I am not really Rising Up In The Face Of Adversity the last couple of days. This morning I had to be a little stern with myself about it. RISE UP, dammit, or no cookies for you!

The MAIN issue is that the minivan has needed $3000 in repairs in the last few weeks (it’s due, it’s due, it’s hardly needed anything in the over 7 years we’ve had it, and it was a 5-year-old car to begin with), and then yesterday morning it wouldn’t start. Just a rapid clicky noise. And I realize it’s not the way things work, that if you pay a lot on a car repair you shouldn’t have to pay for a car repair for awhile, but it FEELS like that’s the way things work. It’s why people get so outraged when something happens right after something else happens. NO FAIR. SOMETHING ALREADY HAPPENED.

But it actually makes plenty of sense that a 12-year-old car having a bunch of problems would have more problems. So I don’t know what my deal is.

Part of my deal is that there were things that happened that wouldn’t have happened that way if I’d had all the information. So, for example, William was feeling queasy from an antibiotic he’s taking for Lyme Disease, so I said I’d drive him to school so he could have another half hour at home to let his stomach settle. I wouldn’t have done that if I’d known the car wouldn’t start. It makes me a little crazy when there is a largeish consequence for a small and unimportant decision that could have gone either way: he missed school because I said I’d drive him, but he WOULDN’T have missed school if he’d just gotten on the bus. THERE WAS NO NEED FOR THIS SITUATION TO HAPPEN. And then Henry had to miss school, too, because our school system only transports kindergarteners one direction, and because coincidentally my parents are on vacation so I can’t call them for a lift as I’d usually be able to.

Part of my deal is that there is a simmering pan of stress already on the back burner, what with the Lyme Disease thing, and some “parenting a teenager makes me think this whole having-children thing was a bad idea” things, and some “5-year-old wearing a hole in my skull with his constant dumb-voice-thing talking and saying ‘poopy’ and so forth” things.

Part of my deal is that car stuff goes with bank stuff and insurance stuff and medical stuff and dental stuff: stuff I DON’T UNDERSTAND so feel like I’m being INCESSANTLY RIPPED OFF even when I’m NOT. How do I know the mechanics didn’t do something to the car so that I’d have to keep getting it repaired? I DON’T. There’s all this, “Well, find a mechanic you TRUST!” advice. Well, duh. And just as soon as I can read minds, I’ll be sure to do that. Human beings are NOTORIOUSLY bad at judging character, and are CONSTANTLY making dumb “Well, I like him, so my gut is telling me he’s trustworthy!” decisions and then thinking they’ve put a check in the “find a trustworthy _____” box. Not me, though! I live in a pool of unending mistrust and suspicion! That’s a way better plan!

Where was I? Oh yes. So we jump-started the minivan after Paul got home last night and we ran it for half an hour. Then this morning before he left for work he started it “just to make sure”—and it did not start. Rapid clicky noise. He was late for work because he stayed to jump-start it for me again, thinking maybe we could drop it at the mechanic’s—and then it didn’t take the jump anyway, just did more click sounds. So Henry will miss another day of kindergarten, and I guess I will have to have the stupid car TOWED? For a surprisingly high price, if I remember correctly from the last time I had to do this.

And my point is that this has me pretty flattened, which makes a person wonder how a person would do if a person had a more significant set of problems to deal with. Because this is our SECOND car. And we can afford to have it towed/repaired. And wah, wah, I don’t have my parents as a net the way I usually do, the way MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVER. I assume from evidence around me that what happens is that we DO get flattened by little things and yet DO also manage to handle larger things.

[Edit: So, as with many such things, it didn’t even turn out to be that big a deal: the mechanic we use sent a truck to us with a fresh battery, so there was no towing and only a small fee for the service call. SEE? IT PAYS OFF TO FRET AND GET ALL UPSET FOR NOTHING!]

[I wrote this a few weeks ago and completely forgot to publish it. No wonder I wasn’t getting any good cat name suggestions!]

