Department Of A Star Is Born

The prevalence of female vanity is legendary and, like most legends, largely fictional. Counterpoint stories of men going to extremes to make their boy-selves attractive – or caring about such at all – are viewed as anomalies, despite data and anecdotes to the contrary. As per the latter, of the four Parnell offspring (three girls and one boy) constituting my Nuclear Family ®, the only one of us who ever stayed home from school because of a perceived bad hair day was my brother. [1]

Yep, there’s a point I’m getting to.  Or rather, yet another anecdote.

Dateline: yesterday morning. Returning from my am walk, I passed a group of four Hispanic boys who were walking down the middle of the street, headed toward the nearby junior high. They were talking loudly amongst themselves in spanglish – loudly because one of the boys was about forty feet ahead of the other three. The lone/lead boy turned around, crooked his arm and called back to the group, urging them to catch up with him. One of the three replied in English, “I don’t want to run because it’ll mess up my hair.”

It was all I could do to stop myself from turning around to get a look at the no-mess-worthy hair, and say, Kid, you don’t know it but you’re gonna be the star of my blog.

 

 

Yet another no-fuss, man-style hairdo.

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Department Of Belated Good Riddance….

To Phyllis Schafly, anti-feminist, anti LGBTQ rights, religious conservative activist. Schafly, who earned the title One of History’s Worst Homophobes in this article by The Advocate, “…spent a lifetime trying to prevent LGBT people from gaining equality, while spreading an onslaught of falsehoods — and she did all of it despite having a gay son.”

Most famous for her strident anti-ERA/anti women’s rights agenda, Schafly was the creepiest kind of conservative: one whose blinkered, religion-tainted world view made her guilty of what is, IMHO, one of the worst of human errors: ingratitude. Schafly profited and benefited from the work of feminists – women and men who fought the fights so that a woman could, as Schafly did, attend college and law school and be taken seriously (and earn money) as a political activist, commentator and author – and then devoted her professional life to dissing feminism and feminists.

On the bright side, ’tis possible that the self-loathing misogynist jibberish rhetoric of Ms. Schafly created more women’s rights advocates than the writings of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and bell hooks combined.

 

 

phyllis

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Department Of What’s Your Favorite Not My

A couple of friend and I were recently sharing stories of what had been, for each of us, one of the surprise benefits  [2] of becoming a parent. Mine was this: once I had children I found myself rarely irritated or offended by being in proximity to other people’s children misbehaving in public. The kid throwing a tantrum in the grocery store or restaurant; the toddlers going ballistic on a flight as the place begins its landing descent – it just didn’t bother me the way it had in my pre-parenthood days.

I was flummoxed the first few times it happened – the first time I realized that, instead of being annoyed by the boy who’d just howled bloody murder and made a Frisbee of his personal size pizza, I felt something like…could it be…liberation?.  By the fourth or fifth time, the aha moment sunk in. I realized that my lack of irritation was in small part due to my empathy for the child’s parents (IF I felt they were handling the situation correctly [3]) and in large, gigantanormous part  because it wasn’t my kid acting up and thus I was relieved of the responsibility of dealing with the situation. As I put it to my friends, “Not my monkey; not my circus.”

 

 

“Paging Ringling Brothers, aisle three, come get your monkey.”

 

The morning after that conversation, I awoke with this thought on my mind: Why have other Not my… scenarios not attained a recognized shorthand for the you-don’t-have-to-fix-everything meme?

* Not my cowboy; not my rodeo.

* Not my buffalo; not my stampede.

* Not my ice block; not my igloo.

* Not my cat turd; not my litter box.

* Not my lunatic; not my asylum.

* Not my urine sample, not my steroid scandal.

* Not my Focke-Wulf; not my Luftwaffe.

* Not my parish priest; not my sexual abuse settlement.

* Not my RMS Titanic; not my Trump-for-President campaign.

Just wondering.

 

 

Someone else handle this, please.

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The Tomatillos Are Calling

Now there’s a sentence I’ve heretofore not written. Nor even imagined, I imagine (no, wait….). But there it was, on a continuous loop or so it seemed, from late Saturday night through Sunday morning.

I tried to blame my insomnia on the mundanities [4]  of life…but it wasn’t the concern for the surfeit of produce from the week’s CSA bag (aka, what-am-I-gonna-do-with-all-of-these-tomatillos?) that had me waking up every two hours with those wretched, what did we miss/what could we have done? thoughts.

 

 

Don’t blame us, lady. Not your tomatillos; not your salsa.

 

 

Instead, it turns out that pesky subconscious mind o’ mine was ruminating on the approaching one year anniversary of A Very Dark Time Of Fear And Sadness ®  for our nuclear and extended family, which included but was not limited to the death of MH’s beloved father.

Just get past that day has been my mantra for this past week; thus, the relative brevity of this week’s post. For which there may be much rejoicing in the blog-reading world.

 

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May you rejoice in the true mundanities of life;
May you be entitled to use (but never abuse) the occasional bad hair day defense;
May you remember to act when it is your monkey/your circus;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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[1] My mother confirmed this, a long time ago when she confided in/complained to me about why my brother was staying home from high school that day – he was faking illness (she’d gotten him to admit this), because he didn’t like the way his hair looked. And this was not the first time he had done so.

[2] That is, a plus or perk which you totally did not anticipate.

[3] And if they were not, well then, I could self-righteously participate in that most American of pastimes: judging other people’s parenting skills.  So, win-win.

[4] Yep, that word has been added to my dictionary.