I am currently watching Ni Hao, Kai-lan, even when the kids aren’t in the room. Right now, we are having a TV problem–it’s 10 years old, takes about an hour to warm up and until then the picture flips and distorts. So once the TV is on, it is on for the day, whether anybody is watching it or not. When the kids leave, I just mute the sound.

Anyway, Kai-lan is a nice show, Pumpkin likes it more than Monkey does, and even repeats the Mandarin words. The visual style is very simple and colorful. The characters remind me of a cross between Hello Kitty and an Avon “It’s a Small World” perfume bottle I had when I was a little girl. The only problem I have is not with the show itself, it’s with Nick, Jr. Love the shows, hate hate hate the commercials. I would pay cash money if my oldest didn’t have the Chuck E Cheese theme song memorized now.

The next show, Pokemon DP, is definitely a favorite of Monkey’s. He plays Pokemon something-or-other every night with his daddy, he’s got a bunch of the cards, and he adores the show. I’ve always liked anime, Robotech was one of my favorites in high school. The show is as intricate as the video games. Last week, Monkey found one of my pens and wrote a little “R” on the pocket of his grey t-shirt. He told me it’s because he’s a member of Team Rocket. Pumpkin hates the show and screams, “That’s not my favorite!” whenever Monkey watches it.

One show they both agree upon is a classic: Popeye. They love it! And they take turns pretending to be Popeye and Bluto. I hear a lot of talk about spinach, but it’s just the pretend kind. Actually offer them real live spinach and they act like you just served up a poop sandwich. One interesting thing–while they like to run around and make straws into corn cob pipes, they don’t hit each other! So that’s good. Another interesting little tidbit, it’s always Popeye and Bluto, Olive Oyl never figures into it. I don’t mind that at all. Olive Oyl makes the rest of us dames look bad! Seriously, that character plays into so many negative stereotypes of women that I’m glad she’s not included. She’s fickle, she’s irrational, she’s ditzy, she’s a bad driver, and she’s only a prop to further the Popeye/Bluto rivalry dynamic.

I’d be really worried if either my son or my daughter wanted to identify with such a character. But I’d be pleased if either one pretended to be Dora or Kai-lan. But alas, strong, capable, identifiably-human girl characters are few and far between. Well, there’s always Velma.

Every single one of my teenage years took place in the 80’s. I know this is the time about which I am supposed to wax nostalgic. But I won’t. I’m absolutely sure that there are some pathetic souls who look longingly back on their high school years as the their peak years, their best years, after which all else is downhill. That is so sad. When I left my high school, and the little town it was in, I shook its dust from my tiny shoes and never looked back. I even refused to attend my 10-year class reunion, thinking that a mere decade was not enough time in which real change can occur. In me or others.

This year I turned 40, officially entering middle-age and marking my 20th anniversary of not being a teenager anymore. In that 20 years I: have been married for 17 of them, had two beautiful, infuriating children, started writing again, swallowed the bitter pill and attended my 20-year class reunion, but I still don’t think I’ve reached my peak. I feel that I still have way more to accomplish, more to offer the world.

So I’m not one of those crotchety, stuck-in-the-past, “you kids get off my lawn!” types. The world of the 80’s was no utopia: cold war, the constant threat of nuclear war, apartheid, famine, AIDS, Ronald Reagan. But there were certain elements of the 80’s that I miss. The wildness and experimentation in fashion–clothes, hair, make-up, anything and everything goes. The music, oh the music. My iPod is just stuffed with music from the Eighties or with artists that got their starts in the 80’s. And not Top 40 stuff either, it’s New Wave, punk, or electronica. Artists that changed the aural landscape of music.

Something else I miss–the movies about teenagers. I was thankfully too young to be subjected to the “Porky’s” franchise but I was of an age to truly enjoy and relate to all the John Hughes movies. If you couldn’t relate exactly to one of his characters, at least you could relate to all the free-floating angst. Some movies were about the brand-new feelings and experiences that all teenagers have to go through, but which they all feel are unique unto themselves. “No one has ever felt this way before!” On a side note, I will have to try very hard not to laugh when I hear this kind of drama from my kids. It’s not the raw and new feelings that are so amusing, it is the absolute certainty that no one else in the history of humanity has ever felt thusly. Sixteen Candles springs to mind.

