Coming Un-”Glee”‘d

I am trying to watch less television. I’m not the first person to figure out the whole “garbage in, garbage out” thing, or to head up to bed after an evening of sitcoms feeling like I ate Cheetos and Red pop for dinner. Gradually, over the past couple of months I have let go of various “must-sees,” and if we watch as a family we try to watch a movie or something with some substance. Gone is “The Mentalist,” the whole Thursday night comedy lineup, and all Real Housewives. I am not giving up Anthony Bourdain, “Boardwalk Empire,” or “House.”

One of the shows I clung to until recently was “Glee.” I was an early adopter; I like shows that take chances, and I like music. It doesn’t hurt that I am also, secretly, fifteen years old. It was preposterous from the get-go that a small town in Ohio would have support three high schools with fabulous show choirs, one of which appears to be lifted directly out of one of Manhattan’s seedier boroughs, and another of which is a private boy’s school with blazer-sporting patricians. I suspended disbelief like crazy because I liked the musical numbers, the soap opera, and the awesomely evil Sue Sylvester, possibly one of the best characters in the history of television.

I also liked the fact that touchy issues were addressed head-on, and at first I cheered as Kurt dealt with the tough realities of being openly gay in high school. He fell in love with a straight friend, endured bullying, and worked on his relationship with his auto mechanic single father. There was some complexity, some suggestion that the world will not throw open its collective arms to embrace the “different” among us, but will require some persuasion and compassion. There was also a pregnant teen with an overbearing, Christian right-wing father who sent her packing, perpetual bullying of students who were not popular, show tunes, and generally enough to push all of my buttons and keep me coming back every Tuesday.

This season, I fell out of love. As a passionate straight ally and pacifist, I have grown weary of the amount of airtime devoted to lectures about homophobia and bullying. So shoot me. It is my firm belief that no one in America who really needs to be “schooled” in these areas is watching “Glee” on Tuesday nights, and that the rest of us are having our consciousnesses raised to the point where our heads may explode from the sheer force of being Woken Up every week.

Turn the show one way in your mind and it is all about whimsical possibilities – the overweight girl from the AV Club captures the heart of the oversexed jock, the ditzy dancing cheerleader is torn between the boy in the wheelchair and her recently “out” lesbian cheerleader lover. I should, by all rights, love this stuff; I was a plain, overweight girl in high school, and my fists should be pumping in the air when the studly guy chases the considerable tail of his unlikely obsession. Turn the show a different way and it is, at this point, nothing more than a soapbox for its creator to correct us, enlighten us, and make us better, week after week. If we’re already there it begins to feel like a reverse kind of bullying, a bludgeoning with the blunt weapon of political correctness. It is not creative, not subtle, and, for me, not worth an hour of my life any more.

I still love Sue Sylvester, whose acidity is almost sharp enough to balance the treacly self-righteousness of the rest of the show. I still enjoy the music, although not as much as I did during the first season. A recent arrangement of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” made me want to gouge out my own eyes. I get a kick out of the guest stars, particularly Neil Patrick Harris and Gwyneth Paltrow, but it’s still not enough. It was a daring, vastly entertaining experiment and for a time I would move heaven and earth to make sure I was home at 8:00 on Tuesday nights to see what happened next.

Last night, I ate Indian food with my family and visited with a neighbor. No Glee, but much more happiness.

The Loss of the Least

The cats were staring fixedly at something underneath one of the Adirondack chairs on the porch. “There’s something under there,” I said to my husband, bending to look. To the left of the chair, near the front door I spied a thick pile of tiny feathers. Too many feathers to leave a bird healthy.

“It’s a bird,” he said, bending to look as I quickly stood up to avoid looking. “A robin.”  He scooped up one of the cats; the other fled into the yard. I made myself look at the terrified creature on the sisal rug. It was twisted wrong, eyes open, rapid heart beat visible as it sat exposed and traumatized. He caught the other cat and put her in the house.

As a child, I would have insisted that we put the bird in a shoebox, feed it with an eyedropper and try to keep it alive. I don’t know whether I have become less hopeful or more realistic in my old age – probably some combination of the two. I knew that feeling of being trapped, stricken, heart racing, with a sickening wound. I could be saved with time, rest and love, but the robin would require medical attention that we could not afford. It seemed unlikely that there was any local organization that would rush out to rescue a common robin at 9:00 on a Sunday night.

“I don’t think it can fly,” I observed, looking away and blinking rapidly. “What’s going to happen to it?”

