Nobel Peace Prize for Trump?
The Tyranny of Yoga Pants
Last week Honor Jones of the New York Times wrote an excellent article on the yoga pants tsunami. It’s good to know that I am not the only person mystified by the number of women who have decided that tourniquet tight legwear is a wardrobe must. And not just slim women; women of all shapes and sizes pry on their yoga pants and sprayed-on jeans each day and head out into the world, defiant as new parolees.
I don’t care if you have a rockin’ body, I don’t care if you don’t. I’m just tired of seeing so much of you. I never signed up for a free subscription to your ass.
“Yoga pants move with your body,” a woman explained to me, beaming at her thighs, which were shrink-wrapped in a dark gray material splashed with giant yellow daisies. Indeed your body cannot shake these pants; there is no escape.
Every time I see a girl in tight jeans—which is every day, many times a day—I cringe a little, imagining the difficulty involved in sitting, bending and walking. A fashion that limits movement, impinges on circulation and inhibits healthy breathing is not a product that favors liberation and empowerment.
Remember Grunge? Well I do, even though it lasted just half a minute back in the early 90s. Grunge fashion—for both men and women—was characterized by durable and cheap clothing often worn “in a loose, androgynous manner to de-emphasize the silhouette.” Decades later, men are still wearing comfortable clothes. Women, sadly, are not. I guess Doc Martens, loose jeans and flannel shirts did not contribute to the objectification of the female form. If a women’s body is de-emphasized, who will want it? Who will care? What is it worth?
What I recall most from the Grunge period was the way women carried themselves. The sureness of their movements, the nascent confidence. Women were finally realizing that they owned themselves, or could.
There are a handful of Olympic sports that benefit from tight uniforms. When winning is measured by a thousandth of a second, a second skin is the way to go. The rest of us have options, especially those who don’t know they do, who believe that yoga pants and tight jeans are tickets to personal freedom.
Comfortable, gender-neutral clothes are not easy to find, but they could be, and if you want to be your own gal, you might want to give them a try. Things are changing for women now. Here’s to freeing our bodies as well as our voices.
What Ants Know
There are ants that tend to their injured
by licking their wounds,
slowly transferring their own health
into fallen soldiers,
sealing fresh lesions against lethal bacteria.
Who can say why a creature as small as an ant
with so many hardy brethren,
would bother to stop—an hour if need be—
and help a troop.
In that tiny helmet of a head
are there neurons of compassion, of pity,
or are these ministrations automatic, instinct,
like the urge to tunnel or serve a queen
(what is instinct anyway
but a word for what we can’t explain?).
Some ants will even evac a battered brother,
not the terminal—those who have lost too many limbs
to the brutal jaws of termites—
but the ones who, with proper attention,
may fight another day.
The medics sense the difference
and do what they can
before moving farther afield,
gifted with the knowing
there is not a moment to spare.
Inner Critics
It was the 70s.
No one had cell phones,
and cameras were for
travel, holidays,
bigger things.
“Selfie” wasn’t even a word.
So when you came across
that ancient photo
tucked in a book,
your stomach jumped.
There you were,
sitting on your dorm bed
hunched over a small typewriter,
looking up, surprised.
Younger, prettier—
that’s to be expected.
It’s the details that fascinate.
The blue eye shadow—too blue,
and eyeliner—too much.
You’re wearing jeans and one of those silly
peasant blouses—all the rage for half a minute.
Long straight hair parted down the middle,
same as the rest of the herd.
A poster on the wall of naked lovers,
red satin sheets. Good god.
A really ugly desk lamp.
STOP!
You can do that now,
tell your censor
to shut up,
leave this innocent alone.
She dogged you then too,
that old nag;
nothing you did
pleased her.
She was with you
from the start,
braiding you with doubt,
cloaking you with dread.
Not anymore.
Age has carried off
what you no longer need,
left you something
to fight with instead.
Now you have your critic
pinned against the ropes.
Let her rail all she wants,
you don’t need to listen,
you slow walking,
white-haired champion.
Love and Lilacs
When I smell lilac blossoms, I am fourteen again and lying in tall sweet grass with my boyfriend. His hair is blonde and curly, and when he smiles, which is often, his blue eyes turn into twin crescents. There are summer cottages just a few yards away, and people moving back into them, but we are tucked behind a tall hedge and no one can see us. We kiss one long last time before getting to our feet and then, laughing, we brush the telltale grass off each others’ back. At the end of my street he pulls me close and kisses me again—this boy loves to kiss—and then he turns and starts walking down the dirt path along the railroad tracks. I do not take my eyes off him. Twice, maybe three times, he turns and waves, and though I can’t see his face, I know he is smiling.
Back east, where I grew up, lilacs grow like weeds. Each spring their branch tips burst into bunches of light lavender flowers that droop and nod in the breeze. On warm days, you live in their perfume. Tender and persuasive, the scent is like no other. There were roses in my youth, big dew-covered blooms lolling over white fences, but smelling them now does not take me back in time. Roses are not lilacs.
We were fourteen and in love. While I appreciate nature now, back then it was clemency, a place to disappear, and this boy and I were as much a part of it as the plants we hid among, all of us getting the same sun and rain and wind.
Scientists tell us that memories are stored at the connection points between neurons in the brain. The brain has approximately 100 billion neurons, each one potentially connecting to 10,000 other neurons. As information moves through the networks of the brain, the activity of the neurons causes the connection points to become stronger or weaker in response. This process, synaptic plasticity, is how the brain stores information. Once a memory has been created, aromas are potent triggers for recall.
This boy lives in me, my memories of him clear and true because they are welded in place. His wife has him now, but his boyhood belongs to me, as I presumably live on in him. I only need lilac blooms to bring him back and give our sweet youth another moment in the sun.
