Of Blogs and Frogs and One More Elephant

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This year is one of those years where we mess with the time-space continuum and add a random day to the calendar. (I learned in science class why we do this, but it's still weird.) Do you have plans for Leap Day? How will you spend your extra day in February? Why not spend it playing Leap Blog?

Some really fantastic bloggers got together and decided it would be fun to use this bonus day to share guest posts on each others' blogs and they've let me tag along, too. It's not too late to sign up. Just click on the link under the frog picture and it will bring you to the sign-up page and perhaps a clearer explanation of what's going on.

This also means that if you should click this way on February 29th, you will not find my usual nonsense, you will find a guest blogger to peruse and enjoy and you must promise me now that should you choose to follow them (which you should), you must not forget about me. Now go sign up so we can mix it up good.

Also, another elephant. Last month, Kelly over at Southern Fried Children - don't click there now, you won't want to stop reading and then you'll forget what I was saying and it's vitally important - wrote an hilarious post about her mom called The Linguist wherein she describes her mom's penchant for picking up accents from people. I commented at the time that my dad used to do the same thing, much to my chagrin. To further mortify entire countries of people, he would often purchase and then wear "native" hats in an attempt to "go local". This obviously had the opposite effect of what was intended and was somewhat the same (or worse) than a tour company T-shirt and a fanny pack. This was especially true in Asian countries where my white, red-haired father could in no way be mistaken for "native" - even if he was wearing the traditional bamboo hat favored by 18th century indigenous peasants.

The only person in my family not to be embarrassed by this phenomenon was my little sister. She was always a Daddy's girl and this was no exception. So we have pictures of our family in Austria where the two of them are sporting jaunty mountain-climbing yodel-ay-hee-hoo hats, in Hawaii with (I kid you not) hats woven from grass, and in China with Chairman Mao hats, and so on, while my mom, brother and I are all just sporting perms and pained expressions. My all time favorite, though, is of just my sister. A tall and skinny 10-year-old with a giant bamboo lampshade hat in Thailand. The hat is too big for her and sits down on top of her glasses. Utterly un-self conscious and thoroughly absorbed in her activity, she (and the hat) are tottering atop an Asian elephant.

It's a picture that makes me laugh and makes me proud.* While I was lurking around with a camera and big bangs trying to disappear, she just fully embraced the whole experience and hopped on that elephant. Because of the way we grew up, I always kind of assumed that everyone just traveled the whole entire world and that I would do it forever. That I would be able to go back to Thailand any time and hop on an elephant. It hasn't happened yet. And it may never happen.

I had the opportunity once to ride an elephant, but I didn't. I was too busy trying to be cool.


*Sadly, I have searched and searched for this photo and can't find it. I believe it may have been kidnapped by my sister. She's not as proud of the picture as I am.

Dancing With Elephants, Part 3

Reason #3 For the Recent and Alarming Contemplation of Elephants:


One of my favorite things that we did on a family trip to England (besides walking five feet ahead of everyone hoping that some dashing young British man with proper dentition would come and swoop me away for tea and crumpets) was to visit the ancient city of Bath (which my dad embarrassingly pronounced "B-ah-th" in spite of his being, you know, American.) It was all just so ancient and so Roman and it thrilled my little preteen soul to walk on those cobblestones and smell the sulphur and know that I was gawking at the very tiled seats where so many royal and imperial bums had sat and soaked. The other thing I loved was making rubbings of the old brass tomb plates. They were engraved in intricate detail and depicted the very royalty I wanted to marry into. (This was before the whole Diana Disillusionment.) So, for a few pence (which at the exchange rate then was probably about 65 American dollars) you got a giant piece of black paper and a gold crayon thingy and you could do a rubbing of the brass of your choice. It was so much fun to run the gold crayon across the paper and watch the picture appear in relief. (It was also a great way to take these beautiful brasses home without committing a crime against the Queen.)

I was thinking about this the other day after I read Masked Mom's post entitled "Can I Get That In Writing?" It's an incredibly thought-provoking post about the things that we choose to write, or actually the things that we choose not to write and what we learn about ourselves from examining that. It sparked a whole mess of comments that were also thought-provoking, one of which mentioned elephants and sent me dancing with the pachyderms again.

