Out of Hibernation

Perhaps I should give up apologizing for the long spells between blog posts. I do now have an iphone, thanks to techno-savvy son. Now I just have to ask him to set it up so I can blog from it like from the former antique. He's probably moved on to bigger and better. I'll ask about blogging from my brain. Actually, you guys don't want to see all that.

Okay, in writing we call what I just wrote above "clearing my throat." Ehh-hem.

The exciting news is I've been taking a class on "Metaphor" with George Lakoff up at UC Berkeley. Unbelievably exciting stuff. Makes my head spin. I recommend all his books, but perhaps the best one to start with is "Don't Think of An Elephant." Then there are many more if you are as into it as I am.

I wrote my first piece incorporating the teeniest bit of cog sci for military.com. It looks at the polarizing effect of the Oscar Grant shooting and subsequent trial, and suggests that the very different interpretations/reactions to the event make total sense from a cog sci perspective. From that insight I find a ray of hope as to how we might be able to use these different reactions to learn more about ourselves and to come together with people who are different. You can read it here.

I thought of a new feature for the ol blog called "Dove/Hawk Nightstand" where I'll share the reading going on at my house. As I've said, I'm reading a lot of George Lakoff. Also I am revisiting The Hours by Michael Cunningham and a bit of Shakespeare. Barrett is reading "Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine" by Robert Coram. He says it's pretty good, if "way too anti-Army."

A Ticket to the "Man-Chest"

Hello there,
I wrote a few months back that I had pitched a column at military.com. Well it took awhile for them to respond but...I am now in the company of Ollie North and many others as a regular contributor there. (To be accurate, Ollie is a so-called "Hard news" columnist, whereas I am a so-called "Lifestyle" columnist.)

I made my debut last week. My overall theme of "Purple Marriage, Purple America," is also the title of my first column. I plan to write "underneath and around" politics, drawing on my bipartisan marriage, personal experience, as well as interviews/ discussions and reading. Please have a look! In it I talk about B.'s "man-chest," which is not a part of his body, but rather a personal treasure chest of manly gifts. After reading the column I thought you might get a laugh out of the photo, taken on Christmas morning, as Uncle Cameron utilizes his Christmas gift from B., a "ticket to the man-chest." Enjoy!

p.s. if you have ideas for column topics, I'd love to hear them. I will be writing somewhere between monthly and quarterly, a reasonable schedule for this busy mom.

p.p.s. The only way I could bring myself to do the column is to ignore any "troll" comments I may get. So if I get them, please don't mention them!

Blessings to you and your families in the New Year!

Purple America

And other meditations on Overcoming Differences, Relationships, Politics, Fear, and Peace.

I’m starting up blogging again with a vengeance. This is the new me. The blogging me. The blogging without fear me. I am going to try something new for the rest of 2009. I’m going to get over my need to polish my work before I publish it, if only for a blog. I know it might seem odd to y’all that someone like me, who has published a book about her personal life, would be reluctant to “reveal” herself, but there it is.

The truth is Love in Condition Yellow is actually a fairly polished view of my private life. By polished I don’t mean “gilded,” but rather that I worked long and hard to get it “right,” in the sense of tone and three-dimensionality.

But I’m not going to worry about that here! You will get to observe the process of me honing down to an idea I might write a longer piece about. (There is a saying by Confucius related to sausage-making that may apply here…)

But enough blowing smoke. The writers among you know that one way to figure out what you want to write about next is to do “morning pages.” These may or may not happen in the morning, but morning is a good time to do them. Actually anytime you can get your sorry butt to do them is a VERY GOOD TIME to do them. Morning Pages are a sort of data dump of your thoughts. You put on a timer for five or ten or fifteen minutes and then you type. There is only one rule. You are not allowed to stop typing. You cannot lift your fingers from the keyboard. You cannot let them stop moving. Even if you are typing, “blah blah blah.” Or “oh my god, who wants to hear this? this is so naïve, what are you thinking, going into the maw of American politics, and talking about Purple America, trying to explain the left to the right and the right to the left. Girl, they are going to chew you up and spit you out!”

From the blog I will refine a nugget or two for a column that I am hoping they will still want me to do over at www.military.com. The Editor invited me but that was back in July and although I notified him I couldn’t start till September, I haven’t heard back. ‘Course out of about twenty emails I sent Ed., he only answered one or two and both of our phone conversations got cut short because of calls from the White House. BTW, Ollie North will be my fellow-columnist. But (I'm pretending)I’ve got no fear. Purple America, baby!

Inauguration Blues and Reds

I was delighted to be asked to post at the blog of my publisher, Beacon Press, on Inauguration Day. I promise to post some photos below, from my trip to Ohio in October to volunteer for the Obama campaign, the dancing at the Inauguration Party, and if he lets me, my husband looking glum...

