Urban Pigeon

A Long Jewelry Story with No Happy Ending

2011-12-27T16:04:00.000-05:00

I am not a fan of jewelry. It might be because I have somany other needs or interests that it strikes me as a waste of money. Itdoesn’t seem practical. Jewelry just hangs there.

I do a lot of computer work, and bracelets bang against thekeyboard. Rings twist around and get in the way of the keys. I wear a name tagall day to move through security doors. A necklace seems superfluous. It itchesmy neck. I have a difficult time with clasps. My favorite bracelet had amagnetic clasp. It snapped together. But I carry so many purses, book bags,lunch bags, and stuff, in the course of traveling, it got tangled up in thestraps and broke.

Pins punch holes in my clothes. I have a utilitarian pair of hoop earrings thatdon’t hurt when I’m on the phone and I never take them off. I have a plain goldwedding band. The morning of my wedding, my husband presented me with a smalldiamond engagement ring that didn’t go with the band. His family had shamed himinto getting it, even when he told them I didn’t want one. We were set withmatching bands. Whenever I see it in the jewelry box, I get sad. It representscoercion to me, not my wedding. Despite knowing me well, he believed someoneelse who said I would like something he knew I probably wouldn’t.

I have been in my husband’s family for 16 years now, andsurely in that time I have mentioned I don’t wear jewelry. I show up for thingssans jewelry. I don’t talk excitedly about jewelry. Either they don’t believeme or they aren’t listening, or they think I can change. My husband is no help.When they tell him what they’re getting me, he never says, “Don’t. She won’tlike it.” He says nothing. So I keep getting jewelry.

I was now in receipt of three new beads for a bracelet I nolonger had. There’s a commercial running where one woman admires anotherwoman’s charm bracelet and she excitedly defines who she is by the charms onthe bracelet. There’s a soccer ball! Because, I assume, she drives her kids tosoccer? Or does she play soccer? There are YouTube videos where you see abracelet full of beads and a narrator tells you what each one means to her. Ican see there is effort here to define me with these beads. One is my initial. One is a cat. I have cats.The other beads are generic.

But I no longer have this bracelet. Putting the charms onand then fastening it to my wrist proved insurmountable last year. A charmwould always fall off and roll into the best hiding place it could find. Itbanged into the keyboard. Charms would snag sweater sleeves. I couldn’t justslip it off. I had to wrestle with the clasp, and when it broke my fingernaildown to the quick, I was done with it. I sold it on eBay to a woman who neededit to fulfill her daughter’s 16^th birthday wish.

The bead market on eBay is weak, so I risk theafter-Christmas rush and try to return them without a gift receipt, since thebarcoded price tags are still on the charms. Kohl’s is ready and waiting, withdirectional signs to all the Return stations.

This is how Kohl’s sells things. They put a tag on the item with an outrageousprice. Then they put up little signs on the racks that translate the tags intosale prices. If the price tag says $58, it’s “on sale” for $24. So I knew goingin I didn’t really have $80 worth of beads, but I might have enough for ablouse. I did. I had $58.50 worth of beads. The tags on the blouses said $58,but the little sign on the rack said $58 was actually $24.80, so I had enoughfor two blouses.

Heady with success, I decide to try to return a diamond chiptennis bracelet to JC Penneys that I actually got two years ago. It was stillin the gift box, except the barcode and price were peeled off. I had looked itup that first year on JCPenney online where it was selling for $75, but figuredthere must have been a sale in the store. On both eBay and Craigslist, there aremany dozens of similar bracelets and people aren’t buying them.

I wait my turn at the jewelry counter and when thesaleswoman greets me, two women start shouting that they had been waiting “anhour.” They have not, but they were there before me so I shrug and my clerk goesto help them. They have thick Eastern Europe accents and severe Communist-erahaircuts and blocky builds. The older woman wears an old fashion headscarf. Theyounger woman wants to see a ring. Then another ring. Then another. They settleon one, but want to pay on credit. They have no cards so have to fill out a newcredit application. The clerk and I wait. They turn it in. The clerk asks tosee their ID. They have none. No driver’s license, nothing. The clerk says she willhave to check with the manager.

This clerk has Mad Customer ServiceSkilz because you know she knows the answer is going to be NO, but the ladiesstand there like there’s still a chance. The answer is no, the clerks says veryapologetically. They leave without any visible disappointment. I am convincedthey knew all along. I develop a backstory that they are actually Romaniangypsies and they were hoping the counter would be so crowded today, the clerkwould leave the tray of rings out, get distracted, and they could pocket a few.Because why else would this woman, who has no cash, need a ring so bad the dayafter Christmas that she will go in debt for it?

Well, turned out she wasn’t the only one. While I wait formy most patient sales clerk to look through pages of inventory photos trying tofind a match for my mystery bracelet, a short, obese woman with over bleached,frizzy hair comes up asking about layaway. There is no layaway for jewelry,fill out a credit application. She does. She has two rings on every one of herfingers, including her thumbs. I am not kidding. She smiles at me. “I can’tbelieve you don’t want that bracelet,” she says. “Give it to me!” And she wavesher beringed fingers at me. Multiple bracelets jingle on her arms. I can’tbelieve she is going in debt for more rings the day after Christmas. On theother side of the counter, I see another woman intently filling out a creditapplication.

