Uncategorized

Guest Blog

One of Mrs Fringe’s previous posts was syndicated yesterday over at http://www.iamnotthebabysitter.com/attachment-and-independence-different-sides-of-the-same-coin/?doing_wp_cron=1346415625.1737749576568603515625

http://www.iamnotthebabysitter.com/?doing_wp_cron=1346416091.2596659660339355468750 is the blog of a fabulous mom with a transracial family, addressing attachment parenting, breastfeeding, homeschooling, travel schooling, and adoption. Check her out, she’s posting from Africa at the moment, and recently met with the “first mother” of her adopted son.

A big thank you to I Am Not The Babysitter and GreatProofreading.com.

Apologies, I’m having technical difficulties this morning, I can’t get the hyperlink to work.

The Super Secret Society of NY Dogwalking

OK, not so secret. One thing that seems to surprise tourists is how many of us here in NY have dogs. I understand the surprise if you’re coming from a place where having a dog equals hunting or long romps through grassy fields. Big Senile Dog is such a city dog he’ll only “go” on concrete or asphalt. Not fun when visiting friends in the country, and I’m walking my beast down an unlit road at night because he won’t poop on grass.

A special relationship, she likes to walk under him when he’s peeing outside, then we come home and she pees on his bed.

Believe it or not, most NYers are pretty friendly, just not chatty. The exceptions come out once you’re walking your dog(s). All of a sudden, people you’ve never noticed before, and who’ve never noticed you, are stopping to say hello, how are you, tell you about their day and begin friendships. An entirely new dimension of bonding and neighborly love becomes clear. Cause nothing says intimacy like a conversation when one or both parties are holding a bag of dog poop.

I think dog owners here are the holders of the neighborhood secrets. We know who’s sick, who’s in love, getting married, divorced, which building is about to shift from rent controlled to co-op, who lost their job. I’ve heard many stories over the years of people finding jobs through connections in the dog run.

Like a bartender recognizes people by what they drink, we recognize people by the dogs attached to them. Sometimes I can tell you what type of dog, elimination quirks, and all about the owner’s life, but can’t for the life of me give you a physical description of the person attached to the leash.

please curb your dog (Photo credit: Charley Lhasa)

In the Lint Pile

English: A close-up of dryer lint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just about all Manhattan neighborhoods are a mix. A mix of ethnicities, political views, religions, and socio-economic status. My neighborhood is particularly mixed when it comes to the latter. We have a high number of SROs. Single Room Occupancy hotels–boutique hotels, if you’re a naive young tourist who believes all the pretty pictures posted on the internets. Many times I’ve come across 120 pound tourists with 150 pound packs strapped to them, looking for the “boutique hotel” they paid for in advance, online, from their clean and comfy homes or universities somewhere in Europe, maybe the Netherlands. Sometimes I run into these same young tourists 2 days later in the drugstore, looking for products to combat bedbugs and lice.

Most frequently, SROs house those who have fallen from the fringe into the lint pile, a few house those have recently arrived in America and are first trying to climb up to the fringe. Rent controlled, very cheap housing, what you get is one room and a shared bathroom and kitchen. Some are reasonably clean and safe, many are dirty, in desperate need of repairs, and not somewhere you’d like to find yourself–day or night. Many who live in the SROs are basically homeless, mentally ill, drug addicted, and either HIV+ or have full blown AIDS.

I’ll be honest, there are certain blocks I avoid walking on at night, even with Big Senile Dog at my side. As the economy has grown tighter, the problems and crimes that spill out of these buildings has risen. Most of the people who live in even the seediest of the SROs seem fairly harmless, I’ve lived here for years and so have they; I recognize their faces, those who aren’t drug or booze addled recognize mine. OK, so it was more than a little unsettling when Fatigue got a new puppy in his ground floor apartment and was assured a few weeks later by one particular man that he didn’t have to worry about said puppy while he was out at work–the man was watching him through the window, and he was ok. Ummm, thanks?