Some movies were subversive fun, all about refusing to submit and conform yourself to someone else’s goals and expectations. Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are both lovely examples.

We have bought a lot of these movies on DVD, and they hold up very well. Some of the movies I liked back then, seen first through naive and uncritical eyes, haven’t retained their charm. Dirty Dancing, oh the shame. I loved that movie so much that I cut off a pair of Levi’s just like Baby’s and wore them with white Keds. I think I watched it with my mom. And Footloose. I went to see this little gem with my friend Sheila and we loved it!!! Unalloyed adoration! We saw it at the dinky little one-screen movie theater that was then tucked into a corner at Ne-Mar Shopping Center in Claremore. Afterwards, we danced around like mad idiots, probably causing many shoppers to laugh their asses off at us. Did I mention that we were dancing on the covered sidewalks of Ne-Mar Shopping Center in Claremore, Oklahoma? Just want you to get the full effect.

And I won’t even go into Red Dawn.

We had our share of gross-out or overtly sexual or slasher movies. The aforementioned Porky’s is one such sterling example. Not to mention Nightmare on Elm Street. I actually lost sleep over that one. Curses on you, Wes Craven! So I’m not saying that all the teenage movies from the Eighties were more culturally worthy than the ones made in the 90’s or this decade.

And I’m not some conservative anti-everything curmudgeon who bemoans the coarsening of our culture. I just don’t think that recycling the same movie plots over and over is very fun. One plot I find particularly annoying is the ugly/nerdy/smart unpopular/miserably unhappy girl is magically transformed through the power of fashion and lipgloss into the prom queen. Along the way she has a magical awakening to the awesomeness of the high school Big Man on Campus, the one she either previously dismissed or secretly desired.

Over and over again we are presented with the smart but somehow socially unacceptable, unworthy of love girl who only becomes a fully realized, completely worthy person when she is turned into a beautiful, sexy girl. The nerd-girl, smart-girl cannot be celebrated for her brain power alone. Her talents are secondary or worthless in the face of her non-adherence to accepted beauty norms. She cannot be celebrated for her independence of spirit, she can only be feted when she conforms and sublimates herself to love! Only in the connection to a sought-after male is she deemed worthy.

There are three movies which point out the problem from different perspectives. There is one scene in The Breakfast Club which I find problematic. Ally Sheedy’s interesting, wholly subversive character is transformed with a headband and an eye pencil into a completely ordinary, socially-acceptable girl, whereupon she catches the fancy of the Big Man on Campus-in-residence. I always identified with Ally-before, not Ally-after.

Never Been Kissed is, of course, a more recent movie in the magic-makeover vein. While I generally enjoy this movie, I find the end to be both edifying and frustrating. At the prom scene, Drew Barrymore’s character, Josie Grossy, who is no longer gross, finds that she cannot make herself conform to the expectations of the popular crowd and forcefully rejects the kind of kids who used to reject her. The frustrating part is that when she finally receives her “first real kiss” from Sam, she is the transformed Josie still. She is no longer the slightly frumpy, mousy grown-up Josie from the beginning.

And finally, the Revenge of the Nerds movies. The nerds triumph over their rivals in all their nerdy glory! The nerds do not need to conform to societal norms to achieve success. My big problem is not the dearth of similarly triumphant lady nerds, but the fact that the nerds still crave and “win” hot girls. We see that the nerdy girls are no prize.

Why can’t the nerdy/smart girls triumph in all their nerdy, brainy, awkward glory? I am, and always have been, a nerdy girl. I didn’t have to transform myself into a living Barbie doll to find love, or success. Somebody, somewhere give us a Revenge of the Nerd-Girls movie!

Addendum: The movies listed are by no means all of my most favorites or my most hateds. Feel free to use the comments as an open forum. Tell us what you did and/or did not like about the 80’s or its pop culture. And share with us your most favorite and most hated movies from the Eighties!

