Author: Hilarie Page 13 of 31

A Little Bit Extreme

On October 18, 2016

When I was growing up my mother used to tell me “Eat your vegetables!”

When I was growing up, we started every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and the Lord’s Prayer.
When I was growing up, we would watch with awe as NASA scientists built rockets that could send human beings to the moon.
When I was growing up, I learned about the Christian Crusades rampaging across Europe on their way to the Holy Land, while most of Islamic Spain and Portugal flourished in a golden age of science, medicine, trade, poetry and culture.
When I was growing up, people were marching for civil rights, for women’s rights, for equality for all people.

My mother’s idea of a correct dinner plate was one composed of 3 parts: there was a protein item such as beef, chicken or pork, there was some sort of starchy item such as rice or potatoes or macaroni, and there was some sort of veggie such as broccoli or asparagus or corn. We never had that all-American staple of the 1960s, the peas and carrots mix (with little pea-sized cubes of carrots) because I was allergic to the peas. My mom often served slightly unusual veggies like artichokes to keep me and my brother interested in them. But regardless of what type of veggie there was on my plate there were always the 2 other items there too. But today it’s not enough to eat veggies with every meal. You are encouraged to be extreme and you have to eat nothing but the veggies. You have to be Vegan and nothing that ever breathed oxygen should pass your lips.

The Pledge of Allegiance had no mention of God when first written, but it did by the time I was in school. The Lord’s Prayer, a specifically Christian prayer was not a part of my Jewish experience. Nevertheless, to me, as I recited it every morning with my Christian classmates, the prayer was just words, without any strong significant meaning. The words certainly didn’t interfere with my identity as a Jew. I got my identity from my home and family. The Founding Fathers had as one of their very fundamental principles, the idea of the separation of Church and State. They were educated men, these inventors of our country. They knew about the horrors that State-sponsored religion had visited on Europe in the past (mainly by the Christian Church) and they wisely wanted to avoid this. So if we really wanted to do as the founders wanted, there would be no prayers at all in the public schools. But today the Pledge and the Prayer have become a battleground between those who don’t want them in the public schools and those who insist they should be there. Prayer in school, mainly Christian prayers, seem to have become a rallying point between those who fanatically believe that America is a Christian country and everyone should be a Christian or at least participate in Christian prayer and those who believe that a Christian prayer in a school is an infringement on their own personal non-Christian rights. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists and everyone else who have an alternative belief should be forced to endure it. Once again, a plate with a variety of flavors, is being rejected by the extremists.

In the days when we watched men travel to the moon, scientists were respected. Real science was taught in school. Darwin’s ideas about evolution had long been proven as fact. Exploring all areas of the world for more knowledge about life was considered important. We believed that life could be made better for everybody though science. But today Science is considered suspect. Scientists too. Scientific knowledge is rejected in favor of unfounded belief. Evolution? A bunch of hooey! Climate Change? Just bunk! Moon landings? A big conspiracy. Vaccines? Don’t do it because they cause autism. Rape? Not a big deal because you can’t get pregnant from it since the body rejects rape pregnancies. I am just waiting for the flat earth people to start demanding that to be taught in schools.

These days the Dark Ages are long over. The Pope no longer exhorts his followers on organized rampages across Europe in the name of God. But instead, a fundamentalist version of Islam is on a holy war against the non-believers, intent on wiping out all who believe otherwise. Extremism at its finest. It doesn’t really matter who’s God is in charge when the extremists insist on deciding who is right and who is wrong. Everyone is sure to suffer.

The days of standing up for inclusion; for fighting for equal rights for women, for people of color, for the handicapped, for all minorities seem to be long over. Instead we have a presidential candidate who makes fun of the disabled, is vulgar and rude about women, who threatens to jail his opponent if he is elected. His followers at his rallies shout things like “Kill her.” or “Trump that bitch!” or “Build a wall — kill them all.” They threaten violence towards anyone in their midst who voices a dissenting opinion.The hatred for The Other has replaced the idea of equality for all which once ruled this land.