Jane In Her Infinite Wisdom said this: "These are the things I don't write about in the blog, things I can't help but remember, things I don't want to share...not because I don't want you all to know me but because I don't want to hurt those who've hurt me. They are my large elephants and I still struggle to maneuver around them without acknowledging they are there."


All of us have these elephants. What do we do with them? Do we dress them up as furniture and bark our shins on them in the dark? Do we dress them in a tutu and turn a spotlight on them and make them dance for a crowd? Do we cower under them and hope they don't shift their position and stomp on us? Do we feed them and let them grow huge and poop all over everything? I often try to answer very important questions with very silly mental images. And I guess that's sort of the point. We all have different ways of dealing with these elephants, some more effective at times than others.


I consistently find it the most difficult to write directly about the things that are most important to me. So I travel back to Bath. I grab my giant piece of black paper and my gold crayon and rub away. I take those elephants' pebbled hides and use them as my brass. I don't touch them directly, but I rub and rub and bring forth their texture, their shape, a piece of their enormity. And it brings relief. Almost everyone I've ever heard of who writes, does so out of a sort of compulsion. They've got to. Whether it's because they have a fantastic story to tell, or because it helps them sort things out, or because they like to entertain, it comes from a drive akin to hunger. It is a relief to write about things - whether fictional or not, whether it's scribbling away in your tear-soaked unicorn journal or a blog or (heaven forbid) writing a best-seller. 


These elephants of ours give us vast resources upon which to draw when we write. I suppose there's a time and a place for stark revelation of the elephants themselves, but I know that even in my tear-soaked unicorn journal it is often more illuminating to write around the elephant, over the top of it and back again, giving it a once (or twice or thrice) over with my gold crayon. It's not ignoring its existence, it's drawing upon its existence. This gives me a chance to take it a piece at a time, to notice details I wouldn't have otherwise seen, to appreciate the texture and contours of different aspects of it. Is it likely that I will somehow forget how much I love my husband and monkeys if I don't write it down? Will I stop missing my dad if I don't use exactly those words? Will my maternal anxieties vanish if I don't address them directly? Probably not. But those are things that I can't write about directly; not well anyway. But I can tell a story about something the monkeys said, or my husband did. I can recall a fond memory of my dad. I can laugh about some minute anxiety (barf). All of those things will bring into relief the bigger picture and the more I do it, the clearer the picture becomes. The same is true of the uglier, darker, more hurtful elephants.


This is especially true of my public writing. It's a great way for you to take these beautiful elephants home without committing a crime against the Queen.

Dancing With Elephants, Part 2

Reason #2 For the Recent and Alarming Contemplation of Elephants:


The summer before my freshman year of high school, I did that of which all young teen-aged girls dream. I moved with my family to Shenyang, China. Who wants to play varsity soccer when you can move to one of the northernmost provinces of a country that's as far away from home as you can imagine? Who wants to spend hours chatting with friends on the phone about who might "go out" with you when you can live nestled between North Korea and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War? And really, who wants to start their adolescent individuation process anywhere but in a city of millions with only 40 or 50 expats in the whole city? As it turns out, I did, but more on that another time.

While we lived there, reading material in English was pretty scarce. We traded books and magazines around among the other expats and waited desperately to see what the diplomatic pouch brought. I used to read the telex (Remember telexes? No? Oh well.) updates from the consulate just to have something to read. I was so desperate that I read my parents' subscription to the international version of Time Magazine. (The international version is moderately better than the domestic version, but only moderately.) Of all the things I read in those magazines, I forgot them all except one and that was an advertisement for something. It was a beautiful watercolor picture of a fragmented elephant with four small figures standing before it. I have no idea what it was advertising, but it included the story of the Four Blind Men and the Elephant. I was young and naive and I'd never heard the story before and it kind of blew my mind. It goes something like this:

Four blind guys walk up to an elephant, each standing near a different part of it, and describe it.
The first blind guy has the trunk and says: "Dude, it's some kind of gnarly, hairy hose with nostrils. It must be a water delivery system."
The second blind guy has hold of the ear and he says: "You are so wrong. It's flappy and large and flat and leathery and would make a fetching pair of pants."
The third blind guy is fondling the leg: "Shut up, you nonce. It is obviously a tree with toenails of some sort. I'm feeling its wide and sturdy trunk right now."
The fourth blind guy is on the tail end and sadly says: "It's a kind of a rope and it reeks of poo."
And the elephant says: "I wish you imbeciles would quit groping me."

