Being a Writer is a Curse

Being a writer is a curse because when something happens, you have to write about it. It torments you until you do. And if it's a sad story, you get to relive it through every draft and rewrite. You let it break your heart over and over so you can recreate the pain and put words to it.

My second husband was a drinker, so when something bad happened, he drank to it until it went away. I have to agonize through what happened and why, put in it words somewhere so I can keep revisiting it and reliving it.

I've put the details of my less than two months with Callie on my cat blog, but there's no getting around the fact that I stressed that cat out today by picking her up and taking her to another room for a few minutes -- she did not like being far from her chair in the back bedroom. I stressed her out so bad, she had a heart attack or a stroke and died in my arms. And I can't give myself closure now because it's already getting dark and there's two feet of damn snow on the ground and I can't even get out of my house, much less find a fitting place to bury her.

I can't even comfort myself with any good memories or kitten photos because Callie came to me as a rescue, a deaf, declawed cat of an unknown age with an unknown history. Unknown everything. She never seemed thrilled to be here, despite our lavish offerings of gourmet foods and a cushy chair in a quiet room, kept warm around the clock with a heating pad. Except for the heating pad, she wanted none of it. She didn't want the fancy foods, or the attention, and certainly didn't want to be picked up and shown the snow through the window. If I had not done that, she'd still be alive, sitting behind me in the chair. She'd be able to die when she was ready, not when I pushed her into it.

I've had two cats die in my arms this year and I think both of them just wanted me to leave them alone.

Need, Want, Have

Here's the problem. No matter how great the sale is on the new TV, which you really didn't need but had to have because it's bigger and flatter and more HD, you're not going to come out ahead. It just sets off a chain reaction of other expenses, and then losses.

For one thing, no one is going to pay even close to what we paid for the old TV, which is as big and extinct as a wooly mammoth. What do we do with it? Then there is no market whatsoever, not even on craigslist for FREE for massive entertainment centers that once embraced TVs the size of a wooly mammoth.

While I wonder how to find homes for the things we're giving up -- which all work perfectly fine, mind you -- he is making a list of things the new TV needs. HTMI cables, for one. A Blu-Ray DVD player. A different type of entertainment center to sit on. An HD Tivo. An upgrade of our monthly cable bill to include the HD channels. An upgrade of our Netflix subscription to include Blu-Ray. All these upgrades negate the deal we got on the TV we didn't really need, and all the peripherals replace similar electronics which work fine and, up until the arrival of the new TV, were perfectly adequate for our needs.

Sometimes it isn't even a matter of weighing the difference between need and want. Sometimes it's just because everybody else has it. Or because it's there. Or, let me delude myself some more: I'm helping the economy and creating jobs?

You Might As Well Live

In the late '80s, I had a teenage driver on the insurance policy, so I got a second job at the latest rage, a video store. Video stores back then were like Starbucks or nail salons today. They were everywhere.

The work was easy, but I learned people smell bad. There was always a stink of fast food, cooking grease and farts in the air when the store was crowded, especially in the evening. We had our regulars, guys who rented a movie or two every single day. How lonely and bored were they? When snow was forecast, we'd rent out 80 percent of our stock, sometimes more! We were open seven days a week, 13 hours a day, no matter what the weather, so when the snow was too deep for people to go to work, they still managed to get to the video store.

One memorable night after a snowstorm, the 80 percent of our stock that had gone out all came back during one evening shift. (This was back in the one-day rental days.) We could not file them back on the shelves fast enough, so when the store closed for the night, we had literal five-foot high piles of videos on the floor. Everyone pitched in to get them back on the shelves, singing, laughing, and gossiping about the stinky customers. Our store, Erol's, filed library-style, spines facing out, separated by genre and then alphabetized. Then you had to balance the shelves so one didn't have 10 videos and the next 25, so the store had an orderly look. I truly enjoyed returning the store to pristine order every night and starting fresh each new day.

Except for the supervisors, my co-workers were high school and college students. The college boys were particularly dedicated and responsible. They had gone to J. Sargeant Reynolds for most of their undergraduate courses, then transferred to the University of Richmond for the last years so ultimately their degree would be branded the more prestigious UofR. The high school kids were less serious about working.

One of them was short, thin, pimply, and always excessively happy and excited. Sometimes he came to work wearing a Frank Sinatra-style fedora hat. His puppy dog enthusiasm was annoying. Just be quiet and work! The supervisors were patient with him and tried to keep him focused. The college boys were dismissive. The high school girls paid no attention to him, no matter how charmingly he tried to chat them up.

He had a flair for performance. One night at closing, he was assigned to vacuum the store. Instead of vacuuming, with a tip of his fedora hat, he danced with the vacuum cleaner. Instead of being charmed, we were all just annoyed because no one could leave until all the closing chores were done.

He seemed happy at the store, but I don't know what was going on at school or at home. I had my own teenager and didn't need to talk to another one about life, especially one that was always jabbering about his big future plans involving unrealistic fame and fortune.

One morning I was on first shift and the shift supervisor met me at the door with the news. The boy in the fedora hat had gone out to a shed in his backyard, put a rifle in his mouth and blown his head off. As the word spread from shift to shift that day, the high school and college kids were shockingly nonchalant about it. What a dork! What a dorky thing to do! But the adults were numb with shock. For days afterward we kept talking about it, comparing notes, trying to figure out if there had been a clue, some warning, that we had missed. But the truth was, none of us had ever really talked to him much because...well...he was so irrationally happy and annoying, like the Tigger character in Winnie-the-Pooh.

That was 20 years ago. The boy in the fedora hat would be in his late 30's now. Surely whatever was so unbearable when he was 16 would have long since been resolved and he'd be living his life now, rolling along with the rest of us. Instead, we left him behind in the '80's, always and forever 16 years old, never knowing anything more about life than teenage confusion.

He has been my touchstone ever since. No matter how bad things are, they are never so bad that you should kill yourself because...things change. Things will change. Things will change!

Life gets better. Or maybe life gets worse, but in a different way. Inevitably, life always has the potential to get better, or at least get different. Maybe still bad, but tolerable. You always have to take a chance on the change. Always.

The boy in the fedora hat drifts through my memories at odd times. I see today's teenagers and think, they own the future, a future the boy in the fedora hat will never see. He doesn't know that VHS won out over Beta, that our Erol's store was bought out by Blockbuster, that Blockbuster is now on the ropes to Netflix. No one rents VHS tapes anymore. Things changed. They changed for me, and they would have changed for him. In big and little ways. Surely one of those changes would have made life more hopeful.

I was just one of the adults at the store when he was there, no one significant in his life, but he turned out to be someone very significant for me. He'd probably be surprised to know how much of an impression he made on me, how often I still think about him, how he helped me push through my own difficult times, and sad to say, how I can't remember his name.

My Brief Bartending Career

In the early 1990s, I left a husband, a house, and a job because none of it was turning out as I had hoped. I could live off the proceeds from selling my house for one year, so I had one year to get on my feet. My plan was to work at night in the lucrative field of bartending while writing by day.

It seemed like a plan. I’d work at night in an atmosphere of noise, hubbub and congeniality, which would take the loneliness out of being single again and make me forget all my romantic and career failures while I lived in this netherworld. There would be the added bonus of big tips for mixing magical potions. I would be a wizard before Harry Potter was ever invented.

This was also pre-Internet and pre-blogging. If blogs had existed back then, and I had blogged my bartending adventures just as Diablo Cody would one day blog her adventures as a stripper, which got a book deal, then a movie, and an Oscar, where would I be now? Alas, I was ahead of the curve, and my bartending life didn’t last that long anyway.

I took a course at J. Sargeant Reynolds in bartending. There was such a thing then. We met once a week at Extra Billy’s for a couple of months, learning recipes, mixing tips, equipment, customer service, and listening to fascinating and hilarious bartending stories from our young, attractive male teacher. All my classmates were younger than me, but back then I could pass. I received my diploma, which no one ever asked to see, and a folder full of drink recipes, which I converted to index cards.

Getting a job as a bartender was just as impossible as getting a job as a journalist. There were seldom ads for the position. Cold-calling bars produced no results. No one wanted to let me start behind the bar. I would have to waitress first, with no promises of advancement. Even at the least trendy places, like Piggy's Attaché Lounge, I was told I had to waitress first. Men did not have to waitress first. They went straight behind the bar, either as a bar back (carrying ice and supplies from the back) or actual bartending. It was discrimination.

I don’t remember now why I didn’t agree to that. Maybe I thought it would be too degrading. With my shiny new diploma, I didn’t want to be out on the floor carrying a tray. I was ready to mix!

So I signed up with a temp agency that supplied bartending and catering services. I said I was a bartender, not a waitress. I didn’t want to do gigs where I carried food trays. I was very clear about that, so I worked less than girls willing to do it all. Still, I got a few jobs.

