An Embarrassment of Riches

Scabby Doom - by Jen One of the features of the library catalog I love most is when it tries to re-spell whatever it is I've just typed. The greatest potential substitution I've had yet came recently when I tried to type "Scooby Doo" without a hyphen.  

"Did you mean Scabby Doom?"

Ah, Scabby Doom.  

Scabby Doom can be leaving your freshly packed lunch on the table near the door. Again.  

Scabby Doom can be waiting for a bus in a cold rain with no hot coffee because you forgot to set it the night before.  

But real Scabby Doom, I've decided, is that adrift-on-an-iceberg feeling I get when I don't have a promising stack of books waiting to be opened. It's that "nothing good to read" feeling, something so ridiculous to contemplate in my line of work that when it happens I feel I must be in an alternate universe. Water water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

I was recently treading water in this book-less sea looking for something to occupy my commute when a hold I had forgotten about crashed ashore. Children of the Sea by Daisuke Igarashi is exactly the kind of imaginative and atmospheric manga I look for and rarely find. The story and pictures combine a detailed realism with an element of fantasy that is compelling. Ruka is a troubled girl from a broken home stuck hanging around the aquarium where her father works. Umi and Sora are strange siblings raised by dugongs with an otherworldly affinity for the ocean. The drawings of the sea and its creatures are striking; whale sharks and beached oarfishes are particularly memorable.  

Japanese culture meets an urban legend from Fisherman's Wharf?

Feral and occasionally luminescent manatee children?

A mystery of disappearing fish involving the world's aquariums?

Scabby Doom be gone!  

(Now if only I could get rid of Scooby-Doo, too. These are the animated perils of living with children who have not been raised by manatees.)

Has the library catalog given you any fantastic or semi-hilarious substitutions? Post a comment!

A Vacation in Five Words - by Jen So I returned from my road trip to discover that I took a total of nine pictures.

I'm a lousy photographer and even worse at remembering to take pictures in the first place. As a consequence I have almost nothing to show for those sixteen epic hours at Disneyland, an ill-timed visit to a jellybean factory, or the frosted tragedy of a dropped birthday cake. No evidence of the hobo spider bite I got hours before leaving for California or the I'm-really-going-to-die-this-time feeling I always get on the freeways of Los Angeles when surrounded by speeding tanker trucks carrying flammable materials. No proof of the fantastic five-foot hole my nephew dug in the sand at Newport Beach which functioned as a novel working playpen for Child the Younger.

It's probably better that way.

I don't know about you, but the pictures I take are never the ones I wish I could take. They never quite sync up with the memories I have of the event they supposedly record and the effect is one of a poorly dubbed foreign film. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the idea of scrapbooking my photos into organized and themed albums makes me break out in hives. (If there were stickers to commemorate spider attacks or page borders to mimic the sounds that two bored children make in an enclosed space I might reconsider the hobby.)

I much prefer other people's pictures.

Two books of photographs I have been unable to put down are American Photobooth by Nakki Goranin and Suburban World: the Norling Photos by Brad Zellar.

American Photobooth's introduction is the fascinating history of the photo booth and the people who invented, perfected, and championed it in its variety of forms. Photo booth pictures of Andy Warhol and honeymooning John and Jackie Kennedy are included. But the real draw of the book is the collection of plates: random finds of nameless Americans in all their creased, scuffed, stained, and noted glory.

Suburban World features the photographs of Irwin Denison Norling, a policeman who seemed to record the ordinary and extraordinary with equal and unblinking fervor. Black and white pictures of smiling girl scouts selling cookies and family suppers share the book with images of horrific car accidents and murder-suicide scenes. Gravely injured and presumably dead people are sometimes, but not always, visible. The pictures are simultaneously and paradoxically revealing yet inscrutable.

And then there is the book of pictures I just had to buy.  

Our True Intent is All for your Delight: the John Hinde Butlin's Photographs is a collection of amazing postcards from Butlin's Holiday Camps in Britain. These camps were conceived as a 'social revolution': affordable holiday destinations for the working classes visited by some 10 million people. The carefully staged photographs feature restaurants, swimming pools, lakes, ballrooms, bars, and playgrounds of the 1960s and 1970s complete with all of the hideous themed décor, bad hair and unfortunate fashions mandated by those times. Throw in a giant fiberglass rooster or the guests snorkeling in a glass-walled aquarium and I'll bet you'll want your own copy, too. In the words of Martin Parr's introduction, the pictures "show an idealised view of the world and, after the passage of time, acquire the power of a lost dream."

