Lena Dunham and Me

I read Lena Dunham’s book Not That Kind of Girl and I liked it. I’ve gotta say it. She’s been getting a  lot of press, some of it accusing her of being weirdly interconnected with, and possibly abusive of, her younger sister. I gotta say I enjoyed the book. She’s funny. She’s young, sure.Painfully so, when I consider that she could be my child. Or rather, that I could have a child her age. Ouch. But she has some self-awareness, thanks to mucho therapy. You know how I feel about therapy. NO? Well, nevermind. I might turn you off by saying more.

How I feel about keeping Lena's book out so long.  

Anyway, my point. Despite all the negative press she has received, mostly from conservatives, I don’t think she wrote anything particularly disturbing about her relationship with her sister. Yes, she did look in her sister’s vagina, when her sister was a toddler and she was six years older than that. But it was because her sister had inserted marbles in there. I would have looked, too. And then she told their mother, and then her mother got to remove them. Ah, the joys of parenthood. Just the other day I was wondering WHEN my children might learn to throw up in the toilet. TMI? Sorry.

Anyway, yes, she shared a bed with her sister, and seems to have tried to lavish her with love as if her sister were her baby. This behavior is so classic I don’t even need a psych degree to analyze it. Let’s just say I was more direct in expressing my jealousy. I simply tried to kill my sister (six and a half years younger, like Lena’s younger sister) by holding her nose. When I let go, her nostrils stuck together briefly, and I panicked.

I like to think this is one of the reasons my sister grew up to be the excellent psychotherapist and psychoanalyst she is.

People’s reactions to Lena Dunham and her book reminded me of an incident regarding Harriet the Spy. The younger daughter and I read it for our mother-daughter book club. Thing is, as a kid, I loved Harriet the Spy. I related to Harriet. I was a writer. We had a housekeeper (a series of them, actually) with whom I had relationships. I even made a spy route around my neighborhood and wrote about it in a notebook. I knew what a dumbwaiter was because my nursery school was in an old mansion that had one. But when the younger generation read the book they couldn’t relate to Harriet. They thought she was spoiled and super rich. Yet I and my schoolmates and neighborhood friends all lived the same way. Many or most of us had housekeepers and working parents and went to private schools. It wasn’t so hard to achieve that standard of living back then.

Which is, I guess, why so many people feel that Lena Dunham is hopelessly privileged. By the standards of these times, she is. Most of the children I know do not have regular housekeepers or nannies. That style of living is out of reach for most people now. This seems like a tangible expression of those stagnant wages and real earnings I’ve heard so much about on the news. You know the stuff about how since the 1970s, people’s incomes haven’t actually kept pace with price increases and other economic stuff I know nothing about. But I do know about therapy and private schools and how my kids don’t get those things – but I did.

So I liked her honesty and her tone and her self-deprecating humor. And I guess I just don’t find her upbringing threatening.

In short, I related to Lena. How could I not, when she writes things like, “The germophobia morphs into hypochondria morphs into sexual anxiety morphs into the pain and angst…?” Sure, she was talking about middle school. I have never been that extreme. Although, come to think of it, in 7^th grade I fell under the spell of that saying, “See a pin, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. See a pin, let it lay, [something one syllable I can’t remember or never knew] bad luck is here to stay.” This meant that I had to pick up every safety pin I saw. Readers, there were so many of them. I hung each new find on a big pin I’d come across, sort of like safety-pin art, and I’d have to carry this set of pins with me. Eventually, I was pinning that bunch of safety pins to my underwear for protection every day. I think this stopped only when my stepmother asked with irritation why all my underpants had holes at the waistband and fear knocked some sense into me. I realized I couldn’t indulge this kind of obsessive behavior. I moved on to something more normal, picking my split ends.

Confession time.* I had this post about Lena Dunham almost ready a while ago. Back in ’14, I believe. But I didn’t get a chance to finish it. I think I had too much procrastinating to do. Then the book was due at the library. I love the library. And I couldn’t renew it because there is a waiting list for it. But I couldn’t return it because I had to look up a couple things to quote for you, Readers. Then it was Christmas and everything got “tidied up” around the house. This is shorthand for saying I lost it. But then I found it again, after New Year’s, and I returned the book. I promise I did.

