Think Outside the Dead Horse

Several years ago someone sent us a movie about talking ponies with falsetto voices who rollicked around baking cakes and rollerblading and pouting and misunderstanding each other and then making it all up in song at the end. I generally don't allow such falsetto nonsense in my house, but the jBird was intrigued and I didn't want to come across an evil dictator, so we watched it. There was a sort of musical interlude where the ponies sang directly to the camera something to the effect of: "Your dreams can come truuuuuuuee!" and so on with all of the self-esteem building that pastel animated ponies could muster. My jBird looked at me and her little chin crumpled up and wobbled.

"Yes, honey. I know. It's so bad it makes me want to cry, too."
"Mama! They are saying that my dreams will come true!"
"Uh, yes..."
"I don't want my dreams to come true! They're strange and a lot of times they're scary!"

Looking into that frightened little face was a moment of pure maternal adoration. I shut off the movie and hugged her and reassured her and explained to her about clichés.  She snuffled around a little bit, verifying several more times that the giant spider who walked on her bed the night before in her dreams would not actually materialize because the talking ponies said it would and then she got angry.

"Why would they tell kids that? That's just mean!"

Why, indeed?

I tell you this because it's hilarious. Also because it perfectly illustrates one of my pet peeves about language. I'm not a fan of the cliché. (Even though I just used one in that sentence. Ooh! Quick digression: when jBird was tiny, we would say "I'm not a fan of ..." instead of "I don't like..." or "I hate..." because we'd rather she not learn those particular phrases when she was two. One time we were in an elevator and a man got in with us and stood rather too close to jBird for her taste and she ducked over behind my legs and looked out at him and said: "I'm a fan of my mom." It was cute and he laughed and she and I were the only ones who knew that she was really saying "I don't like you" to the man. See what I mean? Language matters.)

So, pet peeve. It would seem that we indoctrinate kids from a very young age to think and speak in catchphrases and clichés and then they grow up and think that's honest communication. We tell them things like "your dreams will come true" and expect them to know that we're pumping them full of delusions of grandeur, not threatening them with their nightmares made corporeal. Not only do clichés oversimplify things (which is why, I suppose, they turn up so much in children's literature and on Facebook), they are boring, and to a certain extent, dishonest.

I will fully admit to being a bit of a language freak, here. I didn't speak baby talk to my children, even when they were babies. We taught them the correct words for things when they asked. (Well, except doughnuts. The Chief Lou gave the jBird a doughnut hole when she was about 18 months old and I said, under my breath to him, "She doesn't need to eat that crap." The next time we got doughnuts, jBird piped up and said "I want crap! I want to eat crap!") There were no binkies or ba-bas or tee-tees or ta-tas in our house because I am a curmudgeon about such things. Having these two little language sponges around really made me stop and think about the language I used with them and in general and how I communicated not only with them, but with everyone. We get used to speaking in shorthand, we accept the strange clichés of our particular demographics, and we take the words we use for granted.

As writers, this cannot be so. As writers, we can't take the words we use for granted. We can't resort to shorthand and clichés.  I suppose we can, but we wouldn't be very good writers, then. (One last digression: that is not to say that we wouldn't become published writers, though. This is an odd conundrum.) So, for the writing. Audience participation time! I have it on good authority that people enjoy this. And so do I. Immensely.

Let us think about cliché.  Pick one out.* Write about it. Explore what it actually means. Make a defense of it, or disprove it. Think about the language that you use and blast that cliché wide open. (And, for funsies, you can do what I do, go through all of your old writing with a Sharpie and eradicate anything trite or at least admit that it is and try to find a new way to say it.) Send me a link or an email or leave it in the comments. Share with your friends. There's no particular deadline, just let me know what you come up with and when I get a bunch of them I'll share in a link-up post. Fun, no?

Remember: Think outside the box on this one.

(All right, it physically pained me to type that.)

*This is based loosely on a prompt in The Writer's Idea Book. I highly recommend the whole book.

Too Late?

I had a long and informative conversation with my mother yesterday about her transition into becoming a vegan.

