Thank You for Asking

Religion

 

Youngest and Middle have the day off school today for Yom Kippur.  Oldest thought it was unfair and maybe a little discriminatory for his school (a very nice Jesuit High School) to not observe as well.  Of course, he’s an opportunist and just wanted to sleep in.  I, thinking of myself as a citizen of the world that respects all religions, decide I will try to follow the guidelines of Yom Kippur and strictly observe the “Day of Rest” portion.  Beloved, kindly reminding me, as he plonks down my morning coffee, that if I am to follow the rules then I also can’t eat or drink.  I accuse him of just being grumpy because of the “No Marital Relations” rule.  He walks away grumbling, “so what’s new…and by the way, YOU’RE NOT JEWISH!”   Some people are so narrow-minded.  It’s people like this that give religion a bad name.  I lay in bed, sipping my coffee thinking I’d really rather not give up eating and drinking.  Maybe I can just give up candy like all my Catholic friends do at Lent.  Is Yom Kippur like Lent?  Can you pick and choose what you give up?   I’ve always thought it would be convenient to be Catholic or Jewish.  They do have strict rules but there seems to be lots of ways out…even up to the very end when you can say how sorry you are on your deathbed and be pretty confident things are going to work out in your favor.  I was raised Baptist (southern) and their rules are fairly straightforward.   If you do anything fun you burn in hell for eternity.  You can say you’re sorry at the end all you want, but we all know where you’re headed.  

 

As I observe Yom Kippur, whilst lying in bed drinking coffee and eating croissants (but NO candy), I reflect on my family’s attitude towards religion.  Being raised Baptist, I normally took a “buy now pay later” attitude and thought if I was going to go I might as well go all the way hence getting myself into more trouble than was absolutely necessary.  Beloved, being Episcopalian, always has what I think of as a half-ass attitude towards religion.  His religion seems so easy, accepting, vague and nice…all terribly wrong in my book.  If you’re not slightly terrified, guilty and sorry for your sins what’s the point?  As a result my kids seem to be a little confused at to what they believe.  The baby Jesus in our Christmas Creche was for years thought to be a super hero.  He was extra fun, because they only saw or heard of him once a year.  They would spend hours waging battles with the swaddled Baby Jesus vs the Angels and Shepherds.  The Wise Men and Donkeys were callously considered collateral damage.  Going to one of the secular boys schools in San Francisco didn’t help the situation.  When Oldest started his Jesuit High School and got a crash course in Catholicism it startled all of us.  One morning, in the midst of a fight over who had the blanket on the sofa first, Oldest passionately screamed to Middle, “Swear to God on the Host you had it first!!!!”  We all screeched to a halt.  Middle, not sure what a Host was and not sure he should swear to God on it but still wanting the blanket, was frozen in indecision.  I, trying to remember if God and the Host are one and the same, hoped the boys didn’t ask me any tough religious questions.  Youngest, taking advantage of the situation, as he does, stole the blanket and ran upstairs laughing sinfully.  Beloved, turning the pages of his Wall Street Journal, absentmindedly gave one of his useless little homilies like, “God can see when you’ve been naughty or nice” adding to the Santa/God confusion the boys still have.  

At any rate, I was inspired by the families streaming into the Temple we drove by last night.  Maybe Beloved and I can get off our lazy butts and get our heathen children to Church this Sunday.  Unless, of course, I’m still observing.  How long is one allowed to rest for Yom Kippur?

Excuses

Okay!  Kids in school?  Check!  Labor Day over?  Check!  Messy drawer in the kitchen organized?  Check!  5 lbs. gained over summer gone?  Ch…well, anyway…you get my point.   My excuses are spent.  Somehow it is so much easier imagining writing a Romance Novel than writing a Romance Novel.  It is becoming painfully clear that what I really enjoy is the being-ness of being a “career woman” more than the actual career bit.  It’s also a little bit annoying that my friends that actually have careers are too busy working to enjoy the advantages of being career women!  I call Barb on my cell (even though I’m home) and shout my invitation to lunch into the phone to make myself sound really busy…. like Sabrina.  Barb politely asks me to stop screaming in her ear and says sadly she doesn’t have time for lunch.  She has two big new jobs and meetings all day.  I think of calling Mickey, but I already know her time is consumed with the Slow Food movement.  Apparently it’s not just their Food that is Slow.  Their meetings take all day and when you throw in lunch it can sometimes run into the next morning.  My vision of wearing slim skirts and high heels and “squeezing in” a quick lunch with my other powerful career women friends before sexily running up the school steps to pick up my adoring sons whilst airily waving to their cute male teachers as I chuckle to myself at the “boyish crushes” they all have on me is not panning out.   

