It's a Festivius Miracle!

As bad luck would have it, my darling Hapa Boy had to travel the week before Christmas, when outside the house, not a creature was stirring except oh, an unexpected Seattle blizzard dropping twelve inches of snow over our sleeping heads.

Are you getting this? A blizzard. In Seattle. It doesn't snow here. It snows in Santa Fe, which is, as a matter of fact, one of the reasons I moved away. Yes, it's all white and fluffy and Santa's Coming and reindeer and jingle-jingle until there's a pound of the stuff on your windshield every morning and tracking in the house, and making you slip slide out of every side street. Dear Readers, I do not like snow. I do not like shoveling it. I do not like removing the tiny snow balls that embed themselves in my dog's paws. I do not like the icy pathways. I do not like not wearing my suede boots from November through March. I have never and will never ski or snowboard, as it combines the two things I am most afraid of - height and speed - into one terrifying package. I don't get snowboarding. You go up, you go down. In between, you're cold and wet and scared. It's all fun and games until someone gets decapitated.

But I digress.

Here, a major storm, in Los Angeles and then San Francisco, my darling Hapa Boy. It would seem that the Seattle-Tacoma Airport did not have much in the way of cleared runways or de-icing equipment. Shocker, huh? You wouldn't believe the irritated population of Seattle, complaining that Seattle was not prepared for a snow storm. We're also not prepared for serpents to fall from the sky. Both are equally likely, people.

Overbooked flights were delayed and delayed and then canceled. (It would have been much worse to have been stranded at Sea-tac. Trust me on this one.) His Sunday arrival looked like it would be Boxer Day (also, his birthday.) More snow was coming. And Christmas! (I know, I know. I'm Jewish. Shut up. ;)

But I am nothing if not determined. I am dogged by nature, unless it is about digging out my car from a foot of snow, in which case I am content to give up. Moments before Hapa Boy was trying to decide whether to bunk down in San Francisco or the Oakland La Quinta Motel, I decided to re-check the flights on Orbitz/Expedia/Zippydodo if anything had opened up. And lo and behold, a space on a 9:30pm flight out of San Francisco. Yay!

So I should have my Hapa Boy back tonight, making the cold a little warmer. The moral of this story is never let your boyfriend out of your sight.

Wait, that's not the moral.

The moral of this story is all's well that ends well. Except when it costs you an extra $500 and a mad dash from airport to airport and another mad dash down the LA freeways on the Sunday before Christmas and a lot of assorted aggravation and bad food and whining from your girlfriend capped by an icy I-5 drive home at midnight.

Still, it's not every guy that would do the above to come home as quickly as possible - because he missed me. I feel pretty lucky, all in all.

Happy Holidays and God bless everyone. No exceptions. *

UPDATE: Hapa Boy has landed in Seattle. We will skip the Airing of Grievances, and progress to Feats of Strength - including trudging through the sludgy snow.

*Not even Alaska Airlines.

Let's Get Her Barefoot and See If She Likes it Then.

Click here to see the book cover "What to Do When Your Daughter Hates Being in the Kitchen."

Yes, "this is a great little e-book for parents that need fresh ideas to help their daughter realize the impact of serving others with our time and skills from the kitchen."

There are those that believe the impact of my serving others with my skills in the kitchen is equal to that of a comet hitting Manhattan. But don't you love the look on that girl's face? I'm totally ordering this. Come on, what a great stocking stuffer for the rebellious female adolescent on your gift list. (And who doesn't know one of those?) This will learn her.

Now I personally think buying this ebook is too easy. What you should do with a daughter like that is put that traitor to her gender in the stocks for a few hours, throw old tomatoes at her head, and let the preacher try to fire and brimstone her out of being a FEMALE not interested in COOKING. Yeah, then she'll go whip up some fudge like a good girl.

But that's me. ;)

I Hate My Hair (Salon)

I may be a girly-girl, but I have always hated being fussed at. I hate massage, manicures, pedicures over twenty minutes and featuring older issues of People magazine. I hate facials, shopping at big department stores with obsequious sales people, and haircuts. I can't get my head around anything beyond a morning shower and a little strategic lip gloss. I mean, consider the inexplicable appeal of the brazilian wax. Wait - you're asking me to pour molten lava over my most tender areas so that I can be the girl of Humbert Humbert's dreams? And I have to pay for that experience? Oh hay-ell no.

But because I've been cursed with hair that is both fine and thick, hair that looks best in layers, hair that I let grow long, even though every magazine has urged me to cut it off, hair that refuses to do anything I ask it to do, well, every few months I have to get myself to someone who can wiggle the old Scissorhands over me.

I hate that.

