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cosmolinguistcopeLife requires a coping strategy, undoubtedly.
verb
1 a : to maintain a contest or combat usually on even terms or with success -- used with with b : to deal with and attempt to overcome problems and difficulties -- often used with with
My brother, for instance, seems to have gone a fairly traditional route, given his age, gender and place in the world: he drinks alcohol and has sex and shoots animals and is disdainful of his family.
I, on the other hand, attempt to avoid disdain of my family by realizing that Garrison Keillor is right.
Life in rural Minnesota (like life in general) is a subject that it's so easy to get wrong, a subject that so many people are either disdainful of or sentimental about, and yet he manages to get it just right.
Last week Andrew sent me this link, saying only that it made him think of me. The first bit is about a boy who watches his 19-year-old brother fight with his parents and end up leaving their home, and I guess the theme of familial conflict could make him think of me. But at the end of a long article, which ends up being mostly about Charles Schulz and "Peanuts," I read this:
For the first time, in the months that followed, my parents’ conflicts became audible. My father came home on cool nights to complain about the house’s “chill.” My mother countered that the house wasn’t cold if you were doing housework all day. My father marched into the dining room to adjust the thermostat and dramatically point to its “Comfort Zone,” a pale-blue arc between 72 and 78 degrees. My mother said that she was so hot. And I decided, as always, not to voice my suspicion that the Comfort Zone referred to air-conditioning in the summer rather than heat in the winter. My father set the temperature at seventy-two and retreated to the den, which was situated directly above the furnace. There was a lull, and then big explosions. No matter what corner of the house I hid myself in, I could hear my father bellowing, “leave the god-damned thermostat alone!”
“Earl, I didn’t touch it!”
“You did! Again!”
“I didn’t think I even moved it, I just looked at it, I didn’t mean to change it.”
“Again! You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!”
“Well, if I did somehow change it, I’m sure I didn’t mean to. You’d be hot, too, if you worked all day in the kitchen.”
“All I ask at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the Comfort Zone.”
“Earl, it is so hot in the kitchen. You don’t know, because you’re never in here, but it is so hot.”
“The low end of the Comfort Zone! Not even the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!”
I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.
My father eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window. Like so many of his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school, he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening, my mother and I started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father’s temperature sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater’s faults, the smoke and the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him.
I love that.
I realized then that making cartoon characters out of my family (extended as much as immediate) has helped me immensely.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened—some time after I started my LiveJournal; that either helped usher in the new perspective or at least helped chronicle it—and I never thought of it in exactly those terms, but that's what I did: I made them cartoonish.
I've never quite heard that conversation about the thermostat, but I've heard so many of its cousins, between my parents and grandparents, between my aunts and my mom, between my aunts and their mom ... all of it.
It's sort of Garrison Keillor-y, too; Lake Wobegon is full of cartoons, isn't it? But the best thing about his cartoons is that they're real people. I recognize people in those stories as the people I've grown up with ... and yet still, listening to him, I marvel that anyone can really be like that.
I think one of the things I've always liked about him is that hearing him tell stories of Lake Wobegon convinced me that I'm not the only person who's noticed the absurdities of these people and this life. If his cartoons are real people, real people can be cartoons.
It makes me feel good, too, because if he sees the same things then I'm not crazy. So often when I describe what I find pathetic or silly or whatever, the people I'm telling it to seem to regard it as no big deal, nothing worth commenting. This was especially true when I was first shaking off my mundane upbringing for the company of spontaneous, weird friends: they'd do things I thought amazing and lovely, without even noticing, so often I'd stumble across moments I adored. Sometimes I'd try to tell them how much I liked whatever they'd just done, and they'd blink uncomprehendingly (or some equivalent thereof). They were just being themselves; they didn't see what was worth appreciating there.
This is how I got known as being easily amused; I started to call it that instead of saying that the people I know and the things that happen in the word are sometimes extraordinary. Really, extra-ordinary, outside "ordinary," you know?
And though I may wish to record all of those moments, I know that'll never work. We take some pictures, we write some LJ entries, but it's still not really indicative of the amount and intensity of the weird, lovely moments. (I suppose part of their allure is that they're ephemeral moments, anyway; I probably remember such things as being better than they were.)
I seem to have wandered rather far from my original point ... but that's always been the one trait of Garrison Keillor's that I'm good at emulating.
I like him for making little bits of the world seem realer and truer to me; he makes things worth celebrating without being sentimental.
People need something like the realization that the world is cartoonish; the sense of humor is necessary; it's not just "being easily amused", it might be the closest I've come to figuring out the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
But then, I never claimed to be very close to figuring that out. I'm probably way off. Still, as coping methods go, I think it's pretty good.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-10 02:36 am (UTC)I think that one of the biggest steps of moving towards adulthood and autonomy is being able to look at ones parents with honest, amused eyes. when i was little I viewed my mum and my dad with total awe, and then when I was a teenager, that faded and there was definitely some contempt and some distance and dismay. Now I think I'm getting a bit better at realiseing that although they're my family they're also just people doing their thing, and I'd rather spend my energies pbserving and understanding them than thinking about whether their behavior is 'right' or 'wrong'.
I dunno. But yes.
(but watch out for what will surely be termed my 'exasperated family christmas posts' and we'll see how far this comment stands up)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-10 06:06 am (UTC)Yes. Well said.
The concept is a simple one, but much too often overlooked and, as you say, even when someone realises this, they're probably still driven crazy by their family members at Christmas time.
But hey, it's not our fault, of course we're driven crazy! Craziness seems inherently part of family gatherings and holidays; 'twas always thus, and always thus shall be.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-10 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-10 03:02 am (UTC)Well, I suppose I have commented now and I could have left it at one word (although that would be most unlike me), perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-10 05:55 am (UTC)I (and most other LJers, I'd wager) know the feeling of enjoying someone's posts but not having anything to say or any tangible way of showing it most of the time. It sometimes leads me to make randomly effusive comments, myself ... along the lines of what I mention here, actually: telling people I think they're cool, for no real reason.
Complete therapy pills! I so love you.
(no subject)
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