Fashion: Spring 2009

That's Michelle on the cover of Vogue. The caption:
THE FIRST LADY THE WORLD'S BEEN WAITING FOR. Can't wait to read the story.

Well, the country may be a mess, the world staggering in recession, but let me tell you. The spring clothes in Vogue! OMG! We haven't seen a more beautiful collection in a decade, maybe several decades.

The fabrics, the lines, simply indescribable. It's the March 2009 issue, so if you're not skin-phobic*, take a peak. Leaf through it. Lovely.

I informed FD about the spring fashions, told him that this is really exciting, it really is, and although it's unlikely anyone can really afford to buy anything, and many of the models (meaning the clothes) this year show a ton of skin, our lives will be immeasurably better, very soon, just knowing that there are beautiful duds in the world in which people who are privileged still spend money.

#4 Son walks into the kitchen during my soliloquy.

"What shows a ton of skin?"

therapydoc

*Many cultures really frown upon semi-nudity and exposure of the skin outside of the bedroom. I'm not making a comment here one way or another, just warning that if you have these more modest sensitivities, Vogue is not for you. I blush, seriously, what can I say.

It Never Rains in California

Every time I visit the kids and we hug goodbye, it breaks me up.

Last night I took a red-eye from Los Angeles to Chicago so I could see Sunday appointments as usual. FD stayed on a half day more because he hadn't joined me in L.A. in December when I ran away for a long weekend with the first degrees. So he needed a little more time to get his fill.

We were in Miami only a few short weeks ago for barely a weekend to see the other side of the sandwich, my parents. It's hard saying goodbye to them, too.

If you know me by now, then you know I like life uneventful. I'm not so big on excitement. I like things to happen on time, people to be accountable, and days to unfold as predicted, within reason. So yeah, I get disappointed a lot.

But do you remember that song about rain in California? It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn ya'. It pours, man it pours. . .

I got off that plane Thursday afternoon and dragged my beat-up carry-on outside to the curb where FD would be pulling up any minute with my grandsons in a rented PT Cruiser (a funny looking car that reminds me of the old Pacers, if any of you remember those). He hadn't rented it. Empath Daught's car was in the shop.

And sure. It's drizzling.

In a couple of minutes I see my grandsons making faces at me from the windows of that funny-looking red Pacer wanna' be. I pile in with my stuff and contort those uncomfortable greetings you ply when you're in the front seat and the people you're dying to hug are in the back seat. (FD is all business when he's driving airport traffic, no hugging him).

Within minutes the boys, 3 and 5, decide to be thirsty. This is a state of being for little kids. It's one of those binomial things. They're either hungry or they're thirsty when in an automobile. With adults it's all about the bathroom.

I whip out my phone to call Rac to set up a time to see my granddaughter, another thing necessary to keep me whole.

OMG, Rac cries. It's POURING here. POURING.

Sigh.

This is an event in Los Angeles, pouring. Not on the order of an earthquake, but it's huge. Rain is still unusual. There aren't any basements to flood, so it's hard for some of us to be truly empathetic, but they do have mud-slides and no one seems to know quite how to drive. Can I take the canyon? Dare I take the canyon?

We swing over to the K-Mart to buy a bottle of water and some cups to hydrate the boys. And a package of Tupperware. I had a bunch of small gifts, plastic frogs, bugs, that sort of thing, and want to prevent Empath Daught from stepping on them for days on end if I don't supply the containers. And I can't bare to see them strewn around in a morass of toys in the toybox. The boys actually take care of their toys if they have a method. I find this true of most kids.

The bottle of water, of course, is too warm.

We pick up Empath Daught, and as always, I'm overwhelmed at how well she looks. She could have walked out of Vogue. I say as much and she says, Well, you know how it is. I look kind of young, so if I wear anything but a nice, tailored look, they don't take me seriously at work. They treat me like I'm sixteen.

She's not sixteen. So although every other designer in Los Angeles works in jeans, sweats, or pajamas, my kid does not. She's dressed. And yes, given the chance, she's dressing me, too.