How do you feel about overdue library books? I used to worry about them. I tried never to have overdue books. However, unlike my MIL, who has never returned a book late to the library, I have become a compulsive late returner. Worse, instead of feeling bad about this, I feel okay, because I know I’m performing a service to the library. They count on those overdue fees to contribute to their budget items. So, it’s actually a good deed, a veritable mitzvah, to return them late. As long as you pay those fines.

So what did I want to quote? Well, I intended to illustrate my statement that the book is funny and well–written. That Dunham, while young, is reasonably self-aware, thanks to a lot of therapy, about which she writes at length. She’s aware of how people view her – as a privileged, white, New Yorker. At the same time, she’s only in her late twenties, so she’s still got limited awareness of herself and a limited scope of interest. But she puts it out on the page well. For example, on page 46, she recounts a moment at college (Oberlin), where someone points out her sheltered upbringing by calling her “Little Lena from Soho.”

            “What a snarky jerk,” she writes. “(Obviously I later slept with him.)”

            Come on, that’s funny.

            If I could put myself out there on the page and be honest and raw and funny and insightful and get PUBLISHED and PAID to do so, I’d feel successful. Oh, yeah.

*Rereading this, to implement the fixes the husband pointed out were needed, this strikes me as hilarious, following as it does the paragraph about my 7th grade OCD. Not to mention the attempted suffocation of my sister. Like that wasn't a confession??

Poor Me

My poison ivy is weeping. Readers, did I mention that I have poison ivy? I mentioned the sore throat, right? No? Nor the poison ivy? How unlike me to suffer alone. Of course I’m not suffering alone. The husband is suffering with me. In fact, he may have decent grounds for divorce, based on the disgustingness of this patch of poison ivy – weeping poison ivy – that I keep showing him. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned about beauty from the French, it’s to keep some things a mystery. I’m wondering if poison ivy might be one of those things? 

And itchy. News flash: Readers, poison ivy is itchy. It can weep all it wants. I’m not feeling an ounce of compassion for it. It’s just one of several things (children) that have been weeping lately. I’ve used up all my compassion on them. Birds, boys, 11^th grade blues. I’m pretty sapped. So this poison ivy, and the endless sore throat have filled up my mind and lowered my ability to cope with anything else.

I'm thinking of Iyanla Vanzant's talk at the Oprah event last week, about how she said life teaches you  lessons you may not want to know, just like a real friend will tell you the truth, even if you don't want to know it. Is there a lesson here for me? Let's see.

Well, I'm pretty sure I got this poison ivy from the dog. Thanks, Milo. And I'm pretty sure he got the urushiol (that's the poison in poison ivy) from going beyond the bounds of his electric fence, following a trail scent from a bunny. (Tularemia.) And he went beyond the bounds of his electric fence because the battery in his electric collar died months ago....

No, there's no lesson here. Uh-uh. Nope.

I’m resisting an urge. I’m resisting two urges, actually. One is to scratch my poison ivy. The other is to put a photograph of my poison ivy right here, on my blog. Instead, I will show you a picture of the henna tattoo I got at the beach this summer.

Isn’t that nice? I felt all summertime free and easy with that lil’ elephant on my ankle. Of course there were moments when I felt otherwise, such as when I saw my henna tat as proof that I have no gainful employment, since a gainful employer would probably discourage a tattoo on an employee. Most of the time, however, I felt too free and easy to care.

I have a prescription for Prednisone to stop the itch from my poison ivy. However, I’m not into taking pills. They are scary. And this poison ivy isn’t exactly widespread all over my body. Nobody could call it an emergency. It’s just, you know, uncomfortable. I’ve been living in the Northeast for a looooonnnnggg time. Isn’t being uncomfortable part of the deal? Builds character and all that? It’s a freakin’ badge of honor for some folks. Am I one of them? No. 

No, I’m just a chicken. This may seem funny to some of my readers who recall my college days of “experimentation.” Unlike then, now the possibility of strange dreams and the munchies does not appeal.

Poor me, poor, poor me.

