Dear Popular Kid

Dear "Popular" Kid-
You think you're too cool for my kid. Your mom probably tells you that, because my kid is a little different and not terribly athletic, that it's okay not to be friendly towards him- that it's okay not to respond when he speaks to you or invites you to hang out on a Saturday.  Maybe it's because my family hasn't lived here for a generation or because we don't belong to the right clubs or maybe it's because I work full time and don't volunteer at school all that much.  Or hell, maybe it's because of the political sticker that was on my old car.  You probably think you have enough friends- that you don't need anymore.  Maybe your mom thinks the same thing- that she doesn't need any more people in her life so there's no payoff in trying to accept a new friend in your world.

But you're both wrong.

'Cause there's no payoff for being mean.  None.  Kindness is the most important thing, always and always.  See, before you got all "too cool," I didn't have an opinion about you.  Not one way or the other- you were just another kid on the playground.  Now, though, I know you.  I know who you are and what kind of person you are and, should you ever need something from me, I'll...

Help you. Of course I'll help you.  Because you may not be kind, but I. Am.

And that makes me way more Badass than you'll ever be.

(But your mom? She can totally suck it.)

Boobs- Pt 2

For the record, during a mammogram, snarling at the person handling your boobs to "Stop shoving me around like a piece of meat," is not a good idea.

Nor is asking her how often people tell her she sucks.

She gets vengeful.

Ouch.

Jesus Bugs

Jesus Bugs (aka water striders) are those little bugs that skim across the tops of ponds and streams.  You've seen them, I'm sure. I sort of love 'cause the idea of Jesus as this little bug, about to get eaten by a fish...I don't know.  I'm pretty sure there's a joke there somewhere.  

Anyway, I've always wanted to be like a water skater- metaphorically speaking. Skimming across the top of life, not making a dent in anyone's life.  Zero impact- except for the positive.  That meant always being agreeable, always smiling, always saying yes, sure, I'd be happy to...

That got me nowhere, but it took me almost 40 years to figure it out.

This week we got some news of the "mixed blessings" variety.  My darling TMOTH needs surgery. It's good news because 1) it's possible to fix this thing we've been dealing with for 2  year and B) it's not what they categorize as "major."  The mixed part comes with the words "Six Weeks of Recovery" and "Two weeks of absolutely no weight on one leg."  We're a busy family- the kids are totally over involved and my work is going crazy (I know-  "Just be happy you have a  job, just be happy you have a job...") and having TMOTH totally out of commission for 6 weeks is going to be, um, tough.

Really tough.

One the one hand, I want to call out the cavalry.  Casserole brigade, please?  someone to schlepp my kid hither and yon?  Yes, thanks! On the other hand, though, my internal Jesus Bug still lurks.  Zero impact, remember?

Put all of those things together and they come out in this weird cocktail of mad and sad and scared which, to the naked eye, look like Cranky.  Grumpy.  Crabby.  MEAN.  That's how I spent yesterday and I think I scared TMOTH and the kids and my folks and the dog.  (I'm most worried about the dog, to tell you the truth, 'cause she's usually pretty fearless.)  But today, in the bright sunshine with a fresh cup of coffee and a fully night's sleep behind me, I'm feeling...better.

Now part of me wants to go around apologizing for my mood yesterday- and I probably should at least check in with folks to let them know it was a passing thing, not my new outlook on life.  But there's this other part of me that looks at the big dent that I left yesterday and say...yeah.  Those were feelings, you know?  Big as they come and damn inconvenient at times, but hey-

it beats getting eaten by a fish, right?

Remember the name...

My friend K asked me a really good question the other day. 


"Why are you so terrified that someone might remember you?"


It's a good question.  Without meaning to, I work very hard to be nondescript- to be on non-memorable- because it's safer.  "Keep your head down and no one will shoot it off," you know?  (Granted, that might be better advice if I lived in a war zone (as opposed to Groovy Land), but I've always taken it as a basically Good Idea.  Well, at least since high school.  I think I was wicked memorable then.  The stakes were lower somehow.


I don't think it's in my best interest to stay hidden in the weeds anymore. I think the badass is about making sure that people always remember me for better or for worse and not being so afraid that they won't like me. Because you because really what's the worst thing that could happen? They remember me? They think I'm fabulous? They think I'm horrible? 


More likely, I won't even be in their heads at half an hour after. I maybe I will. So today, I will strive to be memorable. I will not censor myself. 


I will be afraid to be remembered.

Win

http://tinyurl.com/6lh2k9y

Somedays, I think the most Badass thing I can do is get out of bed, let the dog out, and smile at my family before I've hooked up the coffee i.v.   If I can manage to get through the ensuing 10-14 hours of drop-offs, pick-ups, technology snarls and bad frozen lunches without snarling at strangers, throwing things at my co-workers or bursting into tears at an inappropriate moment, I consider it a win.  If I can do all that and everyone I'm responsible for is still alive when I go to bed, it's a giant win.

A mega-win.

And if, on one of those mega-win days, I also manage to blog something? After months and months of life-and-stress-related non-blogging?  Then I'm freaking QUEEN of the Win.


You'll notice I said nothing at all here about quality.  Quality is the enemy of Win- and Win is the essence of the Badass.

So I'm not Marion Ravenwood

Remember this?



This is what you'd think I'd done last night based on this morning's headache. In reality, I just went to book club and had a glass of wine. Okay, maybe two.

 Though, now that I think about it, maybe it was more like this:

 

Hungover on a Tuesday after two glasses of Chardonnay? SO not badass.

My Secret Identity

Back to school has commenced, with all that entails, and I've found myself pulled in a couple of new and fairly uncomfortable directions.  In spite of my swearing I'd never do it, I've gotten involved with the PTA and, unfortunately, they turned out to be very nice people which sort of sucks 'cause I'd mentally written this whole post about how crazy they all were.  (Trust me- it was pee-in-your-pants funny.)  Too bad they were't.  Crazy, I mean. I don't know about the pee-in-your-pants funny part yet.

So that happened.  The other thing that happened didn't actually happen to me per se.  It sort of happened to everyone but, like all moms, I mostly only care about my kids- or at least I care more about my kids- so that means it happened to us.  The "it" was testing and, it's bastard mutant offspring, "loss of recess."

Yeah.  It's like something out of a morality play or a Dr. Seuss book or a Dickens novel or, at the very least, a Very Special Episode of Phineas and Ferb.

I spend a big chunk of my professional life causing trouble of just this variety.  I like to imagine that I'm sort of stealth bomber in pearls and a sweater set.  They hire me to do a simple job and I open up a Pandora's Box of questions.  I love it and I'm pretty good at it, I think.  I help people push back against stupid ideas like these.  Thing is, like all superheroes, I keep my professional and personal lives very separate.  I'm rocking this whole secret identity thing (some days Nice Lady with Cookies and Monkey Bread!  Next day Crazy Chick Asking Snarky Questions at Inappropriate Times!)  and it's starting to jam up the Badass.  

So let's say I come out of the closet, so to speak.  Let's say I drop the whole secret identity thing and just let it all roll out.  What if I do for my own kids just what I do for other people's kids?  Will my worst fears actually come to pass?  Will I suddenly lose all my friends?  Will my children suddenly be ostracized ?  Will strangers point and giggle when I walk down the street?  Will unemployment, homelessness and a bad haircut follow almost immediately?

I used to teach debate and my students would play this game- ThermoNuclear War- where they would take any decision and try to see how it could lead to Armageddon.  The person who could do it in the fewest steps was the winner and you didn't get points for the most likely or even possible sequence of events.  So now I have to ask myself, is this my own little game of Personal Annihilation?  Are all of these imagined consequences really just a way for the Dr. Evil Doofenschmirtz in my head to keep the Badass quiet?