The world is definitely not like it used to be when I was growing up. And I’m not really sure about the reason for why this is. But now we are living in an age of extremism and I have to say that I am getting extremely fed up with it.

Day of Atonement

By Hilarie

On October 10, 2016

In Uncategorized

This evening is the eve of the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is probably one of the most important holidays in the Jewish Calendar. Unlike most of the other Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur is not celebrated by eating a large quantity of food. On Yom Kippur one is supposed to fast for the entire day. And one is supposed to atone for the sins you have committed in the past year – to say one is sorry, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive.

This evening is also the evening before I leave for my trip to New York City. I stand next to my bed and look at the piles of clothing and other things that I have been laying out – choosing what to bring and what to leave behind. Is this item what I want to take with me on my trip or is it something I want to and can leave behind me, unneeded?

I feel these piles are also an apt metaphor for Yom Kippur. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur one must ask forgiveness from those one has wronged. And on Yom Kippur you are judged whether you have done right. I have hurt people. I have said unkind things. For this I am so very sorry. And like the items on my bed that I choose not to bring with me on my trip, I would rather not carry my atonement and its subsequent forgiveness with me. It’s not enough to just ask for forgiveness. The other half of the equation is that forgiveness is given. Without that, the books can not be closed and the journey becomes harder to continue.

I guess when I was younger, I thought that by the time I had reached 65 I would have figured out Life, be settled – know where I have come from, know where I am, know where I am going. But even at 65, it is still all so confusing. Where am I going? How will I live my life? What am I doing?

Tomorrow I will be traveling to New York City – the city of my heart. The first time back to the East Coast in over four years. The place I left almost 30 years ago to live here in Stockholm. I will be staying there for a whole month – the longest time back there in over 20 years. I am no longer the same person that packed her bags in 1987 to move to a foreign land. How will it feel to be reunited with my heart? Will we even recognize each other?

And after that month, I will return here to my home, Stockholm, to pick up the pieces of my life once again, hopefully forgiven. With all my baggage, all the pieces taken with me and even those I thought to leave behind – all the pieces of my life.

I’m still a lot like I was

By Hilarie

On June 21, 2016

In Uncategorized

Then and now.

Lately, the refrain from the Neil Young song Old Man has been circulating around in my head. “Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.”

A recent edition of the Kultur section in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm’s morning newspaper) had an interesting article by Slavenka Drakuli, a Croation novelist who lives here in Stockholm, about how women’s aging is perceived and especially how women are writing about their own aging. It was a translated and shortened version of the longer English article by her at Eurozine.com. The original article can be found here.

Drakulic writes, “Only after my mother’s death at eighty-six, when I stopped being a child, did I start to think about my own aging.”

The words, when I stopped being a child caught my attention. While I must admit that I have been thinking about aging long before my mother died four years ago at age 85, it feels very true to me that only after she died did I feel like I was suddenly no longer a child – being forced to see that I was an adult, like it or not. Like Drakulic, I am now 60+ and what it means to be growing older, how to do it and what the physical changes that occur are, especially after experiencing my own mother’s illness and death, are topics I find myself often thinking of. I found her article very interesting and definitely worth taking the time to read in its original English.

My generation, the baby boomers, thought we were always going to be young – never growing old. But surprise surprise, like so many things we once thought, it turns out to not be true. The slogan, almost a battle cry really, “Never trust anybody over 30!” permeated the air at my college when I was 19 or so. To not be 30 anymore, or for that matter even 40 is almost like a surprise to me. And things will not be getting any better. The internet is filled with consolatory comments like 50 is the new 40 – designed to make us feel like we aren’t really aging. And perhaps it’s not the aging itself that is the problem. The important thing is that we don’t look like we are getting older. That is the lesson we are taught when 50 year old actresses work so hard to look like they are 30. And Jane Fonda at 75+ looks (with a bit of help) like 50+. We are made to feel like that should apply to all of us. But for most of us it is not really a reality.

