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Book: The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh
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Authors: Sandra Tsing Loh
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that has become my home, I’ve decided that everything in my household must please the eye. Also a set of four hand-painted coffee mugs. “I need something to get up for in the morning!” I exclaim. “I want a pretty mug! Not just all these dismal chipped unmatched things from all those damn public-radio pledge drives.”
On our way to Target (less depressing than CVS) to pick up persimmon-colored (and why not?) nail polish, Clare’s eye lands on a USA Today magazine. Its cover is a cheery megablast about the joys of “extreme couponing.” “Look how happy that woman looks!” Clare marvels. “Why have I never couponed? That sounds like fun. I want to start couponing!” This reminds me of how my mother used to collect Blue Chip stamps in the sixties. I share the memory: “I totally remember my mom sitting at the dining room table in the afternoons gluing those Blue Chip stamps into that neat little booklet—it seemed so deeply pleasurable. That, and her cigarette at the end of the day. In fact, I feel like I have some memory of her blissfully doing Blue Chip stamps while smoking cigarettes.” Feeling psyched, we pick up twin green plastic sleevelets that can apparently be used as coupon organizers.
Not to leap ahead here, but before we keep going, pencils up:
MENOPAUSE QUESTION
When it comes to menopause/depression tips, why do typical lists of “solutions” always look like activities one would do at a Finnish Christian work-study camp for moderately slow children? Why is it always:
Sing!
Clean out your closets!
Organize your sock drawer (you’ll be amazed at how satisfying it is)!
Take a daily walk!
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!
Cut and arrange some fresh flowers in a pretty vase!
Why don’t those lists ever have items like:
Have a pitcher of margaritas and just get fucking bombed!
YouTube until your eyes bleed to see who’s fat in a bikini!
Eat raw chocolate-chip cookie dough until you puke!
How about a heady bit of Nordstrom’s shoplifting?!
Three words: Bang a sailor!
Just asking. “One handed catch!”
I find that, by hook or by claw, my happiness project is actually working. These manic “project” activities masquerading as incredibly happy busy-ness are doing an okay job of covering up some of the day’s shifting fogs and fens of stealth guerrilla depression. Perhaps it is because my little projects give me something to focus on, like a cat distracted into hypnotically batting a paw against colorful guppies in a fishbowl, while at the same time being free of anxiety-producing deadlines, negative critiques, or yardsticks of dwindling resources. (For example, I’ve long enjoyed the tactile, deft, satisfying keyboard-smacking experience of paying my bills with Quicken, and yet no amount of colorful pie charts can mask the fact that month by month my money is draining away.) As I beaver away at my personal not-connected-to-anything-at-all-crucial to-do lists, it is like the first day of school, red apple in hand, snap of autumn, when I was young and first realized: “Yay! I am good at sitting at a desk and filling pages with neat if perhaps not always terribly meaningful handwriting! And I will get rewarded for it!” I can’t really do much about global warming, world hunger, or the deficit. Today’s problems are too large, overwhelming, and ever present, on that twenty-four-hour news cycle. You can recycle all year long, but get on a plane and in a flash your ecofootprint sprouts giant bunions. So one’s goals begin to shrink. And that passitivity on my part is rather sad. After all, my generation of females came of age in postrevolutionary times: The good fight had been fought, we had coed schools, a pro-choice society, and all avenues of personal freedoms open to us. Our generation of women was going to change the world—to feminize the power structure and workplace while giving up our subjugation at home. So why then, three decades later, are we staring in a glaze into a
On our way to Target (less depressing than CVS) to pick up persimmon-colored (and why not?) nail polish, Clare’s eye lands on a USA Today magazine. Its cover is a cheery megablast about the joys of “extreme couponing.” “Look how happy that woman looks!” Clare marvels. “Why have I never couponed? That sounds like fun. I want to start couponing!” This reminds me of how my mother used to collect Blue Chip stamps in the sixties. I share the memory: “I totally remember my mom sitting at the dining room table in the afternoons gluing those Blue Chip stamps into that neat little booklet—it seemed so deeply pleasurable. That, and her cigarette at the end of the day. In fact, I feel like I have some memory of her blissfully doing Blue Chip stamps while smoking cigarettes.” Feeling psyched, we pick up twin green plastic sleevelets that can apparently be used as coupon organizers.
Not to leap ahead here, but before we keep going, pencils up:
MENOPAUSE QUESTION
When it comes to menopause/depression tips, why do typical lists of “solutions” always look like activities one would do at a Finnish Christian work-study camp for moderately slow children? Why is it always:
Sing!
Clean out your closets!
Organize your sock drawer (you’ll be amazed at how satisfying it is)!
Take a daily walk!
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!
Cut and arrange some fresh flowers in a pretty vase!
Why don’t those lists ever have items like:
Have a pitcher of margaritas and just get fucking bombed!
YouTube until your eyes bleed to see who’s fat in a bikini!
Eat raw chocolate-chip cookie dough until you puke!
How about a heady bit of Nordstrom’s shoplifting?!
Three words: Bang a sailor!
Just asking. “One handed catch!”
I find that, by hook or by claw, my happiness project is actually working. These manic “project” activities masquerading as incredibly happy busy-ness are doing an okay job of covering up some of the day’s shifting fogs and fens of stealth guerrilla depression. Perhaps it is because my little projects give me something to focus on, like a cat distracted into hypnotically batting a paw against colorful guppies in a fishbowl, while at the same time being free of anxiety-producing deadlines, negative critiques, or yardsticks of dwindling resources. (For example, I’ve long enjoyed the tactile, deft, satisfying keyboard-smacking experience of paying my bills with Quicken, and yet no amount of colorful pie charts can mask the fact that month by month my money is draining away.) As I beaver away at my personal not-connected-to-anything-at-all-crucial to-do lists, it is like the first day of school, red apple in hand, snap of autumn, when I was young and first realized: “Yay! I am good at sitting at a desk and filling pages with neat if perhaps not always terribly meaningful handwriting! And I will get rewarded for it!” I can’t really do much about global warming, world hunger, or the deficit. Today’s problems are too large, overwhelming, and ever present, on that twenty-four-hour news cycle. You can recycle all year long, but get on a plane and in a flash your ecofootprint sprouts giant bunions. So one’s goals begin to shrink. And that passitivity on my part is rather sad. After all, my generation of females came of age in postrevolutionary times: The good fight had been fought, we had coed schools, a pro-choice society, and all avenues of personal freedoms open to us. Our generation of women was going to change the world—to feminize the power structure and workplace while giving up our subjugation at home. So why then, three decades later, are we staring in a glaze into a
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