Christy Potter's Blog, page 18

Consider yourself teased…

It has been two weeks since I’ve posted a new column and I’m aware of just how negligent that is of me. I have a good reason, though, really. And in a few days, I’ll be able to let you know what it is and hopefully you’ll be as excited as I am. So you don’t get bored in the meantime, here’s a baby hedgehog in a Santa hat. You’re welcome.

 

 

 

 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” ~ Faulkner

I miss flavored lip gloss and pens that write in strawberry-scented ink.

I miss drinking out of the hose on a hot summer day. I miss grass stains on my feet and blackberry stains on my fingers.

I miss having someone else buy my clothes.

I miss not knowing how much I weigh.

I miss wanting to tell people how old I am.

I miss thinking I’d never survive whatever it was I was sure I would never survive.

I miss the smell of Mr. Bubble, Bactine and Deep Woods Off.

I miss these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I miss putting too much sugar on already-sugared cereal.

I miss lying awake at night and imagining what I’d be like when I was much older and sophisticated, like sixteen.

I miss noticing stuff, like ants and squirrels and funny-shaped rocks and smells and dusk.

I miss wanting the phone to be for me when it rang. I miss it never being for me.

I miss not knowing what’s really going on.

I miss the smell of these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I miss knowing what I wanted for Christmas, I miss telling everyone within a 50-mile radius what I wanted for Christmas, I miss leaving notes around the house for my parents about what I wanted for Christmas, I miss writing long, detailed letters to Santa about what I wanted for Christmas, and I miss the thrill on Christmas morning when I got it.

I miss the first day of school. I miss the smell of pencil shavings and new notebooks and stiff new jeans.

I miss looking forward to whatever came next, instead of bracing for it.

I suppose buried beneath all this missing is the rich blessing of having been a normal child, a happy, odd little bookworm who took her simple life for granted because she could. Still, though… I miss it.

Do heroes fall, or are they pushed?

Watching Lance Armstrong’s slow fall from public grace is indicative of so much of what I find sad and remiss about the society we’ve built, particularly in recent years.

I blame us for what happened to Armstrong. I blame us for what has happened to many who came before him, and many who will still be put up on that shaky pedestal. We have become a society that values competition over quality, over individuality, over fairness, and over our own sense of humanity and self-respect.

Armstrong is responsible for taking performance-enhancing drugs, for lying about it, and for being a monster to those who tried for years to call him on it. I have no love for the man, but I can’t help wondering if he did what he felt he had to do to compete in a world that emphasizes competition to the point of near insanity.

The most popular programs on television are reality shows that have the sole focus of coming out on top, of not only winning but destroying everyone else. It amazes me that we go to such great lengths to teach our kids about the evils of bullying, then we plop down in front of the TV and turn on shows that feature competitors screaming and scheming, and cameras zooming in closely on people crying in frustration or defeat. I’ve seen more bullying in prime time than I ever did in school.

I believe in doing your best, trying your hardest, striving to win. Competition is fine, even healthy. But when I look around, it’s starting to feel like all I see is a world that values winning, and only winning. Sportsmanship, grace and teamwork are now seen as weaknesses. Would we have continued to cheer for Lance Armstrong if he started losing races? As his body started to age and fail him? Or would we have relegated him to has-been status with barely a backward glance as we immediately started looking for the Next Big Thing we could all live vicariously though? We are enjoying the self-righteous feeling of booing and hissing in his direction, because we haven’t asked ourselves what the hell is wrong with this picture.

As a journalist who has seen my own field change dramatically in recent years, I’ve witnessed firsthand the damage this win-or-die mentality can do. When I was a young journalist, we focused on accuracy, on balance, on good writing. Now that the digital age has taken over, accuracy and balance come in second place. To most journalists these days, it doesn’t matter if you’re accurate or balanced, as long as you’re first. CNN took a well-deserved beating when they initially misidentified the Newtown shooter. They heard a name, and they ran with it because they wanted to be the first out with the story. They wanted to win, and they lost. Armstrong wanted to win, and he lost.

Our kids are pushed beyond their limits to succeed in sports and academics. Our workplaces are rife with people who will stab anyone else in the back to get ahead. It’s a national obsession, this drive to win, and it’s costing us. Until we are willing to take a step back and admit that we’ve got a giant problem here, we’re doomed to endless, spectacular failures like Armstrong’s. It’s quite a legacy we’re building.

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.” ~ von Goethe

I’ve had a lot of really great ideas over the years. I’ve also had some that were such spectacular failures I’m surprised the town didn’t throw a parade just to celebrate how happy everyone was to not be me.

I’m not talking about colossally bad ideas, like a full-body tattoo or marrying Charlie Sheen. I’m talking about run-of-the-mill things that most likely only went disastrous because they were in my capable hands.

When I was a kid, I took the basic and regular activity of sliding/bouncing in a seated position down our carpeted steps, added in the discovery that waxed paper is slippery, and concocted a plan to start at the top, sit on a piece of waxed paper, and slide down the steps to the bottom, where I would make a cushy landing on a strategically placed beanbag chair (they were all over the house – this was the 70s). This actually did work, at least until the carpeting itself became slippery from the repeated butt-pressing of waxed paper in the same path. On the next run, I rocketed down the steps like one-kid luge team, overshot the beanbag, and crashed into the front door.