Fifty

Fifty. Readers, this number has rung up on the cash register of my life. In ten days I’ll be 50. In celebration of this event, our family is planning a vacation to Italy. It’s our first vacation, just the four of us, ever. It’s the first time I’ve been to Europe since 1988. I am scared. Yes, I am scared. In fact, the trip, while being a great idea, in theory, has totally stressed me out. I can barely bring myself to read the guide books. I can’t bring myself to shop for things I need like comfortable shoes.

Is it the trip? Or turning 50? Or both?

50 is of course a highly symbolic birthday. On the other hand, as others remind me, it’s just a day. It’s not as if I’m going to change radically on that day. In fact, in anticipation of it, I’m having my breakdown ahead of time. I already feel fifty, if fifty has a feeling, in that I think of myself as fifty already. Then I realize I’m cheating myself out of the last dregs of forty-nine. My forties. As if they were so great. They started out well, but oy, the muffin top. Among other problems. 

On the plus side, in my overeagerness I got that right-of-passage colonoscopy out of the way. As many told me, the worst part was the anticipation and the prep for the procedure. That didn't stop me from practically hyperventilating until they put the nice medicine in my arm and I went into zombieland. Afterwards, I felt great, and I left with photos of my healthy colon and proceeded to tell several people that all was well and then to tell them again the next day, not remembering that I'd already told them. This had nothing to do with age, and everything to do with that nice medicine.

So what about fifty is so scary? Well, it reeks of mortality. It seems like a big doorway to another phase of life – real, incontrovertible adulthood. Fifty is the place where things can start to go wrong physically and be terminal. At least that’s how my brain is playing it. I realize that’s kind of silly. Things can go wrong at any time. Indeed, in my own life, things went wrong once at 29. I survived. But I have the sense that things don’t usually really go terribly wrong, physically, until the fifties. It’s no longer easy for me to magically think, Oh, that won’t happen to me, when I hear of some illness or tragedy befalling someone else. I personally have always managed to have a sense that I’m going to be fine until I grow very, very old; at which time I will drop off peacefully in my sleep one night. This may surprise some of you who know what a hypochondriac I am; but these two strains, the hypochondria and the inner conviction of being protected from early death, have kept me in balance for quite a while.

The balance is skewed right now. Fifty is pushing the fact in my face that there is a lot of randomness to life and that is frankly scaring me. I suppose that’s just me having the typical midlife crisis. Indeed, as I think about it, I see it. Fifty arrives, and fear of death comes to the fore. Along with that, comes the reappraisal of one’s life. Inevitable regrets.

I feel kinda bad writing glumly about reappraising my life. After all, for quite a long time now, I’ve been all about success, success, success. I have to admit that at this moment, the success feels buried by these other worries. Also, I have been struggling with a book proposal, and as the husband astutely pointed out, the struggle has undermined my sense of achievement over the last umpteen months. It's hard to write about overcoming a sense of failure when once again I'm feeling like one. So the cycle continues. I’ve mentioned it before. System breakdown being part of the system. There are periods of frustration and fallowness even for the most productive, positive, go-getting types – so I’ve heard.

I’m continuing to write the proposal, albeit at a painfully slow pace, and I’m trusting the cycle will turn again, from frustration, from winter, to new creativity, to spring.

Hard Work and Other Things

I've been peaky this week, Readers. Caught a little bug during a three day trip to NYC and have been just the slightest bit off since. But I'm on the upswing. So. Highlights of the week since last I wrote: 

Well, last I wrote was from NYC, actually. I finished up and posted from the mother-in-law's apartment. It was a rainy snowy day. I was in the city because it's audition season for ballet summer programs, and my ballet dancer had three auditions lined up. I accompanied her and waited around. This was actually fine with me. Each was at Lincoln Center, so there was plenty of coffee to drink and shops to look in. I squeezed into a pair of jeans a size smaller than I expected to, so naturally I bought them. And I had a lovely drink and appetizer at the bar of PJ Clarke's one evening with another mom whose daughter dreams of a professional dance career. That part was nice. 

However, to each audition I brought a nervous daughter and picked up a disappointed one. It's really hard to witness the ups and downs. These girls are so hard on themselves it's almost impossible to understand the appeal of this passion. Where is the payoff for all the hard work they do, if they are always disappointed? I shouldn't say always. Usually. Mostly. And the road to a company is so hard, too. And there are so many young ballerinas hoping to dance professionally, all working towards so few spots. They're like, they're like sperm, programmed to give their all, even though only one lucky one will make it.