Idealized worlds and lost dreams. Indeed. A vacation in five words.

The Disney Version - by Jen I have a complicated relationship with Disneyland.

"The Disney Version" are words that generally make me shudder, but I have to admit to spending some very memorable days at Walt's first theme park.

Growing up in Southern California meant we got to visit more often than most people. The ride to Disneyland took an entire twenty agonizing minutes; I knew we were close when we passed Camping World on the right. Then the sparkling Disneyland sign like the pearled gates of kid heaven and the regimented parking operation with ushers to methodically fill every available space. Then the purchasing of the coupon books we were not allowed to hold with their A,B,C,D and fabulous E tickets.  

All too soon came the hated picnic lunch in the always hot and less-than-scenic area by the parking lot for the brown-baggers. A few more rides and then the rise of anger at being forced to return home for naps and dinner, stupid rituals my parents insisted upon while the happy out-of-town children stayed in the park or rode the Monorail back to the Hotel for a swim in the pool. I refused to wash my hands lest I wash away the magical hand stamp that was my return ticket.

As I got older there was Grad Nite, that ritual all-night party for California high school seniors. Disney had a lengthy dress code for this event and I recall necessarily ditching my jacket behind an entry pylon because it had a zipper and would not be allowed in. (Somewhat miraculously, I found it again on the way out.) I still have a picture of myself posing in a hideous bubble-skirted dress with Winnie the Pooh and the boy who would become my husband many years later.

The state college I went on to attend had the unofficial title of Cal State Disneyland. If you weren't a Disney employee, your boyfriend or your roommate was (your annoying tap-dancing roommate who practiced Disney parade routines in the living room and whom you once threatened to kill in the middle of the night if she so much as hummed that theme music one more time.) Disney became more about paying for gas and car insurance, the brainwashing training sessions new "cast members" were required to attend, and the reported miseries of wearing a Br'er Bear costume at high noon in the middle of summer.

Eventually I moved away and mostly forgot about Disney except to heartily enjoy an occasional vilifying tale like Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent. When Child the Elder was three we passed a special display of giant fiberglass Mickey figurines on the street and I patted myself on the back when he said, "Look at that big doggy, Mommy!" Mickey Mouse, one of the most recognizable icons around the world for children everywhere, was a stranger to my son.

Here I am on the cusp of introducing Child the Elder, the premier product of my union with Winnie the Pooh Boy, to the wonders of The Happiest Place On Earth. In anticipation the two of us have been poring over The Disneyland Encyclopedia: the unofficial, unauthorized, and unprecedented history of every land, attraction, restaurant, shop, and event in the original Magic Kingdom. It is fascinating to read about rides never built and lands never realized. The book has details of many beloved things about the park I will never see or ride again (Farewell, Swiss Family Treehouse!) and is filled with interesting behind-the-scenes details, facts, and figures. Because it is in encyclopedic form the reader is free to skip around, but if Disneyland is part of your psyche (for better or worse) you will be compelled to read it cover to cover.

My road trip south to the people and places of my youth, with two small children and covering a total 2,000 miles, is in two days. My head is spinning and I'm back twirling in the kitchen where it's hot and I'm seven years old with 1970's day-glo mouse ears on my head and a hard-won all-day sucker clutched in my sticky fist. Most of my preparatory concentration for this arduous journey thus far has been spent on deciding which books to take with me in the car.

And that, more than anything else, should betray both my eternally optimistic nature and my complete severance with reality-based living.

It's my own Disney Version.

Haunted by Choice - by Jen As Americans we demand choices. Choice equals happiness.

Or does it?

I have an un-American confession: sometimes I'm sick to death of choosing. That secret forced-to-wear-a-uniform-to-school envy I harbored as an ordinary public school kid washes over me once again. I want the choice made for me. Or no choice at all. It's just easier that way.

My happiest summer vacations at a kid were spent stuck at cousins' houses in rural parts of Washington and New Mexico. There was no roster of camps, lessons, or play dates. The only scheduled activity was go play. We poked at anthills with sticks, picked blackberries until we were covered in blood and juice, read the same two ratty books over and over because they were the only books lying around. There was nothin' to do and it was pretty rockin' great.

