Crumpled Notes

I like being a girl. I really do. I like being a woman, too. Shoot. I just like being female in general, but today, after mediocre news from my ob/gyn, I started wondering what exactly made me a girl and even further what makes me “girly.”

I say it was mediocre news because, it wasn’t “good news” but it super bad news either. I just have some uterine polyps that need to go away. So my doctor recommended a hysteroscopy (a scraping of sorts) to get rid of the polyps and then a uterine ablation (burning of the uterine lining) to control the heavy menstruation I deal with and prevent more polyps - this was probably TMI. Trouble is, if I become pregnant after the ablation it could be very dangerous. And in a round-about way, this is what lead me to wonder what makes me a girl.

You see, I never expect to get pregnant again. We have two lovely kids and my husband’s “fixed” as it were, so the factory is pretty much closed and yet I’m loathed to board up the windows and auction off all the furniture. It’s like giving up something that while I’m not using and and have no plans to use it, I’d like to keep around just in case and this got me thinking, “Why?” The benefits of the ablation are wonderful: a minimal period without losing the parts that contribute to hormone production, no more cramps, tampons, pads… everything that makes a period such a pain in the butt and yet… sigh. No more babies either. Babies that I didn’t plain on having anyway. So why the hesitancy to give up my fertility?

I’m not sure, honestly. It feels a little like being 13 and being told I’m too old to go trick-or-treating. “No more free candy for you!” And I know it’s true, but don’t want it to be. I still want to dress up and come home with a bag of goodies. I know that I’ll miss the possibility, the surprise, the wonder and it saddens me.

But does losing this “possibility” make me any less “girly.” In head the answer is a quick, unequivocal, “No.” But in my heart… oh you treacherous little organ you… I feel a little differently. Now, if you asked me, “Are menopausal women less girly?” No. “Are women who’ve had hysterectomies or mastectomies, much harsher procedures than this one, less girly?” No. “So only you’d be less girly doing this?” Ummm. Yes… No… Maybe?… I DON’T KNOW! I know that this is a silly thing to think, but I can’t help it.

Argh! And I still have to make a decision about the procedure. Do I? Don’t I? Do I? Don’t I?

Ah, screw it. I’ll just pull a Scarlet O’Hara and think about it tomorrow.

:-)

So it’s been over a year since either of us posted on this site, but tonight I’m feeling a little wordy so I thought I’d jump on here and write a bit. I have no topic really. Just an urge to write and a headcold that makes it uncomfortable to be in bed. So I’m taking the name “Crumpled Notes” literally and writing a little note to you.

It’s weird realizing that time marches on. That our kids are older than I really think they should be. That I’ve known you half my life now. It’s weird that even though we talk about our kids, our marriages, our *gasp* feelings, but yet I feel to need to talk more, say more. It’s like I’m trying to expel something and choke on it instead… kinda like a hairball, I guess. About what I’m not even sure…………..

Last night I stayed up a good portion of the night, rebuilding my system software and reading the Nora Roberts book I borrowed - “Tears of the Moon.” A lovely Irish romance and brain candy extraordinaire. The trouble with brain candy though is that it goes by too fast.

But today I’m reading a book called, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert - something that’ll take me a few days to read, at least. I’m not quite a third of the way through and so far I’m fascinated. He uses an example of conjoined twins (at the forehead) who state that they are “happy - not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful, and optimistic.” (p.29) Something that the average person wouldn’t guess on nor in which state they could imagine being happy. Not only these twins though, but a referenced medical researcher found that the “‘desire to remain together so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal.’” (p 30) And yet as a community we cheer at successful separation of conjoined twins and are saddened by the loss of those who die but place the loss in the “well, it had to be done” category because the idea of not being separate individuals seems like an impossible state to be happy in.

