This little piece of social satire has me mesmerized:
Keep clicking.
I think that it may be one of the most insightful things about our cultural view of Hillary out there. (Particularly the nature of biases against her.)
And here’s the not quite as mesmerizing, but still sort of on-point Obama site:
Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
Last summer, I briefly heralded my family’s new found normality (after lo, these many years of my husband’s reign as a local independent impresario) in a post called “What we do on a Friday night these days.” It wasn’t a very exciting read, but posting it was sort of… illuminating.
To this day, handfuls to dozens of people still visit that post every week, and it’s not because they think my Cosmic playlist is brilliant. It’s because, come Friday, a number of people from all over the world apparently go to the search engine of their choice and type “things to do on a Friday night,” hoping the bots will show them the way to a good time. Somehow, they end up here instead, tripping the light fantastic through my domestic burbles.
If you are one of those souls meandering through cyberspace, looking for weekend inspiration, I actually can help you. It just so happens that despite of the fact that I am kind of a shut-in these days, I am still something of an expert about things that people can do on a Friday or Saturday night. Over the course of my career, the two jobs I actually had to go into an office to complete involved localizing a well-known national chain of websites and writing for a local alternative weekly – both publications were deeply involved in informing people about the myriad ways they might spend their free time.
I also waited until my mid-30s to become a parent, so that I could enjoy many years of going out on Friday and Saturday nights before giving them up to drool and intergalactic renditions of “The Farmer in the Dell.” I’ve seen enough that I’m not so worried about what I might be missing these days.
My unsolicited advice
For starters, if you are one of those people who lives in a mid-sized-to-major city and scrunches up their nose in confusion or non-recognition when I mention the name of a local free alternative weekly newspaper, you probably aren’t well-enough informed about what your city has to offer to viably complain that there isn’t anything to do. Start there – look for the free rags in the foyers of restaurants, coffee shops, libraries and bookstores, or search for “free weekly + (name of your town)” online. Hunt through their calendar listings and see what you’ve been missing, then consider going someplace you’ve never heard of. If the unknown scares you, pack hand sanitizer and low expectations.
Otherwise, here is my all-purpose, non-geographically specific list of suggestions about things you can do on a Friday or Saturday night.
Part One – Going Out
Gallery openings
I weep when I consider the uneaten cheese cubes cast into garbage cans when an artist loads up a snack table, hangs his or her work for all to see and no one comes.
Actually, in my town, I’ve found that it’s rare that no one comes, even if it’s just people questing for free cheese cubes. Whatever your motivation, it would behoove you to become one of those people. Don’t think that you have to know what you’re looking at. It’s better that you come with questions.
See live, original music in a smaller venue
I obviously have my biases when it comes to this one, but I would be remiss if I didn’t evangelize a little about live music. The fact is, if you love music, and haven’t ever seen it live, in an intimate venue, your relationship with it is effectively stuck at second base.
While it’s true that if you are anywhere between 35 and 65 years old, you can probably have a fairly intimate experience with some band that specializes in covering all the music you sang in the shower when you were twelve, that is not the same as seeing an original act. Connecting with a bunch of people through drunken nostalgia can be fun, but connecting with something new and stirring can actually be transcendent. (Don’t expect that at your first show, but believe me, it happens.) It also makes you smarter and better looking.
I haven’t gone to them as often, but all the same concepts may apply to theater, dance and other live performances.
Go to the drive-in or an independent movie theater
I’ve found the cost of mainstream Hollywood movies offensive in recent years, especially given their soggy quality. I don’t know if exorbitant numbers of writers, directors or film editors are snorting bleach these days, but an awful lot of big-budget films seem to be about 20 minutes longer than they should be. This makes entertaining movies mediocre and mediocre movies excruciating.
The fact that my city still has a drive-in has made many a burdensome movie almost bearable. (I’m talking to you, Titanic.) I can sit there and groan over the scenes that ought to be deleted and only annoy my husband. Because drive-ins now send audio through your car radio signal instead of on those old window speakers, you can still be moderately awed by the actions of magical creatures and things blowing up on the screen, and also have the steering wheel conveniently handy to bang your head against during inexplicable jumps in plot and/or dialog.
And yes, supporting independent films (or at least independent theaters) is healthy for you and me. Although I’ve been disappointed in several indie movies lately because they too often seem like shallow vanity projects for award-seeking stars, when they are good, they are really good. And worth seeing on the big screen.
