the outside lane

Lane BeGone

September 21, 2012 the outside lane

I have cartridge toner under my fingernails, and it looks like I’ve been digging potatoes out of the earth with nothing but my gnarled claws, but my hair looks nice, so it balances? No. Dirty fingernails are my pet peeve. Listen, my dad works on cars all the time. His fingernails? Clean. It can be done. I recoil from dirty fingernails. Imagine how hard it was for me to watch the Lord of the Rings movies.

Speaking of recoiling…

I was in a seminar recently, and one of the men seated next to me was visibly uncomfortable being there. Not “there” in the classroom, but “there” beside me. My sense of humor was repellent to him. At first it was funny that he found me so unfunny, then it hurt my feelings, then it was funny again, and I honestly felt sorry for him having to sit there. So, I just concentrated on writing down my witty observations in the margins of my notebook, rather than sharing them aloud. I’ve had to sit beside people who made me feel like I was biting down on a raw nerve before. I know how that feels. [He was a very, very nice man, by the way.]

Karen pointed out that given how much unwanted attention I attract, he must seem like a vacation. Funnily enough, that was true-ish. Of course I’d like for everyone to like me, and of course I’d like for everyone to find my asides as amusing as I do, but we’ve agreed that even though all art is art, we don’t necessarily want all art hanging in our living rooms, yes? And, since my sense of humor leans to Soup Cans and Bowler Hats, I can’t expect leanings toward the Coronation of Napoleon to laugh along.

Ironically, the seminar was about how to manage your interpersonal relationships, and how to style your communication to meet other people’s needs. I’ve had this class before, which is how I knew to stop talking to the poor captive at my elbow altogether.

As usual, I ended up in the Personality Type group with the smallest number of people. All the other tables were full and bustling. My table, which appeared to be made up of three introverts-socialized-to-be-extroverts, reverted to happy, independent silence when the group work was introduced. Note to seminar people: Introverts are exhausted by group work, so when you leave them alone together, they will sit happily, side-by-side without ever speaking, doing the work individually. Then, when it is time to present, they will look at each other, and will communicate a decision on which of them will speak, using their eyebrows as semaphore.

This particular seminar types you in two ways. A month ahead of the class, you send out a survey to a minimum of 5 people, who score you out on how you function socially based on your control or expression of emotion, whether or not you communicate by asking or telling, and whether or not you appear to tend to the alleviation of your own tension, or to the tension of others. The first two sections give you your personality/communication type. The last gives you your versatility. You also take the survey, and when you get your results, you see where you scored yourself, versus where others scored you.

What you want is to see that you score yourself near to where others score you. This shows that you have a realistic grasp of yourself. I, apparently, have as much social function dysmorphia as I used to have body dysmorphia. The long and short of it is that the 10 people (current and former management, coworkers, peers, and old friends) who surveyed me did not find me nearly as annoying as I find myself. On the versatility scale, my people scored me as being extremely versatile, while I scored myself as being a stubborn mule.

I think this shows that while I may think and feel one thing, I have learned to adjust my attitude so that I can live among humanity without being driven from the village by an angry, pitchfork weilding mob. It’s either that, or take over and I am way too lazy to be staging coups.

Anyway. Of the animals I could have been (a turtle, a dove, a lion, or a peacock) I scored as a dove. And of the combinations to include secondary traits, dove-turtle, dove-dove, dove-lion, dove-peacock I could have been, I was a dove-lion. The facilitator short-lined that as being a worker who says, “Heeeeeey! Good to see you! I gotta work.” I can agree with that.

But no one wants to read about someone else’s personality type. You want to know how things ended up with the repelled man. Did I win him over with my charm? Did he come to see that my jokes were funny? Did he even crack a smile when I changed the animals to people? (Dwight Schrute/turtle, Marmee March/dove, Gordon Gekko/lion, and Liberace/peacock. ) Well, friends, the answer to all these is, no. No, he did not.

In fact, he bolted from the classroom so quickly after dismissal that I actually felt the air move. Had we been cartoon characters, my hair would have blown back.