On the surface, it was glamorous. The uniform was a white tux shirt with a black bowtie, a black cummerbund, a black skirt, and black flats. I still had the legs for the skirt. I’d see older, exhausted women who had transitioned to black pants, but I wasn’t there yet. And my stomach was still flat enough then to rock a cummerbund. A bowtie and a tux shirt is a good look for anyone. I would see how the other half lived, and in Richmond there was definitely another half where life was sophisticated and elegant.

Under the surface, it was not so glamorous. It was a sticky job. You started the evening cutting up dozens of oranges and limes for your station, the juice splashing all over you. Since you had to report to work in your uniform, you were stuck wearing that sticky outfit for the rest of the night. During the course of an evening, you’d be making dozens of basic highballs with club soda, ginger ale, tonic water, orange, grapefruit or cranberry juice, mixed with vodka, gin, whiskey or rum, and garnished with fruit. You’d be rapidly cracking open the soda bottles and getting sprayed by them. By the end of the night, you were as sticky as a pest strip from head to toe, standing in a big wet spot -- and not the good kind either.

Four jobs stand out in my memory, and in the end, I didn’t work much more than those four because they sealed my fate as a bartender.

I’ve never been good at memorizing anything, a flaw that kept me from being an accountant (multiplication tables) and an actress (lines), both careers I wanted to do. So I was very nervous about a special afternoon event at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens where we would do more than the basic highballs. We were equipped to make a few fancier drinks, like whiskey sours, Manhattans, martinis, and others. I had some of my index cards in my skirt pocket and would peek at them. One of my table customers thought this was charming and would cheerfully talk me through his drink orders.

But at the end of the evening, the temp agency booker, who had also worked the event, chewed me out for using cards. It was unprofessional, he said. I was never going to make it in the bartending biz at that rate. Shame on me.

I felt humiliated. Here I was with a college degree, and yet I’m being made to feel like dirt because I peeked at the instructions for a whiskey sour. I would have cried all the way home -- and I did shed a few tears -- except for the fact I had a $20 tip in my pocket from my most helpful customer. There was a certain advantage to being a damsel in bartending distress that my boss did not fully appreciate as far as making money. As long as you looked like you were trying, there was always a mercy tip. But that turned out to be the exception, not the rule.

I didn’t think I’d be called again, but two big events were coming up and they needed everyone they could get. So I got a station at the Bal du Bois ball at the Country Club of Virginia, the only time I’ll ever see the inside of that temple of privilege. Here were Richmond’s most elegant young people and their very rich parents, dancing, eating and drinking in their very fine clothes. But despite all the good breeding, drunk guys are still drunk guys and there’s nothing elegant about being a sloppy drunk.

At the end of the night, as I was closing my station, one of those drunk boys came up to me and blubbered, “I jus wanda you to know you made me feel baaaad all night. Ever’ time I came to you for a drink, you looked at me that way.”

I knew what "way" had cut him to the quick -- a look of disapproval that despite his fine tuxedo and jazzy, multi-colored cummerbund, and his Porsche parked outside, and his future career as a corporate lawyer, he was still one sorry, sloppy drunk tonight and I felt for at least that moment that I was better than him.

I was going to have a serious problem as a bartender if I made my clients feel like crap every time they ordered a drink.

The downward spiral continued at New Year’s Eve at the Tredegar Ironworks, another expensive ticket for the rich kids. It was a BYOB affair. The catering service supplied the mixers and fruit. The guests brought their own liquor, which was name tagged and kept at the multi-staffed stations and poured on demand by We the Bartenders. The evening went okay until the end of the night when a very drunk young man came to retrieve what was left of his bottle from my station and I couldn’t find it. He accused me of stealing it, but his party convinced him to forget about it and leave.

Shaken, I ran to the ladies’ room, which was a disaster area. Every toilet was full and overflowing, a couple of inches of water on the floor. Sanitary napkins, tampons and wads of toilet tissue were floating in the bowls and puddling on the floor in white and pink heaps. Faucets were left running. Every sink was full of plates of leftover Swedish meatballs and chicken wing bones. Lipstick smeared the mirrors. Garbage was everywhere. There’d be no peeing here tonight. Girls who came from well-to-do families had trashed this bathroom. Had no one ever told them not to flush tampons and sanitary napkins in all their private school years? Had no one ever told them to put their leftovers in the trashcan, not the sink?

Out in the parking lot, my drunken nemesis spotted me heading to my car and tried to attack me again for supposedly stealing his liquor bottle. His friends had to tackle him as I ran for my car just as the police pulled up. There was yelling, accusations, and a disgusted police officer who clearly saw a very drunk boy and a pathetic older woman in her sticky tux shirt and bowtie with no liquor bottle concealed on her body. I'm just glad I wasn't strip searched.

You would think that would finish bartending for me, but I took one more job at a reception at VCU President Trani’s home in Windsor Farms. His house is like the White House, with a series of reception rooms for entertaining on the spacious ground floor. The kitchen was huge and impersonal, built for caterers as a staging area. The actual private quarters were upstairs and unseen by the public.

I dutifully cut up oranges and limes, only to learn I would not have a bartending station at this gig. Despite my request to only be booked as a bartender, I was assigned to pick up glasses. Only guys could bartend. The girls walked through the grounds and the reception rooms, picking up abandoned glasses and returning them to the kitchen. I remember being disgusted by a big fish with its face still on being used as a serving plate. It had been split open and its insides were filled with some mushy stuff people were scooping up with crackers. I feel your pain, fish. This is a humiliating way to end up.

When it was over, we were supposed to hang around to load up the caterer’s truck, but the truck was late coming back and when it did, it was parked at the end of the long, curving, downhill driveway. Let the guys carry the trays and stuff down to the truck. They hadn't been walking all night, picking up glasses. I physically could not carry trays of plates down a cobblestone driveway. I had not signed on for that duty anyway, so I left. I left without asking permission if I could leave. I left before the gig was officially declared over. I left confused about my career as a bartender, reduced to picking up glasses from the lawn of the president of the college where I had attended and graduated with hope and promise.

I never got paid for that job and I never called the agency to report that I did not get paid because I figured they’d just yell at me for leaving before the truck was loaded. I never got a call to work again either. And thus ended my brief career as a bartender.

Virtual College

When my son was in college a few years ago, it was like I was back in college, and it was just as dumb as it was the first time. Once he called for help with his English class. They had watched "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," and he was supposed to write two paragraphs on how satire was used in the movie.

To submit his paper, he had to post his thoughts on an electronic discussion board, which was a lot different from when I was in college and we actually wrote on paper and handed it in. At the time, he didn't own a computer or know how to type, so he would call me on his cell phone from the computer lab, I would log into the same discussion board from home and I'd type in what he dictated.

On this particular evening, before he could think of something profound to say about the use of satire in "Dr. Strangelove," a campus policeman flashed a card in front of his face which said the use of cell phones in the computer lab was forbidden. So he logged out and walked home, dictating his two paragraphs to me as he walked. I typed it into the discussion board.

This may not be the college I remember, but thinking about "Dr. Strangelove" is. College is a lot of information you will never use again. Dr. Strangelove had nothing to do with his major either, a technical trade that requires no philosophical thought. There were 200 people in his class in an auditorium setting. At the first session, the professor taught relaxation and meditation technique to prepare for the semester. In preschool, this was called nap time.

Before I logged out of the discussion board, I read what the other students were writing and was appalled to find even in an English class, they were submitting their "papers" in email style writing -- all caps or no caps at all, minimal punctuation if any, and no paragraph breaks. They were not learning to write, spell, or punctuate in this class, although there was an advisory to utilize the spellcheck.

The next week my son called again because he needed to analyze three poems and didn't know how to think about poetry. The poems were vaguely related to "Dr. Strangelove," being anti-war and satirical. For each, the professor's online instructions were to "tell how the poem deepens your contact with its content." And, the instructions prodded, "don't forget to say why this poem is good, and what you wonder about."

What if I wonder why the professor presupposes I think the poem is good? What if my contact doesn't deepen? What if the poem is stupid? What if I think most poetry is a fraud, especially the stuff that doesn't rhyme or have any iambic in its pentameters?

My son got angry with me. "We have to take this seriously. It's a grade."

Well, okay, but it's difficult to discuss poetry and what it means and how our contact is deepening when one of us is making an illegal cell phone call with a dying battery from the computer lab and the other is reading the poem for the first time. I read the poem that begins with the line "McNamara Rusk Bundy." Then it vaguely talks about children in a school yard. Do college sophomores today know what McNamara Rusk Bundy means? That's from the '60s.

"They were poets in the '60s?" my son asks. No. They were government guys involved in the Vietnam War. How old is your teacher that he's going back to the '60s for war protest poems? My son points out that "Dr. Strangelove" is pre-Vietnam War. He has a point. Our contact with the content is actually deepening after all.