This summer, violent crime has escalated, there have been a couple of fatal incidents, and the city is planning to place an additional four hundred people in SROs in the immediate neighborhood. Predictably, there are petitions circulating to stop this placement. Social service agencies place people in this housing, and it is great and necessary to have somewhere for the ill and indigent to go besides the front stoops of churches; but then they don’t provide supports to keep the people well, clean, or even safe. A Catch 22 that affects not only the people living in these buildings, but all living around them.

Some of the people living in the SROs are elderly, some work fringe jobs, some work regular jobs that just don’t pay enough for rent on an apartment, many live off their SSI/SSD checks and supplement by panhandling. Ah, the panhandling. “Mama, you got a dollar? How bout a cigarette?” Usually not, and usually, when I just keep walking, they’re asking the next person before I’ve even passed them. Sometimes it’s annoying, if the person in question decides to follow and continue asking for half a block, sometimes it pisses me off, if I say no and the person immediately switches modes from smiling, hand extended, “God Bless,” to snarling and “fucking bitch.” Sometimes it’s frightening. Flower Child doesn’t understand all the cues and clues, which seems to attract the most fractured of the crack addicts, “oh little Mommy, you’re so beautiful, I don’t have my babies anymore, can I touch your hair?”

When Man Child was little, he used to announce what we were having for dinner and invite the homeless he saw on our way home from nursery school to join us.

homeless (Photo credit: digitizedchaos)

A lot of my younger internet friends think of me as an ex-hippie. Though I’m too young to actually have played on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, the politics and philosophies wouldn’t be far off, and it’s true, my favorite pair of jeans in high school was a pair I had tie-bleached with a friend in the basement. In the eighties and early nineties, I worked in social services where most of my jobs were a direct result of the push to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. So I feel for all of those living in the SROs, had many opportunities to get to know and understand they aren’t just lint, these are people with histories, many of them histories that would make you lose your breakfast, and some, indistinguishable from the others, with histories that would be uncomfortably similar to yours.

The petitions want them placed “somewhere else.” Where? The people behind the petitions fear for safety, other vulnerable residents, and property values. They want them placed somewhere with enough security and supports to minimize these issues. I would like that last part too, but where would the money come from to make that happen?

Tie Dye (Photo credit: deborah.soltesz)

My left leaning, ex-too-young-to-have-been-a-real-hippie, ex-case manager, all too aware of how easy it can be to drop from the fringe to the lint-self wants to see more people placed in local SROs, campaign for donations and fight for the city to help them once they’re in. How can we not care, pretend they don’t exist? But I’m also a mom who is thinking about an escalation of violent crimes, Man Child and Nerd Child old enough and independent enough to be walking the streets on their own, and my vulnerable Flower Child.

What do you think?

Feeling Quiet

So I’ll add some new tank and critter pics, instead of blabbing.

Full Tank Shot

Torch Coral, LPS

: New friend, the pink streak wrasse

Pocillopora, sps coral

OMG OMG!!! Thank you, WordPress

The Surprised Onion Man (Photo credit: smithco)

This is a new blog, and I am a new blogger. Imagine my shock when I came home this evening to find I had an explosion of hits. First, I checked to see if something had gone awry with the spam filter. Nope. I approved and answered the pending comments, and then followed the trail on the stats page to find Going to Hell With Gasoline Drawers On had been chosen for today’s Freshly Pressed. Thank you WordPress, and thank you to all who took the time to follow the trail and check out Mrs Fringe. I hope you enjoyed, and hope you’ll come back.

On the Downhill Side

Downhill (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week I’ve been feeling as if I’m in a winding down phase. Summer isn’t over, but I know it will be soon enough. This makes me very sad, as it does every year. Kinda nutty, to live for three months a year, but I do.

The budget being what it is, we haven’t really done much with the kids. Add in time spent focused on unwell Flower Child and dying mother, and the past 7 weeks have been lost.