The Chief Lou and I have a summer tradition every four years of watching Olympic gymnastics and crying and cheering and remembering how we both wanted to be Mary Lou Retton when we were kids.

A dear friend of mine took me out to dinner at a new swanky hipster joint where we devoured fresh oysters on the half shell and licked the platter clean.

My mother was diagnosed with diabetes about ten years ago. This woman who raised me has always been conscientious of her diet. She fed us from our huge organic garden, locally raised chickens and milk and dairy products. Our sweets and treats were always homemade from scratch and in our childish dementia, a Hostess Snack Cake was a foreign and exotic delicacy. She did aerobics in the 80s, step in the 90s and does circuit training and yoga in the new millennium. Since being diagnosed with diabetes, she has been continually frustrated with willy-nilly blood sugar levels, despite her best efforts. She has spent the last several years feeling like a failure somehow.

I used to stand in front of the mirror and practice my Mary Lou smile and throwing my arms up over my head triumphantly. I cartwheeled around the basement and begged for gymnastics lessons. I taught myself to do a front handspring and wondered if I was well on my way to the Olympics. The Chief Lou mostly ate Wheaties, so he could enjoy her visage on the front of the orange box. He was clearly the most dedicated of the two of us. Anyone who would eat that much sawdust to be closer to his goal is hard core.

I have eaten lotus root sauteed in plum sauce. I have eaten deep fried scorpions and cicadas. I have eaten sea cucumber, turtle head soup (the cheek meat is the most desirable and considered lucky), beef Tar tare, fresh caviar from the Black Sea. I have eaten the worst green beans ever made at a pot luck. I have eaten foot, crow, my words and dirt on innumerable occasions. Until a few weeks ago, I had never eaten oysters on the half shell.

Bumper sticker wisdom and, more recently, Facebook status commenters would tell us:
"It's never too late." Chirpy words of encouragement that are parroted to folks who reach out in a new endeavor, to prod people who may be hesitating about trying something new, to cheer for people who strike out after their dreams.

Sometimes it is too late. I will never be Mary Lou Retton. I will never compete as an Olympic gymnast. That ship has sailed. Unless they open up an event for doughy, hirsute thirty-seven-year-olds thundering and sweating around the mats, I will not get my gold medal or my Wheaties endorsement deal. Let us not even discuss the coveted spangly leotard.

Sometimes it's late, but not too late. My mom, at age sixty-five, has decided to completely change her lifestyle, to chuck over notions she has held dear for as long as I can remember so that she can feel better, live better, and help out her malfunctioning pancreas. The Chief Lou and I have cried and cheered for her nearly as much as we have for Gabby Douglas this summer. We have marveled at the strength she has shown in eschewing foods she loves and trying to re-adjust her way of thinking so that she might just have this chance to control or even reverse the effects of her illness. Many of her friends have encouraged her not to. Many have told her just to get the 24 hour insulin pump so that she can eat whatever she wants. She, the avowed chocoholic, has refused. Why is she doing this? She told me yesterday, "I just don't want to wait until it's too late."

And me. The not-gymnast. I have tried not to resist ageing in any sort of inappropriate way, but I get overwhelmed sometimes with the feeling of marching time. I am content and have no serious complaints about my life, I've done a lot with my years thus far. I've accomplished things I set out to do and some that I didn't set out to do. But sometimes that dull fog of having seen it, done it sets in. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is a little tattered and worn, a little too familiar.

But then a friend calls you up, takes your arm and says let's go here. She laughs that you've never, and she gets you a seat at the bar with all the cool people. She orders for you and promises greatness. Sometimes you get to grasp that shell and let the ice-cold slippery goodness, drenched in lemon and garlic, slide down your throat and you laugh and lick your fingers and go back in for more. Sometimes you get to taste new flavors, get drunk on only the delicious unexpectedness of it. Sometimes you get to be new and inexperienced again and discover something for the first time. Sometimes you get to realize as you sit back and survey the pile of empty shells that sometimes it is too late, but probably not as often as you might think.