My own English professor many years ago was a young man who was teaching to avoid the draft and ending up in Vietnam himself. He wore sandals and sat on top of his desk, cross-legged. His favorite book, from which he obtained his philosophy of life, and from which he taught, was "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

To put this in historical context, before there was "Gilligan's Island," there was a show called "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" based on this book about a frustrated college boy. Bob Denver, who would go on to play Gilligan, played Dobie's beatnick friend, Maynard G. Krebbs. His catch phrase was "You rang?" To put beatnicks into historical context, before stoners, there were surfer dudes, and before surfer dudes, there were hippies, and before hippies, there were beatniks. Hey, I should be teaching college.

All this I remember, yet I can't think of much I actually learned in college that was useful when I went to work. I learned all the work stuff on the job, or by teaching myself things I needed to know to get a certain job.

Still, everyone will tell you that you need a college degree in life. All a college degree means, though, is you went through a lot of crazy hoops and ordeals over a period of time. Maybe that in itself is some kind of preparation for life -- except now we don't get graded.

Elegy for a Printer

I just returned from Colonial Heights where I donated my HP Laserjet 2100M to the Swift Creek Mill Playhouse office. A young man carried it out of my car, up the stairs and left it on a table in the hallway. I said a few final words to it, hoping it would have a nice life and stay busy in the theater world.

Yes, I felt bad about leaving my printer. We had been through a lot together.

I think I bought it in 1997 for $800 from CompUSA. It was a huge purchase for me because I didn't have a job at the time. My hobby, a monthly newspaper I pasted up in my dining room, was almost as time-consuming as a real job and had expenses that were barely covered by the advertising money I raised. Everyone running a website as a job these days knows what that's like.

I originally created the newspaper on a Apple Classic II and a Stylewriter II printer, printing out columns of justified type, headlines and cutlines, cutting them out with a razor blade and a ruler, coating the backs with a glue stick and pasting them onto blue-lined sheets of card stock in a newspaper page design. This was the same way the daily newspaper was created between the eras of hot type and computers. I had been a paste-up girl for about a decade at the daily, assembling pages like a puzzle while old, cranky newspapermen acted inappropriately. When a story was too long to fit its diagrammed space and needed a part cut out, you had to call out, "I need a bite!" to get an editor's attention to come tell you which part you could cut out.

Papers took preplanning back then. You had to diagram them out as precisely as you could because once you had your photos screened, you were stuck. I had to have all my art and photography together in advance, crops marked with a grease pencil, and take them downtown to a very small business that did photo screens. I had to know what size I wanted the photo to be in advance. The screen guy would rephotograph the cropped part of my photos and blow them up or shrink them to the requested size, and give the screened photos back to me in big sheets called veloxes. If you looked at the velox with a magnifying glass, you could see each photo was actually a series of dots. Those dots were your resolution and what made your black and white photos have all the necessary shades of gray; otherwise, without a screen all dark areas of a photo reproduced as black.

Doing color photos was even more complicated, involving color separations, and was something I never learned and couldn't afford to do anyway.

I was paying the screen guy anywhere from $75 to $200 a month, depending on how many photos I had to use, so between the screen guy and the print shop that actually printed the whole newspaper, my profit margin was very small.

Enter the HP Laserjet 2100M. This printer not only produced sharper text than the Stylewriter, it could do 1200 resolution. If I printed out a grayscale photo on it, it would have enough dots in it to look like the photo. All I had to do was cut it out and paste it down, just like I was doing with the text. I could pay for it in four to six months if I stopped using the screen guy downtown. It was my first big business decision, after the decision to start the paper itself.

I still feel bad about the screen guy because I think the Free Press and I were his last regular clients and he was on the brink of being an unnecessary business and had not planned for anything else.

So for the next couple of years, I continued to roll along with the cut and paste, and then doing the paper on QuarkXPress and printing it out in two big chunks, the top of the page and the bottom. But by 2002 or so, my printer in Ashland was telling me, after I did the whole paper in QuarkXPress, to just convert the whole thing to a .pdf and bring it to him on a disc. No more glue sticks or razor blades, and no more need for the printer. It wasn't long after that when I didn't even have to bring the disc anymore. I just uploaded the file. And it wasn't long after that before I decided why bother to pay the printer all the money anyway, just upload the file to a website and let people look at it that way. And it wasn't long after that before the website itself became the paper.

So for the past decade, the big old printer has just been grinding out copies of emails and manuals. It became more and more difficult to connect it to newer computers. I had to buy a converter box to run an ethernet cable through it when USB became all the style. With the latest Apple operating system, Snow Leopard, there was no longer any support for printers requiring AppleTalk, and I had to network it to an older Mac to use it.

I'm not sure if Swift Creek will be able to figure out how to get it to work with PCs, but I wish them well. That printer was a partner and a companion as I taught myself everything I know today about publishing and print production. I'm sorry to see it go, but there's seven other printers in the house right now and it's just crazy to have so many.

That printer is also the star of my second most popular video on YouTube with almost 17,000 views. Good bye printer. I loved you. I'll miss you. I think I finally paid for you, although I'm not sure. Have a nice life at the historic theater and I hope you don't end up in a recycling drive anytime soon.



This Old T-Shirt

My husband has never worn a suit to work. He has never had to interpret "office casual." His entire working life has been spent in uniforms, sometimes with his name embroidered in italics on a breast pocket patch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Jobs requiring uniforms are just as honorable as suiting up. Toilets gotta flush; cars gotta run; product gotta ship. My husband has never spent money putting together a work wardrobe.

He has a funeral/wedding suit and a button-down collar shirt to go with it. He has a pair of dress shoes, and up until recently when I converted him to Skechers, he always had three pairs of Reboks: lawn-mowing Reboks, work Reboks (when he wasn't required to wear steel toe boots), and dress Reboks. They were all the same shoe, just in different states of wear.

Instead of office casual, his non-work wardrobe is life casual. He has a week's worth of jeans in two sizes, fat jeans and thin jeans. He used to have several pairs of Dockers, but after 10 years with the tags still on them, I gave them to charity.

He has never bought a T-shirt, and yet the last time I counted, he had 75. T-shirts are accumulated free so often, it'd be foolish to buy one. His T-shirts are a lifelong habit. His siblings are dressed up in their school photos. He's in sci-fi movie T-shirts. For a pricey Olan Mills studio portrait, he shows up in a Close Encounters T-shirt.

When I first met him, he wore shirts that advertised his state of mind. He often showed up for our dates in a shirt that said, "Ask Me If I Care." It was more nihilistic than romantic. Another favorite shirt presented a quandary: what do you call a bear with deer antlers?

A beer.

Another was philosophical, outlining the "four stages of tequila: I'm rich. I'm good looking. I'm bullet-proof. I'm invisible."

After we married, the shirts disappeared. Must have been some kind of laundry accident, I would say. But I can't make his entire wardrobe disappear. He wears shirts that advertise music festivals and events long past. Twenty-two, in fact. Whenever someone in his family goes on vacation, they bring him back a souvenir T-shirt, so there's all these shirts from places we've never been. Some of them have disappeared, like the one from the Outer Banks that says, "Got crabs?" I just don't want to go out to dinner with someone wearing that shirt. Some advertise colleges he's never attended. Several are tie-dyed. A couple of dozen advertise products he has sold, shipped, or purchased at one time or another.

Four are Redskins shirts that are only worn on game days because it helps the team. That's what I hear.

Sixteen shirts promote bands he's played with or roadied for and some of his favorites in that category are so thin, you can see your hand through them, but they can't be thrown out because of the "memories." They can't be worn anymore either to protect the fabric that's left. I can't think of any clothes I have that gets the museum artifact treatment. Okay, maybe my wedding dress. I still have that. But he still has his Stiff Richard band t-shirt from 1992 with a cartoon of a bare-assed boy holding his penis. Somehow it's not the same.

He spends his life as a walking billboard for bands, products, businesses, schools, and resorts, and for no more compensation than the shirt on his back, literally. Like the side of a bus, he travels around town emblazoned with a message.

Things Bosses Have Made Me Do

I once had a boss who wanted me to print all the photos on his boss' camera. I open the camera card and see an assortment of vacation and party photos, and then photos of the boss' boss sitting around the house wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a tight pair of red underpants.

My eyes, my eyes.

I went back to my boss and told him this was inappropriate for me to view since his boss was not fully dressed in some of the photos. He told me to burn a CD of the photos and make an extra copy for him.

***

Everyone in my office was required to email the boss when we arrived and when we left, keep a timesheet, and sign out on a dry erase board. He would schedule staff meetings and then he wouldn't show up for them or let us know they were canceled.

***

When a Presidential candidate came to town, he sent me out to buy two of the man's books at a Shockoe Slip bookstore, saying I had to get them and get back in 10 minutes. (Our office was not in Shockoe Slip.) I said it wasn't possible to get there, find a parking space, get the books and get back that quickly. He said to doublepark in the street. Since I thought the books were for the Big Boss, who was going to see the candidate that night, and I was currently in line for a promotion, I somehow managed to do it. It turned out the books were just for him. He wanted to get them autographed.