2the9s, Style

Mixing It Up

September 20, 2012 the outside lane

Want to see what I am wearing today?

starsandstripes — Stars and Stripes. I am almost obsessively into mixed prints right now. And yes, that is a maternity skirt, but NO, I am not maternitized.

Let’s talk clothes.

I’ve been mixing prints for a while now. I grew up in a world where you wore print as an accent, and always with a solid, never mixing stripes with dots, or plaid with florals, but I think all those cute little, mixed-print dresses you see in the Zulilly type ads for girls seeped into my brain and suddenly, I find myself actively seeking prints to mix.

I mixed Thor’s prints at my cousin’s wedding a few years ago, and I was inordinately proud of myself for having done. Plaids and stripes–see his little collar and sleeve cuffs? So GQ. I just wanted an excuse to post this picture because it is a favorite of mine.

For me, the trick to mixing prints is color and size of print. Your colors have to match or blend impeccably, and your prints need to be of very different sizes. For example, I wouldn’t match a big floral to a big plaid. I would match a tiny floral to a big plaid, or a big floral to a tiny plaid. I probably wouldn’t match florals and plaids at all, actually, unless I was using the floral as an accent on the plaid. I could see a floral necktie, or waistband/belt on a plaid jumper dress, but not a floral top with a plaid skirt. Chloe Sevigny? She can see that, and it looks good on her. Not on me.

The other night, to the play, I wore a mixed-stripe cardigan over a floral dress. I liked it. Thor approved of it. It certainly got some looks. Whether or not other people liked looking at it is up for grabs, but I was happy wearing it, and that’s really what matters.

Wide and narrow stripes with a tight floral. It made me happy.

Fit, when you’re wearing prints, is also very important. If it is a rosebud, you don’t want it stretched out to the point it looks more like a carnation. (I used to have this glorious gored skirt–it was white with huge pink rosebuds on it. Apropos of nothing, other than that I love rosebud prints.) Now, I am not one of those “never wear horizontal stripes unless you are thin” people, however I am a “wear white whenever you want to” person, so take my opinion for what you think it is worth. If you are going to wear horizontal stripes across your hips, make sure the fabric drapes smoothly from the widest part of your hip, otherwise you can end up looking like you have big rubber bands wrapped around your body. My look, today, comes courtesy of teensy stars and chevron stripes, and the Misses and Maternity section–my skirt is a maternity skirt. No, I’m not pregnant, I just like some maternity clothes. I think it is actually a well kept secret that the only difference between maternity pants and skirts, and regular pants and skirts is the waistband, and the ease across the hips and thighs. There is some cute stuff in the maternity section! Maternity pants/skirts are cut to fit an expanding belly (by offering stretchy, often fold over waistbands–think about your favorite yoga pants), and wider hips and thighs (by offering a more relaxed cut across the bum.) Thus, if you’re looking for a fit that accommodates some junk in the trunk, and you don’t mind a more casual waistband, the maternity section might have something for you. This is especially true if you aren’t quite big enough to fit well into a Plus Sized cut, but are a skosh too big to be comfortable in a Misses Sized cut. (Now, if someone will just make a button down shirt that fits a big bust without looking like a button down tarp…)

Reviews, Uncategorized

A Review: War Horse…Winner!

September 19, 2012September 19, 2012 the outside lane

Thanks to Nicole Barrett and KLIF radio, I won 4 tickets to see War Horse at the Winspear, last night. It was marvelous! Marvelous.

From the War Horse on Stage website:

War Horse, based on the beloved novel by Michael Morpurgo, is a powerfully moving and imaginative drama, filled with stirring music and magnificent artistry. South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company brings breathing, galloping, full-scale horses to life on the stage — their flanks, hides and sinews built of steel, leather and aircraft cables.

Experience the emotional journey that charges through the battlefields of history straight to hearts of audiences around the world.

I have never seen anything like the puppets used for the horses. I had read, in reviews, that after a few scenes you forget you are looking at a puppet. I was skeptical, but I can tell you that within moments I forgot I was looking at a puppet. Those horses are alive with movement, breath, quivering manes and tails, and grace. The grace is indescribable.