I have always had a love/hate relationship with undergarments. Bras are fine, I tend to find ones I like and wear them until they fall apart. Underpants always have been, and ever shall remain, the bane of my existence. Don’t get me wrong, I always wear underpants, I wouldn’t dream of going around without them. It’s like they know that I can’t live without them, so they take advantage of my naked vulnerability so to speak, engaging me in a near constant wrestling match just to keep them in place.

You may find this difficult to believe, but there have been times when I have been reduced to tears out of sheer loathing for my underpants. OK, it was just that one time and I was pregnant. You do not know clothing hell until you have worn maternity underpants. Pregnancy is the one time in my life when I have even considered going commando because all maternity underpants were apparently designed by sadists.

There is even one brand of ladies’ underpants that claims to have a no-ride-up guarantee. Ride-up, how deceptively charming. I refer to the phenomenon as Black-Hole Butt. As long as I can remember, my behind has acted as a kind of gravity well, pulling in every garment that gets close. So I have perfected some techniques for dealing with the problem. There is the Rise-and-Tug, useful for getting out of chairs and cars. There is the Discreet-Turn-and-Tug, perfect for dealing with the problem while in enclosed public venues, like department stores and grocery stores. But recently I have stopped caring so much, if the issue doesn’t involve more than a little elastic-snapping, I just do it. Since having children I have come to the realization that other people rarely care about, or even notice, what is going on around them. And even if someone notices, I am not the first person, nor will I be the last, who has to make adjustments in public. Fear not, if the problem is serious enough, I excuse myself and head to the ladies’ room.

For the record, I have tried department store underpants, mass-retailer underpants, fancy schmancy lingerie store underpants, and not one of them are better than the others. It has gotten to the point where I am considering men’s underpants. I never hear of men having to go through these gyrations just to keep their undergarments in place. My most recent purchases have been the ones with the charmingly deceptive “guarantee.” Oh, and Major Underpants Manufacturer, they still ride up, you owe me nine dollars.

Today I had occasion to purchase underpants for my both my children, you know, to pass down the misery to a new generation. Don’t blame me, kids, I just bought them. My son, who is growing up faster than I like, decided that he no longer wants picture underpants. He wants underpants just like Daddy’s, so today I got him his first “tighty whities.” Those things are cuter than I thought possible; who knew miniature underpants were that adorable.

I also bought my 3-year old daughter her first big-girl underpants. Not that she gets to wear them right now or anything. I also got her a little tin lunch-box/purse thing for her “money box.” Monkey has a shoe box full of coins because he filled up his piggy bank and had to have a place for all the extra money. How does a five-year old get so much money, you might ask. Easy, extortion. He got into a bad habit of asking anyone who came to the door if they had any coins for him. It’s Nana’s fault. She started giving him the coins to put in that piggy bank, then Uncle D. got in on the act. Enablers, the lot of them. Luckily, he’s no longer asking plumbers and electricians to empty their pockets. But I digress.

Pumpkin decided she need a money box, too. One that would go up in her closet so Monkey couldn’t get it. Only one problem, she has no money, and she wants some. I have decided to turn this to my advantage and I told her that I will give her coins for peeing and pooping in the potty. That’s right, I am resorting to bribery. I hope that the lure of cold, hard cash will convince her to start using the potty. Heaven knows nothing else is working. So I am going to pay her. To use the potty. If I could outsource one parenting task this would be the one.

I hope that the big girl underpants will also be an incentive to use the potty, but I really think I’ll get more traction with the cash. But it’s like I’m paying her to stop using diapers and start wearing underpants. Come to think of it, if somebody paid me to wear underpants I might not mind that whole Black-Hole Butt problem.

We did an inordinate amount of running around this weekend, pretty much like always. We needed some stuff for the House and Hubby wanted some wine and wineglasses for Father’s Day. This was all on the whiteboard I keep on the fridge.

Along with some other things, all written by Hubby (except for ADAM, which was written by Monkey of course). He has the worst handwriting. To the untrained eye, our list may appear as this:

• Tvash Caus
• Smoke Detecnvs
• Surge Supressov
• ADAM
• o x o corn holders
• 11 choppers
• more chip clips
• wine
• wine glasses

Hug-and-Kiss corn holders? And don’t you think one chopper would be enough, even if you weren’t sure if we were talking about motorcycles, helicopters, or vegetable choppers. It’s that last one by the way.