Hell if I know.  But it's a question worth pondering, don't you think?

I Thought This Would Be Sexier

You know that scene from the 90's flick Ghost?  The one with the potter's wheel?  This may job your memory:

Yeah.  So I'm old.  Get over it.

See, here's the thing.  I've been using this whole "potter at a wheel" metaphor a lot lately.  Not 'cause I'm teaching classes in pottery or anything, but because I'm trying to step back from this need to MAKE things happen.  I mean, I can spout buddho-mindful flarn all day long, just so long as I'm spouting to other people.  But when it comes to me?

Yeah.  Not so much.

So imagine my shock when my choice to say "Yeah, do what you want" to not one but two important people actually worked this morning.

I know.  Crazy.

I didn't force them, just put the idea out there and...wow.

It's not nearly as sexy as I'd imagined, but dammed if it didn't work.

Huh.

Looking for Mama

Here's the thing:  Sometimes the badass rises up all on it's own.  I see stuff like this stupid T-shirt from JC Penny (not the one you may have heard all about last week, but this one's just as bad) and it just springs forth like Athena from the head of Zeus.  (Can you tell we've been reading some Percy and the Olympians in my house lately?

But you know what squashes the badass like a pea under a 300 lb princess?  Tears.  Specifically, little girl tears.  More specifically, *my* little girl's tears.  In the face of that, I've got nothing.  No badass.  No snark.  No force-to-be-reckoned with.  Nothing.  I crumble.  I waffle.  I fold like a crappy tent or a really good map.  In the moment when I most need to model my badass self for my girl, I'm not doing it.

And it pisses me the hell off.

She doesn't need loving, huggy, kum ba ya Mama.  She needs "get your ass through that door and don't let those feelings get in your way" Mama.

Um...has anyone seen that one? That kickass Mama? 'Cause I'm sure she's around here someplace...

Saying No

I've been on a media black out for about a week now, at least where coverage of 9/11 is concerned.  I've avoided the articles in the paper, the Truther's letters to the editors, the specials on TV.  I've stayed of NPR and limited my web time to the most mindless and entertaining sites I can find.

So this morning, I was oddly surprised to find that even the comic pages weren't safe.  I was surprised to fin that, unlike every other media outlet in the country this morning, they were filled with tasteful, carefully designed tributes to the losses suffered.

But here's the thing:  on 9/11/01, I was cocooned in a world of work and baby and family.  I lost nothing that day.  No one I know was killed, no one was injured.  A couple of friends were part of the numb parade across the bridges, but other than that I had no personal connection to anything that day.  And watching the days and weeks and years unfold, I've had this strange sense that I'm eavesdropping on a stranger's funeral.  I don't belong here and, quite frankly, the masturbatory need of some to co-opt this tragedy confuses and saddens me as much as the tragedy itself.  It reminds me of the years when I worked with adolescents, when every tragedy took on a "what if that were me?" or a "I once sat two rows behind her cousin in biology!" hysteria.  I didn't deny that they really experienced the world that way, but it reeked of narcissism and immaturity and made me want to shake some collective sense into them.

I think it takes strength to step back from the peer pressure of "never forget" and "Proud to be an American" today.  It's not popular to day, "This grief belongs to someone else and I won't cheapen it by pretending it belongs to me."  So I'm going to work in my yard and get ready for the week ahead without the Sponsored by WorldMegaCorp tributes and the flag waving ceremonies with all of their oddly jingoistic undertones.

I'm going to leave this day to the folks who deserve it- who earned it through 10 years of wishing they could forget, but never managing to figure out how.

Once More Into the Breach

I did my Shakespearean time back in the day.  Took the classes and all that but I wasn't a scholar of the Bard by any means.  But today, this is all over my brain.

Back to school much?

Yes.  And it feels more than ever like a return to the front lines.  I'm a seasoned, grisly veteran of this war, but it's a war nonetheless.  Like all good soldiers, my only goal is to survive and to achieve my mission.

Wish me luck.  It's going to be a long, hard slog towards June.

Neighborhood Watch- Fairy Division

I just got home from our annual pilgrimage to the beach.  Trust me- anyone who willingly camps at the beach with children (let alone a husband) is, by definition, badass.  'Cause between the sand (oy the SAND!) and the trying to find things people will eat and the sleeping on the ground and the bug spray and the sunscreen which only attract more sand? That's a whole mess of work.

This year we had an added wrinkle in that my darling girl- the budding artist- wanted to Make Art this summer.  So we schlepped sketch books and colored pencils and markers down to the water every day and then we schlepped them back.  She wasn't that committed to the work, though.  Instead, she was all about the sculpture.  Mainly, she was about Fairy Houses.  You've seen them, right?  Teeny tiny little homes for Fairies?  They're sweet and charming and they're hell to build out of shells and drift wood and sand and kelp.  Especially when every. single. piece. has to be placed Just So.  We built about 10- complete with teeny tiny plates and teeny tiny chairs and teeny tiny itsy bitsy food on the plates.

As we were working on House Number 8 of our little Fairy Subdivision, crouching behind some rocks in Just The Right Spot, I hear a voice.  An 8 year old boy (aka juvenile delinquent).  Want to know how I know?  "Look!  Little tiny houses!  Let's stomp on them!  Look!" stomp stomp stomp.

Now, at this point I'd given over at least 3 days of quality beach time to crouching in the sand tucking little bits of sea gnarl into cracks that housed god-only-knows-what, so I was not so much the mellow groovy chick I usually try to be.  I popped my head up over the rock, eyes narrowed and ready to kill- especially when I saw this punk-ass kid in board shorts bouncing a ball into #2 and #4 of Fairy Acres.  His buddy kept yelling "Hey C!  C!  Over here!" I assume he'd selected the next victim.  Maybe they'd found a baby seal to club or a puppy to kick.

When I started towards them, the buddy took off (C needs to make better better sidekick choices, doesn't he?).  C starts to take off too but it's either a testament to my teacher voice or to his lack of intelligence, that C stops running when I call his name.

"The little girl who built those worked for hours on them.  You just ruined her work for fun. FOR FUN!  Do you think it's fun when someone ruins something you made?  I don't think it's fun.  I think it's mean.  That was a mean mean thing you just did. Go find something else to break and stop being mean, you hear?  Now git."  (Yes, I said "Git."  Like some Ozark grandma.  Apparently I channel the Beverly Hillbillies when I'm cranky.)  And I waved him away and watched him run.

Don't mess with the Fairies. They'll kick your ass.

This is Your Brain...

Long holiday weekends like this one just past are a mixed blessing for me.  I love the days off- I'm not an idiot- but they're hell on my unreasonably high expectations (a kissing cousin of my Impossibly High Standards).  I imagine bar-b-q and family board games, all governed by the calm competence I recall infusing the adults of my childhood.  Now, we did pretty well this weekend- there were fireworks and a baseball game and friends over for the aforementioned charbroiled goodness and a lovely spread of food under my apple tree- but I'm up this morning with a little bit of an emotional hangover.

Here's the thing- I think the RealSimpleMarthaStewartNaturalLiving thing is a gateway dream.  It's not real but imagining it feels so good and it seems so possible...but it's an illusion.  It's a mirage that leads us further into the desert, away from the oasis of real connections with people who are imperfect and funny and interesting and definitely Not Martha.

Not badass, maybe,  but perhaps a step along the way?

