Catering to the Bottom Line

Am I the only one sickened by the fact that Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, and Benicio del Toro are going to be the Three Stooges in a feature? I sense a real lack of outrage here and the notion that we can just nick something classic and remake it so reflective of the times we live in. Can't we value the past and then just leave it the hell alone? I understand that musicians peform covers as an homage to their favorite composers and lyrics, but covering film equates to just stealing it outright and devaluing it in the process. I can't think of a single remake that has actually improved the original and fail to understand how Sean will squeeze another Oscar performance out of the Academy with the inevitable prat falls he has lined up. And I know that I'm whipping a dead horse here, but really, what's next? Meryl Streep as Deborah Kerr in End of the Affair, although I think they already remade that with Jennifer Lopez. Forgive me. Then we definitely need to redo His Girl Friday (George Clooney and Julia Roberts, of course, with a steamier script by Judd Apatow perhaps), and Roman Holiday (Joaquim Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon heat up the screen again), Dirty Harry (Ed Norton playing Eastwood), and many, many more. Let's not leave out the talented Ashlee Simpson, Britney Spears, Miley, or any of the other dispensable charmless human widgets put out by the Hollywood machine. And let's not forget that the whole point has little to do with entertainment -- not real entertainment that gives you something of value for the big bucks wrestled out of your wallet. How silly. It's all really about the bottom line, isn't it? And we all know what bottom's produce.

It's My Blog and I'll Rant If I Want To....

What do you do with your anger if you live in the city? I'm not entirely sure what you do with it in the suburbs other than drink yourself into a quiet oblivion (then go pick up the kids), or take a little fury out on a fellow soccer mom (or dad if you're feeling really choleric). In the city, there is so much external stuff to fuel the internal combustion that I often reach a point at which mercury would be considered somewhat unsafe. I tried kickboxing and had to be wrenched physically off the bag once the session was over, so I guess I could install one in my apartment and risk bringing the neighbor down via my bedroom ceiling, or I could do what I usually do and throw things. The walls are marked with small indentations that record the missile-style trajectory of everything from books, shoes, wooden coat hangars, and pens. The cat knows enough to disappear, fast, lest he find himself hurled through space. Considering that he has already visited this sorry misfortune on himself at least once (he fell out the window, but no biggie, we're only on the third floor), he is obviously loathe to revisit the experience. Which brings me back to the question at hand. How to channel anger in a healthy and meaningful way? While you're pondering it, I'll just nip out for a 30-mile run, and if you happen to have any ideas while I'm gone, be sure to send'em over. Have rage, will try (almost) anything.

Too Hip to Handle?

We forayed into the depths of Brooklyn this weekend, to Williamsburg, where you don't need a passport as much as a woolly cap, a goatee (men too!!), a baby in a sling, chic clothes that appear to be thrift but are really costly designer, and a certain slouch that denotes indifference to anything that is not informally modish. A British accent really helps, which gave me a slight advantage, and while it was initially a relief to be among creative sounding and looking individuals, after a few hours it began to wear off and take on a homogeneous quality all of it's own. We browsed a few of the thrift stores, picked up some vinyl, and hung out in a suitably mellow cafe with an adjoining, indoor playspace, so that the members of our party who could barely walk (and I don't mean those with nasty hangovers) could toddle, bite, push and fall on soft foam, in relative freedom, while we adults sat nearby, sipping chai lattes and discussing sustainable and social networking issues. We even managed to duck into a quick open house -- a 1700 square foot loft -- where we were attacked by a broker who was so incredibly aggressive that we almost succumbed and bought the place on the spot just to get him off our backs. It didn't take that long to get back to Manhattan, making us realize that 'coollness' was just a subway ride away -- and a short one at that. But once we were back uptown, in the relative suburbia of our northern locale, we couldn't help feeling that hip really works best when it stands out and that relocating to a place where everyone looks, sounds, and feels just like you do becomes an emotional prison of it's own. Each to his own, of course, and while it's definitely comes closest to the Portabello Road that we miss dearly, we fear that, generationally-speaking, we have missed the boat. Then again, my fifteen-year old, who I consider pretty chill, pronounced it a little too cool for it's own good, and that he prefers Brooklyn Heights. With you on that one, son.

Kung Fu Parenting

Unlike a car, or almost any gizmo on the planet, babies don't come with a manual. They just wrap 'em in a towel and send you on your way with a few bottles of formula, some disposable diapers, and lots of paperwork that eradicates any liability on their part. Anyone can have one, really, and they do. But the best part is that, once you get home, they're all yours to screw up as you see fit.

Thankfully, most of us have only the best of intentions -- too good really -- and indulge 'em with love. So much love, in my case actually, that it is only now, fifteen and a half years later that I take pause and think, wait a minute, what's with these grumbling, moaning, dogmatic, ungracious, unmotivated semi-adults living in my house, rent free?

Being members of the great child-centered parenting generation that we are, and anxious not to repeat any of the dysfunction that marked our own childhood, we have showered our little darlings with love and adoration. And as they scream back across the dinner table, whine endlessly, and roll their eyes when you dare suggest that they make a contribution to the household, such as making their beds, perhaps, or sitting straight, with their legs under the dining table, not half lying across the chair, you can't help thinking of the phrase 'spoiled rotten.'

