Travels with Grumpus

As daily lives go, mine is pretty cushy. Yes, I still cringe when I fill in “housewife” for “occupation” on airport immigration forms — after all I do have 18 years of schooling behind me, and I’m not talking vocational or liberal arts degrees here but good old fashioned “you may hate Accounting but you will get a job after graduation” business degrees — but there’s no denying the fact that while my husband trudges off, reluctantly, to work every morning and draws a paycheck twice a month, I have no such constraints on my daily schedule and yet have marital drawing rights on his income.

This subject is rife with comedic and dramatic possibilities, but let’s save such talk for another post.

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The Maya says, she is in love!

Before all this of course, well before, a whole civilization named Maya thrived in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. Hence we have Maya writing, Maya mathematics, Maya astronomy, and the Maya calendar which tells us that the world will end in December 2012. Since the Mayans abandoned their cities and returned to agriculture long before even the Spanish came, we can’t ask them what they meant by that. But they did leave us with the magnificent Maya ruins and the location of the secret rebel base in Star Wars.

So what’s in a name? Apparently everything from the silly to the sublime. My father tells me he named me after Buddha’s mother, which has a nice romantic ring to it. He also says it’s Hindi for illusion which is just as cool.

On the other hand, my classmates called me Maya bird a whole lot.

Lest you think this family is all about superhero conversations and new shoes, here’s a reminder that at least one of us manages to think deep thoughts. In a previous life Mickey was a serious scholar and an academic superman, and his paper on divorce in the Philippines, cited in a number of newswire articles, may yet figure in the battle to legalize divorce in the country.

So he isn’t, after all.

“I love them,” I said. “Not as much as I love you, not even close. But as much as it is possible for a human being to love a pair of shoes.”

You probably now think that things named Maya are all fashion and frivolity. Think again. These super fantastic movies and a host of other excellent, but lesser, movies were made with the help of Maya animation software. And if the Maya Design consultancy had come fishing at my school, I would happily have moved to the 412 area code to help them “approach the struggle between simplicity and complexity”. My own cost-saving contribution would be to use their existing promo collaterals as my business cards.

Walken for President

What’s in a name? Well for starters, a shopping guide. It turns out that I can put my late summer-fall wardrobe together with things named Maya. Let’s start with the bag from Kooba, which is kinda cute, and catapults me into Sienna Miller territory. You can always build a ton of outfits around a serious purse. For Saturday-afternoon slumming, for instance, I think the Ella Moss Maya tank, bootcut-patch Maya jeans and Puma Maya retro sneakers would look totally fab. For Saturday night, I could skank up the outfit a bit by ditching the sneakers in favor of the BCBG Girls Maya strappy platforms. Maybe switch purses too. Doesn’t the Maya python purse put you in the mood for some serious clubbing?

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First the Man-date, and now this. Mine is Angelina Jolie.