So, I may have paraphrased that a bit, but you get the general idea. We, like the blind men, often just have hold of what's directly in front of us. We can describe it and feel it and see it as the whole world, but it's only a part of a much larger whole. None of the blind guys were exactly wrong in their conclusions as far as they went, but they were missing the point.

There is the truth of the elephant. It is a large land mammal with a trunk and big floppy ears and sometimes tusks and a funny rope-like tail. Elephants are so many other things, too. They are amazing creatures with intelligence and memories. Aristotle said they were "the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind". They are strong as all get out and they have no natural predators. There is the truth of the elephant, and then there are the elements of truth of the elephant. They have a long trunk that spews water, so the Blind Guy 1 was right. And Blind Guy 2 was right about their ears being large and flappy and possibly about the pants. Ditto, Blind Guys 3 and 4 - large sturdy legs and a small tail and poo. But they were all wrong, too.

A few weeks ago, M at the M-Half of the M-n-J Show wrote a Thinky Thursday post about Truth. What is it? Is it absolute? How do we know when we've found it? Certainly a lot of thinky. It made me remember that old advertisement I cut out of a Time Magazine in my formative years and laminated and hung on the wall by my bed. (Hey, some people had Shaun Cassidy or Simon LeBon, I had a Time Magazine elephant. I never said I was cool.) I think we all grasp bits of truth. I think we read the braille of our lives and make the most sense of it that we can. But I also believe there's an elephant: the solid beast who is living just outside our field of vision. If you grasp the elephant's tail and feel its thin, rope-like qualities and then pronounce the beast in question a giraffe, you would be wrong. No amount of open mindedness in the world makes an elephant a giraffe. If you grasp a sturdy leg and declare the beast your Aunt Marge, you'd best run and hide because Marge will let you know just how wrong you are. There are consequences to pay for that kind of wrongness. Regardless of the similarities its parts may bear to other things, only an elephant is an elephant.

I believe in absolute truth. I believe it is the challenge of humanity to grasp these bits of truth, understand them and then step back out of ourselves to figure out how they all fit together as a whole. I believe this is achievable and knowable by anyone who cares to try. I believe in elephants.

Dancing With Elephants, Part 1

Elephants have been on my mind for the last few days. That sentence is alarming to me. Not being a zoo keeper or a safari leader, I don't have a whole lot of good reasons to be contemplating elephants. Do I really need a good reason? I have three reasons, anyway.

Reason #1 For the Recent and Alarming Contemplation of Elephants:
The Republican "debates" and stuff. This is something I have studiously avoided hearing about, but hear about nonetheless. When I explain to people that I do not pay attention to such things, I invariably get the same sort of response: something about staying informed, or my civic responsibility, or being in the know. These appeals  used to bother me, but I've discovered there are some things I'd rather not know. I like to think I am a relatively intelligent person. It's not that I'm not capable of following political discourse, it's not even that I'm not interested in politics, it's that I refuse. Just no. Increasingly over the last 12-16 years things have become depressing to me. The presidential race is like a 2-year long reality TV show where we all watch and opine about people's hair and their clothes, make political decisions based on our "guts" rather than on logic or any sort of fundamental knowledge of the Constitution or law. Whoever gets the best one-liner for the day gets to stay on the island. Whoever buzzes in with the right catchphrase gets to go on to the next round. And we let them. We let them by participating, by circulating the videos of the latest moronic thing someone said when they thought the mic was turned off, by watching the "news" and repeating the talking points, by rising to the vitriolic bait that's thrown our way.