There is some kind of need and loneliness going on here,these women alone, shopping for themselves, the day after Christmas. They don’thave gift cards, or apparently money or credit. They fill out applications fornew loans. My sales clerk can’t find my bracelet in the inventory. I don’t tellher it’s from two years ago. I just smile and say, “it must have been regiftedthen.” The woman with many rings suggests again I can regift it to her. Theclerk with the Mad Customer Service Skilz says if I can find it onlinesomewhere with a price and an inventory code, to please come back.

I look at the bracelet. Apparently for some it is a cure forevery kind of sad and lonely. It is worth borrowing money to get. And yet, Ican’t see it.

You may think this story ends with me giving it to the womanwith all the rings, but no, it doesn’t. I am still trying to figure out analchemy that will turn it into something I need, that will cure my sad andlonely, even for a moment.

My Career in Education

2011-11-10T10:28:00.000-05:00

I was a junior in high school when I got my second job. Itwas an unusual job. I was in an unusual high school, the International School of Bangkok. My father, in a mid-life crisis, had joined the foreign servicedivision of the Voice of America and it was our first overseas posting.

My mother was beside herself in anger at leaving her home state of NorthCarolina. Her blood pressure shot up and literally never came down until shestroked out at age 57. My brother, who had just started middle school andwanted a major league sports career, felt he was being deprived of his future,even though his Little League record was less than stellar. My sister wasn’tgoing because she was in college and engaged to be married.

I was the only one happy to go. I hated North Carolina. I hated my high school andfellow students. And my very inadequate boyfriend was already on the other sideof the globe in Vietnam, next door to Thailand. We would see each other twice ayear instead of once. It was fine with me.

One morning, just as I was beginning my junior year, a student job was postedto teach English as a foreign language at a business college. I was used tohaving my own money. I had been working since I was 15 at a movie theater inNorth Carolina. I had played teacher to my dolls as a child. I thought I coulddo it. I had nothing better to do on Saturdays. I took the address andnegotiated the bus trip across Bangkok to the school offices.

The bus cost a single satang to ride, equivalent to less than a penny, so itwas the most economical way to travel, although the buses were always full andyou seldom got a seat. People actually hung from the doors and windows and rodeon the outside. Sometimes there were caged chickens on the bus. I could alsospend a whole 25 cents and take a samlor, which was like a golf cart with aback seat. Or I could go deluxe and spend a $1 and take a blue Datsun cab. Butthat would be wasteful. The cab drivers, thinking I was a tourist, would askfor $5 or more, and I would have to use the little Thai I knew to tell them Iwas on to their tricks and knew the going rate for locals.

The head of the business school looked like Buddha in abusiness suit. He sat on a rug on the ground, surrounded by cushions, incense,and statues of…I guess Buddha and other gods with many arms and legs. I waslucky I wasn’t sold into white slavery. My parents had no idea where thisschool I went to every Saturday was. If I had disappeared, they wouldn’t evenknow where to start looking. I never even knew the name of the school. TheEnglish on the sign just said Thai Business College.

He hired me on the spot. I thought life was always going to be this easy. Iwould teach three classes every Saturday morning. I would take attendance. Theywould listen to an English-speaking person speak. I would turn in grades. Ionly had to grade them on attendance.

The first year was exciting. The students were thrilled to meet me and treatedme with respect even though I was a few years younger. The movie “To Sir With Love” was very popular in Thailand then. They called me Sir. They gave me love.At the end of each semester, they gave me little gifts. We took turns reading outloud from their text books and I would correct pronunciation. They would ask meto explain the lyrics to popular songs. It is not easy to explain the meaningof “yummy, yummy, yummy, I have love in my tummy” by Ohio Express or “do wahdiddy diddy dum diddy doo” by Manfred Mann. I tried. They would laugh. Theylooked at me like I was a fascinating animal in a zoo. They had many questionsabout American life.

The hardest part of the job was taking attendance because the Englishtranslations of Thai names are very long, full of vowels and consonants that phoneticallysounded like gibberish. They would laugh at my attempts to get through the rollcall, but that was essentially their grade so it had to be done. I never got tothe point where I could identify them by name. One hour a week wasn’t enoughtime to connect, and they all looked alike to me. Everyone’s hair was straightand black. They all wore the blue pants and skirts and white shirts and blouseswhich were the Thai school uniform.

And I had 120 or more students, divided up into three classes each semester. Imade $30 a month, which I picked up in cash from the Buddha superintendent atthe end of each month when I turned in my attendance records.

It was a princely sum since I could have a dress custom made for my body from amagazine picture, including the fabric, even Thai silks, for $5. A manicure was50 cents, a pedicure 75 cents. I bought a fake hairpiece for $15 and I couldhave it built on top of my head in a mountain of curls and loops for $1.25. IfI slept carefully, it would last the whole week. It made me look six inchestaller. Shoes and handbags were as cheap as I could get the price down. I had aset to match every dress. Jewelry was a pittance, and we’re talking blue starsapphires set in silver. My family had a live-in maid who cleaned my room, mademy bed, and washed and ironed my clothes. Kongkao was paid $25 a month and abag of rice. Life was pretty good.