“I’ll catch it and move it,” he answered. “If it really can’t fly-“

“We have to kill it” I finished. I thought ridiculous, philosophical thoughts. I am not supposed to kill anything, and as a Buddhist I should probably just let it die or be eaten, as nature would have it. I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to be the one to kill it because I couldn’t. Rob would have to be the one to put it out of its misery while I avoided the whole thing. I knew it had to be killed; I could not forget its blank eye and the frantic beating of its tiny heart. The cats had been doing their job, we had interrupted, and I could not believe that there was any compassionate solution other than a swift, man-made death. I still wanted to save it.

Rob set it gently on the lawn and we watched it for a bit; I had made a half-assed plea for time based on my delusion that adrenaline would kick in and the broken creature would suddenly take flight. It sat, it hopped a bit; it clearly would have flown away had it been able. There was no miracle, St. Francis did not appear in his roughly woven robe to lift the broken thing and set it free from pain and danger. No one’s eye was on the sparrow that was the robin in our yard.

“So, what are you going to do?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m going to have to hit it with a shovel. It’ll be fast. Then I’ll put it in a bag in the trash so the cats can’t get at it.” I nodded. I went into the house, taking a last look through the darkening air at the small shape that now huddled near the sidewalk. Inside, I sat at my computer, looking at things and not seeing them, until he came in. “It’s done” he said. “You know that wasn’t easy for me to do. It felt good that I could put it out of its misery so it wouldn’t suffer any more, but it still wasn’t easy.” I nodded, still staring at Facebook updates that might as well have been in Cyrillics.

“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

No one had his eye on that robin.

Seether

 ”Depression is anger without enthusiasm.”

-Anon

I have always envied people capable of real, honest anger. By “anger” I do not mean the persistent wormholes of bitterness that lead to a grim worldview and the auxiliary need to puncture balloons and rain on parades. What I admire is the capacity to look steadily into the eyes of anger, shake its hand, share a drink and a dance and bid it adieu while the band is still playing. I imagine that people capable of expressing anger have some skill or supernatural power that allows them to turn the initial burn into a bright blue flame, apply heat to the appropriate parties, and extinguish it before moving on to the next thing. My mother can do it, as can my brother, and my only child has clearly inherited the DNA that permits him to hurl a shoe and return almost immediately to his sunny set point. I envy them that.

Too much anger is a terrible thing; expressed or suppressed it is the foundation for abuse, depression, violence, ulcers and the kind of killing cynicism that paints all red doors a dull black. I have, only recently, had the experience of bumping my shopping cart accidentally into the cart of a fellow shopper. Looking up to smile and apologize, I was met with a roll of her terrible eyes and a gnashing of her terrible teeth. She “tched” in my general direction and muttered something to her companion about people needing to look where they were going. Something was eating her alive and imprinting a kind of lividity on every human contact.

My own tendency is to swallow the flame and try to maintain my composure as my tender innards are consumed. Like Whack-A-Mole, the swallowed fury pops up as headaches, depression, tears, tics, hives, and (on one memorable occasion) the perceived inability to swallow.  Consciously, I believe that if my Chi is all balanced and I am Living Right, I will be able to rise above anything so destructive and petty as blazing fury and all that comes with it. I was also raised to have lovely manners, a proposition that makes no allowance for any expression of anger more discernible than the icy hauteur of “the cut direct.” In laymens’ terms, as far as the healthy expression of anger is concerned, I am screwed.

It can’t be bad to have some anger, though; in the same way that the heat from a burner warns that the hand should go no closer, anger is some kind of vestigial warning that something is wrong. If I were capable of sorting anger into tidy piles, “Justified” and “Get Over Yourself,” I might do better. If someone is threatening my child, cutting down my prized Lilac or treating me in some objectively cruel way, it seems reasonably healthy to feel the burn, dismiss it as a primal motivator, and take care of the presenting problem. If the offense is subtler, say, the failure to conform to my unspoken wishes or to read my mind correctly, it should properly be dismissed. It’s kind of a moot issue, though; whether jack-booted thugs were confiscating my library or I had to wait in line behind a coupon champion, I would be utterly incapable of speaking up.

The closest I can get to actual anger is to be spectacularly passive-aggressive. If there were Academy Awards for the strangled and distorted attempt to say everything while saying nothing, my shelves would be a glittering mass of golden statuary.  “Go ahead, jack-booted thugs,” I might say, “Enjoy your destruction of my first edition of The Red Pony.” I believe, really and truly, that these muffled cries will send a message, smite wrongdoers, and do it all in pearls and cashmere. I swallow the scalding soup of rage, unwilling to part my lips to admit the cooling air that might offer some relief, and then I congratulate myself, still seething, on my discipline. I have also been known to drive around listening to my “Angry” mix, singing along to “Hollaback Girl,” “You Oughtta Know,” and “Fuck you.” That’ll teach them.