As a parent, is this what I want for my child?

Don't answer that. (She says to herself.)

Let me focus for a moment on the positives. Number one, the child has a passion that gives shape to her world. People with passions are lucky. Number two, she is accustomed to disciplined, hard work, repetition, practice, and incremental progress. These habits are transferrable.

Yes, they are transferrable. (She says to herself, under her breath, not suggesting that they would ever need to transfer.)

The 15 year old's belief in the transformative power of hard work is unshakable. Hers is the epitome of the growth mindset. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know about Carol Dweck and the growth mindset and how it’s key to sustained success. This is good, right? Hard work does accomplish a lot. Unbelievable things, even, sometimes.

But this belief has a downside, because it creates an unrealistic sense of control over outcome. It means she thinks that if she finds the right teacher at the right ballet school and works as hard as she can, she will succeed; whereas, those are incomplete determinants of success. We know that success depends on factors outside our control. Genetic factors like inherent talent or flexibility or musicality or body proportions, to speak specifically of dancers, for example. It also depends on circumstances. On luck. On being the one the program is looking for.

So I can't help worrying what will happen when she realizes that hard work won't take her all the way. It'll get her close. If hard work were all it took, she'd succeed - no question. But those other factors. That random chance thing. Smack into that at the wrong time and you wind up with an existential crisis.

So there's that to worry about.

Along with her dancer's feet. Have you ever looked at a dancer’s feet? They are not lovely, Readers.

In addition to the audition tour with the 10^th grader, here are some other things I’ve been doing this week:

• A drawing a day. Well, not exactly every day. A drawing a day was and is the goal, though. A friend suggested it. We share the pictures on Flickr. The 11 year old is drawing, too. So it's also a mom-daughter project.

• Three book clubs. I know. Don't say it. Three is a lot. Especially since I have a knee-jerk reaction against being told what to read. In my defense, I will say that one of these book clubs is a mother-daughter book club in which we read YA books and always have homemade baked goods; another is really a monthly dinner with old friends during which we pick a book to discuss the next month because we’re all interested in a lot of the same books - which is one of the reasons we are friends. That leaves one more official book club where I'm getting to know the people, as opposed to already being friends with all of them, and since we’re not a community of leaning over the fence chatting, the book club is the official, sanctioned way for women to get together.

• My shitty first draft.

• Meditation. Sort of.

• Yoga in the mornings. Sometimes just the barest of sun salutations.

• Kegel exercises. If you don't know what those are, you can look it up. You should be doing them, too (if you are a woman).

• Plucking chin hairs before they grow long enough to curl around themselves.

• Therapy Dog visiting at the middle school.

• Belonging to the Make-up Committee for the middle school musical (Seussical, Jr), which means face painting a cast of 75 students, one of whom is the 11 year old. She is a jungle animal.  

• Wondering if the pain in my side is cancer or gas. Wondering if the intermittent pain in my eye is cancer or fatigue. Wondering if my fatigue is just fatigue, or cancer.

So that’s an update on what’s been occupying my time and my mind - a lot of different stuff, which always feels like too much and not enough simultaneously. Periods like these feel like muddle, and muddle seems like inefficiency, although sometimes it's fertilizer for creative growth. One can always hope.

Update: This just in. One of the NYC auditions panned out and the dancer has been accepted for the summer. The dream continues uncrushed for now.

It's Hard to Be Me, but Easy to Influence Me

So I have my annual physical on Friday, to which I will bring my nattering nabobs of hypochondria with me via a list. My younger than me, thinner than me, doctor will respond to each item with non judgemental briskness and hand me a wad of referrals or bland reassurances. These will hold me until the next bout of “oh my God my feet itch - do I have an undiscovered autoimmune disease?”

It’s hard to be me.

Anyhoo, in preparation for the physical, I had to take care of lab work. I went to a different lab than usual, one in the same building as my doctor’s office. I was dreading the wait. I was dreading the whole thing. But I went. The waiting room was small, close, and dreary. Thank goodness it was almost empty. That meant I wouldn’t have to wait long, and more importantly, I wouldn’t have to wait long surrounded by people with indeterminate illnesses pressed cheek by jowl to one another, as my stepmother would say, watching a procession of the lame and the halt, as she would also say. In the close, dingy, small room. Germs, Readers, are what I am getting at.