Things were great until the end of the second year when I had disruptive malestudents in my class. This was unusual because the Thai culture was builtaround good behavior and showing respect for authority. In American schools,disruptive students were sent out of the classroom. I tried that. Everyone wasshocked. Having a conflict was embarrassing to everyone, even the ones beingevicted. Face was lost. Theirs and mine. They got cocky and challenged it, butgave up when I held firm, but the good atmosphere was ruined after that.Everyone became nervous and uncertain. We laughed less.

I was glad the semester was ending soon and since I was leaving for collegeback in the States in a month, I turned in my resignation and didn’t teach thesummer session. There was no love for Sir anymore. Buddha Superintendent wassad to see me go. I probably lasted longer than any other American high schoolstudent – two years – and had been diligent. The way it ended soured me onbeing a teacher and I never taught anywhere again.

Attacked by the Japanese, Order & Chaos

2011-11-09T16:22:00.000-05:00

It started with an email from Apple saying it was curiousthat I had purchased the Order & Chaos app, an online game, from a computerI didn’t normally use. In the middle of the night. Was I all right?

No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my purchase, so I rushed to mycomputer to change my password, only to find my iTunes account had been takenover by some kids in Kyoto, Japan and left in shambles. Whenever I logged in,iTunes would dissolve into the Japanese version. Although my name and addresswas the same on my account, my city and country were now Kyoto, Japan. And Ididn’t recognize the credit card.

They didn’t steal my money as they replaced my credit cardwith a card that would work in Japan, which changed my country code in theprocess. Nothing I did would move my iTunes account back into English. Becausethe credit card number had come up as fraudulent – the billing address didn’tmatch mine – Apple was insisting I settle that matter before I could make anychanges to my account. And I couldn’t. Every time I entered one of my creditcard numbers, it rejected it because it didn’t match my billing address, whichwas now my street, but in Koyoto, Japan. And I couldn’t fix my address until Ientered a valid credit card number. I was stuck.

How come it was so easy for my hackers?

Apple doesn’t make it easy to reach a human in iTunessupport. They have robot operators who sound very human -- the precursors ofSiri -- and many press 1 for this and press 2 for that choices that solve mostroutine iTunes problems, but My Account Was Hacked by Japanese Kids was not oneof the choices in any menu. I futilely hit every button and verbally requested “Ahuman” at every menu, and finally, a voice came on saying there was a 5-minutewait for a human. By then I was already two hours into my attempt to fix myiTunes account, so this seemed like a blessing. As is often the case, the waittime is exaggerated to discourage you from holding. A human came on almostimmediately after I accepted to wait.

I explained my dilemma and the young man with a Valley Girllilt to his voice asked for my computer serial number. Do I have to turn thecomputer upside down to find it? And this wasn’t a computer hardware problem anyway.He insisted he needed it. We found where it was hidden, three clicks into theAbout This Mac panel. He told me my 90 days of free telephone support hadexpired.

Well, I know that. I’ve had this computer a couple of years,and it isn’t a hardware problem! I don’t need support to explain something tome! I need these damn Japanese kids out of my iTunes account! He agreed thatfraudulent activity was in itself its own category and politely forwarded me onto another young man with a Midwestern accent. We both agreed this was abaffling crime since they had stolen nothing from me except my ability to usemy iTunes account since it was frozen over the issue of the unpaid apppurchase.

“iTunes accounts are free,” he said. (My husband latersuggested that maybe the credit card was stolen so they needed to weld it ontoan account that couldn’t be traced to them. Yet, it was a 600 yen purchase,which is about $7.74.)

It was a mighty struggle to successfully delete thepurchase, and forgive the debt, thus enabling me to change my address back tothe United States and reenter my own credit card and reset my password. Thefirst half dozen tries failed, and finally my guy had to kick it upstairs toanother team of computer wizards. He would come back from hold and say, “Try itnow.” I would try it and say, “Still in Japan.” This went on for another twohours. When we finally landed back in the United States, it kept rejecting mycredit card. The account was now flagged for “unusual activity” due to all ourfinagling and locked me out. It was another 30 minutes to override that.

At the end, when the Apple guy should really have been tiredof dealing with me, he patiently sat through a long tirade about what I hadgone through to connect with him. I wanted an explanation of how this happened;how did the hackers do it when it was so difficult to undo it? And what was thepoint? He didn’t know and offered no theories. And so ended my 4.5 hours withApple support.

Got to say, they were good. The robot support menu wouldhave solved most things. The first Valley Boy was good about recognizing aspecial situation and letting me go through the phone support portal despitebeing out of warranty, and the iTunes team really put in a morning’s work releasingme from Japanese attack. They should have been at Pearl Harbor.

Naturally, I had to google Order & Chaos and see what was so special aboutthis game. The logo is one of those big-eyed Japanese anime kids in medievaldress. Then I googled Order & Chaos hackers and found complaints going backto the beginning of the year of similar iTunes robberies for this game and aTexas Hold ‘Em poker game. Only what the hackers were stealing were credits.Apparently many people don’t feel safe leaving a credit card open on theiriTunes account so they purchase gift cards and enter the credits. Someone witha list of iTunes user names and passwords could write a program sweepingthrough the accounts and downloading all the available credits with purchasesfor poker chips and extra powers and weapons for this Order & Chaos game. Andthen somehow resell these virtual goods?

