Category Archives: Experiments

Bright Pink Lipstick

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I’ve spent the last several years writing blog posts about the Recession. Here’s how it started: an old friend of mine got ahold of me. It turns out he was an editor for a website about the new economy, and he wanted me to write my story. This is a familiar sort of occurrence among people of A Certain Age: thanks to the wild accessibility of really pretty much everyone through Facebook, we are all reconnecting with folks we were too drunk or too careless to keep in contact with. For some time now, I’ve been ludicrously rewarded for decades of bad behavior. Turns out that all of my exes and a whole bunch of lost friends are excellent people, which makes me feel a whole lot better about my taste, but even worse about my carelessness and the time I lost.

Which brings me to: carlessness. My word processing program doesn’t want to even acknowledge it’s a word; it’s just a snippet of the zeitgeist and that takes longer to integrate. It’s too close to carelessness, and maybe that resemblance is a bad thing. You see, outside of places like Portland and maybe New York City, not having a car–especially when you are the suburban mother of three–is a sign and symbol of having Blown It Big Time. But we are without a car. It was an easy decision at the time: we couldn’t pay the rent. What we had was a paid-for, valuable hunk of metal parked in the driveway and a roof we preferred to keep over our heads. Some people make another choice: to move in with family, perhaps. “Temporarily,” of course. But it was no accident that we had found ourselves in Northern California, far away from both of our parents’ households in Texas. We had severed the ropes of that safety net and had no regrets. You see, there are some sorts of safety that are so fraught with danger and damage that calling upon them feels like a sort of suicide.

So we carry on, working menial jobs and trying to shake money from trees. We take our children on errands in our bike trailers, pedaling in the sweltering heat or in downpours, faces held in caricature expressions of grim determination. It’s been an adventure. A noble experiment. So many others around us are in similar straits, so this whole thing–newfound poverty–has an air of camaraderie to it, and whole new ways of doing things have taken root. We’ve done it all: bartered, gotten backyard chickens, grown a vegetable garden. I’ve written so many essays about the New Simplicity that I’ve started to think of my style as “Chicken Soup for the Recessionista’s Soul.” This ghetto for my writing is eye-rolling in its tendency to put a positive spin on things but still keeps my work out there, in front of appreciative eyes.

But something horrible has happened to me this year, and I don’t know what to do. At some point–was it after the hundredth “no?” The thousandth? Was it day number 1350 of not having enough, or maybe day 1351? But somewhere along the line I realized this is not going away, and that struggling to pay the utilities is a monthly reality with no end in sight. That making Top Ramen for dinner had stopped being an amusing indulgence in crappiness, and has become–at times–economic necessity. I look at my children and I want to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you’re having to wear this need and pretend it’s okay, I’m sorry there are no birthdays at pizza parlors or dance lessons. I’m sorry I can’t send you with a handful of change that I don’t have so you can get a candy bar at the corner store. I’m sorry you notice what other families enjoy–simple things, a drive to the country and a weekend of camping–and you notice the difference and have to ask me why. I’m so sorry I cannot provide for you the things that were provided for me. I’m sorry that a simple trip to the doctor to check for pinkeye has to be a negotiation based on the twenty bucks in co-pay expense versus what may be curable with time and the hive mind of online medical care advice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I wear bright pink lipstick and have my cruiser bike decorated like a parade float. I let my children dress with hippie freedom. We played by the rules and we lost everything that offered us safety and security, so to hell with the rules, I teach them. You will get screwed-over six ways to Sunday, so find the hidden magic, I say. Do you see that smooth brown stone? Pick it up and shift it towards the light, and you will see small bits of glitter like tiny stars. I try to tout this lifestyle as one we would have chosen back when we were flush with income and silly material wants, and YES: there are lessons we’ve learned. Yes, you can be a band of hobos in satin and velvet castoffs, and yes, there are blackberries that grow wild all over this town.