We have a great weekend and the sun comes out on Saturday for about 3 hours. I see the whole thing. The kids play all kinds of games outside (in January!) despite my insistance that these are not appropriate games. They like games like Hit the Orange with the Baseball Bat, Smash the Orange on the Side-walk With Your Shoe, and Whack the Tangarine on the Tree. Let's not forget Putt the Lemon. (Sure, I exaggerate. They only smashed two juice oranges with their shoes on the sidewalk and whiffed at the ones on the trees, missing completely.)

By Saturday evening the boys are worn out and my granddaughter blissfully exhausted. My son has scored some Garth Brooks tickets (GARTH!) for Rac, his deeply Southern spouse, who simply can't wait to get their little girl to bed so that she can get ready to see the true love of her life. I can hardly hug Rac goodby since The Controller has those little arms clinging tightly to her neck.

And it has started to rain again.

Y, my son-in-law, asks if I mind if he takes me to the airport. Do I have any special need for E-Daught to make that run? The weather's SO bad. Or FD, perhaps? Do I want FD to drive me?

No, Y. Any time to talk with you is a good time. The plane's delayed. After all, it is RAINING. The kids are in bed, so the four of us eat our fifty-seventh snack of the day, moussaka and Parmesan, you can't have too much of that, and gradually wind down the visit. When it's time to go, I hug my daughter goodbye.

FD catches the mist in my eyes. She hugs hard and well, one of those amazingly satisfying hugs you get when you've been apart too long and you're not sure, really, when you'll hug again. FD asks me for the third time if I have my boarding pass and my driver's license, and why am I taking this red-eye flight, anyway, past midnight?

Y takes me to the airport and repeats, at least a dozen times, I've never had to drive in this much rain before. I'm so glad your daughter didn't drive you.

Me, too. She should get some special time with her daddy. I think of the two of them together, the boys asleep, and feel good.

The flight's really late, of course. How could a flight crew possibly find their way to the airport in this weather, and so late at night at that? I'm sitting at the gate typing away at something and I hear my name called over the loud speaker.

There's this mixture of excitement and fear when that happens, you know.

I gather my stuff. They want me to change seats so a child can sit with her mother. Sure, I say. What am I supposed to say, No? Then I correct myself. Uh, how far back, um, am I going?

You still have your window seat and you're moving up a couple of rows, actually.

Actually, I'm sitting behind a crying baby and am effectively blocked from ever leaving my freezing seat at the window because two enormous men in blue jeans from Oklahoma are in Seats C and D.

I smile at them and remind myself that I'm flying a red-eye to see the Big Dipper from the window of Row 8, and to catch a sunrise peaking over a sleeping, yet dazzlingly lit major metropolitan city. And I want to see my usual Sunday morning suspects-- on time.

Despite the crying baby I'm asleep within minutes and wake up only to catch a glimpse of those stars (you can touch them), then go back to sleep. But before I do that, I think back on that goodbye in the valley.

It wasn't always like this. No trouble saying goodbye when they left for summer camp. No trouble when they left for Israel straight out of high school for a year, or two, or three of seminary/yeshiva. We visited.

No trouble when they left for college, and not all that much, really, when they married. As long as one was around things were okay.

And now we have two, perhaps soon, even more. So why now?

Oh, who are we kidding? It's not a now thing. But as I age, it does seem that I'm getting a little more vulnerable, a little more emotionally reactive. I know I've seen the phenomenon in my practice with other people, patients, even colleagues. Especially colleagues! But nobody ever warned me about it, really. I don't think I read anything about it in a textbook or a journal, and it seems that I never needed to know about this, particularly.

Am I generalizing?

So I did a little research. It seems that older people are actually happy. As we age, we have to learn to regulate our emotions. It's that or feel totally out of control. Our social circles get smaller and smaller (attrition) and we value the relationships we've got. So we either (1) reappraise the situations that make us angry, anxious or depressed (the stuff of cognitive therapy minus the expense of professionals) OR we (2) suppress the thoughts that bring us down.

