This “trend”* of dressing us in pantyhose?
We don’t like it.
A jaunty bandanna on a Summer day? Fine. A top hot on New Year’s? Sure. We hate the bunny ears on Easter, but we get it. Hell, we even appreciate the sweater and raincoat in December.
But this?
Not okay. Bad mommie.
- Jen
*I put quotes around trend because I don’t believe this is a trend, more like seven crazy people, but those seven needed a talking to.
For many of us, this weekend involves cooking with relatives…a situation fraught with every kind of tension. I once got in a fight with my mom and my sister while baking Christmas cookies. It was over the correct way to soften butter. Thankfully, there was enough champagne to remind us we didn’t really care if we did it in the microwave (my suggestion), on the stovetop (my mom’s) or just used it hard (my sister’s).
Cooking with older relatives can be especially frustrating. The recipes are never updated (how is Crisco still so popular?) and it always has to be their way. My paternal grandmother drained three cans of beans, threw them in a bowl and served it as bean salad. And couldn’t understand why we didn’t like it.
My Nana (maternal great-grandmother) generally referred to things by their brand name. So her “cooking” sounded like this: let’s go to the Frigidaire, grab some Philadelphia and spread it on Nabiscos. Still better than Loreta’s Bean Salad.
And Grandma Georgie (maternal grandma) always had lemon squares and the latest National Enquirer waiting for me when I visited. She passed 15 years ago, but I can summon the feel and smell (lemon and cigarettes) whenever I’m tempted to buy an Enquirer at the checkout line.
Cooking with Grandmas (and aunts and moms) is usually stressful for a million reasons. I recently read a short little essay about it that changed my feelings on the topic forever. I hope you have some time this weekend to read it.
I promise it will make you laugh and get a little weepy and, if you’re like me, you’ll wish you could go have some lemon squares and read all about Elizabeth Taylor’s latest marriage.
Happy Easter, blessings over your Passover, hurray for Spring!
- Jen
Family Ties and Growing Pains, Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes…I loved these shows for their theme songs almost as much as the actual shows.
And lately I’ve been noticing how much I look forward to theme songs again.
Some of my favorite shows have boring, repetitive, or discordant themes that I simply fast forward: Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead and Dexter. It doesn’t detract from my enjoyment, it’s just a non-factor.
But when the song is just right…it gets me pumped for the show and puts me in the exact right place.
I’ll start with Justified. This ridiculous “rap” by Ganstagrass has somehow wormed its way into my heart to the point that it comes on and I feel happy…happy that hillbilly meth dealers have a song all their own…and happy that we get to rap along to “God get acha boy” and then sing the ending refrain “I seen them long hard times to come”. As those last notes play, I get giddy for my Raylan and Boyd time.
On the shorter side, the :16 second opener to The Mindy Project is adorable, sassy and perfectly fits her and the mood I’m in when I watch:
And my current favorite, is the theme to Parks and Recreation.
The show has barely started and I feel the perfect combination of civic pride, joy, and loyalty to Leslie Knope. I will follow her anywhere!
- Jen
This conversation caused so much email and commenting that I thought I should share my findings. According to your mail and comments, I may have been right about the way the world is divided, it was about 60/40 (non-regretters to regretters).
It’s helpful to note that many of you mentioned that it’s not that you (and Oprah et al) don’t have regrets, it’s that you don’t think about them. You’ve moved on. Which makes way more sense!
Also, many of you encouraged me to stop dwelling on regret and be more positive.
Now, I live with someone who doesn’t look back, who forgives himself, who I fondly call Pollyanna because he could have written her life message, “If you always think about the bad in life, you’ll miss the good” and so I completely understand what you’re saying. I love being around people who don’t dwell on the past so much, I married one.
This is almost exactly what Jason looks like (sans the hat):
However, this gets to my point about how people are made and what differentiates these two categories of people. Whatever combination of nature and nurture made me a person who cannot expunge my past. It is intrinsically part of me and what I use to make decisions.
I can see clearly from the feedback I’ve received in the last 24 hours that people on the side of “have no regrets” feel that it’s a better way to live, that they are happier and more productive. You may be right. (None of the “have regrets” people expressed the viewpoint that it’s the healthier way to live.) But we do have regrets and we would do things differently.
I wonder if there’s a psychological term for “hearing the question differently”, because that feels like the root of the difference between us.
