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Published bi-weekly, 2 or 3 times a month

When to Say When

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 17, 2011

The first time I heard my toddler curse another driver from the backseat, I realized that our kids learn an awful lot through observation. The key word being “awful.” Whether we’re driving aggressively, snacking unhealthily, or saying, “No, sorry,” to the panhandler outside the market, our progeny are watching. They’re listening. They’re learning. It’s unnerving.

We try to model thoughtful grown-up behavior. We try to embody — or at least convincingly imitate — the people we hope our children will eventually become: Respectful and responsible, courageous and considerate. We’re even careful not to gripe (out loud) when our own parents call during dinner, because someday that will be us. We’ll be the ones phoning our kids at inopportune times, and by god, they’d better answer with smiles on their faces.

But right now, we’re facing a tough grown-up task that’s made all the tougher under our kids’ searing scrutiny: managing our aging dog’s demise.

Jasper is 15, which is a-hundred-and-ancient in dog years. The boys have never lived a day without her.

Once the energy core of the family, she’s now a fluffy but matted rug that lies against the front door and can barely be budged when we come and go. She still barks, but it’s mostly at us, since her cloudy eyes can’t always tell who we are.

She’s stone deaf. Her hips slip. She sometimes leaves messes on the floor. And we invest more each month in her pain pills than we do in our boys’ college savings.

Marriage by iChat

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 10, 2011

Got big plans for Valentine’s Day? I do. I’m hoping to get booped. Repeatedly, resplendently booped. By my husband, of course — I’m not a loose booper.

“Booping,” in our cheeky marital vernacular, means sending instant messages to one other via our computers. My spouse and I both work at home; in separate rooms, on opposite ends of our house, we cyberchat each other all day long, our Mac speakers pertly chirping with each incoming missive:

Boop! “Hi, babe.”

Boop! “Hi, back.”

Boop! “How’s work coming?”

Boop! “Slowly but slowly. U?”

Boop! “Ugh. Need. More. Coffee.”

The dialogue may seem dull and the practice pointless; if we hollered, we could hear each other, and if we opened our office doors and craned our necks, we could actually see each other. Like, in person.

But booping is actually better. It’s easy. It’s fun. And despite social scientists’ fears that quick-yak portals like iChat, Skype, and AIM spell certain doom for interpersonal relationships, booping can be deliciously — unexpectedly — intimate.

In a recent survey by Shape and Men’s Fitness magazines, the majority of male and female readers said that texting, emailing, and other forms of hi-tech chatting led them to have sex earlier in their relationships than they might have otherwise. Why? Through cyber-flirting, they felt connected.

Grief with a Side of Popcorn

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 3, 2011

Okay, I admit it. I’m a sucker for a stud on a stallion.

When it comes to kid flicks, I’ll suspend disbelief for any number of tired old tropes. I’ll endure sinister stepmothers and musical montages wherein fiercely loyal woodland creatures lead plucky-if-impossibly-thin-waisted princesses through whole new worlds of eye-twinkling wonder. Long as the theater’s dark and the popcorn’s crunchy, I’m immoderately tolerant of pixie dust, talking race cars, and other absurd cinematic conceits committed in the name of outright emotional manipulation.

Sure. I’m down with that. But there’s one stunt perpetrated by children’s movies that really cracks my glass slipper, converting me from Happy to Grumpy in a single animated scene: It’s killing off a beloved character — only to revive him miraculously, senselessly, for a happy ending.

I’m not talking about faded fairies who can only be reanimated with our earnest belief, or giant iron robots who self-reassemble after being obliterated by missiles. I’m not whining about lion kings whose voices echo through their offsprings’ ears from beyond the grave. I don’t even take issue with close calls, near deaths, or even seemingly inescapable doom; the trash-incinerator scene in Toy Story 3 was one of the most riveting things I’ve ever seen on the screen, an almost shockingly mature, dialogue-less treatise on friendship and acceptance that left my heart racing, eyes brimming.

Who Loves Jury Duty?

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 27, 2011

Continue readingWho Loves Jury Duty?

Correcting Others' Children

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 20, 2011

Thump. Thud, thud. Whack! Whack! Whack!

You’re halfway through your entrée when the child in the next booth goes all Keith Moon on your backrest.

First you ignore it. When the pounding continues, you glance over at the parents — the universal signal for, “Your child needs guidance, or restraints, and I don’t care which.”

His final blow sends petite sirah sloshing down your dry-clean-only date-night blouse, and you launch over the booth, locking eyes with Thumper.

“Sweetie,” you say between clenched teeth, “there’s a person sitting here. It’s time to stop.” Considering what you were really thinking, the comment is friendly, sensitive, and generous. It doesn’t matter, though; you could say, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” and it would still cause the drummer boy’s parents to regard you as though you’d just stabbed their musical angel with your salad fork.

My mom friends say they feel “hateful” and even “violent” when someone else — particularly a stranger — reprimands their kids. And I honestly don’t get it.

Aura You Single?