Do guerrilla theater
Why are you hellbent on being entertained when you could be the one doing the entertaining? You don’t have to have an agent or a cause. Join or look to these people for inspiration. (I’m especially fond of their freeze series. Another great one is Look Up More.) Going to public places in full costume when it’s nowhere near Halloween is also a good idea. Consider it an anthropological investigation.
My brother had a few of these inspired moments in his youth. Like the time he and a friend made up fake fliers in support of building a canal in the center of Broad Street here in Columbus. The kicker was the suggestion that our city’s replica of the Santa
Maria be floated down the middle of the canal as an innovative form of public transportation.
To be continued next week, with suggestions about what to do if you’re staying in.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
The snowy skies cooperated and cleared to crystal, so naturally, we spent much of evening admiring the lunar eclipse. We crunched down the icy street but soon found there was no better view than the one through the bare Black Locust branches from our back deck.
Dan’s cell phone rang over and over with friends calling to make sure that Declan wouldn’t miss the orange-red sight in the sky. Dec helped me stir hot chocolate on the stove while his dad hooted at and applauded the moon. I ladeled some of the warm mixture into Dec’s orange mug, and he sipped it as he stood on his stepstool, looking up at me. Then, in a moment that was both celestial and Beatles-esque, he said “this world is the one thing money can’t buy.”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
We spent part of our evening out at a citizen summit about the future of our city of Columbus. Ah, the things I would like it to be…
Meanwhile, earlier this month in Munich, “thought leaders” contemplated future cities in Munich-y ways. (Part 2.)
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
“So, how many pounds do you wanna lose?”
She snaps her gum . Her gaze seems to be darting everywhere in the room as she talks, landing on me about as long as a fly would.
“Well, uh, I don’t know, exactly. I want some of my pre-mommy clothes to fit, I want to feel better. But I don’t really want to watch the scale,” I tell her.
“We weigh you you and take your measurements every week until you reach your goal weight,” she says. “We will weigh and measure you today. How many pounds do you think you want to lose? Just guess.”
Gum snap. She fidgets with the paper she’s holding. Gum snap. She mouths something to a co-worker. Gum snap. Her eyes are everywhere in the room, except on mine.
“I don’t know, twenty? Maybe thirty?” I am looking at her, thinking, you didn’t hear me at all. “Whatever it takes for me to feel better, healthier.”
She looks beyond me again, and says something to the girl at the front desk.
“I’m going to have Gina give you a tour, then you can do fifteen to twenty minutes of cardio and then we’ll do your workout,” she says to me, still looking at the front desk.
The place is nice enough, and the girl who takes me through it is also nice enough. There is a lot of space dedicated to only women, which is also nice. I’m having a hard time figuring out why a place that seems to be taking the Curves approach to marketing has no child care available, and when I make a comment to that effect, it draws a blank stare.
The nice girl stashes me at the elliptical trainers, makes sure I punch the right button to start it and leaves me alone. I didn’t think to come equipped with water and the hotter I get as I step, step, step, the more tantalizing the coolers in the front become. I sweat my way through 18 or 19 minutes and stumble to the front where I buy a bottle a bit breathlessly.
“How much longer do you have on cardio?”Gum snap asks. I don’t understand the question.
“I…. I did 18 minutes or something,” I answer.
“Oh!” She says. “Oh, then let’s do your workout. Ready?”
When we reach the weight machines, she tells me what to do at chipmunk speed at each one, saying “do two sets of 15 for me” faster each time and ordering me to spray and wipe the thing down afterwards. I feel like I’m in a hurry, so I push through the sets quickly, and by the third machine, I begin to feel nauseous. It’s mid-afternoon, and I’ve had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, a salad for lunch – I begin to realize that there wasn’t enough protein in my day.
I sit on the floor and a couple of minutes later, after talking to several other people in the room, she realizes where I am.
“I didn’t see where you went, are you okay?”
I insist that I am, but that I’m nauseous, so she gets me some sample power bar to eat. I feel better, but three machines later I’m nauseous again, so I take a real break in the bathroom, wash my face and finally come back out for the last two machines.
Now my free day pass is complete and it’s time for me to be sold. I hate that gyms refuse to tell you anything about their cost without coming in, and this place at least has signs for $15 a month stuck in the ground every ten feet between my house and the freeway. I could have sworn they also said something about no membership fees, but she gives me three possible equations for membership, all involving paying several hundred dollars that day, with alleged incentives for better deals after I’ve joined for one year.
