Mommy, where did the pooh stick go?

Main Entry: pro·voke
Pronunciation: \prə-ˈvōk\
Function: transitive verb
1 aarchaic : to arouse to a feeling or action b: to incite to anger
2 a: to call forth (as a feeling or action) : evoke b: to stir up purposely c: to provide the needed stimulus for

Last week was scary, I'm glad it's over, now lets play Pooh Sticks.

Pooh sticks, of course, is the game where you and a friend each drop a stick over one side of Christopher Robin's bridge in The Hundred Acre Wood, then cross to the other side of the bridge to see whose stick emerges in the current below first...or last, makes no diff. See, the beauty of Pooh Sticks is in the lack of definition as to who wins. Does the stick that fights the current win? Or the stick that rides the current? Or perhaps the one that is stuck in an eddy and swirling gracefully just under the bridge out of sight?

Not actually stipulating what constitutes winning cleverly ensures everyone remains happy in The Hundred Acre Wood. (Now there's a cumbersome sentence and my kind of competition!)

I've had a discussion with myselves and we've agreed that we are, basically, selfish.

Me : (buttering toast) Ok, shall we put it to a vote?
Myself: Could you pass the butter sometime today?
I: (Gets up to look in the mirror) Could we get this over with? My hair is going to be all crimply if I don't style it now.
Myself: BU TTER PLEASE, geez, you've used like half a stick!
Me: Why don't you just get another stick outta the fridge?
Myself: Fine. I, could you grab a stick of butter on your way back?
I: You're the one who thinks we need to work out, get up and get it yourself!
Myself: GOD you are so selfish sometimes! All you think about it your stupid hair!
I: IF IT DRIES BEFORE I STYLE IT, IT WILL HAVE A CRIMPLE!!
Me: So? What's wrong with crimpled hair? (salting toast)
I: NO ONE LIKES A CRIMPLE!
Myself: Geez frikkin' louise, I hate this family. (gets up and stomps to fridge)
Me: PEOPLE!! WE ARE VOTING! SELFISH OR NOT???
Myself: THERE IS NO BUTTER LEFT IN THE FRIDGE. YOU ARE USING THE LAST STICK OF BUTTER AND YOU'VE PUT MORE THAN HALF OF IT ON ONE FRIKKIN' SLICE OF TOAST!!!!
I: I don't know about selfish, but SOME of us are pretty darned CRANKY. Can we take a vote on THAT?
Me: NO. We are voting on SELFISH. Remember, we were gonna determine if we need to be a little less self-centered and a little more aware of the needs of others around us?? It was one of our New Year's resolutions?
I: Can't the voting wait? I just need ten minutes to dry my hair. TEN MINUTES.
Myself: I'M NOT VOTING TILL I GET SOME FREAKIN' BUTTER!
Me: FINE! Here's your stupid butter (passes the remaining sliver).
Myself: Keep it, my toast is cold now.
I: Dammit, my hair is crimped!
Me: Ok! (puts the remaining sliver on the last bite of toast).
Myself: You should redo your hair, you have a crimple.
I: Fuck off, bitch.

The conversation didn't go as well as we had hoped. In the end, we concluded that we are mostly selfish and a little crimpled. And that we need more butter. These are the three key takeaways from that important conversation.

Now, here's the thing about selfishness - it's self-perpetuating. Case in point, if acting selfish makes you feel good about what you've done, you'll likely continue to be selfish.

If, on the other hand, acting selfish makes you feel bad about yourself, you'll likely determine to act less selfish in the future, resulting in your feeling better about yourself but with the motivation for acting selflessly based in a selfish desire, returning full circle to acting in a selfish manner.

A truly selfless act should be like dropping a Pooh Stick into the water and not running to the other side of the bridge to see what has become of it. To qualify as selfless, the act should not generate any thought of recognition or other gain to or on the part of the person performing the selfless act.

I need more toast. And I think I should quit talking to myself.

Me: I agree.
Myself: Hey!!

The mantra will get you home, the shoes will get you fucked

Jody wants to do an adaptation of a book and asks, "Velveteen Rabbit or Wizard of Oz?" First, L. Frank Baum's classic has been adapted to death, and nothing tops the original. Second, I think Velveteen Rabbit would make a killer horror story, don't you? I would read it to my grandchildren...but only in the morning cuz if I read it to them at night, they would have to stay awake for hours having to calm me down. I mean, I got seriously freaked over the rabbit in Spamalot...