The credit card number that replaced mine was probably justa bogus one to sweep my account into Japan since it only worked for yen purchases,and the point was to steal credits, not actually try to use the card. At leastthat’s my theory.

And the other weird thing was I had just read in Steve Jobs’biography that his favorite place in the world was the Kyoto, Japan gardens,and I had made a mental note to google it and see the pictures. Only to wake upand find my iTunes account had gone to Kyoto without me that same night. Odd?Mystical.

My Hollywood Career

2011-11-07T14:33:00.000-05:00

My first job was at a movie theater concession stand. Thesecond I turned 15, I got my worker’s permit and applied to the first placethat appealed to me. I was hired on the spot. I thought life was always goingto be this easy.

An actual crone in the actual ticket booth
of the actual Pitt Theatre

The Pitt Theatre had been my social life since I was 11. Wemoved to a small North Carolina college town from the outskits of New YorkCity, and I might as well have landed on another planet. With my coarse, darkhair and harsh accent, I was immediately ostracized by a population of schoolgirls who looked like cheerleaders and blonde boys with Mercury astronautbuzzcuts. So I spent the weekends in the two movie theaters in town, the Stateand the Pitt, one across the street from the other. My mother would drop meoff. I’d see the 1 p.m. show; cross the street and see the 3 p.m. show. Then Iwould walk a block to the library and wait for my ride home. It was easy to do.A child’s ticket was 25 cents back then. I saw everything, and if the movie at thesecond theater was not to my taste, I saw the first movie twice. This was atime where you could spend the entire day in a theater. No ushers ushered youout.

The Pitt was the nicer of the two, so I went there first andasked to see the manager. I did not have to answer 20 questions posed by apanel of three. We came to terms immediately. I would report after school everyday and work until 6 p.m. On weekends, I would arrive in time for the firstshow. I would sell candy, popcorn, soda, and snowcones. Snowcones were trickyto make, so I was glad they were seldom ordered. I was thrilled.

The elderly theater owner was also the daytimeprojectionist, and his elderly wife opened the concession stand each day, stockedthe cash drawer and supplies. Another elderly woman sat in the ticket box. Byhiring me, the owner’s wife could now leave as soon as I arrived and have therest of her day. I worked until the nightshift came on, another husband andwife team who worked as projectionist and concessions and closed the theaterafter the last show. Another old woman was in the ticket booth at night.

There was seldom anything going on during the 3-6 p.m. shift. I would serveless than a half dozen customers. The theater did inventory by cups, so if Ibought a cup at the beginning of my shift, I could refill it several times forfree. Candy was carefully counted at the end of the night and had to match thecash drawer, so you couldn’t stuff your face without paying. But there was anice assortment of 2 cent candies, including Tootsie Roll Pops. A chocolateTootsie Roll Pop, sucked slow, could last a long time.

From the concessionstand, I could hear the movie, and if I opened the door in the back, I couldsee it. The 3 p.m. show would be underway by the time I had squared away my fewcustomers, and my shift was over halfway through the 5 p.m. show, so I heardall the movies backward those years, the ending first, then the beginning. Tothis day, I prefer to watch films that way. And I like Tootsie Roll Pops.

Weekends were busier, but less fun because the other womanwas there all day, too. I had to share my private little candy world. But Ialso got to work the much busier evening shift, sometimes as late as 9:30 whenthe audience for the last movie of the night had settled in.

I worked there for almost two years, until we moved.Whenever someone paid with a Kennedy half dollar, I covered it with my ownmoney and took the Kennedys home. It was a flawed savings plan because my heftybank deposits of Kennedy halves were exciting to look at, but when you withdrewyour money, you didn’t get Kennedy halves back. I guess I could have asked forthem, but in the end, my treasure trove didn’t matter. Years later, it all wentto buy my incredibly bad boyfriend his first car, a Ford Falcon stick shift Icouldn’t even drive.

My fondest memories:

The movies changed every week, but “Sound of Music” was sopopular, it played for an entire month, and we even added weekend shows. Therewas a lot of overtime. People dressed up to come see it. I heard the soundtrackso many times, for many years afterward, I could sing (badly) the entire score.

I lived in a college town, and the Clint Eastwood spaghettiwesterns would actually bring in business during my slow day shifts. Collegeboys would come. They seemed exotic and dangerous and laughed at theover-the-top gun slinging.

On weekends, if there was a kid movie playing, too manyparents would drop their kids off unattended. Sometimes they did it for horrormovies, too (which looking back, were not that horrible compared to now). Thescared kids would hang out at the concession stand with me rather than goinside the theater, all full of fake bluster and bravery.

Once in a rare while, the crones who sat in the ticket boothtook off. Usually the nightshift concession woman took over the tickets then,and I was called in to work night concessions, but if it was a really bigmovie, the thinking was she could handle concessions alone better than me, so Igot the ticket booth. This was the most exciting thing, to be in the box, theface of the theater, distributing the magic tickets. It was even more headywhen kids I knew from school, the cheerleaders and Mercury astronauts, had tostand on line for me to sell them a ticket. Somehow I felt vindicated.

