My daughter got a camera for Christmas. My college student sons got new phones. My husband got an electric hammer. I got Irritable Cat Syndrome.
ICS can afflict anyone at anytime, as long as they have a cat. You are more prone to getting ICS if you have recently adopted a cat from an animal shelter.
Cats confined to small cages for long periods of time after having been abandonned by previously loving families are five thousand times more likely to inflict ICS upon their new owners. ICS is not readily apparent while the cat is still in the animal prison, laying in his cat litter because his cage is too small.
At this phase, pre-ICS, the cat is extremely loving and snuggly and on its best behavior in his attempts to force you to fall in love with him and go into utter panic, when the last chance adoption sign is put on his cage. In pre-ICS, the cat will gently touch you with his paw as you walk by his cell block. If you remove him from the cell block to pet his soft orange fur, he will purr and rub his cheek against your cheek. He will not try to get away because he wants to get away with you at this point, rather than away from you.
After you pay the adoption fees, he will remain grateful for a period of time. He will bounce five feet in the air from a sitting position and catch all flying pests. He will kill these pests and lay them at your feet. Then he will rub against your legs and purr.
When you leave the house, he will run to the window and watch you leave, wondering if you are coming back. When you come back he will run to you and meow loudly that he is glad you came back. That being left alone before was traumatizing and he doesn’t want it to happen again. He will not jump on your counters or furniture because only bad cats do that and he is not bad, so please don’t take him back to animal prison.
Then ICS begins to set in. He realizes, the cute little kitty, after gaining five pounds from being fed properly, that you are more in love with him now than he is with you. He can begin to test your love. He hops on your dressers and steals jewelry and hides it under your bed. He hops on the counter and knocks food stuffs off and the dogs eat the stuff and when they get into trouble, he waits for them to be taken to the animal shelter.
When they are not, he must concoct other ways to irritate you. ICS is full blown now.
And, joy of joys, you set up the Christmas tree. He can climb inside the Christmas tree and try to knock it over. He can whack the ornaments off the tree and watch the dogs get into trouble again. He can pull all the bows and tags off the gifts under the tree and cause mad confusion on Christmas morning. He can rub against the gifts and leave clumps of orange fur and make everyone sneeze.
During ICS, you will wonder why the hell you brought him home from the animal shelter. When you lock him in your bedroom with you at night because the Christmas tree cannot be destroyed, even bringing all of his necessities into the room with you, he will torment you at regular two-hour intervals, pawing at your face, nipping at your nose, scratching at the door, leaping at the door knob to open the door. See, he had figured out how to open long handled doors. But, the bedroom door knob is round. He can’t open that. So, he stalks you.
And this is Irritable Cat Syndrome. It is worse than Irritable New Baby Syndrome. It makes you take down the Christmas tree two days after Christmas and say to him, “Hah! You can’t ever make me take you back to the animal shelter, you Devil Cat. You’re stuck with me til the day I die!”
And at this, he rubs against you and purrs.
The Women is the story about the women, geez how tacky, that Frank Lloyd Wright, brilliant architect, had in his life. It is an interesting story, if you can stand how it is constructed and if you can get past the numerous deragatory references and images of Native Americans that Boyle justifies on his site (after I asked him) as coming from the thoughts and viewpoints of his characters, chiefly a Japanese man. I mean, how is it that a Japanese man, born and raised and only visiting here to learn from Wright, has American Indians on his mind so much that he uses them for violent and aggressive metaphors and similes? Hmmmmmmm!
Anyway, the book tells the story of Frank’s loves backwards. I think this is because the most riveting aspect of Frank’s life and loves is the period when his mistress/wife Mamah was murdered, along with her children and several of Frank’s draftspeople and Taliesin was burned down by the murderer. And yes, American Indians are used as similes to describe this heinous act.
By not telling us about this trauma, we miss something when reading about Frank’s later decisions and involvements with other women. For me, what would have been riveting would have been in understanding how Frank had survived this very real and horrific tragedy in his life by seeing how his life had unfolded after the loss.
