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Bike Season

A beautiful Spring day draws out the cyclists.  As I cruise through town in my rolling dumpster, I watch riders emerge from backyard sheds and cellars with their bikes. The first cyclists out are the serious types, the ones who hover-balance at stoplights. On their feet are tricked-out shoes that click into stubs where pedals should be. The riders sport yellow jerseys and tight shorts. People say that dog owners and dogs often resemble one another. Well, the same goes for cyclists and their bikes. With their cool Euro logos and slender frames, it’s hard to tell man from machine, or to resist hoisting them over your head.

By contrast, it’s easy to resist hoisting up another type of cyclist. No need to wait for Spring, he and his buds are out year-round. In the Tour de France, they’re called Team DUI. Actually, they’re called that everywhere. You know the ones..the guys with no helmets, chain-chomped pant cuffs, and Sealtest crates carrying their stuff. Bob Roll is their leader. As part of their rigorous training regimen, they regularly hump-it down sidewalk curbs in order to run red lights. Sometimes the heavy thud of the back wheel launches a treasure out of the crate…a sock, a pretzel, a toddler. If they notice, they’ll yell “Hey!” and keep going.

Now don’t hate on the Coconut Girl for speaking the truth. I’m all about sharing the road. I didn’t even own a car until I was thirty. I’m allowed to make these observations because I’m one of you. (Or I should say “them,” if you’re not one of us.) As with most areas in my life, when it comes to cycling, I’m a monstrous hybrid of two extremes. I embrace both butt-hugger shorts, and the racked back wheel. The Specialized water bottle, and the squealing brakes.

Wherever riders fall on the cycling spectrum, they face the same friends and foes. Wait, are there truly any friends to cyclists? Respectful drivers are rare, and even in bike stores, the shaved employees make you feel like a chump. “So…just the reflective cuff strap, then?”  Cyclists most definitely share foes: the pothole, the trolley track, the car door, the wet stripe up the back of the pants, the rabid dog. Then there are the insults. “Whore!!!!” a guy yelled at me once as he passed me in his pickup truck. Must have been my suggestive sweat pants. My husband, who also rides, once had a quarter thrown in his face by a motorist. In college, a clever prankster came upon my parked bike and bejeweled the seat with a slice of cheese pizza. Face-down.

It’s all right, though. As long as there are warm days and sobriety checkpoints, cyclists will endure. While I shuttle my kids from school to sports practices in our station wagon, I’ll keep my quarters and pizza to myself. Before I know it, the kids will be driving, and I’ll be back in the saddle again.

Posted in General.

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By the Coconut Girl – April 23, 2013

tCG’s HoneyWagon Music Fest!

A man stands at a street corner with his partner, waiting for the light to change. He notices a flyer stapled to phone pole.

“Awesome! The HoneyWagon Music Fest is this weekend!”

The partner steps around the phone pole, and sees a flyer, too.

“Oh.”

 

Posted in Music, Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – April 15, 2013

Waterworks

It’s time for a good cry!

Who’s in?

The rule: cry as long as you like, and for any reason: sadness, fear, loneliness, boredom, nostalgia, frustration, anger, happiness, disappointment. No judgement, tears are tears!

Informal Survey:

1. If you have kids, do you cry in front of them?

2. If you have a pets, do they offer their own brand of comfort?

3. Who’s the best celebrity crier, Tammy Faye Bakker, or Ricky Schroeder in “The Champ” ?

Please reflect on a memorable encounter with a crying person. Sample memory: When I was ten, I knew a lady who wore sunglasses inside the house—at night—to hide that she’d been crying. Standing at the kitchen counter, she’d pack lunches for the next day, and nonchalantly answer our questions or yell “Stop running in the house!” It was all pretty normal except that 1) she was wearing sunglasses, and 2) we were supposed to pretend we didn’t notice she was wearing sunglasses.