Like tomatoes that are way past their due date, I often wonder if my three offspring aren't a little ripe at times? I discovered that I wasn't the only one, which led to a conversation with someone in the know about these things, someone who has my mental health interest at heart. Like a good parent really, except I pay him. And this sage and perceptive person revealed that he too has experienced the ungracious teen who will do everything in their power to make your life a misery, and that the root cause of it is, wait for it, too much loving. I kid you not. I call it Kung Fu parenting because of the image of myself leaping up into the air, a la Bruce Lee, parrying a grumble from all sides, with a deft kick here, an arm thrust out there. I never stop. I am exhausted and burned to a crisp.

Some of us love our kids to the point where they can do little for themselves. Don't really want to use the 'enabling' word but it snuck out and there you have it. In our effort to protect our chillun' from the big, bad, world, as such, we inadvertently disable their self-reliance, and independence, and motivation, leaving them with only one way for them to separate and show us that they are different. They stop doing what we want them to, and they sneer, to boot. Which makes (some of) us pull out our hair, rent our shirts, and wail in the bathroom as we puff at that forbidden cigarette, and in doing so, realize that we have become the cliche that we so dreaded -- the deeply disappointed, guilt-tripping, lecturing parent.

Which shows you that what goes around, comes around, however you choose to do it. Dysfunction is dysfunction. Teens are teens. And parents will always be parents. Poor, ignorant suckers, groping in the dark for a helping hand.

And the answer? Simple as it sounds, it makes sense. Love them but leave them be. Their failures are their failures, not yours. Stop catching them when they fall. Show them that you have a life, and get on with it. Stop making their actions the center of your existence, and when they realize that the emotional leverage has gone and that their behavior no longer affects you (visibly), who knows, it might change. It's a long, slow, work in progress. Watch this space.

Random Thoughts because it's Tuesday

Just watched Crimes & Misdemeanors for the umpteenth time and once again, I made discoveries among the interwoven tales of unhappiness, unrequited love, arrogance, sexual dysfunction, and envy in a questionably moral world. How apt during this time of get-rich-quick scams, mediocre talent, opportunism, war, and corruption, to list just a couple of the issues we appear to be facing right now. I can't help feeling like a bit player in a similar morality tale, watching the forces of good and evil duke it out on every continent of the planet. It seems like there's no safe haven any more -- as the world melts slowly before our eyes and men find even more obscure reasons to kill each other beyond the usual territorial or religious rights. Not to be left out of the fray, the IRA are back in the mix, adding their bullets to the global body count. What's a few more corpses when the numbers are so high, anyway? But it can't all be Sodom and Gomorrah. Like Judah, the rabbi in Allen's flick, I can't help believing that good can prevail and that we are long overdue for a major correction in the world. It isn't just Obamania but he's certainly a manifestation. It's a long-repressed ache for good -- good films, good literature, good communication, good people -- a genuine society that upholds bigger values than winning American Idol, getting your mug on Page Six, or achieving notoriety because it's better than not having been noticed at all.

As I ran this morning, on my son's thirteenth birthday, which is somewhat hard to take in, the notion of time became palpable as it often does when I am forced to remember how old I am. I thought of all the women, at that very moment, delivering infants who will see the year 2100 and I can't help wondering what we have in store for them?

I am attracted to teenage boys....

I can't help it. Whenever I see a small knot of adolescent males gathered on the street, my eyes are drawn magnetically to their budding acne, gangly legs, sprouting and totally incongruous face hair, and voices that are stuck in a barren land, somewhere between alto and base. A year ago I would have walked right by them, without a glance. They would have been as transparent as the dogs being walked around me, or the strollers, or young couples, arm in arm, experiencing the first raptures of young love -- I always find this sight especially invisible, ever since Cupid's blunted arrow led to the very reason for all of this. I realize that the things that cause a second, or third glance, and still do, are those that relate to my own, self-serving interests. I'm guessing it's all very Darwinian, intended to keep us focused firmly on the most important things in our life.

Now that a thirteen and fifteen-year old actually reside in my apartment -- which is hard to believe -- and are eating me out of house and home and challenging my debate skills on the hour, my teen radar is on high alert. It's all I notice when I go out. Teens, skulking around, smoking, looking shift, walking in groups of fifty down Broadway, secure en masse but petrified alone.

Same deal when the kids were tiny -- unlike my single years when the mere sight of an infant had me running headlong in the opposite direction -- once I became a mother, I was instantly attracted to anyone in the same boat, which I would describe as fairly desperate at the time, given the overall amount of colic my kids brought with them into the world. Back then, anyone struggling with a stroller, or carrying a baby became my peer group, someone to sympathize with and relate to, and on through the ages as the babies grew into kids and developed their unique personalities.