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed help in any way...oh, sorry, I mean, when I was younger, we watched the Wizard of Oz every single year. My mom would jiffy pop some corn, we would sit three in a row in front of the black and white tv with the long plastic tuning stick that could be inserted in a little hole on the front of the tv, sort of a prehistoric rabbit ears (not the scary kind like the Velveteen Rabbit murder mystery adaptation I will read later in life and not the chocolate Easter Bunny kind that my dad used to eat before we could have even a single bite), and we would watch this wonderful show about color - ruby slippers, yellow brick road, emerald city, horse of a different color - we would watch this colorful show...in black and white.

And then we got a new tv. And we sat with our popcorn and tuning stick (what did we know? We were kids and the tuning stick was part of the experience!) and watched Dorothy fall into the pigpen, and watched her ugly neighbor ride helter skelter on a rickety two-wheeler, and watched her stamp her petulent foot against the closed and locked cellar door, and watched her clutching Toto tightly as her bed was flung from side to side and watched as EVERYTHING. WENT. STILL.

I remember that moment, on this new TV, when Dorothy opened the door and looked outside and saw...color.

We gasped! I couldn't breathe! We had no idea the horse really was a different color! And the RUBY SLIPPERS!!! They were, to my young mind, the MOST BEAUTIFUL SHOES IN THE WORLD. Oh, I was in love for the first time and it was with a pair of shoes.

Of course, years later I realized those weren't really rubies on the slippers, they were stupid sequins. Thoroughly disillusioned, I quit liking shoes and went on to liking boys instead...from a distance because I was shy.

Then I got married and had kids of my own and started reading books to them, books like The Velveteen Rabbit and The Wizard of Oz and...WHOA! Back the buggy drawn by a Horse of a Different Color up! The ruby slippers were...(GASP!) SILVER! Whaaaat??

My entire childhood went swirling clockwise down the toilet. Clearly, L. Frank Baum was not aware the value of silver was decreasing while the Technicolor value of rubies was skyrocketing. And the Emerald City? It was only emerald IF THEY KEPT THEIR GLASSES ON.

I haven't watched the movie or read the book since (although I did enjoy Gregory Maguire's adaptation, Wicked; I saw the play as well, with Jody, and of course it differed in significant ways from Maquire's vision, and not improvements I might add. Why can't people leave good enough alone? Is it because we are taught from early on about good, better and best, to never let them rest until good is better and better is...well not quite as good as good was, but sequels stretch a buck to a buck fifty?)

People often wonder what was in Baum's mind when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. My literary angelica thinks the book and movie are all about capitalism. I personally think it's much simpler than that - to me, it's about searching for our self.

Dorothy isn't content with her plain jane life, and the discontent she feels deep in her soul launches her on a tumultuous journey into exploring other ways of life where she gets down and cozy with thoughtlessness, fear and a callous attitude towards everything. Along the way, she is haunted by evil thoughts which vie with her own inner bubbly goodness, and she is simultaneously awed by the rich color of other lifestyles while realizing they are not going to fill the void in her soul, the void that longs to find a place called "home." She gets quite confused about what she wants from life until one day, in a moment of remarkable clarity, (perhaps the opium wore off?), she realizes she isn't so very far from home after all, because home isn't a house or a farm or an emerald green lifestyle, home is in our souls and that is where we should look for it, it was there all along.

Merriam Webster's online dictionary lists nineteen definitions for the word home. And in over three hundred words, it still cannot completely convey that feeling we recognize when we are well and truly home.

The Irish lass hosted Candlelight Supper last month, and we laughed and ate and opened pressies, she and I and other close friends. She'd put up a tree and lit candles and even laid out the traditional Christmas Crackers, you know, the ones that you pull the ends on and there's a popping sound and a trinket flies out along with a joke that a 7 yr. old might have written?

And when I popped my cracker, a compass fell out and I picked it up and looked at it, at the wobbly needle pointing somewhere between north and northwest, and I looked around me, past the colored lights and colorful friends, and I realized in a moment of startling clarity, that I was well and truly home.

I spent years being someone I was never meant to be with only bits and pieces of the real me popping out now and again, I came far too close to being swallowed by my own evil thoughts, and I was no longer interested in the answers being given by a silly man behind a curtain. Somewhere along the line, I made a wish as deep and heartfelt as it could be, and I was home.