We took the whole crew to Bed Bath and Beyond and came home with a bag full of this:

Apparently, the House is keeping OXO in business. The coffee mug and the (one) chopper are fairly self-explanatory, but I think some background will help on the other stuff.

Chip clips–I cannot tell you how many of these things I have thrown away, usually stuffed down in cereal boxes. We’re on about our tenth package of them. Hubby thought the big red ones would be good, he’s probably right, they are more noticeable. Maybe I won’t be so inclined to throw those away.

Corn holders–the set we bought last summer fell apart, because they cost about a dollar. And we’re gonna need them soon, it’s nearly time to go buy a couple of bushels of corn from Conrad Farms in Bixby.

Measuring cups and spoons–I don’t care for cooking, but I love to bake. Over the years, various pieces from my previous sets of cups and spoons have gone missing. The spoons have largely fallen prey to the garbage disposal, even some of the metal ones. The cups are a little harder to explain, I think one or two of them have been left in bags of flour. If it’s been a while since I baked anything, and there’s not much flour left in the old bag, I’ll start over with a new bag. It’s very likely that some cups have been thrown away with flour remnants.

We did buy two items not made by OXO–a little trash can for Monkey’s room (he loves having his own trash can and has been finding things to throw in it), and a sleep mask for me. I’m still debating whether I should wear it or not, at night of course.

That was yesterday. Today we went to a bookstore, finished grocery shopping, and ate an early dinner. Hubby took a nice, long Father’s Day nap when we got home. The kids absolutely did not stay quiet or calm, but he managed to sleep through all the ruckus.

After one of my many, futile tries at getting them to pipe down, I found this little guy.

For all the world, just sitting there, looking like he’s waiting for a bus. And then this:

The crime scene. And the culprit?

Pumpkin.

I have a couple of things that are too short for or not worthy of a post of their own, so thanks to Christina for pointing me the way!

1. We didn’t lose power in this latest round of storms; nor did we lose many branches. Mostly because we didn’t have many branches to lose due to December’s “ice pruning.”

2. Somehow I have to find my childhood vaccination records for Nursing School.

3. I turn 40 on Saturday.

4. My hair is becoming quite salt-and-pepper grey and I have decided to grow it out a little. I was afraid my very short hair was starting to resemble George Clooney’s hair.

5. Procrastination- I’m doing this instead of working on my book of short stories.

6. I hope to go see the SATC movie on my birthday, sans children.

7. Follow me on Twitter, when it works. http://twitter.com/burningprairie

8. A couple of months of ago Pumpkin broke Monkey’s train table by jumping up and down on it. This week, she tore some of the sticker-decorations off her play kitchen, then she broke Monkey’s play tool bench, and sometime yesterday she broke the DVD player. Oh yeah, a while back she ruined Monkey’s Nintendo DSLite, by smearing it with yogurt. This kid is getting expensive.

9. I’m about done with children who won’t use utensils and insist on shoving Spaghetti-O’s in their mouths with their little fists. (I’m talking to you, little missy.)

10. The Incredible Hulk is Lou Ferrigno, thank you very much.

Hubby and I got a bit of late start on having kids, not entirely by design. I found out I had PCOS when I was 22, it was mildly disturbing to hear, but not devastating. Yet.

So we knew going in that it may take us a little longer to get pregnant, but we didn’t know it would take us FIVE YEARS!!!!! Five years of tests, treatments, pills, shots, daily temperature taking, procedures, optimism, pessimism, defeatism. I gave up. I didn’t actually tell anyone else that I had given up, but my heart was tired of disappointment and giving up was a hedge against more of it.

Lot’s of other things happened during those five years: changing jobs, buying a house, moving to Chicago, moving back. All the while, I had that giving-up as an insurance policy against getting too invested in all the things that weren’t happening in my body. One of the things that happened in the course of moving was changing doctors.

In Chicago, I starting going to a doctor affiliated with Northwestern Healthcare in Evanston. The beautiful, wonderful, miracle-working Dr. Jennifer Kim put me on Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat Type II diabetes. When we moved back to Oklahoma, my new doctor here approved of that treatment and kept me on it.

