Another One Bites the Dust

He's dead, and there's still a lot of confusion. After all these years, nobody can agree on how to spell his name.

Qaddafi, Gadhafi, Gaddafi, Kadafi. How can we possibly know the truth about how he died when nobody can figure out what his name is. No matter. At least we can be sure the murderous megalomaniac died certain that whatever he had done in his life was justified. "Do you know right from wrong?" was his parting question. I, for one, can never get enough self righteousness.

The whole chase into a rat infested drain pipe was unseemly though, and it's difficult for someone like me (who finds it hard to step on a spider) to watch the up close and personal violence, no matter how well deserved. I wonder if I would have enjoyed the spectacle more if I had lost someone over Lockerbie, or anywhere else the monster's handiwork had been carried out. I wonder how far my humanity extends, whether I could ever reach the point where I could kill someone with my own hands. Or watch it with glee.

Frankly, the brutality scares me. Raised on a steady diet of oppression, violence, and pure evil, Qaddafi's (or however you spell it) blood thirsty killers are now poised to take his place. It makes the sniping at the Republican debates seem rather benign, to say the least. All of a sudden, just being vapid and rude and completely full of shit doesn't seem so bad. Not that I would ever actually vote Republican.

Who knows. Maybe nature will triumph over nurture, and the innate humanity that has kept our species at the top of the food chain will overcome baser instincts. But rage and hatred and gruesome violence are powerful habits, and habits -- particularly bad ones -- are hard to break.

Hop Hip

Somehow I let myself get talked into trying a hip hop class this Saturday. How somebody with two left feet will survive a hip hop class is beyond me, but in my old age I've lost a lot of inhibitions, so what the heck.

Years ago, I tried a step aerobics class. I was mortified, as I stared into the wall of mirrors in front of me, to see that as everybody else was traveling to the left, I was going right. Everybody else would step up, I'd step down. And so on. But forcing yourself to do things you suck at is good for the soul, I think, character building at the very least. And I like to think of myself as a character, so I'm not going to back down on the hip hop thing.

I do draw the line, however, at activities that are excessively humiliating or demoralizing. A friend recently gave me a book (a signed copy, no less) written by an attorney turned career counselor outlining how to land a great job in the legal field. The book targets people like me -- middle aged, woefully out of practice, pathologically insecure. I thought maybe it would offer up a magic formula, one that involves sitting alone in my sweats by the computer waiting for a fantastic job to fall in my crumb filled lap.

Unfortunately, that chapter seems to have been edited out. The book was all about positive mental attitude (shit) and persistence (oy, I was exhausted just reading it). Hip hop is within the realm of possibility. Pounding the pavement and looking confident while I turn blue in a suit that fit a lot better before I took to spending evenings on the couch with Ben and Jerry is not. I have my limits; like I said, I know where to draw the line.

On Saturday, I may "hip" while everyone else "hops," but I'll just laugh it off. My soul will thank me.

Heavenly Father

For as long as I knew him, my father thought his birthday was October 20th, and that's when we celebrated. After he died, we discovered a discrepancy on his birth certificate, which listed his arrival date as the 19th.

One way or another, my dad would have turned ninety-two this week. Even though pancreatic cancer had made him look old in the final months of his life, I still remember him as a youthful looking seventy-six, the strong and vibrant rock in my life. I can still hear his reassuring deep voice, the voice that retained its resonance until the end. I wonder what he would have been like had he made it to ninety-two.

He was the one who always told me I could do anything if I set my mind to it. I always believed it when he said it; I play it back in my head often these days as I face the terrifying thought of reinventing myself for the next chapter of my life. "Don't take the path of least resistance," he would caution. Oh, but the path of least resistance can be so soothing, daddy. My daily dose of comfort food. Where the heck is he when I need a loving kick in the ass?

After I graduated from college (by the skin of my teeth, I might add), I took a year off to work before going to law school. It was a year I try to forget, a year marked by tremendous self-doubt and all encompassing eating disorders and an unbearably tempestuous relationship with my mom. My dad, never a fan of public transportation, would buck ridiculous traffic every evening after work, heading out of his way from his office in Queens into Manhattan to pick me up so I wouldn't have to endure the long subway ride to Brooklyn.

I've erased a lot of that year from my mind, but those car rides with my dad have stayed with me all this time. We talked about everything and about nothing. Mostly, he listened. Without judgment, without scorn, without any semblance of anger, he listened. I know now how powerless he must have felt, my rock, unable to fix whatever was wrong.

He may not have fixed anything, but he carried me through the worst of it. Sitting next to him each evening, I felt as if he was carrying me on his shoulders, protecting me from all the muck. Some days -- every day, really -- I miss those broad shoulders, would do anything for a ride.

Happy birthday daddy -- today, or tomorrow. I still hear your voice, still count on you to steer me home.

You've Got Mail

On average, ninety nine per cent of what I find in my mailbox goes straight into recycling. So many wasted trees.

The other day, as I was quickly sorting through the mess, I came upon a puzzling item. Not anything like the usual fare -- catalogs for stores I've never heard of, paper bills confirming my paperless online payment (wtf?), cards offering up the best landscaping or housecleaning or roofing services. It was a small bubble wrapped envelope, no stamp, my name scrawled hastily on the front, no return address.

I considered putting on a hazmat suit before opening it -- you can never be too careful these days. The envelope felt light, almost empty, and I couldn't help but think it would emit a thin cloud of white powder once opened. I shook it; nothing. I squeezed it; just bubbles. I held it up to the light; well that was pointless.