Blinding Flash of the Obvious

I had a Blinding Flash of the Obvious (BFO) today.  Actually several of them. 

1) I cannot sew.  

2)  I am a terrible gardener 

3)  I cannot cook (though I sort of suspected that) and 

4) I am neither an educational visionary nor a powerful force for change.  

I have no doubt that I could learn to do any of those things, if I really wanted to.  I also realized, however, that I lack a work ethic of any kind.  And developing a work ethic?  That actually requires a work ethic.

I am, however, decorative and occasionally entertaining.  

Living La Vida...um, What's Spanish For "Working too damn hard?"

It's summer. I'm sitting in a basement meeting room, engaged in relatively interesting conversation around educational legislation and policy. With people I don't know. And there's no booze and thus far no one has laughed at any of my jokes.

This? So not badass.

But when I get home I'm going to sit on my deck with a beer and ponder the world-gone-mad in which people ask *me* for input on educational legislation and policy.

Calling me out

"You know, I still have yet to see signs of bad-assery..."

Thanks to my friend Katie and these words, shared in a recent exchange over why she needed to write me a giant grant to fund this project, I'm do a teeny bit of soul searching today.

She makes a good point. I haven't done that much, outwardly, to merit the title "Badass." A little shooting, a little shouting, a whole lot of thinking...

Then again, there's a reason this whole thing is called "Becoming Badass" you know.

It's a process.

So get the hell off my back and write me the damn grant already.

Badass Poultry

I rarely make posts out of other blogger's stuff. It feels vaguely ooky and just a little dishonest. But then, I rarely come across something this perfectly, beautifully badass in just exactly the way I one day hope to be badass.

Behold. The Chicken.


This is golden. It is perfect. It is all I aspire to be in life. I need this chicken. I need it with the most powerful force known to man or woman. I need it more than sex or chocolate or a cabana boy named Pedro. Where can I find this chicken?

Bang

I have lots of things on my Becoming Badass list of skills. Some of them are internal- I want to be able to carry my Screw You internal attitude into the world at large. I want to stop caring so much about what people think of me. I want to let go of my impossibly high standards. I want to say what I'm thinking- even if it's not the nicest thing to say. Some of them are what we call "hard skills"- stuff that I want to be able to do. I wanted to learn to hotwire a car (though I learned better), to throw knives, to fight, maybe to ride a motorcycle, to shoot...

So that last one was proving to be tougher than I'd imagined. I never occurred to me that the guys who wanted to teach me to shoot might also want to teach me other stuff- like how to manage their zippers. As a result, it took me awhile to find some one with both the appropriate skill set, but also appropriate expectations. Turns out, the guy I needed was a guy I'd known for years. Never in a thousand years would I have known that this mild-mannered teacher with an amazing wit and a great brain would also be a guy with an arms stockpile to rival a small-time militia. Other people, however, were hip to his real passion (besides teaching and his wife)- small arms.

We made arrangements to meet at the local "Rod and Gun Club" (which was really just a firing range). The local police department was re-certifying so it was like walking onto the set of a John Woo movie: lots of pop-pop-pop, lots of yelling, lots of stinky gun powder. I'll admit, I was surprised to see picnic tables- this didn't really seem like my first choice for a Family Friendly outing, but R assured me that the community of folks who frequent the place were harmless. I took him at his word but I also kept my eyes peeled. He opened his trunk and pulled out a duffle full of stuff. And by "stuff," I mean guns. Big ones and little ones. Being a teacher, he started me off with a bit of history and a quick overview of how they were the same (they all have safeties, they all go boom, they're all wicked helpful in the zombie apocalypse), their differences, and then- just to scare the crap out of me- the skinny on what exactly happens when a bullet enters a person- er, a zombie.

Suffice to say I had a healthy respect for the thing going into this. After his little lecture, I was scared shitless.

Then we went down to the range. And, without further ado, my results:



See those red arrows? Those were my first three shots.

Yeah. Pretty badass.

Soccer Mom My Ass

It's soccer night. That means I get to schlepp my kid, his best buddy, my other kid and a butt load of stuff out to sit in the middle of a field to stand by as two teams of 9 year olds race around after a ball for an hour. Then I'll schlepp them all home. The badass possibilities are limited, so I'm choosing to stake my claim in a more subtle fashion: I'm actually going to watch. I'm not going to talk on my cell phone, catch up on my reading (or texting). I'm going to watch my budding David Beckham as he runs, trips, dives and falls. Then I'm not going to holler that he should be more aggressive, pass the ball to Danny or "Go! Go! Go!" He'll get a pat on the back and a question about whether he had fun, but that's it.

Then we'll come home. 'Cause soccer may be something we do- but it's not who we are.

Tough Enough

I've heard lots of people make the joke about birth being the easy part of parenting. You know, like this. I sort of assumed, though, that this hellish childrearing experience would come with adolescence. I imagined screaming fits, tattoos, poor clothing choices and Libya-level engagements around curfews and cellphones. Maybe that stuff is coming, but I've already seen the worst I can imagine.

My daughter has always been chipper, easy going, free-thinking and adventurous. Not much throws her and she's got a natural badassity that does my heart good She's my idol in a lot of ways. But in the last three weeks she's become a different kid. A kid I recognize because I was that kid. The timid, "Mama don't leave me," cling, terrified kid. The one with the red eyes and the constant tremor. My darling girl has somehow inherited the anxiety I tried so hard to hide from her. Not just inherited it, but been attacked by it. It's crept out from under her emotional bed and has her cowering under the covers- and she's missing out on big chunks of her life as a result. Brownies? Nope. Sunday School? No way. Play date? Uh-uh.

I've done everything I know to do. Therapy, mindfulness, sitting with the feeling until it passes (it never does so this is fairly fruitless), keeping her so busy she can't think, more rest, less rest, changing diet, changing bedtime stories...nothing's getting us closer to the goal of a return to my brave, happy girl. A few good friends have pointed out to me that all of my efforts may be convincing her of just the opposite- that it may be reinforcing her belief that there's something to be scared of because otherwise why would mama be giving this so much attention?

Damned if I do, damned if I don't right?

So now I've taken to what my friend Katie calls Bored Indifference. When the worry starts to well up, when the panic sets in, I'm trying to respond with "Oh, that? Yeah, we're used to that. We've seen that before. No big thing girlfriend. Just keep moving and it'll pass."

But that means that I have to not show how much it kills me to see her quiver. How I have to feign nonchalance when the tears well and her hand tightens in mine. It means peeling her off me at school and bedtimes with a cheerful kiss and a reassurance that she'll be okay and that she's safe. I'm not sure I'm tough enough to do it. I'm not sure anyone is- but I'm doing it. Just like I did childbirth when I was sure I couldn't (right around hour 20). That was the second hardest thing I've ever done. Coincidence?

Essentially, it means doing every single thing I don't want to do and I hate every single moment.

I think that's the bad side of badass. Incidentally? It sucks ass as well. Just in case you were wondering.

Free to Be...

I've been thinking a lot lately about a little girl named Lisa. Lisa was in my 2nd grade class (about a thousand years ago) and I invited her to my Super Amazing Sleepover Birthday Party, along with 7 other girls. We did all the usual birthday things- ate cake and pizza and slept in sleeping bags on the floor of my room. It was a typical 8 year-old good time.

The morning after that party was not so much a good time. I was suddenly persona non grata in my small town. A 2nd grade (and 3rd grade and 4th grade) pariah. I was invisible.