I can make a great argument for single-payer health care, but I'm more likely to sound off about the drinks in the vending machine at work (twenty-eight varieties of sugar water but not a single root beer.) Recently I started whittling the choices I offer to Child the Elder. Hungry? Here's the one thing you can eat right now. Time to read a book before bed? Mommy's voice means Mommy's choice. He complains, sure, but secretly I think he's pleased with this totalitarian turn of events.

Summer is when I give myself a break and go back to the things I want to read repeatedly. Most people in high school are forced to read both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson. They either become English majors or they run the other way, screaming, into their sensible adult lives and never discover both authors have written hilarious tears-will-leak-out-your-eyes memoirs about raising children.

Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages are her fabulously funny accounts of surviving life with four children as a professor's wife in the 1950's. She is a woman who treats hospital childbirth as a well-deserved vacation and flips a coin with her husband to decide who will talk to the detested teacher during Parent's Visiting Week. She is a one-woman taxi service minus modern car seats and has sarcastic conversations with clueless college students:

"Certainly," I said. "My only desire was to be a faculty wife. I used to sit at my casement window, half embroidering, half dreaming, and long for Professor Right."

"I suppose," she said, "that you are better off than you would have been. Not married at all or anything."

"I was a penniless governess in a big house," I said. "I was ready to take anything that moved."

"And of course you do make a nice home for your husband. Someplace to come back to, and everything so neat."

"My spinning lacks finesse," I said. "But I yield to no one on my stone-ground meal."

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny is a personal diary extract and will show you a side of Hawthorne you never dreamed existed. Think of the guy who wrote the Scarlet Letter. Now think of that same guy stuck at home taking care of a spirited five-year-old while his wife is away. He is alone and this is his debut as a single parent. In Hawthorne's experience this includes application of curling tongs to the tot's hair with predictably poor results and encouraging the boy to, um, evacuate his bodily waste on the property of the neighboring Shakers. Hawthorne didn't like the Shakers.  

Lucky for us, they wrote all of this down. Jackson and Hawthorne both knew the value of a good haunting but probably never intended to haunt me with their quirky parenting. Now they can haunt you, too.

Go play. And don't come back until I call you for dinner.

I Heart ACK-WA-MAN* - by Jen

There is something comforting in the rift we have as children between fantasy and reality.

When I was a kid, there were two beagles in my life. There was Snoopy. Everyone had Snoopy.

And then there was the "beagle" my Aunt and Uncle owned. She was elderly, obese, and toothless. Her tongue lolled in a perpetual pant over the left side of her mouth without any barrier to keep it contained in her head. Her name was Hyphen. She was nothing like Snoopy, and I decided she could not possibly be a beagle because there was no reconciling Hyphen with Snoopy. And anyway, who names a dog after a punctuation mark? Snoopy and Hyphen did not occupy the same universe. Hyphen was an obscurity; an unknown in the beagle world.

While I will now freely label Hyphen of the beagle breed, it took me until last year to admit that Aquaman is not considered by most people I have surveyed** to be a top-tier superhero. His power to telepathically communicate with ocean creatures has been mocked and ridiculed by many. Sufferin’ starfish!

Spiderman is cool. Batman is cool. Aquaman is NOT cool. Some would insist they do not occupy the same universe.

I am a geek for not realizing this sooner, I know. But I freely admit to my personal geekiness and make regular overt attempts to turn my children geeky as well. (For help with the geekification of children, I recommend Bringing up Geeks by Marybeth Hicks.) This includes subjecting them to the early episodes of Little House on the Prairie and reading a somewhat obscure Australian novel about a talking pudding. 

And now thanks to the The Complete Collection of The Adventures of Aquaman I have 36 episodic chances to convince Child the Elder that there is nothing better than rounding up sea creatures in defense of Atlantis against the evil Vassa, Queen of the Mermen while riding a giant snowy seahorse named Storm. Look out, Aqualad!

Perhaps it is my lifelong fascination with all things ocean-related, but Spiderman and Batman just never measured up to a guy who battles mechanical whales and mutant plankton.

I dare you to watch it without reveling in a satisfying universe where good always triumphs. It is a relief to dive down below the reality of our recessionary realm to a place where bad guys can be vanquished with a few compressed balls of water and a school of obedient yet determined fish. The corny and hilarious dialog is a bonus. And you just may ask yourself, "Why does every last villain aim to smash the glass bubble surrounding Atlantis and drown its hapless air-breathing inhabitants? Do they hate the Atlanteans for their captivity?"

Great Gastropods! Long live Ack-wa-man*, and long may he reign.

 *The proper pronunciation, according to the television series.

