Month: January 2018

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Ponies, Google, Ray Bradbury, and redefining effort in 2018

It’s hard to know, exactly, what this says about motherhood and about 2018— but this morning, I spent more than 10 minutes searching Google in an attempt to identify the name of a rather obscure My Little Pony.

I found it.

And finding it felt like victory.

In moments like these, I find myself thinking of the “Little House on the Prairie” books that I loved as a child. “Love” might not be a strong enough word. I read them and read them and read them again.

The Ingalls family didn’t grab the bottle of Log Cabin syrup and pour it on their frozen waffles. That log cabin wasn’t a logo. It was their home.

Who needs Nintendo? Or even Nerf? In “The Little House in the Big Woods,” Mary and Laura have fun playing catch with a pig bladder.

And those waffles weren’t frozen. They weren’t even waffles. They were flapjacks. Even the words were stronger. And in order to enjoy those flapjacks? They harvested the wheat. They made their own syrup. Their own syrup. Don’t even get me started with the churning and the butter. That bacon on the side, the item I shouldn’t eat because there is no room in my sedentary lifestyle to accommodate the calories? The Ingalls family butchered that hog in order to eat that bacon, thank you very much. They skimmed cracklings off of the fat. They knew what cracklings were.

And when the hog butchering was done? Laura and Mary played a lively game of catch with the pig bladder. The scene makes me imagine a side-by-side comparison of an eight-year old’s Christmas lists.

What I Want for Christmas: 1868 vs. 2018
1868
A new doll made out of an old corn cob
A shinier lunch pail
Vaccines
An inflated pig bladder

2018
A smart phone
An American Girl Doll, complete with her own Mars Habitat, Gourmet Kitchen, Groovy Bathroom, and Gymnastics Set
A Nintendo Switch

To be clear, I have no desire to go back to 1868, for a whole lot of reasons. I’m kind of partial to air conditioning and the right to vote, just to name a few. I am not suffering from the delusion that 1868 was better. Far from it. (Oh, really, so far from it). I just can’t help but wonder, sometimes, though, about what is happening to my sense of the word “effort” in these modern, high tech times. I don’t want to churn butter—though I do like the verb “churn” a lot. But I don’t want to confuse, you know, reaching for the tub of butter that I bought as being “hard work.”

In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a gadget-laden future in Fahrenheit 451, there is a scene where one of the characters, Mildred, is making herself breakfast. Except she isn’t making it, exactly. Bradbury writes, “Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with butter.”

I don’t want to get to a point where I think I have to rely on some robot-hand to butter my toast.

Meanwhile, the Little Pony whose name I triumphantly found, after my exhaustive 10-minute phone search?

Mosely Orange. Also known, to his family, as “Uncle Orange.” He is from Manhattan. He is a sophisticated pony. I know this because the internet told me so.

I spent 10 whole minutes searching for the name of this pony. I mean, that’s a lot of minutes.

Here’s the really crazy part. If I owned one of those hockey-puck-internet-robot things, I could have, perhaps, even spared myself the labor-intensive 10-minute Google search. I could have just asked the device—spoken these words aloud to the ether: “Which My Little Pony is yellow with green hair and an orange cutie mark?” and a human-sounding voice probably could have given me the answer. And I would have been all the better for sparing myself that 10-minute search, I’m sure.

Those 10-minutes would be the greatest gift of all, right? The gift of time? There’s no telling what I could do with those 10 minutes. Climb a mountain, perhaps. Or at least find out what in the hell a crackling is.

 

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The Crockpot Blues: A Mother’s Lament

Oh, Crockpot. You are an enigma to me. A mirage of meal planning. A siren song of supper.

You might think the food in this Crockpot and its little companion looks delicious. But you would be wrong.

Why do you tempt me and tease me so?

I love the idea of you. I even like the food that you produce—very much. The problem? My kids do not.

This is their own fault, of course, for having such infuriatingly picking palettes. Probably mine, too. I mean, I’m the mom—it all circles back to being my fault, in one way or another, doesn’t it?

I was also a picky eater as a child. I didn’t really even embrace pizza until the later years of elementary school. I’m fairly certain I did not deliberately eat a slice of cheese until somewhere closer to college. I was, in short, ridiculous.

This photo, a good approximation of the nightmare plate of my youth, can be found online featuring the words “Getting your child to eat healthy food may be as easy as adding color.” Sure, it’s colorful. But did the writers of this caption not notice the suspicious crust? The these-aren’t-baby-carrots spears of asparagus? The saucy pea concoction covering it all? Nice try.

My greatest nemesis for the better part of the first two decades of my life: FOOD THAT TOUCHED. I liked my plate lean and mean. Bread goes here. Peas—if there must be peas—here. Never the two shall meet. I liked applesauce, but it always posed a challenge, as it had a way of sneaking its way across the plate to the other items’ neighborhoods. I liked a clean border. A clear perimeter. Applesauce—stay on your side. Do not even think about going over to visit that macaroni. Do. Not. Even. Think. About. It.

In retrospect, “picky” is probably being kind. To say I was “kind of a freak” about my food might be more apt. Today, I may be labeled with some sort of syndrome and given something soothing to comfort me. Instead, because it was the 70s, I ate a lot of plain bologna sandwiches and, when confronted with a plate of offensive and gelatinous items, remained vigilant.

