After we watched The Sound of Music on New Year’s Eve, I got interested in Julie Andrews and have read a couple of books. The first was Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, written by Julie Andrews.

(image from Amazon.com)

I almost didn’t get past the first few pages, which are along the lines of “My great-great grandmother was born in…” It was hard to keep track of who was who (“Let’s see, so now we are talking about your mother’s father’s mother’s sister”), and seemed like the sort of information that would work better as a little picture of the family tree at the beginning, or distributed throughout the rest of the book only as needed for a particular story. But I was glad I persevered past the basic genealogy, because it got better after that.

As the title warns, this is only about her early years. It stops before The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, and before her divorce and remarriage. It covers more about her childhood and family, and her training, and her successes before the Big Success started happening, and generally how she got started.

I felt like she was trying to be fair, and also trying to be warm and personal and give some revealing details (I hadn’t realized it, but she has a reputation for being private, and hard to get to know). I do think she partially succeeds. But the book overall still had a feeling of “Everyone was just wonderful” plus “This is the material I use for interviews, plus some new personal stuff to balance my reputation for being withholding.”

Next I read Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography, written by Richard Stirling.

(image from Amazon.com)

My overall impression of this book is that even though it is packed full of numbers and names and quotes from articles, it was written from almost nothing. Julie Andrews does not appear to have cooperated, despite the author saying “Julie Andrews told me” at every single point he possibly could: it seems as if he’s trying to imply she told him for the purposes of the book, but that she didn’t. My guess is that if I bothered to look into it (can’t…quite…reach…Wikipedia…), I’d find that he was a journalist who did an interview or two with her for a magazine, or got a comment from her at a press conference, and used those few occasions to make it seem as if he is her official, chosen confidante/biographer. The rest of it seems written from articles and interviews and official records and things other people said about other things; there is very little about Julie Andrews HERSELF. Lots of “Rehearsals began on such-and-such a date, and here are several pages mentioning every single person involved with the project, and here are quotes about how a bunch of other people felt about the project, and here are a bunch of reviews, and a bunch of back story on people we don’t really care about, because otherwise this is not enough material for a book.” I did a fair amount of skimming.

This book does mention Julie Andrews’s divorce, but seeing the author try to tell the story is what shows how very private Julie Andrews must be: the author tries to write about it, but doesn’t have enough material to go on. There is a lot of fluffing up of the very few details known, and then suddenly we’re past that part and you think, “Wait…did I miss it?” I felt some sympathy for the author: I think he was stuck trying to write an account of a marriage/divorce based on nothing more than what was available from public court records. Lots of “It must have been,” very little “This is how it was.” Like if you imagine one of those celebrity couples saying “It was amicable, we remain the best of friends,” and now someone wants you to write a chapter from that about what the marriage was truly like and what happened to it and who was at fault and how each person felt about it.

This continues in the descriptions of her second marriage (to Blake Edwards), her step-parenting of her second husband’s two children, and her adoption of two children. The author is TRYING to give us the scoop, but he doesn’t know it either. He’s got the publicly-available information, and that’s it. Miss Grace and I were talking about it afterward, and agreed that both of us REALLY ADMIRE celebrities who manage to keep their private lives separate—while simultaneously wishing WE PERSONALLY had access to the details.

I ended the book feeling quite low. If you’d asked me beforehand, “Do you think Julie Andrews has had a nice life and good career?,” I would have said yes. But it felt as if the book highlighted every disappointment, every poor review, every not-quite-a-roaring-success project. And her marriage to Blake Edwards could have been a spectacular marriage in nearly every way, but I ended up with the impression that he was a very difficult person who ruined her life trying to further his own career.

But of course it’s all SPIN. When I looked up one of the projects the book describes as an unmitigated disaster, I see that many people considered it a huge creative success even though it wasn’t a huge financial success. When there were a bunch of negative reviews quoted, I wondered what percentage those were of the total number of reviews: were we getting a representative sampling, or was the author choosing the quotes that further the plot as he’s decided to tell it? When the author uses the verb “confessed” instead of the word “said,” is he accurately representing the situation or is he making us feel something that isn’t true? (This is the problem with all biographies, not just THIS biography.) It also made celebrity/fame very unappealing, but that’s a nice thing to be reminded of from time to time.

All of it was a reminder that there is something that makes some of us want to know more about celebrities—but that we can’t actually have that information. All we can have is what is produced when other people (including the celebrity) see a want and try to fill it.

