Betty White and Nana

Part of the reason I begrudgingly created a facebook account about six months ago was that I had heard there was a "Betty White to host SNL" group--and I wanted in. I simply adore Betty White. I own several seasons of Golden Girls on DVD; I watch the show on reruns as often as I can after work; and I have even been swayed to watch rom-coms, like "The Proposal," when I heard that Betty White had even a minor role. I just can't get enough of her. She truly is "(North) America's Grandma"--or nana, as she was referred to in several sketches last night on SNL.

Despite SNL writers' near exploitation of White with their highly sophisticated formula--old lady + swear words (prison rape and genitilia jokes) = haha--White still managed to pull it off with a wit, charm and sass that only she possesses. I had heard that there would be extra guest hosts (Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, etc.) to ease the burden on an 88.5 year old woman--but White appeared in every sketch and showed no signs of slowing down by the time 1:00 am rolled around. She reminds me of my own nana, who lived to be 89 and only passed away after a slip in a nail salon (she still received regular pedicures, which only made me love her more) led to complications to her internal organs. Before the fall she was healthy, spritely, and lively, and didn't miss a beat when it came to telling a joke or giving a good belly laugh.

My nana, who passed away in my last year of university almost five years ago, meant more to me than perhaps anyone else ever has or ever will. She had that same combination of playful adorableness and astute wisdom that Betty White seems to possess. I loved my nana so much and from such a young age that my first sentence was "I want my nana." As I grew up, we only grew closer. Nana came on every family vacation with us, and would sit in the most uncomfortable seat in the minivan--the middle seat in the back row--just so my brother and I could both lean on her and sleep. She literally sat with an enormous smile on her face the whole time--almost three full days of driving and two overnight stop-overs to Florida--just because she loved being with us.

And as I got older, entering into university and living in student housing, nana treated my every experience, as mundane as it might have been, as a milestone: she bought me a housewarming gift every time I moved into a new abode, and would deliver it herself, climbing the steps to my apartment above Fabutan, or the Westend Pub, or whatever sketchy place I had found to rent at a cheap price. And despite what loser I might have been dating at the time, nana would always make him feel like a part of the family, even though she always knew before I did that it wouldn't last.

I guess I am feeling particularly sentimental since it is Mother's Day and my mom is on vacation. I hope anyone with their own nana, oma, gran, grandma, nona, or jadda appreciates her while she is here.

A Good Ol' Fashioned Fish Smacking

I am in a wedding in July and this past Saturday we ran the stag and doe. I have never helped to oversee a stag and doe before, but apparently there is some kind of rule whereby every guest must purchase, in addition to their $10 door ticket, something called "fish insurance." My friend Kristina, the bride, is a staunch vegetarian and animal rights activist, and so I pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of having one of her guests swallow a live goldfish (which is what happens to the one unlucky guest who hasn't purchased said fish insurance). Instead, she agreed to purchase a dead fish from the grocery store (not a fillet, one with eyes and everything still in tact) and allow a member of the wedding party to smack an uninsured guest across the face.

For some reason, more people seemed to pay attention to the fish carcass than they did the bride. The fish had a prominent place on the front entrance table--on ice, of course--where people proceeded to touch it, talk to it, add cigarettes and gum to the inside of its stiff mouth. I wanted to see the humour in this, but for some reason I felt really bad for that fish. We can be so melodramatic about human death, and reserve such grandeur for the memorialization of the human dead, but we degrade and debase the lives of so many other creatures. I tried to spare the fish any further indignity by hiding it, but it was discovered.

It's difficult to be political when a bunch of drunk people want to see another drunk person get slapped in the face with a fish.

Faking it

I came across the following article on the Freakonomics Blog today, and the title alone was obviously enough to intrigue me: “We Pretend We Are Christians.”

Here is an excerpt from a reader who admitted to "faking" a pretty significant aspect of her life:

We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.

It seemed silly but it’s all very serious business down here. We don’t go to church or teach or children one belief is “right” over another. We expose them to every kind of belief and trust that they will one day settle in to their very own spirituality. However, for the sake of friends and neighbors, we pretend we are Christians. We try not to lie but rather not to disclose unnecessary information. As the children are getting older, this isn’t so easy for them and an outing is probably eminent.

We are not the only ones. We have found a few other fakers out there. I would love it if you ever explored this subject in a future book. I should mention that the friend who recommended Freakonomics to me is the head of the bible study at her church. Interesting.

I am interested in hearing similar stories from readers. I would not be surprised if political ideology is another vibe that gets faked once in a while.

This makes me wonder about myself: how much of my own idealogies might I "fake" to a certain extent, or at least (pardon the expression) bullshit? Despite priding myself on my open-minded liberal humanitarian values and (my consciously ironic) moral relativism, I sometimes cringe at my own reactionary and even--dare I say it?--ahem, conservative judgments and assumptions. When you have to sometimes remind yourself of your values, how much are they natural and how much are they contrived?

Sometimes I also "fake" not liking children. In fact, I have, even recently, told people that I hate children. Hate. I don't hate children--far from it. I am in love with my nieces and nephew, my little cousins, and my friend-since-grade-five Amy's daughter Hailey. But I can't stand, as a relatively newly married, healthy young heterosexual woman who is financially, emotionally, and romantically stable, that everyone assumes that my partner and I want to have--or worse, should have--children. And so I have perhaps exaggerated my opinion of children in order to deter would-be child-pushers from commenting on my choice not to automatically spawn.

