Effortless Effervescence

We have a vegetable garden!

Or rather, a vegetable garden BED. I haven’t planted anything yet because I think it needs a few more bags of soil. Still, I feel great about what we accomplished today *pats self on back* and worn out in a good way. It’s been a long time since I worked hard with a shovel and rake, and even longer since I wielded a power tool. I miss physical labor - not only do I get a great workout, and all the endorphins that go along with that, but at the end of the day, I have something to show for my efforts.

I’m waaaaay outside of my comfort zone with this garden. I’ve killed many plants, although I did manage to keep one alive for a year before it succumbed to neglect. The problem with plants is that they do not tell you they need food and water, as animals or children do. They just sit there quietly, getting wilty and brown and… dead. However, several of my friends have encouraged me to take another leap into the world of gardening; they look at their gardens as experiments, and don’t expect everything to go right. There’s always next year, they say. So I’m blocking out the part of my brain that says I should always have adult supervision when working with green things, and I’m plowing ahead! (Bad pun, right? I can’t believe I typed it out loud.)

Our home’s previous owners had their garden in the side yard, and though I thought the location was perfect, I wanted to downsize a bit since I’m still on the learning curve. I also wanted to build a raised bed because the soil in our yard is black clay that holds gallons of water after a short spring rain. With the help of Jon’s parents’ rototiller, we destroyed all the weeds and rotten fruit leftover in the original bed, then I came in with a rake to level the ground, and laid down the landscape timbers. Jon drilled holes in the corners for stakes, and when the frame was (mostly) secure, I filled it in with peat moss, perlite, sand, and LOTS of compost.

It looks so pretty I almost don’t want to disturb it by planting!

I think it’s particularly fitting that as soon as I finished Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, I dove into Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult. Both deal with the sticky moral challenge that parents face when they learn they’re expecting a special needs child. The former book is a memoir, bittersweet and challenging but ultimately satisfying; the latter is fiction, and left me with a bad taste in my mouth.






From the Publisher’s Weekly review of Handle With Care:

Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe’s daughter, Willow, was born with brittle bone disease, a condition that requires Charlotte to act as full-time caregiver and has strained their emotional and financial limits. Willow’s teenaged half-sister, Amelia, suffers as well, overshadowed by Willow’s needs and lost in her own adolescent turmoil. When Charlotte decides to sue for wrongful birth in order to obtain a settlement to ensure Willow’s future, the already strained family begins to implode. Not only is the defendant Charlotte’s longtime friend, but the case requires Charlotte and Sean to claim that had they known of Willow’s condition, they would have terminated the pregnancy, a statement that strikes at the core of their faith and family.

I have read maybe a half dozen books by Jodi Picoult, enough to fully appreciate all of her strengths and shortcomings as a writer. She always tackles Big Deal issues, and manages to illuminate corners of these issues that the reader likely had not considered. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people were blindsided by an epiphany while reading Picoult’s prose. I enjoy immersing myself in the lives of her characters, and I often have to remind myself to breathe as I rocket toward each books’ conclusion. However, her books are formulaic and melodramatic, so I find it entirely appropriate that two of her novels became Lifetime movies.*

Handle With Care was the first of Picoult’s books that made me angry with when I reached the end. Although I have to give Picoult props for not succumbing to the temptation to Disney her books up with Happy Endings for Everyone, I still felt that she was a little too cruel to her characters this time around. If you’re new to Picoult’s work, I’d suggest you start with one of her better works, such as Plain Truth, Picture Perfect or (my favorite) Mercy.






From the Amazon.com review of Expecting Adam:

Expecting Adam is an autobiographical tale of an academically oriented Harvard couple who conceive a baby with Down’s syndrome and decide to carry him to term. Despite everything Martha Beck and her husband John know about themselves and their belief system, when Martha gets accidentally pregnant and the fetus is discovered to have Down’s syndrome, the Becks find they cannot even consider abortion. The presence of the fetus that they each, privately, believe is a familiar being named Adam is too strong. As Martha’s terribly difficult pregnancy progresses, odd coincidences and paranormal experiences begin to occur for both Martha and John, though for months they don’t share them with each other. Martha’s pregnancy and Adam (once born) become the catalyst for tremendous life changes for the Becks.

Martha Beck’s story of her pregnancy was difficult to read at times (though, I’m sure, nowhere near as difficult as it was for her to live!) but I felt like a brand-new person, a happier, kinder, more optimistic person, when I was done. Beck doesn’t reduce her book to a preachy treatise on why she made the best damn choice when faced with a Big Deal issue. Quite the opposite - she’s honest about how much she struggled, honest about the mean, petty things she thought, honest about how mean and petty others were when they learned of her “dilemma,” and in the end, with humor and grace, she arrives exactly where she needs to be, and we’re glad to be there with her. I highly recommend this book for anyone who needs some hope and joy in their life.