I am assorted cranky this morning. There was a long series of events starting with Rob texting me that the bake sale was TODAY instead of tomorrow (luckily for him, this was not his error), and me being thankful I’d done the baking already but worried because I’d put everything in the freezer because I made it ahead of time, but fine, no big deal, I will just drive it all over to the school, everything will thaw. Except…where is my key? It is not on my keyring. Paul borrowed my keys yesterday, so probably my key is in his pocket. But the keyring is all bent, so perhaps my key is more lost than that. And then the genius realization that we made Rob a copy of our car keys, to give him when he gets his license! Whew! Saved! Except…the copy does not work. HOW CAN THIS BE? WHY DID WE NOT TEST IT?? ARE WE NEW HERE??? Anyway, my parents have a spare so my dad drove over and gave it to me and I took the stuff over to the school.

Really, when I type it out it doesn’t sound nearly as exasperating and thwarted-at-every-turn as it FELT. Partly is that I am trying to be brief because this is not the INTERESTING kind of dramatic event, so I left out things like “And then I realized I couldn’t go yet because it was almost time to bring the littler ones to the bus stop” and, like, the part where I emailed my dad, then emailed him to say never mind because I’d remembered the spare key, then had to email him again to say the key didn’t work; and partly it is that it all ended well with the baked goods at the bake sale, so I’ve lost the urge to communicate the FRANTIC PANIC.

Another issue is that my baby names blog is down. Just…down, since at least yesterday. I can’t even get to the dashboard. And I just recently gave access to that blog to a place that does one of the plug-ins, so they could fix their polls that stopped working when I updated to the new version as requested, so I’m wondering if that is connected to this problem and, if so, how serious the fall-out is going to be. I have copies of all the posts, but dear heaven that would be a chore. Well, maybe the blog will pop right back open today, with all the polls working again too! Wouldn’t that be nice! La la la!

Also, I bought a new chair to replace the one that had duct tape holding it together, and it’s a nice chair but I didn’t give any thought to the upholstery, which is a cool grey-blue or blue-grey, and I don’t think it’s going to go with anything else I will ever like. And I am JUST ABOUT to replace our two stuffing-bursting-out recliners, so perhaps it would have been nice to consider the upholstery. Also, I ALWAYS choose bad upholstery. ALWAYS. When we bought our couch, I thought we were choosing a daring fiery multicolored orange and red, but it turns out it’s the standard wine-color, which I dislike even though it’s convenient for spilling wine. Well. Let’s just not think about that. Let’s certainly not turn this into a series of thoughts about ALL past furniture errors and all future likely ones. La la la.

Also, my blog is doing this annoying thing where it asks me to log in while I’m in the middle of typing a post. Then it goes back to the post as if everything is fine, but EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE, and when I try to publish/save the post, it says “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again,” and when I try again, it brings me to a BLANK POST. Luckily I am now in the habit of copying the whole post when this happens, but isn’t that annoying? Isn’t that something that SHOULDN’T HAPPEN? Well, it just DID happen. AGAIN.

Oh, and one more thing is that I heard that song about “with every broken bone, I swear I lived,” and I am very tired of the concept that “living life” has to be measured in units of DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES.

It is time to do an update on parenting a teenager, because I think the last update I gave was when Rob was in the worst part of the transition and I, as my brother remembered it recently, was wishing that either I or the children had never been born. I felt it had been a giant mistake to have children. I felt tricked by biology into doing something completely against my lifetime best interests in exchange for the very brief and pleasant and IRRELEVANT TO THE REST OF LIFE cute stage. It felt like the worst bait-and-switch of all: this PERSON didn’t seem anything like my BABY. I could feel the other four wolves in sheep’s clothing children coming right up behind this awful one, and I didn’t know how we were going to make it through without ruining our lives.

My plan was to find all those posts and link to them, but once again I regret my apparent inability to grasp the use of helpfully descriptive post titles. Here are a few samples I found by searching for the word “teenager” in the year Rob was 13: This is a Stage That Will End; Biological Set-Up; Wan. (I would have SWORN a post called I Didn’t Sign Up For This would be another, but that one turns out to be a PTA complaint.)

The update is that things feel better now. MUCH better. I remember MomQueenBee saying something about each child having One Terrible Teenage Year, and me trying not to hope too hard that it was true. I’m not sure how long it DID last, and it’s not as if everything is lovely lovely all the time lovely NOW, but feelings of regret and questions about our survival have passed off, and it DOES seem like it lasted about a year. And in fact, things are so much better, I now think of the teenager years as one of my Preferred Stages. Like, some people love toddlers but dislike the Newborn Slug stage, while others are the opposite; it turns out that, at least with THIS teenager, teenager is another stage I like better than others.