Even though it was released in 1962, the film “Phaedra” withAnthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri played during my concession years. It was aracy movie and something of a local sensation. People almost wore hoods andmasks to see it, as if they were in an adult bookstore. The plot was the wifeof a Greek shipping tycoon falls in love and seduces his son from a previousmarriage. It was adults-only, but no one banned the 15-year-old girl who wasworking the concession stand. Even so, the film seemed so erotically steamy tome, I could only bear to open the back door of the concession booth briefly tosee what was going on.

When we moved, this job was the only thing I was going tomiss about living in that town. I could have gone far in the movie business.

Hush Up

2011-10-28T20:45:00.000-04:00

I used to cover the Hanover County Planning Commission for the Mechanicsville Local. The poor Planning Commission had to approve all the proposals from everyone who wanted to build something new, and listen to the complaints from everyone who had already built what they wanted in the county and didn't want anything else added.

The Nimbys -- Not in My Backyards -- were as united as any political party. Their platform was Stay Away From Me. They usually showed up at the public hearings with the Utopians, those who believed in a world according to their own rules and tastes that protected their God-given "quality of life."

The Nimbys and Utopians shared the same basic argument, no matter what the proposal was. Nobody wanted anything in their neighborhood. Everyone had a quality of life they wanted to preserve, an existence like living on the moon with no noise, nothing, for miles around them.

At one hearing, a neighborhood was up in arms about a new store in an existing shopping center that wanted to have gas pumps in its parking lot. It would destroy their quality of life, they said. One man told the Planning Commission that he could already "hear" the Home Depot, which was across the road from the proposed gas pumps, both about a mile from his house.

After the hearing, I drove to the Home Depot to hear what it was saying. What message was it sending out, and how did you hear it? Through the fillings in your teeth? I didn't hear anything coming out of the Home Depot, and I was parked across the street. How could he hear something from a mile away, a mile that crossed dozens of other houses with televisions, music, barking dogs and lawn mower noises?

I tried to write sympathetically about these residents whose quality of life was soon to be destroyed by gas pumps, but then I remembered I lived two doors down from a 7-Eleven with six gas pumps. Two doors! Six pumps! I had forgotten that because I never heard them, and they were open 24 hours a day.

It made me reflect on what was spoiling my quality of life in bucolic Mechanicsville, what noise do I hear if it's not the gas pumps?

It was the birds, the damn birds in the woods around my house. They woke up before I did and tweeted with much enthusiasm, waking me up. They disrupted my quality of life.

The second thing I heard was cars. I was always amazed at how many people had to be at work at 5 a.m. because when I woke up at 4:30 a.m. (damn birds! Shuttup!), I heard traffic whizzing by at a steady pace. I blamed it on the early shift at the hospital, which was across the street from the nontalkative 7-Eleven gas pumps. The hospital shifts were disrupting my quality of life!

The third thing I heard was NASCAR. I lived close enough to Richmond International Raceway to know when there was a race in progress. All day long, it was rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. But if the television was on and the air conditioner was humming -- which made the pots on my stove vibrate -- I didn't hear race cars. I had to stand outside and listen. Rrrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrr. It disrupted the quality of my standing outside and listening life!!

And the last disruption was the train. Decades ago, my suburb was a little town far enough away from Richmond -- if you traveled by Model T or horse -- to have its own train depot. The site of the station was just blocks from my house, and although the train didn't stop there anymore, it still came through the neighborhood several times a day. All the windows in my house rattled when it did, and the engineer blew a horn to let folks know he was coming through, get off the tracks! The train rattled along right beside a newly built, upscale neighborhood of $300,000-plus homes and was much louder than gas pumps, but the train was there first. The people came later with their 4-bedroom McMansions, four to an acre, 2.5 baths, whirlpool tubs, entertainment rooms over the two-car garage, and interest-only mortgages that would soon be underwater when the housing market collapsed.

The Utopians, and even the Nimbys, considered the train, as well as gunshots and buzz saws "country noises," while Home Depot and gas pumps were "city noises." There's a difference, you see.

Ugly Girl Thinking

2011-10-13T15:43:00.003-04:00

I decided that the night we'd go to the State Fair was the night my husband knew the guys playing in the band, as if he needed an extra incentive to go out with his wife. I still think like an ugly girl, like I am not enough and I need to offer something else in order to deserve a man’s attention or time.

After an hour or so on the midway, and after he stopped three times to talk to friends he encountered, he went backstage to wish the band a good show. With any luck, he’ll come back out and we can go home. The sun had set and it was getting cold. But the bandleader told him, “We’ll call you up to do a song.” So now he was out front waiting for the call-up, which came an hour into the show. With any luck, he’ll take his bow, come down and we can go home. But he stayed on stage, playing guitar, for the last hour of the show. So I wandered around behind the stage and across the field, and around the rodeo, and across the field again, alone. Even married, I can’t get a date.

For awhile I sat on a bench, staring at the ferris wheel lights and realized I had set myself up. I did it to myself. I could have just as easily picked a night when he didn’t know the band playing. Then I would have had his full attention, and we would have left when I was ready. But, I think like an ugly girl and give up control, even when I have it.