Continuing on the baby theme, I’m finally reading Midwives by Chris Bohjalian, which has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for a couple of years now. Maybe my biological clock is talking to me (I am a newlywed, after all), but I am enjoying reading about birthin’ babies - the good, the bad, the messy, the beautiful.






* I have two friends that considered suicide after watching a Lifetime movie marathon. If TNT knows drama, Lifetime knows melodrama, and bad acting, and really depressing story lines. My opinion of them isn’t high, and though I feel bad for being so catty, I think Lifetime’s producers should feel bad for making such sucktastic movies. They should NOT feel bad for airing reruns of The Golden Girls, Designing Women or Will & Grace, though. Those programming choices were clearly inspired by the divine.

I’m roughly halfway through my workweek and glad of it; today should be the last of our cold weather for awhile, which makes me VERY happy. I hope you’re enjoying your Wednesday!

Random annoying thing of the day: I need new clothes. A great deal of what I own is either worn out or doesn’t fit. Although shopping is one of my favorite things to do, clothes shopping is toward the bottom of my list.

The same thing happened when I finished Expecting Adam that ALWAYS happens when I finish a book I love: I wanted to find another book to read, right away, even though I knew I might not find one I loved quite as much. My mother sent me Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult a couple of weeks ago, so I pulled that out. Jodi’s a great old standy-by; I always enjoy her books because they’re suspenseful and emotional. The only problem is they’re an incredibly easy read, and I’ll probably be done with this one in the next day or two and have to find something else to read. Perhaps I’ll check PaperBack Swap for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, since my husband and I watched the movie last night and I LOVED it.

Movie Review: No County for Old Men (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

Though my husband was pissed off at the ending (he’s of the opinion that in movies, the Bad Guy Gets Caught, and that’s that) I felt that it was incredibly satisfying. Sure, I was sad that Llewelyn Moss didn’t live happily ever after with his wife and the $2 million, but that would have been way too after-school-special-perfect-ending. I kind of nodded along in the final scenes, thinking, “Yup, we all saw that coming.”

Tommy Lee Jones was the PERFECT actor to cast as Ed Tom Bell, a sherriff who’s seen so much shit go down he’s beginning to wonder what the hell is wrong with people. What saves him from going completely mad is that he’s still able to distance himself from the crimes he’s witnessed, viewing them with mix of curiosity and astonishment. It’s probably a good thing that he retires at the end of the movie, because many more crazy assholes like Anton Chigurh might put Ed Tom in a padded room.

Speaking of Anton: it’s been a long time since a villian unsettled me as much as he did. The scene in the gas station, where he’s baiting the scared store owner while tossing peanuts into his mouth, made my skin crawl. He reminded me very much of John Doe from Seven, the craziest of all crazy scary asshole movie characters, someone whose actions made me want to say, “Stop the earth, I’m getting off, this place is nuts.”

Now back to the ending that upset my husband so much: normally I’m not a fan of having a character sum everything up for us at the end. For instance, in Mystic River, when Laura Linney was telling Sean Penn how he was a king and he protected his family and it was the right thing to do, all I could think was, “Blah blah blah shut the hell up.” The whole point of a weird, unsettling movie is for the audience to draw their own conclusions. Interpreting the meaning of the movie for the audience in the last five minutes is like selling copies of Wuthering Heights with the Cliff’s Notes stapled to the back cover.

Well, luckily, the dreams that Ed Tom expresses at the end of No Country give us just a hint at the the answer to, “What the hell was THAT all about?” I didn’t feel talked down to, I felt like I was let in on a secret. Ed Tom’s dream of his deceased father going ahead into the darkness carrying fire likely meant that Ed Tom was coming to terms with his own mortality. His father had gone ahead to prepare a place for him; perhaps Ed Tom was even thinking of the Bible verse where Jesus says he’ll prepare a home in heaven for his followers.

In the same way that his father had gone ahead of Ed Tom into the afterlife, he’d also preceded him as a law enforcement officer. I got the feeling that Ed Tom’s father had been killed in the line of duty. Perhaps Ed Tom was beginning to understand that the world wasn’t going to hell in a handbasket; rather, hell is often here on earth. Though several of the characters in the movie lamented the increase of violence and rebellion, I believe that they were only becoming more aware of human nature. And yes, it is unsettling to find that you’ve been surrounded by this darkness all along, but so were those who went before us. Thankfully, they show us a path to follow, and carry a fire to illuminate the cold dark night.

