fierce attachments

a mother-daughter blog about the fierce attachments in our lives… title inspired by Vivian Gornick's wonderful memoir

Category: odds and sods

May 19, 2012

the challenge of being a writer who doesn’t write

by caitlin meredith

You, like many people, might have some preconceived notions of what writers do. Chief among them, I presume, is that writers write. I would like to correct you. This is not always the case. I, for instance, am a writer who does not write.

You might be thinking this sounds great. I get an official occupation  – “writer” – but don’t actually have to do anything to earn it, leaving me with oodles of time to goof off and really live. But you are also wrong about that. What you don’t know is that being a writer who doesn’t write is very, very time-consuming. It’s actually such a full time job that there isn’t any time left over for writing.

This brings me to the existential question all non-writing writers are routinely forced to confront: Where the fuck did all of the time go? Read the rest of this entry »

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February 22, 2012

the cats of my alley

by caitlin meredith

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From my office window I have a front row view of the backyard wildlife. Mostly, the scene is dominated by squirrels. The way they leap from limb to limb in the canopy of pecan trees makes me feel like I’m at preview night for the Mighty Flying Squirrel Circus. My fists clench as I hope for the successful completion of a particularly daredevil maneuver, sometimes wanting to rise for an ovation in awe of their acrobatics. My fists clench for other reasons too, though. As the tender fruit starts emerging from the branches of the fig tree in the center of the yard in early summer, too young and small for me to yet pick, I watch in horror as the squirrels razor their tiny teeth into one after the other of the bright green pearls. Those days I wish my backyard was a shotgun shooting range, not a circus tent.

Other than the squirrels, blue birds and bright red cardinals flash and flurry from the trees to the grass and I once even saw a possum rooting through my compost heap in the middle of the night. And then, of course, there are the cats.

Read the rest of this entry »

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December 6, 2011

conversations with drivers

by caitlin meredith

elpasoborder

I could write a whole book about my conversations with drivers. Most of them have been in long, pot-holed sections of bandit roads in Sub-Saharan Africa sitting shotgun as my local driver expertly navigated a Land Cruiser between the ditches on either side of the road. A lot of funny, tragic, harrowing, familiar and confusing stories are exchanged on those drives. Like the Kenyan-Somali driver Tigania who complained about dividing the cabbages evenly between his three wives on market days. Was he supposed to give each wife the same number, or dole out according to how many children each had? As you can imagine, each wife had an opinion that correlated with her child count. Being completely out of my realm of practical experience, that one really stumped me. Like anyone who has ever taken a taxi in Manhattan can attest, conversations with professional drivers often give you more of a sense of place than any of the monuments or attractions you visit. The same thing happened to me last week in El Paso.

I went to El Paso to research a student media project at the University of Texas that covers the U.S.-Mexico border called Borderzine. I knew I’d be talking to a lot of journalism professors and students about the border, but I was curious about how “normal” people thought about it. It seemed like a big deal to me, living on the border. All of the news reports we get in Austin are about how dangerous it is, but maybe, like many over-sensationalized stories in the media, it was no big deal. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 7, 2011

mother-daughter relationships: then and now

by nikki meredith

Image via Couture Allure

Easter Sunday. I’m 10 years old.  While other families are attending Easter sunrise services at the Hollywood Bowl, my family is in my father’s Buick heading to Rand’s Roundup in Hollywood – a restaurant billed as an urban chuck wagon.    I’m clutching my Easter basket – my brother is 14 and too old for Easter baskets — but we are each holding a cellophane bag of foil-covered Sees chocolate eggs that my mother’s Jewish friend Rose gives us every Easter to celebrate our secular L.A. urban holiday.

My mother and I are wearing Easter bonnets —  plain straw hats to which she has attached fresh gardenias — and matching dresses. I love the dresses — delicate Swiss cotton in pale yellow with tiny pearl buttons down the front. I like being twins with my mother. I like my mother. That will change but I don’t know it yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 24, 2011

top ten things for guys to avoid in their online dating profiles

by caitlin meredith

Date me.

1. Don’t use a profile photo of yourself where it’s pretty clear you’re naked. As a general rule, wear a full set of clothes in the photos. Unless you want random late night Craigslist hookups. If that’s the case, then go right back to the bathroom and take a few more self-portraits.

2. Don’t include photos of you and another woman, even if it’s not your ex-partner. It makes a potential date look at the lady your arm is around more than you, and wonder what she knows that you don’t.

3. Don’t include photos of your kids, just like you wouldn’t introduce your kids to a woman on your first date. It looks creepy to bring kids into these sites. The online dating community is small – your ex-wife will find out and freak out. I say wait until you have individual communication before sharing photos of you and the kids.

4. Don’t use a profile photo that you took from the webcam on your computer as you sat in your cubicle. These are unflattering, depressing photos. Even if you have to pay a stranger, have a more natural photo outside of fluorescent lighting.

5. Don’t target an age range that you yourself don’t fit into. Even if you only want to date 25-year-olds, you can  just not respond to the messages and winks from women that you think are too old for you. Why? Because a 42-year-old guy looking for women between 18 and 35 looks like a total douchebag. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 26, 2011

the botoxed heart

by nikki meredith

My husband wouldn’t smile at me. To be fair, he, more accurately, couldn’t smile at me. He was hit in the mouth with a hockey stick and required stitches both inside and outside. He’s a long time hockey player so over the years he’s had many injuries – this wasn’t even close to the worst (black eyes, cracked ribs, broken teeth) — but this one was the most painful for me. I had to get through each day without that particular physical manifestation of love and approval from him and it was as effective as an anti-Prozac. I realized that given the choice: no sex for a month; no smile for a week, I’d choose the first. It didn’t matter one wit that he might have been smiling on the inside, my heart hurt.

I thought about this experience recently when I read a New York Times report in about a study that seemed to demonstrate that Botox not only neutralizes how one looks, it neutralizes how one feels, particularly how one feels empathy. At issue is ”embodied cognition” — the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. In one experiment, women who had been injected with Botox were asked to look at a set of photographs of human eyes and match them with human emotions. Women with Botox were significantly less accurate at decoding both positive and negative facial expressions than the women in the control group. Read the rest of this entry »

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