See, Lisa was (and, I assume, still is) black. She was the only black girl in my class, in fact, but I had been living in a Free to Be You and Me world for the first 7 years of my life. It never occurred to me that her skin and hair should be factors in my party planning. Plus she wore her hair in 4 braids sometimes and she had white knee boots and I thought that made her the epitome of cool.

Since I had no idea that I'd violated some social contract with my birthday party guest list, I attributed my new social leprosy to something I'd done. I assumed there was something wrong with me- that I was inherently broken. It took me years to put together that I wasn't about me, that it was about the ignorance and fear of a bunch of small town parents who taught their own kids to take that fear out on another kid.

Later on, I learned that my parents saw this coming. When the party invitations went out, other moms and dads (including my dad's boss and the school principal) contacted my folks to tell them that this was a Bad Idea. That Lisa had to be dis-invited asap. While I wish someone had explained all this to me then (I could have lived with a little more righteous indignation and a little less self-loathing), I understand that it was complicated. (1977 wasn't exactly the most enlightened time in the Midwest, you know?)

My mom admits she had a moment when she considered it. She thought of calling Lisa's grandma and making excuses- the party had been canceled or we'd had to postpone because I was sick. Then she realized that she wanted more for me. She wanted my life to be bigger than that single, stupid small town. She wanted me to be a part of creating that Free to Be You and Me world. She was brave enough to stand by what she knew was right and to bring me along to stand beside her.

I think that's pretty badass.

Testify

You know what's really freakin' brave? Standing up and saying "Hell No" when something's just wrong.

Visit my darling friend Katie to see the latest in Badasssity.

Then go here and tell NH Legislators to keep their damn hands off Katie's Marriage.

Tearing Down My IHS

I have a confession. It's a hard one to make and I hate to admit it because it feels like a terrible, awful thing to admit- like the sort of thing I need to whisper with my head down, not making eye contact.

I'm L and I have Impossibly High Standards.

There. It's out. That's like 50% of the battle right? Or 90%? I can never remember.

I'm not sure when it happened because my youth was filled with "screw you" on the standards-front. I did what I did as well as I saw fit because I wanted to do it that well. Or not well. Period.

But somehow, the Talbots- Inspired acid trip that was my 20's and 30's brought me here. Here, to this crazy place where I obsess over how clean the grout is and how well behaved my dog is and whether my roots are showing. I have somehow landed in a world in which I must be beautiful and cheerful and totally organized and mistake free all the time- in spite of my perpetual clinging to the Big Fat Lie that this isn't the case.

I'm no Tiger Mother. I don't hold anyone else to those same standards. My kids, TMOTH, my friends, my family- they all get a pass. They get to be human. I guess because they are sub-me. Not as strong, not as smart, not as able.

Whatevs.

But over the weekend, I had a Blinding Flash of the Obvious. I don't have to do anything other than be kind, fair and loving to the people around me. That's it. I actually don't have to DO anything. And just being, well, that can't be measured against any standard- high or low.

So that's that. Starting now I'm pointing my feral badass self at those Impossibly High Standards- and I'm totally bringing them down.

What about you?

Feral Mindfulness

I've been dabbling for a few years with the idea of mindfulness as a way of climbing out from under the giant, ever-growing tsunami that is my life. The whole idea- that I can better manage by focusing myself on the present moment, not yesterday or next week or 5 years ago- seems lovely, in a polished wood, watercolor, home-canned jars of peaches sort of way . I imagine that, in my totally mindful life, I'll be patient and smiling and very Caroline Ingalls. My world will be filled will candlelight and moonlight and I'll be lovely. It will all be lovely.

I've had a couple of good friends with me on this exploration. One of them I pay. The other I don't. The one I pay asked me a really good question which, after a little thought, came down to this:

What if the whole mindful-acceptance- be in the moment thing is intrinsically at odds with my deep need to have something to push against? What if the "battle against" is the only thing moving me forward? What if the only way I can be in the moment is if I'm fighting hard against the present in an effort to bring about a new future? What if the feral, refuse to accept the boundaries me is the me that the world needs?

I have to say, I really like the idea. My need to fight back isn't in the way of my acceptance of the present- it's how I accept the present. I think that's sort of Badass- in a sort of feral way.

Tired

I can't sleep. Technically I suppose that's not true- I can sleep. I can close my eyes and doze off. I snore a little, drool a little, have a little dream- and then I wake up. (It's the waking up that clues in me in to the fact that I was actually asleep. I'm pretty clever you know.) So actually, what I can't do is stay asleep past about 3. Or go to sleep before 11. I can go to bed before 11, but rarely does sleep actually occur before 11.

Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm not doing anything interesting- I'm just lying there. I'm just Not Sleeping. In a really big way.

I'm coming up on day 5 of this and it's wearing thin. I'm not cute when I'm this tired. I'm not bitchy either- bitchy takes effort. I mean, bitchy done well takes effort because it requires wit. Wit requires west- I mean rest. Which I'm not getting. Because of the whole "not sleeping" thing.

Someone told me today that I'm not sleeping because I'm worried about something. Well of course I'm worried. If you're not worried, you're living in a cave. Things are sort of a disaster in general and my particular corner of it isn't any great shakes right now either.

See, my darling TMOTH is sick. Not ManFlu sick, really sick. Chronic, life-changing, bad medicine sick. Thankfully, though, not life-threatening sick. Certainly sleep-threatening sick. And Wit-Killing sick. So yeah- I worry. I worry about everything from the time I was mean to that guy in high school (sorry!) to what I'll do if TMOTH gets sicker and can't work. I worry about the house, which seems too small and too messy and too rundown to represent the pinnacle of my income potential. I worry about my kids and how they're coping with the New Normal.

Mostly, though, right now I worry about being able to sleep. "Not sleeping because you're worried about not being able to sleep" feels ironic. Is it ironic? I"m too tired to know. What I want is to be mad- to fight back against something. There's no Zombie Apocalypse to deal with, no contagion or Super Villian! to foil. In the movies, there'd be something powerful for me to do. Something meaningful and IMPORTANT. Something that would require a clipboard and a purposeful stride. And maybe a microphone. Or a megaphone. So that everyone could hear me make big important updates about the situation. Don't panic. Our best researchers are on the job. A solution is coming!

But I fear that the people who would listen are also tired of hearing about it. I worry that there is no solution, no research, no important updates. I'm starting to suspect that this just...is. And that is unacceptable.

There's no way to be Badass in this, nothing Badass about managing a chronic autoimmune disease.

Maybe the Badass is in getting out of bed in the morning, but I wouldn't know. I'm too tired to tell.

Disruptive Joy

Earlier this month, the good folks over at Blogher suggested we make vision boards filled with "the images that are reminiscent of your list of things that fill you with joy and grace, or things that you want for yourself in the coming year, or images that typify the kinds of creative activities that you'd like to try, or just words or passages that you find especially stirring."

This is a little touchy-feely for me, but I figure since not doing this sort of stuff for the last 42 years hasn't helped much, I might as well give it a shot for 2011. Not a list of resolutions so much as general idea of what I'd like 2011 to include for me. The only thing that's not here is this: I'd like 2011 to be the year where I stop worrying- about what other people think, whether they like me, if my kids will become serial killers or I'll end up living in a cardboard box. That sort of stuff. I'd like to put my anxiety in a box and bury it in the yard. But not my yard- someone else's yard. A long, long way away from here.


The thing I like best about this is the idea of Disruptive Joy. I don't know if I read that idea or if I made it up, but it's simple: use laughter, joy and fun to give the metaphorical finger to the crankypants people in my life. It might just make them madder- and that's sort of fun- but it's one way to not let myself get sucked into their black pit of despair and doom.

