BunnyBlinks

My sister, singing along to Akon while driving my nephew home from school:

That girl is so dangerous. That girl is so dangerous. That girl is a bad girl. I’ve seen her type before.

My nephew, inquiring with surprising innocence:

I don’t get it, Mom. What could be so dangerous about the way she types?

A rough week at work led to a short break for daydreaming toward the end of my shift tonight. Recently, daydreams tend toward thoughts about my mom, who died last month. Tonight’s catalyst was “Manuela,”  the name of the woman on the other end of the phone.

Enter (brain right) another “Manuela,” this one played by Cecilia Roth in Almodovar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Toward the end of the film Manuela comes face-to-face with Lola, the baby daddy (now baby mami — it’s Almodovar, after all) of their son, who dies near the beginning of the film, so I can skip the spoiler alert.

Lola’s past actions and Manuela’s pain have led us to expect a confrontation marked by anger, rage, and hatred. Instead, there is calm, peace, and acceptance, although not reconciliation, since there is nothing to reconcile.

Anger is an abandoned possibility. Manuela would not choose to hate, and she understands that a person must decide to be angry. Anger, she has learned, does nothing for those you love, including (especially?) your own damn self.

Back to the then present moment, I opened up a web-browser to check my Facebook newsfeed. Cabby Dave had written a thoughtful post, “A Dishonorable Man,” about an easy target for the Madison Left, Dick Cheney. Scanning  the post’s comments, I jumped to the words of Rebecca, my friend, life coach, and coworker:

Wishing an asshole like Cheney dead does, in fact, commit spiritual violence, which is why it’s a self defeating wish that plunges the wisher into his world. Not a world I want to be part of.

Whereas pain can be inflicted,  anger is an emotional state we enter by choice, usually but not always a bad one. My job is filled with moments where understanding this can make the difference between comfort and exasperation.

My own mother, however, would have freely admitted she did not teach me this lesson. She would sometimes revel in her anger, refining it to a point whereupon she was clearly having fun, such as that time when out of nowhere and with great pride she announced during her last Thanksgiving dinner that she hoped Rick Santorum would someday “get caught fucking his cat.” (I think he preferred talking about “man on dog,” but whatever.) My mother was more like Manuela’s friend Agrado, who ruffled her costumes until they were real. She had fun faking it til she was making it, having learned to love it by the time she succeeded.

My 10-year-old nephew reports that my 66-year-old dad has announced plans to patent the video game “Tuba Hero.”

According to my nephew, what’s truly funny about this pronouncement is that he can’t tell if his grandpa is joking.

In other tangentially guitar-hero related news, my 7-year-old niece is working on a re-write of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” The little I’ve heard so far sounds promising: “He’s smelling us all with the nose …… of the Tiger!”

I’ve never been to Iowa. A couple of Bunnyblinks readers live there, and a few of my Madison friends are Hawkeyes (although they’re the sort of Hawkeyes who don’t generally identify with team mascots).  That said, I realize that my never having been to Iowa might not be a big deal to many of you. It is.

I’ll admit I’ve always been attracted to the state. Maybe it’s Harkin. Maybe it’s that I’m a political junkie. As a kid, I remember admiring its eastern bump — the one Dubuque sits atop, shaped by the Mississippi River on Iowa’s border. But to this day, I’ve never set foot there. Why?

It was a matter of pride. The fact that one of the five United States I haven’t been to borders Wisconsin should tell you something about the extent of my grudge, which began when I was a kid. (I think I’d only been to, say, 27 states at the time the seeds of this grudge were planted). My parents loved subjecting us to road trips, which I’m sure I’ll finally be grateful for in three more years or so. On one trip (not, obviously, to Iowa), Mom was passing the time with one of her well-worn routines, slowly naming and counting each of the states she, Dad, my sister, and I had been to.  She never lost count, nor did she ever seem to mind that we weren’t paying attention until, toward list’s end, she would invariably point out that my sister and I would’ve been tied at 27, but — gasp! — she’d been to Iowa and I hadn’t. Sure, she was only a baby at the time, riding behind Mom and Dad on the green Plymouth back-seat floor in those old-timey pre-car-seat days. I didn’t care.

At least that’s what I convinced myself. Today, I live some 80 miles from Iowa, as I have for over a decade, but that hasn’t broken my decades-long streak of expending lots of energy not caring that I haven’t been there (although most of this energy, I’ll admit, has been channeled into no more than a few dramatic moments).  Once I even drove to the river, waved across in the general direction of Iowa’s bump at any Iowan who might see me,  only to turn the car around and head home. True story.

When I read yesterday’s news, I knew it was time to call off the boycott. I’ll admit, Iowa was never all that bad. Still, it’s high time for a road trip. It’s the least I can do. No hard feelings?