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 13, 2011

What do you wear to a meeting with a psychic? This is the mystic puzzle that plagued my soul the morning I met Pamala Oslie, a Mission Canyon resident who reads people’s auras the way fortune-tellers read palms. Auras are said to be halo-like energy fields that surround us, revealing our personalities through their various colors. Most people can’t see them; Oslie can.

“I do psychic work, clairvoyant work, mediumship,” she said. “Auras are my tool.”

She recently teamed with Santa Barbara artist and social activist Rod Lathim to create an Internet dating site that matches people based on the colors of their aura. LoveColors.com launched in September and already has thousands of members hailing from San Francisco to Sioux City to Washington, D.C., and from Ireland to Australia. A hefty chunk of the sign-ups are from Southern California.

The concept: Our aura colors correspond to personality traits. Reds are physical and sexual; Blues are loving and nurturing; Yellows are fun-loving and childlike; etc. And by whittling down the dating pool based on compatible colors/personalities, we’re more likely to find suitable companions.

I wore solid gray to meet with Oslie so as not to pollute any vivid vibes radiating from my pasty-hued winter flesh — but then, what do I know? Despite the cosmic sensibility that my name implies, I’m skeptical of woo-woo: tarot, astrology, voodoo (is voodoo woo-woo?).

Chasing the Empty 'A'

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 6, 2011

Take out a pencil. This is a test.

Which of the following best describes parents who pick up their children from school and ask,

“Hey, how’d you do on that math test?”

Attentive
Supportive
Involved
Contributing to a high-pressure academic culture that’s hurting our kids’ health without actually helping their intellect.

Yeah, take your time on this one. It’s tricky.

I thought I knew the answer. I thought I understood how to squeeze my kids through the narrow, competitive tube of American academics. But a challenging new documentary called my assumptions into question.

Created by a frustrated mother of three, Race to Nowhere aims its cameras at our pressure-cooker of a school system, where college hopefuls scramble to build dazzling transcripts only to graduate high school burned out and, ironically, unprepared.

With a sold-out screening at the Arlington Theatre on January 9, the film is getting nationwide attention. Filmmaker Vicki Abeles, a former corporate attorney on Wall Street, made the film after her seventh grade daughter was diagnosed with school-induced stress.

Well, Excuuuuuse Him!

Published by Starshine Roshell on December 16, 2010

I met Steve Martin when I was a kid. We were at a party, and I shadowed the poor guy all afternoon, waiting for him to crack me up, to slip into character. He never did.

Where was the Wild and Crazy Guy? Where was The Jerk? Where was King Tut?

Years later, he granted me an interview about his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In a dumb attempt to catch him off guard, to give my readers the Steve Martin I was sure they really wanted, I asked him if he preferred boxers or briefs. I don’t recall his good-sport answer — only that he uttered it earnestly, artlessly. It seems I’d finally located The Jerk; it was me.

It’s easy to forget that entertainers aren’t always entertaining, and that they’re deeper — and sometimes duller — than their onstage personas.

Though Martin once wore a gag arrow through his head, in real life he’s far more the reticent sophisticate of It’s Complicated than the inane pratfaller of The Pink Panther. But he’s more than those, too: He’s also a successful playwright, Grammy-winning banjo player, and avid art collector who just published a novel, An Object of Beauty, set amid New York’s high-brow art scene.

Faux Ho Ho

Published by Starshine Roshell on December 9, 2010

One word comes to mind as I watch my husband and sons scramble over our extremely pitched roof, stringing lights over the precarious edge of our home: balance.

It’s hard to find during the holidays, isn’t it? I’ve yet to master the balance between magic and madness, that elusive equilibrium between what the season should be about (family, friends, and gratitude) and what it actually, quickly becomes about (overspending, overeating, and buttoning up your coat for yet another bothersome obligation).

Heres one that no longer jingles my bells: I cannot bring myself to haul the family to a bustling parking lot, scout for the least-mangled tree, curse its $80 price tag, wrestle it into a stand, curse its asymmetry, argue about which unsightly side should face the wall, curse it for tilting, crawl underneath it to add daily water, live in fear of its flammability, and ultimately drag it, browned and battered, to the curb before vacuuming pine needles from the abused rug below.

I can’t do it. You can’t make me.

As a child, it was enchanting to have a huge, live tree in the house — no less astounding than if we’d dug a pond in the middle of the living room: How can this be? It’s magic!

Fame and (Mis)Fortune

Published by Starshine Roshell on November 25, 2010

Daily Mail: Schoolmates teased him. He was contractually bound to avoid the sun for 10 years. And heaps of money — combined with teenage naïveté — got him into trouble with the tax man. “One thing that people [say] to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood,” said Felton, who dismisses the idea as ridiculous. “You will never get those years back, and you can’t put a price on them.” Indeed, young stardom is a precarious state of being. Some actors, like Natalie Portman and Neil Patrick Harris, spin early fame into brilliant careers; others, like Lindsay Lohan and Corey Haim, spin out of control before they’re even old enough to legally see their own R-rated flicks.