But most annoying of all, is telling us that the narrator, the Japanese man, is collaborating with another man, an Irish-American to narrate this story and then writing all of the scenes from one of the other character’s viewpoints. I never could get into this until I worked hard to forget the Japanese guy was speaking at all, and just let the scene be told by the character of the moment (which is what happens anyway). I’m thinking about the loss to the story with this technique as I compare it to The Great Gatsby and Nick telling us the story, but Fitzgerald staying with Nick’s viewpoint.
Please, all you authors out there, do not latch onto this new technique!!! Some of these fads should be allowed to disappear forever.
The footnotes are annoying also until you simply realize that the author couldn’t figure out how to retain the suuposedly chosen narrator’s voice without them, since the story is really told by the character of the moment, whether it be Frank, Miriam, Olgivanna etc. and hardly ever the supposed narrator. The Japanese guy that hates American Indians.
Here is my list of words that I had to look up in a dictionary because Boyle is fond of adverbs and adjectives and flowery writing and cannot use common vocabulary like Kingsolver manages to:
- filmic
- impecuniosity
- melliflous
- maculate
- orotund
- dehiscence
- deracination
- umbrage
- animadversions
- incarnadine
- pugilistic
- fulmination
- ordure
- rubicund
- ichor
- prestidigitation
- opprobrium
- fumarole
- pellucid
- tintinnabulation
- adumbration
- oleaginous
- luteous
- crepitus
- ausculated
- dischronic
- oneiric
- Lucullan
- dubiety
- charnel
- abstersion
- emendations
- canescent
Here is the image I found most offensive. Catherine just had a fight with Frank. She lives in one of the first houses he designed in Chicago and it is the 1930’s. Frank has fallen for his client, Mamah and wants a divorce from Kitty, the mother of Frank’s children. Frank is a skank if you are wondering, like Tiger Woods.
Catherine is doing the narrating here (even though it’s supposed to be the Japanese draftsman):
“The night came down and lay across the roof like a presence out of the forest primeval that had once stood here, on this lot, while Indians beat their squaws and stripped the flesh from their enemies with knives of stone.”
Sure, this fits the kind of thing a middle-aged white woman with a bunch of kids living in a midwestern city in the 1930’s comes up with while standing on her front lawn, angry with her husband…
It’s good to know, I guess, that ALL of the people Frank Lloyd Wright knew, even the Barbadian cook and butler, and Frank himself, were racist against American Indians because they all use American Indians as metaphors and similes for violence and aggression and primitive savagery.
I didn’t realize how much I had to force myself to continue reading this book to get through it over a period of weeks, until I started reading Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and have nearly finished it in a matter of days.
It is always the little things we overlook when giving thanks on Thanksgiving. We’re always profusely thankful for our family and friends, for our jobs, for our Civil Rights, for not starving and having to eat our young during the long winter of 1620 and for the American Indians taking pity on our incompetence, idiocy and lack of survival skills during that long winter and saving our necks so that we could turn around and take over their country. I digress…
For me, the spirit of Thanksgiving should lie in the little things. The things we take for granted and could live without, but without, make life like cake without the frosting.
Such as the blessed times when the outfit that you pick out to wear to meet with people who make far more money than you do, does not attract pet hair like a magnet attracts nails. This saves you the unfortunate situation of hopping out of your furry car and having to perform the shake and shimmy in the parking lot. The hairs of your beloveds catching the flourescent glow of the parking lot lights and shimmering in the night, floating hither and thither while you dodge their landing. This has happened to me so rarely, that its event is one that I am deeply thankful for.
I am thankful for the times when I go to the doctor and there is actually something wrong with me. There is always a 50% chance that when I go to the doctor there is not really anything wrong with me that the doctor can write down and give a diagnosis code for and do anything about, and so when there is, I am deeply thankful for saving face. And for not wasting thirty dollars on a co-pay. And for being spared once more the nagging underlying thought that I’m being driven to the brink of insanity by my life and it is seeping out through my bones, organs and skin via imaginary medical complaints.