First of all, I don't like the salon experience. It makes me feel like I'm desperately fiddling while Rome is burning. People are losing their jobs and the polar bears are eating each other, so the angle of a razor cut seems a little less earth-shaking. I mean, my hair isn't that interesting to me, so don't pretend like you're all up in my grill about it too. You know, this kind of thing:

What are we going to do with your hair today?
Well, I imagine you'll cut it. Right?
Have you thought about going any shorter?
I'm 5'3" - there really isn't that much shorter to go...oh my hair. Let's just say the last time someone whacked it to my neck, I cried for three days and considered joining the Peace Corps - Congo region.
A bob would really draw attention to your face.
I don't want to draw attention to my face! I want to hide my face!
Let's cut it to here and see what you think.
Please put down the scissors and back away from the hair. That's right....nice and slow. Put your hands where I can see them.

Here in Seattle, there are at least many many tattooed and pierced young men and women who cut and clip and trim. Every salon seems equally outfitted with blue-streaked cutters and small Asian girls who wash your hair so carefully, it seems to be happening strand by strand. You wait amidst all the overpriced shampoos for your turn in the Chair of Transformation. It is a long wait at times. I don't like this, because I also hate woman's magazines. I hate walking around with wet hair in a stupid looking plastic bib. These bibs are always eggplant-colored. I don't know why that is.

I hold out as long as I can, but then I fall to the seductive siren call of the Expensive Haircut. Here's how it ended up a couple of days ago, cut by Erika at Vain (I know, right?)



Fluffy: check.
Wavy: check.
No maintenance: check.
No blowdrying required: check.
Long suffering expression on my face: check.
Ungodly amount of money paid: check.

Here are some other things I hate about my super-pricey cut:

I hate spending so much money.
I hate going to a place called Vain.
I hate noting that I have the same haircut my sister had in 1978, for which she paid $12 at SuperCuts.
I hate the way the cashier at Vain, after giving him the equivalent of the down payment on my first car, asks me "how much I'd like to tip Erika today." At this rate, my house sale is going to go directly to my head.

Yes, I keep thinking I will not go back, I will find something less annoying and expensive, and then I remember how truly bad my hair is capable of looking, and I cave.

Hair junkies are sad people, dear readers. We need your compassion, not your judgment.

Speaking of dear readers - I'm sure you're wondering if I always take such terrible pictures. I'm sure you're thinking, "why was I so hard on her when the issue is not her relationship with God - it is clearly her inability to take a decent photo. I mean, she can't always look so...so...you know." But yes. Yes I do. The moment a camera hits me, I shut my eyes, squint, or start to look like someone with a cardboard sign by the end of freeway. Compare me, if you will, to my cluelessly handsome Hapa Boy (a man with no idea how good-looking he is, you understand), who sat in front of my Mac and took this on the first try - in an attempt to look like a mug shot. Are you getting this? Here he is trying to look as pathetic as I look without trying, at his worst:



I know. I know. You see the issue.
Clearly, we must never be photographed together.

Or I best give more thought to upkeep.

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

In February, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique will have been published 45 years ago. I'm pretty sure that if you ask most women on the street what The Feminine Mystique is about, she'll probably guess it's about picking out sexy underwear for your boyfriend. It isn't. Here's the introduction:

Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire--no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. (You can read the entire excerpt- if you're interested- here. )

Yes, feminism started as a way to approach the "problem with no name," the fact that women were not only unhappy, they felt invisible in their homes. They felt becoming a doctor was less "feminine" than choosing to be a nurse, and math was something boys needed to do. They went off to college for an M.R.S, and hoped for a nice husband to support the 2.5 offspring when they went to live in a big house where the grass was so much better really for the children. It was monumental and revolutionary when Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem pointed out that maybe women could have other choices. If you know, they wanted them.

It started from such a benign place I'm puzzled exactly when it became a dirty word. Back when I was teaching in Arkansas, I never had a female student make a single comment about their lives without looking around nervously and mumbling, "I'm not a feminist or anything but..."

I mean, there they were, in their little skirts, drinking their Big Gulps of Diet Coke, beaming with artfully rendered makeup and tiny diamond earrings and long blonde locks wrapped around their freshly tanned fingers, earnestly declaring that Lawd, the last thing they would ever ever ever ever ever want to be as a card-carrying University of Arkansas co-ed is a feminist. What if that got out around the campus? I know, that would just be like you know so uncool! OMG! But let me ask you now: Why? What horrible thing did Betty Friedan do by suggesting that maybe maybe some women wanted to do something else? Be a physicist? Become Sally Ride? Run for office? That maybe biology wasn't destiny?