She might as well have been saying “you’re on a an orange train 763 miles away from town, traveling 64 miles per hour with a load of 754 clown shoes that retail for $3.79 a pair. Your membership cost will be the square root of the number of minutes it takes you to get to town, multiplied by the overall value of the clown shoes two years ago, which have since been reduced in price by 37 percent…”
By the time she spins all three membership packages, I’m completely confused about which one is the best deal, but I’m told that I’ll be giving up the one she says is best if I walk out the door without getting it today. Then she changes my deadline to closing time that night, but says she’s not allowed to give me the paper that explains the cost of a membership to help me think it over.
Because I’m too tired, demoralized by how sick the workout made me feel and confounded by the need to do 9th grade algebra to make a decision, I make the only one I feel comfortable with. I skip it. She asks me why and as I’m telling her that it’s more than I expected, that I think I should talk to my husband about it first, her eyes are back up on the front desk, the Biggest Loser sign dangling from the ceiling, the butt of a passing man.
I think I could have said, “I can’t buy a membership because I’m made of plutonium and oatmeal cookies. Please let me eat your barrettes. My tonsils are periwinkle. Neep norp, neep norp, neep norp,” and she still wouldn’t have heard a word.
Thankfully, she spared me the indignity of weighing and measuring me, probably accidentally, because I’m sure the results would have become part of her pitch. I didn’t need to subject my body image to a person who couldn’t stay with me through the end of a sentence.
The next gym experience, which I’ll write about later, wasn’t much more human, but at least it was also free (for now). Affordable gym with reasonable math run by compassionate humans, if you are out there, I will find you!
I’m submitting this post to the Group Writing Project at Mamablogga. Visit the link if you’d like to join. The subject for January is “Me time.”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
I went to bed chilled with a fever last night. I took a little Tylenol, drank a lot of juice (I don’t do cold medicine) and crawled under a heap of blankets.
Then I dreamed that I became a cosmic string. I extended from the earth. I saw Heath Ledger on the way. I heard Eric Idle singing The Galaxy Song. I grew longer than the solar system, the Milky Way, past Andromeda and other galaxies. I became the length of the entire universe.
And as all of this was happening, I was thoroughly convinced that I was getting very important information that I had to bring back to share with Earth’s astrophysicists. The things I saw were going to change the world. I can’t remember the last time I had a dream that vivid, or was so thoroughly hoodwinked that everything about it was real.
I certainly never dreamed on this scale before. Thank you again, my son, for making me aware of how much of the universe I had been missing.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2008.
The worse your child feels, the closer they want to be to you. The more you soothe them, the greater the likelihood that you’ll get sick too.
Check.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
He was the father of five children, husband to my grandmother for 61 years, a highly regarded surgeon, a farm boy, an inventor, a World War II veteran and the man with a well-developed sense of humor who taught me to rhyme as soon as I began to speak. Our earliest conversations went something like this:
“How!”
“Wow?”
“Cow…”
“Now.”
And so I called him Powdaddy. He would have been 96 today.
We lost him in 1999. My grandmother followed in 2004, almost exactly a year before I had Declan. It’s hard for me to fathom that my grandparents will not know my son, and that he will only know them through story. My grandfather would have loved my boy, loved his ravenous curiosity – a characteristic they definitely share.
On New Year’s Day, my mother and I (and a sleeping Declan) went out to the small town where Powdaddy was born, and chose to be buried. Mom wanted to put lay down a grave blanket, something her mother used to do at her mother’s grave every winter. While most people consider this simply as decorative, my mom and her mom took the meaning of “grave blanket” at its symbolic face, as a way to warm their place of rest.
Afterwards, we went to see if the house where my grandfather and his brother grew up — the house built by my great grandfather, who died in the 1940s — was still standing.
It was, although it may not be much longer.
The farmhouse is a few hundred feet from Buckeye Lake. From the shore down the road you can see a place that I learned used to be called “Zollinger Island.”
My great-grandfather sold it for $500 in order to pay for Powdaddy to go to Harvard medical school. His older brother insisted that it was the place to study medicine. Both men left their mark on the world of medicine, in different ways.
If you happen to have surgery just west of Downtown, it’s possible that you may have it in the room named for my grandfather by his colleagues. The family collected there at dawn one morning in 2000 so the hospital could dedicate it, then sanitize it again before the day’s first operation.
I miss you, Powdaddy.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2008
I started paying attention to the presidential debates pretty late in the game, mainly because they started so unbelievably early. But after perking up for the past couple of weeks, I’ve decided that virtually every television pundit is even more full of it now than they were last time we went through this. I’m especially tired of Chris Matthews and Cokie Roberts, who have incredibly myopic, insulting views of the Midwest.
