Barbie Dolls and Barbie Art

Ever since they finished their first Barbie Art project, the girls have been begging to do another one, so yesterday we started. Already their work is becoming repetitive and cliched, the new Barbie Art looks very much like the old Barbie Art: there are the layers of paint, the faces smeared in dark blues and greens, the painted on boots and elbow-length gloves. But still, each piece emerges unique and the proud artists drag visitors through the house to show them, see? see my Barbie Art?

Although I have to say, these new Barbies are really strange. The bodies of the old Barbies were always so obviously, completely fake with their rotating waists and strange triangular torsos, but these new ones have had those weird hips and waists sort of smoothed out, they have this little belly and curves. (No nipples yet, but I think that's so they won't look pornographic while wearing their clothes - little hard plastic nipples would be difficult to hide. They'd look normal enough while the dolls were naked, but put on any one of their tight little outfits - Barbie is not a fan of baggy clothes - and we're talking way beyond wet t-shirt material.)

I know that Barbie dolls have gotten a bad rap in terms of influence over body image and promoting a totally unrealistic standard for women, and I'm sure I'm not alone when I quip, well, I had them, and I turned out just fine. But the new bodies really do sort of make me question thier potential influence. These are not the same dolls that I played with, the bodies have developed a surreal-realism that is more than a little creepy. I'm not saying that people really look like this, just that it seems more theoretically possible than before. And besides, their hips do this weird gyrating thing now.

Matilda wanted to use fabric this time, so the finished project will be clothed. The first project happened because two Barbies (fresh from the Goodwill toy bin) had lost their heads and we just had to do something with them. But now it seems to have become an ongoing theme for their art projects. Soon we will have all of our walls covered in painted Barbie dolls with capes and veils and glitter.

Matilda's Impending Birthday

On Sunday, April 1, Matilda will turn five years old. This seems a little crazy to me, but what the heck, linear time doesn't lie, right?

I've been thinking about her and how she's so crazy and imaginative and weird and doesn't think that it's weird to be weird. There are two posts on other blogs that have sparked different thoughts for me lately.

One is this post by my friend Annika about homeschooling and unschooling. I think that Matilda will do well in school, at least initially, but I don't want the word weird to become weird for her if that makes sense. I want her to revel in being weird, to embrace it, let it be a positive force for as long as possible. I hope that she can still do that in school. If she can't, Steve and I will have to stop and rethink school and no school and figure something out.

The other is this one on my new favorite blog Breed 'Em And Weep (written by Jenn Mattern, who mysteriously, also lives in Western Mass, is a writer, has two young daughters, and issues with the Disney Princesses - how is it that we've never met?). This story just made me laugh and wonder what would happen if my children and her children ever got together. The end of civilization as we know it maybe? This is the kind of total insane wackiness that I like to encourage in my children, the kind that makes me shake my head and just wonder how they pull these things out of the ether.

For her birthday party Matilda requested "a show" so everyone who comes has been asked to prepare a little performance piece. This is partly die to her own creative impulse, and partly because I let her watch the movie Cabaret with me a few months ago. I think she is planning to do a campy (possible slutty) dance involving a chair as a prop. I have no idea what I am going to do.

Reaching Critical Mass

I am feeling better. I spent the morning spring cleaning, it is just so beautiful outside today, I couldn't help moving things from the porch to the garage and back again while the girls rode their trikes around the driveway.

I have decided to skip school tomorrow and feel no guilt about it at all. This is how I am able to clean things that have been waiting to be cleaned for so long that a few more weeks/months would make no difference. Some of the pressure has been alleviated. There is a huge pile of laundry on my unmade bed, the girl's playroom is a total disaster, but I can sit and watch the Daily Show instead of doing anything and it's kind of okay, because I don't have to do anything until next Tuesday.

Actually, that's not really true. Actually, it's not true at all. I have a lot to do before Tuesday, but the point is this: instead of letting my brain reach the boiling point and trying to do everything right-fucking-now, I can take today to relax, and pretend that it will all wait until tomorrow. Which of course it will.

Maybe there's some way I can stall tomorrow's arrival....

The Pros and Cons of Losing Sanity

You know that when you find yourself daydreaming about having a mental breakdown you're in rough shape. The list of Things I Must Keep In My Brain is about twice the size of Things I Am Capable of Remembering at any given time. A total breakdown is seeming more and more attractive. Kind of like a vacation.

Just think how relaxing it would be - everyone would be worried, my mother, Steve, my friends, total strangers. All of the responsibility of bills and schoolwork and parenting would just disappear, be absorbed by the people around me. I wouldn't even have to make sure that I was fed, let alone care for my children. I am talking complete surrender, giving myself over to the unknown that is A Total Lack of Control.