Eventually, after some other bumps in the road, we got pregnant with Monkey. It was officially a high-risk pregnancy, but I suffered only the usual annoyances plus gestational diabetes. After the level hormonal playing field of PCOS, I was completely unprepared for the wild fluctuations pregnancy brought. Day after day, I would come home from the bank and tell Hubby, “I hate everyone but you.” And then Monkey was born.

His birth story is one for another day. What is important here is what happened afterwards. If the hormonal changes of the pregnancy threw me around like a rag doll, the ones postpartum were expontentially worse. And I had no idea what was happening to me. You see, no one told me that I was going to be sick and crazy for a year.

Oh, everyone knew about the “baby blues”; and postpartum depression and psychosis had been in the media but I never applied these things to myself. I could get out of bed in the morning and function like a normal person. There were no crying jags, no dramatic weight loss or gain, no sadness. But there was an underlying current of anger. Sleep disturbances come with the territory when there’s an infant the House, so does a loss of interest in sex. I was never suicidal and never thought about harming myself or others; I was just…crazy.

I was so angry at everything and everybody and I did feel worthless. Since the age of 18, I had worked full time, gone to school full time, or some combination of the two. After Monkey, I stayed home, something with which I had no experience. There was this huge chunk of who I used to be that was now missing. And a terrible isolation took over. With Hubby at work every day, no other SAHM’s that I knew, and only a drooling infant for company, I was starved for grown-up interaction.

Every day, I felt like I was at the bottom of a dry well or that I was twisting in the wind, alone. The twisting-in-the-wind days were bad; I was the last dead leaf left, buffeted about by the weather, clinging desperately to the end of the thinnest, driest branch on the tree. The dry-well days were oh so much worse. I could taste and feel the fetid, stale air like a noxious slime at the back of my throat. That well was too dark and close and deep for even an echo of my voice to escape. And even if I could’ve spoken aloud, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it. Weeks passed, then months. Monkey turned 1, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then the new year all passed me by. Then one day, in the Spring, I came back. The person that I had been before, that I hadn’t been for so long, came back. I could, again, feel the familiar curvature of my mind. The dark, jagged, bitter thing that it had become was gone and once again my mind took on its usual gentle hills and valleys. Oh, my temper was still there, but the fury was gone. I bid adieu to the alien thing that had taken up residence in my brain and never saw it again.

I may never know why I was hit so hard. Perhaps it was the years of trying and disappointment and anticipation, followed by a cold splash of reality. Maybe it was my utter inexperience with hormonal changes due to the PCOS. Whatever it was, I didn’t have those problems with Pumpkin. All my problems with that one happened during the pregnancy. But that, too, is a tale for a different day.

There was one major self-discovery that came of all this: I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Don’t get me wrong, I love my babies and I like being a mom. But that can’t be all that I am. Once, before I had kids, I read one mother’s tale of much the same discovery of self. She came to the realization that she was a better mother to her children when she worked outside the home. Of course, being a pre-parent, I knew absolutely everything there was to know about raising kids. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. But I do now.

It is an ongoing process, but every day, every semester, I get closer to my goals. And that makes me a happier, better person and mother-day by day and semester by semester.

I obsessively check the stats on both of my blogs. The stats I have set up over at Tales From The Burning Prairie
let me see what visitors “Google” that directs them to my site. I love that feature, and sometimes it cracks me up.

So what are people searching for when they find me? In January there were 10 searches related to ghosts, 5 searches for Bigfoot, and 7 searches related to accidents and falling. There are others of course, tornadoes,  hobo grocery, tiny houses, and to everyone searching for controlled burning of prairies for ecological purposes-hope you liked it anyway.

Here are some of my particular favorites: fell from stairs hip and back pain, my knee swelled up after falling, two left thumbs clumsiness, and fell backwards stairs not walk. But hands-down, all-time champion, weirdest thing someone typed into a search engine that turned up my blog is, drum roll please, didn t you see the angels what angels they were all around us tornado school!!!!!!! (emphasis mine, oh and the exclamation marks are mine too) Congratulations to whoever thought that one up, I was thoroughly charmed!

Well, I guess if anybody needs to know about ghostly Bigfoots who fall a lot, I’m your girl.