The mystery envelope still sits, unopened, on top of the pile of things I might get to one day. I've gotten to the point in my life where I just don't like surprises. Suspicious packages, emails from unfamiliar senders, unexpected knocks on the door. I ignore them all. Ninety nine per cent of the time, it's just junk.

Rain Check

At the last minute, my daughters and I made a unanimous executive decision to blow off the breast cancer walk. Not even the idea of an activity for our favorite charity could lure us out of the car and into the heavy rain for a three and a half mile soggy and cold trek.

Twenty minutes later, lying back in bed, still clad in layers of pink and my running shoes, I was feeling a little bit wimpy. Every day, women across the globe suffer the pain and emotional turmoil of breast cancer, and I couldn't handle a little precipitation. I certainly didn't deserve to be wearing the shirt with the image of a tough babe flashing her bulging bicep.

I beat myself up all day about it, particularly when the sun began to peek through and I realized the walk may have been quite bearable, at least halfway through. I rarely pass up an opportunity to beat myself up, and this seemed as good a reason as any. I did, however, hope my daughters were cutting themselves a bit of slack. Really, who in her right mind would want to walk at the crack of dawn in a deluge if she didn't really have to. I applauded their intelligence.

So much for working on self love and all that crap. Face it, sometimes you just need a little help from the outside. And, sometimes, when you most need it, it appears. In the middle of the night, I received a series of emails from a friend I had met this summer on my girls' weekend away, a fellow writer and yogi. Her insomnia had led her back to my blog (it was either that or laundry), and she was enjoying it, even feeling moved by some of the posts. Her compliments lifted my spirits, opened my eyes to the brighter side of things. And hearing about someone enjoying my writing because of insomnia certainly beats hearing that it's just a time killer for someone on the toilet. When I start looking at the bright side, there's no stopping me.

I had considered giving away the shirt with the tough broad on it, to someone more worthy. But I'm over that. Sure, into each life a little rain must fall, but that doesn't mean you have to walk three and a half miles in it.

Who's Your Daddy

At least three people had told me that day alone the name of the site I should go to to select my domain name for my fledgling writing business. Still unclear about the meaning of "domain name," I managed to remember the name of the site. Or so I thought.

As it turns out, "Go Daddy" and "Big Daddy," though they both refer to the same relative, are about as unrelated to each other as a dog is to a fish. At first I thought it was just an advertising ploy, a way of showing domain seekers how to craft an eye catching web page. Yipes. Eye catching, mouth opening, gasp emitting -- if these were the tricks of my new trade, I wasn't quite sure I could handle it. "Big Daddy" was, indeed, big, and, I suppose, theoretically, could have been about daddies, although there was not a womb in sight. Bigger than life size (at least in my life) penises were everywhere (and when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere). Grown men looking like nymphs, flaunting their gargantuan wares for all to see. Yipes indeed. My legs are still crossed.

Note to self: delete Internet history so when my daughter logs on she doesn't think I'm batting for a team that, no doubt, does not have any use for me. It took me longer than it should have to realize I had traveled to the wrong place -- or maybe I was just in a state of shock -- but I finally navigated my way back to the far more innocuous "Go Daddy" site. Phew. Despite all the foreign sounding phrases about domain names and SSL certificates and search engine visibility and web hosting, I felt comfortably at home after my surprise foray into gay porn.

So I followed the instructions and created my domain name and established an email (three, actually) to go with it and charged it all to my credit card and, lo and behold I am now an entrepreneur. Although, to tell you the truth, I immediately searched the Internet for my new domain name and couldn't find it. For all I know, I'm advertising on "Big Daddy," with a big penis as my logo.

One day soon, I hope, I will become the master of my domain.

Status Quo

My mom called yesterday to remind me her phone is working. Over fifty years as a Jewish mother, and that's the best she could come up with to make me feel like shit?

I admit, I've been a bit remiss about staying in touch. I didn't even realize her email was down (which is why, allegedly, she called to remind me about the phone). I know she's worried, I'm a mom, I get it. But I have nothing good to report -- nothing she'd be interest in hearing about anyway -- and it's just not my habit to call people to say "hey."

Shame on me. I should know better. I am well acquainted with the cheap little thrill that goes along with a quick text or call from one of my kids, even if it's only just to say "hey." (That is, after I get over the initial panic, assuming as I always do that something must be wrong.) Kind of ironic, since I never contact my own mom when something is wrong. Which is why, these days, communication -- on my end -- leaves a lot to be desired.

It's not that anything in particular is wrong. It's just that things have not yet become right. I remain in limbo, at the mercy of folks who are simply not as motivated to be done with my divorce as I am. In fairness (to me), I am an equal opportunity uncommunicative bitch; I avoid lots of conversations, since most folks I know will ask me what the status of my divorce is, and, frankly, I don't feel like discussing it.

My daughter explained to me, this morning, that everyone in her life pretty much knows everything about everybody the moment it happens. The Facebook generation posts status reports as things happen -- break-ups, hook-ups, the eruption of a pesky new pimple, with up to the minute pictures to accompany all the breaking news. The inner circle, the outer circle, anybody who's ever heard your name -- and is therefore officially your "friend" -- knows what's going on in your personal life at any given time. A good thing? I don't know, but at least it saves everyone a few phone calls to the people who really matter.

I will try very hard to remember to call my mom today. I will suggest to her that she join Facebook and check my status for any changes. Or maybe check for a new profile picture; if my thumb is up, she'll know things are good.