***
He emailed me at 8:55 on a Friday night -- even though I didn't have a Blackberry or a pager -- to tell me to come in Monday even though it was my day off and clean out the storage room. I found out later he wanted to use the storage room for his things while he was having new carpet installed in his office.

***
He took the spaceheater I had in my office for the past two years and moved it into his.

***
He asked me to get him a bowl of chili from the cafeteria because he was busy waiting for the phone to ring. I declined. He said he could change my job description so I would have to run personal errands for him. I went to HR. They said, no, he can't.

***
He brought an old draft of the annual report to a staff meeting. We told him that version had been updated already and we all had the new versions, but he wouldn't admit he had the wrong version. For the next three hours, he discussed changes to the report that we had already made. We tried to suggest we should all use the same version of the report for the meeting, but he said we had a "fixation" about versions and to stop bringing it up.

***
One winter, the staff took old candy dishes and vases from the supply closet to fill with water and put on the windowsills to add some moisture to the overheated office air. He said we were monopolizing all the vases. When a coworker went to lunch, he went into the coworker's office and moved one of the bowls of water to his own office. The next day, he continued to comment about how we were hogging all the water bowls until the coworker who had suffered from the dry heat the most felt so guilty, he put his vases and bowls back in the supply closet so he wouldn't have to hear about it anymore.

***

One day I called in sick and after cross-examining everyone in the office about when I called in, he told them I was probably out "shopping at Dillard's because they're having a sale." This is funny because I am the least fashionable person on earth.

***
I selected a photo to use for an employee promotion story. The employee liked it, but boss said to use another one. He said the employee didn't like it. I said, "She just told me she did." He said, "it doesn't matter what you think; it matters what I think."

***
Our building was closed because of a water pipe break for two days. On the second day, he called me into work to send a notice to employees that our offices were closed for the day. When I arrive, I find there is no electricity. My computer cannot be turned on. He makes arrangements for my computer to be carried down three flights of stairs to a floor being powered by an emergency generator. By this time, it's 2:30 in the afternoon. I don't know who read the message anyway because everyone was at home.

***
One day he told me the company's money, which happened to be taxpayer money, wasn't real money, it was "play money."

****

He changed my spelling of Landmark Theater to Landmark Theatre. When I sent him documentation showing it is spelled "theater" on its website and on its logo, he said, "do as I say." When I asked him if he wanted me to change every instance of it on our website where it was already spelled "theater," he said he would take care of that. He never did.

***
He sent me an email at 2:57 a.m. (yes, as in middle of the night) to do a typing project he had already told me to do the day before.

***
He neglects to approve a logo in time for me to present it at a meeting, even though he told the people conducting the meeting that we had an approved logo. He tells me I am not to talk to anyone about anything at the meeting, just take notes and report back to him. He says I also cannot tell anyone I was told not to talk at the meeting.

***

He gets a request for a speech 13 days before it is due and tells me to write it the day before it is due.

***

He yells at me for letting seven of his phone calls go to voicemail. It turns out they were old saved messages. When the admin assistant is away from her desk, he expects me to hear and answer his phone, even though I am three offices down the hall from him. Male co-workers are in closer offices, so of course they are not expected to answer his phone.

***
He says he doesn't have time to look at my emails requesting him to sign off on work I need to send out. I have to tell him verbally that I have sent him an email.

***

At 11:40 a.m., he assigns me to write a speech for his boss to deliver at a function at 12:45 p.m., that same day.

Large

This explains so much, and is what I've always suspected. Glad to see science confirms it.

From Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant book, Blink:

Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and the stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.

...An inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary...a tall person enjoys literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage...

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It's because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rationed than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon.




Different Grieving

The night our cat was dying, my husband had band practice and he didn't cancel it. During the cat’s frightening first seizure, I could hear the music and laughter downstairs.

He can compartmentalize his emotions. I suspect most men can. The fact that they can turn it on or off doesn’t subtract from the sincerity of the emotion. That’s something women don’t understand about men. We tend to marinate for long periods in our emotions. I can be unhappy, depressed, bitter, angry, or revengeful for a long time. I can wear it like a floppy hat obscuring my face. I can manifest positive emotions as well, but their shelf life is much shorter.

All through the month that the cat was slowly melting away of whatever killed her (cancer, pancreatitis, FIP, does it matter?) he could sit with her and look profoundly sad, and then he could go downstairs and watch television…or sleep at night. He could talk about other things. Do other things. I could only huddle around the cat, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this for both of us. At the end, I couldn’t even go to work. I stayed huddled with the cat for the last three days, day and night. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes she would look at me like, “Please go away so I can die. You know I can’t do it with you staring at me.”

Last night, after sitting silently over bowls of soup at Panera, I finally asked him the question that had been irritating me like a bug bite since the incident happened. “After you saw her have the seizure, why didn’t you say let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

When band practice had ended and his friends had gone home, he came back upstairs where I was sitting with the cat on the sofa. The seizure had been over for about an hour, but she was trying to push her head under the sofa cushion and was gently paddling her feet. I told him what had happened, and he immediately folded into sadness and sat next to her, petting her. After awhile, he said, “I think she’s trying to climb off the sofa.”

So I picked her up and put her on the floor, arranging her body like the Egyptian Sphinx. She briefly held her head up, then started wobbling, and then horribly, the second seizure started. “Don’t touch her,” my husband said alarmed, but we both moved to the floor and hovered over her, our palms open as if we were trying to catch the seizure as it bounced over her body and toss it away. After it ended, she was again limp and exhausted, and didn’t seem to notice us anymore, or care. I thought for sure my husband would say, “Grab your purse and keys, we have to go to the vet now. It’s time.”

Instead, he said he was going to bed. And he did. And he slept.

I picked up the cat and went downstairs to the futon where we had been restlessly sleeping for the last five nights, but every morning when the sun came up, the cat would lift her head up for another day. The seizures were not a good sign, but so many other nights when she had gotten so still that I thought she was gone, I had been wrong. Maybe I’d be wrong again. So we bundled up together on the futon and waited.

There would be eight more seizures that night before the dawn. You could set your watch by their regularity. Sometimes I thought I should jump in the car and drive to the emergency vet by myself and be done with it. I knew he would be upset when he found out, but if he couldn’t make the decision, someone had to. But then I couldn’t either. The seizure would end and she’d be peaceful again, asleep and breathing quietly. I would think, okay, that’s the last one. I didn't want her to die in the car en route to the vet because she hated riding in the car.

But it wouldn’t be the last one. By 3 a.m., the craziness set in. Maybe it’s not a tumor, but a cyst and it's breaking open. Once it drains, she’ll be all better! She’ll wake up her old self! This is just the poison leaving her body! All is well!

That mental trickery lasted a couple of seizures. Then I went into negotiations. God, end this. End this or cure this. I want a dead cat or a well cat right now. Work a miracle. You can do it! You are God! Do it. What good is being God if you don’t do stuff like this? Now, now, do it, now!

That didn’t work either, although the seizures from 4 a.m. on were less violent. Her head didn’t shake. Her mouth didn’t open. Only her legs would paddle furiously, like she was running. Then less furiously, slowing down to a trot, like she was arriving somewhere.

The sun came up. I could hear my husband upstairs waking up. Another day had started. The cat was still breathing, although asleep. Her body was strangely warm in places, cool in others. I kept checking her. If I rubbed an ear, it would twitch. If I rubbed a paw, it would flinch. My husband came downstairs.

“How is she?” he said, ready to be sad. I dully, bitterly reported the eight seizures, the night of no sleep. He just said, “oh, man.” He petted her for a while, and then he was able to switch it off again, go upstairs and start the coffee. I hoped all the normal morning noises would provoke a response in the cat. It’s morning! Breakfast time! Lift your head again like you do every morning when you hear his voice! Like you did yesterday!

Nothing.

I wrapped her in the blanket and moved her upstairs to my bed. Now that she had survived another night, it was my turn to get some sleep. My husband could watch over her. Her body felt limper than usual, but it was still warm and she was still breathing. I put her head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. I went in the kitchen to get a donut and went back to my bed. That’s when I noticed the look.

I had two cats die on me years ago, one at age 18 and one at 17, both at home, and I knew right away when I saw them it was a dead cat, not a sleeping cat. Their mouth opens just a little. This look was different than the one she had when I went for the donut. I tried rubbing the ears, the paws, nothing moved now. She was still warm in parts, cool in others. I couldn’t see breathing anymore. The vet had said to watch the eyes at the end. I shined a flashlight in her dilated pupils and they didn’t contract. They didn’t move. My insides starting folding in on me like a collapsing house of cards.