One terrible place to cry is at work. The best thing to do is to use the hall bathroom on another floor of the building and snivel in a stall. If that’s not an option, tell co-workers you’re going out to grab a coffee, then hit a restaurant with a multi-stall bathroom. (Starbucks is out; there’s usually just one can and you’ll feel pressured to wrap up.) The good news is that people are pretty chill in public bathrooms. Restrooms are like mini nasty utopias of live-and-let-live. Patrons will barely take note of you at all. If there’s a Coconut Girl in there using a breast pump, everyone will be too busy empathizing-pitying her to dwell on your sobs.  In case you’re really cracking plaster and even the Medela can’t drown you out, try flushing for audio camouflage. But don’t waste too much water being embarrassed. Instead, take a moment to collect yourself. Have a look at the floor. Notice whether it’s tile or terrazzo. If you’re lucky, you might spy the Cadillac of floor drains: a brass JOSAM.  JOSAM spelled backwards is MASOJ, which sounds like “massage.”  The thought of this may improve or worsen your crying, depending on how frigging long it’s been since you had one.

Kids, like adults, have many reasons for crying. Except they’re way better at executing. If there were a Cry-Off, any kid would beat any adult (so I guess I just answered #3 above). I admire the emotional authenticity of children. When they’re sad, they cry (or fake-cry, when they want something). For the National Championship though, any baby would beat any kid. And for the World Title, a colicky newborn would not only dust everyone, but he’d also skip the awards ceremony so he could get back to crying.

I recently realized that even while kids are still young, a shift happens, and they become self-conscious about showing sadness. Specifically, they learn to suppress it. Families have tense days from time to time, and one day last week, it was our turn. Everyone was tired and cross.  I saw one of my children go into the bathroom. A strange feeling crept up my shoulders as she closed the door. There was no flush, no sound of washing hands, just quiet. When she came out five minutes later, she was blinking more than usual, and her nose was red. “You okay?”, I asked. “Uh-huh,” she said in an upbeat tone, looking the other way and speeding past me.

I saw my sunglasses on the counter, and cried.

Posted in General, Planet Newborn.

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By the Coconut Girl – April 12, 2013

Sleep: The 20/20 Experience

Sleep deprivation is something you’d never wish on a person, but it has a humbling, equalizing effect. People who’ve raised newborns or puppies understand the dread when a cry or bark pierces through REM sleep. They know how the body catapults into care-taking before the mind is awake. Nights grind into weeks, and new parents crave sleep like zombies crave brains. Out in the world, parents look at adults with older kids and aren’t fooled by their normal appearance. Inside, they know, they’re decaying, too.

Newborn-parent-zombies don’t excel at reading comprehension. This is a special pisser because they tend to slurp down books, ravenous for baby sleep solutions. The more complicated the books’ instructions, the more likely they are to be botched. For example, flip through Marc Weissbluth’s directive-dense Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and it’s instantly clear he never read his own book while tending a newborn.

Then there’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg. She advocates establishing a consistent routine for infants. The idea is to engender cues for feedings and diaper changes that will lead to a predictable, diurnal schedule. She also says to narrate everything you do with your child, much like the voice-over in a Ken Burns documentary: “I’m pulling a wet wipe out of the box, and it’s getting caught on that round, plastic, shark-toothed thingy.”

The Whisperer’s ideas are all well and good, unless you have a rotting brain like I did as a new parent. I rarely had time to read more than a page in one sitting, and even then, I was nervously anticipating the next interruption. I did my best to be Whispery, to make every diaper change exactly the same. This meant at night, I’d flip on the bright nursery lights and describe the play-by-play in detail, down to every p.j. snap and ankle grab. I even got my poor husband in on the act (“Honey, would you say this hue is more Yellow Ochre, or Burnt Sienna?”) Little did I know I was stimulating our baby’s senses so much that she needed forty-five minutes to come down from our Cirque de Soleil.

It took years for me to figure out that quiet and darkness are king when it comes to nighttime infant sleep. During our second child’s late-night diaper changes, we used the tiny light on my travel alarm clock and just wiped the entire lower half of his body for good measure. To communicate with each other, my husband and I developed shadow-charades for messages like “stinky soaked onesie up-the-back blowout” and “this frigging diaper tab just pulled off, I quit!” Finally we’d cracked the Baby Whisperer’s secret code: whispering.