Art - Lapham’s Quarterly

I found this image in Lapham's Quarterly and it reminded me of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that essentially women--as writers, artists and other producers of culture--were limited not only by sexism or their roles as wives and mothers per se, but specifically based upon their lack of two essential elements: independent finances and her own private space in which to write.

Carol Shields also visits this notion in her novel Happenstance. The female narrator and protagonist must have her own space in which to design and make her quilts. Often feeling as if she exists only in her husband's shadow (he is an academic and an historian), she is empowered in her own space, creating her own works of art--so empowered that she decides to attend a crafts convention and ends up having an affair.

I wonder how many of us--male or female--truly have our own space in which to write. Despite being an adult and having moved out of my parents' creatively oppressive home years ago, I still struggle with finding the right space in which to write. I have a bedroom, but I share it with someone else and can't stay up writing into the wee hours of the night. I have an office, but it is full of school supplies, binders, and pedagogical books. I have a living room, but it faces onto the street and we don't have sufficient window coverings to offer an privacy. Then there is the family room, which is typically where Lars and the dog hang out watching sports and scratching themselves (respectively, of course).

My summer project--after three wedding showers, two bachelorette parties (one to the Caribbean), three friends' weddings, a friend's surprise 30th birthday, a two-week trip to Germany for Lars' Oma's 90th birthday, and planning for next year's IB course--is to create a suitable room of my own.

Art - Lapham’s Quarterly

http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15767439

http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15767439

Students

Oh, students. I'm not sure if any of you read this, and if you do diligently read your teacher's blog, then these comments likely do not concern you to begin with.

I'm sure many student archetypes remain unchanged since I was in high school just a decade ago. There are the cliched try-hards, the uber-athletes, the misunderstood "mean girls", etc. But you're all so much more interesting and complex than that. However, I have noticed that many of your generation have embraced this Seth Roganesque persona of the intellectual slacker--but not like I knew this stereotype, as the dopey, grungy, rock'n'roller with unwashed hair who was born two decades too late--a new brand of the proverbial lost soul, a precocious cynic trapped in the body (and branded American Eagle jeans) of a North American teenager who has all of the cerebral tools, charisma, and hygiene to render such antiestablishment attitudes redundant.

We teachers keep lamenting the loss of due dates; we worry that none of you will be prepared for post-secondary--whether that means receiving a zero on that late paper in university bio, getting fired from your retail job for three consecutive lates, or even failing to catch your flight from Paris to Berlin on time as you trek across Europe. You've heard this countless times, no doubt, but it is a cause for concern when returning students tell us that we failed them. And I feel ashamed when I realize how many students I am failing right now--both in terms of poor grades, and in terms of poor fundamental life skills.

Keep writing on your blogs and I will keep reading them. Keep submitting work. Or start. Either way, try to compromise your anti-establishment side with the inevitable conformist that, to a certain extent, we all become. Actually submitting your writing to me doesn't make you any less talented. I promise.

Sick

So I am home sick from work today--albeit after a beautiful excursion to Italy on a school trip. I actually first got sick on the trip, likely due to the combination of exhaustion, exposure to exotic Italian cold and flu viruses, and, of course, sharing boring old Canadian germs with 42 other people on a poorly ventilated bus. I thought I was getting better, until I came home with a wicked headache and the inability to breathe--in or out--by Wednesday afternoon. The spastic, phlegmy coughing has also intensified since then and here I am, a real treat to be around. A friend called last night and insisted she let me go since she couldn't stand to hear "my gross voice and hacking" anymore. Even the dog won't sit with me.

I used to love getting sick as a kid. I don't know why. Maybe, subconsciously, I still do. Feeling helpless isn't exactly appealing, but for some reason the lack of choices (and responsibility) certainly is. A typical work day is comprised of hundreds of decisions, from the trivial to the profound. An afternoon at home on the couch? Very few options. What to wear? Sweatpants, obviously. What to eat? Soda crackers, of course. What to do? Other than nap, you mean? I guess there is always HBO on Demand or, at worst, HGTV. There is really nothing to decide, and that is liberating.

When I was little I was sick all the time. I have always been an obsessive-compulsive germaphobe, only then I didn't know there was a label for it. I was actually sick so often that I developed projects to be completed on sick days. I figured that if I was home sick, I might as well do something. For some reason, I was inspired to map and remap the City of Hamilton. I used several sheets of bristol board and began with my own neighbourhood, as if the city revolved around me and my family. I would use city maps when I got too far from the epicentre, and then would proceed to replan the city from the perspective of an eight-year-old. I must have used 6 to 8 sheets of bristol board, because the final map was far too big to be unfurled in my bedroom, and instead had to be opened in the basement.

I would also sketch floor plans for my own and my friends' and family's future homes. I had an entire sketchbook full of blueprints. Then I would use the Sears catalogue to shop for and record the items with which I would fill my future house. I actually made spreadsheets to record and organize items according to room allocation and usage. None of this makes any sense to me now.

What does make sense is that I forced my younger brother to play both school and library, two "games" he hated. I wrote grammar lessons on our blue Smurfs chalkboard and even made small envelopes and cue cards to attach to the back pages of all of our books so that my brother could check them out. My mom supported these dreams by buying me a date stamp and a red ink pad, a gift for which I was eternally grateful. But I couldn't play these games while I was sick. No. Sick time was solitude time. Just me, my sketch book, and my bristol board maps.