I live in a city – the kind with subways and buses and sidewalks. Not the type of city where one drives everywhere – encased in a bubble – protected from contact with other people. In my daily life in that city, I see all sorts of people, many of them my age or older. I find myself watching them, almost greedily, looking to see signs of aging on them. To see what it looks like. To see how they walk, how they sit, do they look confused, tired, in pain. So that I know what to expect – what my future is. Because to be getting older is the only direction I’m going. Unless of course, I don’t.

I also look at all the younger people that are riding the buses and subway cars with me: so full of hope and optimism. And that’s where the Neil Young song comes in. Because I look at them with their young bodies and long futures ahead of them and think to myself, “I used to be a lot like you are.”

While Young’s song is sung to an old man, I think it applies equally well to us aging women today. Drakuli says that when she was looking for articles or stories by women about aging she found very little written. Most of what she found was self-help information about how to look better. Women weren’t talking about aging. But when she changed her search parameters to include Alzheimer’s disease or memory loss, there she found what she was looking for. Because women weren’t, at first glance, discussing aging by the way it affected their physical bodies. They were coming at the topic by first describing the experience of memory loss, of losing one’s sense of self. Describing their mothers or aunts or sisters or themselves. And in the descriptions of the progressive loss of the sense of who we are, also comes the descriptions of what is happening to our aging bodies. When I was 19, to me, an old lady was someone with short permanented, curled hair and wearing a proper wool suit; good jacket to the hip and a just below-the-knee length skirt. Unless of course they lived in Florida and then they had bluish, curled hair and wore polyester. But now members of my generation have become the old ones and the signature outfit of my fellow baby boomer ladies is more likely to be a pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt worn with natural color hair, sometimes still down past the shoulder.

There were a whole lot of us baby boomers born during the years after the second world war between 1946 and 1964. According to what Wikipedia says of us, we tended to think of ourselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. Because of our numbers we were everywhere and influenced everything. But we are no longer young and hip and oh so cool any more. But as I wander through my adopted city of Stockholm I see us everywhere still. Alongside of all those hipsters who have invaded Södermalm and now even my neighborhood of Hornstull, are all these aging baby boomers, often still well-dressed while pulling their shopping carts into the Hemköp grocery store, waiting on line for the next available druggist at the Apotek to fill their ever growing list of prescription meds that keep them going. They wander though H&M looking for a new top or pair of pants. And they come in all shapes and sizes, the boomers that is, not just the pants. They may not always walk as fast and steady as they once did but they still push their way through the crowd. The lines on their faces show they have lived a life. Their hair colors may have faded but they are still very much visible. And these baby boomers are still my demographic. They belong to my age box as they did even when I was 19.

In just about a week I will be turning 65. I consider myself, so far, still fairly well preserved. I’m still 6 feet tall so still get noticed wherever I go whether I want to be or not. My hair is still curly though no longer its original auburn. I admit I am no longer as thin as I once was and the dressing room mirrors in H&M are a rather unpleasant reality check. My knees hurt more and more, not just when going up and down stairs. My joints creak, my feet hurt and I no longer run to catch that bus. But I still remember what to do with that key even though sometimes I can’t remember where I put them. And most importantly, I am not invisible! I was in the make-up section of a department store recently. I asked the very young sales clerk (she must have been all of 20) where they kept or even if they had black kohl eyeliner. She found something for me that had black on one end and white liner on the other. Then she started to explain what the white pencil was for. There is lots of talk these days of Mansplaining but I realized that I was getting Youngsplained! I looked at her and said, “I’ve been putting on makeup way before you were born. I know what this is and I know what to do with it!” I said it with a smile. I hope I didn’t intimidate her too much. But its always nice to be reminded that I am still what I once was.