I sit at my desk looking at my computer…finally it’s just too painful, and I pick up the phone and call Sabrina.  “Of course we can have lunch!” she kindly says.  “It’s been an age, and I’m dying to hear all about your summer!!”  Well, we both know she will not hear anything about my summer, but that’s okay.  Sabrina always has a lot going on, and, in spite of myself, I am a little fascinated at her big life.  Also, I am determined to turn over a new leaf.  It’s going to be an all new me…I will take charge of this lunch.  It will be an equal and balanced friend-to-friend situation.  No side-kick status for me!    

As I sit at lunch waiting for Sabrina to finish her telephone call, I try to look busy with my water glass.  I wish we had ordered already, so at least I could eat while waiting.  “Now!” she says finally after leisurely finishing her call, “How have you been???” she puts an intensely interested, head cocked to the side, wrinkled brow (if she could) look on her face.  She’s surprisingly thoughtful, and nods compassionately as I explain my problem of getting going.  “I understand completely” she sympathetically responds.  “You do?” I say in a surprised voice.  “Of course!  I remember when I was still working for Amazon, you remember, I was one of the first 100 people there.  I had not been out of Stanford Business School for all that long, you know I was young for my class anyway.  Well, Preston and I had just gotten engaged, so I had an enormous amount of  pressure from his mother’s Old Guard San Francisco friends all insisting on throwing us parties in every club and home in town!!  It was overwhelming!”  “Oh…I imagine it must have been” I say in a small voice.  “I will never forget the day I finally broke,” Sabrina reveals.  “You broke?!  What happened?!”  In a flash, I conjure up images of Sabrina catching Preston dressed up in her lingerie, or Amazon finding out her Stanford degree was a ruse or some other super sad situation where I could shake my head and pat her hand compassionately.  I will be a stalwart friend while at the same time feel much better about myself.  “Well, Amazon offered me a promotion just as my old beau, you remember Titus, showed up begging for me to come back to him.  It was just too much!  I finally just took to bed!  I didn’t move for days!”  “Ah…yes…I seem to remember it all now.  Wasn’t there an article in the Chronicle begging for the 'Bright Light of San Francisco' to re-join the Social Mileau?”  I ask.  “Aahhh, yes.”  her lips turn up in a secret little smile as she remembers the silly, gay, carefree youth she enjoyed before she embarked on her very significant and weighty adult life.  “Now!” she becomes all business.  “Let’s address the problem you’re having?  What is it you’d like to do again?  An article on dating?  You must meet my editor!  I remember when I was writing my book…I went through exactly the same malaise…well...not exactly…you see I …”

Anniversary

Beloved and I just had a biggie wedding anniversary.  He is just the best, and I love him to death, but it made me wonder what other women would be attracted to in a man.  Could he compete on the open market?  Oh all right…the truth is I started to wonder if he is still the catch I thought he was sooo many years ago.  After consulting with a very diverse group consisting of women from Pacific and Presidio Heights about what they find attractive in a man, one theme kept recurring…Irish contractors.  Apparently, one can be married to a nicely successful businessman with a Harvard Business School degree who has a mean backhand and considered an all-around nice guy, but next to an Irish brogue and a tool belt, they really can’t compete.

Wendy, my super sensible girl friend in New York, and I have been friends since we were children.  Even though she’s been in New York longer than not, she’s never lost her small-town practicality.  She’s an inventor of some note, and her “Toss & Chop” salad chopper has taken her to the Today Show, Good Morning America and the Oprah show twice (biatch).  However, she has not been immune to the effects of the recession.  Since she could no longer afford to have her cute Irish contractor/handyman fix every leaky faucet and change every blown light she now throws a tool belt on her born-and-bred New Yorker husband the minute he steps in the front door of their apartment.  He was confused at first, but apparently it is killing two birds with one stone for them, and as a bonus, the apartment is now in tip-top shape.

 I’m a little more straightforward.   A rolled up shirt sleeve showing a bit of forearm with a very nice-but-not-overly-fancy wrist watch does it every time.  If that forearm is attached to a hand holding a cigarette while the voice says in a busy and maybe slightly annoyed manner how he’s trying to give it up, I would not object…  I once asked Beloved to just hold the cigarette with his rolled-up, shirt-sleeved, Patek Phillipe-wearing arm…he informed me, in a not at all uncertain voice, that he does not role play and cigarettes are bad for your health.  

 My sister, the super-cute recovering alcoholic, finds the guy (contractor again) in her AA group devastatingly appealing (we live in different states so we weren’t breaking code).  I asked what his drug of choice had been and she said she didn’t know but it wasn’t appropriate to ask.  When she texted me a few weeks later, inappropriately gleeful, saying, “it was heroin!”, we both felt strangely excited and relieved it wasn’t something half ass like back-pain medication.  One thing no woman wants is a half ass man.  

