Housewives in the Time of Cholera

I should have been in bed hours ago, but I can't bear to sleep while the house is so quiet and I'm alone, so why don't you and I talk?

I asked a friend if she watched the TV show Breaking Bad. No, she responded, she can't handle dark shows, they make her too depressed. She liked the Real Housewives on Bravo. I laughed because my friends are always trying to make me watch the Real Housewives series, but they make me too depressed; I weep for the future of America when I watch the Housewives (sorry, Susie and Noelle.) I'm not sure why shows that are clearly meant to be campy and ridiculous, like the Housewives, sometimes make me sad, and the intense shows, like Breaking Bad, are like Lisa Frank unicorns dancing around my heart, but that's how I feel. When every element of a program is perfection, like it is on Breaking Bad, it's a joy to watch. It's the culmination of an extraordinarily talented group of people producing the best work of their lives. Everything from the performances, the writing, the acting, the production design, even down to the art direction, is masterful.

Take the lighting: when Walter White and his wife Skyler are being open and honest with each other, the lighting in their house is bright and cheerful. When they are lying, or things are complicated, or they simply aren't speaking, the lighting isn't just dark, it's oppressive.

It's a relief to experience a piece of art like Breaking Bad. It's the same feeling you get when you see a Van Gogh in real life, or a Mahler symphony, or the first time you heard The Joshua Tree. When you connect with a piece of art it's almost hard to handle how it vibrates through you. Kinda like meth, right? (I'm guessing. Never tried meth, but I did drink a lot of Diet Cokes in a row this week. Totally the same.)

Love in the Time of Cholera is supposed to be my favorite book, but it's been years since I'd thoroughly read it. When Christy challenged me to discuss it with her (she did not like the book) I decided it was time for a re-read. What if I've read too much in the meantime and it's no longer even in my top 10? Thanks to a cross country flight I'm about 2/3 of the way through Cholera. I'd forgotten how Gabriel Garcia Marquez jolts me. Makes me question everything I've ever written (discarding it all, immediately.) The simultaneous thrill of beauty and connection, tangled with the despair of knowing you'll never make anything like it, not if you, or your band of monkeys, banged at a typewriter for a million years.

The truth is that the first time I read Love in the Time of Cholera I couldn't finish it. Not because I was bored, or got distracted, but because I couldn't bear to finish it. I wanted to keep reading it for the first time. I wanted it to last for the rest of my life. Probably the same reason that I've never watched the last episode of Firefly, even though I own the DVDs. Someday I'll watch the last episode and it will be finished and I won't be able to live in it anymore. After I read Gone With the Wind I tried to read Scarlett, the sequel penned by another author. I got about three pages in and dropped the book. Margaret Mitchell's prose is extraordinary (rising above even the ugly early 20th Century racial stereotypes, characterizations, and anachronisms,) and the sequel's simply isn't. The connection broke.

So now it really is time for bed, which is not a piece of art, nor anything I'd watch over and over, but it is a nice place to rest until I have time to read, watch, or listen again. Maybe I'll dream something beautiful.

Take it Literally

The bugaboo of so many a writer is the word "literally." As in, "I literally sprained my ankle wearing those shoes" vs. "I literally died of fright." Obviously, the person didn't literally die of fright (although it would be freaky cool if they were able to write that sentence and they really had literally died of fright.) But that's not what I'm writing about this afternoon. My personal bugaboo is not people who misuse "literally"* but people who are too literal in their thoughts and comprehension.

I don't mean serious people, because I rainbow-heart serious people, but those souls who read and comprehend everything at only a literal level. These folks can't seem to find anything funny, take everything they read at face, literal value, and must proceed through life with un-literal heavy chains of black and white. I suspect they didn't read enough C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia as a child, or didn't understand why the kids in Bridge to Terebithia would be out on a rainy day instead of being inside counting their real collection of cardboard boxes. A failure of imagination is literally one of our most tragic national issues.**

A week ago I posted this status on Facebook: "Fashion Question: What can I wear that will make it so I never had children?"

Now, if you don't read that closely enough it looks like I wrote, "What can I wear that will make it LOOK like I never had children." I didn't, because that would be a serious question and is not particularly entertaining. Informative, maybe, but not entertaining. Instead it was "What can I wear that will make it SO I NEVER had children?" Obviously, this is a joke on several levels; it's clearly a jab at how hard it is to be a parent. I am not being literal when I write a sentence suggesting that I wish I could put on a sweater and not be a mother. My children are wonderful and it's my privilege to try to raise them to be good citizens and great people. Which is why prefacing a joke about how parenting is hard, sometimes thankless work, with the qualifier that it's a fashion question makes it funny. Why? Because fashion is usually regarded as a frivolous pursuit, while parenting is perhaps the most serious thing many of us accomplish each day. You could even take it as a skewer at the fashion industry because they consider themselves terribly serious, when most of the world does not. A difficult day with children is not the same as picking which scarf to wear (although the latter might ease the frustration of the former.)

This did not stop kind, but literal people from suggesting Spanx and miracle body wraps.

I sent a message to my friend Emmie saying that I loved her with the power of a 1,000 suns. A literal person might write me an email with the helpful tip that 1,000 suns might burn my friend! If I want to keep my friends I shouldn't put them in danger like that! I'm sometimes guilty of the same literal offenses: reading a status or post and thinking that they really shouldn't do such a thing because someone could get hurt, or their clothing stained, only to realize a few minutes (or hours) later that the author was being silly. But I wonder what it would be like to constantly live in a state of literal comprehension. The world must seem to be a terribly irresponsible and foolhardy place in need of constant guidance!

I laughed a great deal at my friend Courtney's blog the other day when she wrote about a neighbor who sometimes mows her yard, calling it "a service project." More than a few commentors were upset that Courtney would joke about such a thing and briskly suggested she invest in a gift card and a thank you note for the intrepid young man. I giggled because no one in their right mind would consider referring to the mowing of a yard as a "service project" unless the occupant of the home was truly in need, let alone being horrified because the writer didn't specifically state, by line-item, exactly what she'd done to make the man understand how grateful she was. I imagined a blog where the writer wrote literally everything they'd done that day in a perfectly serious, explanatory tone. Those gentle, right-thinking souls could rest assured that everyone was doing exactly what they were supposed to do, while errant steps would be caught and rectified immediately. What a relief! Meanwhile, the list-checker was missing the larger story of a summer spent healing a soul with an application of wild wandering.

I read most of what my friends write and inevitably there are literal participants who are intent on demonstrating just how little fun they will allow. Such is the nature, I suppose, of writing. You can crack a joke, compose a metaphor, select a simile and there will still be readers who do not understand your intent (or worse, deliberately misconstrue your words.)  More fun for the rest of us (if it does not make us cry.)

Anyway, I'm glad you're still reading these words because it clearly shows you're a terribly smart person who can always distinguish between the serious and the satirical, yet enjoys them both in good measure.



*In fact, misusing the word literally usually gives me a laugh as I imagine someone "literally peeing my pants" or "literally climbing a mountain of paperwork today." Which is why Chris Traeger is so funny (thanks, Whitney.)

**This is a minor sarcasm. Hunger and also harem pants are far more serious issues.***

***Sarcasm (about the harem pants, hunger really is a problem.)