The art center where I took the wheel pottery class did a Student Expo at the end of the term, with work on display from all the classes. The teachers did such a cool job setting all the projects up as if they were pieces in a museum. My pieces, which had previously looked lumpy and tipped to me, now looked like Significant Primitives With Artistic Value. And I will have more to say about the pottery class, now that it’s over, but I want to wait until I have all my pieces back (some things haven’t been fired yet) (or do I mean kilned) (anyway they’re not done) so that I can illustrate the post with a picture—and because the way those final pieces turn out will contribute to my final evaluation of the class.

What I wanted to talk about today is that as I was looking at all the art, a guy came up to me and started telling me about the acrylic paintings I was looking at. I thought he must have been a member of that class, so I nodded and smiled politely. Then I moved on to the next display, with work from another class. He followed me, and started telling me about that display too, standing at Friend Closeness instead of Stranger Distance. I showed even less interest. I started being more deliberate with my body language: closed, turned away, stepping back to Stranger Distance, no eye contact, sounds instead of words, leaving the display as soon as he joined me and going to one across the room rather than to the next natural one along the path. He kept following me and talking, and there was no one else in the room. I had been feeling uncomfortable from the beginning, but now I started to feel increasingly anxious. Why was he telling me all this? Why did he know so much about every single class? Did he work here, or had he taken all the classes, or was he Not Quite Right and he was making it all up?

Then Paul, who had been looking at something in the next room over, came over and joined me. The guy turned into mist and vanished. I was relieved, and also upset. I felt as if I’d had to use Paul’s protection—and that the guy had respected Paul’s mere existence as a man, when he hadn’t respected my clear social signals to leave me alone. The guy had been nearing the point where, if Paul hadn’t been there, I would have had to either leave the building or else start an uncomfortable confrontation. But Paul just appears next to me, and THAT’S what communicates to this guy that I don’t want him near me? If he were actually genuinely thinking I wanted to have him following me and talking to me, he would have stayed and continued “educating” me even with Paul there, and in fact would have included Paul in his informative lectures; his swift departure indicates that he knew perfectly well I didn’t want him around me, and that he was counting on social pressure to keep me from saying anything to stop him.

Thinking about this in the days afterward, I’ve wished a bunch of things. I wished I were Holtzmann in Ghostbusters. She would have glanced in his direction and then licked a gun or something, and he would have backed away, first slowly and then much more rapidly. I wished I were someone who would say the uncomfortable thing and get rid of the guy myself. I wished for, like, a completely different culture, where women don’t have very good reasons to feel nervous about the risks involved in strange men and confronting them.

Rob came home for Thanksgiving and it was great. He started one prolonged fight with Paul about the rules to a game and whether a rule had to be explicitly stated or could be implied, but other than that it was just great. He and William stayed up late talking every night (I got up to pee at 3:30 and they were STILL TALKING), and there were lots of computer/math discussions at the kitchen whiteboard, and I sat nearby feeling contented to have all the babies home. Sure was LOUD, though.

It turns out there is a students-only charter bus that goes from Rob’s college, which is 8 hours away, to a stop 40 minutes from our house, and it is one of the best things to ever happen to my life. There is a woman who coordinates the whole thing, and she has a clipboard and you best believe she checks it eleven times to make sure EVERYONE is on that bus before it leaves the school, and on the return trip she sends an email to all the parents to let us know the bus has arrived safely back at the college. And it costs less than gas and meals would cost me if instead I drove to get him.

Anyway, after I dropped him off at the bus, I went home and sipped brandy (doesn’t that sound classy? actually I mixed it with diet Coke and swigged it down fast to avoid tasting it) and started CHRISTMASSING THE HECK OUT OF EVERYTHING. I got out the Christmas dishes and the Christmas CDs and the Christmas lights and the Countdown to Christmas calendars and the Christmas wreaths and it is just everywhere now. I want pretty Christmas lights and I want them EVERYWHERE I TURN.

I ordered our family pictures to put in the Christmas cards, a task I usually put off until the point of agitation and inconvenience. I scheduled a get-together with my friends, and we’re going to do a Yankee Swap and eat all the Christmas treats. I put a big gold bow on a floor lamp. I got out the pine-scented hand soap. Last year I was too sunk in despair for any of this, but this year GURL IT IS ON.