So yeah. Disruptive Joy. Your first Badass idea for 2011.

You're welcome.

Raise Your Glass

So it's been a hell of a year. Without sharing the details (which I will share, eventually. Trust me. They're just not quite funny yet.), suffice to say that it's been...a hell of a year. Have no fear, though, my journey to Badass isn't over. Detoured? Maybe. Canceled? No way in hell.

But it's almost New Year's and I'm not going to navel gaze or ponder or meditate on the lessons learned/ lessons yet to learn. I am going to take a moment to acknowledge that, while it may not be pretty, I'm still here- and that little part of me that I used to be ashamed of because it didn't quite fit, didn't get me dates, embarrassed my family and made my sorority sisters look at me in horror- that little part is leading the way.

So let's raise a glass to it, shall we?




Damn Straight.

Living the Dream

The pie's in the oven (that and the cranberries are my sole contribution to this year's meal), the kids are hooked into screens and The Man of the House is headed to Sears to buy his big Man Machine (snowblower). I'm still in my jammies, enjoying my second cup of coffee and I'm pondering the journey thus far.

When I was a kid, living in a series of apartments and rental houses, I used to imagine my life the way I wanted it to be when I "grew up." When it didn't involve red carpets and long walks on the beach, it looked like this:

A little house in a nice-but-not-fancy neighborhood with neighbors we knew and liked. A tall, handsome husband who could Fix Things and who thought I was wonderful. A blond girl who looked like me and a little boy who was just a little too smart for his own good. And a dog who'd chase a ball in the yard for hours without ever running away and needing to be hauled home by the collar.

This morning, I'm looking around and thinking...yeah. Things may not be perfect. We're dealing with some major health/ work/ financial decisions and there are nights I lay awake wondering how we'll get through the next week or month or 24 hours, but mostly...yeah. This gig is pretty Badass.

I do more before 10 am than you do all day.

Here's my morning so far:

5:45- wake up from a nightmare about a friend telling me she quit going to our church because I said something mean about her kid
6:00- give up trying to go back to sleep and get up
6:10- step in dog poo
6:20- realize I forgot to take the monkey bread out of the fridge last night.
6:50- put monkey bread in the oven, hoping it will still work
7:00- realize that my kid's parent conference is at 7:45. Peer anxiously at Monkey Bread
7:10- scramble to get kids out of bed and rushed through morning routine
7:30- kids announce that today is "dress like your hero day" at school. Tell them that's fine, but they're on their own costumes-wise and we're out the door in 10 minutes
7:32- reminder call from radiology- Harry has an x-ray at 8:10
7:40- Monkey bread isn't done. Curse. DH and I yell at each other and the monkey bread goes back in the oven (now turned off) with a prayer that it will somehow finish.
7:50- Kid's teacher arrives for the conference. Proceeds to tell us he's the cleverest child she's ever taught in 30 years (yeah!) and that he's going to be a juvenile delinquent if we don't teach him some self discipline and organizational skills (boo!)
8:15- Can't find kid to get him to the clinic for the X-ray
8:20- Locate kid in the library, frantically call X-ray. They promise to squeeze us in.
8:20- Call from pediatrics- why didn't we come to our appointment? We had an appointment? I had no idea. Reschedule appointment
8:30- Call from husband's doctors reminded me that he has an appointment today. Remember that I need to be sure to go with him.
8:35- Waiting in waiting room at x-ray.
8:45- Still waiting
9:00- Still waiting
9:10- X-ray! All appears well, to my untrained eye. The mass is gone! Mostly! Hooray!
9:15- PTA chair calls asking about the monkey bread. I improvise a cover story.
9:20- Scramble home. Monkey bread is done enough. Dump it on the tray, slap some foil over the top, and scramble back to the car.
9:30- Kid and I struggle into the school with the monkey bread, his trombone, his backpack and music folder. I nearly dump the monkey bread in the parking lot. Twice.
9:35- Monkey bread accomplished! Kid's at school! The x-ray is complete! I prepare to stop for celebratory coffee! Alas, I arrive at the drive up window and realize I've left my wallet somewhere. The Barista takes pity and gives me the coffee anyway.

You know what? That's a pretty badass morning, if I do say so myself.

Seize the Fish

Sometimes, the universe (or God or fate or whatever) has a way of deciding things for us. When I really think about it, easily 75% of my life has happened by accident. I met my husband because I decided, on a whim, to blow off my American History exam and go out dancing during finals week. I became a teacher because my Intro to Speech class was filled with kids that scared the piss out of me so I transferred to another class. One taught by a teacher who changed my life. My daughter, whom I adore, came a year early.

I may like to pretend I'm driving this thing, but in reality I'm just holding onto the steering wheel praying I don't crash.

This became uber-clear to me earlier today when I realized that I'm losing my job.

Gulp.

I've been in denial for weeks (okay, months) but now...well let's just say that there's nothing quite like a fish in the face to wake you up to reality. Metaphorically speaking, I mean.

I watched something on TV once about this place somewhere out west (Seattle maybe?) where there's this big fish market. The guys throw the fish all over the place, catching them and wrapping them up to sell. Apparently it's really something to see. I think there's a book about it too. That's the kind of job where there's never any question about your performance. You catch the fish or the fish hits you. Immediate feedback. If the fish hits you too many times, well, then I guess you're looking for a job.

I thought I'd been catching those fish quite nicely and passing them along with speed and accuracy. Apparently my fish are irrelevant though. They aren't so much necessary in the larger scheme of things. So now I have to figure out what to do next. The Badass thing to do is pretty much NOT to cry. Right? So...no crying. Check. Also no breaking things. Got it. I suppose a Plan B would be a good idea. But otherwise? Eh.

So Carpe Diem, I guess. I'll seize this day- or this fish- and I'll do something with it. But I think I'll do it later. Right now, I think I want to go to bed. Can retreat be Badass? I certainly hope so- 'cause I've got nothing to fight this fight with right now.

Grin and Bear It

I went camping with my family this weekend. We drove way up north and set up our tent and did the whole Griswold Family Car Camping thing in one of the state campgrounds (read: Right next to the highway and surrounded by drunk people). We've done this trip before so we totally knew what we were getting into and we'd adjusted our expectations appropriately. The thing we didn't plan for?

Bears.


Okay- bear. Singular. Two of the three nights, we were awakened by horns honking and cursing and banging and people shouting "Git out of there! Git Bear! Git!"

Lovely.

Now, in past years I would have been nervous about this. You know- me, my babies (and my husband- I guess I should mention him too)- all within earshot of 250- 300 pounds of black bear. But I was just...annoyed. The way you'd be annoyed if you looked out and saw a raccoon in your campsite. Much more "oh hell" than, "Oh SHIT!!!"

That's what we call Backwoods Badass, I guess.

These Boots are Made for...Not What You Think.

I bought some boots last year. Some knee boots. I haven't had knee boots since the 70's when Jamie Sommers made them de rigueur for the fashionable Bionic Woman wanna-be.

But boots are badass. And these boots were WICKED badass. They made me feel...amazing. Powerful. Sexy. Plus they were warm- no small bonus for a New Hampshire winter. Warm AND sexy. What're the odds?

So I wore the boots a lot and I got a lot of compliments of the "Oh look at your cute boots! Where did you get them?" variety, but the real power of the boots didn't become apparent until I boarded a Delta flight bound for New Jersey.

It was one of those out-and-back trips that everyone hates. A "fly down, have a meeting, and fly back all in one day because we're too cheap to spring for a room" trip. I needed the meeting to go well and so I called upon The Boots. I paired them with an appropriately conservative skirt, a little sweater set. I even broke out my pseudo-pearls.