I remind myself that control is what makes me keep it together. That a revaluation of the things in my life and the places I am going is not a Bad Thing. The list of Things That I Amazingly Keep In Mind All The Time is really, really long and - I think - pretty impressive. And I am getting better at focusing on one thing at a time and whittling down the list, even as it keeps on growing.

Still, I like to keep all my options on the table, and the more I think about it, the better a Total Mental Collapse is looking.

I had better remove it from the list of Things I Am Keeping In My Brain Right Now and put it into the I Will Think About This Later pile. It (and I) will be better off that way, I'm almost sure of it.

Reasons

Well, Steve proved that it is possible to have a worse weekend than I did. A friend of his found out that his very-recently-ex-girlfriend is getting married to a guy that she has worked with for years. That can't be fun. The night we spent in Albany, Steve spent driving his friend from bar to bar self medicating.

There are other reasons not to feel sorry for myself too. Here's one:

I am torn now between doing the work I should be doing for tomorrow and starting right away to find new (and better of course) prospects for grad school.

The backlash did come by the way, at least a little bit, last night when I was trying to distract myself by reading other people's blogs. It turned out to be even more depressing than the actual rejection letter. There are so many writers, all of us struggling in one way or another, all of us trying to stay positive in the face of overwhelming odds. It was humbling.

The problem is that I can almost always think of reasons not to be doing the things that I should be doing. I am very good at reasons. I have a lot of them. They hang out together in this little bundle and every now and then I pull one out, or a forgotten one sticks it's head out and bites me on the ankle.

This morning I went for a long walk - one of those things I have been thinking about and not doing for a while now - and thought about stuff, none of which I remember. I keep trying to pull my focus back to what I should be doing, and I keep failing. I keep reminding myself that this disorientation is temporary, and then I forget.

Well, there will be no PhD for me. At least not in four years. At least not from the University at Albany. Oh well. I expected to be more disappointed about this, the assurance that my application was given careful consideration but was "not among those selected...from the group of very competitive applicants."

It definitely helped that Andrea was here when I opened it, there was no time for self-pity, with her help (and a little pinot noir) I was able to jump right to looking at other possibilities. I hope there won't be a backlash some time next week.

I had all of these smart things to say about this, but now it seems kind of pathetic. I have no choice but to move on. I would have liked to have been the one to say no, but I wasn't. It was the only school I applied to to.

If I hadn't been so damn sure of myself I could have already done all of the other applications that I now have to do.

Which Super Villain I Am

So, this is super important. I just had to know which superhero I was (Iron Man), and when I realized I could find out which super villain I was, well, of course I had to know that too. I was hoping for Catwoman whose work I've always admired, but I'm sure I'd look good as a redhead.

Your results:
You are Poison Ivy

You would go to almost any length for the protection of the environment including manipulation and elimination.

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

So, I'm sitting here, doing my usual waste-quite-a-lot-of-the-morning-before-actually-doing-anything routine and Freya comes halfway down the stairs and looks at me.

About half an hour ago I caught the girls upstairs in their playroom pouring water back and forth between various containers. (This time is was the sound of the water that gave them away - remember when you were little enough to be mystified every time your mother knew something naughty was going on, how did she always just know like that?)

I was overly-annoyed because Matilda and I had just had a conversation about appropriate places for water yesterday. So I sent them both for a time out on Matilda's bed and cleaned up the mess. I then returned to my spot on the couch until Freya slowly came halfway down the stairs - dragging her little green blanket - and turned to look at me.

She was silent for a minute, then she said, "I told Matilda you were so mad at her and I have to get out of her bed because you told her and you are so mad and you have to go to your bed right now! Humph!" and turned her face to the wall for dramatic effect.

I love when they can bring me back from being irritated without even trying. I mean, it was only water, right?

Writing under self-inflicted duress

"Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities."

Silas Flannery (fictional author in Italo Calvino's If on a winters night a traveler)

I was thinking recently about a new story that I want to tell, and as usual, self-censoring before I'd written a single word. Oh, but I don't know anything about this kind of person, I'm a white girl, what do I know about growing up black in America? How does one become a bounty hunter anyway? Am I writing genre fiction, and if so, am I okay with that? Why not? What's wrong with writing genre fiction? Just because I have a higher admiration for more intellectual authors and would very much like my work to reflect that admiration doesn't mean I can't write pulp if I want to, does it?