Then, the lights of the ferris wheel dislodged an unpleasant memory. When I was 15, my mother gave me permission to go to the North Carolina State Fair, which was a two-hour bus ride away in Raleigh. A boy I had been dating irregularly for four months lived there and he was meeting me at the bus station. He was 18. He was not someone I had fallen in love with. He was just a boy. He had asked me out. I went because at 15, any date is good. Why my mother allowed me to go will remain one of my life’s mysteries.

We went to the fair, and we left with an hour free before my bus back home. He invited me to wait it out at his place, a single room he rented at a boarding house. I foolishly went. He wanted to make out. I had made out with a boy or two before and managed to stop things before they got out of control. This time I could not. Let me say this: it is possible for it to happen and you don’t realize it and don’t really feel anything unusual. It is possible for it to happen without you removing your underwear. I wasn’t even sure if something had happened, but I had a bad feeling, and when I got home, it was confirmed. There was the telltale blood stain of a broken hymen.

I was 15. He was 18. This was technically statutory rape, and since I had not agreed to it, was arguably genuine rape. But teenage girls don’t think that way. I never told anyone. I just stepped sadly into adulthood. I wrote some mournful poetry about not being ready for this in a notebook I have to this day, despite numerous moves and housecleanings. A notebook I have never shown anyone, a notebook I need to destroy before someone settling my estate finds it. (I keep thinking I may turn out to be Emily Dickerson. But, seriously: posthumous fame – what good is that?)

Two serious problems developed. The first was: every date with this boy after that became a struggle. I had done it once, why not again? The toothpaste was out of the tube. And usually I lost. I could only win if the geography of where we were made it impossible, or if my father was following our car on the date, which he sometimes did. I had to listen to all the ridiculous teenage boy lies like being in pain if he didn’t get relief, and using a condom was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. I did not have enough self-respect to say no and risk losing him.

I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Teenage sex is awkward, uncomfortable, and full of guilt, embarrassment and fear of pregnancy and parental wrath. I wasn't even sure I wanted him as a boyfriend anymore. But I thought like an ugly girl, that this might be my only chance to have one. After all, it took me all the way to 15 to land him! The first one to call back for a second date! What if that never happens again? It didn’t occur to me that I might do better than him when I was 18, or 22, or 30, and I should keep my options open.

And the second problem was: despite it being the swinging ‘60s and the summer of love and all that, I had been raised in my mother’s morality and the Baptist Church and truly believed that you get to do it with one guy and that was it...if you were a nice girl, if you wanted to go to Heaven. No matter what. You made your bed, now lie in it. (A decade later when I brought my second husband home to meet my parents, my mother greeted me at the door with, “So now you’re a whore.” True story.)

So there it is. A trip to a state fair put in motion a situation I could not see my way out of. Fortunately or unfortunately, just weeks after the deflowering, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, so the struggle to not have sex before I was ready or wanted to was conducted only twice a year when he was on leave. When he got out of the army, we went to colleges in different states. Our relationship was in its fourth year when we finally lived in the same town, saw each other frequently, and realized we didn’t like each other at all and never had. He was, from beginning to end, a terrible boyfriend in every way.

But by then it was too late. I was pregnant at 19. He went on to live the life he had planned. My plans went completely off the rails. Our pathetic shotgun marriage didn’t even last a year, and even as I was going out the door, having finally caught him with another woman, he convinced me to co-sign a loan for him. Like an ugly girl, I did.

It was not possible to fully enjoy the college experience when I was limited to night classes and had to rush home to the baby. The career I planned required a lot of time to get started, working nights and weekends, being available to cover a story in some distant place at a moment’s notice, moving from town to town to advance your career. It was going to be very difficult to do as a single mother.

And I couldn’t muster the determination. I kept hoping I had enough talent to make it happen in limited circumstances under multiple handicaps. I did not. I watched women with far less talent and desire move ahead just because they could move without strings attached.

And I continued to think like an ugly girl and give up, give in, and sell myself short. I accepted terrible dead end jobs and stayed in them. I married another person I should have left after a few months, and stayed put for years. Thinking like an ugly girl is a hard habit to break. I need to stop going to fairs.

Postscript:

There's honky-tonk magic at Atlantic Beach
Shining on the shore where the sea can't reach
And me and my lover that I found on the sand
Become enchanted by the lights of pinball land.
And all the colored moons of the ferris wheel
Sparkle 'round and 'round and inside we feel
That love will come to us if it possibly can
In the salt water taffy world of pinball land.

While I was still in high school, I wrote a short story about how I met that boy and our first date, and prefaced it with one of my bad poems from that era. It came in second in a short-story contest and was published by the national magazine, Ingenue. I was paid $200, a huge amount at the time. So maybe I thought he was good luck, having kicked off my career to such a promising start.

My Cloverleaf Mall and Peaches Story

2011-10-03T10:59:00.001-04:00

As soon as we entered Cloverleaf Mall, I’d let my toddler run loose. Sears and Penneys, the anchor big department stores on either end, would eventually pick up my toddler and start broadcasting over the PA that they had a “little girl” who had become separated from his parents, or “Scott has become separated from his parents, please come pick him up.” My son was neither a little girl or named Scott. Because of his curly hair, sometimes they just assumed he was a girl, and if they asked, he would tell them his name was Scott, which he preferred to Jeff. I have no idea why. (When he became an adult, he changed his name legally, but not to Scott.)

