Monday, October 31, 2011

Mean

College football is part of my life.  I attended a rocking-good SEC school and married a fan of football.  It was not novel to go to a game this weekend.  The new part was my kids.  Three young people that I love perched in the stands, faces painted with team insignia, sweatshirts proffering school support, noses pink from the cold air, pompoms clutched in fists, eyes wide to flashing lights and throngs of people.  All was well until a pair of unruly fans took seats to our left.   They brought a rude,  crude-mouthed element to the game as they chose to berate folks rooting for the opposition scattered among us home-team supporters.  Those two fans were mean.

The adjective mean is defined at dictionary.com as follows.
                1.  offensive, selfish, or unaccommodating; nasty; malicious
                2.  small-minded or ignoble
                3.  penurious, stingy, or miserly
                4.  inferior in grade, quality, or character
                5.  low in status, rank or dignity

Mean was already on my mind because I attended an education conference only the day before where we heard a heartrending presentation from a woman who had been bullied in school.  My mind was flooded with emotions during her moving talk.  I also had questions.  “How did those children who abused her at school get so mean?  What could possibly make them act so nasty and malicious?  I could scarcely believe any young humans could be capable of such constant harassment.  One might occasionally make a hurtful action in poor judgment but these kids were relentless and deliberate.
Nowhere in the definition is any indication of mean being synonymous with superior.  Quite the contrary, inferior is listed.  Yet supremacy is what appears to be in the minds of persons acting offensively.  How do people come to think that treating others poorly elevates them in power?  How does such lack of empathy exist?  I find it implausible that mean is something a person is born with. 
Is it because in many movies and television shows, often those aimed at kids, the mean girl or boy is rich, fabulous looking and popular?  Is it because magazines offer hateful things:  Whose big butt is this?  Who is getting a sordid divorce?  Who looks better in this dress?  Who flopped in an interview?  Is it because young people see adults acting heartlessly toward others?  Are we so base a culture we willingly create and consume mean over and over?  Are we promoting cruel teasing, extreme pranking, and embarrassing, berating, gossiping behavior as cool and fun - perhaps even a way to fit in with others?  If we step outside of ourselves to watch what we are doing would we be proud?  I think some mean behavior may be because people are moving without attention.
Fortunately the noise kept my youngest from learning new vocabulary in the stands and my older children recognized the small-mindedness and could process a blip in our family fun in a later conversation.  We concluded life is better when people are not mean. 

Monday, October 24, 2011

Jeans

The weather is getting beautifully colder and an attire change is required.  It feels a bit like getting new clothes when I pull out my fall/winter things.  This morning I’m revisiting and revising a piece of flash fiction I wrote some time ago that returned to my mind as I slid into some denim. 
Merriam-Webster online offered this definition of blue jeans:  pants usually made of blue denim.

        “Indigo blue workman’s pants.  How did they come to be wardrobe essentials worth so much money?” Angelica ruminated as she fingered and flicked away the price tag on a pair of jeans.  Yet she knew she might pay it – pay whatever the cost – to find just one pair of dungarees that fit.  Really, truly fit.  No cramming her stomach into submission to close a button.  No jumping and tugging to get the waistband past generous thighs.  Her body was not the primary problem, did not make her uncomfortable – the problem, the source of discomfort, is the pants.
        Selecting three dark blue possible contenders, Angelica weaved through gleaming stainless steel racks.  At the far end of the dressing room she shut the door of a closet like space near the all-seeing, multi-angled mirror.  Skirt shimmied to the floor, she guided one leg and then the other to descend into the denim – no jumping required.  As the buttons were a breeze, selection one held promise.  Oh.  Wait.  The gap.  The waistband above her butt was an open mouth sticking out a tongue of Victoria Secrets cotton briefs.  Angelica knew this would require extreme belting and the added bulk would only feel good while standing.  Pair one, rejected.  Removed.  Returned to the clamps of their hanger.
        Candidate number two shook to life.  A little hula wiggle got the jeans up smoothly but up and up they ascend.  High rise?  Angelica’s ribs and ankles cry for life as she realizes the waistband is only inches from her bra and the skinny cut decreed on the tag may be cutting off circulation.  No need to waste a gander in the mirror on this pair; they double as a corset and support hose.
        The last chance unfolds from the bench.  Stretching to their full length the slacks slide on like stiff cotton skin.  They don’t bind.  Angelica steps into the hall to confront the tall mirror.  Her investigation reveals a front that looks pretty good.  A turn to the side offers a satisfactory sight.  The rear view rotates into scrutiny.  Angelica is brought to wonder, “Do the pockets on these britches make my butt look big?”  The answer to the final question:  Yes.  The pockets are not flattering.  This marks the third pair as two-thirds tolerable.  Angelica twists and assesses.  “How high a price should a girl pay for just okay?” 
        She returns three rejected pairs of jeans to the rack outside the dressing room and strides in her old skirt from the store thinking of what blue may be in the next shop.   
 

