Of Entitlement, Cat food and Project Management

I am happy for my gay friends that DOMA and Prop 8 bit the dust. My own personal opinion is that the State should get out of brokering marriages altogether, that "civil unions" are not the same as "marriage," a word with a whole other realm of ramifications, most of them religious or cultural. That didn't stop me from getting married, of course. More than once.

I can't really join in the tide of hyperbolic rhetoric – New era of tolerance and personal freedom! -- bla bla bla, because I don't think the United States is entering a new era of tolerance and personal freedom at all. Or at least – personal freedom is very tied in to access to resources here and everywhere, and the split between the haves and the have nots is getting progressively wider, which means fewer and fewer people have access to any real freedom, personal or otherwise.

Possibly personal freedom is not all that important in the bigger scheme of things. I've always assumed it was, that it was the only important thing in some essential sense. But maybe I'm wrong.

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I read an amazing statistic the other day: 20% of all Americans women over 50 are on antidepressants.

This really speaks to some huge societal, collective problem in my mind.

I was chatting with the Birdies about entitlement, about Boomers.

"Well, every generation thinks it's 'entitled,'" said Max

"Not like we did, honey," I said. "You have to think of it in narrative terms. I think the generation that came before mine was the generation that grew up during the Depression and the privitations of World War II. And I think that one of the things that parents do as a matter of instinct is that they try to shower their kids with all the things they didn't have. So my generation grew up believing we were the princes of the universe. We grew up entitled. I think that contributes to more than the normal share of angst and bitterness now that we're codgers –"

"Come on, Mom! Everybody gets angsty and bitter when they get old."

"No, honey, I don't think that's true. In most traditional cultures, getting old means assuming a lot more significance in the family, in the community. When you're old, you're important. I think eople looked foward to that. I think Boomers contributed more than their share of eroding certain social institutions like religion that acted as safety nets for the aging process. But they didn't implement anything in place of those institutions."

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We did the Museum thing – katestine and I had just been to the Brooklyn Museum about a month ago, but we didn't do the El Anatsui installation – which was just like amazing.

"How many cans of cat food do you think I'd need to make something like that?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know," said Max. "Would you be using the tops and bottoms?"

"Of course."

"Umm – 10,000?"

"Hmmmm… So if this becomes my life's work, I'd have to feed cats for another 30 years or you and Robin would have to take over after I croak –"

"Or you could adopt more cats and feed them more."

Afterwards the Birdies very obligingly slogged with me through the muggy streets of Brooklyn all the way to the House of Usher Ground Zero while I bored them with stories of the family insanity. I was on the verge of tears the whole day – I don't know why. I kept looking at Max and thinking, I tried so hard to be a good mother. And maybe I was, he's turned out well, Robin's turned out well, everything else I've touched may have turned to shit but the kids are good.

I suspect really the teary mood had mostly to do with the heat and my sense of being absolutely overwhelmed by everything I have to do in the next 30 days –

"Feeling overwhelmed is the new normal," says B.

I spent last night blocking out everything I have to do into a huge grid and breaking down every task into quantifiable steps with a timeline. Project management. So. It will all get done, and I even know how --