 Case in point: gay marriage. This is becoming a central campaign issue, again. Gay marriage is to the new millennium what abortion was to the eighties and nineties. I bet even in reading that last sentence, it conjured a spark of emotional response. What is she going to say about it? Where does she stand? Here's the thing, though: that's why it's an issue. It attacks you right in your amygdala. It doesn't matter which side of the issue you fall on, it will piss off people on the other side. It's like a homing beacon. One candidate emits a signal that attracts us on a cellular level, another emits a signal that repels us. These kinds of issues are fraught with emotion, with personal experience, with fear, with hatred and with very little sense.

From a purely governmental perspective, does it benefit the function of government to deny certain people civil unions? Absolutely not. It would probably be beneficial in the long run and save money in costly legal battles and legislative snare-ups to just give it all the go-ahead. And while we're at it, from a purely governmental perspective, does it matter if any two people getting married love each other or are morally upstanding? Absolutely not. There are far too many hetero marriages that prove that point for me.
So why, then? Why is this even an issue? Why are we talking about it? Why can't we just make civil unions legal and be done with it? The legislators on both sides of the aisle know that it makes good sense, both politically and economically. Regardless of what they say, most citizens who oppose it know in their heart of hearts that after the news cycle dies down, it will affect their life probably not at all. But yet again this election cycle, it's an issue. Why? Because it makes everyone so emotional. Because it's sexy. Because everyone seems to feel strongly about it one way or another. Because it's a surefire way to divide people and draw up camps along party lines. It gets dangled out there every election cycle, well, because it dangles. It makes us think of all manner of evil people get up to in their bedrooms and oh! won't someone think of the children?! And we buy it. Some of us try to have a rational discussion about it. Some of us act on instinct. Some of us are horrified and some of us are intrigued, but we all fall for it.

This is politically a non-issue. There is no reason that in 21st century, post civil rights movement America that anyone should be legislatively excluded. Case closed. The contestants in the electoral game know this, but they also know that the issues that really hit us where we live aren't so easy to make posters of. They're issues that affect everyone, across the board. They're issues, that regardless of party affiliation or political leanings, are crushing the American spirit. A lot of the issues we face today have been decades in coming and there are not easy, 8-year solutions to them. They are so big, so entangled, so unwieldy that we can't even think about them properly. So they play the sleight of hand tricks, pander to emotions and we all get to ignore the elephant in this particular room. Personally, I find this reprehensible. I find the hijacking of the American political process by charlatans and show-biz to be utterly inexcusable. The fact that it is done on the backs of citizens who unquestionably deserve equal rights is disgusting.

So I stop listening. I tune out. I'm not really missing much, but I'm gaining a ton. I meet nice people everywhere I go. I get to think for myself. I get to make decisions based on my own faith, my own beliefs, my own morality, without the interference of so much noise. I live my small life from day to day, choosing what's important to me, rather than being told. It has been a delightfully surprising discovery over the last several years that my whole outlook on life, and on people in general, has changed for the better. I get to make judgments based on tangible interaction with actual human beings, real life situations.

 I have friends from every sector of the political map and guess what? We all get along. I find things to love about all of them. I find things that we hold deeply in common. I find things I can learn from them. I find beautiful people who are working hard and doing the best they can. I've watched people take punches from all directions and survive. Not just survive, but live joyfully. I've watched people come together and help each other out. I've watched people celebrate together, mourn together, eat together, work together and live together. These are far more valuable to me than which bubble to fill in on my ballot. These are the people who are going to make a change. These are the people who keep this country (and countries all over the world) alive. This is where it matters. We can have all the legislation in the world, trying to make everyone live and do just so, but that won't change people's hearts. But you know what will? A loaf of bread for the new neighbors, a jump for a stranger's dead battery in the grocery store parking lot, a get well card, a "you go first" to the person behind you in a long line, helping a child find his mother in a crowded room, looking up and saying hi when you walk past someone on the street. These and all of the millions of little opportunities we have every week to do something to remind us that we are human.

Thank you for tolerating my righteous little rant. Stay tuned for other fun elephant-related news tomorrow.