I went to the front door and opened it. My husband had just finished watering the bushes and was talking to the neighbors. I let him be happy until the neighbors drove away. He turned around and saw me in the doorway. I couldn’t find the words, but I guess my flailing hands and collapsing face said them for me. He ran into the house.

I did my crazy act. “Maybe it’s a coma. You think it’s a coma?” And he was realistic. “She’s gone. She’s gone.” And we cried, again hovering our hands over her like we could catch her spirit leaving and stuff it back in. For the rest of the day, we solemnly went through the ritual. Finding a box. Deciding where to bury her. Getting the shovels and picks together. Picking up favorite items to put in the box with her. Looking at photos of her and printing them to put inside the box, photos of us with her so she wouldn’t forget us.

He was able to turn the ritual off long enough to go to McDonald’s and get us food, food I couldn’t taste although I tried to eat it. Then we went to the woods on his mother's property for the burial, a story in itself for another day, and it was over. I haven’t seen him cry since and he’s been fine, like it was something that happened a long time ago to someone else. That is, until I asked him the question at Panera’s.

“After you saw her have a seizure, why didn’t you say, let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

The muscles in his face started moving like there was an earthquake under his skin. His facial features sucked themselves inward as if I had literally punched him. It all happened in a fleeting half a second and I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking right at him. The emotion exploded and was contained that quickly. He put his head down so I couldn’t see anymore and mumbled something that sounded like, “I couldn’t…”

I quickly changed the subject because that had been answer enough. That’s how men deal with strong emotion. They compartmentalize it; they turn it off. It's the instinct of war where you can't mourn a fallen comrade for even a second because the battle continues all around you and you have to continue. They’re able to, in the face of a painful decision, just not make it and go to bed. And sleep. He had left that hard decision to me, knowing with my high threshold for pain and drama, even if I couldn’t make it either, I could endure the consequences of our not making it. I’d take care of it. I’d absorb it all and suck the pain right out of the air for him.

I’ve read about couples that lose young children. It is very difficult to keep the marriage together after that. The divorce rate is high, as if the only way to escape the memory is to escape the relationship that created the child that died. I had a friend whose marriage collapsed after their son died. I look at the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards and know they were damaged irrevocably when their son died, and nothing they’ve done since has fixed it for them, not having more children or running for President, or even having an affair.

I have to accept that we mourn differently. He can put his pain away in a box and be happy again. If I keep poking at the box and force it open, he’ll hurt and cry for me, but as soon as he can, he’ll shut that box and move on. He’s gone away for the weekend now with friends to play music and swim in the sun. No one will talk about the cat there. If he had stayed here with me, we would talk about the cat, because I’m wearing the pain like a big floppy hat that gets in the way of everything else I might need to do. Even if I said nothing, he can tell by looking at me that I’m thinking about it.

If I keep wearing this misery hat, eventually he’s going to forget that it’s about the cat and think I’m just a miserable person in general. Someone else will come along who is happy and laughing for the moment, and she will seem like a much better person to be with, and he will be right. She’ll be able to taste and enjoy food, laugh at bad jokes, want to go out with his friends, and embrace him without thinking that the last time they hugged, it was over the cat. Never in her life will it ever cross her mind to blame him for making her sit alone through the night through eight seizures because that will not be in their history.

Maybe it’s women in general; maybe it’s just me. Maybe realizing how we’re different and accepting it is half the battle. He’s going to be all right. I need to take off this hat and put it in a box.

This Makes Me Happy

Would You Get Divorced Over This?

If my life were a reality show, you’d see the same type of squabbling as Jon & Kate Plus 8. (Our reality show would have to be on Animal Planet, though, because it’s Me & Him Plus 8 [Cats] right now.) Our fights are just as epic and just as irrelevant, only right now neither one of us can afford to drive off in a new sports car to a bachelor pad with a caravan of young women we met in bars (or in my case, a stud bodyguard). Not until that reality show money starts coming in, anyway.

Just like Kate, I’m a sniper critic. Under my breath, barely audible, I maintain a running commentary of how I’m not getting the cooperation and labor needed to keep our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning. Mumble, mumble, mumble. If cameras were on me, I know I would mumble louder, hoping the entire camera crew would turn on him and guilt-trip him into keeping our household clean, repaired, financed and functioning.

Like Jon, he is largely unresponsive to sniping. He saves his retaliation for three main arenas – the kitchen, the car, and who let the cats out? And he’s no mumbler either. The shouting can get epic, awesome and FTW, as they say on Twitter. An outsider would find some of these verbal beatdowns comical because the causes are so off-the-wall. Okay, sure, sometimes I did let the cats out on purpose, but most of the time, it’s not like I did something just to aggravate him. If any of his meltdowns or my sniping were packaged as a weekly TV show, you would definitely think we were headed for divorce.

But alas, we are too poor. We have to stay together.

What do we fight the most about? Not in any particular order:

- Who let the cats out

- The fact that I use the garbage disposal to grind up and dispose of leftover food (Isn’t that what it’s for?? Isn’t it? I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer from him on why garbage disposals were invented and what they are supposed to be used for.)

- Why he piles junk in the garage without leaving a passageway to get through the garage and get to the junk

- Why he keeps trying to turn any room he spends time in into the garage

- Why I don’t run the garbage disposal for a precise amount of time (which only he knows) before I run the dishwasher

- Why I don’t wash the dishes BEFORE I put them in the dishwasher (Isn’t that what the dishwasher is for??)

- Why he leaves damp washcloths around the sink in balls instead of spreading them out so they actually dry

- Why he won’t flush the toilet before taking a shower (it does not steal all his hot water, this is just crazy. I flush toilets in the house while he’s in the shower and he doesn’t even know it.)

- Why he spends so much time in the passing lane

- Why I drive at all when I am clearly a woman

- Why doesn’t he write it down when he withdraws cash from the ATM

- Why do I sell everything we no longer use (because we no longer use it???)

Wouldn’t this make a good television show? I think so. Then we could get enough money to live in separate places.

Michael Jackson

He should have stopped with the way he looked in the Billie Jean and Beat It videos. By the time you get to Black and White, something isn't going right, and the Leave Me Alone video where he's flying around in the little roller coaster rocket, he's taken his first step into the true Neverland where you Never Can return to anything even remotely normal or even good looking.

There is so much danger in having too much money when you are young and have no concept of how to manage it. I watched this documentary about him where he was shopping in a Las Vegas gift shop, a lot of fake Egyptian "relics." He would just walk up and down the aisles saying, "I'll take that, and that, and that one..." It was insanely expensive, useless, fake crap.

A news program tonight suggested that as Michael matured into adulthood, the face of "the man in the mirror" became more and more like his father's, and so the surgery began not just to de-ethnic the nose, but to make him so different from the father, he could never again be the son. And then you always think, the next thing will make me happy. The next thing. If I change this. If I change that. I will be happy. I will feel like I have back what I lost, what I never had.

But you don't. It must be a very strange and difficult way to live.

I liked "Rock With Me" and "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough." Sweet songs, and he was cute, even with his original nose and little Afro. He wore a tux, not gigantic baggy pants and a wifebeater undershirt. The Thriller video was a huge event. I remember hanging out in a Sears TV section because MTV was on and the station was about to play the video. It's a long, long video, and people gathered around to see it, fascinated. It was the perfect match between a catchy, epic tune and wonderfully choreographed dance numbers.

The dancing was amazing. Dancing went out of vogue in the 1950s after Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire faded from the movies. Michael Jackson brought it back for awhile like no one else could or has since. He would have had a much happier life on Broadway as a dancer and being openly gay. (As a singer, he is not that much, a Mickey Mouse voice that, like Britney Spears, benefits from special effects and studio enhancements. He is no Adam Lambert.)

I love the mysterious romance of the Billie Jean video. It is as classic and timeless as Gene Kelly's title performance in "Singin' in the Rain." The Beat It video is silly. Jackson cannot pull off being a tough guy, even in a red leather jacket, but the song is great. I attribute that to Eddie Van Halen, though. The introduction of the moonwalk at the 25th Anniversay Motown show is electrifying in ways I cannot describe. I remember watching it live when it happened and you just don't believe what you're seeing. His body could truly move in magical ways. It was the talk of the world the next morning, a defining moment in entertainment history.

But when he died, he was 50, almost 51. There is no magic in being a manchild and 50. There comes a time when you have to begin looking old or else you'e just going to look ridiculous. Like it or not, you start to look like your father and your legs and arms don't bend the way they used to. You cannot fight time. And you can no longer do a 50-city world tour and expect to enthrall the fans the same way you did 30 years ago. Even Sinatra became, in the end, a painful singer to listen to. If you are millions of dollars in debt (that no yard sale of all that Las Vegas gift shop crap is going to solve) and have no choice but to commit to such a tour -- and kill yourself trying to get in shape for it -- well, that was a series of bad decisions made by a manchild who had no one he could trust for sound advice.

