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Starshine Roshell Posts

Thank-You Notes

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 27, 2011

Circumcision. Gay marriage. Immigration. There are a handful of subjects so controversial, so likely to propel people into disparate, dueling factions, that one dare not even broach them in mixed company.

They’re surefire feud igniters. They’re quarrel kindling.

Who knew thank-you notes were among them?

With the holidays approaching, I asked some friends what they think of thank-you notes — those customary expressions of gratitude scribbled, stamped, and sent by refined recipients of thoughtful gifts and generous gestures — and I was surprised to find people staunchly divided on the value of these mannerly missives.

Some insisted that thank-you notes are gracious, timeless, and classy. Others declared them outdated and meaningless. And the fight was on.

“I am dumbfounded at the numbers of people who think they don’t need to acknowledge a gift, or who think an email suffices,” said a woman who wouldn’t let her kids use any gift until they had written a thank-you note for it.

“Better to look someone in the eyeballs and say a sincere ‘thank you’ than to go through that paper-wasting ordeal,” argued another mom.

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Population Seriously Scary

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 20, 2011

There are few things that scare me in this world. Ghosts? Meh. Vampires? Yawn. Zombies? Bring it. But this Halloween, something truly terrifying will take place. On October 31, the world population is expected to hit 7 billion. Seven BILLION humans will walk, crawl, and limp across this Earth — many of them doing the “Thriller” dance, actually — before the night is over.

The planet’s population has nearly doubled in my own lifetime, and experts say it will reach 10 billion (for visual learners, that’s one zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero) by century’s end.

When you read that, does your stomach knot? Does your chest tighten as you fight the urge to panic? I had that reaction yesterday in my bathroom. In the morning, I noticed an ant on the floor and barely took notice. A few hours later, three ants were circling the sink; I was concerned. By nightfall, a swarm of black specks was scurrying across the counter. Maybe 100 of them, maybe 1,000. I didn’t know where they had come from or why they were suddenly crowding my very personal space. But I freaked the flip out.

It’s too many, my mind shrieked. They’re after my stuff. It’s kill or be crawled on …. BLECHH! I howled for the man of the house to bring a bottle of blue Windex (has to be the blue kind) and stop the madness with a few well-aimed squirts.

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Gift Wrap This

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 13, 2011

I’m not what you’d call a natural salesman. Having never worked in retail, and rarely even hosted a yard sale, I’m uncomfortable pawning merch onto other people. My idea of a solid marketing pitch: “Hey … you don’t want one of these, do you?”

Yet in 15 combined years of my children’s schooling, I’ve hawked enough nearly useless junk to fill a 3rd-grade classroom. And not one of the tiny portable ones either: a huge classroom, like the kind we used to have before schools were penniless and begging for bucks.

Sucked into countless school fundraiser sales — whining and grumbling all the while — I’ve slung chocolates and coffee. I’ve moved magazines, pushed potted poinsettias, and hustled gift wrap. I’ve hit up friends, trapped neighbors, and pleaded with long-since-tapped-out family members to buy muffin tins and scented candles and macadamia nuts.

I’ve done it for two reasons: to funnel field-trip/assembly/art/lab money to our sickeningly cash-strapped schools, and so that PTA moms don’t mutter “slacker” when I skitter past them, hoping to avoid being tapped to work the clean-up shift at the scrapbooking booth. (I will write a check for \$100 right this instant if you promise never to make me scrape craft glue off of someone’s decorative scissors.)

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Spousal Grousing

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 6, 2011

Standing at the altar, everything looks easy. The groom is impeccably groomed, flashing his best manners, and, while he may very well be thinking about the game, his eyes are on you. A decade later, though — when the caterer’s gone, the finery is shelved, and you’re deep in the bog of intimate cohabitation — spousehood can begin to chafe. And grate. And rankle.

Even if you have the best husband in the solar system — in fact, you don’t, because I do — you might be surprised to discover that he has an infantile fear of ants, an unnerving fancy for circus posters, and an inability to smell rotting trash from two lousy paces.

The truth is you never really know someone ’til you’ve shared a toothbrush-holder with him. Since the day we said “I do,” I’ve learned countless surprising things about my husband. I always knew that he’d never intentionally hurt my feelings — but I didn’t know how often he’d do it unintentionally by failing to notice a haircut or ask me, “What did the doctor say?” And I could never have guessed that the attentive boyfriend who made an embarrassing fuss over my half-birthday would become the distracted husband who asks, “It’s Mother’s Day? Again?!”