What I didn’t like was the TRANSITION from Older Child to Teenager. We need a word for that, because I was thinking of that as “teenager,” and it kind of IS teenager, but it also ISN’T. Oh, I guess the word is “puberty,” but I think that’s kind of a gross word, the way some people feel about the word “moist,” and also, puberty can last for years and include several years of non-awfulness, whereas the transition to teenager doesn’t seem to line up with that. I think Transition to Teenager is an okay term, and I’ll just use that for now. Especially since I don’t think I need to talk about it anymore, except to say I hated it to the point where I really, no-exaggeration-for-comic-effect, genuinely wished I hadn’t had children. I say this so that if you get to that point and you feel the same way about it, you won’t feel like you’re the only one, and it may give you hope that it may not be a permanent regret.

But I feel like I also need to specifically clarify that all this surprised improvement doesn’t mean everything is great all the time, even though I know you know that. We have a 6-foot-tall child who sometimes doesn’t realize his voice and strength are now grown-man-sized, and that he needs to be careful how he uses them. He of COURSE thinks we are kind of stupid about a lot of things. He of COURSE thinks we are unreasonable about a lot of things. There are a lot of times when he acts like he has the worst case of PMS I’ve ever seen. He can be super sensitive about things, or super full of himself about other things, and there are still sometimes discussions where I feel like I’m defusing a bomb, and other discussions where I feel like everything was going fine and suddenly I stepped on a mine. But all this is as if I said I loved the newborn stage, which I do, and then clarified that I don’t love blow-out diapers, or when the baby spits up a whole feeding all over me and the recliner at 2:00 in the morning, or when the baby cries and cries and I can’t figure out what’s wrong: of COURSE those things happen, and of COURSE I don’t like them. Every stage has the parts we don’t like, even if we like the stage.

And I do like this stage. I’d rather try to figure out whether he’s allowed to go to the movies with a girl than to figure out if he can have a playdate at a house where the mom expects me to stay and talk to her. I’d rather make rules about curfew than bedtime. I like how little I’m involved now in his homework and his toothbrushing. Little kids say MUCH cuter things than teenagers do, but the trade-off is that teenagers tend to talk on topics I find more interesting. I like when we’re in the car on one of our trips, and he starts a conversation about why people say not-true or not-necessarily-true things (“Boys/Girls suck!” “Girls/Boys only like you until you like them!” “You were too good for him/her!” “He/She is going to be sorry!”) as comfort after a break-up. It’s fun when he says, “Oh, by the way, Josh is dating Abby now,” and then we talk about who Abby used to date, and how it is that all Josh’s exes are friendly with him even though he has so many of them.

This is also an update on student driving, because I think the last time I talked about that, the word “hate” was involved, and the tone of the post contained considerable despair. But after the first five hours or so (during which time he also had a couple of hour-long sessions with the driver’s ed teacher, which don’t count toward the 50 hours the parents have to do), things improved considerably, so that now I don’t really mind doing it.

And here’s the unexpected part: it’s been 35 hours so far of spending mostly-pleasant quality time with a teenager. We drive for an hour or so, then stop for lunch, then drive another hour or so. He’s good enough at it now that I can look out the window for the scenery as well as for Potential Death. There’s chatting. There are tacos. We decide where we feel like driving, and we go there; the other day, we went to a beach we’d never been to; another day, we drove past the exit we always take, just to see where a highway went after that. It’s a nice time, and that’s not something I expected when we were still driving agonizingly around a parking lot at 5mph.

Another thing I want to update is the social situation. Back when Rob was in 5th grade, I wrote a post about how he said he felt he was “the chosen one”: the kid who always got picked on and excluded. In middle school, sometime in 6th grade, this started to resolve: he made friends with a very social, outgoing, large-friend-network person—or more accurately, that person made friends with him. So then Rob started meeting other people in that group. Meanwhile, a child he’d had to be separated from in 4th grade because the teacher said they could not keep from arguing if they were within 6 feet of each other, turned out to be a “we fought because we were so much alike” type, and they became good friends, and THAT person was friends with OTHER people and THOSE people became Rob’s friends too. And also when he started middle school, there were extracurriculars other than sports, so he joined some of those and made more friends that way. (I wish they’d have some of these non-sport clubs in our elementary school, too: it seems like a shame that kids who play soccer can start bonding in kindergarten, but kids who like math or drama or debate have to wait for sixth grade.) So now he has a very nice central friend group, and also a number of specialized friend groups, and as far as I know he doesn’t get teased anymore than anyone else does.