I am thankful for my small dresser-top room fan that runs during the night, no matter the season. This fan creates a white noise and that white noise reduces the amount of sleep that I lose to my chronic inability to sleep well. I am certain that the white noise interfers with my brain’s desire to dwell on obsessive thoughts and keep me awake after disturbing dreams. The white noise tricks my brain into thinking it is too stupid to think because all it can process is the whir of the fan. This fan also blows a cooling breeze upon me for the times when a hot flash decides to descend upon me like an alien abduction.
These are just a few of my favorite things that I am thankful for this Thanksgiving. There are other, more private things, like the invention of bum wipes, post-it notes, gel pens, overnight Kotex, fleece and electronic fund transfers that I won’t bore you with.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I have a thing about hair stylists. Most of the ones I’ve known have taken the slash and burn approach to my hair. One of my most traumatic memories involved being age 12 and asking for a Dorothy Hamill hair cut and getting what I could have done myself in the comfort of my own home with a mixing bowl and scissors.
For the last five or six years though, I have been going to the same person. For the sake of my forthcoming ventures into my small town, we’ll call her Mildred. Some backtracking is now necessary.
My daughter thinks I am a beauty geek. She never knew the very thin, very hot young woman who went off to study at the University of Michigan. The together with-it college chick with her own Hudson’s card and her own spending money. The only woman she knows as her mother has birthed three children and sacrificed her career to raise them.
Needless to say, I have not colored my hair in twenty-five years that is until, this same eleven-year-old daughter convinced me to to go for it. ”Your hair is too black,” she said. “Plus you have gray hairs.”
“Those gray hairs are from you and Matt and Ben,” I said. “Not to mention your father’s contribution to my gray hairs.”
She snorted. “I want my hair dyed too. I want to have real blonde hair, like Marilyn Monroe, not this dirty blonde hair.” She tossed her golden curls as if tossing out old food.
“There are women who would die for your hair,” I said.
She snorted. “You look old.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll color my hair but not a big change. Not anything permanent. I happen to like my brown hair.”
“Your hair is black,” she said.
I still cannot figure out what is wrong with having my color hair, but okay, I decided to spend a little money on both of our hair and we went to Mildred.
Mildred did a beautiful job on the daughter. She came out looking just like the picture of Hannah Montana and the daughter was joyful beyond what should be allowed.
But for me, no, Mildred was .. let’s say, not on her best game. Instead of red highlights — I got purple hair. The kind of deep purple that is not a rock band. I could have joined the Purple Hat Society and not worn a hat.
Mildred also was oops! careless with the dye. The result being a line of purple where my hair meets my forehead that stayed with me for nearly a week. Don’t take off that hat!
On top of all that, Mildred hacked and chopped my hair. I guess it was too much trouble that day to simply cut it and she left the bits of my chopped hair all over my face. Maybe she knew I was going to be hysterical after and she wanted me to be able to glue those bits back in.
Thus began the month-long process of washing my hair as much as possible, soaking my head in the bathtub each night and watching the gallons of purple water go down the drain. And no, I didn’t call Mildred and tell her and yes, I had left her a tip. It wasn’t until we got outside the salon that my daughter pointed at my head.
“You have purple hair,” she said, her eyes wide.
And, she was absolutely right.
Tomorrow, we have an appointment with a new hair stylist in a city that is 25 miles away. We found her on a referral from someone I trust with my life.
The other day I told my daughter, “Listen, I like my brown hair, it matches my eyes. I like my gray hairs, they help me to remember traumatic events. And someday, when you kids stop sucking every last penny out of my bank accounts, I’ll be able to buy nice clothes again and have a real life. So don’t get any ideas about my hair.”
She smiled. Then she disappeared into the office and came out with a camera. She made me pull the hair off my face, took a shot and went back into the office. Fifteen minutes later, she called me into the office. On a website was my forty-something face but it was barely recognizable. She’d given me a virtual make-over.
