The Smell of Oranges

Every year about this time I get nostalgic for California. More than usual, anyway. Spring really is the loveliest time out there. The days are warm but not summer's holy crap, I'm living on the face of the sun heat; the rains turn the hills and deserts green, the winds buffet the smog back once in a while; and best of all, the orange trees bloom.

We lived in an area very close to major orange groves and for a week or two every spring, the whole world would seem clean and dewy and smell like a feshly-cut orange. It was amazing. The winds would kick up a swirl of fragrant white petals, and to drive past the orange groves made me feel like I was cruising by trees topped with orange-scented snow.

While looking for pictures to go with this post, I stumbled upon the excellent themed collections at The UC system's Calisphere site. I experienced Internet-Induced Missing Time Syndrome and somehow lost an entire naptime while browsing those photos.

In Defense of Julie Cooper

August 7th, 2009: I have been craving a good summer TV distraction lately, and since TV largely disappoints me these days (me falling love with a show is pretty much a guarantee that it will immediately be canceled, and we have no cable except HBO) I turned to our robust DVD collection to fill the void. We love TV on DVD and buy far more of that than actual movies. One title immediately jumped out at me from the multicolored rows in the cabinet:

You know you love it.

I was skeptical of this show when it started, dismissed it as teenage fluff - which it sort of is - but got sucked in during the first season's Thanksgiving episode. Some good friends of ours also admitted to watching it, and pretty soon we had a weekly couples-date going. This was before we moved to California, before it was even on our radar, but still some of the place names were familiar to me, since I had spent part of my childhood in the Golden State. It was good, silly fun, and it is that kind of TV I turn to now, in these muggy, grouchy days of summer.

My husband and I both had an immediate loathing for the Marissa Cooper character. Part of our love for the show was mocking her mercilessly, but after a while it's like shooting fish in a barrel, really. The poor little beautiful rich girl, with her alcohol problem and her shoplifting and her stupidity and her complete inability to come out and say what she means and her passive-aggressiveness and her constant needy clinging and her total lack of anything resembling a personality. She played everything doe-eyed and dumb, but somehow found a way to make everyone's lives miserable the instant they weren't focused on her. It drove me nuts.

Her mother, however, was a different story. I loved Julie Cooper. She was exactly the sort of trash-talking, manipulative, clutching villainess you want in a soap opera about beautiful rich people. She gets her comeuppance - more than once- in some very public smackdowns, but she keeps on going. In the end you wind up rooting for her, even though you don't want to.

More than that, I have to say I respected Julie Cooper. Admired her, even. Julie's backstory had her pregnant at not-quite-18 years old with the child of one of Newport Beach's shining scions. Married very young to someone who, despite his family's good standing with the country club, was sort of a hapless ne'r-do-well unable to handle real responsibility, Julie would've found herself thrust into a world of expensive cars and vicious tongues. She was from Riverside, which, while not as big a craphole as some parts of the IE (like, um, the part that we lived in), is not necessarily a nice place to grow up (they made it pretty obvious she didn't come from the big-houses-on-the-hill part of town). So what did Julie do? At the tender age of 18, she jumped right in and clawed her way to the top of the social mountain. She became not only one of the Newpsies, but their queen. Feared far and wide, Julie could organize a charity benefit for cancer kids or shoehorn her daughter into a coture dress with equal steely-eyed determination.

I have to say, I admire that.

And she's always got such great handbags...

Not So Sunny

I'm in a bad place this (these) week (weeks). Everything I write is so melancholy and bitter. Everything I feel is so melancholy and bitter.

I am trying to focus on the good stuff: my loving husband, my beautiful baby, the fact that my little family is safe and warm and healthy. But in and around and behind those things creeps the fact that I am tired of living here. The arrangement has lost its lustre. I have never done well when I have had to live with my mother, and three continuous months of it have pushed the limits of my endurance. I am irritable and snappish these days. I grit my teeth and tap my feet. I snarl and grunt. Everything my mother does or says annoys me, it's like someone is running a cheese grater over my soul. I have to remind myself daily of all the reasons we left California. I use them like mantras. It was dirty, I chant to myself as I clench my teeth and try not to explode while my mother says for the 1,000th time that Piper is fussing because she wants her grandma. It was crowded, it was concrete ugliness and expensive trash and we hated it as I trip over a box of our clothes that's sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor because there's nowhere else to put it. Max hated his job, he was so miserable I tell myself as the box of clothes trips me a second time and I crash into a dresser, sending a cascade of our junk to the floor. I missed the rain. A stack of CD's falls behind the dresser with a clatter. We wanted our daughter to know her family.

It's not working so well these days. I am homesick for our old apartment, a place that was all ours. I am tired of sharing my baby. I am tired of nothing ever staying where I put it down, of all our posessions constantly being scooped into piles and dumped into baskets and shoved into boxes and nothing is ever where I need it to be and nothing is ever where I left it. I am homesick for the dry heat and even more so for our apartment's air conditioning, which we could turn on and set to nipple-hardening temperatures whenever we felt like it. I miss the places we used to go, even though by the time we moved I was so sick of seeing all those ugly malls and chain stores I wanted to scream. I miss the familiarity of it all, the rhythm of days that were ours for the taking.

I miss having a life of our own, seperate and far away from all this. I miss being able to try new things (like joining the Unitarian church or watching Justin Timberlake videos) without someone screeching "WHAT?!" because they don't know or understand the version of me that longs for a sense of community and would like to bring sexy back. We moved back here to be closer to our family, all of whom were so ready to love and love and love and love our little baby, but these days I wake up thinking why the fuck am I here? I want to be a continent away from these people again. I am starting to resent my husband for bringing us here, and to resent myself for not speaking out against this plan when I had the chance. I resent myself for not having fantastic job that would have allowed us to stay there. I resent California for being expensive and dirty and unsustainable; I resent Michigan for being humid and crowded with family and devoid of economic promise. I am growing morose and moody this week, I am twisting inward like a shriveled, dry tree trunk.

10 Things

10 Things I miss about California:

10. Cheap, yummy, authentic burritos.
9. People who don't freak out about "traffic," i.e. more than 3 cars on the road.
8. Having our own apartment where we can have sex, crank the A/C whenever we want, eat curry, sushi, or falafel without someone wrinkling their nose, have the baby to ourselves, sleep naked, know where all our stuff is, receive our mail, and sleep on a couch which is a real couch and selected specifically for its comfy-nap-enabling qualities and is not a loveseat specifically selected for its sleep-discouraging properties.
7. Employment.
6. Distance from our families.
5. Being able to drive an hour and see the ocean.
4. Being able to wear flip-flops 11.5 months of the year.
3. Driving on roads that are not full of giant potholes.
2. The friends we made there. They were few, but we miss them all the same.
1. The dream of California - being able to say that you live in that weird, hot, fabled place.

10 Things that make me glad we moved back to Michigan:

10. Jimmy John's, Bell's Oberon, Bilbo's Pizza, and Faygo.
9. The possibility of getting in on the ground floor of some gentrification instead of having to buy into the tail-end.
8. Watching Piper interact with her grandparents, aunts, and uncle.
7. Our friends.
6. Taking the baby outside for a bedtime walk up and down the street at 11 p.m. and feeling totally safe.
5. Summer rainstorms.
4. Going to the grocery store and not being accosted by 6 kids selling candy, 3 people with petitions, a rep from the L.A. Times, two panhandlers, and a stray dog.
3. Can now say "governor" without snickering.
2. Can reference any point in the lower peninsula of the state by pointing to a spot on my hand because this state is shaped like a giant mitten.
1. Looking at the real-estate section of the paper.

California, You Break My Heart

A couple of weeks ago, we drove the hour-ish out to Newport Beach to see a friend of Max's. Usually I don’t get along with this friend very well. I mean, we make nice conversation, but end up arguing about stupid stuff. I try to make all these highfallutin’ points about how if you’re a real fan, you’ve got to be willing to admit when something sucks and you need to maintain some objectivity or you’re a mere sheep who will wind up watching the new Star Wars trilogy while sucking down a Big-Gulp and raving about how funny Jar-Jar Binks is. Much of my ass-talking about art and artforms is lost on my husband’s friend. But Max loves this person as though they were blood brothers forged from the same unholy mold, so I try to shut the fuck up and make nice. I often get the impression that Friend doesn’t quite know what to do with me, he’s unaccustomed to a girl who talks about which actresses she’d like to sleep with and curses like a sailor. And I don’t know what to do with him, either. He has an engineering degree, he’s from the same small town Max is from, we have some TV shows that we both like. That’s about it.

This time, we did better. We managed to find some things in common. We went to Huntington Beach and walked the windy, chilly pier up and down. It was a fun outing.

Friend lives in a tiny studio apartment. He doesn’t have much stuff, mostly a few clothes, a big-ass computer (with two huge monitors), and a really big-ass television. You know, the usual trappings of an unattached guy with disposable income. We gazed around his small, just-moved-into place with envy. I think, in our hearts, we both long to live like that. Barely any stuff, able to pack up and go whenever we please. But we have a lot of stuff, and nine cats. We have school debt and car payments and will usually opt for groceries over a faster Internet connection. There are no studio apartments near the beach in our future. Which did not stop me from being filled with a terrible longing to live where Friend lives. He’s just up the hill from the beach, less than two miles. In my head I saw myself pushing an expensive, streamlined stroller full of baby those two miles and back to our tiny, uncluttered apartment. I saw myself working at a desk, doing freelance writing, and actually making enough to help with the gargantuan cost of living so near the ocean.

It was a stupid thing to imagine, stupid stupid stupid. Unchecked fantasies of a life so completely different from the one we have now are dangerous; they are insidious, creeping like vines to infiltrate the brain. They grow like cancer, and poison everything in their path. Weeks later, I still find myself drifting off to sleep lulled by these visions. I ache for this different life, this fantasy life. The longing fills my days and makes me useless to manage the life we already have.

But, truthfully, can I be fully blamed? I love it when we go out to the coast. We’ve never been in the summer, so I haven’t gotten the full-force experience of noisy, rude tourists crowding every square inch of space and crawling so far up the locals’ asses it takes the Jaws of Life to pry them out. We go in the off-season, November or February or other months when the sunlight fades fast and breezes are more chilling than welcoming. I still love it. It’s always about twenty degrees cooler there, the wind is incessant but not dry and baking like it is here. There’s little or no graffiti on the buildings there; here anything that doesn’t move for 12 hours will be covered in spray-painted scrawling. There are sidewalks everywhere, and real bike trails; it’s not like here where you’re lucky to even find a sidewalk and the drivers consider anyone on a bike a moving target. There are actual things to walk to along the sidewalks there, shops (albeit full of overpriced souvenirs and “beach wear”) and restaurants and grocery stores. We’d hardly need our car.

I build this life in my head and then idealize it. In this dream-life, we’re both the trim, athletic versions of ourselves we've always wanted to be. Our daughter is adorable in her tiny tank tops and sandals as we let her toddle about in the sand. And there I am, sipping coffee in a real cup from a local coffee house as our adorable girl slumbers in the stroller beside my table and I type furiously on my laptop. The baby and the stroller and the laptop and I walk all the way home to our tiny uncluttered apartment, and a few minutes later my husband arrives, smiling. He loves this job, which actually pays him enough to live on. Later, we turn out the lights and crack the window, then fall asleep in each other’s arms with the ocean smell wafting in.

You see? It’s poison. I ache so badly for this future that can never be. We will never have this, this simple but happy life in a beautiful place we love. At least, that's how it feels from where we are now.

While we were in Newport, I kept thinking that California is evil. Because this, this was the California all our friends are shocked we want to leave. Sandy beaches, breezes, a sense of freedom – it’s the California you see on television, the one they write songs about. It in no way resembles the place we actually live. And it broke my heart to get in our car and drive back out to the dust and sand and the terrible kids my husband tries to teach all day and the trash everywhere and graffiti covering everything. I felt so miserable as we came back to all this, miserable and trapped and filled with rage that we couldn’t have our tiny slice of the good life.