With each milestone, the past became another country, so to speak, so that I have become somewhat intolerant of kids younger than third grade, and appear to struggle with latent hostility towards new mothers -- particularly the happy ones. Six of them trooped into a restaurant yesterday, in single file, each carrying a baby in a Snugli, looking very proud. As soon as the squawking began a few minutes later, I became a crochety old diddy, raising eyebrows and frowning at the invasion. Perhaps it was the memory that I could never get near a restaurant when my kids were babies, given their inability to sit passively while I ate. I was always the exception, circling the block with the stroller while everyone else dined, waving to me occasionally as I passed. That was a century ago and whoever would have thought that teens would seem attractive in any form?

That's really the most ironic aspect of this all given that there is nothing particularly redeeming about them -- having been one, and now being a parent to two of them. Teens are awkward, half-beings. Neither man, woman nor child. The teen is Nature's little inside joke -- bumbling outcasts, hanging in a limbo land of humanity.

Like I said, I just can't keep my eyes off them. And that's just the boys. Heaven help me when we get to the girl version. By then, I'll be veering unconsciously towards young twenty-somethings, which might ease the pain -- somewhat.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

Can we talk about rodents for a bit? I don't mean the big gray ones on the subway platform, the size of small dogs. I want to talk about why parents cave to the reasonable but occasionally misguided notion, often directed by severe guilt, that children require rodents, particularly inner city children who have little access to nature in the wild, not counting the rats?

We good-hearted, animal loving parents run out and purchase these tiny creatures and their accompanying accessories -- organic food, roomy cage (a classic six at least), fresh-picked organic hay, house to sleep and hide in, non-bleached organic bedding, filtered water bottle, toys, flatscreen TV -- and $150 later, there it is, ensconced in your house. A tenant. Your kid spends exactly four minutes with it and then, guess who cleans, nurtures, feeds, coos, and spends quality time with the inmate? Guess who really bonds with it when the kids are plugged into the Wii?

Recently, we relocated our dear little friend, a guinea pig called Delilah, to New Jersey, after a mere three month sojourn in my daughter's room. We'd noticed a correlation between our cat's inordinate amount of time spent staring Delilah down from a distance, and her refusal to leave the cage except when pulled at full force (and even then she grabbed the sides of the door with her little hands as we tried to extract her). Delilah, who is now Lily, is delirious in Fort Lee. She has an older sibling, Lucy, and runs freely around a duplex townhouse, and obeys a single, nine-year old mistress. She definitely traded up and we have pics to prove it. My daughter cried for a day then the tears stopped as if on cue and she asked if we could try a couple of dwarf hamsters -- perhaps?

I was reminded of our experience while speaking to a friend yesterday who regaled me with the tale of Hamletta -- her hamster that broke its leg last week. The babysitter and the kids rushed Hamletta to the vet, who put a cast on her miniscule limb. The hamster, being of tiny mind and huge teeth, promptly chewed off the cast. The vet applied another, at no small cost. Same deal. Sorry, said the vet, the big heave-ho is your only option now. He didn't use those exact words.

At this point, my friend and her husband were already injecting Hamletta with a nightly concoction of antibiotics and painkillers, after a full day at work, followed by a full evening, chasing the terrified animal around her cage -- once a highly social and friendly creature that was now a petrified mess. It wasn't a life for them, or her. And it was costing. So they pulled their kids aside and came clean. Hamletta is going to, you know, well, not be here any more.
"The kids caught onto the euthanasia word really fast," my friend explained, and both of them abruptly fell to pieces, noisily, all over the floor. After much talking and explaining, they returned Hamletta to the vet, and my friend's daughter picked out a replacement and named this lucky creature Zippy. But hold it. The vet then tells them that euthanasia might not be necessary. Friend's kid stamps her foot. Now she wants Zippy. Hamletta can go to you-know-where. Friend is a therapist and explains the problem using lots of feeling words. Kid is contrite and then mournful. Kid is also sensitive (and smart) and wonders aloud if perhaps Hamletta should have been discharged to the great beyond a few days earlier to prevent her suffering? Limping hamster returns home but things spiral out of control and suddenly, playing God appears to be a wonderful option.
"It's like she knows," my friend said, sadly, having just administered another injection.
"Is the hamster going to be, you know, deaded, today?" her husband asked, reverting to the language of his three-year old, confused by the semantics of it all (he's a lawyer, language is a loaded barrel). His wife shrugged.
"So we can get Zippy?" the daughter asks, without missing a beat. Mother shakes her head. Hamster cowers. Daughter holds back a tantrum. Three-year old brother announces proudly to his sister that he is the only one in the house with a pet now (if you can call a fish a pet). My friend is wiped out -- exhausted, burned out, done with rodents for the foreseeable future.

As we leave this tragic scene that is undoubtedly being played out around the city, a word from the wise for those of you thinking that the furry-rodent, with a two year lifespan, is a small price to pay to stop your kid nagging.

Might we suggest taming some of those house-broken roaches that scuttle freely across your counter tops (only when there are guests around), or the pigeons that fight to get into your window when they aren't crapping all over it, or admiring adorable canines from afar, the ones that muck up your shoes with their enormous deposits (only when you are on your way to an important meeting)? And if all that fails to appease your cherished ones, may we suggest a great therapist, with firsthand knowledge of such things? We have the perfect candidate.