So what does this mean to the state of happiness? The author goes on to discuss different theories of why the girls might consider themselves “happy” - they don’t know what happy is, they don’t have a reference to being truly happy, etc - but the truly fascinating part to me is this:

“The philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes concluded that our experience is the *only* thing about which we may be completely sure and that everything else we think we know is merely an inference from that. And yet, we have seen that when we say with moderate precision what we mean by words such as *happiness*, we still can’t be sure that two people who claim to be happy are having the same experience, or that our current experience of happiness is really different from our past experience of happiness, or that we are *having* an experience of happiness at all.” (p 63-4)

So all we can do is trust we know what happiness is when we have it, regardless of our situation, but that no two happinesses are the same nor can we even be certain that we’re consciously aware of all the times we are happy. Ok, so where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves me with two-thirds of a book to read and the need to ponder the study of “What is happiness?” Maybe even more topics for future blogs. But all this reading about happiness - in both the romance novel and the more serious psychology discussion - has got me thinking about what makes me happy, if I’m even aware of it, and why I feel sometimes feel, especially lately, that I’m on the short end of the happy stick.

I just hate TV sometimes. You know that time after prime time but before the late night talk shows? Yeah, the time when nothing interesting is on but reruns of various past and present primetime shows. Now, normally, I don’t go out of my way to watch TV this late, but when I need some brain clearing time after the kids go to bed, I flip on the tube and start looking for something – anything – to watch. I can keep flipping for a while looking for something on Bravo or TLC, but unfortunately most nights, I get stuck on CSI: Miami.

CSI: Miami. I just get mesmerized once it’s on. I WANT to know who killed the bastard who cheated on his psychotic, lying wife with the psychotic, lying neighbor. I want to see what kind of high tech devise they use to figure out who did what to whom like when the sniffer smelled out air freshener on the victim and on the murderer’s cloths and therefore the pretty forensic specialists were able to make the arrest. Man. I burned smelly candles every day for weeks after that episode, just in case…

But what really chaps my hide is why do I have to fixate on a show that pivots around David Caruso? Like I haven’t seen him pause dramatically, speak slowly and give thoughtful chin down glances enough in EVERY OTHER MOVIE OR TV SHOW HE’S BEEN IN. Why can’t I get stuck on some rerun of Law and Order or Everyone Loves Raymond? It’s always David Caruso and CSI:Miami.

And before you fire off a response stating how great CSI: Miami is and how I’m underestimating David Caruso’s acting ability, just remember The 40 Year Old Virgin… “Be David Caruso in ‘Jade.’” “Ok. I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

See. Always the same…

So as I’ve mentioned before, I listen to XM Radio. I even went into a little depth about how incredibly stratified the stations are. I can see how this could be a selling point for some people, but for me, it’s actully XM’s biggest problem. Yes, they do have a few stations that seem to be devoted to eclecticism (XM Cafe, HearMusic (the Starbucks channel)), but the problem for me there is that it’s eclecticism of Not The Kind Joye Likes.

When I’m listening to FM Radio, I tend to listen to “variety” stations like Bob or KGSR, stations that make a point of playing a wide variety of music–Bob’s tagline is “We’ll play anything!” and KGSR really does. So sometimes the very narrow stratification of channels on XM gets to me and I switch over to FM for a while. But then I start to feel guilty, since I’m paying to listen to XM; perhaps I actually should.

So I’ve got an idea for XM Radio: license the playlists from several of the top FM radio stations around the country. Entertainment Weekly did an article about FM radio a while back (FIND ARTICLE OR SIDEBAR), and they had a sidebar about the five or ten best radio stations in the country. KGSR was, of course, one of them. I would SO listen to XM’s version of KGSR or even Bob–even without the local content that gives KGSR some of it’s flavor and appeal, I’d love to just hear the playlist without all the flippin’ ads. Or Bob, for that matter.

I guess instead of writing about it here, I should just go find XM’s version of a suggestion box.

In the past six months or so, when my mother-in-law visits, I get totally pulled into whatever telenovela she’s watching at the time. For the uninitiated, telenovelas are Spanish speaking and the ultimate in soap opera experience. Our English speaking counterparts have nothing on the drama of the telenovela and even better, the telenovelas I’ve watched only run for a set number of episodes so you get to learn about brand new characters every few months or so. Frankly, I just think they blow soap operas like All My Children out of the water.