I wish more people would take the time to consider weird art, because it’s often the things we find perplexing, discomforting, even disgusting, that can teach us the most about the world and ourselves. Consider “String of Babies, holds a baby bottle upright,” Daniel Edwards’ sculpture of the media sensation dubbed Octomom. Edwards has captured Nadya Suleman’s saint-like expression perfectly, and it occurs to me as I look at her gentle Mona Lisa smile that she’s the sort of woman that makes people happy, makes them comfortable: pretty, soft-spoken, earnest. She comes across as someone who is decidedly against rocking the boat, who does everything in her power to keep the peace, who’d rather suffer torture than hurt someone’s feelings or make them mad. There is not a trace of cunning in her large, brightly shining eyes.

But rock the boat Nadya did. She’s inspired deep feelings of injustice and incredulous anger in thousands - maybe millions? - of people across the world. Amid the “how dare she” and “who they hell is paying for this” questions is a deeper, more disturbing question: “Why?” Not only why did she do this - and the theories I’ve heard range from suspicions that she’s using her children as pawns to garner fame and fortune to speculation that she has Narcissistic Personality Disorder - but why do her actions get the rest of the world so damn fired up?

I honestly don’t know. I try to maintain coolly distant attitude towards the ill-advised choices others make. “I wouldn’t do it,” I say, “but who am I to judge?” Sometimes, though, my live-and-let-live-even-if-they’re-stupider-than-mud worldview is challenged by someone whose actions are so outside the realm of what I find acceptable and understandable that I cannot help but shriek, “Are you fucking CRAZY?”

Perhaps that’s what so unsettling about “The Octomom” - her choices are so outside the norm of American culture that we regard her as a freak, a sick and dangerous person who is intent on self-destruction and cannot be trusted to care for her own children. This is surely why Edwards chose to depict her as an alien monster, cradling her tiny babies in coyly protective tentacles. She is hideous to us, and yet we can’t turn away. The irony is, of course, that Nadya seems puzzled by and only mildly concerned with the public outrage over her reproductive choices. What people think about her is nowhere near as important as, say, caring for her children. She’s got the “problem,” but we’re the ones who can’t let it go.

My goodness, I love Martha Beck. If you don’t know who she is, you probably don’t read Oprah magazine. Martha is a counselor/life coach who writes a column in Oprah’s magazine, and unlike Dr. Phil her advice actually comes across as helpful and loving. And funny! I didn’t realize how very funny she was until I last night, when I started reading her book Expecting Adam (which I just received from Paperback Swap, a totally awesome and free services for bibliophiles).

Expecting Adam is a memoir of Martha’s second pregnancy. I love memoirs - I think it’s because I’m so fond of talking about myself that I’m comforted to know that a genre of authors talking solely about themselves happens to exist. Since I want to write a full review of Expecting Adam when I’m done, I won’t give you the synopsis now, but I will say that I’m so glad I ordered this book. Don’t let Martha fool you with her self-deprecating humor: she’s one tough cookie, and incredibly intelligent. So intelligent, in fact, that she’s begun to admit that she doesn’t have all the answers, which I’ve found is usually the first step to actually learning something worthwhile.

In other Sunday news, after I have some coffee and read a bit more, I think I’ll steal my husband’s truck and go to the garden center at Lowe’s. This year I am going to attempt to Grow Things. Again. I will not be discouraged by the many plants I’ve killed in the past. I am a phoenix, I rise from the ashes of Gardening Failure. And since our dryer still isn’t working (though according to the FedEx tracking email I received yesterday, the replacement part is en route) we’ll be hauling our dirty clothes to Jon’s parents’ house at some point. We’ll have food and wine and watch NASCAR - or rather, my husband and his father will watch NASCAR. I’ll be LOLing at Martha Beck.

This weekend I watched Schindler’s List for the first time. (Yes, the very first time. I know, I know, it’s a classic, it’s amazing, I can’t believe I’ve never seen it before either!) I had a slight issue with the viewing - the DVD was one of those double-sided dealios and I assumed that each side had the whole movie on it, just in different formats (widescreen vs. full screen) so when the DVD player refused to play one side, I just flipped it over. Aaaaand the movie was over in 45 minutes and was missing some of the scenes I’d heard about from friends. I realized at the end that the first half of the movie was on the side that wouldn’t read! So I kind of watched the movie backwards, but that’s okay because I still got the gist of the story and was quite moved by the back half of the movie!

