Back in my day....

I was in the car the other day, engaging in my usual, safe, mother-of-three driving (which entails yelling at my children for fighting, while watching them in the rear view mirror, steering with one hand while, with the other, trying to retrieve Thomas the train from the floor, after Little Man has catapulted him across the main cabin for the tenth time, not understanding this results in him no longer being in his sticky grasp, all while simultaneously drinking a large coffee) when I was asked by my (now, no longer fighting) children to put on some music. And after inserting and ejecting the fourth Hannah Montana/Green Day mix CD that was skipping like it was being played by a dj on crack, as it was scratched beyond all recognition, I thought to myself, "God DAMN, just give me a good old fashioned cassette tape!!!"

I realize there are many benefits to CDs. The recording is of higher quality, you can immediately skip to the track you want to hear, they are very difficult to break and, well, they just look cooler, but unless you have the time to meticulously care for and store these little gems they wind up virtually useless. Admittedly, to me "meticulous care" means putting them back in their cases instead of stacking them, uncased in the glove compartment, or, let's be honest, letting them slide around, naked, on the passenger-side floor, but back in my day, that side of my Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra was six inches deep in uncased Erasure and MC Hammer cassettes and they played just fine.

It astounds me that my children will never listen to a cassette tape. Their pink boom box has no deck and cars today would sooner have them as cigarette lighters. But in my youth, tape ruled, and I think for good reason. Sure, kids today can wait for a song they've just heard on the radio to be released on iTunes and buy it with a click of the mouse, no waiting for Mom to drive you to the mall so you can buy "Ice Ice Baby" at Sam Goody, but when I was young, you could have the song immediately and for free! It only required sitting in your room all night, listening to the radio on your baby pink, light teal or peach double deck boom box, waiting for said song to be played and then pushing the "record" button. Sure, the opening bars were covered up by the dj giving the one hundredth caller Bon Jovi tickets and the end of the song segued right into a Wendy's commercial, but it was yours right then and there!

The double deck boom box was a teenage bootlegger's dream! You could copy your friends New Kids on the Block tape without worrying about pesky copyright infringement, or spending your babysitting money. And where would we be without mix tapes? Kids today know nothing of the joys of creating a mix tape. Sure, sure, you can create an iTunes playlist for someone, but would it include the sound of your inept fumblings as you struggle to hit the "stop" button at the right moment, or even possibly, a personal spoken message? (In high school, you think you want the kind of boyfriend who does that. I had one and you don't.) You could labor away on the "liner notes" and even glue your own photo onto them to show through the clear plastic window (that was after you had the film developed, another Neanderthal technology our children will marvel at)*. I'm tearing up a little as I write this - the first gift I ever gave H was a mix tape I labored over for hours. Each selection was carefully chosen, and I included a note about why I had picked every song and what it meant. It's like a time capsule each time we dig it out of our college memorabilia, and when I hear one of those songs on the radio I can actually remember what song came after it on that tape. Sure, kids today can churn out masterfully created CD's complete with professional sounding fades, photo-shopped labels and perfectly printed liner notes, but there is nothing quite like getting a mix tape from the guy you really, really like, and maybe love, with the title of songs like "You're My Home", in his handwriting.

Yeah, yeah, cassette tapes had some major drawbacks. Of course, the incessant rewinding and fast forwarding trying to get to the song you want - quite annoying when the single you've been hearing on the radio is three or four deep on the tape, and you aren't familiar enough with the new album to know which song is which. And tapes were not impervious to maniacal little hands getting their pincer-like grip on the thin tape wound inside and pulling it out with glee.*** But a pencil stuck in one side of the tape and the patience to sit there and wind it back in usually did the trick. Hell, you could even splice a broken tape with scotch tape in a pinch.

I know some day I will be the butt of my kids' jokes, as they roll their eyes in smug superiority, when I am still referring to recording things as "taping" them, much like my teenage amusement as my father called jeans "dungarees". But my love for tape technology, with its simple durability and accessibility will never die (a post on the joys of video tapes to come). And if I have to be that crazy old lady who still has a functioning cassette deck - a purchase I am determined to make before it's too late - just so she can listen to some old tape from back in the day, then so be it.