On the flight home, feet aching and exhausted, I reached down to unzip my boots. That was the moment when I realized their hidden super power. My boots are the footwear equivalent of Spanish Fly.

The man next to me- who was old enough to be my father, by the way- was fixated on them. And not just on them- on me unzipping them. I swear to god, the look on his face told a story of arousal that was so plain and so intense...this random guy on the airplane was turned on by my boots. And my taking them off.

I started to write him off as a run-of-the-mill perv when I realized that the two guys on the other side of the aisle were equally focused. Apparently the fact that I was exhausted and disheveled and not at my sexy best meant nothing- the boots were all that mattered.

Who knew how much guys like boots? Today, *I* know how much guys like boots. And don't think for one single moment that I won't use the Power of the Boots to bend the world to my badass whims once fall rolls around again.

Human Will

Today I got a lesson from my little boy in the power of sheer human will. He's recently been diagnosed with a condition called Developmental Coordination Disorder. On the surface, he just looks clumsy and sort of odd. He runs with a weird gait, he can't catch a ball or throw a ball and he holds his body in a way that just seems...off, somehow. He responds oddly to some noises but others- loud ones- seem calming. I remember holding him as a baby and thinking that there was something not quite right but I just couldn't put my finger on it. First I thought Autism (my most powerful fear while I was pregnant). Then Aspergers. Then his preschool teacher threw out the idea of something called Sensory Integration Disorder, but that wasn't quite it.

Then he discovered numbers and we discovered that he was gifted- really gifted, which is not so much a gift as a new set of challenges balanced by a freaky smartness where numbers are concerned. We thought maybe this was part of that. It wasn't. Finally we discovered DCD and it felt like my 8 year old suspicions had finally been validated- but the victory was awful, hollow. This thing wasn't in my overactive imagination. I wasn't just being paranoid. This thing was real and it was holding him back.

We suddenly found ourselves in The System.

After a year of in-school services (and a startling realization that we had been expected to arrange private clinical support even though no one ever mentioned it to us), we hooked up with a lovely woman I'll call Miss M. She's our new PT/OT and she's amazing and funny and kind and energetic.

We're so lucky to have her. And today, watching her work with little boy, I wanted to cry.

She knew just what to say and do to make his disabilities oh-so-obvious. He can't hop on one foot really. He can't do jumping jacks. He can't process what he hears half the time. He gets nervous and jumpy and that makes it worse.

Watching him struggle and sweat and work with her to do things that other kids find simple- like run and jump and hop and climb- made me want to cry and scream and rail against whatever deity it is that decided my sweet boy shouldn't be like other kids. That this would be his thing to manage.

It's not fair.

He doesn't have any illusions, I don't think, about the ways that he falls short in comparison to his peers. He knows that he's a freaking math genius and that he reads better than most kids his age and I guess, for him, those things balance out the ways he struggles. For me, though, the daughter of a coach raised to see boys as the sum of their athletic ability, it doesn't quite balance out. He wants to play baseball. I want him to be able to play baseball. And soccer and basketball and whatever else he wants to play.

Like I said- it's not fair.

But fair or not fair doesn't seem to matter so much to him. With Miss M's help, he saw all of it as a game. He knows some of why we go to her gym once a week- and why we'll go there for at least another year, probably more than once a week when we can manage it. He knows he has to get strong if he wants to keep up with his friends when they play games. He doesn't fully comprehend how far behind he is or how far and hard the road to "caught up" is going to be, but he has eyes and he's smart- he sees the difference.

So today he giggled and sweated and strained and pushed and he tried again and again and again for the longest hour of my mommy life since transition.

Then he asked if we could go back tomorrow. Right now, he's doing the exercises he learned today, in spite of the fact that he's exhausted. My little boy is a force of nature and he's going to beat this thing by pure force of human will if that's what it takes.

And that's really badass.

Letting Go

Sometimes the bravest, hardest, most badass thing you can do is let people you love fall on their assess. Watching people you care about struggle through hard stuff- even if it's hard stuff that they brought on themselves or hard stuff that you know they have to go through as part of becoming who they need to be- is gut wrenching. I know that my kids need to go through the misery that is goodbye and the hard work of figuring out how to navigate the world as themselves (as opposed to the people others may expect them to be). I know that my parents have to make their own journey into this next "retired" phase of their lives (which is not at all what any of us expected it to be). Rescuing or solving or fixing things for any of these most loved folks in my life would be robbing them of the opportunity to become who they are becoming- no matter how much better it would make me feel.

I just hope I'm badass enough to keep my mouth shut and my heart open.

Forever Young

There aren't a lot of days when I wish I was 17 again. Or 27, even. But today? Today I wish I were 21 and still in college with every possibility stretching out in front of me. I am yearning for the days when I was absolutely certain of things. When the beer was free and cold and a flip of my hair could get me all sorts of things. I am longing for a twin bed and a clear to-do list, created by someone else, with deadlines and expectations and page limitations.

I want clarity about what I'm supposed to do and who I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to (allowed to) expect from other people.

I need a syllabus for life. And a really, really good party.

Wondering where I am?

Without going into the gory details, let me share this single piece of evidence re: the level of insanity in my life right now:

My children ate Captain Crunch for dinner last night.

'Nuf said? 'Nuf said.

Going Public

If you're reading this, chances are good that you're a friend of mine. By and large, with just a couple of exceptions, my readers are people that I have known- some for over a quarter of a century, some for less- personally. You're my peeps. I've shared excerpts and proposals and the like with various and sundry publishing-types, but this blog has remained largely in internal thing. But in the last few days, I've made the decision to go public. Technically anyone could find me through google or through one of the handful of links from other sites, but I didn't actually tell me people who *weren't* my friends about this project.

That's no longer the case. Today I gave the name of the blog to someone who doesn't have to love it by virtue of being my friend. My hands were shaking and I thought I'd throw up, but I did it. See, I can't do the stuff the project calls for- fighting and shooting and the like- because I'm not strong enough. In order to get strong, I need someone else's help. So I asked and then I outed the project to her (though in that moment I couldn't for the life of me remember the address).

It scares the hell out of me- having my Badass self out for the world to see- but it's the thing I'd do if I weren't afraid.

Fearless

Yeah, I've been quiet lately. Partially because I've been engaged in the most soul-sucking writing project ever- a federal grant proposal that turned out to be a whopping 250 pages by the time it was done- and partially because the Mother of All Ear Infections had me unconscious for a week. If I'm honest, I also have to admit that I also just lacked inspiration.

But now I'm back. Or at least some version of me is back. The soul-sucked, half-deaf, wiped out version is back because of something someone said to me yesterday. Actually, she didn't say it to me, per se, but she said it in a room I was in and therefore, by virtue of the fact that the universe revolves around me, it was said to me. The context escapes me ('cause like I said- half deaf so not able to hear half of what is said to me), but the part I caught was this:

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

There are two things I love about this. The first is the assumption that of course I'm afraid. That we're all afraid. I like the shared insecurity there, the "of course you're scared. We're all scared. If you're not scared your either stupid, crazy or not paying attention." It releases me from the sense that I have to pretend to be certain of anything at all. It equalizes us in this shared insanity that is life in the 21st century.