And it's not like this is the first time this has happened to a famous person. Elvis and Judy Garland come to mind, just to name two. Elvis died at 42, bloated and puffy. Garland was only 47 and looked 20 years older.

Missing Mechanicsville

It was with great regret that I left Hanover County. I moved there in 1999 to be near a job. The only thing I knew about Mechanicsville was it had a windmill bank.

I found a great old house to rent for less than what two bedroom apartments were going for ($750 a month, and the rent never went up in five years!) Even though we were very close to a commercial area and a busy intersection, the house was surrounded on all sides by trees and brush and was far off the road. I felt like I was living in the woods, even though I was minutes from I-295, which quickly took me anyplace I needed to go.

Everything about Mechanicsville was convenient. Within minutes I could get to a Wal-Mart, a Ukrop’s or an all-night Food Lion. I was looking forward to the new Target with great excitement. I had all my doctors, bank branches and the vet nearby. The traffic was not bad at all compared to the West End or Southside.

I felt very safe and didn’t panic if I couldn’t remember if I had locked my front door. Nothing was ever stolen out of my yard or car. I lost one mailbox to vandals and that was it for my Hanover crime. During that same period, my wallet was stolen twice and our vehicles were broken into twice while in the city.

The police officers were familiar faces, like having a town full of big brothers looking after me. The one time I needed to call an ambulance, I was literally picked up by three grandfathers. They even stayed with me until I was put in a room. And I didn't get a bill afterward for the ride to the hospital.

It was an idyllic place to live. I got married at the historic Hanover Courthouse on a summer Tuesday evening, standing in the same spot where Patrick Henry tried cases. New commercial development brought new opportunities to shop, and yet there was still a small-town, rural feel. I loved to drive along scenic and twisting Atlee Station, Pole Green and Cold Harbor roads.

Then I decided I didn’t want to rent anymore. I wanted to buy a house, but Hanover was being built up with huge and identical looking subdivisions with tiny yards, prices starting at $270,000 and up. I guess when you have a school system as excellent as Hanover’s, people will pay anything to live here.

The few neighborhoods that still had houses under $170,000 were mostly along Cold Harbor Road, up against the steady roar of I-295. People were selling their little houses to move up to the bigger ones. They wanted me to pay $173,000 or more for a modest three bedroom rancher, often with only one bath and no garage, or a little four bedroom Cape Cod, two up, two down, eat in kitchen and a living room. The market was so hot, these houses would sell in minutes. We rushed around for several months, putting in bids, but people would actually offer more than the asking price.

Finally someone told me that the last place that was relatively close-in and still had some affordable housing was the Lakeside or Dumbarton area. On our first Sunday afternoon tour of open houses circa 1950-1975, we found one that easily would have cost $20,000 more if it was sitting across the county line. No one bid more than the asking price, so we got it by virtue of having our mortgage paperwork already in hand—although I have to ask myself how crazy is it to buy something as big as a house after looking at it for 15 minutes? I spend more time trying on a pair of shoes before I buy them.

I didn't want to leave Hanover, but I had no choice. I still miss everything about Mechanicsville very much, especially Anna’s Italian Restaurant, Cracker Barrel, the 23116 post office and the windmill bank, which I hear is no longer a Wachovia anyway.

The Truth about Jon & Kate

Who didn’t see this coming? The demise of Jon and Kate. (re: TLC's cable program "Jon & Kate Plus 8.")

First, they need to stop saying they’re both all about the kids and everything they’ve done, they’ve done for the kids. Granted, this was the plan when the first hour special was proposed to them. The money would go a long way into creating a better life for the kids. But then things got out of control, and it’s about way more than the kids now.

What the show doesn’t address because it would turn off viewers is Kate was once very religious. Decisions to promote the family were made on behalf of the “testimony.” I have religious relatives and know all about the testimony. You have to testify. You talk in public about what God has done in your life. In their case, they feel He delivered healthy children and brought together a network of people and resources to support their family when neither one of them had a job and family support was iffy. All that is documented in Kate’s first book. When God gives help, you have to show thanks by testifying. So Kate and Jon accepted speaking engagements at churches. It almost seemed like the testimony was the whole reason God had given them this big family (if you count using fertility drugs as God’s will.)

The churches paid their expenses. Then, after the two hour-long specials on TLC proved so popular, TLC offered them a television series. Being a family became their job, as Kate often says. As their television fame increased, churches paid more for them to speak. Then talk shows wanted them. Then other organizations. But the talk shows and other organizations didn’t want to hear about God as much.

Part of getting the religious testimony out there – since the TV show would not let them speak about religion – meant Kate had to promote the book. Being the articulate, educated,and confident one, Kate was the natural choice. She was more religious than Jon anyway. But the testimony got lost since it was only being heard at the churches. The mainstream media left God on the cutting room floor.

Kate didn’t back away when the media put the spotlight on her instead of her God. She stepped off the path of faith and let the god of money and hubris tempt her. That’s not saying she can’t come back. You can’t have a good redemption story without first having a spectacular downfall.

That’s the religious viewpoint of what’s at play here. The secular viewpoint is this marriage was doomed from the get-go.

If you’ve seen the “how we met” episode, Kate is older than Jon by a couple of years and was a nurse. At an event she was attending, she spotted him working at a golf course. Jon admits he had no career plans at the time and was going nowhere. What about that was attractive to Kate? A younger man with no plan. I’ve been there myself and the attraction is: he’s your own boytoy to control unless of course somewhere along the line he develops a mind of his own. And Kate, we know, is a controlling person.

In their wedding footage, the faces of key family members are blurred out because by the time the couple were having children, war had been declared against certain family members. It has always been Kate’s way or the highway. Jon overlooked all these early warning signs of Castration Up Ahead. The pre-babies Kate of the early footage is almost unrecognizable, so happy are they as they honeymoon in Disney World.

Then – cue the shark music from “Jaws” – Kate immediately wants a family. I mean, immediately. No waiting for a few years to see what happens. Kate is certain it’s not going to happen without help. Why is she so certain when she’s so young and it’s so early in the marriage? They successfully have twins, but no sooner are they out of diapers when she wants another baby. They both admit Jon was happy to stop at two. Two should have been enough for anyone. Where was letting God’s will prevail in this scenario? (Oh, sorry, this part isn’t about religion, but really, how do religious people conveniently forget the story of Sarah and Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac?)

Anyway, with Kate all determined and preoccupied with babies, she couldn’t work as much. When TLC begins filming them, she’s still doing weekend shifts as a nurse, and Jon’s spotty career as an IT tech is still spotty. Throughout their marriage, he’s been fired and laid off repeatedly – the surface excuse being that his health insurance coverage would be crippling to the companies he works for.

Kate wisely decides that she can’t work and mother eight children. Jon's employment is too irregular, but if she goes back to work, she will have to depend on outside help – which is hard to keep since she’s so particular and bossy and such a clean freak, no one meets her standards – so the best plan is to become employees of TLC and make the family the family business. With such a big organization to run, she’s bossier than ever, and now Jon has no escape. Suddenly he’s being recognized in public and other people are asking him why does he put up with so much crap from that wife of his? (Because that’s what happens to the man-with-no-plan.)

Now, embarrassed, he wants to dial down the show. But Kate is at her zenith. In last year’s finale, while he talks about the awfulness of being recognized in public as “Jon & Kate,” she says she’s never been happier. She is master of all she surveys. She controls the kids, the husband, the film crew. She is the TLC network golden goose. She has a hairstylist who designs a signature look for her. She has sex appeal. Her photo on a recent People magazine cover was dazzling. During Octomom mania, she gets calls for appearances on talk shows to flaunt her expertise. There’s a second book deal and both books are on the best seller list.

Jon wants her to give all this up because people are calling him henpecked? What will she have if she gives it all up for him? The lackluster, career-less boytoy she married. She’d have to go back to nursing, being bossed around by arrogant doctors. They’d have to live in a smaller house. The trust fund for the kids would not grow. They’d be as broke and ordinary as you and me, passing on this rare opportunity to be rich and famous, and rich and famous for excelling at management, Kate’s favorite thing!

If you really loved me, you would not ask me to give all this up, Kate thinks. If you really loved me, you would not ask me to live this way, Jon thinks. And they are both right. They do not really love each other. There was no real love in this marriage from the beginning. It all happened too quick, too impulsively. So Jon does what many men do when they feel henpecked, controlled, or trapped. I’ll show her. I’ll go out and have some fun.

He's disloyal. He embarrasses her in public. It’s all unforgivable to a controlling woman. Being one, I know. It is the worst thing. Jon is now doomed to multiple relationships with women looking for fame, impending baldness, irregular IT jobs and living off of alimony provided by Kate for the rest of his life.

(Rereading this in 2012, I was tempted to delete it since both Jon and Kate have disappeared from view.)