I finally finished watching Boyhood. It took me a long time to watch it, because it made me very uncomfortable so I kept shutting it off. Also it’s really long.

There were four types of uncomfortable it made me. I’m listing them partly because I want to talk about it, and partly because these are the types of uncomfortable where some people LOVE them and some people HATE them, so seeing them listed out may help you decide if you want to see the movie, apart from whether I would want to.

1. First type of uncomfortable: It had some escalating scenes of the sort where someone is slipping into addiction / violence / mental illness. I hate that kind of thing so much. I especially hate it when it’s adult behavior from a child’s point of view, and you don’t trust the filmmaker/author not to take things to a very bad place indeed. I don’t find that entertaining AT ALL, and it makes me upset about The World at Large. I would have stopped the movie very soon into it, if I hadn’t been extremely motivated to watch it. But I know lots of people do enjoy this sort of uncomfortable. I know it in part because SO MANY BOOKS AND MOVIES are made along this theme.

2. Second type of uncomfortable: Reality/documentary-type scenes where the awkwardness of human existence is allowed to play out in all its excruciating glory. I sometimes love this and sometimes don’t. I find it makes me feel very self-conscious, and I have to keep reminding myself that when I’m PARTICIPATING in similar kinds of reality, it DOESN’T feel that awkward. It’s WATCHING that’s awkward. And TONS of people like to watch reality/documentary shows.

3. Third type of uncomfortable: Time passes, people get old, children grow up, it all goes so fast, there’s nothing that can stop it, we all think there will be more time than there is, but there’s actually less. Sometimes I love this kind of thing and sometimes I don’t. Mostly I like it, in a “good kind of hurt” way. Or sometimes in a “drink most of a bottle of white wine and cry silently and wide-eyed into a handkerchief while watching it” way.

4. Fourth type of uncomfortable: Children going through child experiences: dealing with a mean kid at school, being in a car with a teenaged driver who’s not paying attention, going to a party their parents would never have let them go to if their parents had known, dealing with a kid who’s making them uncomfortable but they feel trapped, being introduced to risky/mature things by other kids, their parents saying something hurtful, overhearing grown-ups fighting, experimenting with alcohol/cigarettes/sex/drugs, dealing with painfully awkward lectures from clueless adults, having very little control over major aspects of their lives and too much control over others. I don’t like it at all. But again: I know lots of people LOVE this and read young adult fiction ON PURPOSE, so what makes me want to break things and run away is going to be CATNIP to others.

Other remarks:

1. The director cast his daughter as one of the main characters. She looked so absolutely unlike a daughter of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke that I was confused: I thought that must be on purpose for something the plot would do later (surprise, you’re not the father, that kind of thing), but it wasn’t.

2. I was distracted by the names. The mom and dad are named Olivia and Mason. The kids have peers named Barb and Sheena. It isn’t that no one born in 1968 was named Olivia and no one born in 1996 was named Barb (there were in fact 325 Olivias born in 1968 and 667 Barbaras born in 1996)—but man, what a coincidence to have SO MANY atypical-generation names in one movie (for comparison, there were 49,528 Lisas born in 1968, and 25,148 Emilys born in 1996). Hey. Hey. I have thought of the job for me: Character Name Consultant. Yessssssss. The parents are now Kevin and Michelle, and the kids are Kevin Jr. and Samantha, and the kids’ peers are Taylor and Amanda. Or we could keep ONE name oddity, since those DO happen: the kids’ peers can be Barb and Amanda.

3. I think the main (in fact, ONLY) reason I would see or recommend this movie was its gimmick of using the same actors over a 12-year shooting period. That was a really cool idea. If the movie had been made using aging make-up for the parents and different actors for the different ages of the kids, I wouldn’t have had any reason to see it OR recommend it. Without the gimmick, it strikes me as an overly long and not very interesting movie with a lot of uncomfortable parts.

I have some online shopping peeves. I feel as if venting them will improve my mood.