*No, Ferone, I am not forgetting our special tape "DJ Jazzy Jen and the Fresh Mare - She's the DJ, I'm the Rapper" - bad photo and all.
**Babysitting catastrophe of the highest degree when the little hell spawn got his mitts on my new Depeche Mode tape. Even worse story? My friend Jen's cat ate the insides of a cassette tape and the vet told her mother to just let her poop it out. It made me think of anal paper cuts and makes me shudder to this day.

I'd like to trade please...

(Warning: this post is entirely about female genitalia. Male readers, i.e., my father, you have been warned.)

"I am tired of having a vagina. How' bout you take it for the next twenty years?" This is a direct quote from a conversation Hubby and I had before he left for work. After surviving the world's worst and longest lasting chest cold/infection, I am now being rewarded with an antibiotics-induced yeast infection. "Come on", I told him, "I've done the hard time with all the baby-birthing and everything. You'll just need to coast to menopause." His response, other than looking at me like I was a lunatic, "Hells no."

Well who can blame him? Having a vagina, even under normal circumstances, is like having a classic, old car - it leaks, it requires a lot of upkeep and can be slow to warm up at times. Having a penis, it seems would be like having a brand new sports car - requiring little to no upkeep and can go from zero to sixty in thirty seconds.

I would like to experience peeing in the woods, on a cold day without freezing to death or soaking the back of my pants, or feet, with urine. I would like H, just once, to take over the two days a month I am crippled by cramps, but am expected to swallow handfuls of Advil so I can function normally. Seriously, if this were the normal course of events each month for men, "period days" would be worked into the vacation/sick day scenario in the workplace.

Even the list of things that can go wrong with lady bits, from the trivial to life-threatening, is about ten times longer than the one for the twig and berries. And half of the list is from having sex with men! And look at reproductive cancers, the female versions can be dangerous, deadly and insidious. You can live with prostate cancer for years! Never mind the fact that ovarian cancer, unlike prostate cancer, can't reliably be detected with a blood test. Imagine if that situation were flipped, and men were required to have someone sticks their hands inside them once a year (I seem to be dwelling a lot on this lately, huh?)? "We've spent enough on the war! Throw some money at the NIH and get this thing fixed!!!"

Notice pregnancy and childbirth's marked absence from my shit list. While, yes, pregnancy can be a pain in the ass, and childbirth hurts like a motherfucker, that is the one part of the vagina experience that wouldn't trade for the all the world. I often felt bad for H, during my pregnancies, that he never got to experience what it felt like to carry a child. Then I had to get up and pee for the tenth time in half an hour and that feeling passed.

So I am stuck with the stuff God gave me, and, there are times I hate it. I haven't even hit menopause yet - can't wait to see what a twisted hormonal roller-coaster ride that will be (buckle up, H). But thinking about it, I will admit, there are two advantages we do have over men. I never had to fear wearing sweatpants during puberty, for fear a wayward erection would humiliate me and no one was able to end a schoolyard fight with me by kicking me in the balls.

*And I guarantee when my OB/GYM returns my call to discuss treatment options, it will be, on my cell, right in the middle of school dismissal, where it is so convenient to be using the words "vaginal discharge".

Give the pig a break...

No, you're not hallucinating. It's a new post. I was suffering, last week, from my annual, knock-me-flat-on-my-ass illness. It seems every year I have to get really, really sick at least once, requiring me to call in all the reinforcements (including my saintly mother in-law who used up her entire day off shuttling my kids to and from school and activities). H was also extremely helpful, but after day three, his inquiries of "How do you feel?" were heavily laced with a "When the hell are things getting back to normal round here? As there is a marked decrease in cooked food and clean dishes."

So during my recuperation, I actually watched enough TV to get sick of it, which I did not think was possible, and saw, while watching live television (imagine!), several Disney commercials featuring The Muppets. I know everyone has a favorite, I myself am very partial to Beeker, but a thought occurred to me while I watched her style, work ethic and bravada made the butt of jokes, yet again. Miss Piggy gets a bum rap.