Photo by Breelynne on Foter.com / CC BY
A Streaked Window
A child needs a father like a fish needs a bicycle. That’s the conclusion I came to somewhere in my teens. Now, decades later, the notion persists despite the heartening anecdotes I’ve heard. It’s not that I don’t believe the people who tell me their fathers are or were gems; I just can’t envision that Father Knows Best kind of world. Were these men Fred McMurray nice? Did they sit cross-legged on sofas, pipe in hand and gently listen to their children’s gleeful chatter? Did they grin and tousle their hair like Brian Keith in Family Affair? Did they teach hard lessons in a tender fashion, a la Andy Griffith of Mayberry? Or did their good qualities simply edge out the bad? Society holds the bar lower for men than women as if, expecting the worse, all we ask of fathers is decency.
My father, as you may have gathered, was not a nice man. He was a sadist and a tyrant and worse. There are too many similar stories, too many women abused by a father, uncle or grandfather. I know that these men do not represent their gender and that good men are plentiful, but my view remains smudged, a streaked window I cannot wipe clean. Each time I see a father with a young daughter I look for signs of trouble. I want to save whomever I can, now that I have the power.
Two friends of mine, women happily married to each other, are raising a boy and a girl. I have observed their family dynamic for many years, and what strikes me most about these women is their keen awareness of the colossal responsibility they have taken on. These two have made a solemn commitment to motherhood, parsing every detail and possible consequence of their parental decisions in a continual quest to keep their offspring out of harm’s way and reasonably content. The same can be said of another couple I know, married men, who are also raising children. Perhaps this level of dedication comes from hard-won victories: the right to marry, the right to adopt. Perhaps it is borne of suffering, whatever ridicule or injustice these men and women endured growing up in a culture that did not include them. Pain depletes some people, breaks open the hearts of others.
There are communal families, as in the Scandinavian countries, and there are transgendered couples raising children; there are those who, through divorce or tragedy, are compelled to parent without partners, and there are those who deliberately choose that arrangement. Love being fluid and accommodating, families can be cobbled from whatever is there.
I admire these devout parents. I never wanted children—the idea makes me woozy. Motherhood requires resources I must have been born without.
I live in the suburbs, where traditional nuclear families still predominate. The notion that such environments produce the healthiest children is religious propaganda with no supporting evidence. Sometimes I stand at the window and watch the kids across the street playing with their dog while their father washes the car. I have no idea what goes on behind their front door, but the children appear well-adjusted, and I have no reason to believe they’re in danger.
I want this to be true. I want them to grow up as they should, so that the sight of children at play will bring them nothing but joy.
Photo by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton on Foter.com/ CC BY-NC-ND
Blood Thirst
Who can forget Sean Connery as 007? Smiling, square-jawed, never had a scratch on him. James Bond was spring fresh in every scene, ready for a cold martini and a hot babe. And Robert Vaughn, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Wasn’t he a smooth operator? Calculated, restrained, just the right amount of derring-do. And how about Robert Conrad, that gorgeous gunslinger from The Wild Wild West, effortlessly slipping in and out of trouble and relishing every minute of it. And Mission Impossible, the original, with solemn Peter Graves and shrewd Barbara Bain. I loved that self-destructing tape, the quiet gravity with which the missions were accepted and the grace with which they were accomplished.
One of the features that distinguished these TV shows was how neatly the heroes sidestepped bodily harm. 007 was on the brink of annihilation in every movie but used his wits, and often some thrilling gadget, to elude his torturous predicaments. Robert Conrad availed his gymnastic prowess, along with the futuristic features of his luxury train. The men from U.N.C.L.E employed smarts, hi-tech communication devices and a versatile firearm known simply as “The Gun.” The Mission Impossible agents were endowed with a protective canniness and a spectacular range of disguises. There was violence in these shows, to be sure, but kills were bullet-clean, and the camera did not linger over them. Gore was not the point.
Fast forward to the Mission Impossible movies starring Tom Cruise in which Ethan Hunt plunges repeatedly into brutal protracted slugfests. The first 30 seconds of these battles would put any mortal in ICU, or worse, but Ethan keeps coming back for more, enduring multiple lacerations and contusions before emerging in the next scene with just a few tidy scars to remind us of his durability.
Another thing we didn’t see much of in those early TV series were explosions. Now they’re everywhere, one colossal deafening fireball after another, coupled with billowing black smoke and flying chunks of mortar and steel. The challenge, I’ve heard, is to see how enormous these explosions can appear on screen while maintaining relative safety on the set.
And then there’s hyper-speed, the most overused special effect of our time. From knife fights to space ship battles, overdrive is the numbing norm. That these scenes are too fast to follow and too numerous to sustain interest doesn’t seem to matter.
What is next? What is the follow-up to bloody beatings, fireballs and warp speed? What is left on that big screen to bowl us over? Not those flimsy “reality shows” with hoarders and naked survivors and duck hunters. And not the next tier, where people dare each other to eat pig eyes or throw themselves onto giant obstacle courses or brawl inside cages. Those games will no longer suffice.
We will have to have the real thing. Real contestants fighting in real time with real consequences, the same entertainment Roman emperors used to placate the swollen, restless masses before the inevitable fall of the empire. We will sit not in amphitheaters but in our living rooms and sports bars. We will cheer for our brawny idols and watch them attack each other with increasingly frightening weapons, and how far we let these contests go will determine the speed of our own demise.
After a while, even this entertainment will not satisfy us, and we will turn to each other in bewilderment and despair and bottomless need, and slowly we will find our way back. Or not.
Photo by ЯAFIK ♋ BERLIN on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA
