Best Medicine

I am binge watching a regular tv show called "Best Medicine." It is an American knock-off the British "Doc Martin," a show about a grumpy/autistic surgeon whose fear of blood sends him to be a GP in a small town. 

I watched a few episodes of the British version back when it was on Netflix years ago. It was a cute show in a quaint town, but I was at the time living with my own person Doc Martin, and I lost interest. I didn't realize at the time it was a show about an automaton evolving into a regular human.

The American version with Josh Charles has snagged my attention. I have friends who also watch, just because it is a sweet show and couldn't we all use a little sweetness?

I am on episode 6 or 7, and I don't think I'd want to live in a cozy town where the big city doctor moves in. I am feeling sorry for the cast, especially this guy who plays Mark, the town cop and the ex of the doc's love interest. In just a few episodes, all kinds of crazy shit happens to him. He had a dramatic allergic reaction to Red Dye 40, then he was impaled by a rod at a school party. In the first episode, the love interest has had a rare eye problem. A few episodes later, she had a rare blood disorder where she has too much iron and needs blood letting once a week. One character has marfan syndrome. The town needs to be in the Guiness Book of World Records of the most number of people per capita with odd diseases. Half the population has rare conditions, and statistically, that isn't possible.

I imagine being a writer on the show, where their main job is to look up obscure illnesses and inflict them on the poor cast members. It is also odd that no one on the show is overweight. They are all thin and fit. No one has garden variety diabetes, or bad knees. How much can these otherwise healthy characters endure? 

Ode to the Mozzie

Fuck you 

Mosquito!

How dare you keep 

Me

Awake 

For two hours last night

Biting my arm

Biting my hand

Buzzing in my ear

You tiny 

Tiny

Tiny

Piece of shit.

I can’t see you

But damn you are loud

For something so 

Small.

You hide when the light turns on.

Please 

Please 

Please 

Leave me alone.

Oh

And Apple Sleep App--

You don't need to tell me

"You had a poor night's sleep

Last night,"

No shit, Sherlock.

I was

awake for most 

of 

it.

And could you 

at least maybe ask,

"Are you 

Okay?"

Adulting 5.7

I've been doing a lot of adulting lately, and it kind of sucks. The only good thing about it is that all of my friends are going through this too, like these are rites of passage for the mid-fifties. 

There are three main categories I am dealing with:

• Health
• Retirement
• Death

Health

All of the cool kids are getting their shingles vaccinations and colonoscopies, in addition to mammograms.  I just got a personal trainer so I can remain strong as I age.

Retirement

While I believe I have done a fantastic job of saving money for retirement, I now need extra help getting all of my shit in order. Like, will I have enough cash on hand to retire? Will I have stacked Roth IRAs? What are my investment allocations? Yeah. I am glad I am paying someone else to figure this out.

Death

Yep, writing up my will. My divorce lawyer gave me a simple will, but I needed to make some changes and my new lawyer is asking me a thousand questions, not just "give me the names of your kids" and we are done.

All of this is like the Bermuda Triangle -- I need to get my health checkups so I can stay healthy, and I need my retirement accounts so I have money as I age, and then I need plan for when I kick it, but I don't want to kick it anytime soon, so I am exercising and getting all of my health check-ups. See the fun here?

The funny thing is that I don't feel old. I feel like I am still sixteen and entering a new phase, like getting my drivers license so I can go wherever I want. And everyone I know is tracking at least one of these categories.

Judy and Margaret

On my way back to my car from playing pickleball Sunday afternoon, I saw a Little Library, a box where people leave books they have finished reading for others to take. 

There, I found a copy of "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" by Judy Blume, the insanely popular author of teen and tween fiction in the 1970's. I devoured her novels fourth, fifth and sixth grades. 

I picked up "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." I wondered how it would hold up over time. Would it be a classic? Would it have aged well? Would I cringe at what I thought was brilliant as a child?

I am halfway done, and yes, yes, no. 

Yes it is a classic.

Yes it aged well.

No I didn't cringe at my younger self.

Margaret is a sixth grader in her last year in elementary school. She just moved from NYC to suburban New Jersey with her Jewish dad and her Christian mom. Her new friend Nancy asks her if she is going to join the YMCA or the Jewish Community Center. Margaret -- raised without religion -- doesn't have a clue. In addition to navigating her first crush, first bra, first kiss, and getting her period, she tries to figure out where religion fits in her life. Spoiler: She doesn't find what is she looking for in the organized religions she explores. (This isn't to bash organized religion -- it serves many people.)

What does Margaret do? She prays "to her own personal God," said one review. 