Miss Piggy first made her debut in 1974, which was a pivotal time in the history of the American woman. In 1960, the percentage of women (with children) in the workforce was only 29%, in 1974, it was 49%. Miss Piggy was a role model for strong, ambitious, working women, and still is. She takes her career very seriously and has the utmost confidence in her abilities and works tirelessly toward her inevitable rise to stardom. She might be working on a hack show now, but not for long. She is the lone voice of female strength and character in this motley crew. Who else are girls going to look up to? Janice, who has smoked so much pot her eyes are actually closed? I dig her tube top though.

Of course Miss Piggy takes the most flack for her relationship with Kermit. After the relentless pursuit of his love, she spends that majority of their relationship ping-ponging between being saccharine-sweet-in-love with Kermie and brow beating him. Um, wait. Who am I talking about again? Yes, she can be a bit over bearing, but Kermit needs a wake up call occasionally. Especially when dealing with his idiot friends. If he would take some of her advice, this show might actually go somewhere. You know she would suggest Kermit fire Fozzy and tell him he really needs to pursue another career, instead of enabling him in his comic delusions, and overall have a tighter reign on the cast, avoiding his head-thrown-back-waving-flaccid -arms-in-frustration-screaming fits that he resorts to when things get out of hand. Yes, Kermit is whipped, and his friends think she's a total bitch and sometimes wonder why Kermit is with her in the first place, but I believe they really love her, deep down. There wasn't any pre-wedding scene in The Muppets Take Manhattan where Gonzo pulled Kermit aside and said, "Hey man. It's not too late to get out of this..."

And of course, the cherry on the piggy sundae is Miss Piggy's undeniable style. The gloves and huge ring? Timeless and fabulous. And remember that fantasy scene in The Great Muppet Caper? A feather trimmed pink gown? A sequined bathing suit? Oh, yes, she rocks them all. She does seem to be in an unfortunate bang phase right now though, which makes her look like Kim Cattrall. I think she needs to keep it old school and return to the Farrah Fawcett-esque long, curly mane.

So give the pig a break. She's the muscle behind her marriage and the raging bitch among her cast-mates because these idiots force her to be. When you get down to it, she's made the butt of jokes simply because she is stronger (have you seen that karate chop?), smarter, and more talented then the men surrounding her and maybe Jim Henson*, considered such a nice guy, was a bit of a male chauvinist pig. Pun intended.

*Henson-lovers, spare me your hate. I don't need another Folgerberg-gate. I love the man too, but can't help but wonder at his lack of female persepctive.

GTL

For those of you not living in a cave, you will recognize the abbreviation in today’s title from my new obsession, MTV’s Jersey Shore. My version of GTL today? Gymnastics (taking #2 to her first lesson, not performing them myself, unless getting three kids to three different schools counts), Tidying up, Laundry - a far cry from The Situation and Ronnie’s mornings of Gym, Tanning, Laundry.

I’m sure many of you expected me, after my Patty’s Day rant, to react with horror at these twenty-something, Italian-American caricatures, marinating in a cesspool of fake tanner, vodka and hair gel, but I can’t lie. I. Love. It.

Why, you ask, would I love a show that highlights very unflattering stereotypes not only of the state I live in*, but my husband’s dominant ethnicity as well? I love this show because in this age of mass-media-marketing and herd mentality, these idiots are unabashedly being who they are. They may be following a different herd, one that is intent on developing melanoma and disdains modest clothing, but they fly in the face of, what they knew would be, national scrutiny, and they do not waiver. The cast of Jersey Shore is unwittingly fighting against the homogenizing of our country into one big Pottery Barn inhabited by yoga-toned, skinny-jeans wearing, blondes with Nordic features.

Throughout the history of this nation of immigrants, the self-imposed definition of success for each subsequent generation has been how well they blend into American society and, therefore, how much less of their ethnicity they display. And while what the JS idiots are displaying (other than cleavage and ass cracks) can not be truly called “ethnicity”, even though their constant claims of being Italian are making it hard to ignore, they are staying true to the identity of their background. Even if that background wears acrylic nails, and “I’m from New Jersey – We hate you too” t-shirts. It’s that pride in who you are and your traditions that is missing in a lot of young people today.