Meanwhile, it is a compelling and historic democratic race. And while I will be one of the first to shed a tear of joy if there is first woman or first African American presidential win, I’m frankly not convinced that Clinton or Obama have the best political agenda for women or African Americans in this country.
I’m more interested in John Edwards, and I’m also bored with the passive-aggressive pundits who keep trying to rule him out. I share several of the opinions of the moms on independent web site The MOMocrats, where the catch-phrase is “Vote for John Edwards or you’re grounded.”
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2008
(Image: A sculptural representation of Milarepa).
When Declan was about four months old, I took a rare evening to myself so I could attend a teaching by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. It was to be, I believed, a dharma talk for Buddhist novices like myself, replete with a tantalizing title about the “purity” of desire, stupidity and anger.
After the Rinpoche and his translator entered the room and took their place in front of the group, they compelled us to sing. We sang a verse about the purity and oneness of desire and forms, followed by the same verse, only this time about the purity and oneness of desire and feelings, then about desire and discriminations.
For the first five rounds or so, it felt novel and fun. I sat with friends who brought their weeks-old baby girl, singing along cheerfully, confident that this was an overture for an illuminating lecture. But as we kept on going past four to five, six and seven verses, my friends and I looked at each other, and at the list of 100-plus virtues, vices, senses, feelings, elements and emptinesses that we were marching through.
“We aren’t going to sing all of these are we?” One of us whispered. There were shrugs all around. I started to feel vaguely annoyed. I wondered if I had chosen to spend my precious evening alone for nothing more than an extended Buddhist version of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”?
But as a few more verses came and went, I resigned myself to this fate. Singing these lines would have to be my lesson. Once I accepted that, I enjoyed it immensely, the way that I had found that breathing and accepting the requirement to be still often made breastfeeding a time for meditation, rather than a struggle.
Somewhere during those verses, I let go of some of the noise in my head. I let go of some of the new, protective anger that motherhood had brought me, and the unfamiliar fears. After more than an hour of singing 60-plus verses, I did get the dharma talk that I had hoped for.
Now, I’m no great scholar or practitioner of Buddhism. I started attending dharma talks at a local Kagyu temple soon after I got pregnant for completely selfish reasons – I wanted to find more ways to deal with stress in my daily life. I felt more vulnerable than ever before. And I especially wanted hope for the future in the face of a war I did not support and a president I did not support (who had just been tipped to reelection by my home state). In the sangha, I found some people seeking the same.
Of that night of singing and the talk, what I remember learning best was that things like anger and stupidity can come through us in a neutral and benign way. It’s how we grab at or cling to them, the pentimento that we make of our experiences, that propels us to do hurtful things to ourselves or to others. And simply put, it’s a lot harder to cling to your past or your fears or your ego when you’re singing. (Or chanting prayers or mantras.)
A little over a year beyond that night, Declan’s hunger for language became overwhelming. He went from saying a few words to learning the name of every color, shape, animal and household item in his proximity as quickly as he could. One of his favorite words was “space.” He would jump up and down and cheer “space, space, SPACE!” in front of various Star Trek series’ openings, marveling at the planets, asteroids and stars.
Wondering if his interest would extend to science as well as science fiction, we started saving space documentaries on our DVR. Declan would watch them, and pick out and modify lines from the narrative to repeat over and over while he played, ate breakfast, tackled the dog or took a bath. His earliest mantras included the ominous-sounding “galaxies fade away, all stars merge” (from “Unfolding Universe“) and “just the right speed, just the right angle!” (from “If We Had No Moon“). Others were simpler, like the one he has most frequently yelled up the stairs at me while I try to get work done: “Saturn has rings, MOMMAY!”
There is such joy on his face when he says these things – an abandon in his mastery of language, in his strange desire to process the workings of the universe. And because of the vastness and mystery of his favorite subject, his mantras have a special depth and gravity (pun intended). Now that he’s a full sentences kind of guy, he still has a remarkable skill for picking up on soothing concepts, many of which still have to do with space. He also finds them in other places, like the latest wisdom from Blue’s Clues: “Stop. Breathe. Think.” A reminder he’s offered me three times today.
I’m still not very good at managing stress, and I am probably not any closer to being able to let anger and stupidity announce themselves without climbing on for the ride. But Declan’s mantras, like that night of singing, are often the things that remind me that forgetting myself and being in the moment are possible.
This is my 200th post!
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2008.
