But Call Me Betsy

Luke starts sixth grade in one week. Maybe it's different for boys, and easier somehow because they don't mature as quickly as girls, but I found almost all of middle school to be hellish. I was too young to do anything on my own like go to the Quick Mart, and too old to play with stuffed animals and dolls. Plus, I was losing that ability to forget myself in games I made up. Or maybe that happened in seventh grade. I do remember this distinct feeling of loss--losing the ability to be able to make up pretend stories, like when kids play house or imagine they are super heroes. When you're little and making stuff up, there's a part of you that believes it's real--you really are Wonder Woman or Batgirl or slaying dragons or running away from monsters--it's possible to forget that you're a human girl and imagine that you are more than that and the world has mystical things like dragons and if you concentrate hard enough, you might be able to fly or time travel....

The show always starts with this benign preview nonsense. We pick up right after the final rose ceremony where everyone is oh-ing and ah-ing over the fact that Michelle got a 100th chance for love on this journey. She literally went from going home empty handed to staying there with huge lines of black mascara running down her Barbie face. AshLee astutely observes that there is one less guy than usual, forgetting again that they always add extra people. First date card goes to Robert. He better ask out the one-arm lady. He does, mainly because they want to show her jumping into the water with just the one arm. Michelle goes from thrilled to absolutely pissed and crying more in the bathroom. Graham knocks on the door to comfort her. Highs and lows! Dude, he didn't pick you in the final rose ceremony, he's not going to then ask you out on a date, AND let us not forget that you shouldn't want to go on a date with a guy who has just expressed disinterest in you. She's g...

It's not written in second person, not really--what I mean to say is that the first person narrator spends most of the novel in direct address to a man who is stalking her. With sentences like, "You were waiting for me at the bus stop. Seeing you made my stomach turn over, like a fish was dying in it. You smiled, your perfect teeth reminding me of a wolf from a fairy tale story that ended badly." I made those passages up, but you get the gist. I only read about fifty pages before giving up.  Look, I know it's fiction and we should maintain our willing suspension of disbelief, but I was annoyed that the woman didn't consider going to the police to report her stalker until well into the harassment. And when she did, the police were like, Has he hurt you? Threatened you? No. Then there's nothing we can do. That may be true, I don't know. But it's still annoying to read a book where the suspense created isn't because of an interesting story with comp...

I don't know what all this chatter is about. Has the show started or is this all a preview? Or is it a recap? Or a preview of the recap? Elise says, "Through the storm, comes a rainbow. And I want Chris to be my rainbow." There must be a dirty joke there somewhere. A semi-black girl named Danielle joins the group, just to throw in a little excitement and so they can make a gesture toward diversity. Her date card says, "Choose a man of your choice to go on a date." I guess that's written by the same person who came up with the rainbow line. "Pick a person who is picking a people's very first choice." Danielle chooses Marquel. It appears that nerd glasses are in. Meanwhile, this other girl is upset, but you can't really tell because she's wearing a distracting Cleopatra head dress and a watermelon-sized turquoise ring. Lacy is so beautiful that she's hard to look at. It's like she's this super cute puppy that you jus...

Just finished reading Tana French's The Likeness , the second literary detective novel featuring Cassie Maddox, a weary detective in Dublin. The first was In the Woods --I have no recollection of the plot, as I read it a few years back and the details have since fled my brain. Something about some missing kids, and she and her partner Rob end up finding one of them, but there's a bleak ending. Most of this I recall because it's referenced in the second novel. In any case, this plot centers around a girl who is found stabbed to death near an old mansion outside of the city. The twist is that she's a doppleganger for Cassie, and she happens to be using Cassie's old undercover identity. It sounds a bit on the soap opera side, you know, like when an evil twin suddenly surfaces and wrecks havoc on things, but it doesn't read that way. Cassie, who has transferred out of the undercover life and into the numbing hell of domestic violence, is persuaded to go back ...

When I lived in Chicago, my friend Becky Wittenstrom (who I worked with at Northwestern), suggested out of the blue one day that we take a trip to Italy. I'd only ever been to Germany, and had never taken a trip with a friend, but she was a go-getter and found us tickets for a long weekend to fly to Rome and then take a train to Florence. Or maybe it was the other way around. She was an excellent travel companion, organized without being too bossy, un-fussy, and interested in both seeing the important sites (the Uffizi, the Colosseum) and walking the streets to just see what was happening. Here is a picture that represents one of the happiest moments in my life, because all of my favorite things converged at one time--a shop dog named Crisso (I wrote his name on the back of the photo), a gelato, and an adventure in a foreign land with a good companion.