Here are the things the grocery store was out of when I last went:

1% milk
pepperoni
bologna
salami
frozen hamburger patties
red bell peppers
zucchini
the big bags of spring greens
vanilla ice cream

I realize we may be a bit over-accustomed in this country to getting whatever we want whenever we want it, without even having to stand in line or use ration coupons or ANYTHING. But considering we DO live in such a country, where grocery stores are NOT dealing with shortages and/or other issues, I DO expect them not to be out of so many things in one trip. “People in other countries wouldn’t think this was worthy of complaining about” is NO DEFENSE when you and I are in THIS country, GROCERY STORE!!

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We continue to languidly think of name options for the new cat, just in case the Penny Arcade thing falls through. One of my favorites is Hastings, which I think is a good name but also I love it because of the character Hastings in the Agatha Christie mysteries. Problem: Agatha Christie’s Hastings is laid-back, good-natured, relaxed in any situation, and quick and confident in an emergency. Our cat is…none of these things. So now I am trying to think of a well-loved anxious/shy/jumpy character from books or movies. Can you think of any? Wilbur, maybe, from Charlotte’s Web?

I needed to go through Elizabeth’s shirt drawer. Well, ALL her clothing drawers, but the shirt drawer was most urgent, especially because soon it will be time to put away short sleeves.

It is very tempting to overbuy for her. I have the following excuses prepared:

1. She is my only girl. (I can spin this either way: for the boys, I justify overbuying by saying I’ll get so much use out of handmedowns.)

2. She’s so EXCITED by new clothes. If I come home from an outing and I say I bought her a new shirt, she is LEAPING AROUND with excitement. It’s very gratifying, especially compared to the boys. She likes to help shop for them, and I find her little opinions amusing.

3. She has been in the same size for SO LONG. So each year when the clearances roll around, I buy more extremely inexpensive clothes I can’t resist—but it’s been three years now, I think, so things have really PILED UP.

4. She DESIGNS each day’s outfit. She has specific ideas. I feel motivated to make sure she has all the resources she needs for an all-yellow outfit or an all-stripes outfit, because I find the results so fun.

5. I like to buy things.

So. This is her short-sleeved-shirts-and-tanks drawer, dumped onto her bed:

I started by putting everything in piles, mostly by color because I find it easier to get rid of things if I’m thinking “This child does NOT NEED fifteen pink shirts, so which of them will we keep?” instead of thinking “Should I get rid of this shirt? …this shirt? …this shirt?”:

There are a few non-color-based piles. The first pile in the back row is sleeveless tops, because those are their own category of shirt type, and because she can’t wear them to school, so for both those reasons I want to consider the quantities separately from the other shirts. The second pile in the back row (stripey) is a single shirt I love, which she won’t wear; I need to remember to force her to wear it one time and THEN I’ll give it up. (She is accustomed to such deals.) Last pile in the back row is a shirt I know she won’t wear anymore because it’s too short for her, but I want to make sure to put it aside for Niece Handmedown because it used to be a favorite.

Once the piles were established, I went through them one at a time. Here is the pink pile spread out in front of the other shirts. It’s kind of a confusing picture, I realize, with an insufficient sense of pile height, but it’s what I’ve got:

FIFTEEN pink shirts. FIFTEEN. And the pink pile wasn’t even the tallest pile! (The blue pile was tallest.)

The first thing I noticed was that FIVE of the shirts featured butterflies, so that seemed like a good culling area. We kept one that had an overall pattern of butterflies (as opposed to one big featured butterfly), one that doesn’t really look like a butterfly because it’s made up of words, and two that feature large butterflies but they go with almost all of her skirts and she preferred one and I preferred the other so we kept both.

…So….we got rid of one shirt. Hm. This is an unpromising start. But I also noticed there was a butterfly shirt in white that was nearly identical to the one I didn’t want to get rid of in pink, so I got rid of the white one:

There was also a SECOND butterfly shirt in the whites pile that seemed boring compared to the ones we were keeping, so that one went too. So that’s THREE shirts gone, even though it’s only one from the pinks.

I got rid of the pink Hello Kitty shirt, because I know she has a bunch of those in various colors and this particular one isn’t a favorite. And she never wears the solid pink shirt above it in the photo, so that went too.

