Day 147: Jell-O, Forever Wobbly

Karen called me from Hawaii today, worried that I wouldn't make my deadline.
"What, you haven't even read the instructions yet?!"
Never mind that during 20 years in the newspaper business, I never missed a deadline. Neither did Karen, as I recall.
"So," she continued, "what are you going to write about?"
Jell-O, I said.
"Noooo!! I already wrote about Jell-O! I want you to write about how you can read the blog. Everyone says, 'I can't believe your mother reads the blog!' "
Well, OK, but I'm still writing about Jell-0.
"WHY?"
Because I have a different point of view.
(Brief silence.)
"Oh. You're going to make me look bad."
No, silly.
"Hmmm."

So, for openers: How can I read the blog?
Well, I don't mean to play dumb here, but what's the problem?
Potty mouth? Please. Though I did tell Karen she should save the f-word for emphasis. Constant repetition debases the coinage.
Dope? Old story, though I was surprised to learn how often. Sigh. But my guess is that Karen stoned is not all that different from Karen not stoned -- still talking, maybe just a little more slowly. I don't know for sure. She doesn't smoke around me, a delicacy I appreciate.
Sex? Being shocked that your children have sex is a lot like being shocked that your parents have sex. What, you thought YOU were the only one?
And love? As I told Karen on the night she officially "came out" (in a crowded restaurant, probably so I wouldn't shriek), love is where you find it. It's rare to find it anywhere. Don't pass it by.

I do wince at the blog's occasional howlers (a recent one: "soley"). Happily, Karen's writing is rarely flabby and never dull. Even when she's obsessing about something (or lately, someone), she has an excellent ear for what her writing sounds like. Her inner editor kicks in and she revises until her ear is satisfied.

So far, however, only one thing about the blog has really bothered me: Karen's Jell-O theory of life (Day 127).
"We're all born as different kinds of Jell-O ... When we're born, we're in a liquid state, and we're placed in a refrigerator to set ... There's no such thing as a do-over ... We only have two choices: we can either spend our lives hating the way we've set ... or we can learn to appreciate the imperfections."
This is extremely important, even if the Jell-O thing makes it sound silly. (Sorry, writers are supposed to capitalize Jell-O and use the stupid hyphen and capital O. Like Kleenex and Xerox, the word is a trademark, even though it sounds generic. And you'd never want to say, "The Gelatin Dessert Theory of Life.")

Karen arrived in the world as herself, not as a watery mixture of gelatin and food coloring. She was a good baby. She started walking and talking very early and never looked back. She loved stories. I read her Kipling's "Just So Stories" -- "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin," "The Cat Who Walked by Himself." They're exotic, wise and mesmerizing. Once you hear about "the great grey green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees," you're hooked. And: "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all creatures are alike to me."

I bought Karen picture books to show her the world. She loved dinosaurs best. She knew their names by heart at age 3 or 4. "Brontosaurus!" she would shout, pointing at its picture in her book. "Apatosaurus!" "Stegasaurus!" "Pterodactyl!"
She loved being with other kids. She loved parties. She loved ice cream and cake. She hated cleaning up her room and being an only child.

The point is, she didn't set like Jell-O in a refrigerator. She had and has a DNA set of propensities, as we all do. After that, things happen. Things change. Nothing ever sets, not permanently. Everything is dynamic. Which, when you think about it, is good news. We're not stuck with some solidified, permanent self we are powerless to change. Think of the Jell-O (if you must) as changing and wobbling all the time.

The first lines of the "Dhammapada," the sayings of the Buddha, are these: "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." Most of our thinking, of course, is not very smart. It's full of delusion, ego and grasping. But if we keep trying to think as honestly as we can, we get better at it. Our inner editors can observe carefully, see our flaws, change them, remake ourselves. It's a world of vast possibility.

Karen is the best example of this I know, her Jell-O theory notwithstanding. What is this blog but an effort to remake herself -- in front of an audience? And I'm not just talking about the dope and the fat. I see her thinking about herself and her life in new ways, always pushing, pushing, until things make more sense. I like that about her.

An early warning: Karen says that Hawaii is too wonderful for her to count Weight Watchers points there.
Makes sense to me. The weigh-in can wait.

Posted by Mom, 11:50 pm.