There is a good sale this morning on one of my favorite Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendars (normally $16-17ish, this morning $11.68 at time of posting):

(image from Amazon.com)

I bought one a number of years ago, and it’s one of my favorite holiday things to bring out. Even Rob, who is now 18, still wants a turn choosing which ornament to put up next. It’s all wooden, nice quality, and nice and flat for storing. I like that there’s a little box for the ornaments that haven’t been put up yet.

I don’t want to wait long for this, because I’m worried the price will go up—but IF THE PRICE STAYS LOW and doesn’t, say, suddenly go to only third-party sellers trying to get $50 for it, I will do a giveaway of one of these mid-day, U.S. addresses only. No comment-content requirement, but if you’re like me and you get shy trying to think of what to say, tell me if you had an Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendar when you were growing up, and/or if you have one now.

[Edited to add: Jessica (Nov 24, 2017 @ 1:49) is the winner!]

In fact, let’s talk about that even if you don’t want to enter the contest (just make a note of that in your comment), and even after I’ve picked someone, because that’s a fun topic and it’s after Thanksgiving now.

When I was growing up, we made a paper chain, alternating red and green links. Each night we could take off one link. Inside each link was written an activity for that evening: sing Christmas carols; watch a family slide show (real slides! we had a screen!); make gingerbread houses; read a Christmas story; draw a nativity scene. (I think my mom must have sorted them to make sure we didn’t have a bigger activity on a busy night.)

When the kids were little, I bought a really cute drawered unit with one drawer for each day until Christmas—but it was too hard to think what to put in the drawers, so I gave up on that. Now we have the Melissa and Doug one.

(image from Amazon.com)

Also, this year I bought the Lego Advent Calendar for the first time, at a price significantly lower than what I see it is today. I’ve been tempted every year, but they’re so expensive, and then last year I thought, “By gum, I’m going to buy one!!”—and then it sold out, and I was disappointed. So this year I bought one, and we will just see. I’ve heard such mixed reviews of delight and disappointment, I think my expectations are nicely managed. It’ll be fun to TRY, even if it is not all that we hoped.

I would like to write a post today, and I will, as soon as I can get Rock Me out of my head.

The lyrics are below dumbness (I think the worst part is when they are spelling out the word “rock”), but it’s so so catchy. I can’t stop. HIT THE PEDAL HEAVY METAL SHOW ME YOU CARE. I can’t comfortably sing along with lyrics like those even when I’m by myself. And is it deliberate that the beat is the same as We Will Rock You? And why do I love it. Why. I am going to have to listen to it over and over until the compulsion is extinguished.

Speaking of embarrassing obsessions, have you played a phone game called Love Nikki Dress-up Queen? I cannot explain its appeal for me. Am I at all interested in fashion? Does the “plot,” in which the heroine encounters people who challenge her to fashion battles and then her cat evaluates the results, make sense in any way? Do I approve of how slender and beautiful and perfect everyone is, or how sexualized some of the levels are, considering how appealing the game is to pre-teens and teens? Are the incorrectly-translated instructions intelligible or helpful? NO TO ALL. And yet here we are. It’s a fun game, once you figure out the one hundred million confusing things about it. I would recommend having a teen or pre-teen play it first and then explain it to you, except that that means feeling mounting horror as you realize that the lingerie challenge you are currently playing was first played by the teen or pre-teen.

Have you ever made cold-brew coffee? There was a booth handing out free bottles of Starbucks Cold Brew, so I tried one, and I really liked it, and then I went to the store to buy some and found it was QUITE A SURPRISING AMOUNT OF MONEY for cold black coffee in a bottle. So I looked up how to make it, and it’s not hard. The worst part is finding a couple of jars, but if you have been enthusiastically participating in the “EVERYTHING is better in a mason jar!” trend you will likely have a couple of them in your orbit. I’m using two well-cleaned 24 oz Ragu pasta sauce jars.

Recipes vary considerably, but this is the one I’ve been using. I put half a cup of ground coffee in the first Ragu jar, and fill it almost all the way to the top with cold water, and put the lid on. I give it a few shakes. I let it sit on the counter for some amount of time over 12 hours, shaking it a little when I see it and think of it. Then I put a funnel in the other Ragu jar, line the funnel with a paper coffee filter, and pour the coffee/water into it. I put a lid on the second Ragu jar and put it in the fridge. When I want some of that coffee, I dilute it 50-50 with water and heat it up in the microwave; if I’m going to drink it cold over ice, I use less water to allow for ice-meltage.

