A n n a r c h y

In college, I had a friend named Jane. She was the oldest daughter in a family of tennis players, and they all looked like her: tall and willowy, but strong as thoroughbreds, with defined muscles in their long arms and legs; permanently sunburned noses; and an effortless way of moving that was almost heartbreaking to watch. Even when Jane was just swinging her backpack over her shoulder as she sauntered out of class, she had a way of making it look like art.

At her Long Island home, her family walked around in track suits and tennis shoes, without the irony that, for example, a track suit would have conveyed on my plump mother. Someone was always going out to play on the courts or coming in from just having played, toting bags and several racquets and fresh cans of balls that smelled excitingly of gassy rubber. They had kitchen conversations about faults and flats and tournament seeds, and other things that I desperately didn’t understand. They taped the US Open, replaying the best parts for each other. Even their golden retriever always seemed to have a tennis ball nestled between her paws.

I envied Jane deeply. I coveted her family’s casual athleticism, their secret language, their common bond that elevated tennis from a simple game to a distinct family culture–a way of life that lent meaning and purpose to each as a person as well as to their lives together as a unit.

For a while I took tennis lessons. I started running to improve my wind and stamina. I walked around in gym shorts and short white socks with pom-poms at the heel, with a racquet tucked in my armpit. My then-boyfriend and I hit the ball back and forth on the weedy courts at a local middle school. It was fun enough, I guess, but it lacked the magic I had seen in Long Island. [Read more →]

1970

It’s four days before Christmas, and my father finally retrieves from beneath the cellar stairs the huge Sears box that houses our Christmas tree. The tree is heavy, its metal trunk solid and plumed with thick branches trimmed with rough-cut green cellophane that simulates pine needles.

It’s the only Christmas tree I’ve ever known, and when my father wrestles it upright and folds its heavy wire branches down, one by one, it’s as magical to me as a butterfly unfurling new wings. He gets pinched once or twice by the boughs as he tugs them into place. “Goddamit,” he says under his breath, to no one in particular.

Then comes the endless detangling of lights (“Goddamit!!”), and my favorite part: the box of ornaments. Most of our Christmas tree ornaments are flimsy or plastic—cheap molded candy canes painted with red, uneven stripes; cardboard stars dipped in white glue and glitter; small plastic elves trimmed sloppily with felt, their faces painted by someone who slap-dashed their eyes on, completely askew from the divot meant to replicate a tiny plastic eye socket. But I love them all.

What I love best, though, are the few fragile glass balls that predate me and are carefully hung in a place of honor on the tree, high up in front. They aren’t particularly fancy, but they are beautiful in the eyes of a 6-year-old. My favorite is a fat little ball with a pointed tip, painted with a picture of a small white snowman holding what looks like a palm tree, but which I later realize is supposed to be a broom.

I don’t really fully know the story of the handful of painted glass ornaments on our tree—and I still don’t. They might have been purchased by my parents as newlyweds, or possibly they once hung on a tree at my grandparents’ house. But those years, they add import and sophistication to our metal tree, erected in the basement rec room. We aren’t a family prone to cultural or ethnic traditions: Like many of their generation, my parents have fully embraced the conveniences of the suburban New World and cast off the Old. But, still, our Christmas has the ornaments, and I associate them in a murky, unfocused way with all that is rich and good about family history, and ritual, and tradition.

1973

I am invited to my friend Heidi’s house for a Christmas party. Heidi’s mother is German. She swings open the door just as we hit the top step, at the threshold, and as we pass through… her meaty arms swing heavily, like hams in a butcher shop, over our heads. “Velcome! Velcome, children!” she says. [Read more →]

It snowed the other morning north of Boston. It was the first, early snowfall of the season, if you take a very literal view of the term “snowfall,” because the flurries that fell didn’t amount to any real accumulation. They stuck tentatively to the ground, in clusters, like they were as surprised to be landing on the lawn as we were to see them.

My 11-year-old woke and from her bedroom upstairs, and I heard a noise that sounded like she stepped on a puppy’s tail. She was squealing not about sledding or school closings, as you might expect. Instead, she hollered as she charged down the stairs, “Yippee! We’ve stopped global warming!”

