Month: March 2013

by

The Problem with Heroes

This was going to be a post about my on-going love affair with coffee. But I decided it might not be suitable for younger folks. Plus, I have a noisier bee in my bonnet.

Friendships tend to be easier for me in my salad days. Having read and loved the entire LoTR series was enough to base a close friendship on. From conversations about LoTR, we’d jump to discussing other literature, art, music and the metaphysics of courage, friendship and love. Purely theoretical at this point, since my friends and I were still in pinafores. Well, maybe except the discussions about friendship.

As an adult though, things are different. A friend of mine posited the theory that people, consciously or otherwise, are inherently selfish. People will tend to only keep individuals around them that fulfill a function. There has to be some kind of payoff on both sides in order for a set of individuals to remain friends. Commonalities which drew my adult friends and I together seem more ephemeral. We are not cobbling together foundational philosophies anymore. That’s already done with and basically set in stone.

But stones can be broken.

And the implications of this last category of friends is the noisy bee in my bonnet. Friends the universe sends you in times of crises. In novels, we read the denouement episode, maybe as an epilogue. And then we close the book.

Do we also close the book in real life?

During the crisis, we can be, and very often are, each other’s heroes. Crisis is, by definition, temporary. If the commonality that drew us together is crisis, does it also mean the friendships formed are also temporary? What happens when our heroes outgrow their functions?

Am I over-thinking this?

by

The Nemesis

She’s disemboweling the blanket. The brown one. The blanket I was just under. She is Zelda. My nemesis.

My name is Clarence and I am a bogeyman.

Not the Bogeyman. I am not so arrogant as to claim to be s/he who is the Bogeyman. There are a number of us around, you know. Usually when there are small children in the area. The monster that supposed to be in the closet or under the bed? Probably one of my colleagues. Not me. Well, maybe the closet. But only if it’s regularly vacuumed.

It’s the dust bunnies, you see. Vicious, malicious dust bunnies. I avoid them like they carry the plague. Because they do. That laughable bit of fiction humans tell each other? That the bubonic plague was spread by rats? Lies, all lies. I’m telling you, it’s the dust bunnies. It’s a part of their ongoing nefarious campaign to take over the world. And not just the plague. Oh no, not by a long shot. The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic? Dust bunnies. Think about it, they make you sneeze. The 1952 Great Smog? Dust bunnies, airborne.

Maybe it’s time for my pills. I’ll take it in a bit. She is still patrolling the room. I am safe, for the moment, under the child’s helmet. It’s small, dark and completely devoid of dust bunnies. It’s perfect.

Everything used to be perfect. I’d rattle the blinds, make suspicious shapes in semi-darkness, and be rewarded with the child’s terrified screams. Angelic music to a dedicated bogeyman’s ears. The child was never able to sleep alone in his own room. At least not for long.

And then she came. Zelda.

Now, she patrols every shadow, chases me from my every hiding place. No scrap of darkness is safe from her claws or teeth. She doesn’t even deign to hiss at me anymore. And she feeds the evil dust bunnies by shedding fur everywhere she goes.

And the child? He sleeps soundly the whole night. Alone. It’s enough to make me want to hand in my cape.

In fact, I am handing it in. I quit. Maybe I’ll try being a Tooth Fairy. I hear they’re hiring. I’ll even wear the tutu and sparkly wings.

Fab’s note: To the best of my knowledge, dust bunnies are not responsible for spreading the bubonic plague, the flu (Spanish or otherwise) or for generating smogs, both great and small. 

by

On ten

Ten is a significant number to me. More significant than I realized when I first wrote this post 🙂

Our number system is based on tens. Most of us have ten fingers and ten toes. Each decade of the rosary is made up of ten Hail Marys.

And El Kiddo turned ten recently.

When I was ten, my family moved to Singapore. I learned English at age ten. I ate my first fig (delicious) and my first, and last, turtle egg (raw with a dash of salt, disgusting). When my friend was ten, she stood up to a bully who terrorized a girl for wearing glasses. She told the bully she’d smack him like a fly if he called the other girl “four eyes” again. I suppose her instinct to stand up for the underdogs contributes to her current reputation as a raging redhead.

I stood on the cusp of great change when I was ten. El Kiddo also stands on the cusp of great change. Girls, puberty and impending adulthood, among others. The following are some advice I’ve garnered for him.

1) Enjoy childhood while you can. You’re going to miss it when you grow up.

2) Stand up for what you believe in.

3) Help those who cannot stand up for themselves.

4) Stay true to yourself, come what may. The alternative is never worth the cost.

5) Laugh often, love truly, live freely. Anyone who gets in the way of these, is worth neither your love nor time. And not worthy of you.

Care to share anything that happened when you were ten? Or any advice for El Kiddo?