Suppression is thought to be the least optimal solution, and is associated with memory loss, something none of us even want to think about.

All of this emotional work begins in late-middle age, supposedly.

I'm supposed to be getting a grip on my emotional reactivity. On the other hand, what if I like it? What if I think it's rich? What then?

My guess is that those of you with small children don't have to worry about this stuff for quite awhile. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Tonight I picked up FD at Ohare, Terminal 3, Baggage Claim 6. We took off our coats and he looked at my sweater a little curiously, a sweater that our daughter had insisted I wear home.

It looks so GOOD on you, she said, But it needs a good cleaning. Do you ever wear the white jacket I gave you?

Wore it all the time in Miami.

Good. Take this sweater. Please.

Honey, I don't need it.

Take it, please. Just take it. Besides, you paid for it.

Huh?

Sure. When I lived in New York, remember how I bought all those clothes, just charged them to your credit card? You were so nice to let me do that. This is one of the sweaters I bought when I was away at college.

You never spent that much. You bought this while you were at Parsons?

Uh, huh! And it's perfect for you. Tell them to get those little fuzzy things off, those pills, at the cleaners. They can do that, you know.

See? Things do have a way of coming home again.

therapydoc

THIS is love?

I had an associate professor who didn't particularly like me. He taught Research 540 (I think that was the number, could be wrong) first semester, first year, first research course on the way to that Ph.D.

Most of the docs-to-be in my cohort bucked to become either full-time academics, grant writers, or social service agency directors. He knew I'd probably shirk all that, continue to do what I do best, maybe charge a few dollars more.

In the end, ironically, I did continue on to teach and do research, if not full time, and had an offer to direct a social service agency.

Anyway, the first day of class we tossed around dissertation ideas. The doc encouraged us to fantasize about things we wanted to study. I naively suggested Internet Addictions, explaining that I had been treating a woman who had an obsession with chat rooms. At that time what she did was called "hot chat." Her spouse didn't approve.

He chuckled at my expense (embarrassment).

"And how would you propose to get your data for that," he laughed. "How would you get a sample?"

Ha, ha, ha.

I crawled back into myself and didn't say much for the rest of the semester.

So imagine my not surprise reading Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? a Friday Weekend Journal feature by Alexandra Alter.

This man is Ric Hoogestraat and he spends 12-18 hours a day on-line in a virtual video world, Second Life. There he has a virtual wife and a virtual job. He goes to virtual parties and has virtual sex. He is strong, handsome, viral. He is Someone.

And his real time marriage is in pieces. His wife attends a support group for women who have lost their spouses to video games.

Some 30 million people are involved in these virtual worlds. Their avatars, computer generated cartoon likenesses of themselves, are living the good life in a "better" world.

Ms. Alter tells us that according to researchers at the University of Washington, the brain doesn't distinguish between virtual reality and reality. Processing stimulation from a computer screen (virtual reality) is the same as processing real sensory data. Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University, says that the social dynamics of virtual relationships mirror real life. "People feel bad when something bad happens to their avatar."

Yes. This certainly explains our compulsion to run to the computer or check our Blackberries fifteen times a day. It explains why 30 million people create cartoon alter egos on-line and are willing to live vicariously through them, interacting socially with other cartoons. We feel badly for our on-line friends and creations, we feel good for them. They make us happy, they make us sad.

And the data seems to indicate that we can't tell the difference between our virtual lives (or those of our virtual creations) and our real lives.

Well let's try to think critically for a moment, please. I for one, can tell the difference, and think you can, too.

If I couldn't then I'd have to believe that 30 million people really, really are at risk, marriages are in the toilet, parents, siblings and friends are shut out, virtual relationships are ascendant, more real and important than the flesh and blood creatures who share our bathrooms.

For sure there are such things as Internet addictions. The Chinese take kids from their homes and put them in isolated treatment for this. Kids are skipping school to play on line. I've seen it in my practice.

Games aren't for children. And they're probably dysfunctional in a lot of adult relationships

But let's think. I'm going to object with the U of W findings, provisionally, and hypothesize that most adults who have lives on line do know the difference between virtual reality and reality, and propose alternatively that we choose, believe it or not, reality. We do choose Life.