Here is Neil Young singing Old Man when he was a young man.

Here is Neil Young singing Old Man when he had become one himself.

Twittering

By Hilarie

On June 11, 2016

In Uncategorized

I can’t remember why I joined Twitter in the first place. Perhaps because of work. Or because of a friend suggesting it. But I can see on my profile that I joined in March of 2009. My first tweet was “Im not sure what Im doing” and my fourth tweet was “My goodness-I actually have people following what I have to say. How bored can you get??” (those first followers were my son, my husband, my cousin and two friends) I had already been on Facebook since 2007 and was very active there. I posted a lot and even still do. But I never just shared articles. When I shared something that I liked I always told why I was sharing it – what I thought about it. I also posted a lot of stuff about what I was doing or thinking or feeling. And I didn’t use those feeling icons to substitute for my own words. I wrote my own words. I liked talking – still do. I guess I’m just a blabbermouth, with lots of opinions about things. But except for a very few people most of my contacts on Facebook were real people who I had actually known in Real Life. I rarely Friended people who I had never met or had only met once for a very short time. So this meant that most of the posting and sharing I did on Facebook went out to people who actually knew me in person.

Twitter was a whole different ball of wax.
First of all I had to confine myself to only 140 characters!! I like words. Words have meaning and nuance and syntax and even grammar. To say a whole idea in only 140 characters is very hard for me. As I said I’m a blabbermouth. So much nuance has to be removed in order to fit that parameter. I have spent my whole working life as a professional graphic designer – visuals not text. I have never considered myself an artist, a person who makes Art with a capital A – Art that is created to serve the artist’s own vision. I do commercial stuff. I like getting assignments. I like working within defined parameters. So I figured Twitter was just a matter of learning how to edit, to work to fit the parameter. Knowing how to and being able to edit is always a good thing.

Anyway, after 6 tweets in 2009 I didn’t do anything until about 4 years later when in 2013 I put up a new picture as my avatar. And then again nothing until March 2015 when I twittered this, “I’m following people’s tweets only due to my Outlander obsession.#Outlander“.

Since then I’ve written 451 tweets, liked 1,217 tweets by others, I have 45 followers and I follow 136 mostly, total strangers. All because sometime in the late fall of 2014 I got introduced to Outlander, the Starz TV series and have been addicted ever since. I’ve read all the big, enormous books, most of the smaller novels and some of the bulges, as author Diana Gabaldon calls her handiwork. And I have of course watched the TV series’ first season episodes a zillion times and the second season episodes, so far shown, at least 3 or 4 times. I’ve probably watched most of any Outlander panel discussions and interviews with stars that I can find on the Internet. I joined the Facebook group called Outlander Sweden (since that is where I live) Both my husband and my 24 year old son think I’m a bit nuts (they thought that before but now they think they have evidence) And my former co-workers wouldn’t let me even mention the word Outlander at lunch breaks. I have one good friend here who I have caused to follow in my addiction. So yeah, I guess you could say I am a bit obsessed. You can read more about my obsession here. And here. And even here.

And now there’s Twitter
First, I have to get one thing straight – I don’t only post, read or share Outlander stuff on Twitter. I also post pictures from my summer house, I announce posts from this blog, sometimes a political opinion creeps into my posting, I also follow CNN, New Scientist and the New York Times among others. My Twitter posts also appear on my Facebook feed where my real-life pals like my posts or even respond. But yes, I admit it, most of what I do on Twitter has to do with Outlander. I’ve become a Fan! I’ve joined a Fandom! And its lots of fun. I read what Sam or Caitriona or Tobias or Graham or Ron or Diana or Maril or Terry or JON GARY or a bunch of others involved with the series have to say. In some ways I feel like I know them. But I never cross the line to think that they are my actual friends or I am their personal friend. What I am reading are the public personas of the private people that they really are. A tiny glimpse that they allow me to see. And I am grateful for that.

