I got your "obey" right here, mister.

April 23

I keep feeling like I need a new Crab Apple essay, but I haven't had the time to get coherently enraged about anything lately. Unfocused, growling rage, yes, all the time. But if you wanted to hear unfocused curmudgeonly ranting, you don't need me--you could just watch Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference. Hey!

So, it was my and Matt's 5th anniversary this week. We did the normal anniversary things. Italian meal, went to a play, went to a bar, home for Chinese when Matt got hungry again. We had fun even though we were home before midnight. Because we're old.

The play was an off-off-off Broadway play that wasn't, in my opinion, far enough off Broadway. I mean, when the playwright resorts to the old chestnut, "Hey, it's getting slow, let's kill an unimportant character for no particular reason," it's hard to restrain the eye-rolling and exasperated groans. Especially since Matt laughs when I do that. He's my enabler that way. But I kept it discreet, because it wasn't really the actors' fault, they didn't have much to work with, so I didn't want to be rude.

Which reminds me of a story: OK, I was a bridesmaid for a then-friend of mine, and unbeknownst to me, she actually had arranged for her preacher to use "obey" in the service, and I sighed a little too loudly and disgustedly when he said it. Because, really, what is this, the Middle Ages? Anyway, I hope the bride didn't hear me, (she never told me so and I never asked) but the other bridesmaid did, and nearly lost it.

Yes, it was rude of me, I admit. I just couldn't contain myself. Lord. "Obey"??? They're lucky I didn't throw down my bouquet, rip off my bra, and use the "unity candle" to burn it right there in protest.

But back to the anniversary thing. In honor of the occasion, I present:

Thirty Three Useless Facts About Me and Matt

Our song is My Love by Paul McCartney.
We like to think the actual lyrics are "Milo does it good," and then call one another Milo. Heh.
The first song we danced to was actually Tupelo Honey, but Matt hates Van Morrison, so we had to pick another one. Ladies, this is what it's like to date a musician.
We married in 1998.
We dated for 2 months before we got engaged.
No one in my family had met him yet. Many didn't even know I was dating.
My family lived 10 minutes away.
They forgave me anyway.
The longest I'd been in a relationship before that was about 3 months.
I have never regretted one second of our relationship or wanted to be with anyone else, and it's pretty amazing even to me to be so content.
When we met I had very short hair and he had long, beautiful hair to his back. Now I have long hair and he has short.
I had nothing to do with his decision to cut it. He was tired of strangling on it in his sleep.
Really.
I did tell him that he should keep the beard, because I don't like being married to someone who looks like I picked him up from the junior high pep rally. With a beard, he looks like the foxy young teacher that all the junior high girls crush on. Much better.
I've taught Matt the cha cha and the waltz, but we never did get around to the ballroom dance lessons we were going to take before our wedding.
I think he's kind of relieved about that.
On our first date, he informed me he was never getting married, ever, so don't get my hopes up.
I thought he was being kind of jerky to say that.
Did I mention he proposed 2 months later? I love that story. Still, I don't recommend it as a first-date ice breaker.
We met working at a bookstore, where I was a new-employee trainer. I trained him on the cash register, and had to reprimand him for jumping ahead before I had walked him through it. He thought he knew all there was to know about cash registers. I knew better.
I also had to teach him how to gift-wrap. He wasn't as pissy about that, I think.
I barely said a word to him for two years after that. With his long hair and his band, I assumed he was smoking, drinking and partying all the time.
Plus I had a crush on another guy who wouldn't give me the time of day.
Plus, Matt had a girlfriend.
Then I left to work somewhere else. A year later, I walked back in to get a book, and he made with the flirty yack-yack. I was kind of annoyed. I was trying to find a book, dangit, and he kept talking. It didn't dawn on me he was flirting until I left the store.
Then he found out where I worked and called me to ask me out. I said "yes", hoping he wasn't really a stalker.
After that, I panicked and completely forgot his name.
No, really. I had no idea what his name was. I knew his job title, and had to call the store and pretend to be someone else asking who their Community Relations Coordinator was. Then I had to write it down.
Our first date was a freebie he got from his job...a classical music reception. Then we saw Mars Attacks. It was actually a pretty dull date overall. But I really wanted to see him again.
It was all a blur after that.
I was incredibly relieved the first time I heard his band play. I didn't know if I could lie if he really sucked. Thankfully, he didn't.
We got married in a YWCA that was actually a beautiful Victorian building with a ballroom, but I when I tell people where we got married, I know they are imagining us standing in our wedding clothes next to the deep end during Free Swim. Which would have been kinda cool, but my mother would never have stood for it.
And here we are.