Still I have to wonder, sometimes, where our loyalties really lie. Our friends wonder, too.

Like I've worried that my real friends are jealous of my Internet relationships. (They're not). Or if FD, perhaps, wonders if I'm carrying on with one of my readers in some gathering place in the sky.

Oh dear.

Were it not for the fact that the better sensory data isn't available on-line, he might have cause to worry. A computer screen is only marginally stimulating compared to other sensory input.

Sex therapists encourage sensate therapy for that reason. We believe that most sexual problems are curable by couple work that re-establishes connections between the body and the brain. It's recommended you enhance ALL of your senses if you're having difficulty with arousal.

As a therapist I recommend enhancing sensual stimulation for all kinds of disorders, not just sexual ones. What is aroma therapy all about, anyway? Or art therapy?

How do you do that? Try playing around with . . .

the sense of smell (rose petals, perfumes, Bvlgari if you're me),

the sense of taste (apples or apricots, chocolate, but it's your call),

the sense of touch (tell him/her for crying out loud, what feels good),

the sense of hearing (music or chirping birds on a window sill)

and the sense of sight (your choice, of course, perhaps take a look at a decent art history book or show someone your In Style, Vogue, or W).

Or dress up and go out and accomplish all five.

I'm sure that what people see on line, including virtual games can be really, really good, unbelievably entertaining, and for sure emotionally satisfying.

I don't play the games, but I'm sure they distract nicely from hum drum every day life. But you can't touch the people behind your screen. You can't smell your avatar's cologne (not yet).

So I don't think they're a threat to most of us sentient types.

I recently went to I-Tunes to download a song for a mix. I couldn't remember the name of the song and had no idea who did it, but it went something like this. . . far away for far too long. Must've been 200 songs with that lyric and I-Tunes gave up on me.

So I Googled the lyric and found a music video on YouTube with avatars, or perhaps they were only cartoons. It was fantastic. I'd never seen anything like it, visually (I live a sheltered life). Mickey Mouse and these romantic/beautiful cartoons all interacted in a virtual StarWars/Gilligans's Island music video and I said to myself, "THIS is what the kids are talking about. THIS is what's so appealing about the new graphics on the Internet. I get it."

Except I can't smell it. I can't taste it. I can't feel it. The music and visuals are nice, though. But like television, all they do is say, Gotcha'. Your computer snags only 2 of the 5 senses.

Another good dissertation for a young therapy-doc-to-be is how imagination IS the 6th sense. That would still net only make 3 out of 6 senses though for on-screen stimulation.

Our brains are SENSORY PROCESSORS. They are capable of processing ALL of the five senses. And it's true that what you don't use, you lose. And I think most of us want to use them. It's why we shop.

As good as you make him, you can't smell an avatar. You can't touch him.

And virtual friends? We can't stand in line with them at the movies, we can't kvetch about our portions at a restaurant, and we can't get an opinion on new shoes. Not really.

I'm loyal to you readers. I seriously get all warm and fuzzy and just love it when you comment, don't care what you say. I love the virtual relationship thing and surely you "read me." The definition of that expression may be grounded in our blogging culture.

But will blogging ever be better than dinner out with the girls? Come on.

I can look at pics on blogs, but the eyes will never look back. We're not sharing real tears (okay, sometimes we do, I take that back). But at the end of the day, how really satisfying is it?

And is there anything on the Internet more interesting, attractive, exciting or seductive than your guy's hands on your trapezius, deltoids, supraspinatus (shoulders), squeezing them just right, and saying, "How about you and me go to bed early and read until we fall asleep?"

That's love, Mr. Hoogestraat. Get out of Second Life. Go back to your wife and get a first.

respectfully,

therapydoc

Children's Books, Mannies, and Waiting Rooms

I'm not stretching it when I say I've probably read thousands of children's books. My feeling is that children are unmanageable, well let's say difficult, until they can read for themselves, so why not read to them?