Somewhere along the way, I figured it out. Cheese is good. So are lots of vegetables, even. So are lots of FOODS THAT TOUCH—lasagna, and cheese enchiladas, and omelets, and chile relleno, and huevos rancheros, just to name a few.

This. My children will eat this. Plain pasta, with butter. Two of my children will add Parmesan cheese. The other will not. And one of them, truth be told, isn’t super keen on the butter.

My children, sadly, have not yet seen the light. This means that virtually everything a Crockpot could produce will be rejected by them.

Still, I keep trying. Because I am busy. Because I am a working mom and because Crockpots offer the promise of mealtime sanity—that wonderful feeling of walking in the door and knowing that dinner is already made. And in one pot, no less!

Why do my children persist in their rejection?

Maybe, I think, I just have not found the right recipe. So, I search. Just this morning, I cozied up to Google and hunted for “Crockpot recipes for picky kids.”

The results? From esteemed, allegedly informed websites?

Recipes for Crockpot dinners that kids will love, the sites promised, for “creamy mushroom . . . [something]” (I don’t know the something, because I stopped reading after “creamy mushroom”) and for another dish that “tastes just like grandma’s chicken casserole.”

Creamy mushroom [something]? Grandma’s chicken casserole? Really? Who are the picky children these recipes have in mind? What do these hypothetical children not like? I mean, I know picky. I was (am?) picky. And you, hypothetical internet child who will happily eat creamy mushroom [something], are not picky.

I called off the search. Who am I kidding? Until I can find a Crockpot recipe that magically produces “chicken nuggets and a separate container of French fries” in a white McDonalds bag, the effort is probably futile. Oh, wait, come to think of it, my youngest doesn’t like French fries yet either. Ah, well, a mother can dream.

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The Last Jedi deserves Best Picture nom

Academy Members, nominate The Last Jedi for an Oscar already. Please?

And not just for one of those technical sound editing type Oscars, though, don’t get me wrong, I believe all components of filmmaking are important and should be valued. 

Nominate it for Best Picture. Why not?

As a devoted Academy Awards junkie and Star Wars fan, I have been keeping a close eye on the horse race leading up to the January 23rd announcement of nominees. The Last Jedi has made it as a “dark horse” possibility on a few lists. But that’s it.

How is it possible that The Last Jedi, one of the best-reviewed films of the year, is barely scratching the surface of the conversation?

Most critics agree that Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Post, and Lady Bird are probably a lock for Best Picture nominations. Other likely contenders are The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Get Out, Call Me By Your Name, and I, Tonya. Less likely but not-out-of-contention: The Florida Project, The Darkest Hour, and The Big Sick.

So why has The Last Jedi, so far, barely entered the discussion?

Its box office dominance doesn’t help. The Last Jedi ended 2017 having earned more than $1 billion worldwide, after being in theaters for just a little over two weeks, and it is still going strong.

This chart is featured in the Feb. 24, 2017 article “The Best Picture Oscar rarely goes to the movie that makes the most money” on marketwatch.com

A MarketWatch.com article (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-movies-that-make-the-most-money-rarely-win-best-picture-oscar-2017-02-24) demonstrates how The Last Jedi’s financial dominance is probably working against it. For the past twenty years, the Academy has favored the films that earn less, such as in 2010, when the low-grossing The Hurt Locker bested mega-hit Avatar.

The only three exceptions to this rule have been 1998’s Titanic, 2003’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, and 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire. To underscore this trend, with a domestic gross of $22.2 million, last year’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, was the lowest grossing among the seven films nominated, and among the lowest grossing Best Picture winners ever.

More specifically, according to Market Watch, no Best Picture winner since 2003’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, “has come close to grossing $378 million domestically.” The Last Jedi, meanwhile, had earned more than $444.6 million domestically by the end of 2017.

I get it. Everyone loves an underdog. Even me. I’m all for championing smaller films that often have more interesting and challenging storylines than the latest churned out blockbuster sequel.

But sometimes, sometimes the box office giant is not evil. Sometimes the box office giant is awesome. Sometimes it is filled with a thought-provoking narrative, and excellent acting, and thrilling cinematography, and a fantastic score—and this is one of those times.

Academy members, please do not ignore The Last Jedi. In the year of #metoo, consider the vision we are given of female leadership in the characters of Jedi-in-training Rey, and General Leia, and Vice-Admiral Holdo, and maintenance worker Rose. And diversity. The latest Star Wars films have made good efforts to assure us that Lando Calrissian was not, in fact, the only non-white person in a galaxy far, far away. At a time when politics and government are . . . complicated, consider the resonance of the questions this films asks about individual sacrifice, about our loyalty to institutions, and about governance. About leadership, and faith, and bravery. One of the narrative undercurrents running throughout the film is even a melancholic meditation on mortality; do not disregard it just because it has crystal foxes, and porgs, and explosions, too.

Surprisingly, though it is a part of a franchise that began forty years ago, The Last Jedi is, in every way, a film for our time. Is there any question, really, that, looking back, The Last Jedi will have been THE movie of 2017?

The list of contenders is strong, of course. But many of its offerings also feel a little too quirky. A little too precious. Or, in some cases, very accomplished, but stale. The Last Jedi, by comparison, feels fresh. Visionary.

Academy, do not overlook The Last Jedi because it is popular. See it for what it is—a remarkable movie: serious and crowd-pleasing. Action-packed and funny. Timely and timeless. Give it the Best Picture nomination it deserves.