**Not a scientific survey. Includes many disdainful children of my relation or acquaintance and one sarcastic husband.

Brain Pudding - by Jen (read)

I realized the other night that parenting has pushed me into full intellectual survival mode. I watched Child the Younger (who is not yet two) throw a blanket over his head and run, yelling, straight for a wall at full speed. This spectacle was like an infant version of a Braveheart battle scene, but I could only think: if he knocks himself out, maybe I can read three more pages before he regains consciousness. . .

This is my brain on toddlers.

I caught myself reading while stirring tapioca pudding on the stove, vaguely aware that if I wasn’t reading at that very moment my brain would actually dissolve itself and become one with that pot of pale, gelatinous, gently bubbling goo.

What separates me from tapioca these days?  Anything I can pick up or put down in hurry; magazines, graphic novels, comics, and zines are my lifeline.

The best mom magazine I’ve found is Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers.  Each issue is filled with thought-provoking essays and articles that get to the core of what it means to be a mother in our time. There are no smarmy potty-training lectures or mind-numbing checklists or cutesy impossible birthday cakes I would never make in a million years or big corporate food advertisements for the unholy Uncrustables.  (I’m sorry; if you’re really too busy to make a PB & J, you need more help than a frozen sealed crust-less sandwich can offer.)

Graphic novels and comics are more weapons of defense in my arsenal for brain cell preservation.  Keiko Tobe’s With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child is the fascinating and realistic saga of one family’s day-to-day struggles with the disorder.  (Yes, the Japanese mothers resemble Barbies and the children have giant doe eyes, but that’s manga for you.)

Richard Thompson’s brilliant comic strip Cul-de-sac keeps me subscribing to The Oregonian even though I currently have no time to read the rest of it.  His first book of collected work is a fabulous introduction to the most searing and poignant comic since Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes.  Any modern parent can commiserate with the family’s recent visit to P. J. Piehole’s, a soul-sucking chain restaurant with vaguely terrifying décor and pepper jack cheese in every menu item.

My go-to mom zine is Ayun Halliday’s The East Village Inky.  Halliday writes about her adventures as the (way cooler than you) mom of two living in New York’s East Village.  It is a vicarious and hilarious thrill to follow her through one gritty urban experience after another.  Kate Haas’s Miranda: Motherhood and Other Adventures offers a more local take on parenting in P-town with bonus recipes.

Reading anything these days is an act of survival.  I may not make it through that dusty copy of Bleak House on my nightstand before 2012, but a comic book will do for right now.

Because nobody wants brain pudding in their lunch box.

SAD + SAD = :) - by Jen (watch)    Portland can be hard to love in February.  The current economic news combined with my first overdraft notice of the New Year adds another steel gray layer of despair to my annual slugfest with SAD.  I find that these days I am prone to reading depressing fairy tales involving starvation to Child the Elder: The Little Match Girl.  Hansel and Gretel.  

 “But why do they want to let the kids starve, Mommy?”  
 “Maybe because the kids said dinner was ‘yucky’ once too often, honey.”  
 “But it’s MEAN!”  
 “So is telling someone their tamale casserole looks like throw-up.”  

  Maybe your instinct at times like this is to go for comforting and escapist entertainment, but that is where you and I part company.  Go ahead and take your Hawaiian holiday.  Don’t forget your copy of Chicken Soup for the SAD*.
My instinct is to head directly into the storm, like those crazy people who chase tornadoes. If you’re still with me, I’m headed for Helsinki.  Because what’s colder, grayer, and more depressing than Portland in February?  That’s right, my friend...Finland. 
  Aki Kaurismaki’s proletariat trilogy of films spins tales of working-class socioeconomic woe that are not to be missed.  All three are worth the watch, but the best by far is The Match Factory Girl.  
  Poor Iris is a social disaster, living with her disapproving parents and working on the factory line.  The desperation and hopelessness of Iris’s situation are leavened with deadpan humor and the superbly straight-faced under-acting of Kati Outinen.  This tale of her unintended pregnancy is the anti-Juno and I laugh days later just thinking about it.  A dose of Iris is better than a melatonin shot.
  The schadenfreude I experience after viewing is enough to carry me through another week of too many bills and not enough magazines in the mail.  It is another week of children spending too much time in the house criticizing my lackluster winter cooking.  But wait a minute.  Is that the Little Match Girl flying to heaven?  Or could it really be the sun?

*Not a real title.  At least I hope not.