Monday, October 17, 2011

Hunger

I have been experimenting with hunger.   I was not aware of it when the process became an organized approach over ten years ago.  Just after my first baby, I started reading about nutrition and diet.  I felt dismay after gaining a significant amount of weight.  I tried different ways of eating based on information I was gathering.  I threw in a little exercise.  Over the decade that followed I bounced around various states of weight, eating approaches and exercise.  This created a kind of hobby:  exploring eating – vegetarian, low-carbohydrate, gluten free, low-fat, reduced calorie, meal replacement, macrobiotic influenced, protein shakes, herbal supplements, dairy-free and combinations to feed my hunger.

Dictionary.com lists the following to define hunger as a noun.
                1.  a compelling need or desire for food
                2.  the painful sensation or state of weakness caused by the need for food
                3.  a shortage of food; famine
                4.  a strong or compelling desire or craving   

While my experimentation may have been a banana peel littered path along the edge of eating issues it taught me a lot.  I was searching from a place of hunger.  Through life’s course I found empty places in myself.  I decided food would fill them.   I read books, took cooking classes, digested research, bought an elliptical machine, discovered yoga.  I also sometimes stopped at the store exclusively to buy cupcakes that, if they made it home at all, I would hide in the freezer to avoid sharing them instead eating them in stealth secrecy when no one was home. 
Recently, I watched myself walking home thinking, “I am hungry.”  The thought did not go further.  Simply, I felt hunger.  No headache, no lightheadedness, no wonder about what it meant.  I was experiencing the pure, physical feeling of an empty stomach combined with the ultimate knowledge that I would be soon be home and could eat.  That moment felt like a revelation. 
The physical reality of hunger and the body’s need for food is real.  We cannot deny our physiology.  But we can separate it from our emotions.  We all know when we are empty – it makes hunger.  Deciding what to ingest is our work.  Much of consumption is not about food at all.  Hunger is physical and emotional and spiritual – fasting and feasting relate to our souls as well as our stomachs.  We know hunger can have as much to do with our sacred selves as our physiological need for food. 
Yoga may be the nourishment that allowed me to find the truth in my hunger.  What I have learned from living in my body and food research I have ingested on my mat:  humans thrive in balance.  From the science of nutrition I learned excess fat storage is an outward sign of my body’s internal imbalance.  Balance in the physical body is thrown off by extremes - over consumption (say of sugars) and under-consumption (perhaps of protein and green stuff).  Feeling hunger and feeding ourselves in balance is a daily challenge. 