This Makes Me Strangely Happy

I Don't Need Mother's Day

Every year people ask me on Mother's Day if I heard from my son, or what did he get me, or where is he taking me, and when I say no, nothing, nowhere, they are appalled. But I'm not. I don't expect or require any kind of behavior on Mother's Day out of the norm, and he knows that.

That there's a day that requires a certain behavior seems insincere to both of us. If he suddenly decided to buy me a gift for some appreciative reason, I'd be fine with it any other day of the year. If he wanted to take me to dinner or somewhere to enjoy my company, I'd also be fine with it any other day of the year. And we'd probably get a reservation easier.

I'm happy without a phone call. Silence means he's handling his own problems, paying his own bills, busy, and relatively at peace. I'm a helicopter mother, always hovering, ready to swoop in and rescue my troops...and he's a generation that only marginally has a problem with that. For the most part, they let us hover and rescue. I know I won't always be around to do that, so when I'm not needed, I'm glad. If he can manage, that's good. I've done my job.

Why Urban Pigeon?

Every day at the bus stop downtown, I watch the pigeons. They are fearless. They don't care that cars and buses are whizzing by inches away from them. They don't care that people are sharing the sidewalk with them. They're busy looking for garbage to eat.

Then they fly to a monument and crap on it.

It's sort of like my life. There's been a lot of traffic and a lot of garbage, and my career as a writer hasn't advanced much past crapping on the monuments of decorum and tradition that is Richmond, Virginia. I came here just to go to a college that would let me get a degree without taking a math or phys ed class, and then the plan was to get out of here. But I keep getting married to people who want to stay here, and when I'm between marriages, I don't have enough money to rent a U-Haul. My life is in New York City but someone else is living it.

I think about that when I see the pigeons at the bus stop, one thing Richmond does share with New York. Pigeons.

What am I doing here?

Actually, I really do like pigeons. They also remind me of my father. As a boy growing up in the 1930s in the tenements of Long Island City, he raised pigeons. A lot of city kids did. They kept the roosts on the roofs of their apartment buildings. You didn't need pet food as the pigeons could find things to eat while they were out flying, and they always came back.

When I was in the 7th grade, we moved to a house in Greenville, North Carolina. It was the first house we ever had to ourselves. In New York, we had lived with relatives, like many Italians do. Everyone in the same house. Then we lived in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and then we moved to this house in North Carolina. There was a kid in the neighborhood who had a pigeon coop and we were so enthralled with it -- I had heard my father's pigeon stories -- we decided to buy a couple of the pigeons and build our own coop.

So for a year or so, I had this project I shared with my dad, the pigeons. I have never had a very close relationship with my father, and this was the last chance. Before long, I'd move to permanent alienation via puberty and then distance, and then evil stepmothers.

Our two pigeons had babies (squabs are very ugly babies; I don't think there is an uglier baby in the animal kingdom), and the babies had babies, and I kept journals of which pigeons were married (they mate for life) and who their children were, and who their children married. We let them out. They flew around the house, sat on the roof, and came back to the coop. We cleaned out the coop. That was an awful job, and what eventually distanced me from the pigeon project. That and puberty.

(By the way, do not, and I repeat, do not, google "squab" for a photo. Apparently squabs are a delicacy, and you will find only photos of cooked squabs, which are more disgusting to look at than live squabs. It will also turn you into a vegetarian immediately. I warned you!)

Towards the end, it was just my dad. I'd see him out in the yard, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, watching the pigeons circle the sky around the house. Eventually it was no fun for him either, or no fun to do alone, and he sold our pigeons back to the boy who had gotten us started. The decaying roost was still in the yard when we sold the house.

And that was pretty much it for me and my dad. He died a few years ago, an old guy in his eighties that I no longer knew. His third wife kept us all at a distance, so I hadn't seen him in 20 years. But he wrote me one letter every month of just casual chit chat and put a $50 bill in it. I would write him back not to send cash through the mail, but then it occurred to me it was the only way he could do it without his wife knowing. And sending me money was the only way he could make up for not ever coming to see me, or being there for me.

So I watch the pigeons at the bus stop, and because of my dad, I know they're not well bred pigeons because they don't have thick crusts on top of their beaks, but they're not trashy birds either because they do have rainbow coloring on their necks. I wonder who they're married to and where they live. And I think about my dad, standing out in the yard by himself, hands in his pockets, wearing his Eisenhower jacket, and watching the pigeons we named and raised together, flying around the sky.

Mortgage Voodoo

Even though the whole housing crisis, bubble, creative mortgaging, etc. sunk the economy, the evil persists. This week I received a letter from First Fidelity Mortgage Group in Baltimore. They knew my name and roughly how much I still owed on my house. They were offering a 4.5 percent refinance, with a monthly payment almost two-thirds less than I'm paying now, plus for a mere $90 a month more, a $24,000 cash payment.

Down in the small print, there's a reference to interest only, and the 4.5 percent is good for five years only. After that, it could go anywhere. "Rate and programs subject to change at any time." Something mysterious about my refinancing charges being "higher over the life of the loan."

Isn't this how everyone got in trouble?

Legalize Marijuana, Already

The first person who offered me pot was a 4-year-old boy. You read that right. I was 17. My girlfriend, a Ritalin addict, wanted to visit some world traveling hippies she had met somewhere so we went to the run-down hotel where they were crashing and a cigarette was going around. Their 4-year-old was sitting next to me. He took a drag and then passed it to me. I had no idea. I pretended to take a drag and passed it to the next person.

Like Clinton, I’m not an inhaler. Having been a severely asthmatic child, breathing is important to me, so anything that fills my mouth, nose or lungs with smoke has no appeal. Throughout college, whenever I found myself in a similar situation, I did the similar fake-out and left before the conversation bogged down into too much mellowosity. I like provocative conversation and plans of action. Pot smokers like sofas, television, and silence punctuated by endless loop observations of the obvious. They are too content to change the world, or even change the channel.

Plus it’s nasty. It smells bad. Bong water is a whole other kind of vile. I’m not a fan of anything that someone puts in their mouth and then hands to me. Too much spit-sharing going on here.

Except for a caffeine rush from Mountain Dew, I am immune to most addictive substances anyway. Nicotine, alcohol, prescription painkillers – nothing does it for me. I have an Eeyore level of discontent that nothing can dislodge, even temporarily. Although the one time I did inhale at a Christmas party when I was making a feeble attempt to fit in, I actually did feel a lifting of my usual innate apprehensions.

I was lifted enough to get into a car with bald tires on a rainy night and not pay attention to my driver’s directional skills, and broke the windshield with my head when we hydroplaned into a guardrail on a Chippenham off ramp. Natasha Richardson died from less of an impact. I don’t know why I’m alive. After an ambulance ride to MCV and a full body x-ray, I proceeded to the next Christmas party, minus my holiday dress and underwear, which were scissored off in the emergency room. Just paper scrubs and party shoes.

That was 15 years ago, and I considered it a Message from God: Received. If I need to be in the game, back to Mountain Dew. Out of the game, extra strength Benadryl and an hour of C-Span works fine. ZZZzzzz. I will deal with life by continuing to be aggravated.

All that said, I support the legalization of marijuana. (If my driver had been drinking, I think we would have hit that guardrail a lot harder – and in a muscle car.) This really needs to happen, and soon. I have been in rooms full of beer drinkers and rooms full of pot smokers, and I’ll take the smokers any day. It’s quieter, less stupid, less marred by incidents of indiscriminate urinating. There’s definitely less fighting. And less vomiting. Pot is the drug of less. Less worries, less violence, less ambition, less money.

For those who are easily disappointed, angered, or frustrated by life, less can be more. I don't understand why alcohol is not only legal, but sold by the state.

I don’t believe pot is a gateway drug. And if it does have medicinal qualities, if it does ease nausea caused by chemotherapy or dulls the pain of arthritis, how is that a bad thing? Seems like a plant put on earth by God is being used as God intended, instead of pharmaceuticals cooked up on lab hot plates.

The columnist Joe Klein recently proposed in Time magazine, tongue-in-cheek, that marijuana should be legalized for seniors who give up their driver’s licenses. But there’s a good point here. Keep the Boomers sedated as they segue into substandard, under financed, understaffed assisted living and nursing facilities. If marijuana is legally sold only to those 62 and over, then everyone will want granny to live with them.

Klein also points out that decriminalized marijuana means fewer people in jail, that 47.5 percent of all arrests are marijuana-related. Police can concentrate on something more damaging to the public welfare.

It would save Philip Morris, not to mention California. Even when limited to medicinal use, pot is the largest cash crop in California with $14 billion in revenue. What kind of sin tax can you levy on that kind of moola?

It would reduce crime, like repealing prohibition did, by taking the transporting, sales and marketing out of the hands of the underground criminal economy and creating jobs for regular people.