April 11

(New Book Review: The Corrections)

It's a cold gray day here in Brooklyn, one of those rainy days that never gets bright enough to turn your inside lights off. The wind is ferocious and angry, but you can feel the push of spring behind it. The cold doesn't have the same bite. All the snow from our freak April storm has melted, and it's going to be 70, they say, on Monday.

A topsy-turvy time of year. Everyone longs for sunshine and warm breezes that don't give you goosebumps. Spring's just been so slow to arrive, even for me, who kind of enjoys gray wintry days.

Life grinds on. Some days, it seems to grind a little too hard. We have to do taxes this weekend, and I know I'm going to be peeved that I'm not a billionaire and so don't get a tax break, never mind that I'm barely getting by. I want so many things that I can't have yet, and I can't really know if or when I can have them. No debt. Kids. A house. Nothing grand, but it feels like saying I want a gold-plated Lear jet at the moment.

I guess I should be more obsessed with my writing career, but the thing is, it's much more attainable--at least in terms of writing books and knowing how to shop them around. I don't know what my chances of being published are, of course, but I'm strangely not worried about that. I guess I don't worry about changing the world with my books, because that seems like a strange reason to write a book, to me. I don't want to write with a mission, but because I have something that interests me to say. I have this feeling that if I do that, it will find an audience. Maybe it's naive, but I refuse to obsess about becoming successful. I've always wanted to care more about happiness than success.

Is that the character flaw that keeps me from being successful? Am I just being lazy? I really don't know.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life claims my attention, and I can't stop caring about it. I was never good at being the hippie dreamer. I always wondered why people who drifted around artistically didn't feel guilty that they were sponging off of other people who had to go to work every morning. When I married an artist, I married one that did understand that, who supports himself one way or another, but he is rare.

Sometimes, it all seems a little too hard. It's funny that you can be happy and still worry, still feel self-pity and frustration. Basically I'm a happy person, most of the time. I try to make choices that I can live with, so that I don't carry too much regret. I try to listen to my conscience, when I can decipher it. I take as many healthy risks as my timid nature will allow, and a few that it can't. And yet, I can't guarantee that it will all work out, any more than anyone can.

I know what the alternative is...my grandmother taught me that. She lived her life worried about what people would think, consumed in regret and disappointment. As long as I knew her, she never had a happy day that wasn't somehow compromised by something someone had done to her or against her. She was actually a good-looking woman for her age, but always kept her mouth set in a tight, angry line that made her look much older. I loved her, but I decided at an early age to be as little like her as possible.

I know that's what I'm doing, and that it's the right thing to do. But there's no road map, so sometimes I wander around a bit feeling lost, maybe whining a little.

And probably, with a little sunshine and a chance to think some more, I'll be just fine.

April 6

Phew. A long, crazy busy month. I wrote a book! That's a good excuse for not updating, isn't it? Well, if it isn't, you already hate me anyway, so who needs ya?

Sorry. Feeling belligerent this week. It's not you. It's me! The crazy one. Matt puts it best: "She's just havin one-a her spells."

I am. I've been really cranky the last month, all keyed-up by war news, hiding my face and yelling at the screen alternately. One of the sites I link to, Lileks.com, hasn't been helping.

I have been an open admirer (and imitator) of James Lileks on my website. I have learned a great deal from his polished prose and his ability to put all his obscure but fascinating interests on his site. I was charmed by his unapologetic love of Target merchandise and his obvious deep love for his daughter. I still wish him well. But I just can't take his unbalanced politicizing any more.

It's sad, because he's someone I respected and looked up to. But he has thrown himself into a bad cause, and it's begun to taint everything he writes. I can't separate him from his views on this war, much as I have tried. So, sadly and resignedly, I'm kicking him off my links page. Not that he will care or likely even know. But I felt I should tell my tiny readership why I was doing this. War divides us, and sometimes, it's a divide that we aren't able to cross.