Her comment came without a hint of irony. How heartbreakingly innocent is that?

She bounded into the kitchen and gave me a quick, happy hug. She might now be almost as tall as I am, but as she stood there in the kitchen — in bare feet and with her pigtails loosened in sleep, bits of wild hair sticking out — that was easy to ignore for a second. In her freckled face I saw only a child’s hopeful optimism.

Apparently, her kind of optimism and idealism are baked into her generation the way that “don’t trust anyone over 30″ was baked into the Baby Boomers. [Read more →]

Maybe it’s because the onset of the holidays always puts me in something of a melancholy mood, or maybe because I’m again staring down the barrel of six bleak months of winter, but I can’t help but read lolcats these days without glimpsing at something of the heartache of the human condition.

In a piece a few weeks ago in Salon, Jay Dixit articulated it perfectly, when he wrote, “This is all funny stuff. But I submit that the true genius of lolcats lies in their tragedy.”

Lolcats, if you don’t know, is a web site and internet phenomenon that combines a photo of a cat with a funny, idiosyncratic caption in broken English—a sort of dialect known as “lolspeak,” “kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin,” which parodies the poor grammar and spelling of Internet slang. The name “lolcat” is a compound of the phrase “LOL” and “cat.” It’s simple, it’s goofy, and it’s stuffed full of references and self-references. Sometimes even I don’t get it, and I spend a lot of time online.

Its flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, will top a billion page views this year, and all of its photos and captions are submitted entirely by its fans. Readers upload thousands of home-rolled captioned photos every day, and six or eight of them are posted on the site. Last month, Gotham Books published the coffee table book, “I Can Has Cheezburger,” which helps to deconstruct some of the lolcat culture and lore.

I’m not much of a fan of cats, but still I check in with the felines on lolcats almost daily. I started because it’s a quick pit stop, and it’s often hilarious. [Read more →]

Barb Chamberlain is the Director of Communications and Public Affairs at Washington State University in Spokane. She was also the youngest Representative and (later) Senator elected to the Idaho State Legislature–which I didn’t know until she tagged me in a post she wrote on her blog: Five things you don’t know about me. But I’m glad I know now.

In blog-speak, being “tagged” means that Barb challenged me to reveal five little-known things about myself, as well. I’ve done that before, with a giant dollop of discomfort. But since I’m a soft touch for people I like, I’m complying here. Well, sort of. Instead of giving you more little-known facts about me, I randomly opened my diary and transcribed a few entries. [Read more →]

When the flight attendant advises that passengers place the oxygen mask over their own faces before assisting those seated nearby, I always interpret this imperative more broadly—that I should take care of my own needs first, whether or not I’m strapped into an airplane seat, 10,000 feet in the air. Day to day, this doesn’t really happen, of course. What with dogs needing kibble in their bowls and mail needing filing and kids needing an occasional warm embrace or a ride to school… my own needs often wind up in the back seat, shoved in the crevice between the seat cushions along with candy wrappers, pennies, and old gum.

But one thing I do hold sacred: In the morning, I don’t want anyone to bug me before I’ve cleared that first cup of coffee. Around my house, my daughter has learned to steer a wide berth for the 5 or 10 minutes it takes for me to drain the mug. My teenage son just stays in bed.

This morning, I filled the first cup before first light, and in the dark toddled over to the fridge to add a bit of milk. I unscrewed the carton and started to pour, then—surprised—stopped. The milk, which had been fine the previous night, was a startling shade of blue. An oddly bright color, like a robin’s egg.

“What the…” I said, to no one in particular. Then, more loudly, in the general direction of the bedrooms, “Hey!” I yelled. “Anyone know what happened to the milk?” From my son’s room, somewhere under the covers, I heard a muffled sort of snort that before long matured into a prolonged, knowing cackle.

When I told this story to some friends today, each looked at me quizzically, like a dog might cock his head at an unfamiliar pitch. “So wait… he dyed the milk blue? Well what’s so funny about that?” [Read more →]