Lizkdc Dislocation

The Return of Glee

Well, Tuesday night.

Well, if you love pop music with such a sickness that it can make you happy to have Bruno Mars and "A Chorus Line" mashed together in one hour.

If you spend expensive hours with your therapist's furrowed brow, attempting to spackle over the foundation-sapping traumas of adolescence.

 If your stupid, unkillable inner girl insists still takes a detour outside the approved playlist of Belle and Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens  to take an  inner spotlit stage and  belt an unholy synthesis of "If You Believe in Life After Love," "Don't Rain on My Parade", and "Circus" while you make your rounds of office desk and Powerpoint and lonely smart-phone twaddling  . . .

If you ever had a freak-out seeing the junk culture of your oddball, shabby, inflationary, low-budget decade of childhood turn into some sort of warm and glowy, cherished cultural touchstone . . .

If you're not sure if you're ironic, camp, or just a loser.

Then, you probably enjoyed the coming of a new season of Glee.

I would like to report that instead of such futility, I spent the evening tutoring orphans soaked in British Petroleum spillage and writing free-form poetry on soy paper. But it would not be true!

L sign.

As They Did in the Golden World, or, Goodbye July

Something this morning reminded me of a Shakespeare wedding.

No doubt it has to do with the fact that I spent all my summers as a teen in sort of academic nerd camp where the Renaissance and the hot dry crunchy grass of later summer and the salvational power of college admission and nubile adolescence in glasses all blended together.

Actually there was only one summer like that, but evidently it left a deep impression on one.

In all events, I don't want to think about that long-ago July, and As You Like It and Twelfth Night and Rosalind and people singing in the woods and how exile and injustice and loneliness are swept away by weddings and justice restored and weddings.

Because I so absolutely bought it even at the exact moment, as a young person, when I thought I was that cynical smartypants who would certainly avoid all the sad stupid things the adults around her had gotten themselves into.

And look at my grownup life and how much sad and stupid is all over it. 

"I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs."
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.5

But that makes me more or less the parallel of the Fool in the play, and the play makes the fool's own melancholy the object of laughter, and even he gets caught up and run through the machine of love and weddings and redemption and putting things back in order in the end.  I need little hat with bells, and some coffee and July is almost over, anyway.

Death of a Schoolgirl

The Boston Globe ran another editorial page column today about Phoebe Prince, the Irish schoolgirl who committed suicide in a small, upscale town in Massachusetts after being tormented by the other girls. It's a good column that touches on anti-bullying legislation and trash-talking in sports and media, but dances around the problem completely, to my mind.

Maybe because, of all the stuff that's hard to talk about,  this is among the hardest.  It's stuff that both kids and parents resist putting out there in front of one another.

Shame.

Cruelty.

I  speak from memory.  Once upon a time, a popular football player in my high school thought it was hilarious to write sexual threats and insults on notebook paper, then stick them in a girl's locker or her desk. He and his friends would be lurking nearby, ready to burst into guffaws when the recipient read it.

Waiting to catch you in that precious moment when your face burned, your eyes teared up, your mouth went all wrong,  and a big old neon sign of visible humiliation went on over your head for all to enjoy.  This "teasing" contained messages such as . . .

A Lesson in Winter Sports and Frozen Hubris

(Yeah, tomorrow all we'll care about is the stupid election, so I'm publishing my ridic own life post tonight)

For years, I've been telling people that skiing is like riding a bicycle--a bit tricky to learn, but once you learn, you can always recover the skill again with a little practice, and be off and enjoying yourself amidst the beauties of the snow-covered outdoors blah blah blahdy cakes.

I based this wisdom on my experience in my 20s and 30s, when for a decade I did a mild bit of beginner to intermediate downhill in Maine and New Hampshire every year with various clumps of family and home town friends.

Back I would then go to Washington, DC, for the nonce, where the entire nation's capitol is halted by two inches of powder three times a year, and as soon as a flake falls, everybody panics, leaves their offices and crashes directly into one another.

I'd be all smug and "I'm from Boston," and secretly laugh at my fellow office workers who "made it in" from Northern Virginia two hours late in their North Face jackets during a snowfall about as deep as the top of their coffee cup.

Apparently, though, karma was hiding under the desk and hearing all this and totally about to disprove my thing about skiing. It seems I've been lying about those skills staying with you, or at least, they have an expiration date, like milk. And expired skiing skills will kick your booty even worse then milk gone bad which you only discover after you have poured it over the last bowl of cereal in the house.

The Man at the Door (Ted Kennedy's Death)

Of all the stories about Senator Kennedy in this morning's Globe, this one reached out and grabbed me. It's about Ted Kennedy quietly attending wakes for local servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sharing a gift of insight arising out of sheer, damned misfortune--nobody knows better then he what it's like to get the bitter news that turns your life upside down.

There's a tiny detail in the article recalling the first time it happened, a death forgotten or never known by those who don't follow Kennedy history.  It was August, 1944, in the midst of World War II, when a priest came to the door of the family home to tell them that the oldest Kennedy son, "Joe Jr," had been killed in a bombing raid over Germany.  Ted was just a kid at the time, the youngest of nine. That man on the doorstep in his black clothing, bringing bad news that couldn't be unsaid, must have left a mark.