In any case, I knew it was him so I would leisurely go collect him. I was never reprimanded or arrested. They cheerfully handed him over. Becoming separated from your parents in the mall was not uncommon then and the announcements over the PA were routine. Things have changed very much.

There was a Ruby Tuesdays and a Piccadilly Cafeteria at the entrance to the mall, and a two-screen movie theater on the right side of the intersection. There was even a dentist. I went there once for a toothache. They charged me to have every tooth in my head x-rayed by this robotic machine that circled my jaw, flashing my head with radiation, then the dentist found a popcorn skin lodged between my teeth.

I spent many hours in Cloverleaf Mall. The Sears there was a home away from home. At one time, they even sold Apple computers. This was between the reigns of Steve Jobs I and Steve Jobs II, when such blasphemy was allowed.

My second husband knew nothing about cars, so the Sears auto shop in front of Sears regularly charged us to replace our struts. We knew nothing about struts or why they needed to be replaced so often, but we always agreed. Now, I always call my third husband, he goes “what the hell? Put them on the phone,” talks to the auto guys, and the next thing I know, they’ve changed their mind about what I need. No more waving muffin tins and pizza pans at me and telling me my animatron defibulator is malfunctioning and my car is unsafe to drive until I get it fixed.

My third husband spent many more hours in Cloverleaf Mall because even though he lived deep in Chesterfield County, down a long and winding country road that was near nothing but Lake Chesdin, he regularly hung out in Cloverleaf Mall. Just to hang. To sit there and walk around. Just to see who else was sitting there or walking around. It was a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of thing.

Chesterfield Towne Center was Chesterfield Mall back then, and derisively called Chesterfield Morgue because nothing was going on down there. But between the loitering teens, urban decay creeping up Midlothian (it eventually murdered the Red Lobster and Steak and Ale on the other side of the overpass years after it killed off the original version of Target/Walmart, a store called Carousel across from WWBT that was half department store, half grocery store), Cloverleaf was in the line of rot. I don’t even remember what was across the street now except for the Best Products, Friendly’s and Peaches. Peaches always had that overpowering incense smell. And at one time, you had one of their crates. You know you did. Maybe you still do. I still have a Peaches cassette crate, full of tapes. I need to throw them out.

Here’s my bonus Peaches story. I worked for them one day. I’m not sure if I was never put on the schedule for a second day or I quit, but one day was enough. You couldn’t bring your purse into the store and leave it in the employee lounge. You had to leave it out in your car during your shift. Any personal items you absolutely had to have with you, you were required to bring them into the store in a see-through plastic bag. At the end of the shift, we all gathered at the door where the shift manager inspected our plastic bags for contraband, activated the security alarm, and we all scurried out at the same time. No one could leave earlier than anyone else.

But even that wasn’t so much the problem as my eyesight. My job was to stay out on the floor and keep checking that the records and CDs and cassettes were all in the right places. I needed my reading glasses to do that. But if a customer asked me where something was, and I looked across the store to find the sign, I couldn’t see it. I needed my distance glasses for that. And I immediately figured out that the behind the counter, check-out jobs went to the favored few who had been there for ages, so moving up at Peaches was going to take much longer than I had time for. My shift manager was very nice, actually cute in a way, and gave me a four-track Ricky Nelson CD (he had an office full of samples) at the end of my shift as a present. I still have it. It has “Hello Mary Lou” and “Travelin’ Man” on it. But I was done with Peaches. I never got paid for that day. Peaches, you owe me money.

My Porn Store Story

2011-09-29T15:05:00.001-04:00

The porn store on The Boulevard sits on a median strip, so it looks like it is practically in the middle of the road. My run-in with the store was literally a run-in.

Sometime between 1994 and 1995, I was driving my 1983 Toyota Corolla south on The Boulevard, having just gotten off the I-95 exit. I had 2,000 copies of my newspaper, the Richmond Music Journal, in my trunk, fresh from the printing plant in Ashland, and was starting my delivery route. In my personal life, things were not going well. I was unemployed, on food stamps, and living on credit card advances. I was in the middle of a divorce. No doubt I was preoccupied.

In any case, I was at the stoplight directly across from that porn store when I saw a light several blocks ahead change to green and in response, I pressed down on the gas pedal even though my own light was still red. An old white work van T-boned me. My car went into a spin into the parking lot of the porn store where I slid into the three cars parked there. My car was totaled and I had inflicted damage on four others. I was unhurt. Luck.

Stunned, I knew I had to call the police and get the paperwork done for all these other drivers to sue me. This was a time before affordable and commonplace cell phones, so I went into the porn store to use their phone. Rubber dicks were hanging on all the walls. I explained to the attendant what had happened and could I use the phone, but before I was finished, three men ran out of the store, into the parking lot, and drove away in their damaged cars. Luck.