Anyway, my impressions:

• I’ve seen some very graphic archive footage from WWII, so I wasn’t necessarily shocked by the images in the movie. Appalled, yes, but all over again, because I already knew what an incredibly sad story I was going to hear. I was also scared, because I don’t think that it’s impossible for another Holocaust to happen. I think that people are easily led and make bad choices when it’s popular to do so. I think that people are afraid of and repulsed by “the other” and often justify doing horrible things to other human beings simply because they are a different race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera. In short, people have a great capacity for evil. All people. (That’s my worldview; if you choose to believe differently, good for you, but my experience and my understanding of history has led me to these conclusions.)
• I also believe that all people have a great capacity for good, and I wish more of us tapped into it. If I was in the situation Oskar Schindler was in, would I have done as much good as he did, or would I have said, “Fuck this noise, I’m getting the hell out of here while the gettin’s good”? I don’t know. I know my level of selfishness, especially in situations of life and death and extreme discomfort. All that being said, I am amazed by Schindler’s generosity toward his fellow man.
• The fact that Schindler did lots of “bad” things (black market trading, cheating on his wife) before and during his great act of kindness toward over 1,000 Jews doesn’t make me admire him any less - it makes me admire him MORE. Here’s a person who lived much of his life thinking only of himself, but who made a conscious choice to do an amazing service for others that didn’t benefit him at all - that, in fact, bankrupted him. No one knows what his motivation was, but I would like to believe that when he realized he was in a unique position to make a difference in so many lives, he felt compelled to do so because compassion lived in his heart alongside self-indulgence.



• I was fascinated by Ralph Fiennes’ character (and by Fiennes’ performance - but then I really like him as an actor), Amon Goeth. I believe Goeth is an example of what happens when a person who is predisposed to hatred and brutality is encouraged to indulge his darkest desires. As one great philosopher said, “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable;” I think many people can imagine committing a murder, and there are many people who have actually done it. Systematically eliminating a race of people, or randomly executing hundreds of people of that race, however, requires taking a GIANT step over the line of right vs. wrong and brisk walk away from it.
• Aesthetically, the film was simply lovely. I especially appreciated the limited use of color and the soundtrack.

Years ago, one of my college professors told me why she had converted to Judaism: while working as an artist on a Holocaust memorial, she talked with several Holocaust survivors and was amazed by the peace they had, despite the terrible things they had experienced. I, too, am amazed. So many of us hold on to bitterness over minor sins committed against us and miss out on the joy of living because we’re too busy being pissed off. (I speak with authority because I have a lot of experience in this area.) Perhaps it takes truly looking evil in the eye, and narrowly missing death, to appreciate life. I would prefer not to be tortured into enjoying life, so I’m taking a cue from “Schindler’s Jews” and just being grateful that I’m alive. And that there are people who do the right thing.

I’m in the process of revamping my website, and I’ve completely dumped my old blog so I can start another. So watch this space for new and (hopefully!) exciting things.

Welcome!

One of my favorite things about blogging is meeting new people from all over the world, so please feel free to say hi and tell me a little bit about yourself. Be sure to point me to your little corner of the web, so I can stop in and say hello, too.

If you’d like to contact me directly (rather than leave a public comment on my blog) you can reach me at smoochagator [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to come back again soon!

Photo credit: Acid Burns

My name is Emily; “Smoochagator” is a nickname my dad gave me when I was fourteen and my mom caught me kissing a young man on our front porch. What can I say? I’m a friendly gal, and that boy was darn cute! (Not very bright, though…) Our courtship lasted just a few months, but the nickname stuck. A decade and a half later, my father still calls me “Smooch.”

Today I live in Virginia Beach, VA with my husband (Jon), our five cats (Squeaker, Indy, Fluffy, Randall and A.C.) and our two dogs (Milo and Anastasia). I work as a graphic designer and in my spare time I love to read, write, watch movies, cook, and paint.

I named my blog “Effortless Effervescence” because I’ve been blessed with a (mostly) optimistic outlook on life and I am so grateful for that. I try to bring cheer to the people I meet in real life and on the net, but I don’t always succeed. (In fact, I have moments where I’m a real jerk.)

What will you find on this blog? Some essays, movie and book reviews, pictures of my adorable animals, comments on current events, and a lot of thoughts about God and church. After working five years as a “Missionary to America” at a local Episcopal Church, I left shortly after my pastor was fired for illegal and immoral conduct. Working behind-the-scenes at church and being a victim of spiritual abuse did a number on my heart and soul, but I have been slowly healing and I certainly learned a lot from the experience. Most of all, I learned that I’m not always right (and that’s okay!) but God is always good.

Thanks for stopping by - I hope you enjoy yourself! Please take a minute to sign the guestbook; I’d like to know all about YOU! If you’d like to contact me directly (rather than leave a public comment on my blog) you can reach me at smoochagator [at] gmail [dot] com.

Photo credit: Carolyn Juanita Foster