To my memory, there were no police raids at that time forcing women into taking jobs outside the home. No one dragged anyone kicking and screaming from the washer-dryer. No one said, for heaven's sakes, give those pesky children of yours up for adoption and be a realtor! Hey, there's no doubt there's been a huge backlash from 60's style feminism, but it wasn't from what the feminists were asking for. They were just asking for more choices. It was from a kind of media hysteria which happily proclaimed that well, if you're more powerful than men, no man will want you! You'll be alone! But that wasn't true. Most of my friends married very nice men who liked that they were strong and interesting and diverse. So why, as Susan Faludi once wrote, is "fear and loathing of feminism is a sort of perpetual viral condition in our culture?" Check out this newly minted thought from Generation Cedar:

One of the feminist lies is that a woman can only be truly free in a career outside her home.

Wait - what? Who said a woman can only be free that way? Betty Friedan didn't. Gloria Steinem didn't. I know I didn't. Why is this crusading judgement suddenly ascribed to feminists, who I'm sure appear in their nightmares with dirty hair and unshaved armpits? At what point did anyone tell anyone this?

As far as I can tell, some of my friends with young children stopped working for awhile to be home with them. They didn't hire a baby nurse and go back to the office on the Tuesday after labor. They like being moms. And the ones that did get back to the office after awhile because they take pride in what they do in the world seem to be raising very nice little beasties. I mean, having a mom that has priorities in addition to mothering isn't a death sentence - say what you will, but clearly Hilary Clinton was a terrific mother. She and Chelsea are very close, and unlike *cough* certain presidential *cough Bush* children, she has yet to have one embarassing drinking binge in public.

Nothing is perfect, and we haven't worked out all the kinks - but do we really want to throw the baby out with the bathwater after all that? Look, I shave my legs. I even wear mascara when I remember to which isn't terribly often, but still. I like to buy clothes. I've read the entire Jane Austen. Three times. I'm kind of a girly-girl, in fact. Ask anyone. The fact that I want to hold on to the idea that I can choose a thousand different ways to live from finishing a book to finding a great job to trying to make Hapa Boy a happy camper and that I equally admire the job that Michelle Obama and Hilary Clinton have done with their families as much as I admire their fire and intelligence and place in the working world doesn't make me someone who argues with anyone else's choice to stay home and raise children or learn to bake or make fancy dinners.

It just makes me a feminist. That's all.

The Heart of the Matter

So recently I've had some visitors of the, shall we say, fundamentalist Christian mindset. Most have been extremely nice and engaging, and I kind of welcome their different sensibility. As I've said, sometimes Liberals can be a might heavy-handed. However, some of you might wonder - why exactly is a nice Jewish girl getting traffic from Christians? Well. This is mainly because I've felt compelled - at times foolishly - to comment on a very Hyper Christian blog. (Say what you will, the woman gets a lot of hits. )

Here a homeschooling mother of seven lets forth on such riveting subjects as why public schools are like the Nazi regime for Christian children, how birth control is against God's plan, why homosexuals are sinners and how homosexuality should be illegal and - thereisnosuchthingasevolutionhowdareyoumentionityounastyliberal. She is a firm proponent of something called Biblical Womanhood. Here's a little tutorial:



Should women submit to men? Apparently, they should (I want to point out that the very smart and devout Terry @ Breathing Grace explains that most Christians believe that women should submit to their husbands, and not to ALL men. Fair enough. Not having a husband, this hasn't come up exactly. Thank G-D):



Yes Kelly over at Generation Cedar just f'loves this guy's preaching. Oh, and don't send your children to public schools! They are a breeding ground for Marxism:



I know, right?

But I think in general I've been a little unfair. You don't get overnight to the point where you tell a stranger that homosexuals should spend their lives celibate and safe from sin. That's a long indoctrination. I wasn't raised by Fundamentalist Christians - I wasn't raised by Christians at all. And curiously, all my years of Hebrew School didn't have much to do with, well, God's Wrath. Let's face it, fear of Brimstone is not the primary motivator in my life, because as I've pointed out, I was more afraid of my mother - and she was a lot scarier than Brimstone. In fact, I'm sure the Archangels are asking her right now how she inspired so much respect from us.

But I digress.

Remember that famous passage where Anne Frank - living in an attic and soon to die in a Concentration Camp - said that she still believes people are basically good? I've always thought that if she can think it, I can think it. And so I do believe people are basically good. With a few bad apples, of course. I believe that being nice to each other is kind of what every religion is getting at. I believe that faith is a personal matter, and you have to find your own way. I believe that everyone is in charge of their own destiny because if there is a Deity up there, She's kind of busy, you know? I believe in forgiveness, although I often fail to be forgiving.

Mostly I believe if we let go for even a moment of why everyone should have the same rights to love, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we will lose those rights.

What can I say? I was raised by Heathen Liberals. :)