Isn't that an answer to some of the big questions of life? How do we find peace? What should we do when we are lost or confused? What does Margaret do? She prays in her own way to her own God. I spent the last ten years trying to figure it out with meditation and therapy and twelve steps programs and reading Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest with a radical and gentle interpretation of Christianity.

All of those things have been helpful in letting me find peace with a complicated and complex past (and to be honest, complicated and complex present.) 

Here was the answer, in a book I adored when I was twelve. 

Stalling

I am trying to launch a new creative project, but I am stalling.

I came up with an idea in April of last year, and I've been working on it since then. I got a solid draft of the project up, and I got some feedback that was direct, honest and a little harsh. Not harsh in a bad way because most of it was true, but harsh in the sense that it wasn't balanced with enough positive feedback to keep me going.

I've workshopped lots of writing pieces before, and there is a simple pattern to it: You say what you liked, and then you say what you struggled with or didn't understand. A simple version would be "I liked the plot, but I don't understand why Mary would rob a bank. Perhaps a better explanation of her motivation would help..."

And then you give feedback back to the other person. This works because it is a two way street. You give the feedback you want to get -- you want to someone to point out your blindspots, but also honor the intention of your project. 

Without that mutual feedback, I got lost in the soup. 

In my stall, I have been needlepointing up a storm. These projects are infinite. I could take these on a forty hour flight and still have work left at the end. 

This is just a sample. I have way more craft projects in my stash.

The challenge with my new pet creative project is that it is loaded with uncertainty, unlike these needlepoint projects. Each stitch gets me closer to completion. Each stitch brings me a tiny sense of peace. 

With my creative project, I have no idea where each step will take me. Will it lead to garbage? Will it lead to something messy and confusing? Will it lead to something beautiful and wonderful and inspire people to see themselves in a way they didn't before? 

I don't know, and "I don't know" can be very hard to say. 

"Elle," or Is Seattle the new Hollywood?

This past week, I started watching Elle, the prequel to Legally Blonde, on Amazon Prime. My daughter loves Legally Blonde, the Reese Witherspoon movie about a fashion obsessed sorority girl who goes to Harvard Law School. When I saw the prequel, I was curious.

In Elle, Elle Woods is a junior in high school when her plastic surgeon father botches a nose job and they have to leave Bel Air and move to Seattle.

Elle takes place in 1995, and Seattle is a full-blown character in this streaming series. 

But why Seattle? Why didn't the Woods family move to San Francisco or New York or Chicago? Why move a pink loving girl to gray and grungy Seattle, with its anti-superficiality stance?

Why Seattle? I love seeing my adopted hometown played out on a show where the city isn't just a backdrop, but why?

Could it be because Amazon is based in Seattle, and pitching a show to Amazon that takes place there might scratch an itch for people choosing series for Amazon? I know Amazon video has offices in Southern California, but still the mothership is down the street from where I live.

Of course, no one show can completely capture a city, just as each person experiences a city just as they experience it. Nevertheless, I find the Seattle/Los Angeles clash interesting, and I think the show does a decent job of showing the Pacific Northwest. One of my favorite scenes is when Elle walks through the lunch room and one of the students points out the jocks table, the bank geeks, the stoners, the rich kids, etc., and they all look exactly the same. I had to laugh because it is so true, even for the adults.

So many shows and movies are made in L.A., but I never really considered how much of SoCal vibe slips into shows without my even noticing. Frasier took place in Seattle, but it could have taken place anywhere. The writers could have thrown a dart at a map and picked a place. Frasier could have been filmed anywhere. No one comes to Seattle looking for Cafe Nervosa. 

Elle is different. Cross country is a high school big sport (true). There is even a theme on the mountain being out. Only in Seattle do people talk about the mountain being out. Frasier has the Space Needle in the logo, but Rainier looms larger. 

The best part is watching Elle and her family slowly fall in love with this quirky town, as did I twenty years ago.

Will Amazon's influence mean more shows based in Seattle? Even if they don't film here, could we become a new branch of Hollywood?

I hope so.

Oh Mary! and Walter Mitty

Maya Rudolph is taking a turn playing Mary Todd Lincoln on Broadway in "Oh Mary!," a campy send up of the famous First Lady. It sounds ridiculous and hilarious and wild.

I've never aspired to be an actress, but I would love to play Mary and I haven't even seen the play yet. I want to be a one-show Broadway actress. I don't want to do Chekov. I don't want to do Shakespeare. 

I want to play Mary Todd Lincoln. 

I've been involved in politics, surely I can play a politician's wife? I'd pay to see Hilary play the role. She might be hilarious. 

This would be my Walter Mitty moment, where I dream of marching on stage with a black dress and head of curls, and playing deep physical comedy about a woman who wants to break free from her cage. I want to embody the unhinged First Lady.