Thor with the tickets we won, courtesy of the Nicole Barrett show on KLIF radio. Thank you, Nicole!

I’m not sure what I expected of the show. I hadn’t seen the movie, or read the book, so the lady at Will Call, where we picked up our tickets, made sure to let us know that there would be some loud scenes of war. Set during World War I, she wondered if that would bother Thor? Thor asked, “Will we get to see guns?!” Boy child.

The story is simple and the stage was spare. The stage set is an open area (so that the massive horses could move freely) with a black, backing screen with a slash of cream across at a height. It looks like a piece of a page torn out of a book, pasted across the “sky”, and it becomes the sky, and the earth, and the war–many things as pencil sketch drawings fill in the gaps between imagination and prop.

Here a window drops down, and here a door, and on the screen you see the scribbled thatch roof of an English farmhouse. Here stand the cast/crew with fence posts, and on the screen you see the rolling hills of the English countryside. Here sit the officers astride their horses, and on the small slash of screen you see the battlements behind them.

I was impressed by the way they utilized the screen. In one scene, after an entire half of the play in pencil sketched, black and white, the screen blooms with the bright red blood of British soldiers in the field, and as the splatters spread, they bleed into the shapes of poppies. It was simple, and understated, and intense.

This was Thor’s first theater experience, so as we were leaving, I asked what he thought. Among his delight at the horses and the tanks, he said, “I really liked that screen. That was really, really good.” So, it was well done enough that a jaded adult was impressed by it, and a 7-year-old neophyte could grasp it’s purpose and make an emotional connection with the scenery.

Thor standing in front of the War Horse poster at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. This was his first theater experience, and he was impressed with the massive horse puppets as I was.

War is hell on both sides, and this play did a great job of humanizing the soldiers. Sure, there are the caricatures you expect, but ultimately, what you see are human beings who have the same hopes, dreams, thoughts, and feelings, and whose only differences are in the styles of their uniforms, and the accents they bear.

I watched the year-markers ticking by on the screen and thought, “My grandfather wasn’t born yet. My great-grandmother would have been pregnant now. Boom would have been an infant. Boom might just have been learning to crawl. What kind of world was it for them? How uncertain?” It was a different war, for sure. What does a cavalry do against machine guns? What do horses do against barbed wire?

One of the themes of the play is the progression of mankind. I love that in this day of 3-D animation, CGI, and surround sound, I got to watch this simple, beautiful, unadorned show.

Every show has its challenges, and there were a few things that stood out to me (and to the man behind me, who was cataloging aloud), but none of them were significant enough to name. The cast performed very well, and the stage crew and puppeteers–you just have to see it to understand why they are so amazing.

Our friends Leslieann and Ellie were able to join us for the play.

I have been telling everyone about the horses in the show. Again, puppets, and puppets worked by three, full-sized adults each. I can’t explain to you how these grown people blended into nothing against the flick of a tail, or the shake of a head, or the stamping of a hoof, but they did. In one scene, two of the horses challenge and chase one another, rearing up and bucking in a choreographed dance that looked like equine ballet. In slow motion. Y’all, they did it in slow motion. And. It. Was. Perfect. It was breathtaking.

So how did my 7-year-old do at his first theater experience?

The play lasts 160 minutes with one 15 minute intermission. We hit the toilets right before taking our seats, so Thor was able to sit through the entire first half of the show–on the edge of his seat, which is where he stayed most of the time.

The second half of the show happened almost 2 hours past his usual bedtime, so I expected him to slouch, fall asleep, or show signs of restlessness. Nope. He did ask me two questions, but those had to do with the plot. He remained upright, engaged, and jumped up to participate in the standing ovation for the cast. He loved it. As well behaved a boy as I have, I give a lot of credit to the production for being so interesting and entertaining that the time flew by. It really felt like just an hour, instead of two and a half.

What I liked best:

The horses. They could not have been more realistic.
The story itself.
The way the screen/backdrop was used.

