I’ve noticed that I cycle through a routine
litany of complaints on this blog based on the seasons. After nine years (!) of blogging here, I’ve become absurdly predictable: Sun, heat, no
professional hot-weather clothes, allergies, allergies, fatigue, bad knee, cold,
Christmas, weight gain, hormones, work stress, can’t find decent
fill-in-the-blank consumer good, Mr. Typist leaves his stuff all over, cat,
knee, allergies, cat. So I am not going to bitch yet again about the disgusting
90-degree heat. I will exercise constraint. I’m not going to rant about how I
didn’t move to the Northwest so I could be subjected to L.A. weather, how the
relentless sun and lack of rain is killing my soul, how I miss boots and
sweaters, and how unfair it is that as a Northern European, blue-eyed red-head
I am probably going to get skin cancer living in, of all places, Seattle, where
it’s supposed to be gloomy and gray all year round, but wherein the last few
summers have been dementedly hot and sunny for an area in which only two
percent of the domiciles have air conditioning. Nope--I’m not going to gripe or
moan about any of that. AND, I’m going to share a sartorial victory—around this
time last year, I wrote an angry screed about the lack of professional
hot-weather clothing for women. But just today, I trundled off to Fred Meyer
and found a plethora of….drum roll please…breezy, light-weight, professional
tops I can wear to work for the summer! I was so completely delighted I didn’t
even mind that the place was jammed full of mean, crabby, sweaty people who
were obviously just there to get out of the heat and scam some free air
conditioning.
If I may channel Tim Gunn for a moment and lay a
fashion lecture on you: The blouse pictured here is decidedly not a drippy blouse. It is a decent work blouse you can wear in the heat. It does not
contain extranea. It is not garish. It is not burdened with a bejeweled
neckline or frivolous bobbly things on strings. It has tasteful pattern that
can be combined with neutrals, blues, or blacks, it is nicely gathered in the
center. It has shape and structure, yet it flows. (I like my clothes to
flow.) I bought five such blouses today. Not five of the same blouse, obviously,
but five different blouses that meet that criteria. I guess that’s pretty much
what I’ll be wearing for the remainder of this hideously scorching summer: All
of five non-drippy blouses in varying shades of purple, neutral, and blue. Woot!
When I started this blog post, I was in the
middle of watching a rental of “While We’re Young” on my tablet. I had about a half hour left to go in the
movie, and I didn’t love it. I don’t mind sad movies, but I have grown weary of
hopelessly unredeemable sadness, both in my life and in my media. There is a
certain type of indie movie that seems to be popular now, with people being sad
and wistful. They are sad and wistful at the beginning of the movie, and then
slightly more sad and wistful at the end of the movie. In between, not much
happens. But I took a break from writing this post to finish watching the
movie, and the ending really pissed me off. I have a personal pet peeve around
redemption narratives that involve pregnancy or adopting children. It’s a lazy,
cheap way to create meaning in a character’s life, and I really dislike it as a
device. Of all of the things that happened to these characters--of all of the ways
they could have found a creative outlet for their ennui and hopelessness, of
all of the ways they could have corrected their mistakes, they just to get to
erase everything with the easy cultural shorthand of having a baby. Because we
all know that fixes everything. Ben Stiller didn’t have to figure out a way to
make his incredibly dull, pedantic documentary shine, and his sad shell of a
wife never found her own voice or a way to differentiate herself from her
famous, lauded father, but hey, all of that would have been too complicated to
work out narratively, so let’s just have them adopt a foreign baby, and, bam,
everything is sunny and sweet and okay now. It’s an insta-fix. I don’t
understand why acquiring an infant is considered a way to solve everything,
both in fictional narrative and in real life. But I really resent being dragged
through a painfully awkward ninety minutes of stilted Millennial hipster-vs-Gen
Xer conflict, only to have everything wrapped up neatly with the baby-bow trope.
I think writer/director Noah Baumbach could have done better.
Continuing with the formal verse series and the
theme of regret and failure, below is a poem about another fail: The day Ididn’t jump into freezing-cold water in Greenlake for the Poet’s Polar Bear Plunge.
Even though I wrote an overly-dramatic poem about my lack of spontaneity, I
know deep within my heart I that I made the right decision in that specific
circumstance. That water was cold, swampy, and infected with god-knows-what,
and every single person who jumped in got sick the next day. Risk-aversion has
it’s perks!
UPON AVOIDING
THE POLAR BEAR PLUNGE
Time once, my
heart would court and take
The black burn
of the freezing lake,
And love the
fight, hard and bold,
Against the
alchemy of cold.
But now my veins
are lax and weak;
My soul is
flaccid; my mind is bleak.
Courage fled me
long time past,
And my mettle
was long surpassed
By remittance of
fearful debts.
For all one
gives to life, one gets:
I watched the
others risk the pain,
And ached to
feel that free again;
To toss off fear
and grab the heart
Of this frigid,
giddy art!
To dunk my
dullish, talking head
In living waters
and dare tread;
My body's
furnace roaring heat
To fuel my
hubristic feat.
I could have
chanced this dare--and more,
But I'm afraid
I've lost the war
Against the gods
of angst and qualms:
I've traded in
my nerve for alms,
And spent the
coin on safety nets
And hedged or
reneged all my bets.
The world is
divided so
Between those
who live life in flow;
Who embrace the
water's passion--
And those who
prudishly ration
Their
fulfillment for protection,
But take no joy
in its collection.
--Kristen
McHenry
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