I'm curious to hear your ideas about overcoming differences, political or otherwise, in our important relationships, and how Obama inspires you or not. Enjoy!

The following is reprinted from Beacon Broadside. The original can be found here.

To go to my main website home page, click here.

Celebrating the Inaugural in a Bipartisan Marriage

At various points during Election Day I briefly let myself think that Obama might actually win. If he did, I was going to do something BIG. I was going to run naked down the street with an American flag streaming behind me. I was going to dance (clothed) with throngs of people— all shades of brown and black and white. I was going to kiss random strangers. But at some point in my imaginings, about when the tears started to form in my eyes, I always stopped myself, not sure it was time yet to let all the frustrations of the past eight years, the voicelessness, the demonization, all these bottled emotions come gushing out. Not yet. Not until it was sure.

I knew my husband would not share in the festivities. He is no Obamaniac. The way I feel about Obama, he feels about mmm... Ronald Reagan, maybe, or better yet Theodore Roosevelt, whom he refers to simply as “T.R.” I have become accustomed, in my bipartisan marriage, to not sharing the same perspective on electoral politics. But still, my husband encouraged me to go to Ohio in October because he knew it was important to me to volunteer for Obama in a battleground state. On Election Day he humored me by taking my photo at the voting booth, my grinning face next to the big check mark by Barack Obama/ Joe Biden.

But around 6 pm, as Ohio was declared for Obama and I opened my front door and whooped like a banshee, my husband seemed annoyed by my joy. He chided our seven-year-old son and three-year old daughter who were taking my revelry as a sign it might be a good time to start leaping off our furniture. My husband’s reproach was almost churlish, which is very unlike him. After putting our daughter to bed, my husband did the same, at his usual time of 7:30 pm, before the victor was even announced. He gets up at 3:15 am to start his shift as a sergeant of police in nearby Oakland. He is also a West Point graduate and a colonel in the Army Reserves. He returned from Iraq this past May after fifteen months separation from our family. Politically, he is what I call “a Republican like the Republicans used to be:” fiscally conservative, small government, pro-defense. For a while my husband supported John McCain. But McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin completely disillusioned him.

At eight o’clock, when CNBC announced Obama had won, I opened the front door and whooped again. There were some other whoops but no one running, naked or otherwise, on our street. I proposed my mom, my son, and I drive to the nearest Obama office to find some strangers to kiss. But my mom insisted we watch the acceptance speech first. My son consented to doing a crazy dance with me on the couch. Unfortunately, after the speech, my son began exhibiting the classic signs of being up way past his bedtime: verbal jabs at his mother. I don’t like Obama anymore! Enough about Obama!

Once my son was asleep in bed, I didn’t know what to do. I suddenly felt dog-tired, and besides, I had no one to go with. My mom was already in her jammies. My sleeping children might wake up and need me. My husband needed to rest. I stood in the kitchen and felt the moment slip out of my grasp.

Thousands of people danced in the Berkeley streets just a short drive away from my house. I missed it. There will never be another Election night like the one when Barack Obama got elected. I cried, telling my husband this a week or so later, as we stopped to rest during a walk along the San Francisco Bay. I missed it. I got left out. I asked why he hadn’t recognized how important the occasion was for me, and helped me to take part in it. We do this for each other: I go to the police promotions and the Army ceremonies; he to the book readings. I asked him, didn’t he understand how important the election was for me?

He said he was sorry. He had known how important it was to me, but he hadn’t been just tired. He said the election was really hard on him. He felt disappointed, deflated, lonely. He said, “The kind of guys I usually admire... in this election, they just turned out so lame.” Talk about feeling left out. I took his hand, and suddenly I didn’t care so much about missing the party. The party isn’t always where I think it is. Sometimes it’s just between me and my son, doing a silly dance on the couch. Or sitting with my husband, watching a tiny Vietnamese fisherman expertly casting his line into the Bay, and hearing what it’s like for one Republican at this historic moment in time.

For me, this is the hope for unity that Obama represents, that we might reach out individually, and as a country, to listen to those who are different from us. I don’t think we realize as a society how powerful being heard is, how it softens the differences between us, and builds a foundation upon which solutions can be constructed. We all so much want to be heard. Some of us want to be heard so much, we write memoirs, for goodness sake.

I’m having a little party on Inauguration Day after school lets out. The guests will be other parents and their small children. I will play over and over the countdown in Grant Park to the CNN announcement of the Obama victory. Then we can re-enact the hugging and the kissing and the dancing in the streets that I missed. My husband will work on the streets of Oakland, and when he gets home, we will sit quietly together and tell each other what it was like.

To go to my main website home page, click here.