I got rid of a pink shirt that has an adorable fake ad for a rollerskating rink on it, because Elizabeth won’t wear that kind. WHY WON’T SHE? I love that kind! But she won’t. There were more than three of that sort, but here are the three I was saddest to get rid of:

All Lands’ End, too. SIGH. It’s comforting to think maybe my niece won’t have the same objections. And if she does, by then the pain will have faded.

Here’s the After picture of the pink pile:

It’s down from fifteen to eleven, which is not HUGELY encouraging but eleven IS better than fifteen. It IS better. SOMETHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING. Plus, some of those are unlikely to fit in the spring, and maybe I can do a second run through the pile in a couple of months. We’ll call this “the first pass.”

Fast-forwarding through the rest of the piles because otherwise this could get even more tedious, here’s what I had at the end:

The three piles to the right are all going: the leftmost of the three is Niece Handmedowns; the middle is Too Meh To Save For Niece; the rightmost is unisex Threadless tees Henry can wear. (There were also a few in too poor/stained shape for donation that Paul ripped up for workshop rags before I took the picture.) It doesn’t look terribly impressive, especially compared to the Keep Piles (and especially because a lot of those Keep Piles are only two shirts high, but all the eye registers is LOTS OF PILES), but it’s twenty-five shirts we’re getting rid of. The drawer CLOSES now.

One reason I like the “dump it all out and sort it” technique is that there were quite a few shirts I’d had no idea she had two almost-identical ones. She had the same navy blue polo in XS and S. She had two Peter-Pan-collared light-blue school-uniform-type shirts. She had two green Hello Kitty shirts. For those it was pretty easy to just say “Okay, I will choose ONE.”

I also got rid of her kindergarten graduation shirt from a year ago, and her camp shirt from this past summer, both of which appear to be men’s size small and go down to her knees like a dress, and also the tie-dye one she made at school that she enjoyed at the time but has never worn since.

I had her sit with me for part of the process, and that was helpful too. There was a very pretty shirt I lightly scolded her for not wearing, and she said, “It looks like a DRESS for a BABY,” and I thought, “….It DOES look like a dress for a baby.” Toss.

There were also quite a few where, if I’d considered them individually, I would have felt like keeping them—but seeing them against all the GREAT shirts, they were easy to let go.

Paul and the children are watching a Japanese cartoon in which the child characters put a (presumably empty) gun to their heads and fire it, FOR LUCK. This is NOT TRANSLATING WELL FOR ME.

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The children were using spritz bottles out in the yard to play a Star Wars game. William said he was “Lukewarm Skywater.”

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Rob’s room is starting to smell seriously revolting. I’d expected the “hamster cage” smell I’d heard others mention about boy rooms, so I recognized that stage when it arrived—but now we are entering a new level of “Oh, MAN. Whooof!” *Febreze everywhere*

When he was on the trip with Paul and William, I thought I’d do some cleaning in his room and see if I could improve things. Here is what I learned: he is now too old for me to do cleaning in his room, and/or I need to buy him a lockbox and say “PUT IN HERE EVERYTHING YOU DON’T WANT ME TO SEE.” Because I was NOT SNOOPING, I was not trying to snoop AT ALL, but I am in possession of information I would rather not have.

This was a very good lesson for me, and I hope it sticks. Because I have snoopish INCLINATIONS. And yet I KNOW how important it was to me to know I could believe my mother when she said she would never, never snoop. She said I could leave my diary open on the table and she would not read it, and I completely believed it. (I think there might have had some sort of addendum about how if she felt she needed to snoop for my own safety, she would tell me she was going to do it, and tell me WHY, and then do it while I was there in the room—something like that. But then, that’s not really SNOOPING anymore anyway.)

And my parents wouldn’t allow my brother to snoop either, and made it clear to both of us that it would be considered a very serious offense with significant punishments, and my dad put a lock on my door when I felt uneasy about people maybe barging in by accident, and all of this was very, Very, VERY important to me as a teenager, and I would LIKE to give my kids the same assurances. I think it’s RIGHT.