I’ve begun the process of cleaning out my mother’s apartment. It’s slow, she had an incredible amount of stuff packed into that tiny space. Strange, because she seemed to be the opposite of a hoarder. Why did a woman who never entertained and never cooked need enough china for 50? Also, I’m pretty sure the salt I found in the shakers belonging to that set was from 1961.

P1140885-1 (Photo credit: leechungyu)

I haven’t even begun the work of sorting through photographs. I know that will take forever. My parents weren’t big on pictures or photography, but still, it’s a lifetime. More than one, because I’m sure I’ll find the photos from my grandmother, and whatever my father had from his family. For all the purging she did, I never saw my mother throw a photo away. I get it, it feels wrong to do so, the guilt of a sin. When I first got a digital camera, the concept of the “delete” button for terrible photos took a while to sink in. Should I do it? Maybe I’m going to need four shaky, dark photos of that door knob. Is anyone looking? Yes, yes I can delete the fuzzy picture of the floor taken by one of the kids. Liberation of the digital age!

Can’t I just stay on the beach for the next three weeks? I know there are plenty of people around me who will. The problem is knowing that this gentle, mild-palpitation inducing slide downward will be full tilt careening within days. Three weeks, and I haven’t finished paperwork! Two weeks, the boys still need clothes! And shoes, and everything else. One week, where did the summer go, can’t we squeeze one fantastic splurge day out of the budget? Flower Child still hasn’t recovered from the last school year.

English: Kirnu, a steel roller coaster in Linnanmäki. Suomi: Kuva Kirnusta. Français : Les montagnes russes finlandaises Kirnu à Linnanmäki (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t do roller coasters. Ever. But if all goes well, I’ll be on the beach later today.

Dear Mama Fringe,

Mail box (Photo credit: Mark Sardella)

I hate the mail. Nothing good ever comes. Well ok, sometimes there’s a nice surprise. As email takes the place of snail mail, it’s beginning to be the same. Bills, obligations, and bad news.

Sometimes I check my email as it comes in, others, especially in the summer, I only check it once a day or so. Last night it occurred to me I hadn’t checked it all day, so I decided to throw off any chance of a decent night’s sleep by opening the inbox.

Boring back story that would be eliminated or cleverly worked in if this was a piece of fiction: I have one connection in the writing/publishing world. Perhaps it’s more of a connection to a connection, but still. This is a brilliant, well respected, well established writer. One evening we were chatting, and she offered to look at some of my work. Sure there might have been a glass or two of wine involved, but it was an offer I took her up on. I know there are many unpublished writers who work every hint of a connection like a cat working over a cockroach, but I’m not one of them. Not because of any sense of decorum, probably from fear and not wanting to ruin the original relationship in the first place.

There was a time in my life when I diligently pursued a writing career. I woke up and did some editing every morning of the previous day’s work, then wrote for at least a few hours, then spent time crafting and mailing query letters, partial submissions, etc. I belonged to a writer’s association, a critique group, and attended a few conferences. Rejection is part of writing. A big part. If you take each rejection to heart, stop now and give up. Some people find journaling is more their speed, perhaps even blogging.

I didn’t develop the courage to take myself seriously enough to take these steps until I was well into adulthood. Some might say middle aged. I had three children and a husband when it occurred to me my dreams of being a writer were never going to happen if I didn’t DO it. Writers write. And they submit. I was lucky. Many writers submit for years before seeing more than a form rejection–and if you aren’t familiar with the business, there are nuances to rejection (though not as many as new writers believe). There are form letters, form letters with an encouraging handwritten note written across the bottom, personal rejections, rejections with an “invitation” to submit other work; then there is interest, requests for partial manuscripts, hopefully followed by requests for full manuscripts, hopefully followed by an acceptance.