I’d be kidding myself to think my brain is moist and springy again. Almost ten years into parenting, it’s recovering, but there are still signs of spoilage. For instance, sometimes I see brand-new parents and feel sympathy, when really what’s coming up is a mixture of compassion for myself as a struggling new parent, and respect for how hard they’re working. I understand now that the Whisperer wanted me to be Ken Burns mostly to crowd out my thoughts of self-doubt. Do I still find it helpful to narrate everything I do all day? Maybe, especially in the car. If you see me driving and talking to no one, just go with it. Decide I’m a regular zombie parent crooning the new Justin Timberlake hit. I understand that he recently got married, and may be singing my song before long.

Posted in Planet Newborn.

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By the Coconut Girl – April 8, 2013

O Marks the Spot

“Kids do well when they can.”

A friend said this to me when my children were toddlers, and it set me free. She’d been reading a book about behavioral challenges in children. In addition to some innate physiological predispositions, she learned that some children are especially challenged by certain foods, fatigue, and overstimulation. She was concerned about her son’s behavior, and became more compassionate when she understood that most times, he really was doing his best.

Children also do well in environments designed for their physical scale. If there are low hooks on the wall, kids are more likely to hang up their coats. They’re also able to fix a simple snack if food and utensils are placed within reach. Lately my kids have been leaving the lights on in their rooms when they leave for school. The problem is not forgetfulness; it’s darkness. The no-cord hooks on their toddler-era window shades are out of reach, and out of date. The kids need curtains they can operate themselves so they won’t need lights in the first place.

Recently a dinnertime design stumped me. Every night as a family, we review table manners ad nauseum. We re-re-re-remind: Stay in your chair. Chew with your mouth closed. Use your fork. Put your napkin in your lap. Use an inside voice. Say ‘excuse me’ before getting up.

And this one: return your glass to its spot above your plate.

It’s not that I’m a stickler for place settings, just that I don’t like glass stuck in my foot. We buy IKEA ShrÃ¥pnel juice glasses by the case because they sail off our table with freakish frequency. The glasses perch on the edge of the table and take flight during dramatic recreations of playground scuffles or game-saving hits.

My dinner design assignment is two-fold:1) teach skills for verbal recounting, not physical re-enactment, and 2) create a visual cue for proper glass placement.

This challenge, and the hundred others that precede it in a given day, are why my brain aches by bedtime. I look across the candles at my earnest kids. Their eyebrows lift and their smiles widen as they share their important news. Their sense that their lives matter, that we want to hear what they have to say, must be safeguarded. Then I think of stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia, whose sleep disorder causes him to act out what’s happening in his dreams. Once during a nightmare, he ran through a second floor plate-glass window trying to escape a missile. To stay safe at night, he seals himself up in a sleeping bag and wears gloves so he can’t undo the zippers. I wonder: should my family suit up after grace?

For now my imperfect solution is also two-part: 1) I lead by example by recounting events with my arms pinned to my sides like a robot, and 2) I’ve taped a circle to the dining table to show where my son’s glass should go. The paper’s getting a bit skeezy with guacamole and spaghetti sauce, but it beats the grinding clank of glass in the vacuum cleaner at mealtime. To add value, I also tell a story—just to myself—that my dinner design is what inspired modernist glass architect Mies van der Rohe to proclaim, “God is in the details.” (And by God, he meant parenting.)

Posted in Design, Food.

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By the Coconut Girl – April 1, 2013

Run Down

Last week, time pooled around my ankles. When you’re sick, more than your-usual-sick, the water rises slowly and you blink with indifference.

My children knocked on the bathroom door. By Wednesday, they’d had it with my absences. I called back,

“Busy.”

“Come back later.”

“Privacy.”

While they were at school, I draped over the arm of the sofa. Thanked God I’m self-employed.  Got good at the remote. I scrolled through menus, and settled on Documentaries. Watched “Happy,” “Vegucated,” and “Food, Inc.” Maybe there was a clue about what was making me sick.

In the past I’ve just slept in the bathroom. Now my children are a little older, and sometimes they wake early in the dark mornings. I didn’t want them finding their mother in a heap on the floor.

“I promise, God, I will never, ever drink again.” Between labor-like cramps, I smiled at the memory of my old college bargains. What would my bargain say now?  “I will never, ever eat dumplings again.” Except the labs said it wasn’t the dumplings. “I will never draw floor plans, pack lunches, do taxes, refinance the house, drive for the field trip, change health insurers, and call my father on his birthday ever, ever again.”