What Thor liked best:

The tank.
The horses.
The dialog between two soldiers, one British, one German, as they fumble their way through to saving a horse from harm. (Which should tell you how well done and how well acted the scene was!)

5 out of 5 stars

Once again, much thanks to Nicole Barrett and KLIF. We would never even have considered going to see the show without their gracious gift, and I am so glad we went!

Follow Nicole on Twitter.

Like the Nicole Barrett Show on Facebook.

A Day in the Life, Beauty, Family, Health

How I Lost my Baby Weight!*

September 17, 2012 the outside lane

With so much attention focused on how quickly mothers can “lose their baby weight” (in scare quotes because…scary how obsessed the media is with how quickly celebrity moms can lose their baby weight?), and with my favorite “how quickly did this celebrity lose her baby weight” getting lots of publicity today (click the link, you’ll get a good laugh), I thought I would share the things that concerned me in Thor’s early days, weeks and months. You know, the things that so many women are concerned with, when not being shouted at and called fat by the media for having dared to gestate a human being.

My first and most oppressive concern was in getting the child fed. We didn’t get the nursing thing down pat for several weeks, and I felt I had already failed as a woman by having been induced in a low-level emergency situation because I had planned an earth-mother (or water mother, actually, since I wanted to float around in a birthing tub), natural delivery. Not being able to nurse him as easily as the lactation specialist seemed to think I should consumed me.
Right alongside feeding him, was the cost of feeding him. Since he rejected (with a forceful stream of used formula, right across the room) the first few formulas we tried, we were told to buy one that many families (ours included) might find cost prohibitive. Fortunately, we were only tied to that as a mainstay for a couple of weeks, then it was only as-needed to top off his tank.
Was he breathing? You ask any new mother which is a top concern: Her weight or whether or not the new baby is breathing. You cannot know the number of times you feel the need to check just to be sure until you are responsible for one of those baby things. It is insane. You feel insane. But you go check again anyway, because some experts tell you that if the baby is on his back and he barfs, he will choke and die. Some experts tell you if the baby is on his stomach, he will smash his face into something soft, suffocate and die. Some experts tell you that if the baby is in a crib with a bumper, he will die. Some tell you that if the baby is–do you see where I am going? Not even the experts can agree, so you go check again.
The baby’s laundry is now ankle deep.
Is he pooping? If you have ever had a constipated baby… He cried. I cried. None of us were happy. And then I introduced the baby suppository. Wow.
He won’t go to sleep! When will he ever sleep?! Something is wrong!
He’s asleep…he’s been asleep too long! Something is wrong!
The baby’s laundry is now mid-calf deep.
When can I take a shower? Oh my word. I can tell you that my proudest moment in Thor’s earliest days was when I managed to take a shower AND wash my hair in one go.
Everything on you is leaking, and they don’t make pads for all of it.
Everything on the baby is leaking, and they don’t make pads for all of it.
The baby’s laundry is now knee deep–you did laundry two hours ago.
When do I eat? When do I sleep? Oh sure, they tell you to nap when the baby naps, but do you know how that works? You get the baby to sleep and you see this: The breast pump you haven’t had a moment to rinse yet, which you are going to need in half an hour. The bottles that need to be washed and sterilized. The diaper pail that needs changing. The mess in the living room. The mess in the kitchen (because you still have to feed the other members of your family, too. Don’t forget that.) The detritus from the baby’s bath. Your own post-baby garbage that needs to be taken out (so incredibly gross). Your own milk/poop/urine/barf/drool/food stained wardrobe (when Thor was 3, I lost my freaking mind over fingerprints on my Easter dress because I hadn’t had a stitch of clean, just clean clothing in three years. I will never forget the look on B’s face as he steered the confused child away from the crazy lady.) There are phone calls to return, emails to check, knocks at the door to answer. If you can fall asleep after running through this mental list, good on you. Because the baby will wake up just as soon as your breathing regulates.
Laundry. Oh my god, the laundry.
I was consumed with worry about going back to work. Forget about the pressure to be thin, I was dealing with the judgment of literal strangers, who felt perfectly justified in telling me that I was dooming my child to a life of delinquency and crime by shuffling him off to daycare so I could fulfill my selfish desires to keep a decent roof over his head.