Never mind all of the other ways I find to avoid writing, now I can just sit perfectly still, or drive my car, or make dinner, and be actively not writing all the time! It's a miracle break through! In her book on writing Bird by Bird, Annie Lamott talks about putting all of those inner voices in a glass jar and screwing the lid on tight. The visual doesn't quite work for me, but the idea is right. One at a time these voices must be silenced. The problem I keep running into is that each time I think I have eliminated them all, a new one turns up, more serious than the last and demands consideration before joining the others. (Where do they all end up anyway, do they find ways to disguise themselves and appear in the writing itself? I think they might.)

This latest story that I have been thinking about and writing snippets of will get itself written. One way or the other I will push the doubts aside and force the words to stick to the paper. I know I will. I know this because I have to know this. To push past my own limitations and prejudices, to force my own hand and create something is the only way to make the voices disappear, if only for a little while.

I will worry about the revision demons when I get there.

Waiting... waiting...

Two months ago I applied to the graduate program at SUNY Albany. I still haven't heard yet. I usually try not to think about it, but sometimes...

You would think that it would sort of creep up on me when there was nothing else going on, but actually it's the opposite. Today I had about 200 pages of reading to do, research paper guidelines to review for the class that I am assistant teaching, an ad to design for my dad, Anna IMed me for Photoshop advice, Andrea and I were trying to figure out how to get myself and the girls over there for Eden's birthday this weekend and the girls were feeling under the weather and the bills were looking at me funny. It is in these moments, when I barely have time to stop and catalog the list of things I have to do, that I remember that I am waiting to hear from SUNY and it becomes just one more thing to fill my mental space.

I did make it. I've done about half of the reading for tomorrow, and although I know it's not much of an excuse, I happen to know that if I do the rest of it, I will probably be the only one who has bothered.

I went outside and took pictures of the snow monster and the little mini victims as promised, but the shot of the victims is white on white and vaguely resembles shadowy ghost snowmen, so here is the big monster snowman, bear in mind that he is hungry and about to each dozens of helpless snowpeople sunbathing on the back porch.

While you were out

I was at school all day today, Tuesdays and Thursdays are my non-mommy days to do brain stuff. When I got home, ready for a glass of wine and an episode of Prison Break, Steve gave me the details of his day with the girls. It was a good one.

They went outside and made snowmen. This might sound normal, but there are lots of little snowmen on a "beach" and one giant snowman rising up out of the "water" to eat all of the little snowmen. Steve and Freya made the big one and Matilda made all of the little frosty victims. It's dark now, but I'll post a picture tomorrow.

Also there was an incident with a bug. The girls were out in the middle of the yard and I guess Steve was checking on something inside, or fixing up the snow creature, but suddenly Matilda is screaming, "Daddy! Daddy! Freya has a bug in her boot and it has pinchers and it's pinching her!" And Freya's lying on her back in the snow freaking out, so of course Steve rushes over and the bug is some small non-pinchy bug, and in fact Freya is not freaking out about the bug, she's screaming because her other boot is stuck in the snow (which is too high for her to walk in anyway) and she can't move. So Daddy saves the day, removes the bug, replaces the boot and takes the girls inside for hot chocolate.

I think about Steve's days with the girls and am jealous sometimes. I wonder if I don't give them enough attention, get down and play wth them enough, let myself climb into their world the way I maybe ought to. I can tell myself I have homework to do and that they're happy playing together without me all I want, but sometimes they have a day like this with Steve and I wonder if I'm missing something important. I love them both so much, and I love the idea of playing with them, but whenever I sit on the floor and help them build a castle for the Polly's, or set up a farm for the plastic animals, it doesn't take long before my character develops a life threatening disease, or homicidal tendencies.

I'm there when they need me, but when it comes to their playtime, they're probably better off without me. But is this just an excuse? Am I being lazy? When it comes to parenting, I know that different styles work for different people, and shouldn't I just embrace the one that works for me, which is the one where I get to do my stuff, and they do their stuff?

If on an almost spring day a book lover

I'm halfway through Chapter 7 of Italo Calvino's If on a winters night a traveler. It might just be my favorite chapter in the entire novel because it is all about the books and other things that Ludmilla keeps in her apartment, how they are arranged and what that says about her.

How many times have I rearranged the books on my shelves to achieve a certain effect? Too many. I used to do a lot more arranging, now I just move things back and forth between the front of the house and the bedroom. I tend to put the books I am proud of reading, or have loved, or think I ought to love on the prominent shelves in the house. The mysteries and pulp fiction I reserve for the bedroom where only those who already know that my tastes are not as high brow as I would like to pretend they are.

The movies are kept in a closed drawer. My addiction to television programs is not something that I am proud of.