The morphine at the E.R. unhinged a memory from middle school. The tall walnut pole with the brass fitting at the end, the little hook. The teacher raised it to lower the window shades in the south-facing classroom.

And then a theory: the man on the train in The Green Glass Sea, Jimmy Kerrigan. He was the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. But this time, he had a brain.

“Brother, don’t touch the doughnut,” I said to my son when I crossed our threshold. At six, he still likes to lay his head on my bare, soft stomach. I pulled back the covers on my bed and followed the trail of bread crumbs:

If you’ve set up the ironing board in the bathroom to support you, it’s time to get help.

And,

There’s no place like home.

1. Stay warm all day and night without changing your clothes in our lightweight Aviator Jacket. 2. Okinawan elders from “Happy” have seen it all and will take care of you.  3. & 4. Itty Bitty Toe Light. Exclusive to Run Down.â„¢ Waterproof for all applications. 5. Adjustable ironing board for daytime support and nighttime sleeping.

Posted in General.

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By the Coconut Girl – March 19, 2013

Shambala Angel Flag

A homeowner in my neighborhood likes to hang seasonal flags. In the Spring, a giant, nylon dogwood blossom catches the wind. Summer showcases a stitched red cardinal drooping in the humidity. In the Fall, a festive fabric ghost welcomes trick-or-treaters.

Though I typically don’t like the graphics on these flags, I do like the idea of accepting the present moment. The flags are a reminder to carpe diem, or to “rock what you got,” as my friend Susan would say.

For these flags to fly outside my house, they’d need words rather than pictures. Like giant fabric bumper stickers, but with better proportions. Yesterday’s flag would’ve read “Shambala Sun & Angel Soft” because I tripped over these items on the landing as I went upstairs. It’s just not fair to ask a flag stylist to pictorially render Buddha’s wisdom + toilet paper for the average dog walker.

Today my flag would announce “Destruction Welcome!” That’s the theme for February, you know, because February is still bossing everyone, even though it’s already March. We got nearly a foot of snow in the last 48 hours, and all that frozen weight snapped big branches off our trees. This morning I looked out the window while my restless snow-day kids stood on opposite sides of me, swatting at each other. “Good,” I thought, surveying the broken limbs and matted shrubs. “Very good.” On the other side of the glass, our neighbor’s cat breezed through the cavernous maw of our smashed fence.

I watched the cat’s surprise as she then sunk down into the snow. It reminded me of when I was a senior in high school. That year I won an academic award and attended a banquet dinner hosted by the mayor. I liked the man a lot, but even at eighteen I could tell he was BS-ing my fellow honorees and me. “You can be anything you want to be!”, he gushed.  Sure, I was a little cynical back then, but cynicism wasn’t to blame. Wasn’t I being recognized for excelling in history and literature, both of which are chock-full of promising figures turned tragic? Hamlet, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archduke Ferdinand, Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, Willy Loman, JFK, Julius Caesar…I looked past my certificate and saw them seated at an eight-top in the shadows of the ballroom, drinking pitchers of “Yeah, right!”

Why not a banquet for failure, I wondered this morning, looking at our damaged trees. Why not a prize for the D+ and the botched interview? For the mean swipe at your spouse, for using a sarcastic tone with your child? Why not raise a glass to still-February, and to that awful charge in a room where there’s just been a fight?  Don’t these parts of life deserve a bon-voyage, lesson-learned, sadder-but-wiser send-off?  When my mother and I talk on Sundays about the week’s foibles, we crack up by pairing two expressions we detest on their own but adore together: “It is what it is,” and “It’s all good.”

It is all good. When the mayor said I could be all I could be, he was partly right, but he might’ve rounded things out by saying my original plans might not go as expected. That after some thrashing around, I’d make some kick-ass new plans. He should have brought Ziggy Marley and Paul Simon onstage to sing “Walk tall, walk tall, even if you fall, get up.” Or even my son’s tragi-comic version, “Walk tall, walk tall, even if you fall, give up.” Yes, we have to dream, but sometimes we also have to take those fallen branches from the yard and build a log cabin. I’m pretty sure that’s what it says somewhere in that issue of Shambala Sun. Or maybe it’s on the Angel Soft label. Either way, “building a log cabin” is definitely going on my flag tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By the Coconut Girl – March 8, 2013

Aleppo Girl

I was getting a cup of tea last Wednesday when I saw a copy of The New York Times. A girl from Aleppo, Syria appeared on the cover, in a photo by Muzzafar Salman. She’d lost her home in a missile strike the day before.