But…I also feel very CURIOUS! And so far in my first year (OF FIFTEEN) of parenting teenagers, I have not found teenagers as dishy as I would have hoped, which increases the temptation to find out by other means. So. I hope very much that this unintentional snoop with unwanted consequences will teach me firmly that I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

Yet again, someone on my friend/family Facebook did a status update that left me thinking “Listen, either TELL or DON’T TELL. Those are the options.” I’m thinking of setting up awards for it: instead of “Oh, what HAPPENED??” responses (which I never do anyway, because The Tease sets up an instant cold stubbornness in me), I’ll go directly to “ULTIMATE TEASE AWARD.” Maybe I can arrange some text to look like a wee trophy.

..Except I CAN’T, because maybe this time something ACTUALLY SIGNIFICANT has occurred, and I will look like a flippant jerk. Plus, I’ve seen other people making remarks of that sort to the teasers, and yet the teasers keep doing it without realizing how annoying it is, perhaps because for every “Come on, either tell or don’t, but don’t TEASE!” comment, there are a dozen apparently gratifying “WHAT HAPPENED??? CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR!!!” comments. I’m so TIRED of this. Why do people give the response they’re being manipulated into giving? Aren’t THEY tired of it TOO?

When the news DOES finally come, it’s almost never at the level of drama it was set up to be. That’s probably what I’m REALLY mad at: the feeling of having been manipulated into giving all the responses and attention we’d give for Big News, when the person knew the news itself wouldn’t warrant the level of hype they were giving it. It’s a fake-out, a bait-and-switch.

Have you already seen this great xkcd.com comic?

There is sometimes an additional level of disappointment to deal with. When, for example, someone has been trying for a baby for a year, and then posts, “I hope to have some exciting news to share soon!!!,” the news of her promotion causes more sadness than she realizes. If she’d waited until she was allowed to announce the promotion to mention it, the reaction would have been all happiness.

I’ve started seeing statuses that know to be self-conscious about it BUT DO IT ANYWAY. “I know, everyone hates vague statuses—but I REALLY CAN’T tell you my news yet!!” O RLY? Then DON’T TELL IT. There is no rule that you must SAY you have a secret. And in fact, in our house there is a rule against it: you may not prance around in front of your siblings singing “_I_ know something YOU don’t know, _I_ know something YOU don’t know!” It doesn’t seem as if adults would need that rule enforced anymore.

*pant pant*

Here is the dilemma. Our son Rob, age 13, got an invitation to a friend’s 14th birthday party barbecue. And when I say “invitation,” I don’t mean a paper card, I mean the friend told him about it. We drove him to the party at 4:00, and when I say “we,” I mean Paul.

Originally I was going to drive him, and my plan was to go up to the house, introduce myself to the parents, get a magical feeling that everything was okay and that our views on supervision of teenagers was compatible, exchange phone numbers with the parents, and ask when to pick Rob up.

But what Paul did was drop him off in the driveway, waving to a distant adult as he did so. So! We don’t know when the party ends! We don’t know ANYTHING!

Keeping in mind that Paul is SORRY, and also that he couldn’t have our usual Saturday Night Drinks because one of us had to be completely dry to go pick up Rob later and that got to be Paul because he cheesed things up—keeping all that in mind, what would YOU do? Would you…wait to get a call from Rob, somehow? Go back to the house at a certain time and just…see if the party is over? This is new territory for us, and we’re not sure if Rob would feel comfortable asking to use the host’s phone, or if Rob would know to take an “Okay, the party is over now” hint, or what the protocol is for 14-year-old parties.

Update: What we did was wait until about 7:45 (assuming in the meantime that Rob would be capable of calling us from the host’s phone if necessary, and wishing he’d remembered to bring one of the family cell phones with him), and then Paul drove over there—but with a casual attitude, ready to hear something like, “They’re right in the middle of a movie” or whatever, at which point he would have said, “Okay! When should I come back for him?” Instead, his timing was very good: kids were still hanging around, but a couple had already been picked up, so it was fine for Rob to leave with him right then.

I have come up with the solution to a problem, and I think it’s a good idea to share such solutions when we think of them, however small the problem. SHARE THE GENIUS, is my motto. Not that I am necessarily calling my idea genius, except that it is.

The problem: The kindergarten teacher would like us to send in a photo of our family, for Henry to look at during the day if he feels homesick; but I don’t HAVE a recent or decent photo of our whole family. We are so multitudinous.