Sure, at first the novelty of it being mainstream will make everyone eager to try it, but then all those, like me, who inherently don’t like the stink, the smoke, and the inertia will quickly move on. And as Klein writes, given the “assorted boozehounds and pill poppers” in talk radio and Congress, “the hypocrisy inherent in the American conversation about stimulants is staggering.” Bad influence on children? And Joe Camel, Captain Morgan, and the Budweiser frogs are what?

As more and more of the WWII generation dies off and out of political office and those born in the 1960s and later rise to power, it’s going to be a done deal anyway. The whole 20th century prohibition of it will seem like an historically quaint era.

Marley & Journalism

"Marley & Me" wasn't so much a story about a dog to me as it was a fantasy journalism story. The movie did not take too many liberties with the facts of the Grogan's careers. By 1991, both Mr. and Mrs. were employed journalists on neighboring South Florida newspapers. Mrs. voluntarily gives up writing to be a mom. Mr., at least in the movie, is almost forced by his gruff but lovable editor to switch from being a reporter to being a twice-weekly columnist. Then he again is almost forced by Gruff But Lovable to write a daily column at twice the money (!!!)...about things that take little or no research: the life of his community and his personal life in that community.

He easily changes from Florida columnist to Pennsylvania reporter and moves into a big stone house on lots of acreage. At the turn of the new century, apparently you could still live high on the hog on a single income as a newspaper or magazine writer. In the book, he actually left Florida to be the editor of Organic Gardening magazine, a Rodale Press product, and tiring of that, walked right into another columnist job with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It was reading stuff like this as a child that made me think this was the desired life and within the realm of possibility, making a grand living writing about myself for a daily paper. Grogan, though, is a rare case of an extraordinarily lucky guy since his writing skills are average. The prose is workmanlike but doesn't sing or soar in "Marley & Me." The amazing second act of his fantasy life is not only did all that dream journalist stuff happen to him, when his dog died, he wrote a book about the dog's life and it became a best seller of such monster proportions, he never has to work again. Money has just poured down upon this guy's head. (And who among us has not had a pet that did stuff and then died of old age? We've all been sitting on book fortunes all this time and never knew it.)

His payday for the movie "Marley & Me" is icing on the icing. The movie is actually faithful to the book (which is not a plus here) and a stupider movie you couldn't ask for. Owen Wilson, he of the bizarrely indented nose, and Jennifer Aniston never age during the 12-16 years this movie covers. Not only do they not age, they never change their hairstyles. Aniston, showing why she will always be a celebrity and never an actress, doesn't employ a single wig to show the passing of time. She is Jennifer Aniston and her trademark hairstyle stays in the movie. Throughout I wondered what this movie might have been in the hands of two actors who were more committed to the roles instead of two celebrities who usually pick the worst scripts and don't act other than to be the same character they play in every movie.

Kathleen Turner, who has not aged well at all (I think she has actually become a man), appears as a dog trainer who gets humped by Marley in one scene. How terrible is Turner's finances that she had to accept this role? No hairstylist or costumer lifted a finger to try to make her look like something...anything.

And worst of all, after enduring the movie, I was really looking forward to the extra features on the DVD, especially a look at the many dogs used to play the life of Marley, but my Netflix copy did not include them. What...was this a two-disc DVD set in the stores?

Meat and Vampires

I experienced two things this past weekend that are ordinarily well-liked: Texas de Brazil and “Twilight.” As usual for me, I couldn’t get on the excitement bus.

I have to thank RVAblogs for my trip to Texas de Brazil. Someone else blogged about going to the restaurant's website and entering personal data and getting discount coupons. So I did that, and sure enough, for my birthday the restaurant sent me a free entrée ticket, as long as I arrived with someone who was paying full price. Otherwise, I would never pay this much for a meal. Not without winning the lottery.

Yes, the salad bar is delightful with an unusual assortment of vegetables, breads and cheeses that are not your usual salad bar fare. We both forgot to even try a soup. As for the meat, it almost makes you turn vegetarian. There is something unseemly about guys walking around with long skewers of meat. It was hard not to think about the Amazing Race All-Stars edition where the teams had to eat a bucket of gnarly looking meats in Brazil while whooshing away flies. The clever Rob of Rob and Amber fame figured out a way to pass on it and take the penalty, as long as he could convince a team behind him to do the same. It was almost like I now had to figure out how to get out of this meat-eating competition at Texas de Brazil to save myself.

Instead of a bucket of meat with a side of flies, they slide off one small piece for you as each skewer goes by. This way you don’t get stuck with too much if you don’t like it. There are no doggie bags at Texas de Brazil. You either eat it then or it gets trashed. Our server told us, yes, they waste a lot of food, but the alternative is to be taken advantage of by the evil conniving people among us, and if you don’t believe they exist, read the Check Out Girl’s blog.

The garlic sirloin was very salty, not surprising since everything is cooked in rock salt. The Parmesan chicken was thigh meat, which I find gross. This almost ended the meat-eating competition for me. The flank didn’t have much flavor, and neither did the regular sirloin. None of the other 10 or more meat choices ever came by our table. Garlic sirloin came back three times. After I declined a second piece three times, our server came over to ask, well, what do you want? Like Oliver Twist begging for more gruel, we timidly asked for filet mignon wrapped in bacon? But the next meat man to come by said it’d be five minutes before any was ready, and by that time we were full anyway and just wanted to leave.

But, now that I’ve survived it and know a little better what you have to do (plan to be there a long time waiting to meet the meat of your choice), by the time my anniversary and another coupon rolls around, I might be up for it again.

As for “Twilight,” this silly teenage romance is a metaphor for every teenage romance. At 16 or 17, what does any girl know about choosing a lifelong companion? Nothing. We haven’t even figured out a hairstyle yet. But we are mightily convinced a boy we hardly know is “the one” we want to spend the rest of our lives with, when they’re really not even worth spending the rest of our teens with. We just can’t see beyond the moment. It’s sad and tragic. I know the vampire I met when I was 15 should have been stabbed through the heart right away. Instead I clung to him until I was 20, and he left me with a baby to pursue his Peter Pan existence. What about my Peter Pan existence? Why do I have to be Wendy and the responsible one? You know how hard it is to finish college and launch a career in a demanding field when you’re a single mother? In the 1970s?! It’s hard. It is a game-changer that impacts every job and relationship you have in the future, and usually not for the best. Damn high school vampires.

So I’m watching moody Bella insist that yes, she wants to spend the rest of her life with cold-skinned, deer-sucking vampire boy and his unusually friendly vampire family playing superspeed baseball. Bite me! Bite me at the prom because it’s a prom moment. Vampire boy, on the other hand, is totally entranced with Bella only because he can’t read her mind. The fact that he can’t figure her out makes her special. So he will protect her forever, except if he wasn’t hanging out with her, making the out-of-town vampires jealous for her blood, she wouldn’t need protecting.

Maybe the book is better. I am tempted to put it in my Amazon cart, except I am afraid it will change me somehow. Everyone I have talked to who has read “Twilight” is insanely crazy about it and has read the whole series about this goofy girl and her pasty lover and they talk and talk about it like it's an addiction. I don't want to be one of those women.

Breasts Like Pizza Dough

Who likes mammograms? Nobody. It is a flawed system, in which something round and attached vertically to your body is supposed to become flat and extend horizontally between two pieces of glass. The technician is pulling and tugging on you like she expects your breasts to be pizza dough, which she can twist like bread sticks.

The lady at the registration desk has a collection of photos of her family at her station. And they all face me instead of her. Why does she have them when she can't even see them? Why does she want me to look at her family? Why does she even have to have this many framed family photos at her work station? Is she going to forget she has family if she doesn't have the BACKS OF THE FRAMES looking at her all day? I don't understand this.

This is a change. They put an identity wrist band on me, and I'm only having a mammogram. Is there a chance I won't survive the mammogram and they won't be able to identify my body without this tag? I'll get lost in the jumble of women who were twisted to death that day in the mammogram lab? Or do they think I have a stunt double in the wings who was going to sneak in and take my mammogram instead of me? They want to be sure that it is me attached to my breasts, not some imposter.

The xray technician puts little band-aids on my nipples. They are purple with pink and green flowers on them, and each one has a tiny little pink fake nipple on it. Why do I need this? The technician tells me some women don't have noticeable nipples and it confuses the people reading the xrays. For the past 15 years I've been having mammograms done without artificial nipples. Have the doctors been confused all that time? (Or are they stupider now?) But I have fairly obvious parts. Nursing a baby will do that to you. It is obvious I am obvious, but I get the band-aids anyway. The fake ones are not even as obvious as the real ones. This makes no sense whatsoever.

"What do you do if someone comes in with a pierced nipple?" She doesn't have an answer for it. I speculate that maybe the pierced nipple crowd has not reached the age of mammograms yet.

The wrist band is on my right wrist. I am right-handed and do not handle scissors well with my left hand. I spend the afternoon trying to wrestle this band off my wrist. I don't have the nerve to try to pull the band-aids off.