retirement or whatever). Or you’re still questioning things, maybe even questioning things more than you ever have before, which seems in this light disorganized and pathetic, like, is that all you have to show for a near half century on the planet, a bunch of questions?
Quite honestly a big part of me would like to live a life of greater certitude. It seems like a clean and strict and satisfying way to live. But I worry about that mindset writ large—how can we ever change as a people if all the adults are already so certain of everything? Who’s going to figure out how to save nature and stop these religious wars and feed the hungry etc.?—but also, on a personal level, if you have preconceived notions about, well, everything, you’re going to miss out on stuff that might be really cool.
So with certitude, you get a lot, but you also give up a lot. Like, oh, vacationing in North Dakota instead of Turks & Caicos. Or finding that even better way to load the dishwasher.
If you’ve found one, let me know. I’m still open to suggestion.
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Love O Careless Love
September 20, 2007
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages
Did anyone else catch Donald Hall’s poem in today’s Writer’s Almanac?
He’s got a line that pretty much sums up my philosophy on marriage (if I could be said to have such a thing):
We learned how to love each other
by loving together
good things wholly outside each other.
Exactly.
Also I have found this works well for friendships.
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Remnick! Call me!
September 18, 2007
Filed in: The Way We Live Now
Did you have a chance to read Jerome Groopman’s long and insightful article on colic in last week’s New Yorker?
I liked it.
What I really liked was the structure of the piece. First he introduced us a new mom with colicky twins, then he discussed the difficulties of trying to diagnose and define colic, followed by general historical information. Back to the present, where he delves into what people are trying now, before taking us to the Colic Clinic, where he describes Dr. Barry Lester’s office with its whacky colic cures, followed by salient and moving quotes from Lester. Cut to a scene at the clinic—mother, baby, writer and Dr. Pamela High in a room, getting diagnosed. Return to Lester talking about what causes colic, add info from other researchers, then wrap up with the mother from the lead, who survived her children’s colic but leaves us with some searing, moving quotes on the subject.
I liked this so much because it’s the exact. same. structure. that I used to cover the exact. same. topic. including the exact. same. clinic where the doctors gave me the exact. same. quotes exactly a year ago for Child magazine (here’s the link, but warning, it’s a pdf).
I am not in any way, shape, or form casting aspersion of any kind on Dr. Groopman. I’m only saying, there’s a certain way one structures a story like this for a glossy mainstream magazine out of New York, and this is it. Given the topic and that structural constraint, well, yeah, the two stories are going to be parallel.
What I am saying that I’ve never heard said before is this: If Jerome Groopman writes that way, and he’s published in the New Yorker, and I write that way. . . well, then, shouldn’t I too be publishing in the New Yorker?
Am I right?
Anybody?
Hello?
[crickets]