It’s kind of fussy, is my feeling about it, but not as much fuss as it seems like it will be, and it would be a handy thing to know how to do in case of a power outage. Also, Paul keeps drinking it all before I get to it: he says it doesn’t taste much different to him considering how much cream and sugar he adds, but that it DOES significantly reduce the Coffee Mouth afterward. I should get bigger jars, but right now I’m not sure I’m going to bother to do this much more.

I think for a man to more fully enjoy the movie Wonder Woman, he should spend five minutes before the movie picturing this alternate reality:

A nation where presidents and vice presidents are and always have been women, literally never men. Until 101 years ago, only women served in Congress; and even now, not even 20% of congresswomen are male. Fewer than 100 years ago, men didn’t have the right to vote—only women could vote. In the 1960s, there were still states that didn’t allow men to serve on juries. Education for men is a relatively recent idea, and many colleges had to be forced by legal action to let men attend. “Traditional values” includes the idea that men should stay at home and raise children and take care of the house and defer to their wives out of respect; many men do go out to work now, it’s true, and this development is blamed for current rates of divorce and the problems kids have in school and the breakdown of the family unit. Almost all religions worship female goddesses, and have female leaders; many still don’t allow men to be priestesses, elders, deaconesses, board members, or serve in any leadership/governing role. (Men can teach Sunday School, sing in the choir, and help set up the refreshments.) Superheroine movies and costumes and books are popular and there is tons of related merchandise for little girls. Even movies that aren’t about superheroines still tend to feature a woman in the lead role; male characters are mostly present to help her learn lessons about herself, or to further her plot development, or to be eye candy so that women will be willing to see the movie. Sometimes there is a movie where one or more male characters play the lead, but it’s called a Dick Flick, and men go see it with their groups of boyfriends because their girlfriends/wives aren’t interested. Fun Boys’ Night Out!

There. Now. Men! With all of that still in mind, pretending we do not instead live in a world where spellcheck underlines the word “superheroine”: imagine that after many, many superheroine movies (including multiple remakes of the same movie), MANY years of going on dates to see yet another movie about a woman saving the world or leading the mission or finding the killer (and then later watching your girlfriend flex her muscles in front of the mirror as she apparently identifies her ordinary self with that heroinic character), MANY years of seeing the male character endangered or attacked or killed in order to give the female lead an excuse to clench her teeth and repress her grief and start shooting up the place—there is a movie staring a MAN in the heroine role. The first whole movie about one of the only MALE superheroines! And the movie is directed by men, too, so the male superheroine isn’t dressed in just a metal speedo and sexy boots as usual! (He still doesn’t get pants, of course, but we will take our progress in stages if we have to. And maybe Davy Duke short-shorts are better for ease of movement in battle.)

And then when the movie comes out, women dismiss it, and roll their eyes, and say it’s no big deal, and deny that it’s anything special, and don’t want to go see it with you because it’s stupid and just some sort of forced political correctness; or they do go see it but then write think-pieces/tweet-threads about how masculism has gone too far in this post-sexism age, and how there are too many movies these days catering to males, and how actually it’s women who are oppressed by men’s relentless demands to be considered equal members of womankind when in fact they’re now OVER-privileged, and you don’t seriously expect any MORE movies about male superheroines now that we’ve indulged you with this one, and maybe we should remake Batboy and Superboy to be about girls if this is how it’s going to be, and is there a way we could make the seventh Spiderwoman movie so that it has more hot guys in it, like maybe by having flashbacks to when Uncle Jay was young and hot?

“It’s not even that great of a movie,” the women say, shrugging, as if their opinion is the only thing that matters, as if that’s the point, as if movie quality alone is why the men are happy-crying and heartened. You make sure your kids see it (“especially the boys”? “especially the girls”? it’s hard to say which seems more important), and you buy a Wonder Man shirt to wear to bed; and if another movie about a male superheroine comes out, you’ll see it in the theater.

