InnerTeub

I probably should have mentioned in my last post that the reason I finished “The Blind Side” in 24 hours is that I’m on spring break. Well, I’m on my stepdaughter’s spring break, and since 13 year olds don’t need supervision so much as companionship, I’ve been blessed with many, many hours of looking out at the water, kicking my feet up, and enjoying a good book.

And possibly a gin and tonic. Or two.

So, while I understand how football is scored generally (I mean, I know a touchdown is 6 points and then you get an extra one for kicking), for the most part the specifics of football are completely uninteresting to me. My dad did the best he could to teach me, and I have very pleasant memories of going to see a college football game with him at his alma mater, and thinking “oh, this is kind of cool,” but, I mean, autumn in Minnesota gets REALLY cold, and I never had much interest in sitting around on metal bleachers in November to watch a football game.

Given this, I can honestly say that football as something more than just a passing (ha!) interest didn’t actually occur until I watched the first episode of “Friday Night Lights.” You guys, that show is so wonderful. I care not at ALL about football, and by the end of that pilot episode I extremely intense about the strategy of a football game. It really wasn’t until this TV show that I had ever considered football to be any sort of intellectual undertaking, but all the sudden I was starting to understand the mass amount  of thought and strategy that goes on down on the field.

And then. THEN! I picked up the book “The Blind Side”

I haven’t seen the movie (though I want to), but I had read an article about this book several months ago, and had been wanting to check it out. Within the first 50 pages, I was in love. The entire first chapter is a second by second detailing of the sack that broke Joe Theisman’s leg. I can honestly say that before this book, I did not know who Joe Theisman was, or that his leg had been broken, or why that mattered at all, but ten minutes into reading the book, and I can recite chapter and verse about left side tackle, how this position came to importance due to the West Coast offense (dude. There is a west coast offense. And I know what that means. AND I CARE.) and how all these things came together in the perfect storm of NFL wants, needs and recruiting to change the life of one Michael Oher.

I’m told the movie focuses on Michael Oher’s story. That makes sense; it’s an incredible story. But the book only uses that story as a backdrop to the changing nature of the NFL, and it works perfectly. If 36 hours ago you had told me to read a book that details the way strategy in the NFL passing game has influenced it’s recruiting policy, I would have tuned you out immediately and gone about my day. But with the lead up of Friday Night Lights and my love for Matt Saracen paving the way for my conceding that football might be somewhat interesting, I stumbled upon one of the best non fiction books I’ve read this year, possibly ever.

Of course, then I spent a good five minutes discussing “The West Coast Offensive” with the Boss. Sigh. So we’re two steps forward, one step back in my basic football knowledge, but at least we’re getting there, right?

One: I’m coming home from a lecture, perhaps Russian Literature or Statistical Modeling with SAS or Ancient Roman History or some other variation of Stop Thinking About Yourself for A Few Hours that are a part of the college experience. I walk in the door to see my roommate Devon cross legged on the coach, wearing two week old sweatpants and ratty t shirt, face tear streaked, eating cake frosting out of a can with knife, and at the same time I think “Oh no, what did he do” and “Man, I have got to wash the dishes and get her a clean spoon”

These type of boy problems can only be solved with raw cookie dough and the movie Center Stage, and I make the necessary arrangements, cookie dough and cheap wine from the deli downstairs, overwatched VHS in the VCR,  sweatpants donned in solidarity, and we settle in to ride out the storm.

Years later my husband will come home to find us in sweatpants on the couch, drinking champagne, caught up in the talk of insubstantial nothingness that can continue for days.

Two: I walk into the restaurant and find him sitting in the back. We’re here most Monday nights, getting take out or eating in, depending on the time we left work and our willingness to deal with people at the end of the day. I’m sure they think we’re a couple, and we are, but not the type they mean. Over dinner we’ll discuss the people we’re dating, or the ending of Gone Baby Gone and how that’s quite possibly one of the best movies we’ve ever seen, or what a jerk Mel Gibson was to make What Women Want, or our mutual surprise out how Britney’s comeback album was kind of ok, actually. We walk back up to his place, or mine just a few blocks away, raiding our TiVOs and clinking beers at the beginning of How I Met Your Mother, another “Sibling Date Night” in full swing. We ping absentmindedly on our blackberrys and flip through magazines, folding laundry, spending a quiet Monday night with no requirement to carry on conversation or be in a good mood; two siblings, being the best type of friends.