I don’t know if this is a curable issue, and if it is, whether the cure is found in a therapist’s office, a brisk walk, a prescription bottle, a Primal Scream retreat in some flaky California enclave, or a firmer resolve to follow the Buddhist principals that make of anger nothing more than a passing thing to be observed and released. Is some anger normal, and if so how much, and is so when, and how, and does it ever make anything clearer, stronger or better?

My tic and I are going to scream in the shower.

Something Wild

As a child, I had very curly hair. Although the ringlets disappeared into memory some time around my fourth birthday, the curl returned when it rained, when it was humid, and after I swam in the ocean. I speak not of some beach goddess wave, but of actual ringlets, small, perfect spirals appearing at the nape of my neck and colonizing the rest of my head. That uncontrolled, disorganized tangle of curls has disgusted me since I was old enough to express an opinion about my appearance. It was wild, alien, and messy. Even as a child, I sensed that I was not a person who could carry off hair that attracted attention. I preferred to be invisible, thinking that if no one was arrested by the sight of wide, frizzy curls, no one would look closer and see the fat cheeks, tummy pooch and obdurate plainness.

The hair required constant vigilance. It was first twisted into tight braids, and later blown dry in exhaustive sessions involving approximately 32 products with “smooth” in the name. I once attended an August wedding in Cleveland, during which I went into the bathroom eight times in two hours trying frantically to beat my curls into submission. It really didn’t matter what I looked like; my date was gay and the only straight man I knew at the ceremony was the groom, but I was obsessed. By the end of the evening my hair contained as much lacquer as a Chinese screen, and had assumed the shape of a rather unattractive lampshade: straight-ish to a point just below my ears and then bursting into a row of curls resembling that bobbly kind of fringe.

On a recent Saturday grocery run, I noticed that I was fixating on the cascading ringlets of a woman in the Self-Serve checkout line. In that sort of subjective, subconscious assessment we all make a hundred times a day, I classified her as “sexy.” She was not particularly beautiful, but her hair spoke of an unfussy life spent savoring sensual pleasures. I knew by looking at her that she could get up, take a shower and get dressed with barely a glance in the mirror. Her light was not hidden under a bushel of styling product, and she was comfortable in her skin, in her hair, and in her being.

This was a woman who slept naked in the heat of summer, and would never give up a chance to swim in the Atlantic because of the way her thighs looked in a bathing suit. She would never order a plate of field greens when she wanted a steak, and she would be able to dance without the pathetic White Girl Rigor that has always afflicted me. If she ate a juicy peach she would let the juice run down her cheek, and it was likely that some very lucky person might get to kiss some of it from her lips and chin. She looked un-careful, un-controlled, and un-inhibited.

Surfacing a bit to place my groceries on the belt (as always, grouped by food type and in straight lines down one side of the belt) I considered my own hair. It is, at that moment, blown straight with tiny ringlets popping up at the nape of my neck. It rains often, lately and the air is heavy with the spring humidity that makes the green of buds extra vivid and carries a whiff of damp earth. I thought about letting go, surrendering to nature and giving the curls a season of living large and out of control. It would be hard for me, a control freak who could, until recently, have taught a class called Tightly Wrapped at the local community center to young women in danger of surrendering to a life of musky perfume, excessively loud laughter and saying “yes” to things just because they might be fun. I have always lived with an invisible monitor watching me from the near distance, shaking her head at any action that tends to draw attention. “Do not,” she says, “sway your hips to the music at the concert. You look ridiculous. Do not leave the house without your face on, don’t make trouble for anyone, don’t draw attention to yourself.” In the past couple of years I have been fighting back, one toe ring, expletive and mid-week beer at a time, flirting with the checkout guy, and leaving the odd thing to chance. It’s time, I think, high time to let my hair out and see whether I can bury her, frown line and all, in a mass of soft, crazy curls.

I wink at my oppressive monitor as I burn rubber and drive away, ringlets tangling in the moist, fragrant air, and middle finger raised in her general direction. Music blasts from my stereo, I sing out loud with my mouth open wide, letting the warm sun relax me so that I can move fluidly to the beat. I am alive, I am floating to the surface like a cork, and I’m on my way to buy peaches.

I am something wild.