I have gone through this myself personally. Having come from an Irish Bronx family, then gone on to a private college in upstate New York, I ran from anything that smacked of my mother’s chain-smoking, Schiltz-drinking, loud-mouthed Irish clan. They were an embarrassment to me, as I ordered entire pages out of the J Crew catalogue my freshman year trying to fit in. But I realized, no matter how many pairs of corduroys and rollneck sweaters I owned, these people, and being Irish, were part of who I was and they were responsible for the parts of myself I liked best – my low tolerance for bullshit, my love a good time and the ability to speak my mind. These characteristics have been passed down in a mellowed version – I wasn’t getting wasted every night and starting beer-fueled bar brawls and I know when not to offer my opinion out loud – and after seeing part of them in me, I came home for winter break in subsequent years, ready to appreciate my uncle’s drunken demands for my sister to write him an essay with her “fancy education” to win the Guinness Trip to Ireland contest, and my aunt calling Bill Clinton a commie asshole at Christmas dinner.

Jersey Shore really highlights how much we really all don’t want to be the same. The world would be a damn boring place if nobody had so much pride in their heritage they expressed it on their garage, or expressed their opinions, no matter how unpopular (it’s even better when they share them in loud and inappropriate ways on national television). You know what it would be like? Living in California. My sister exclaims, time and again, how there is so little white ethnicity out there, she is thrilled when she gets off the plans at JFK and a cabbie wearing a Giants parka screams in a heavy New York accent, “Marone, what are you an asshole?” Apparently, people out there with names like O’Reilly and Piazza, don’t even really realize they’re Irish or Italian. She has asked people about their ethnicity and gotten only perplexed looks for her efforts. I imagine the Patty’s Day parade in Berkeley is pretty low key.

In the interest of honesty, I have yet to watch an episode of JS in its entirety. H and I feel it’s like looking at a bad car wreck - you can only look for so long before becoming ill. And I know there is much inappropriate behavior, promiscuity and violence, but I really can’t help but feel a little love for these idiots despite it all. If the world is plain vanilla ice cream, they are nuts that make it a sundae.

*I am only now coming to terms with the fact that I live in New Jersey and actually love it (but still don’t have an accent, screw you, Jen V). And yes, much has been made of the fact that these people aren’t even from New Jersey, but let’s be honest with ourselves folks, they fit right in, don’t they?

Just call me Fertile Myrtle*

Sitting in the gynecologist's waiting room the other day, dreading the long overdue Pap smear I joked about a few months back, was a surreal experience. Not because someone was about to shove an instrument shaped like a stainless steel duckbill in my body and crank it open*, but because This was the room I waited in almost ten years ago for my first appointment as a woman ready to have a baby.

For the men I am fortunate enough to have as readers, let me explain. As a non-reproducing woman, the main objective of going to the "lady doctor" is for her to tell you you don't have any diseases that might prevent you from having children waaaay down the line when you are ready to have them, and for her to give you the pills to prevent you from having them now, thus putting an abrupt end to your drinking two bottles of Chardonnay every Saturday night. But once you are ready to conceive, a visit to the gyno takes on a whole new meaning. You are visiting an oracle who, you hope, will tell you that you will indeed be the mother of the 2.4 tow-headed children you have dreamed about your whole life, but put off having so you could build a life, save money, travel the world, etc.

Sitting in this peach oasis of calm, apparently the preferred, soothing color of all reproductive facilities (along with dusty rose) surrounded by pamphlets for blood cord banks and osteoporosis medication, I could feel the old desperation of so long ago, having been in the "trying" game almost year with nothing to show for it but a trash can full of used ovulation predictor strips and negative pregnancy tests, praying to God the doctor wouldn't tell me I was as barren as the Gobi. Glancing around the room at other young women, three children later, I wondered which of them was in my former reproductively-challenge shoes and, having on been on both sides of the equation, I became inspired to put a message out there. That message?

It is not OK to ask a woman with no children when she is thinking about having children or to brag about how easily you became/become pregnant yourself.