Three: I spend 48 hours in LA on her couch, leaving the house only to ride beach cruisers up and down the boardwalk, chatting about traffic and men with bald spots. The only thing I know about her is that she loves my brother, and that’s enough for me, really, but as I learn more I relax, and ease into this friendship that feels inevitable. Her favorite movie is What Happens in Vegas and she can keep an email thread going for days just using the phrase “You know why!” She talks with an enthusiasm that feels like dancing, and it’s infectious, making it impossible to feel left out, unwanted.  For Christmas she gives me a framed picture of my brothers and me as small children, in a three person bear hug, and I feel like the picture is missing someone; I find myself thinking: “What took you so long to join us?”

Four: It’s 7am and we’re running late, frantically working around each other trying to get ourselves situated for another day, coffee feverishly being drunk and cereal being consumed while in motion. It’s Tuesday or Wednesday, and we’re buried so deep  in the week that we can’t even be hopeful for the weekend. From the speakers I hear Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” pipe in, followed by some Bon Jovi, followed by Poison. For the next 30 minutes we DJ ourselves our own 80s rock karoke party while we finish suiting up, smiling and dancing despite the day and the time, and we leave the house humming along to Van Halen’s “Right Now,” enjoying a Tuesday more than should be expected.

****

I find myself in the basement of a bar in downtown New York, hurling darts against a wall with the skill level of someone who has never played a hand/eye sport in her life and is four beers into this game. They make fun of my efforts, but they’re not doing any better and we laugh at each other while we sing along to background music.  I look around at my people and I think “My God” and I think “How lucky” and I think “How Goddamn lucky am I.”

Me and my four people, in the same city at the same time, and you know, it’s just another day, one in the collection of many, but these days, these moments, stop me in my tracks and I think, “I am luckiest son of bitch in the world.”

I’m usually loathe to disagree with my brother Mike. We’re good friends, and get along very well, but we have a tendency to revert to our 7 and 11 year old selves (respectively) when we disagree, and many disagreements tend to end with me frustrated and close to tears and him smirking and say “Ha! I told you you were stupid!”

But, you know, we both well over our teen years, and you would think we’d be able to intelligently discuss why he is completely and utterly mistaken about the movie Avatar.

The crux of his argument is this:

Avatar is a great movie.  It has a generic story but the look and feeling of the film was spectacular.  When i left the theater, and everyone else i left with, we had a collective sense of “holy crap, that was really something” feeling that never happens.  Ten years from now, i’ll remember my Avatar viewing but probably not my Hurt Locker experience. Thus, i’m voting for Avatar.

And this is where I disagree: I won’t remember Avatar in ten years. Hell, I can barely remember it now; I had to go re-read a review to remind myself of what the actual plot was. I left Avatar thinking “Wow, you know, that looked really cool.” But Best Picture? Really? No. To steal from Linda over at Monkey See:

It’s fine to admire Cameron’s technical advances with the movie — what he did with motion capture is clearly an advance in the sense that certain aspects of it moved the idea of CGI films forward. But the question becomes: in service of what?

…it reminded me of an incredibly gorgeous web site design where all the text was the dummy nonsense Latin that’s used to fill space and avoid distraction. Avatar works well as a demonstration of technology — particularly for other filmmakers who might use it for, say, better films.

But consider this, for a moment: If Cameron had made the movie with actors in rubber masks, and he hadn’t used special motion capture or a special camera — if he had made it as a conventional sci-fi movie — how good would it be?

And that’s really where I’m coming from with this. Avatar absolutely deserves as many awards are available for it’s technological coolness, but as an overall movie — by which I mean, a combination of story, acting, visuals and execution — it ain’t there. When I think of Inglorious Bastards, I remember the amazing acting by Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent, the captivating story, the haunting visual of a blue eye peeking out from under a floorboard. That movie hit it out of the park on every level, almost serving as a master class on how to bring together a million different elements into a highly enjoyable film, whereas Avatar just kind of … looked cool.

And that’s Ok for Avatar to look cool. It’s impressive. But that doesn’t make it the best movie of the year, not by a long shot.

(I should note now that my brother compares the Oscar race between Avatar and Hurt Locker to the Star Wars v Rocky Oscar race for Best Picture, and where he comes down on the side of Star Wars on that one, I’m firmly in the Rocky camp. So it’s likely we’re just dealing with a difference of styles and expectations here, which is Ok, but doesn’t change the fact that I’m right and he’s wrong.)