I shook my head. “I am not getting white hair!!”
We found these really nice books to read when studying historical figures of the Renaissance. They are published by Chelsea House Publishers. They call the series of 10 books: ” Makers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” .
We read the Michelangelo one and the one about Leonardo daVinci. My 11 year old really enjoyed these books in particular because they are chocked full of concrete yet interesting information along with illustrations, photographs and side bars of further information. At the end of each chapter are two page quizzes, to see how much information the reader retained.
We also did some of the projects out of the book Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions You Can Build Yourself by Maxine Anderson. But when my daughter built the webbed hands project, she left the webbing off the sticks so she would have X-Men Wolverine’s claw hands. The project involved duct taping chop sticks to the fingers of rubber gloves and then the child was supposed to wrap the sticks in duct tape and simulate webbing.
We learned many interesting things about Michelangelo and Leonardo. For instance, Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor and when commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel tried to get out of it. He even signed his contract as Michelangelo, the Sculptor. He died thinking that he had never really accomplished all that he could have.
Leonardo often left his work unfinished, especially if he was more interested in something else at the time. He designed and built weapons. His anatomy drawings are so accurate they are still used today. He wrote all of his journals in a codex and some of the journals were lost.
We are on to studying King Henry VIII and his brilliant daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. So we will be ordering through our inter-library loan Queen Elizabeth and England’s Golden Age by Samuel Willard Crompton out of the Chelsea House Renaissance series.
Look at these fascinating dolls by artist Beth Robinson. I discovered them when reading the latest issue of Literal Latte.
Only part of me is glad that the Balloon Boy’s parents were found out. This is the part of me that wants a full investigation, including dissection if necessary, into Mayumi’s claims that she and her husband are descended from extraterrestrial aliens. And since my brother-in-law has been saying for a few years now that the aliens are living in deep underground chambers and tunnels dug through stone with a machine that melts stone, I am hoping the Heenes can shed light on the movements within the bowels of Mother Earth.
The other part of me that is not happy about the secret being revealed is the Exploitive Parent in me. My Exploitive Parent’s cover has been blown and she is so upset, she put my Inner Child in a cardboard box in the attic for hours.
My Exploitive Parent needs public attention to get where she wants to go with her writing career. My children often get in the way of getting to where I want to be by consuming what should be time to write with their flues and homework and play dates and softball games that need scorekeeping and their incessant demands to play with my Inner Child. Not to mention the ability children have to swallow whole in one swallow any and all disposable income faster than a blue whale swallows all of the tiny organisms in the ocean. Forget going to that writing conference and pitching my novel, my child needs fastpitch coaching lessons!
See, it would be so simple to exploit my child and bring myself some much needed public attention. For instance, I could put my nine year old on a subway train in the heart of a large inner city, say Detroit or New York, and hope that she found her way home. If my child made it home and wasn’t abducted, like that little girl was just the other day walking home from school with a group of other children, it would bring me instant fame and publishing success. I would secure a spot on Oprah, a regular column or maybe even two in Funny Times and other publications, and I could start my own organization to attract other Exploitive Parents to read my new book about how children should be independent so we parents can stop wasting all of our time and money on them. “Children are an inconvenience!” I could shout from the rooftops, “Let them find their own way home!”
My guess is the Heenes became involved in the Independent Child organization run by the now famous published author that wasn’t famous before, and came up with the idea of using their child to bring them the public attention they desperately needed to pitch their reality TV show idea. My Exploitive Parent thinks this was a brilliant idea with the balloon flying through the air and the newscasters full of anxiety thinking the Heenes were so stupid as to let their boy climb into that thing. Please! He was eating Doritoes in his bedroom and playing Legos.