Monday, October 10, 2011

Cool

I have no experience being cool.  I do not state this for pity or to be corrected in that socially mandated, southern way, “Oh sure you do, honey.”  A poll of my schoolmates would reveal I was not cool (if they answer truthfully and remember who I was).  I was not socially significant.  And, really, it’s okay.  I had the gift over my school years of some truly excellent friends and went largely unabused as nerds go.  I embrace my life in exactly its imperfect form.      
Merriam-webster.com offers the second entry listed under slang for cool as “fashionable, hip.”
I know now it doesn’t matter how the social hierarchy forms in school but I am reliving the learning process through my children.  My 5 year old daughter comes home from kindergarten knowing which girls have Sketchers sneakers and that they won’t play with her because she doesn’t want to chase the boys.  She wants to play something else but no other girls want to play anything else.  My son refuses to team up with the robust boy who insults his smaller classmate, a friend.  My middle schooler chooses not to sit with a group of classmates who gossip about someone she likes but this means she may have to sit by herself.  Refusing what they do not want to do, doing what they know is right, having their own voice is already putting my children on the outs of the crowd.  This I do have experience with – beginning to realize you may not be fashionable. 
I have a gathering of folks on the outs to be with and I love them.  In the fringe and the frazzle we embrace each other without much notion of cool.  But most of us survived times of painful expression and hit or miss relationship experimentation to get strong enough to orbit the center from a safe and generous distance.  Being academically motivated and/or politically outspoken and/or artfully expressive and/or different in fashion and/or uncoordinated and/or displaying dodge ball welts we figured out who we are.  Now I want to protect my kids from similar strife but perhaps there is no other way to gain the strength of one’s own voice but to practice it.
I remain as baffled today as when I was twelve about why anyone would cash in a fellow human for rank or intentionally be unkind to gain a laugh.  I have limited hip skills to pass to my children.  I can buy stylish shoes and skinny jeans.  I can be proud of their individuality.  I can offer hindsight that being cool seems like the only option for happiness but life actually goes beyond these formative years and levels out.  They will not believe me. 
Ultimately, we are who we are – cool or otherwise.  My kids’ analysis of the implications of social strata may be an endowment from me (nature or nurture?).  I can attest it does not lend itself to the prospect of being cool!

Monday, October 3, 2011

Gratitude

I have often a desire to call my parents and say, “Thanks.”  For what?  Whatever I am doing for my kids that they are not grateful for!  I was likely unappreciative in my youth and I want to make up for it.  Thanks for reading to me, getting me out of bed every school day, fulfilling requests for fashion fads, taking me to the doctor for immunizations, giving me pizza money, going to the store at 9:00pm for poster board I forgot to mention I needed the next day, making sure I had toilet paper, soap and shampoo, clean underwear and socks.  My gratitude is tardy.    
Gratitude is defined at by Collins English Dictionary, 2009 at dictionary.com as follows.
                1.  a feeling of thankfulness or appreciation.
A word history is also offered from Online Etymology Dictionary.  Gratitude is from Latin gratus related to Latin gratia which gave us the word “grace.”  So gratitude and grace are related.  Some synonyms of grace listed are “attractiveness, charm, comeliness” and antonyms are “ugliness, stiffness.”
We choose how we present ourselves in the world, on which side of grace from gratitude we wish to fall – attractiveness or ugliness.  Ultimately I suspect our ability to feel gratitude (or not) affects how we appear to ourselves and others – attractive or ugly. 
I can offer a wave when someone lets me into traffic.  I might tell the insolent bag boy who just crammed all my groceries into sacks, “Thanks,” even if he doesn’t make eye contact because without him I’d be negotiating the candy racks from an ineffective, non-strategic position while bagging my own food.   I might send my children’s teachers a note telling them I am grateful they offer their time to educate my child.  Tell my spouse I’m glad he comes home to the chaos every day.  Tell the cosmos I appreciate the inventor of air conditioning because August in South Carolina is really, really hot.  Tell the Universe I am glad the sun is shining.  Tell my daughter that I am thankful for her dedication to success in math.  Tell my son, “Thank you,” for helping his sister tie her shoes.  Thank my youngest for every hug.  Be specific.  Find something.  If I elect to, I can show my kids what gratitude looks like.
I came across a quote from Meister Eckhart recently that stuck with me, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
 
Gratus
Breathe a bountiful belly full of thanks.  Let your stomach
rise and fill, body bathe in breath of gratitude, every  cell
grows with grace, flows in sheer sea.  Notice gifts, each
being an offering, self and other together connected,
eternal sharing, receiving the divine existence
exhaled from the mouth of God, ours.
Aspiring thus we become living.