That's all. I'll keep you posted on my Broadway dream.

Accepting the Offer

I am taking an improv class “Acting for Improvisors” taught by a veteran actor and improviser. She is great. 

I was in a scene last week where the location was an amusement park concession stand line. We determined that we were high school seniors, and this was an end of year field trip. I was hanging out with my new, nerdy boyfriend. 

“What happens to us after we graduate?” my scene partner asked. 

Instead of engaging in the conversation, I ran off to get my corn dog. 

“Lauren,” the teacher said, “You missed the offer. He asked what was going to happen and you ran off.”

First, that kind of shit happens in real life all of the time. People bring up a serious topic, and the other person changes the topic. 

Not "accepting the offer" has happened more than once in my real life. I remember when Jack and I were separated before the divorce, Jack asked me to go with him to Chicago to watch him run a marathon. We went to college together in Evanston, and we lived in Lincoln Park in our twenties. We were married there and had Ada. There is lots of history in Chicago, lots of happy memories. Even Ada reminds me of happier times. While her death was tragic of course, my pregnancy with her was one of the happiest times of my life. We were surrounded by the love of friends, family and co-workers when she passed.

I said no to the trip to watch the marathon.

If Jack had asked me to go to Chicago to walk down memory lane, I would have said yes. I said no to being a spectator in his life instead of a partner and a participant.

I am not sure if I regret that decision. I don't know if it would have changed anything or not, or if it would have gotten us to the same place.

I wonder how many other offers I have missed. Several times a week, I wonder about how I fucked up my marriage. I wonder how many times we missed each others offers.

Bernadette Gets a Divorce

My literary hero is Bernadette Fox from the comedic novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” by Maria Semple. Bernadette once was lost, but then finds herself on a trip to Antartica. Prior to her escape to the bottom of the earth, she previously had a successful career, then an epic failure, then a kid with cardiac problems, and then finally, a marriage that was collapsing from all of the weight Bernadette carried. 

Semple released a new book, “Go Gentle” about a divorced woman who high tails it to NYC. I look forward to see how my favorite author navigates this challenging chapter of life.

The Boring Bits

When I get stressed, I love to do jigsaw puzzles. 

The past few weeks have been super stressful, like "maybe you should call a lawyer" stressful. Just plain bad. Literally insult to injury bad. Awful. Sheesh.

So I am doing a a cute cat jigsaw puzzle given to me by my friend's mom. She knows I am a jigsaw fan and was unloading one from her stash so she can make room for more. 

Anyway, it is a cute puzzle and I've been working on it obsessively so I don't have to think about the stressful thing and I'm also avoiding work on my major creative project which I need to get off my ass and do. 

So here is the puzzle. I just have the boring bits left, the sky-like, monochrome parts. 

The Apology I Made for the Thing I Didn't Say

Lydia came to dinner last night,

my elderly neighbor with

cognitive  decline.

She said she was hurt and sad

because I had said 

I didn't want her over for dinner

anymore.

Nothing could be 

further

from the truth.

Lydia is good company,

a good listener,

full of great stories.

She was crestfallen.

It must have taken a lot 

for her to tell me.

She was brave to

confront someone

who had hurt her

so badly.

"Lydia, I never said such a thing.

Never would I,"

I said.

It didn't matter. 

That was what she remembered,

no matter how many times

I told her otherwise.

It didn't matter 

whether I was right or not.

I didn't want her to think

I was a monster.

I apologized

for the thing

I didn't say.

"Lydia,

I take back what I said. 

I didn't mean it 

and 

I am sorry I hurt your feelings,"

I said.

I held her hand,

and she started to tear up.

I was forgiven, 

for something

I didn't do,

something

I didn't say.

And then 

we ate

chicken and rice.

Apple, Apple, I'm your Bitch

I've had my Apple Watch now for about a month, and I'll be damned if I am not doing what it tells me to do, like it is my boss, my master, my dom.

Today at work, it told me it was time to stand up, so I stood up. It tells me how much to exercise, how much to sleep and when to go to bed. It even knows my name, and says "Good Morning, Lauren!" It is polite and friendly and I obey.

I obey my watch, and I feel bad when I don't.

Sometimes.

Right now, I am disobeying. I should be in bed by 10:30 and I am not. I am sitting here writing a blog post instead. I feel kind of bad, but aren't I a grown up? Can't I go to bed whenever I want to?

In fairness, I programmed this watch to boss me around. It asks me how often I want to stand, and I tell it. It asked me how much I want to exercise, and I told it. It asked me when I want to go to bed and when I want to wake up. 

Is this new gadget my tech overlord, or is it helping me to stay disciplined? 

I don't know. I need to get to bed. I don't want to get a low sleep score tomorrow morning.