I like to put things into my online cart and then think about them. Or I put things in the cart to see if I have enough to meet the free-shipping-with-minimum-purchase or percent-off-with-minimum-purchase deal, and if I don’t, I close the tab, leaving the things in the cart—because the next time I go back, I don’t want to have to re-find all those items. EVERY TIME I DO THIS, Old Navy sends me an email a short while later saying my cart “has abandonment issues.” EVERY TIME. The first time it was mildly annoying but I could see they were trying to be cute. Now that it’s EVERY TIME, I cringe in anticipation of it. It makes me feel like clearing out my cart, forgetting everything I would have bought the next time. THAT’ll show their automatic email system!

Old Navy ALSO sends me emails telling me the GOOD NEWS that the items in my cart are ALMOST MINE, and how extremely lucky I am that I still have the opportunity to pay for them.

I know I’ve mentioned this before. I KNOW I have. But it continues to bug me. “Everything an ADDITIONAL 40% off!”—but many things STILL aren’t as much as 40% off, which doesn’t make sense math-wise. (I do get it when the things are discounted as they’re added to the cart, or when a coupon code is needed; I mean when the store claims the prices are as marked.) Children’s Place is the one I notice most with this.

“ENTIRE SITE 40% OFF!!!*” “*some exclusions apply” Children’s Place is again the one that bugs me the most often with this, but they’re definitely not the only ones. “Entire site” MEANS no exclusions. If there are exclusions, a word other than “entire” is needed, and luckily there are plenty of those.

“ENTIRE SITE UP TO 70% OFF!” That is, many things are 0% off, which counts as up to 70% off. It’s true! And incredibly annoying/misleading. CHILDREN’S PLACE.

“40% OFF YOUR ENTIRE ORDER!!!” But now the pants that have been $8.99 for the past three months are $14.99. This is a LOT of sites.

“GIANT AMAZING 40%-OFF BLOW-OUT SALE!” One item out of thirty is 40% off—and most are familiar to me as items that were on sale before the GIANT SALE. I do expect a GIANT SALE to include enough items that I don’t feel like I’m panning for gold just to find ANYTHING that’s included. If I go to the site and can’t even tell from the prices that there IS a sale, it is not sufficiently GIANT. (Also, I recommend not using a term like “blow-out” when marketing to people who change diapers.)

“Take an additional 20% off all clearance!” But now the clearance item I added to my cart last week at $11.99 is on clearance for $14.99.

Daily sale emails, especially of the “Only 3 Days Left!,” “Only 2 Days Left!,” “Last Day!,” “Hours Left!,” “Sale Extended 2 Days!,” “One Day Left of Extended Sale!,” “Hours Left of Extended Sale!,” variety. I have even WRITTEN to Lands’ End about this, they were overdoing it so hard. They never DON’T have a sale anymore. I adjusted the email frequency with them when they added that option, and that helps somewhat. I finally had to unsubscribe to Lane Bryant: I WANTED emails from them! I had REQUESTED that they market to me! But they overdid it so severely (and, at least at that time, had no option to reduce email frequency), so I finally and reluctantly asked to be taken off the list. (I filled in the “why are you leaving?” field, even though in my experience marketers BEG for customer feedback, PLEAD for customer feedback, even PAY for customer feedback—and then collect it in a box and don’t use it for anything.)

Yesterday I went looking for boots online. I didn’t add anything to a cart; just browsed prices and options. This morning I got an email from L.L. Bean thanking me for my visit and inviting me to reconsider the items I looked at, accompanied by pictures of those items. That’s creepy. I feel spied-on and followed. I expect the same PRETENSE of privacy online that I get if I go to a store in person: if I’d gone to a physical L.L. Bean store, I wouldn’t want to get a letter a few days later telling me that they’d seen me shopping there and enclosing a list of what I’d looked at in case I wanted to reconsider my decision not to buy those things.

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To say some HAPPY, NON-complainy things, I am having coffee with a friend today and really looking forward to it. And also, the sky is looking pretty. And also, See’s is having their “$5 flat-rate shipping or free shipping over $55” deal, which I find entirely satisfactory. (You can choose your shipping date, so I like to order myself some chocolates shipped for Valentine’s Day.)

The winner of the UK scarf giveaway is K, who wrote:

Favorite bits of 2014 include a cross-country move with our four kiddos this summer to a magical place where water just falls right out of the sky, the birth of our fifth–a girl we named Claire, and so many happy little things along the way. My niece just left for the UK as a missionary…would love to win the scarf for her!:)

K, could you email me (swistle at gmail dot com) with the mailing address?