The first time my stepdaughter ever commented on my blog, my mind immediately screeched a halt and went “ABORT! ABORT! CHILD READS THIS BLOG! REMOVE ALL MENTIONS OF HER FATHER TALKING ABOUT BOOBS”

After carefully reviewing past content and assuring myself there was nothing on her that would be too damaging to her tweenager eyes (or, you know, my career, while we’re at it), I sat back and smiled because, actually, I really like the idea of her getting to know me in whatever way she can, getting a view to what I’m doing and who I am when I’m not being her stepmom.

This is one reason I REALLY like being friends with her on Facebook; I get to see her interacting with her friends, see her random thoughts through the day, and really get a view into little things I’d likely miss otherwise. And that is all well and good, but one side benefit I hadn’t thought too much about was the potential to embaress her greatly, and, dude, it is awesome. Check out her comment on one her dad’s status update from this past weekend:

Hi Sammy. We luv u too. I’m glad you can see all we post, and I’m sure you won’t be scarred for like, your WHOLE life.  Most likely, anyway.

When I was 21, I had my tonsils taken out.

This was a good idea. I’d been plagued with the world’s crappiest immune system my whole childhood, always having strep or tonsillitis on repeat, but finally (FINALLY), the summer of my 21st year, I had an allergic reaction to penicillin and decided I was DONE being sick. So I took my doctor’s advice and decided that my tonsils and I were going to part ways.

(Interesting side note re my immune system: I was CONVINCED that once I got rid of what were surely my disease incubating pustules [ahem, um, I mean tonsils], my immune system would perk right up. Goodbye endless colds and strep throat and the flu and feeling crappy at a moments notice! Suck it, low grade fevers! Be gone! But, interestingly, that was not the case. It wasn’t until years later, when my weight settled around 130 pounds – about ten pounds more than my high school/college weight), that I finally stopped getting sick all the time.  So now I suppose I finally know what people mean about having “a healthy weight.”)

Right, anyway: tonsils. SO, my doctor assured me that having ones tonsils taken out as an adult was significantly suckier than as a kid; a minimum two week recovery period in which you were sure to feel miserable. Kids, for reference, apparently just have a really sore throat for a few days, but as you get older, your tonsils get more ingrained in your body, and removing them sucks more. At least, that is the technical explanation as I understand it, and yes “suckier” is the rate meter commonly used by credible doctors AHEM.

Additionally, there are a bunch of complications that are less rare in adults post-tonsillectomy than in kids post-tonsillectomy, and because I am the most frequent traveler on the path of most resistance, I of course had to take part in these complications.

One ruptured carotid artery later, some more surgeries, and heart rate that your average cocaine addict would find normal, and I’d officially become interesting to medical school students.

(You don’t want to be interesting to medical students.)

Luckily, I was already on an operating table when the artery ruptured, which saved my life. Apparently, however, blood got into my lungs, got infected, gave me pneumonia, and freaked my heart right the fuck out. And while I recovered quickly from pneumonia, throat surgery, and the depression that follows hospitalization, it took many, many more years to fix that heart thing, and if I had twenty hours to write this post I would tell you all about how dealing with my chipmunk heart changed my life in almost every way, but for now I’ll just summarize it as: I used to be sick, and now I am well, and I don’t ever want to feel sick again, which is why I do stupid things like Ironmans or marathons as less than subtle way of reminding myself that I’m not dead.

ANYWAY. The point of all of this (and I do have one), is that my stepdaughter had her tonsils out this week, and it is highlighting one of the many strange things I have noticed since becoming a stepmom:  how much I am reliving my childhood.

It’s terrible.

I mean, there is actually nothing TERRIBLE about being a stepmom – at least, not about being a stepmom to my specific stepdaughter, who I think is one of the best people I know, kid or not. But it’s amazing how quickly I find myself looking at her tweenage years and remembering my own – and wincing.

Being a 13 year old girl is HARD, when I look back, a lot of times I’m not proud of the 13 year girl I remember being.  Whenever my stepdaughter is having a hard time, I want to tell her the easiest way to get through it, I want to give her the proper perspective, I want to have her do right all the things I did wrong. But the work division in the parent/teenager relationship is pretty clearly defined — she’s the one living it, I am just the observer, and, hopefully, the helper. I don’t get to live it for her, no matter how many sense memory flashbacks I have.

So of COURSE her having her tonsils taken out has lead me down this path of remembering my own horrible “routine surgery” experience and made me twitchy and nervous and I’m sure very fun to be around. And of COURSE she is totally fine, munching on ice cream, rocking some pain killers, cheering on the Olympics and, you know, that’s another fun part of step-parenting: no matter how much I want to relate her life to mine, she will remind me, again and again, that it’s her turn to be a kid for the first time, and she’ll do it the best way she can. And I’m happy just to be along for the ride.