When I ask Micki what she finds attractive in a man, she says, without hesitation, what every girl over 5’9” says, “tall…period.  Anything after that is icing.”  Barb says without missing a beat, “art-gallery-owning Brit with floppy hair and an ambiguous sexual orientation.”  Apparently that works for her every time. 

It is interesting what some women find attractive in a man.  I, of course, am besotted with my darling Beloved.  I barely notice other men.  Really, I am just a one-man woman…I guess we’re lucky and just have one of those types of marriages…oops, gotta go…I have to throw on my high heels, so I can show the plumber the leaky faucet downstairs (I wonder if he smokes…).

Self-discipline

Isn’t it funny how something like, oh, say, self-discipline, seems so hard until you practice it.  Then it seems so easy you wonder why you haven’t been a self-disciplined person all along.  When I finally get on a self-disciplined roll I’m always pretty sure I will stay that way forever…   

Every diet I start, if I can make it past three days, I realize I am in actual fact a person who enjoys dieting.  I truly like rice cakes.  The idea of processed food makes me a teensy bit queasy.  I’ve never felt so good!  I am a person who eats to live not lives to eat.  The real me has finally come out!  Then I go out to dinner, have some wine and eat my dinner, my kid's dinner all the bread and a nice dessert and there my bag of rice cakes sit getting crumbly until Rowena finally, kindly, throws them out.

It’s not just dieting.  I remember in school I decided to try something crazy and did all my homework in a timely manner.  I couldn’t believe it!  It was weirdly easy!!  I made good grades, I felt relaxed, my teachers smiled at me.  Why hadn’t I been let in on this secret before?!  It was maddeningly simple!  I started hanging out with the smart kids giving the kids who weren’t prepared disgusted “thanks for holding the rest of us back” looks.  But then, I got cocky, decided it was too easy (did I miss the adrenaline rush of getting up at 4 a.m. to study for a test?) and my few weeks of self-discipline was over.  I’ve had various experiences with this throughout the years.  I’m always amazed at how much I can get done if I do things in the prescribed “over- achiever” method.  Sadly, I guess I wasn’t made to be an over-achiever.  My comfort level seems to hover between “barely hanging in there” and “near-miss disaster” level. 

My Romance Novel is a case-in-point.  I had been writing away at a break-neck pace (all right…maybe 5 or so pages a week).  Suddenly I was confident at cocktail parties.  When people asked me what I “did” I would say modestly that of course I am a mom first and foremost, buuuut…(I could only say that because I knew I had something else to self-deprecatingly say if they really dug…I made sure they dug), or I arranged myself to where Micki or Barb were somewhere near, so they could say, “oh…that’s not aaaaalllll you do…tell them about your boo-ook!”  Sometimes Micki and Barb would be engrossed in their own conversations, so I would have to repeat, loudly, how “nothing was more important to me than caring for my family…!!!” They would eventually hear me and spring into action.

Then, the inevitable happened.  I went on vacation.  An over-achiever would bring their computer, wake up early while children and husband sleep, have a quick run on the beach, splash some cold water on their face and then get down to writing.  After an hour or two of diligent work they would have a celebratory cup of coffee and awake their family for a day of vigorous and mentally stimulating fun.  I don’t really vacation like that.  I usually stay up way too late after having eaten and drunk way too much then yell at my kids when they try to wake me in the morning.  When I finally rise I forget my plan of having a sensible breakfast of oats and fruit and decide instead on the sugar  crusted French toast with a side of bacon and sausage.  By the time I finish breaking fast I’m worn out and can barely drag myself to the lounge chair on the beach to rest up before lunch telling my children along the way that I will swim with them “later” (as in, after I’ve lost 5 lbs and can confidently take off my cover-up…so sad). 

Because I didn’t work on my Romance Novel for so long I got scared of it.  I thought it best to not disturb it, otherwise I would see what I had not done and feel really bad.  Plus, it might disrupt my business of talking about it to everyone.  Then, whilst in the middle of lecturing my 15 year old on the importance of not procrastinating and just getting in there and plugging away I happened to catch sight of the dusty pile of pages of my Romance Novel.  Before Oldest could see what I was looking at I cut the sermon short and ran over to hide the evidence.  I suddenly had an epiphany…I could actually…just get back to work right then!  I didn’t have to wait until I cleaned out the pantry, or until Labor Day was over, or until my PMS abated…I could just do it!  I decided that is exactly what I was going to do.  So, I quickly I ran upstairs to organize my jewelry drawer.  I felt so good about my plan to get down to it that I decided I wouldn’t even stop to grab a cup of tea…I was going to get right to work…as soon as I answer that phone…I wonder if it’s Micki…