The last of my three pregnancies were all on the first try, so one would think I now sit smugly in the camp of the extremely fertile, but having suffered through twelve unsuccessful attempts, I can remember the feeling, wanting to punch someone in the head at a cocktail party/family holiday, after being told, "He looks at me and I'm knocked up", even if that person did not know the current state of my fertility. I will admit this sounds a little crazy. Are we not supposed to talk about our reproductive lives at all if we are blessed in that department? I'll borrow a line from You've Got Mail, "It's like those people who brag because they're tall".

All I'm saying is, in this day of later-in-life marriages and careers that take up so much of our time, more and more of the women surrounding you may be having a little difficulty in the baby department. And while some women may be comfortable tempting fate and announcing they are "trying" to the world, which makes me vaguely nauseous as I then immediately picture said woman having sex with her husband and then it's awkward to maintain eye contact, (she will probably send out pregnancy announcements as well), some of us play it a little closer to the vest and don't announce the increase of scheduled sex in our lives, thus making it difficult to suss out exactly who is and is not in the baby game yet.

So tread lightly, dear readers. You do not want to unintentionally hurt someone's feelings and, having been there, it is the kind of hurt that can make you feel like less of a woman, all while sitting at the Christmas dinner table. And if what my good friend told me about the fertility drugs is true, you might wind up being bludgeoned with a fruitcake.

And just for good measure, if you are lucky enough to be trusted by a reproductively challenged woman, and she shares her troubles with you, for the love of Christ DO NOT EVER utter the phrase "relax and it will happen when you least expect it". Those who do are also the same people who tell your forty-three year old cousin, who has been on twenty unsuccessful Match.com dates, she'll find love when she's not actually looking for it.

*And there is special place in hell for you if you EVER use this moniker for yourself in public, where you have to wake every forty-five minutes for all eternity to breastfeed the children you were lucky to conceive so easily .
**Is this making you uncomfortable, male readers? Too damn bad, when the FDA clears that male birth control pill and it requires a yearly rectal exam, we'll talk.

My God, my eyes...MY EYES!!!

Mean Mommy may have been bested by a reality show, dear readers. And that is really saying something considering I am one of the three people in America who watched Mr. Personality. Having sat through the last season of The Bachelorette in its entirety, I got to know this season's star well enough to be sucked in to watching The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love. Or I will if I can master my gag reflex.

So the show opens with footage of Jake, the new Bachelor, on the beach in, what will wind up being, one of his only shirt-sporting shots of this segment, because after this we will be treated to Jake cooking eggs shirtless, jumping rope shirtless, jogging shirtless, sawing wood and constructing a gazebo shirtless. All of this must be to counteract the evidence that Jake is actually a deeply closeted, gay man. For example, he owns a beautiful house in Texas, which is not only super clean, but sports a four-poster bed complete with sheer black draperies. To quote H, "That guy has not one single friend who's a dude."

The butching of Jake continues, as we hear Jake describe the pain he went through being voted off The Bachelorette and subsequent healing process, and we are treated to visuals of Jake in his commercial pilot's uniform (the fifth Village Person anyone?), flying acrobatic aircraft on the weekends and finally wearing a leather jacket as he rides a motorcycle on the highways of Los Angeles. He tells us love is "perfect". Reality? Jake? Have you met? This whole time various tempo versions of "On the Wings of Love" are playing in the background and as the climatic closing strains swell, we see Jake, at sunset, on the beach, on his hog, with a goddamn airplane flying overhead. I swear to God I threw up in my mouth.

Back from commercial. We move on to Jake's cast of psychos, I mean, potential mates. Spoiler alert, half of them are lying about their ages or have spent waaaay too much time in the sun. I have several favorites, each crazier than the next. One of them apparently dresses up as a stewardess during the first party. Part of me loves her for her ingenuity because you really do need a gimmick to stand out in this sea of Single White Females. Then there's the one who I will call The Virgin. The Virgin and her first husband saved themselves for marriage and apparently it wasn't all Mr. Virgin dreamed it would be and he started cheating. Cue tears and babbling about understanding Jake's heartbreak.