Robin Williams killed himself yesterday and I'm not going to offer some supposedly meaningful quote from a movie script he didn't write anyway, or say that we just don't yet understand it but God does, or like, post a comment to his now-dead self on his Instagram account. He will not be reading Instagram any longer, not from heaven or hell or somewhere in between. This manic, too smart person who struggled with addiction and had three kids and two ex-wives and didn't slide away into oblivion like whomever Mindy was from Mork and Mindy--- he still couldn't find a reason to live. Like, he built a film career which is rare for people starting out in sitcoms and he was supposedly doing what he loved and that wasn't enough. And maybe it wasn't what he wanted it to be or maybe he hated Sarah Michelle Gellar and thought that sit-com was crap (it was crap, really, not funny, not offbeat enough), and we all die anyway so what the hell. Except then I started thinki...

When we last left our heroes and heroines, some people were making out and others were upset because they were not being made out with and then even others were leaving the show for unexplained reasons, which may or may not have had to do with making out. I just learned that someone's job is "cast handler." What a job. How much handling does a person need? Is this person a licensed cast handler or a free lance cast handler? And who would you ever assign to Puck ('member him?). The first thing we learn is that Michelle, who I don't recall at all, was interested in one of the microphone guys. He came to her room, she almost got caught with him, and ended up jumping off the balcony to avoid getting caught and broke both his legs. His name in real life? Ryan Putz. Chris B. has been invited to the show and allowed to pick whichever hot babe he wants. I don't like the looks of Chris B. Or any of these guys, really, except for Marcel. All of the other dudes a...

I will admit that I have personal space issues, particularly with strangers. I would never keep my sanity in a place that allowed for a person to be one centimeter away from me in line, so close that I could feel her breath on my neck. I don't like to be packed in an elevator or too close to someone on an escalator or having my forearms touching with another passenger on an airplane armrest. I'm funny that way, even with people who I love dearly--I need a little breathing room. Like in Dirty Dancing when Jennifer Grey's character says, "This is my dance space. this is your dance space..." I need a lot of dance space, even if I like you. So then when a tweaky-seeming guy asked me to move my bag on the Trenton regional rail yesterday, I sighed and didn't say anything, but moved it and reorganized myself so we could have some space between us. Then he did that thing some guys do, where he sat with his legs widely apart, as if suffering from elephantiasis of t...

Watching Judge Judy is not educational in any sense that you're walking away with more legal knowledge. What it does do is to reinforce the concept that many, many people in the world are not very educated. The stakes of the cases are low--no one is coming into the courtroom to settle a domestic violence case or to get custody of children. They revolve around three main topics: damage to a car, rental property disputes, and troublesome animals. Often, the two plaintiffs are former friends or ex-partners or tangential family members like mother-in-laws. On the whole, they are often arrive to court unprepared, like they forget the promissory notes or the photos of the smashed in headlight, or the pit bull's papers, imagining that they can just tell their side and the judge will believe them. I wonder if anyone has ever done a socio-economic study on the participants, because many seem to fall on the lower scale and others are in some way gaming the system (seemingly able bodie...

Some images from our weekend foray to the Sussex County Fair with Luke and Juliet.

I have a sense that we will be seeing a lot of linen in this season. Linen and flip flops and chest hair. So far, we have been re-introduced to Clare (villian from Juan Pablo season), Marcus and Marquel from Andi's season and Sara, also from Juan Pablo and also with the one arm missing. It's hard not to be distracted by it, which shows how much we don't see that many differently abled people in TV land. Here comes a very curvy woman named Lacy and all the guys love her because she's big-breasted. None of the men look familiar to me. Clare hopes that the guys aren't douche-y. Cue the entrance of the biggest jerk of all--Ben (don't recall him at all). Will anyone drown? I think I like Clare the best and I don't care if she's a phony. More  blondes and scruffy faces added to the mix. Not one girl with any ethnicity to speak of--and one black guy. The women look very similar--mostly blondes and the guys are not nearly as hot. Chris explains the rules--only...

We started talking at work the other day about this idea of man asking the father if he can marry the daughter, and two of my very best friends at work think it's fine because it's adhering to a tradition and respecting the dad. I think it's not fine because it's perpetuating this idea that the woman is part of a transactional process and a passive participant in the decision. I know that's not the case---it's a social formality, but it's still based on what used to involve a trading process--a bargaining to see what kind of deal you can strike with the dowry---"listen, I will take this dead weight daughter off your hands, but you've got to give me 25 donkeys to do it." There are other previously strongly held traditions that seem laughably outdated now (showing the bloodstained sheet after marriage, requiring the bride to promise to "honor and obey" her husband, wearing corsets, not being allowed to vote...). But more than anyth...