I could keep going. I could go all day. And, while it is true that I was excited to drop enough baby weight to fit back into my pre-baby clothes, I didn’t give a stinky diaper what anyone else thought about it. And I wore my maternity pants anyway.

If you are having a baby, or have recently had a baby, listen to me: The only people who are worried about your size are the people who stand to benefit from it monetarily. You spend your time loving that baby. You spend your time taking care of yourself mentally because babies, whether you birth them, adopt them, have one dropped off on your doorstep by a stork, or are just watching them for an hour while their mothers try to get showers, are the most mentally and emotionally taxing challenges you will ever face, and you need to be good to you so that you have the wherewithal to be good to them.

Take all the (viable) help that is offered to you. You need it. Anyone who has ever stared at a newborn all night long, trying to suss out why it won’t stop crying KNOWS that you need the help. Accept it gracious, gratefully, and go take that elusive nap. Do not let anyone try to convince you that you need to spend your free time doing crunches (unless that is what you truly want to do.) Anyone who does, slap them upside the head with that diaper pail bag. Twice.

*I have no idea how I lost my baby weight. It just happened. I gained a total of 34lbs, and when I came out of the hospital, I’d lost half of that. The other 15…I don’t know. It just came off over the two months after Thor was born. I cannot offer you a lick of help when it comes to weight loss.

All I can offer you is this: Even if I had never lost the weight, I had Thor, and that child…people. That child is the light of my life. I would weigh a thousand pounds, happily, if it meant his health and happiness.

A Day in the Life, Advice

The Purposeful Tourist

September 15, 2012 the outside lane

I used to really worry about doing things “right”. That is, I used to worry about doing things in a way that would show me to be urbane and cosmopolitan. If I read a list of 10 Things NOT to do When in Paris, I would memorize it just in case I found myself in some little cafe there. I never wanted anyone to think I was a tourist. This is why I did not wear sneakers to Europe. Three days in to my tour, I wished I had worn sneakers. I may not have looked like a tourist, but my toes were bleeding, and that’s gross.

I read this list of things NOT to do in Italy, and one of those things was order coffee after noon. I saw the same thing on one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows, talking about how only the gross tourists order coffee in the daytime or evening. Ten years ago, I would have dog-eared this information, along with the proper pasta twirling technique. At this point in my life I say, and it is best said in a French accent because that makes everything sound snootier, “Fie on your lists. If I want coffee at 5pm, I will order coffee at 5pm, and if you think I am a gross tourist, you can go hmph yourself. I’m the one paying you, not the other way around. You do it my way.”

This is proof positive that I am a nasty American, I suppose.

I also don’t get having to forgo ketchup or steak sauce if you want it, or soy sauce in a sushi restaurant just because the chef thinks his meal is perfect as it is served. Again, if I am paying for it, I want to eat it the way I like it. I want my salmon well done. I want my tuna well done. I want my A1 on the side of my steak. If this makes me a Philistine, well, I am happy to wear the robe because it fits. In fact, give me two robes because I will probably order the wrong wine as well. Actually, I will probably order a Coca-Cola. And I want a straw.

It is ridiculous to me to hear of chefs who won’t serve their guests because their guests’ palates aren’t up to the chef’s standards. It is just as ridiculous to me that some designers won’t cut more generous sizes because, gasp! fat people might want to wear them!

164832_1788472521610_7563234_n — Thor and me being tourists in Manhattan. We’ll take it!

It’s all faux elitism. “If I don’t follow these silly, arbitrary rules that exclude people who aren’t in on the secret handshake, how will the people who aren’t in on the secret handshake know they are missing anything? And if the riff-raff don’t know they are missing something, how can I enjoy lording it above them? Look at this cake you can’t have, you Poor! Now, have some cake! Hahahaha! You can’t! Nom nom nom!”

Whatever. I can cook my own steak, and it tastes just as good. And I can have my coffee without getting side-eye from twit who thinks there is something wrong with being a tourist.

Tourists rock.

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