My absolute favorite bag of saline and Restalyn though, is a graduate of the University of Central Florida, "with a BA in Interpersonal Organizational Communication....so I'm unemployed." Thank you for saving me the trouble on that last part. She "loves herself" and has a "really big personality" which is being supported nicely by a halter top.

The rest of the crew is straight out of central casting - swimsuit model, self-proclaimed "bitch", older woman who's "ready to take on all the young girls", single mother and even a few regular girls who don't make me want to turn in my ovaries. There is an Air National Guardsman (woman?) though, who restores my faith in womankind.

So why would the person who sat through all of Jillian's Canadian nonsense last season not be able to stomach all of this? Because of the lack of dude-ry. Watching The Bachelorette, you get to see all the tomfoolery going on in the men's bunkhouse. Beer pong and farting and good and bad-natured ribbing, and all of it honest. If these guys hated each other they told each other during the drunken boozefests masquerading as Rose Ceremonies. And previous seasons of The Bachelor, while lacking all that, at least had a Bachelor both manly and real enough to mitigate the bitchy bullshit (Bob, anyone?). This one might as well have a vagina.

I say all of this with two thirds of the first eposiode ahead of me. It's touch and go at this point. It might be so bad as to enter Mr. Personality territory, in which case it will just be skimmed through on fast forward during takeout pizza Friday night. But it might turn around and Jake could shed his frozen Ken doll smile and tell one of these freaks she's fucking crazy. Lets' keep our fingers crossed.

The Time of My Life...or not

So did you have the absolutely awesomest night last night? Was it full of hip, happening clubs, limos and champagne toasts surrounded by all your friends who were all also having the time of their lives? No? Me neither. I spent my night playing eighty-five hands of Uno with a seven year old, although, my evening did also include a large amount of good champagne.

Is it me, or is New year's Eve the single, most overrated night of the year? While my current life circumstance eliminates any pressure, I still remember what it felt like in my late teens and early twenties to make amazing plans for the big night and, somehow, they always fell short of my expectations. I think I always felt I should be at some big, beautiful, formal party with tons and tons of fun people and where I usually wound up was in some dive bar surrounded by idiots with one of my gals in a fight with their boyfriend. One memorable New Year's, spent in Albany, the bar featured a drink called Moose Piss, which was a half-pitcher of shots poured over ice and I spent the five minutes prior to midnight running away from some guy intent on a 12:01 lip-lock. Obviously, H and I were apart that night, he in New Jersey doing something equally lame, and in this time before cell phones, this also wound up being the night I called my future in-laws house seven times, not remembering the first six calls, looking for H, at which point my father in-law asked, "Do you need me to come get you somewhere?" How he allowed his son to continue dating me, never mind marry me, is still a mystery.

Once we graduated from college, my girlfriends and I admitted our defeat finding venue that suited our tastes and did not include drinks with reference to mammalian waste products, and decided to take turns hosting an overnight getaway each year at our respective newlywed homes. And while this solved the locale dilemma, the specter of new Year's expectations still floated about, causing the New Year's 1998 freak-out, where upon I stomped out of H's and my apartment, my two best friends in hot pursuit, telling B to stop using her "therapist voice" on me to calm me down and wailing in the street, "Why is this party so dead?? I thought we'd have more fun than this!! Why aren't we dancing???" To which my sage friend, M, replied, "Maybe if you stopped playing Frank Sinatra things might liven up."

For the foreseeable future, there will be no pressure for H and I to make any grand plans, as #1 has now reached the age where she wants to stay up and watch the ball drop, which is why two of my most honored guests are Milton and Bradley. And while this will continue for years, as more of the offspring join us watching Carson Daly (Dick Clark is too depressing and Ryan Seacrest is too eager for him to die, reminding me too clearly of my own mortality on the last night of the year), that pressure is still there, lurking in the background, waiting for them to all be teenagers and ditch their boring parents. At that point my vision of the perfect New Year's Eve will return, because as I have matured, I have finally distilled this idea down to its essence. It will be at a party like the one at the end of When Harry Met Sally, in a big ballroom, with me wearing some gorgeous gown, dancing with H as confetti falls around us at the stroke of midnight. And, dammit if I have to throw it myself, so be it.