It's not about getting them into pre-pre-school. Many times I just looked at the pictures of children's book and made stuff up, like you probably do when you're too tired to read to your kids.

Not that I bought thousands of children's books, but I read over and over again the ones that I did buy . The survivors are pretty well worn. But we have some new ones, some of them pop-up books, those 3-dimensional books where the beak of a bird pops out at the kid like a . . .beak.

We have occasional new copies of older books, the ones that came out in the 80's, mostly.

But I have to ask you. Can you really stand the Berenstain Bears? I can't. Maybe it's the color of Mama Bear. I just hate that blue. Or her hat.

The Dr. Seuss books are fine, yes, of course, who doesn't love Dr. Seuss, and The Places You'll Go makes me cry. I recently I read a book my son B bought for my grandson E, maybe it's new, Carl's Masquerade by Alexandra Day. The book is so totally delightful that I really could read it a thousand times. The dog is the babysitter.

There are books that simply make us so happy, like anything illustrated by Steven Kellogg. My favorite is Margaret Mahy's The Boy Who Was Followed Home. I just love that book where the hippos follow Robert home. Much Bigger Than Martin is pretty fabulous, too.

So when I had my not so proverbial 16 month (K"H) granddaughter on my knee last week I had to make a decision. Do we read a book with cardboard pages and pop-outs that she'll surely rip right off and stick in her mouth, or do we go with Vogue?

We went with Vogue.

She likes clothes, so why not? I shielded her from the looks on the more lascivious models when I had to. Is it really the only way to sell magazines? Do men actually buy magazines like Vogue for the soft porn?

I get Vogue ostensibly for the waiting room, but it comes to my home. There's a good reason. If I had it delivered to the office, then I'd have to shlep it home to read it. There's no time at work for leafing through magazines. This way Vogue stays where it belongs in that pile on my bedroom floor until I get in the mood to read it, move it or recycle it.

Nobody waits for me long enough at the office to need much reading material anyway. We have an understanding about time that transcends the need for props other than the 'zines the other therapy doc's have provided for the waiting room, Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, circa 1980's.

I used to keep WE (a hot softly pornographic fashion magazine) in the waiting room until a 7-year old boy saw a model in her underwear and grabbed it and wouldn't let go. His mother was not pleased.

That ended that.

So little HH and I went through the silky summer clothes in Vogue as she fidgeted and tore at the pages. She hopped off my lap just as I got to About a Boy, a short piece by Holly Peterson (great) about mannies. I wondered if Holly had any problems using that title since chick lit writer Nick Hornby (How to Be Good, High Fidelity, About a Boy) did so well with it.

That guy's sold screen plays with his chick lit. He'd know about mannies, probably.

Oh you want to know about mannies. I did, too. This passed me by, this manny phenomenon, although we did use a couple of guys and dozens of adolescent girls for babysitters when we had the twins and M came so close on their heels. Keeping an eye on the sitters, their genders, and the vodka was difficult.

Things tended to disappear but I appreciated that the boy baby-sitters could keep up with my little ones in a way that the girls could not.

The testosterone and energy in our house used to make me dizzy, especially after adding two more little guys years later (4 years between them following the bonanza) . But to a guy, even a locker room isn't a challenge.

A manny is basically a guy nanny, really a governor, preferably a surfer or an ex-camp counselor who can gently but firmly keep little kids in line yet work them to the point of exhaustion and still get them fed, maybe bathed, before mom gets home.

Well, I added that; Ms. Peterson didn't mention bathing or feeding. That's a nanny job.

People have both, mannies AND nannies.

The manny will teach your son to play like a guy plays (that's good I hear) and because he's strong can grab the little fellow when he's being mischievous, raise him firmly to eye level, give him that watch it if you know what's good for you look, and the little tyke is putty in his hands. He learns behavioral and emotional control toute de suite or suffers unimaginable consequences.

And apparently the manny can be easy on the eyes, too.

But between you and me?

I'd get serious references, here. (Not that you wouldn't with the girls, of course.)

copyright 2007, therapydoc