Someone other than me would be able to put a bunch of photos together and then have them printed as one photo, but I am not good with my picture-messing-with software. I have once or twice managed to make a four-image multi-photo, but the idea of trying to figure out how to do that again is daunting.

The genius solution: I had a one-free-greeting-card coupon on the site we use for photo developing. All I had to do was choose a multi-image option (I found an Easter one that had narrow pastel borders and no writing/designs and 9 openings for photos; I also considered Valentine’s Day ones that said “Love” and “XOXO” and so forth), and then drag over a selection of photos already uploaded to the site. Then I can put that card in a frame! And because this is a picture for a kindergartner, not a family Christmas card or whatever, I only need to indulge my “but there should be an equal number of images of each person, or else approximate equal surface area of each person, if for example I have one large photo of one person and two small photos of another” inclinations insofar as that would be fun.

This was a huge success, I think (I guess I won’t know until I see the card). It would have been an expensive idea (but probably still worth it to me) without the coupon: $3 for the card plus another $1.50 shipping (it reallllly seems like the shipping on a single card should be about 50 cents), but with the coupon it was only $1.50 total.

The only not-so-stellar moment was when I got the email confirmation, which included a discount on collage prints. …Collage prints? Oh. I could have just done a collage print, not a card. For less money. Ahem. WELL. IT WAS STILL A GREAT IDEA.

I just wasted SO MUCH TIME on a movie. It was Eulogy (Netflix link).

(photo from Amazon.com)

This review is going to be full of spoilers. FULL OF THEM. The movie is more than six years old and I don’t think you should see it, so. I won’t talk about anything else in this post, so if you DO want to see it, BOW OUT NOW. I mean, I am going to tell pretty much THE ENTIRE PLOT, so it’s not like it’s just going to be a detail here and a detail there.

Here is the idea behind this movie: If we cast Zooey Deschanel, the emotionally-scarring revelation that a father/grandfather was a secret polygamist can be CHARMING and WHIMSICAL and ADORABLE!!!!! heart! star! smiley! fairy dust! squee!

Speaking of embarrassing, the Debra Winger character is nauseatingly awful to her sister and her sister’s fiancee, saying such HORRIBLE things to/about them (oh, you’re having a gay wedding? as long as you’re having fake ceremony, how about having another one to get yourself declared queen of the world? I mean why not?) that I thought I might rather DIE than think ANYONE I KNEW would EVER SAY SOMETHING SO BARFY—and it turns out it’s because she’s SECRETLY GAY HERSELF!!! OH I GET IT NOW!!!! And then she apologizes to her sister, kind of, and both of them get weepy, so THAT’S okay!

Ray Romano and Hank Azaria and Kelly Preston and Debra Winger are the four children of Rip Torn. Rip Torn dies. In his will he leaves his wife a house, and also leaves a videotape that tells them, “Ha ha, I fooled you all, I had three families, that’s why I couldn’t remember any of your names or act like I loved you, WHOOOOO what a lark, it’s been a wild ride and I spent all the money and I regret nothing, you suckers!!!” He LAUGHS. I mean, you know Rip Torn, with his devil expression; that’s what he does. He then tells his granddaughter, Zooey Deschanel, to please find his other two families and give them the sad, sad news of his death. (Why he couldn’t have left them their own life-shattering videotapes is not explained.)

So she travels to the first of the other families, and she tells the whole story to the wife. The story she tells is the movie, where the four children fight and bond and talk about how their dad was a jerk who had clear favorites and was a jerk and said jerky things and no one can think of anything good to say about him for a eulogy. (Zooey does remember this one time where her grandfather pretended he couldn’t see her on the porch, so, you know, QUALITY PERSON WITH MANY FINE AND REDEEMING QUALITIES, I GUESS IS THE IMPLICATION.)