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But I’m done. The truth is that I’m toiling for not a lot over minimum wage, and those chickens in the back yard have come home to roost. There’s only so long you can go on before all your resources are tapped, and the barrel you’re scraping has well and truly reached bottom. I know we are required to be  grateful for what we have: no one in the family has chronic health issues, we have good public schools for our kids to attend, and we live in a patch of paradise that makes living without a vehicle or air conditioning a tolerable option. We have–praise ye gods!–health insurance from my husband’s soul-sucking, low-paying retail job. We have a marriage where our struggles manifest themselves in silent regret and disappointment (and a lot of space between us in our marital bed) versus thrown fists or addictions. But no amount of health-insurance-provided antidepressants can prop me up forever, and it’s me who has to keep this ship afloat. It’s doubtless my lifelong sense of entitlement that has probably contributed to my lack of ability to turn things around and make something from nothing, which is probably a story for another day. I’m forty-two years old. I have three children. I pull them where they need to go. I look at my husband while we sit on the porch and the hand I reach out to him is conciliatory. Apologetic.

Incandescent

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My latest shareable post, this time on why I have a fetish for string lights and a stubborn attachment to incandescent bulbs.

http://shareable.net/blog/incandescent . . . and while you’re there, can you click on a star? And carry moonbeams home in a jar? You’ll be better off than you are.

As a child, I was known for being a daydreamer, a ceiling-gazer. I wasn’t looking at the ceilings though, it just appeared so. I was looking at the light fixtures.

My first word was “light.” My son’s, too. I love light in many forms: vintage lamps with yellowed shades, strings of Christmas bulbs, paper Chinese lanterns, the golden glow from windows at night, fireflies blinking in the Texas evening, the multicolored circles in a lens flare streaking across a shaft of sunlight in a late afternoon photo.

I’ve been known to put up our pink Christmas tree the day after Halloween. Not because I relish the holidays–in fact, it’s emphatically the opposite–but rather, because once the sunlight dwindles from the days, I need to be sure it blazes from a thousand twinkling places.

As a child, I was known for being a daydreamer, a ceiling-gazer. I wasn’t looking at the ceilings though, it just appeared so. I was looking at the light fixtures. Modern cubist installations, globes on staggered lengths of wire, glinting chandelier prisms. At home, I made mosaics with my Lite Brite and created “stained glass” to hang in the windows by melting crayons between sheets of waxed paper. I would stare mutely at the sparkling chaos of dust motes in bright sunlight. Hold my hand over a flashlight to see the fine network of life that’s invisible under normal circumstances.

I feared dusk because it meant the arrival home of the scary dad, so I would go around the house and start flicking on light switches once the tell-tale dimness settled over the rooms. When I spent time in other family’s houses I was introduced to the wonders of dimmer switches, recessed lighting, and spotlights artfully arranged to highlight the landscaping.

I’m supposed to wear glasses but I usually don’t, because unadulterated, my eyes turn every street lamp into a parhelion.

Overhead lights and the shadows they cast make me feel the smallest bit panicked, like nothing will stand up to the blazing illumination. I’d rather squint to read small print than have that naked blast from above.

I miss the neon lights of city living, though I get stars now, in exchange. I tell my children that they’ll go back to the stars someday, when they ask me about death and dying. It’s nice to have a visual aid for such an important parental lesson. You’re mine but you’re also a mote of light, and that life in you is fire.

This time of year gives me a feast of lighting pleasures, and I stop and pay it proper attention. I see the reading lamp through the lace curtain, the fireplaces in small warm living rooms, this cafe that looks like an especially inviting harbor in the premature darkness. I’ll take one humble strand of old-school Christmas bulbs and their candlelit haze, however, over an entire display of cold LED pulsars. I know I need to move past this obsession with the incandescent and the crackle of its inefficient filament, but for now I am going to lay claim to it and the specific warmth of its glow. It’s how I make it through, until spring comes.