And it didn't take a fancy pair of shoes to get me there, although a new pair of shoes would be nice. Which do you think, silver or ruby?

Fuck The Pain Away

Main Entry: (2) quick
Function: noun
Date: before 12th century
1. quick plural : living beings 2. [probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse kvika sensitive flesh, from kvikr living] a: a painfully sensitive spot or area of flesh (as that underlying a fingernail or toenail) b: the inmost sensibilities c: the very center of something : heart 3. archaic : life 11

Pain is an interesting thing, no? We stub our toe and the nociceptors in our foot send a message to our brain in the form of an electrical impulse, something equivalent to, "Warning, the outer perimeter of your body has been breached, pain will commence in T minus 15 milliseconds." Our brain translates that impulse into something equivalent to "GODDAMNFUCKINGSONOFABITCHSHITTHATHURT!" The funny thing is, without the nociceptors, we wouldn't know it even hurt. Stupid nociceptors...

Yeah, I know; without nociceptors, we wouldn't feel pain (coolio) and thus, wouldn't learn to avoid things that pose a serious threat to our health and welfare (blah, blah, blah). Ok, so they are necessary; they're still stupid.

Still, pain has a way of centering us that is appreciated by this mortal body, for one. When I was younger, I would sit with my school chair on my toes to help me concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. It worked too! (Perhaps I'll test this on someone else, see if a little pain helps them focus on whatever task is at hand - oops! sidetrack and possibly TMI!)

By the time we are of any age of consequence, our bodies have become pros are swatting away physical pain - like cold or hunger, ingrown toenails and papercuts, even the occassional burn from a McDonald's coffee spilled. The nociceptors send their little message, and our brain responds, "Yeah, yeah, I'm busy, go away, I'll deal with it later." On rare occasion, someone will, say, stab the back of their hand with a steak knife in an attempt to spear a corncob for God knows WHAT reason, and then the brain interprets a little more violently. But even then, the nociceptors calm back down and the electrical impulses return to their normally scheduled program, and life goes on, etc...

Emotional pain doesn't work quite like that. Emotional pain doesn't so much center us as touch our center. It's kind of like the beam of a flashlight, one of those high-end maglights with variable focus capability that allows you to dial the beam down from a broadly disbursed illumination to a pinpoint blinding white light that picks out the tiniest emotional spider and blinds every last one of its compound eyes. Emotional pain drills down into the center of our being where all the really hefty feelings are kept, like the L words - love, lust, longing, loneliness. The F words are there as well, along with the A words. It's not so easy to brush away the pain touching these, and the illumination it brings to the center of our being is not always welcome.

And Peaches wants us to fuck the pain away. Basically, the song is encouraging us to do something about the pain - to counter it with an equally aggressive physical action.

Ok. I'm down with that. To be honest, people respond all different ways to emotional pain. Some people get angry, some get sad or depressed, some go straight to denial refusing to let their eyes travel down the path of illumination. I've tried some of each and I find that the best way to deal with emotional pain is continue sitting with the chair on my toes until I am focused on the topic at hand.

The pain is there for a reason; I won't deny my soul the opportunity to learn from a painful experience. I won't. It isn't the hurting that I should ignore. But pain is like a sonic boom that sets off car alarms up and down a street; when that electrical impulse hits our brain's interpretive center and our brain shouts out that string of obscenities, we set off ALL SORTS of alarms in that emotional center - fear, insecurity, anger, to name a few. Even if they are not appropriate or justified, they still jump up and down, waving their hands to be chosen by the light, "ME! ME! ILLUMINATE ME!"

And I am the sort of person who is inclined to generously include all those extra feelings when I am in pain. I screw with the lens and widen the beam and let the light include all sorts of things that have no bearing on anything pertinent, and the widened beam loses its intensity and the spider gets away.

I'm tired of the spider getting away.

So, my new year's resolution has nothing to do with weight or exercise (although I intend to tackle both). My new year's resolution is to feel and deal. I will follow that pinpoint beam and see what it illuminates, and when I arrive at that precise and well-lit location, I will see what I can see and do what I can do to walk from that location in a healthier frame of mind than when that pain-filled journey began.

If I'm not mistaken, I've just move The Year of the Spider up 364 days. Oh geez.

Happy New Year!