And they almost pulled it off. Which brings me back to the anger I feel at being exposed. For this was my plan, we have a lot of woods in our back yard. I could call up the News station and say my daughter was out playing in the woods and she didn’t return when I rang the dinner bell. Dogs would be called out. My neighbors would come over and help search. Helicopters would fly overhead and police would show up in hordes. I could cry and scream and yell and since it would get dark quickly, being autumn, the flashlights would be streaming everywhere. Every time Wolf Blitzer spoke with me, I could say, “These are the very woods for the setting in my not-yet published novel – I should know them like the back of the book’s cover.”
Then after a couple of hours, I could call my daughter on her cell phone and have her walk out of our woods, already appropriately disheveled, burrs caught on her clothes, her eyes “red” from crying. She would do this for a couple of Webkinz. We could run into each other’s arms and then spend the rest of the night being on television and then get up early and spend the entire day on television and I could start an organization: Let Kids Enjoy Nature! Everyone would want to publish my novel and magazines would ask me to write weekly columns.
That is until the Heenes blew it for all of us Exploitive Parents. I think this is because they are part alien. Not quite smart enough to pull it off.
According to Terry L. Cross’s article “Native Americans and Juvenile Justice: A Hidden Tragedy” from 2008, there are 560 federally recognized American Indian tribes in the USA.
There are 4 million individuals within these tribes and half of them live on reservations. 42% of these tribally enrolled individuals are under the age of 19.
The suicide rate amongst American Indian youth is twice as high as white youth. It is the highest rate for any race. 60,000 American Indian children suffer abuse or neglect each year and 200,000 suffer serious “emotional disturbances”.
American Indian youth are over-represented in the Justice System and are 50% more likely to receive the harshest treatments while in our Justice System.
According to Wikipedia, one third of American Indians live in poverty.
I could locate no statistics on how many youth there are in the United States of Native American descent but not within a tribe. Youth whose ancestors were Native American. This is a touchy subject. All of the bad white apples who simply wanna-be of Native American descent, but aren’t really. This makes it difficult for those of who can actually prove our Native American descent through photographs, documents and/or DNA testing.
Needless to say, those of American Indian descent who live in the United States must be in the tens of thousands.
What’s the point of all of this?
It is time for assaults against the American Indian in children’s literature to end.
Recently, a published author whose picture book made it on the Oyate organization’s list of Not recommended books with Native themes asked me to read her yet-to-be published new book with Native themes.
This author is not Native American nor is she of Native descent.
Her new work is an invented Native American tale. She took American Indian tales that inspired her and kept about 25% of the tale or tales and made up the other 75%. She claims her best work is inspired by reading Native American tales.
So, even though Oyate and Professor Debbie Reese of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have explained thoroughly to her how her first book is deeply offensive to the American Indian community, she wrote another book that will be deeply offensive to the American Indian community. And what is worse, harmful to American Indian youth.
And when American Indian youth are already suffering beyond what would ever be acceptable in a country of any kind of moral standards, this author wants to put out another book that will add to their suffering.
And she can’t hear the protests. She can’t hear them from the American Indian community and she cannot hear them from me. After my protests, she thinks the story only needs further revisions.
Do not write your own American Indian tale when you are not Native. Do not use American Indian tales in your work when you do not have permission to do so. Do not lift elements of Indian tales and re-use them in your own tale. American Indian tales are often sacred and have sacred images, symbols, themes and meanings.
Do not do this simply because it is wrong to do so. Respect the American Indian by respecting their beliefs.
It’s not okay to make money off the American Indian by publishing offensive children’s books you know will, first of all, get published more readily, and secondly, sell more readily, because of its Native theme.
It is far better to never be published than to publish a children’s book that is harmful to even one child let alone an entire population of children – we are talking about almost 2 million young people.
And we are talking about the offense it is to all of us who are descended of Native Americans.
My ghost story Teacher In The Woods took an honorable mention in the Genre Short Story category of the 78th annual Writer’s Digest Competition.
Thank you to the editors and judges for this encouragement. This story was something new for me, writing for adults and writing a ghost story.
Now, I will search for a home for my story.