At the end of the movie, Zooey Deschanel reads a eulogy that is actually a love note from her boyfriend but which by amazing coincidence makes TOTAL SENSE as a touching and emotionally manipulative eulogy for her grandfather, and which also brings them all around to understand that they shouldn’t blame the guy for having three families and no job and for being a jerk, but instead should be so, so grateful and feel so, so loved that he kept bothering to come back to them! HE CAME BACK! Occasionally!! That means he must have CARED!! Then we come back to the present, where Zooey is telling all this to the 2nd or 3rd wife—only to find that adorable klutzy Zooey has been telling this whole story to a neighbor instead of the wife!!! Whoopsie!!

So then Zooey goes back to the car and kisses her cute boyfriend for awhile, and then adorably leaves the cruel, cruel videotape in the wife’s mailbox next door, because Zooey is too busy kissing her adorable boyfriend to worry about ripping someone’s life up from the roots, and plus, she already worked so, so, SO hard telling that whole entire story to the wrong person, amirite? I mean, she can’t go through that AGAIN!!

And then as Zooey drives off giggling and in love, we see the wife opening the letter and video—only to find that klutzy adorable Zooey has accidentally switched the cruel videotape with a PORN VIDEO! Whoopsie!!! So the other wife STILL DOESN’T KNOW HER SECRETLY POLYGAMOUS HUSBAND IS DEAD, OR POLYGAMOUS!! Ha ha, isn’t that ADORABLE!!?? And HILARIOUS!!?? She’s sitting there watching PORN!! And soon (maybe) (somehow) she will find out that not only is she a widow, but HER LIFE WAS A LIE! And probably her house doesn’t belong to her anymore, either! Wheeeeeeee!

And what about the THIRD woman?? Hey, who cares, the videotape has already been left for ONE of the two women, surely THAT’S enough to call her duty completed! Hobble cutely away on cute shoes with Mr. Curly Shoulder-Length Hair and Earnest Poet Eyes, Zooey! Everything has been taken care of!!! You’ve certainly done all anyone can expect of YOU!

I was so disappointed. Hank Azaria!! Debra Winger!! Ray Romano!!! Glenne Headly!! But no. They did their best, and they did a great job at the roles they were given, and there were good and funny parts of the movie too, but what were they supposed to do about it, you know? Barge into the final scene and be like, “Hey. Wait. This makes no sense. Why is happy whimsical music playing? Why did our mom act like everything was cool? Why don’t we mind that our blinky-blue-eyed niece/daughter is all, ‘Wheeeeeeeee, tripping merrily on my leg-crossed fairy feet to see wifeys two and threesies ha ha ha omg CUTENESS!!!’? Why did our dad leave this important task to HER? Should one of us maybe supervise her to make sure she, you know, DOES IT?”

Oh, movies are just for entertainment? It’s just for fun, so it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not? INCORRECT. Movies need to HANG TOGETHER and MAKE SENSE. After THAT, they can be fun and entertaining and relaxing. Otherwise I could just patch together a kazoo solo and a cupcake sequence and a montage of YouTube kitten / babies laughing videos and be all “SEE? Entertainment! OSCAR PLZ!!!” …Okay, that WOULD deserve an Oscar, but IN GENERAL I THINK YOU GET MY POINT. “It’s just entertainment” does not justify things being STUPID and CRAZY and NOT MAKING SENSE AT ALL.

To be fair to Zooey Deschanel, she plays her part. She didn’t write the part, she didn’t direct the part, she just took the job and she did what they told her to, and she did a good job at that. They said, “Hey. We need someone who, for the first 9/10ths of the movie, can have truly great bangs. I mean, we want minimum 90% of the female audience to leave the theater wondering if they should go back to having bangs even considering what a hassle it was to grow them out last time. And then we want her for the last 10% of the movie to giggle, kiss, and blink her big blue eyes—no matter WHAT happens with the plot. Can you do that? GREAT.”

“Island of the Lambs! Bay of Pigs! The one with the conch shell!” —Me, last night, increasingly frantic as I try to think of the name of a book I want to mention. I knew I wasn’t getting it close to right, but I ALSO know how frustrating/pointless it is for someone to say “That book, that one with the… Ug. What IS that? It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Hm. Hmmmm. Hm. DARN it, I can’t think of it! What WAS that? Hm…”—so I say whatever I’ve got and hope the other person can help.

“Lord of the Flies” —Paul, who has had to solve this particular book-title-thinking-of puzzle for me before.