As a former Fashion Design student in my way-back-when life I like reading what the Outlander costume designer Terry Dresbach posts. She often starts really interesting discussions in 140 characters. Sometimes I have been able to partake in those discussions. Once, at 2am, lying in bed with my smart phone glued in front of my nose, desperately trying to keep up with a fascinating discussion, I rapidly typed out a comment to the conversation and suddenly Terry answered my question! I sat up in bed and yelled, “Oh My Gosh! She answered my question!” My husband, suddenly awakened, looked at me as if I was crazy and told me to please go to sleep. I have to admit, from that moment I felt like I was talking to someone I knew. It was really cool. I’ve followed and even participated in a number of other conversations started by Terry and always enjoyed them. The very fact that I can be sitting in my home, having discussions with people from all over the world at the same time is just amazing.

But it seems like there is trouble in paradise.
It seems like there are twitterers out there who feel like they have the right to say whatever they want or feel to the people they follow; who feel like they have the right to be mean, to chastise, to demand attention, to spread rumors without any regard to how their 140 characters can hurt the people they are aimed at. And in addition there are others who feel they themselves have been terribly hurt and thus have the right to hurl hurt back at anyone they can. The Internet can be a fantastic place but its defining anonymity can also cause it to be a very terrible place. So all I seem to be reading from my favorite Twittering people is how twitterers are throwing mud at each other, blaming others for feeling hurt and abused.

As a kid growing up I remember being called a lot of unpleasant names. Tall, skinny, freckled and with out of control curly dark auburn hair; beanpole, stringbean, jolly green giant were just some of the things I got to hear thrown at me. My mother telling me that “Sticks and stones can break your bones but names will never hurt you” didn’t really make me feel better. I knew that names definitely could hurt me. I had to learn very early that the names people threw at me didn’t define what I thought of myself. Perhaps I just learned to grow a thick skin. And I learned to develop a very fine-tuned sense of humor about things. Maybe the younger generation, a product of helicopter parents have never learned the lessons that I did, never learned how to grow a thick skin.

As I said earlier 140 characters are not really enough to convey nuance. In response to all this recent discussion of misery and unhappiness on all sides, I posted a tweet that was trying to remind people that 140 characters do not always offer enough nuance to accurately be able to distinguish between humor, irony and satire and what might be meant as a joke could sound like an attack. It can be very easy to misinterpret what is actually being said and a bit of a sense of humor was necessary when responding to those few characters. I suggested that people should lighten up. I was accused of possibly sounding dismissive and unfairly minimizing other people’s feelings – two things I was most definitely not doing. My #lightenup was being offered as a bit of humor but that obviously wasn’t coming through and it was judged to be judgmental instead and assumed to be hurtful.

There are plenty of other things out there to feel hurt and sad and just plain awful about: child slavery, climate change, decimation of animal species, ocean acidification and the bleaching of coral reefs, poverty, hunger, lack of clean drinking water, small children picking up a gun and killing their parents. Go ahead, pick one to feel bad about. But don’t let 140 characters, without any nuance, do that to you. Its really not worth it.

My mother also used to say, “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again”. She didn’t make that up either – she got it from the song but there she was actually right. So I am going to paraphrase what Terry said (if she allows me to) “Hopefully we are all done now.” And even if she feels that she and Ron will never get closure, she still felt ready to say, “I am moving on.”

And on one final note, as a fan, I am remembering our own favorite Jamie Fraser, telling his daughter how he was able to forgive and move beyond the terrible things that Jack Randall had done to him. (If this is a spoiler for non-book readers, then I am sorry) Can we in the fandom be any less than our favorite hero? Can we forgive? Can we move on? Can we take what is written in 140 characters not so to heart but with a bit of humor and try to expect the best of people rather than the worst so that I can wholeheartedly enjoy following my obsession once again? Life is much nicer that way too. IMHO.