Then there's the invitation to imagine a world in which I exist without the fear. A place in my life where I do things because I want to, because they inspire me or speak to something in me or because they sound like fun. Where I say things because they're what I really think and feel, without wondering who isn't going to like it, how they might judge me, what the long-term political ramifications might be of every single statement I make. What would that be like? Would it be liberating or horrifying? Would it lead to some kind of cruel narcissism or would I discover some deep truth, some wisdom born of fearlessness? Is fearless the same as brave? Or is brave only the recognition of fear- the decision to move beyond it- and fearlessness a lack of ability to respect our internal "Danger Will Robinson!?"

So maybe it isn't about always acting on the fearless- of ignoring the danger. Maybe it's just about asking yourself the question. Maybe it's about recognizing the decisions that come from fear rather than some other authentic self, and choosing to go with the later rather than the former.

So I'll ask you, What would you do if you weren't afraid?

Room for the Holy Spirit

A couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that I befriend a cop so he/she could introduce me to a legal brand of Badass. I went on a fishing expedition (a la "Anyone know a cop?") in the normal channels- Facebook, etc- and came up empty.

Then I went to the New Member meeting at my church because my kids guilt-ed me into joining after 8 years of attendance. One other family was there- a retired cop, his wife and their daughter.

I'm not sure if it will turn into anything, but it sure seems like somebody's telling me to keep going, you know?

Easy Rider

My 8 year old learned to ride his bike today, like ten zillion kids before him and another ten zillion to come. This particular right of passage, though, was hard fought and hard won. My boy has been risk averse his whole life- well, except for that one time when he was three and he stepped over a big brown snake in the backyard, but we won't go into that one because it gives me an irresistible urge to wash off the heeby-jeebies.

Actually, hang on a sec. I'm going to grab a quick shower.


Okay, I'm back.

So, my risk averse boy has been afraid of his bike since we took the training wheels off. Not just leery, but full-on afraid to the point that the mere mention of his two wheeler would send him into fits and tears and hyperventilation. I had almost given up ever having a family bike ride, had allowed myself to believe that this single thing was just too hard for my little boy. I believed that he wasn't strong enough to overcome it.

Then I saw him scooter. Apparently, his babysitter had a couple of razor scooters and the kids were taking turns on them after school and had been for quite some time. When it came to the scooter, my darling was a serious badass. He was fearless. He was a speed demon. He was an 8 year old X-Gamer.

I hatched a plan. If the babysitter was a brave place for him, if courage grew in the grass under her oak tree, then maybe the bike would be less terrifying and more possible there than it was here. I pondered, I puzzled, I weighed the pros (fully mobile kid who can do things his peers can do!) with the cons (broken arms! broken legs! getting smooshed by a car!). Surprisingly, the pros won.

I dropped the bike off at her house this morning. When I picked up my dearest boy at 4:15, he was riding like a pro. He was zooming up and down the street and he was sweaty as all get out and he was so. freaking. proud. He'd taken on his Schwinn-shaped demon and he'd won.

My kid is badass. Who knew?

The Sweet Smell of Rejection

Most people don't know this, but I write picture books. Yes, I realize it's odd that I don't draw picture books, but someone has to write the nearly 25 lines of text in your average kids book. I do that. It's much less stressful than trying to draw. Lest you confuse writing picture books with actually selling picture books or even- gasp- publishing a picture book, don't worry. You've never read anything I wrote, unless you've been perusing my hard drive lately.

Or unless you're a member of a certain writer's competition that I recently entered. You might have read my stuff then- right before you plopped it into the "No Way In Hell" pile. I know this because I received yet another in my long line of "thanks but not thanks" self-addressed, stamped envelopes. (And don't imagine for a moment that I don't see the dark poetry in ponying up my own stamp and envelope to be told yet again that my writing isn't quite what the committee is looking for.)

I suppose that I should be used to it right now. With only a couple of exceptions, nearly all of my non-professional writing has been rejected. From what I've heard though, there are like 10,000,000,000 writers submitting pieces for the 2 slots each publisher has available. Odds are better that I'll be struck by lightning or get killed by stampeding zebras or hell, even wear a bikini again in my lifetime. I may never publish anything.

But what if I do? Every time I summon my inner Pollyanna and muster up the energy to send off another manuscript (along with another self-addressed-stamped-envelope for the rejection letter), there's this sort of Schrödinger's cat moment where I haven't been accepted but I haven't been rejected. For a moment, I'm published by virtue of the fact that I haven't yet been rejected.

I have to believe that I"m badass enough to spit in the face of further rejection, to submit again an welcome the sight of yet another SASE in my mailbox.

How Much Glitter Does One City Need or Why Vegas Sucks

I've been in Vegas. That's not a blanket statement, it's an update on my life. I've been in Vegas. Lest you imagine that I chose to go to sin city, let me assure you that I traveled to Vegas for a meeting. That's not the point, though, so I'll skip over that part. The point is that Vegas sucks ass. I should have known when I stepped off the plane and into 1977 (seriously- the airport was a portal to a whole different era) and the woman next to me sighed to her husband, "Oh honey. It's like heaven." Uh, no. Or, if yes, you seriously need to rethink your vision of the afterlife. But I was upbeat. Nauseous but upbeat. Surely this was a city where I could find adventure. I could bring the badass here, right? Then I saw it- a life size cardboard woman holding a machine gun. Now that had potential. Maybe I could finally satisfy my small-arms curiosity. I scrawled the number on my ticket envelope and tucked it away.

We stayed in a hotel on the strip that started out okay ("Look! There's a big fish tank! How bad can this place be if they have a fish tank!?") and then immediately spiraled into the toilet when I tried to cross the casino floor and realized that even the carpet had glitter in it and that it was true- the whole place was designed to confuse and distract me from my goal of getting the hell off the casino floor. There was glitter everywhere. There were pole dancers everywhere. There were scooters everywhere. When I saw the glitter covered scooter parked next to the pole dance, well, the cognitive dissonance of that was almost more than my little brain could bear.

Rather than go into detail, let me just run down the high point.

1. I couldn't get a cup of coffee without crossing the casino floor.
2. I couldn't get anything to eat without crossing the casino floor.
3. I couldn't get into my room without crossing the casino floor.
4. I couldn't get out of my room without crossing the casino floor.

Get the point?

But I still had some hope. I figured that there must be something I could do here that would up my badass cred. I braved the casino floor and found a place to have a beer and as I watched the people around me, it hit me. Vegas is mostly a city filled with posers. Women wearing shoes they can't walk in, sporting fake boobs under dresses obviously purchased for just that occasion. Men trying to look like high rollers, gambling money they can't afford to lose. Groups of men and women trying to cut lose and shake off the mundane reality of their real lives in a single weekend.

And don't even get me started on the brides. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a bride. I'm not even sure they all had grooms- or other brides- with them. I really think some of them were going stag.

My badass choice was to reject Vegas. I didn't gamble anything. I didn't overindulge (well, there was that one Brazilian Bar-B-Que place, but that doesn't count because I didn't choose it). I wore my jeans the whole time. I broke up with Vegas before it even had a chance to ask me for a second date.

Oh- and the gun place? Turned out to be a tourist trap. The guy at the bell stand refused to let me get into a taxi when I told him where I wanted to go. No loss. I'm pretty sure that's an itch I'd rather scratch without paying for it.

Eyes Wide Shut

Once upon a time, way back at the beginning of this project, I googled "How to be a Badass." I found a lot of links- most not safe for civilized company- and the images were, um, had a dominatrix bent to them. One of them had this interesting idea, though: one quality of the badass is the ability to do something without looking. I think the writer was imagining something like throwing a knife or shooting someone's toe off, but it got me thinking about what I can I do without looking. After much thought, I realized that, without looking, I can:

1. Return the shopping cart to the cart corral from across the parking lot.
2. Tell that my children are doing something they're not supposed to.
3. Sense when dinner is "done" (i.e., burning)
4. Smell trouble brewing at work.
5. Know when it's bedtime.
6. Communicate my level of stabby-ness.
7. Tell a joke.
8. Open a beer.
9. Change a diaper.
10 Type.