This lullaby is for her.

To be powerful is to be fragile.       — Ai Weiwei

 

Postscript, March 2013:

After publishing this post, I connected with Nadia Muhanna, a Syrian writer I found online. Nadia knows the photographer of the Aleppo girl, Muzaffar Salman, and interviewed him on her blog. She kindly forwarded this post to him, and then shared it on her blog. It’s an honor to know that Muzaffar has heard the lullaby his photograph inspired. Thank you, Nadia, for your support.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Learning from Others.

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By the Coconut Girl – March 1, 2013

Jennifer Lawrence Answers Questions About Gender Equality

An article came out recently in the New York Times about women in the workplace. Has there been a feminist regression in the last fifteen years? Why are women working/earning/living less large now than in other decades since the feminist revolution? The author, Stephanie Coontz, sets out to answer these questions, using lots of illuminating statistics. Americans love statistics! Americans love actor Jennifer Lawrence, too. I’ve never seen her movies. But her deft, no B.S. handling of inane press questions (and Jack Nicholson) after this year’s Oscars ceremony sure won me over. I’ll distill the latest analysis of gender equality by impersonating how Lawrence might interpret the role of Coontz.

*

-Why has the gender revolution “hit a wall?” Are you kidding me? America is the biggest douche on the globe when it comes to equal pay and policies that support working families.* Plus, many women find themselves doing most of the stuff at home as well as most of the stuff at work. That’s a double workload, so in my calculus, they should retire in half the time.

-What was running through my mind as I just answered that? A bad word. Instead of saying women do most the “stuff,” I was going to say another word that starts with an S.

-Am I worried that Gender Equality has peaked too soon? Well now I am, geez!!  No, seriously, of course not! As I write in my New York Times piece, “let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, children, and elders.” I mean honestly, what do you expect working parents to do with their kids when they’re out of school all summer? Send them to Screen Camp?  Sorry, I did a shot before I came out. God. So embarrassing!!

*Clarification: America shares the latter indistinction with Suriname, Palau, Nauru, Western Samoa, and Tonga. Is that on purpose? Absolutely.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – February 27, 2013

Recession Chicâ„¢

The cheapest home renovation I know of is totally free. Here’s how to do it: put things “out of place.” In my architecture practice, I call it Recession Chicâ„¢. It’s the design version of a Staycation. Start by lifting framed pictures off their hooks and moving them to different spots. Your eye will ka-boing like a jaw harp when it lands on the portrait by the stair of grandma in her swim trunks, instead of the map of Europe it was expecting.

Another way to spice things up around the homeplace is to put things where they don’t belong at all. Family members gladly assist with this effort, even without being asked. No energy to return a needle to the sewing basket? Stick it in the corner of a painting. Toilet got you down?  Pee on the bougainvillea by the bathtub. And how about that knit hat? Winter’s unsung hero deserves a place of honor in the hurricane vase on the mantle.*

While rearranging some items can make a home feel new again, moving other items can make it feel old.  Like when my son moves his orange juice from the table to the floor every day. The sticky floorboards in the dining room conjure an ancient frat house. When my daughter gathers fallen branches from the yard and paints them red for a fort, the wall splatters recall an old timey slaughterhouse.

Who wants a sterile, lifeless home, anyway? Organization is seriously overrated. For example, a neat laundry area is boring, day in and day out. But if you occasionally fill a washing machine with recycling because company’s coming and you need to clean up fast? Now that’s interesting. And speaking of fast, should the mother of all mother-in-laws come to visit (read: the bank appraiser), you can make a U-Haul interesting, too. Just dump in the recycling from your washing machine and add bags of crap from your kids’ rooms.  Park the truck a block from your house for an hour or two, and boom! Your house—and you—are Recession Chic.â„¢

*This sh*t is for real chez tCG.

 

 

 

Posted in Design, Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – February 21, 2013