Elizabeth said she wanted to try eating a vegetarian diet for a week, and she did so, and then she said she wanted to try a second week. So here I am with things like TVP and MorningStar hot dogs in my shopping cart: one week of winging it seemed like it wouldn’t hurt her, but now I think I need to pay more attention and come up with substitute meals other than peanut-butter sandwiches.

I was a little dismayed to see that the faux hot dogs are made of almost nothing except wheat and “corn syrup solids,” which seems…non-ideal, nutritionally-speaking. I guess I was assuming they’d be made of tofu or something, and I should have checked. It was the only option at our grocery store, though, and Elizabeth said the hardest thing to give up was Friday night hot dogs, so I probably would have bought them anyway. There’s a health-food store in town; I’ll see if they have better options.

I feel like I don’t even know really where to start. I’ve never tried to eat a vegetarian diet myself, or had to cook for someone who was on one. I did go through a brief and non-strict Diet for a Small Planet stage in my very early twenties (like, age 20 and 21), because my first husband was into that kind of thing, so I remember there is a bunch of stuff about combining incomplete proteins, but I don’t remember how to do it. Also, I am pretty sure I remember reading a number of years ago that protein-combining was not as important as previously believed? But I don’t remember the source, or whether it was a reliable one.

I remember BEANS playing a big role, and Elizabeth does not yet like beans. She is also not fond of eggs. But I’ve told her she might need to learn to eat beans and eggs as well as some new things, and she is agreeable to that, so I’m going to start experimenting. She does like cheese and milk and yogurt.

Some meals are easy to replace. She can have her pizza with no pepperoni. At Thanksgiving, she can eat potatoes and vegetables and stuffing and cranberry sauce; she never ate the turkey anyway. I’m going to experiment with the TVP in tacos, or she can learn to like burritos made with beans, rice, and cheese. I’m going to see if there are some veggie burgers that are better nutritionally than the veggie hot dogs. But she and I were shopping on Sunday and we stopped at Wendy’s for lunch and…oops, I forgot she wasn’t eating meat. I got her a baked potato and a Caesar side salad, but it seemed a bit sad to both of us, and she said it completely removed the Treat element of eating out. I got her a cookie afterward, out of food pity.

I don’t know what to make for her if I’m making chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes and broccoli for everyone else. I need something kind of easy that can be cooking alongside, so that she can have whatever it is, plus mashed potatoes and broccoli, without me feeling like I’m making two entire meals.

I’d like to find some things that are not just vegetarian versions of other things. That is, I’d rather make her something that doesn’t have meat in it to begin with, instead of substituting in a lot of Faux Meats.

I know there are tons of resources out there, but right now it’s overwhelming. I don’t want a book of two hundred recipes, all containing items I’ve never cooked with before, all of which look like meals for a grown adult with adventurous palate rather than for a picky child; I don’t want a website with ten years’ of archives and a lot of talk about how bad it is to eat meat. I want, like, one recipe that someone’s teenage vegetarian daughter really liked. Or, like, one recommendation for a vegetarian item from the frozen-foods section. (I mean like one or two items per commenter. We don’t have to stop talking after the first comment.)

Edited to add two things I forgot to say:

1. She’s not eating fish.
2. She’s allergic to tree nuts (though not to almonds).

Paul has reminded me that it is time to print out Daylight Saving Time Ends to put on the fridge if I want to avoid everyone having those teeth-clenching conversations about whether it’s “really” earlier or later right now.

My friend Surely mentioned this song the other day and I had forgotten all about it and I am listening to it right now for perhaps the dozenth time since she mentioned it:

When I’m With You, by Sheriff.

DARK-HIGH-SCHOOL-CAFETERIA SLOW DANCING FOR MILES.

One of the things I like best about listening to a song on YouTube is following the suggestions. You start with When I’m With You, and then it’s Love of a Lifetime, and then High on You, and then Make Me Lose Control, and then I Can Dream About You, and then Just What I Needed, and then Wait, and then You Spin Me Round, and then To Be With You, and then ’80s Films, and then Love Love Love (avoid watching that last video if you share my Underwater Largeness Phobia)—and by then the Daylight Saving Time transition is over and no one is commenting on it anymore.