It’s hard to be me.

But can I just say, the receptionist was a talkative lady. She was chatting away to a woman with messy hair right ahead of me at check in. And, truth, I was preparing to get annoyed by the unnecessary chatting. After all, I hadn’t had anything to eat except a tiny bit of peanut butter that I’d wiped off my tongue when I remembered I was supposed to fast for the blood work. Also, I’m an impatient person. Anyhoo, the messy haired woman finished up her chat with the receptionist just as I was about to sigh.

“You’re really nice,” she said, with a note of wonder, and went to a chair.

I know, I really shouldn’t talk about messy hair. I haven’t brushed mine, except right before a shower, since approximately 1986.

So then it was my turn. And the receptionist, let’s call her Lulu because she knew my name but I didn’t know hers, began to “Hope” me and complimented me on my jacket and before I knew it I was showing her the nifty titanium credit card holder with the mechanical gizmo that pushes the cards up so you can see a bit of each of them but crooks with electronic credit card readers can’t. Then it was party time at LabCorps, and I was demonstrating the gizmo for other office members and there was someone else behind me in line, but she didn’t seem on the edge of breakdown. She was interested in my gizmo, too.

Eventually, I took my seat, as far away from the messy haired lady as possible and listened to Lulu explain to the next lady in line that in addition to being the receptionist she is also a phlebotomist and soon enough I was out of the waiting room and was making a fist in the giant high chair and thanking the phlebotomist who wasn’t also a receptionist for a painless needle stick and I was on my way out when I heard, “Hope!”

A receptionist calling your name is not what you want to hear when you’re on your way out of the lab. Even a receptionist like Lulu. Were they going to need to do it over? Had they forgotten a vial’s worth of precious bodily fluid? Had they already discovered the unidentified autoimmune disease I didn’t know I had?

But, no, it was the credit card gizmo. Lulu had rallied a third person behind the desk AND another lady waiting to sign in for her lab work, and they wanted to see the gizmo. And they all wanted to know where I got it, and so another few minutes elapsed before I got out of the dingy, too small, windowless waiting room.

I was about to walk through the automatic sliding front doors to the parking lot – taking a moment to note my gratitude for the hands-free experience, considering that so many sick people would otherwise be touching the knobs and pulls I would have had to touch – when the obvious truth hit me. Lulu was practicing her Dale Carnegie skills for winning friends and influencing people. 

Readers, Dale Carnegie, while long dead, lives on through a website and courses and of course through his books. My copy of How To Win Friends & Influence people in its current edition carries the subtitle, “The Original is Still the Best! The Only Book You Need to Lead You to Success.”

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, Principle Number Two, I think. Give honest and sincere appreciation. That’s what Lulu was using. This principle derives from the idea that everyone wants to be recognized for something positive, everyone wants to feel important. Waiting to check in for lab work is one of those things that drains you of any feeling of importance. You add your name to a list. You proffer some kind of plastic card to prove you are solvent. You sit in a germy chair around other line items on a list who are solvent, and you wait. Lulu the receptionist slash phlebotomist knows this, and she also knows that buttering you up by complimenting your jacket or appreciating your credit card gizmo is going to make her life a lot easier. You are going to sit and wait in your yucky chair in a much better mood than if she barely acknowledges you. And it works. She tamed my irritability by praising my titanium card gizmo and having me demonstrate it, and thereby giving me strokes for having the cleverness to purchase this item.

A quick review of the book suggests she also used four of Mr. Dale Carnegie’s “Six Ways to Make People Like You.” These are: be interested in others; smile; use the person’s name (frankly, this can go too far and feel overfamiliar); and – this is similar to Principle 2 of handling people – make the other person feel important.  The other two, Be a Good Listener, and Talk in Terms of the Other Person's Interests didn't really apply. 

The guy was a genius, I tell you. Lulu learned her lessons well. She seemed sincere, and I was handled with deftness. Maybe I was used, just a little bit, but I didn’t mind. At least I didn’t notice it until I’d left the premises.

Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

I will add that to my list for the doctor.