None of these are really that badass, except the shopping cart thing. I think that sort of freaks people out.

So what about you? What can you do without looking?

Being Brave

I try to go to the gym several times a week. I have time after I drop the kids at school and before I have to be at work and my gym isn't that far out of the way, so I just don't have much of an excuse not to go. (Not for lack of trying to come up with one- trust me.) So I go and I try to use the time to let my mind wander a bit. This morning as I was huffing and puffing on the elliptical, I realized that I had a great view of the women coming in. So I started my own version of that "guess the secret" game I play to entertain myself on airplanes. Instead of secrets, though, I tried to imagine the brave thing that each woman had done in the hours, days or weeks leading up to her walk through that door.

In some cases it was easy- the older mom with the newborn was a single-mom-by-choice who'd taken on parenthood alone. The very heavy woman in the purple sweatsuit was taking her life back by making that first step towards a healthy body. The young woman with the scar on her knee was a former athlete coming back from surgery. Others were harder, though. They looked like me- average, middle-class, middle-aged women doing their best to stay in the same sized jeans they'd worn for years. What brave things had we done, I wondered?

I get on airplanes and drive thousands of miles every year, believing that I will return safely to my family. A friend made a terrifying call to get test results that, while ultimately benign, could have proved disastrous. A colleague insisted that her child get help, in spite of his insistence that nothing was wrong. A neighbor stood in her town meeting and said "No. Not here," to those who would challenge the right of others to marry.

From the mom who turns and walks away, leaving a crying child in daycare and trusting that they'll both be okay to the woman who holds the people she loves to the high standards of their best selves, our brave moments small and large need to be acknowledged- even if only by us. They call us to draw on some hidden resource, buried in some small corner of ourselves, and to do that thing we thought we could not do. We may not have invisible jets or snazzy, bullet-deflecting golden bracelets, but we are superheroes.

So tell me, how were you brave today?

Buzz

I'm not sure who exactly introduced me to the aphorism that "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar," but I'd like to wax on the topic a bit. (I could make a beeswax joke there but I'll refrain from doing so.) Putting aside for the moment the question of why in God's name anyone would want to catch flies as opposed to swatting, killing or repelling them, I'd like to question the moral of this little story- that being nice is the best way to get your point across in a persuasive way.

Now, as I've stated before, being nice is not counter to being Badass and being Badass doesn't necessarily mean being nasty. I was recently involved in a conversation about some work stuff and it got, well, heated. It got really heated. It involved me and my work and my space and I got more than heated- I got pissed. I made my first "hell no" flat refusal of my professional career. I didn't want to discuss, I didn't want to explore other options, I didn't want to help solve the problem because I didn't create the problem. I was just. not. interested. And I was really vehement about it.

My colleagues in the meeting sat, slack-jawed and perplexed, listening to rant and behave in a very not-me manner and they looked, well, bumfuzzled. Finally, one man (the room contained 4 men and me) said in a sort of amused voice, "I'm sort of surprised at your energy around this." Another chimed in with a similar sentiment and a third added his reasoning for why I should welcome this difficult, inconvenient thing being proposed.

At that moment, I realized that they had expected to me to be all "honey" in this situation. I'm usually considered collaborative (which I've come to recognize as sometimes-code for "easy to convince" and "willing to give in"). I go the extra mile to support my colleagues, I don't mind doing a little more work if it's going to help someone else out. I usually am honey. I was raised to be sweet and accommodating and- above all- nice. My sudden shift to vinegar- largely the result of being tired of being kicked in the ass over and over again- shocked them. They didn't know what to do with me and their instinctive response- amusement and a hint of "Isn't this cute? Look how worked up she's getting!"- got them a snarl and a "You like it so much? You do it, then. 'Cause there's no fucking way I'm going to."

I noticed that this group of folks seemed more wary of me later. It was as though they'd discovered their cute puppy had a hint of pit bull in its pedigree. At a later meeting on the same topic, I noticed my colleagues watching me in their peripheral vision as though I were an undetonated grenade in the middle of the room. (I didn't explode, in case you were wondering, which I think was equally frightening.)

The moral of my little story, then, is that honey is nice, but it's sticky and its use for may adhere labels to its user (like "easy to roll over" and "always willing to take one for the team"). Vinegar on the other hand, tends to clean that sticky mess right off, leaving a sparkling new view in its wake.


Badass is about the freedom to be either honey or vinegar- or both- depending on the circumstances.

My Dirty Little Secret

I used to be one of those moms who couldn't say no. I wanted to say no to about 3/4 of the stuff I was asked to do, but I somewhere, deep down, I really believe that my "no" would be heard as either "I don't care about you/ your kids/ my kids/ the planet/ our community/ etc." or that people would just stop liking me if I didn't chaperone the trip/ bake the cookies/ come in for the class play/ host the party.

I've made progress on this. Trust me.

But I still have one weakness. When one particular PTA mom calls, I have a devil of a time saying no because I like her. (As a friend- get your mind out of the gutter.) She's a nice person and she's taken on a giant task and I want to help her out.

So when the she asked me to bake 40 chocolate cookies for a thing at the school on Friday, I agreed. 40 cookies are no big deal. Then I got another e-mail asking if I could do 2 batches and I waffled but then...I agreed. Sure. I had time. This was a full 10 days before the event. No worries. I baked them on Tuesday and had them all ready to go with a few extras to spare. (Not being one to waste food, of course, I even went to the trouble to eat the extras. Waste not want not, you know.)

Then this morning I get an e-mail. Oops! Each batch is supposed to have 50, not 40, so everyone will be sure to get 2. Sorry! But please have your cookies at the school Friday by 11- and thanks!

Well. Hell.

So I did something I've never done. I went to Hannaford's and I bought the pre-cut, pre-made cookie dough. I baked those 20 cookies in less time than it took me to gather the ingredients for the first 100 and then I hid them on the bottom of the tray that I'm not going to label. If I'm lucky, no one will ever know that those 20 obviously pre-made, pre-cut cookies came from my house.

I'm torn between guilt and a giddy sense of "I got away with it..."

Hillbilly Horoscope

So I'm not a big horoscope person. I don't put a lot of stock in predicting the future except as joke fodder ("You will meet an annoying woman today. Give her coffee and she will go away." Bonus points for anyone who recognizes that reference.) and I don't actively seek my horoscope out every day (thought it's hard to miss it since my local paper puts the most important features- Dear Abby and the comics- on the same pages as the horoscopes). I do, however, Tweet. And one of my twitter feeds is something (someone?) called OzarkGypsyArt, which I ended up following after she (they? he?) started following me. (It's a weird Twitter thing and this Missouri girl just couldn't resist the name.) And OzarkGypsyArt is an astrologer, I'm coming to realize, among his (her? its?) other interests. I couldn't resist this morning (I have a bad cold and my resistance is down, okay?)- I clicked the link. Here's what (s)he had to say:

It may seem as if you haven't been like your old self in years with dreamy Neptune in your sign for the last decade. Now it's time to look back and think about all the changes you've been through, especially the ones that elude logical understanding. You are in a gradual transition phase, and your realizations today could be instrumental in making the choices that will redefine your life in years to come. Be patient; this kind of transformation takes time.

Huh. That's all I'm saying about that. Just...huh.