Another time – still in childhood here – I was in the midst of an obsession with the Trixie Belden books. In case you weren’t similarly smitten, Trixie was a 13-year-old girl who went around with her friends solving mysteries and crimes. She was a little less sophisticated than Nancy Drew but not as, uh, psychedelic as the Scooby Doo kids. Anyway, Trixie and her friends called their mystery-solving club the Bob-Whites of the Glen. I wanted to be a Bob-White of the Glen SO MUCH that I declared the attic over our garage as the official Bob-Whites of the Glen clubhouse, painted “BWG” in big, multi-colored letters on the rafters, and then realized that I didn’t really have that many friends, there weren’t any unsolved mysteries lying around, I didn’t know what a glen was, and my dad probably wasn’t going to appreciate the paint job.

Perms make a repeated appearance on my list of Ideas Gone Wrong, and the saddest part of that is that I never remember the previous disaster when contemplating another. Never. It’s unreal. I’ve had big 80s perms (which were very much in fashion then but, as anyone who lived through the 80s can tell you, that isn’t saying much), “body waves,” and the massive spiral perm of the 90s that promised to make me look like Julia Roberts. Ha. So what did I do, just a few short years ago? I stood in the bathroom, gazing down at the box of perm rods I’d found and falling under their spell, my eyes glassy as I mumbled “Curls… yes… must have curls…” And I wrapped and I clipped and I wound and I solutioned and I rinsed and I neutralized and I rinsed. And viola!

 

I once decided to get artsy in my apartment and put wallpaper on the ceiling. But then I found out that wallpaper cost a lot more than I could afford, but I could buy a bolt of nice, heavy, floral-print fabric for pretty cheap. Fortunately, I realized before I left the store that fabric, unlike wallpaper, is not adhesive on one side, so I bought a big bottle of Elmer’s Glue. When I got home, I felt very artistic and quirky and cool as I spread Elmer’s Glue on the ceiling, then pressed the fabric into place. It didn’t look as good as I’d hoped, but it was passable… until the bathroom steam began loosening the fabric and the ceiling started to slowly peel itself. I should have just painted “BWG” up there and called it a day.

Happy New Year, my friends

New Year’s is always my favorite time to reflect on everything I now carry with me from the previous year. Every year brings flashes of insight and moments of growth that are worth keeping as I move forward. Now that I’m in my 40s, I’ve amassed quite a treasure trove. Here are the highlights of what I’ve learned this year:

Drunk people are not nearly as funny/clever/sexy as they think they are. I shudder when I remember life before I knew that.

I don’t have to prove anything. To anyone.

Old friends are the scrapbook pages of my life. New friends are the binding.

“There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line.” Indigo Girls

Closure is about me, not about anyone else. It doesn’t have to involve confrontation, crying, rehashing. It’s just a matter of opening my clenched fists and letting it all float away. The man who shattered my heart is fighting battles of his own. The group of girls who cornered me after school in seventh grade and made fun of my skirt are now worrying about how to protect their own kids from bullying. Closure comes when I decide I’m ready for it, not when anyone else offers it to me.

God is wherever I seek him, not where other people demand I look.

My hair is going to do anything it wants to, and it will rarely be the same thing twice.

I can’t control how other people behave. I can only control how I react to them.

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” Jane Austen

I recognize the divinity in all living things. Every being, from the earthworms that keep the soil healthy to the trees that clean the air, from the homeless woman sleeping on a bench to the guy in the Lexus who took the parking spot I had my eye on, all of them have something to teach me.

Sometimes loving is more difficult than hating.

People are what they are, not what I want them to be.

“There is nothing, nothing that stops me from doing anything except myself.” Susan Sontag

If I had the power to remove three things from existence, I’d wipe out abuse, hunger, and loneliness.

I appreciate being warm so much more after I’ve been cold.

The most important moment in my entire life is this one.

On sadness, anger, and the end of a wrenching year

It’s a hard thing to define, this sadness.

I’m sad in the way we’re all sad, grieving from a place so deep inside that we only see it when something happens that our minds find literally unthinkable, so the shock and the anger and the sadness all come together into a white-hot arrow of pain that shoots all the way down into our souls, into the part where we hold everything that can’t be easily sorted and filed. Simple beliefs in goodness and right, memories of childhood happy moments, ideals and dreams and wishes and ice cream and secret smiles. When that part of you is disrupted, there are no words.

For me, the aftermath has been nearly as bad as Friday itself. People screaming at each other on social networks, in the comments under news stories, in e-mail, even in person. We’re angry, and somehow we think that fighting among ourselves is going to fix it. We seem to believe that shouting our political views at each other, decorated with a few nasty barbs and a little name-calling, will take us all 28 steps back and somehow stop the devastation from happening.

What are we doing? We are friends. We are family. At least we were until this apparent collective decision to put our socio-political beliefs ahead of our relationships. That this tragedy happened at the end of a year already torn to pieces by the warring sides in the presidential race is beyond unfortunate.  For me, it was the last straw. If our politics have rendered us unable to be civil to each other and completely out of touch with our humanity, then I am irreparably heartbroken.

We can blame the shooter, we can blame the government, we can blame the media, and we can blame each other, but at what point do we ask ourselves “What can I do differently now?” It’s an uncomfortable question. It’s far easier to point a trembling finger at those who don’t agree with us.

I am going to be stepping away for awhile. I need a break from all forms of social media, including this column. I will be back at some point, but for right now I need to shut out all the vitriol and spend time alone, in prayer and meditation, looking deep inside myself to find that seed of belief that there is still hope for us, there is still good out there, and that I can still change the world. If I lose that, I’ve lost everything.