From wifely gripes like these springs Santa Barbara author Jenna McCarthy’s new book, If It Was Easy, They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon: Living With and Loving the TV-Addicted, Sex-Obsessed, Not-So-Handy Man You Married.

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Uptight Texter

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 29, 2011

I’m no stickler for rules — at least, not most of them. I’ve always favored whimsy, irreverence, and originality over propriety, decorum, and tradition. I’m the mom who lets my kids run naked in the front yard, sneaks massive snack sacks into movie theaters under my shirt, and is proud to demonstrate my belching skills at the dinner table. As I type this, I’m staring at a recent moving-violation ticket for rolling through a stop sign (I’m sorry, but some rules just beg to be broken).

Why, then, do I find myself stiffly — stubbornly — adhering to fusty old spelling and grammar rules when I’m texting my tech-savvy 8th grader?

I can’t fire off a “Heads up: I’m running a few minutes late,” or bang out a “How did you do on today’s geometry test?” without spelling out every word in its inconvenient entirety, and punctuating each trivial missive impeccably. Regardless of the rush I’m in — or my hair-tearing frustration over the diabolically obscured tilde and discriminatory lack of an em dash on my phone’s treacherously tiny keypad — I’m incapable of embracing the medium’s abbreviated style and typing “c u \@home in 10”.

Not to my son.

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Sex Strikes

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 22, 2011

Sometimes you just have to use what you’ve got. When Liberia’s 14-year civil war tore her family and native country apart, mother-of-six Leymah Gbowee organized a women’s peace movement. She led sit-ins. She led pickets. And when all else failed, she launched a sex strike.

“What does it take to make those who fight listen to reason?” she asks in her new memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. “As a woman, you have the power to deny a man something he wants until the other men stop what they are doing.”

Widowed and raped and too often ignored by war, women have the highest stake in it, argues Gbowee, who’ll discuss her book at a free event Sunday, October 2, at 4 p.m. at UCSB’s Campbell Hall.

It’s fascinating to view political unrest from the explicit point of view of mothers, daughters, wives, and lovers. The juxtaposition of the battlefield and the marital bed is startling (one pictures pent-up heads of state imploring stubborn sweatpants-sporting wives for sump’n sump’n). But if tenderness is the opposite of violence, then perhaps shutting down the ole shag factory is a reasonable whack at peace.

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I'm Gluten-Free Vegan-Intolerant

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 8, 2011

If you really are what you eat, then everyone I know is nuts. You can’t lob a legume through a restaurant these days without hitting someone on a fussy — and fairly freaky — diet.

Gluten-free. Dairy-free. Sugar-free. Wheatless and meatless, pescetarian and Paleolithic, macrobiotic and Master Cleansed. And for heat’s sake, raw.

As nutritionists analyze our diets to bits, as they break down every edible ounce into shockingly potent micro-ingredients, ascribing common ailments and valorous remedies to each (“These cause bloating, these fight cancer, these are linked to erectile dysfunction, these thwart nuclear radiation”), our eating has gone from absurd to exasperating.

Do you have legitimate medical and/or moral reasons for your odd eating, or rather, non-eating, habits? Yes, I’m certain that you do. Does it make you any less irritating to the rest of us? No. No, it doesn’t.

The line between “conscientious” and “pain-in-the-ass persnickety” is invisible to the naked eye. You say, “I avoid foods with a high glycemic index.” We hear, “I only eat miso and millet, tempeh and tofu, quinoa and kale. And only when it’s organic and seasonal. On Tuesdays. When the tide is low. And the Redskins are ahead.”

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What If My Kid's Gay?

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 1, 2011

It’s probably unwise to wonder this aloud, but that’s never stopped me before: What if you suspect your child is gay? Or — you know — will be gay eventually?

My own boys seem humdrumly hetero thus far, but I’ve known lots of kids who bucked traditional gender stereotypes to the extent that I wondered if they were gays-in-the-making.

A person’s sexual orientation can be neither truly discovered nor fully revealed until said person is, well, sexual. And yet there are those kids …

“My daughter has always wanted boy toys and boy clothes and her best buddies are boys. I’d say she was a possible future Chaz,” says a friend of mine, only half-jokingly. “But it’s hard to say. Boy clothes really are more comfortable, and boy games more fun. Ever play Pretty Pretty Princess?!”

Another friend suspects her kindergartner may wave a rainbow flag one day. “He loves to play beauty shop, has known the difference between mascara and eyeliner since he was three, and will always comment on a new haircut or dress. He’s obsessed with drawing hearts and rainbows and has told me that he’d like to marry boys,” she says. “Perhaps this is all typical 5-year-old boy stuff … but my guess is that it isn’t so much.”

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