I received encouraging handwritten notes, personal rejections, invitations to submit other work (does everyone assume every unpublished writer has 12 other manuscripts under their bed?), requests for partials, and even requests for fulls. No acceptances, but I felt like I was getting somewhere, had some encouraging exchanges with a few agents. These were in response to a stand alone romance I had written. Definitely a romance, but off the beaten path. Publishing is a business, very, very difficult to get an agent to take a chance on one of the unwashed and unpublished. Besides the romances, I also write short stories. Not romantic at all, more gritty slice of life type things. Some might call them literary fiction, but in my head that term is linked with being a writ-aaaah. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a forty thousand year old gal from Brooklyn (and not the new, artsy Brooklyn), these are not terms I would use for myself. I submitted a few of my shorts, but no bites. I’ve heard the odds of getting published in a respected literary magazine are smaller than the odds of winning the lottery. I have no BFA, MFA, or known and respected literary workshops in my credits. I just write.

Typewriter (Photo credit: toastytreat87)

Cue the violins. I was continuing submissions and had begun work on a new manuscript. Not a romance, but a full length piece that followed the style of my short stories. Husband had surgery that didn’t go as expected, rocked my world and my confidence. My parents’ voices rang in my head, how nice, you’re writing, get a union job! Then Flower Child got sick. I was devastated. The day she was released from her first PICU stay, I found a rejection letter for a full in my mailbox. How could I care? How could I have faith in myself, my writing, and the publishing world–yanno, good-writing-trumps-all, if I couldn’t have blind faith that my daughter was going to continue breathing? I stopped submitting, and the work of writing became sporadic.

So here was this potential opportunity in front of me, and a younger, tougher me was knocking on my brain, “Remember when you used to be a person?” My friend liked and respected my work, we even had a meeting like grown ups–oh, how wonderful that felt. She passed one of my stories on to the fiction editor at a well known, high brow magazine. What if???? Friendship only goes so far, and she wouldn’t have risked her own reputation facilitating the submission if she didn’t believe the work was quality. After many months, I received a reply yesterday, seen last night.

Rejection. A nice, personal rejection that praised the writing and the story itself, but alas, she didn’t see the piece as right for the magazine.

Shit.

Orange, broken typwriter (Photo credit: paulgalipeau.com)

Sana Sana

Juvenile frog with tail (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sana sana culito de rana

Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana

For those who are unfamiliar, this is a Spanish rhyme told to children when they get a bump/bruise/small cut. Loosely translated, “heal, heal, little frog’s ass, if it doesn’t heal today, it will heal tomorrow.”

Does this make sense? I don’t know, but lots of the rhymes and songs we sing to children don’t make any sense if we take them apart (Rock a bye, baby, anyone?) It’s a silly song, intended to distract and comfort with laughter. It always worked for my kiddos, Nerd Child would ask for “sana” instead of asking for a bandaid. When he began nursery school, that was his concern. What if I get hurt? Who’s going to do sana for me? We confirmed together that one of the teachers knew the rhyme, and all was well.

Frog+ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lately, it seems to me if my Friday Night Madness buddy is Fatigue, then I am Inertia. Yanno, that fabulous vaudeville act of the Upper West Side, “Fatigue and Inertia!” “Inertia and Fatigue!”

Vaudeville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m trying. I have things, as we all do, that I force myself to do in order to motivate myself and feel better.

I get up and work out every day. Hell, I’ve done so many jackknives in the past several months it’s confusing to still see the middle aged broad looking back at me from the mirror.

Going to the beach makes me feel better. I believe I must have an unnamed chemical imbalance, that makes the salt air and salty foods give me a sense of well being. Nope, it isn’t solely the sun, my Vit D levels are fine, and lakes just don’t give me the same feeling. I try to get to the beach with Flower Child at least once a week during the summer. It helps her feel better too, part of her disorder makes her unable to sweat or self regulate her temperature, so being able to stay wet, and the (usually) constant breeze off the water is absolute joy for her.

Other things that used to be certain ways to make myself feel centered don’t work consistently anymore, like cooking, or cleaning the bathroom (I never said I wasn’t a quirky gal). Poor Husband.

I woke up today thinking how lovely it would be for someone to sing Sana to me; maybe then I would find my focus.

What do you do to counteract the blues?