- Jen
(Also, to those who were worried that I shouldn’t have been so candid, I have spoken of those regrets many times. They were not secrets…I do have plenty of those and won’t be listing them.)
What do Chelsea Handler, Rachael Ray and Oprah Winfrey have in common?
When asked a question along the line of “What is your greatest regret or what would you do differently?” they all answered that they had no regrets and wouldn’t change a thing.
To someone like me, who is mostly made of regret, that is an astounding answer. Is this how the world is truly divided? Those who would change almost everything and those who would change nothing?
My regrets in no particular order:
-not helping my mom when she broke her foot
-spending too much money on my wedding
-ducking out of my birthday party to meet a guy
-driving my friend’s car when I didn’t have a license and crashing it
-drinking too much at a dinner party and bragging about how important I am
-telling my best friend’s secret TO HER MOTHER
-not being a better older sister
This list is incomplete, but I can’t go on because even thinking about all my regrets too much is devastating and makes me feel like shit.
I think I understand what they mean…that they learned from the bad stuff, that to change a bad thing could possibly change a good thing, that life’s about the journey…
But I can repeat all of that like a mantra, and I still would give anything to fix everything on that list.
- Jen
Tina Fey and Paul Rudd…what could go wrong? The movie poster should have been my first clue.
Tina Fey is really good at being funny and being whipsmart. When her “Admissions Director at Princeton” character is being either of those things, the scenes work. When she is being dramatic, romantic or emotional the scene dies. Paul Rudd is sweet and sensitive and a little awkward, just how I like him. But he doesn’t have much to do.
The first problem is the script which feels like it was written on “how to make a cliched Hollywood movie that makes about 30 million domestic” software. the second problem is having Tina play a woman with no sense of humor about herself. The only scenes where Tina seems in control of the material are when she matches wits with Lily Tomlin, who plays her eccentric, ultra-feminist mother.
It has one of those voice-overs about how the secret to life (just like the secret to college admissions!) is to just relax and see how it plays out, or just be yourself or maybe it was try to find the kid you gave up for adoption. I’m not really sure, there were a lot of themes being thrown around.
It also has a twist which doesn’t serve the story but seems to happen because the software said it was time for a new dramatic tension. Most problematic is that the twist actually undermined all that had gone before, cheapening any emotion you might have felt at earlier revelations.
Rudd and Fey and the great Lily Tomlin couldn’t be more likable and I was happy to pay matinee admission and watch them be them for 2 hours. But the movie itself was completely forgettable.
Also, I hated that Penny from Lost (Desmond’s constant) was the sort of bad guy, which is like Abigail Breslin playing a bully…shouldn’t happen.
I think I’m going to watch a little Clueless/Role Models/I Love You Man/30 Rock/Mean Girls (one of them is always playing somewhere on cable) and I won’t even remember this movie happened.
- Jen
It seems like every one in the country is either on Spring Break or obsessing over basketball. I, on the other hand, am celebrating the first Saturday of Spring with my annual Spring Cleaning.
When I was little, the movie channels played the Lily Tomlin classic The Incredible Shrinking Woman on a near-constant basis,creating my lifelong worries over chemical cleaners. (Which may be completely unfounded, but I will mention that I’m quite tall…)
Anyway, not cleaning with chemicals means my house is not very clean, which creates a very fatalistic approach to my day. I will work very hard and pull furniture away from walls and wipe down baseboards and clean out the fridge, but nothing will sparkle in the end.
But the day is not lost, because I love my playlist, compiled just for today. So I will sing at the top of my lungs and dance my little heart out as I spread a bunch of Method and Mrs. Meyer and 7th Generation around my house to no avail.
These are the musts:
Prince, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
Madonna, Love Makes the World Go Round
Britney, …Baby One More Time
Robyn, Call Your Girlfriend
And my latest and most favorite jam is Next to Me by Emeli Sande
- Jen
@iamrashidajones tweeted this picture from a Tokyo restroom last night:
Now I love a fancy toilet, but my Japanese reading level is not so good and that’s a lot of buttons. (I do appreciate the directions being translated to English)
But now I can’t stop wondering what all the buttons mean. Obviously there’s #1 and #2, but where does it go from there? Double-flusher? Lady products? Non-bathroom-related items…for when your kid tosses in his Tonka truck?