NOTE: I had a particular entry of his that put me over the top, that I broke down and analyzed. But he hasn't archived it yet, so I can't link it and be more specific about what got to me. I promise to link it when it's available, so you all don't just think I like to hate people for no reason.

In more positive news, I am adding Dan Perkins, a.k.a. Tom Tomorrow to my links page. I've been a fan of his for a very long time, and I was delighted to find out that he had a blog.

It's interesting to me to compare the two. It sort of describes for me why I am a committed liberal, and why I don't return to the conservatism I was raised in. It doesn't have anything to do with democrat vs. republican, either. But liberalism--by which I mean a belief that we should see our laws and policies as tools to build a better society--has always seemed to me the more hopeful outlook. Conservatism, at least the type I'm familiar with, has a deep cyncism about human nature at its core, an assumption that we are all heading downhill into depravity and the most we can do is put on the brakes. We are all ruled by the invisible hand of self-interest, and nothing more. And while I'm pretty pragmatic about human nature, I think that there are good parts of people's natures that can be appealed to, that in fact we must appeal to that inner spark if anything is to improve.

It's the difference between looking at a poor kid in a rough neighborhood and saying, "Let's build more prisons, that kid's gonna be trouble," or looking at them and saying, "You know, with a good school and some help for that kid's parents, they might grow up to be President."

Lileks sees the war in terms of our right and Saddam's wrong, which is very compelling, but far too simplistic. His vision is tinged with a narrow nostalgia that I find troubling...a wish for the US to be all alone, the good guy, not perfect but enough better than the others out there to thumb its nose and fight the good fight. I don't think we are that country now. I don't believe we ever were. We are not alone in the world, and it is immature and wrong headed to act as though we were. We need the other countries, and they are not inferior to us.Canada, with its lower crime rate, national health care, and cleaner cities, might even have us beat.

Yes, I am angry, and I am worried. When my leaders tell me to "watch what I say", when Rumsfeld seems just this side of apoplectic because a reporter or interviewer asks him anything vaguely controversial, when the people pushing this war have connections that make their motives highly questionable, when they repeatedly try to create a false connection (Al Qaeda and Iraq) that they cannot prove--I get suspicious. I don't believe them, and I think something else is going on that makes them want to send those troops, something that has little to do with freeing Iraq.

I am more likely to trust writers like Perkins and Atrios and Tom Paine because they keep turning up credible, damning evidence of this administration's mendacity. Since Iraq began to be pushed, the suspicion that I was being sold a bill of goods has never left me. The administration's assertions had a high level of the things I was taught to avoid in speech class: "straw man arguments", "ad hominem attacks," "circular reasoning."

And then there's the domestic front, which is beginning to make even some of the Republicans a little nervous. Like the rest of us, they are disturbed by Homeland Security freedom curtailments. They too are a more than a little worried about the staggering amount of debt we face. Maybe they just worry it will be to hard to sell a President in 2004 who thinks taxing the rich is a bigger crime than schools without books, families without healthcare, working people without jobs, or old people without retirement income.

Lileks would argue, I suppose, that all that is irrelevant--that freeing the Iraqis from Saddam is worth it. And that is the only thing I might agree with him on. I am not callous to their suffering, and I have nothing but hatred for Saddam. Maybe the world needs to remove him from power. But there is such a thing as doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and worse, in the wrong way. Our administration is so inept at diplomacy, so hostile to it, that the victory we achieve will be much more tenuous and fragile than it should be. And when you make mistakes at this level, it doesn't just cause delays and confusion--it costs lives.

And will Iraq and Afghanistan truly be able to survive as democracies? I hope so. But if they do, it will be because their people are willing to fight for it and do the hard, dangerous work of making it happen. Our current administration lacks the ability to follow through, because, surprise surprise, you need more than bombs and bullets to make a country work, and to teach a people about the entirely new concept of democracy, and overcome the legacy of colonialism and terror. You need communication, patience, diplomacy, and persistence, none of which this administration has shown any talent for. This will be our burden for years, long after the people who set us on this course leave office. The least they could have done was to realize that this is going to be a very long haul, and done a better job from the start. Because I and my children are going to be the ones to deal with the aftermath.