This weekend with friends the conversation turned to First Kisses: the FIRST-first kind and also the first kiss in a new relationship. This is a subject I apparently like to talk about more than The Average Person, so when the conversation turned (oh, too soon! always too soon!) to another topic, I was already getting ready to talk to you about it more later. I am not exaggerating when I say I woke up this morning impatient for comments to start coming in. KISS TALK!!

My FIRST-first kiss was when I was 16, with my first boyfriend, and it was after we’d been dating two months. We were not in any way unkeen about the concept of kissing, and had done plenty of hand-holding and sitting close and so forth, but I thought the kissing stage was Important and shouldn’t be just CAREENED into, and I especially wanted the FIRST-first one to be nice and meaningful; and he’d kissed girls before but never their First Kiss, and never someone who was making such a big deal about it, so he was all psyched-out and nervous. We ended up scheduling it, which exasperated and appalled our friends, but amuses and pleases me to look back on it now.

Another memorable first kiss, also high-school era, was with someone I wasn’t even dating. There had been Considerable Flirting but we were not in a relationship, and we were hanging out watching a movie and he said, “If I ask very nicely, can I kiss you?” And I was surprised, and took a moment to consider the question, and came down on the side of “Why, yes you may, good sir!” I don’t quite like the phrasing of the question now, but at the time I found it wonderfully meta and charming—and since we weren’t dating, it seemed right that he would inquire. And I was just starting to emerge from the hurricane of my first heartbreak, so a little kissing around with a cute non-serious boy seemed like a super good idea.

I completely fumbled the first kiss with Paul—and by then I had a whole (albeit petite) MARRIAGE behind me so you’d think I would know what I was doing, but no. I wasn’t yet old enough to realize I was never going to be someone who could pull off a devastating femme fatale move, and anyway it was really embarrassing and let’s not talk about it. We had a do-over another day and that was much better and allowed me to MOSTLY stop cringing about the first one. Life lesson learned: if you’re a femme fatale, WORK that femme fatale thing, gurl; but if you’re a talker/scheduler, BE a talker/scheduler. Just LEAN INTO IT.

I would like now please to hear about your various first kisses: FIRST-firsts, the firsts of each new relationship; the bungled ones, the sweet ones, the awkward ones, the successes. OH DO TELL ME!

Last time we talked on these topics, things were a little discouraging. But now they are so much better!

First, the tooth. You remember I’d gone in for what I thought was an appointment to get my flipper, but it was only an appointment to take molds for it, which left me having a little weep in the parking lot. But something I didn’t mention, because I hadn’t yet noticed the improvement to my life, is that while I was there the dentist made a few adjustments to the tooth tray, and those adjustments made it much more tolerable to wear: he filled in the little gaps and shaved off a little piece that was pressing uncomfortably against another tooth. It looked better, it felt better, it fit better, and it no longer whistled.

So that was already better. In fact, I worried that paying multiple hundreds of dollars for the flipper would turn out to be a dumb idea. But then I got the flipper itself, and it is MUCH BETTER. It is like a retainer, in that there is a piece of smooth plastic on part of the roof of my mouth. The dental assistant said some people hate that, but to me it feels like the comforting presence of a half-dissolved, perfectly smooth Werther’s Original Hard Candy. What I hated about the tooth tray was that it fit over ALL my top teeth; the flipper still feels intrusive, but it’s a kind of intrusive I prefer. I had a retainer for years, so maybe that contributes to the preference.

The tooth tray was visible when I talked or smiled, and my upper lip would get caught on it; the flipper is completely invisible from the front and looks just like a real tooth, and there is nothing to catch my lip on. I still have to learn to enunciate around the part that goes on the roof of my mouth, but I don’t have to think about appearance at all; I can talk and smile normally. The only thing I still hate is that I have to take it out when I eat. I hate that so much. Each time I have to eat with new people, I feel freshly self-conscious and upset about it. I was going to invite a new maybe-friend out for breakfast, and then realized I would have to take the tooth out to eat, and I decided not to. But this is going to be for the next, like, six to nine months, so really I have to get over it or else suggest a walk instead.

I also have an update about pottery class. Last time I mentioned it, I’d gone to two sessions and I was discouraged and wasn’t enjoying it. Now I’ve gone to four sessions. I nearly didn’t go to the fourth session (not quitting, but just taking a sick day because I really didn’t want to go), but I was already dressed in my clay-spattered clothes and I needed to run an errand in the area, so I just WENT. And this time things were better.