Here’s what I know about myself: I can’t bear to leave it unflushed, but I don’t want to cause trouble (I especially dread bathroom-related commotions) so I would end up having to ask someone and she wouldn’t know, so she’d ask someone else who wouldn’t speak English and pretty soon there would be a pile-up of kind, helpful ladies gathered around my toilet trying to decide which button to push.
And that’s why I can never go to Japan.
- Jen
All this talk about the Girls finale makes me want to talk about the romantic comedies that really work for me. I recently read a really good piece for NPR in defense of the rom-com written by Linda Holmes.* One of the points she made is that most rom-coms (even the classics) have a fairly silly plot. These days there just aren’t that many external causes that keep lovers apart. Yes, fathers can disapprove, but they can’t actually arrange your marriage to someone else. And certainly marrying “up” or “down” can be messy, but it’s not an actual barrier. So we all agree to overlook the “pretending to be engaged to the guy in a coma” or “I’m a CEO and she’s a hooker” or “I’m really a newspaper reporter pretending to be a high school student” because what we care about is the relationship.
Holmes says, ”greatness in romantic comedy has always been about what happens when the leads (and sometimes the supporting characters) interact with each other within that story.
I think she’s right because when I think about my favorites, it’s always the supporting cast and the best dialogue that come to mind, not the love scenes.
I love While You Were Sleeping because of Sandra Bullock’s relationship with Bill Pullman’s family. All of the scenes where she is seamlessly woven into their family dinners and disputes are what make me desperate for it all to work out. It’s not so much her romance with him as her romance with them.
I love Notting Hill for the birthday party where Hugh Grant’s sister follows Julia Roberts into the bathroom, for the gathering of the whole group for the last supper at their friend’s failed restaurant, and for the bookstore employee’s “not classic anecdote” about seeing Ringo Starr…maybe…not.
I love When Harry Met Sally for all of the dialogue, same with You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle. It’s not the grand romance that draws us in, it’s the loss and the longing and the loneliness and hopes deferred and faith restored.
If the human connection resonates, the plot can be as ridiculous as Hugh Grant and Colin Firth having a sorta fistfight in a London restaurant (although politely stopping to sing along when a birthday cake is brought out to a patron) because they’re both in love with Bridget Jones, the best, most lovable flibbertygibbet since Maria.
(WARNING: swears in this)
I don’t defend all rom-coms (I too can do without Gerard Butler and Matthew McConaughey), but I won’t be embarrassed for loving the ones that warmed my heart and made me a little sad and a little happy with just the right song.
- Jen
(*thanks to Gregory for sending me the article)
It seemed like the ending was straight out of a romance novel. Boy and girl break up and then descend into their own forms of madness because deep down inside they love each other and fall apart when they aren’t together. Then the girl is in danger and the boy realizes what we’ve known all along: They belong together! So he races to her rescue and we all sigh with happiness.
Except she has a serious condition that I highly doubt he can “fix” (I’m talking about her OCD, but her narcissism is a pretty big problem as well.)
Except he has a girlfriend who apparently forgave him for an act that I am not sure what to name it, so I’ll say “sexual mistreatment” and she now seems to be teaching him about healthy sexuality. Lesson #1: “Just because I’m having sex with you doesn’t mean I’m a dirty whore”
I don’t know if we were supposed to laugh at the image of Adam running shirtless through the city streets to save Hannah from her bad haircut or if we were supposed to be swooning. Maybe my reaction was the one they were going for: I felt used and disappointed, like I went on this really interesting journey that ended abruptly because time was up and there was no fix for the things that had happened. So is that like a metaphor for life or for love or for your 20′s? I’m trying to understand.
I totally believe that Adam would do everything he did in this episode, I just don’t think any of it makes him a good guy and certainly no savior for Hannah, which I can’t imagine she would want any way!
If I had OCD, it would have been in full effect. I do have some mild anxiety and I had to hide under my blanket and take a Xanax by the time Hannah a) tried to explain how she wasn’t sure if she’d spent her book advance, b) tried to get a loan from her dad, c) turned to the internet community with bizarre health questions, and d) gave herself the worst haircut I’ve ever seen, until the ex-junkie from downstairs made it worse.
I’m all for heroes in books and movie and even in real life. I love my Knightleys and my Darcys, my Atticus’ and Aragorns and even my Sully Sullenbergers. But Adam is no hero.
- Jen