You see, my own mom is a soap opera junkie and so I’ve watched a few. But I never liked them so I teased her for years about watching the US soap opera scene. But now I know: if she spoke Spanish, she would give up those blazé stores of comas and drug addictions for the steamy story of Epólita on Alborada - the telenovela I’m currently watching with my mother-in-law. I mean, how can you resist a story that has the heroine married to a gay guy living in Panama while she’s living in Mexico with the man who fathered her child secretly. Yeah, well. You’ve really got to watch it to get it all in…

Another great thing about telenovelas is that I have a built in rationalization for watching. I tell people who ask why I watch them that telenovelas improve my Spanish comprehension. I mean, I already learned “Where is the bathroom?” and “My name is ____.” Now I can learn more important, and frankly more fun, phrases like “I slept with him but didn’t who he was because my evil mother-in-law tricked me into thinking he was my husband.” Something I’ve always wanted to learn to say.

Another beauty of the telenovela is that it allows me to spend time with my mother-in-law without having to talk about the kids or her son or my family or any of the other mundane family topics. Instead she catches me up on who loves who and who is whose father and who’s bad and who’s good and who is just dumb. I just love to hear her talk about it as if it’s a puzzle to be figured out. I ask questions. Have her translate when I need it. Laugh. A lot. I even love it when she admits she doesn’t understand what they’re talking about or when we had to look the title up in the Spanish dictionary because we knew alba was dawn but what the hell is alborada*?

So next time you’re looking to take your soap opera viewing up a notch or increase your Spanish comprehension or, even better, bond with your mother-in-law, may I suggest a good telenovela? It’s good for the soul. Or at least the vocabulary.

*According to the dictionaries on elmundo.es it means “tiempo de amanacer” or “time to wake up” or, my own poetic interpretation, “awakening.”

Want more info on Alborada? I’d suggest this WONDERFUL summary blog:
Pratie’s Place: Alborada - telenovela recap

or the official site, for those of you who speak Spanish:
Official Univision’s Alborada Site

So I listen to XM Radio a lot in the car. It’s got like a thousand stations and they are are all very precisely defined. For example there are something like 5 or 6 country stations that cover alt country, Top40 (Nashville) country, old country like Hank Williams, honky tonk/70’s (Willie & Waylon), another “today’s country,” folk and bluegrass. I guess that actually makes seven. I used country as an example because to use “rock” would’ve required listing out 13 channels, and that’s before including categories like “Hits,” “Urban” and so on.

So anyhow, I was getting tired of listening to my main 5 channels (Lucy, X Country, the Mix, The Loft and XM Cafe) and started browsing around (now that I have my cool new Roady XT, browsing around is easy, plus you can see what’s playing without actually changing to each station) to see what was good. I found a channel that was playing U2, and one of their songs I actually like, always good. I switched to it, and proceeded to listen to six or seven songs in a row that I really liked. I remembered the name of the channel (Top Tracks) and it’s channel number (46) for the future. Well, after listening to it several more times and finding that Top Tracks played more stuff I liked more often than many of the other channels I usually listen to, I added a button for it. All was well and good.

Then, one day at a stoplight, while rummaging in the glovebox, I found the little card XM Radio (the company) sends out to subscribers with a list of all the channels (there’s really 160) and 2-3 word descriptions of their content. I was curious how Top Tracks was described so I looked it up. Classic Rock. Oh my god, I must be Old now.

See, I’ve always kind of made fun of people (principally my husband) who listen to “Classic Rock” stations. And to be fair, the primary one here in Austin plays mostly old CCR and Zeppelin–you know, OLD stuff, not REGULAR stuff like U2, and Billy Joel, and Prince, for god’s sake. Though to be fair, when I went to the website for Top Tracks, it listed the following as what you might hear:

Aerosmith, “Dream On”
Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Def Leppard “Photograph”
Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water” (which, incidentally, my 8-year old daughter can play on the guitar)
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Free Bird”
ZZ Top “Tush”
Van Halen “Jump
Kansas “Carry on Wayward Son”

Most of that list is the kind of thing I’d make fun of Will (my husband) for listening to. “Get out of the past–geez, listen to something more current!” But once I thought about it, U2’s “The Joshua Tree” is nearly 20 years old. That’s 2 - 0.

I feel like the protagonist in that most annoying of songs (”1985,” by Bowling for Soup) who wondered “When did Motley Crue become classic rock?”

We’re still looking for our voice, but our plan is to provide a combination of reviews /recommendations and thoughts and/or rants.  Like I said, we’re still looking for our voice.  But we won’t find it until we start generating content and see where it leads us.  Not to mention see what, if anything, gets read.