Part of what made it better was having your comments, which cumulatively informed me that not all pottery teachers/classes/philosophies are the same. Liz said:

It’s been a long time since I took ceramics in high school, but my memory is that you need to start small. Small amount of clay, little bits of water, small movements. Play with the clay without thinking about making anything with it. How flat can you make it? How tall? What happens if you have just your fingers on it? What about just your palms? Just play with no expectations.

Lauren, too, mentioned that SMALL was the key.

And I laughed with delight at all the comments that were basically “I HATED pottery but didn’t want to say so earlier.” And Jill, who commented “Well hell.” It made me feel so much better.

Anyway, I went in and the teacher was down the hall helping with glazing, so instead of trying once again to make the 1.75-pound straight-sided cylinder that I COULD NOT DO, I took a pound of clay and just messed around with it as Liz advised. And I kept in mind what Artemisia said about how clay-centering feels: “It is like the clay just disappears. You almost can’t feel it.” I aimed for that feeling, and although I didn’t entirely achieve it, I could tell I got a lot closer.

Instead of going with my teacher’s philosophy that you should know before you even cut off a piece of clay EXACTLY what you are going to make with it, I went with the philosophy that made more sense to me, especially for a beginner, which was Liz’s: just see what happens. And instead of going with my teacher’s philosophy that you should only keep what you LOVE or else you’ll be overrun with pottery and have nowhere to put it (and that makes a LOT of sense for someone at her ability level), I went with my own philosophy, which is that if I follow her philosophy I will end up with literally nothing, and that I really don’t want to attempt the next stages of the process with something that is precious: if I’m going to accidentally trim a hole into the bottom of something, or drop it on the way to the glazing room, or do it wrong so it cracks in the kiln, I want it to be something I don’t really care about.

I was nervous when my teacher came into the room and saw my tray of three little things, none of which were a tall straight-sided cylinder, but she gave a very positive reaction, as if she’d said that thing about the straight-sided cylinder but didn’t remember/mean it. I said my line about wanting to make some things I could practice trimming on without caring if I messed it up, and she said that was a good idea. So! I made something like a cup, and something like a little flower pot, and a flattish bowl, and a tiny little bowl like for dipping sauce. (The tiny bowl happened because more than half the clay broke off when I was trying to center, but I went with Liz’s “play, with no expectations” concept and just kept going with what was left.)

Oh! Also! While the teacher was out of the room, other students in the class kept coming over to help me, and they were saying things along the lines of, “[Our teacher] suggests doing it this way, and that’s a really good way! But [other teacher] suggests this other method, which is ALSO good and which I found easier.” Which really bolstered the “People do it different ways and you don’t have to do it exactly like this teacher says to” idea. And I started asking other students if I can watch them do things, which I wasn’t sure I should ask, but they seem to really LIKE showing me. And it’s a nice class for praise: there is a definite culture there of everyone asking people what they’re working on and commenting positively on it.

Anyway, I was SO MUCH HAPPIER not trying to make A Particular Thing! I am, as it turns out, a “let’s see what this piece of clay Wants To Be” type of person, not a “4-inch-by-6-inch straight-sided cylinder” type of person. I see huge merit in being able to make a set of four matched mugs, but I am not interested in doing that! at all! and I don’t have to! because I am an adult taking a non-required, non-graded class!

And one more thing that made me happier: thinking of this as a Pottery Appreciation Class—like Music Appreciation or Art Appreciation, where the benefit is in ending up better able to appreciate what OTHER PEOPLE do. I am already planning to lay down some cash for SOMEONE ELSE’S gorgeous ceramics, now that I know how difficult and time-consuming it is to learn how to do it beautifully.

I feel like talking with you, but I don’t have anything in particular to say. This is where in-person friendships work a bit better than blogging. I’d lead with “I feel like talking with you, but I don’t have anything in particular to say!,” and instead of me continuing to look at a nearly blank page on a blogging form, I’d be looking at YOU, and you’d say, “Well! I have something!” and then you’d tell me about it, and I’d sip my coffee and listen. Maybe I’d get a doughnut. TWO doughnuts.

There is no actual reason we can’t do that. I will get a coffee. Do you have anything you want to tell me about?