They did not want to be part of a police accident report that placed them in the parking lot of the porn store in the middle of the day. They’d rather repair their cars on their dime. So that was three of four problems solved. The police came and took the reports. The tow truck towed away my car and the van that hit me. Then I realized I was in a real pickle. My newspapers were in the trunk of the car, newspapers I needed to deliver that day so I could collect the advertising revenue. And I didn’t have the newspapers or a car.

I went back into the porn store and looked up the nearest car rental business and called. Now I needed a ride. A customer in the store volunteered to take me. It is a miracle I am still alive. Yes, I got into the car of a strange man I met in a porn store. Luck.

His car was even older than my ’83 Toyota and was a sea of garbage. It was obvious he never had passengers because he had to do a lot of cleaning just to clear the seat. My legs were still almost knee deep in debris. Off we went down Broad Street to the car rental place. My side of the conversation was moaning about my bad luck and bad driving.

I don’t think he had much experience with real women outside photos in a porn store because he seemed excited and eager to be of service, but still tongue-tied. Finally he rustled through the debris on his dashboard -- coins, food wrappers, tickets, paper – and came up with a sad and sticky looking piece of gum. He presented it to me. “Would you like a refreshing piece of gum?”

No one has ever offered me a “refreshing” piece of gum before. I never forgot it. It was like the most awkward courtship ever, but I did want to arrive at the car rental place so I accepted it, and despite all its dubious history, took off the wrapper and put the gum in my mouth. I dropped the wrapper on the car floor where it was sucked in the muck.

He did deliver me to my destination. I thanked him. He did not ask for my name or phone number or to see me again. That was Courtship 102 and he had barely passed 101 that day. I would have said no, anyway, but politely. Luck.

The end of the story is I rented a car with my credit card, drove to the junkyard, transferred my newspapers from one car to the other, hugged my Toyota good-bye with much weeping, apologized for killing it, delivered my newspapers, and then drove the rental around to dubious car lots on Midlothian Turnpike until I found a 1989 Mercury Tracer for $3,500, which I bought with a credit card cash advance check. Then I filed for bankruptcy, so it was a free car. Remember, I had no job. Luck.

I drove it for 10 years. It had a bend in the top of the antennae, which eight years later, made it recognizable to its original owner who left me a note on my windshield. He had driven that car back and forth from Roanoke when he was going through a divorce and put so many miles on it, he sold it after four years. I probably put another $6,000 into it to keep it running until I finally found a stable job in 2002 and could buy another car.

Also, after the accident, despite only one of the four drivers filing a claim against me, Allstate canceled my insurance. Not only had I had an accident, I was driving while divorced. Divorced women are an increased liability. We are preoccupied and usually drunk. We are suicidal and distracted. All the other auto insurers gave me outrageously high quotes. Remember, I did not have a job. I was trying to figure out what to do when my Allstate renewal bill came in the mail. I called my agent. I thought I was canceled?

“Pay it quick,” he said. “It’s a mistake, but if you pay it and they accept it, then they have to cover you for another year.” I dropped another credit card check in the mail ahead of the bankruptcy. They cashed it. I was never canceled again. Luck.

Every time I stop at that light across from the porn store, I get a grip on myself. Watch the light in front of you, not down the street. Pay attention. And so far I have safely gotten by it every time. Luck.

A Better Job Interview

2011-06-27T16:24:00.000-04:00

Job interviews are difficult. Three people with a list of 20 basically irrelevant questions take turns asking them. They methodically write down your answers.

They already know you are qualified to do the job. They decided this from your resume. That’s why you got the interview. This is the swimsuit part of the job pageant. They want to look at you. They want to decide how you’re going to fit into their office based on your appearance, voice, behavior.

The questions reward people who are good at lying on their feet quickly and convincingly. Every answer may be utter baloney, and the interviewers don’t know that.

This gets you a new employee who will be able to call in sick, even when they’re not, and make you believe it. Or provide a creditable explanation why a project isn’t progressing, even when it’s not remotely true.

Then they usually end the interview by asking if there’s anything you’d like to know about the job? I know asking about benefits or hours shows you’re only interested in helping yourself, and not the company, so that’s the wrong thing to say. I don’t know what the right thing to ask them is.

I do know you can’t ask any of the things you really want to know, like how crazy are my co-workers and bosses? Most of the jobs I’ve had, I wouldn’t have applied for them if I didn’t think it was something I’d enjoy or could do. But when I’ve quit, it’s always been because the people were insane.

How many women in your office are childless and what positions of power are they in? If you have kids, a childless woman is not going to comprehend how you have to juggle your priorities. And if you are not raising kids and you are surrounded by women who spend 80 percent of their work time raising their kids by telephone, it is going to drive you crazy.

Who smokes and are they management or peons? If management smokes, the peons who also smoke are going to be sharing quality, relaxation time with the bosses out on the sidewalk half a dozen times a day. They will bond on a level the non-smokers cannot hope to obtain. This is such a truth, it’s been an episode of “Friends.” And if your boss doesn’t smoke, he or she, and your nonsmoking co-workers are going to perceive the smoke breaks you need as wasted time.

How many people in the office wear excessive amounts of cologne, and how close will they sit to you? One cubicle dweller I worked with even took issue with the smell of gum or mints. I have despised jobs where co-workers frequently went out for Chinese, but didn’t stay out with it. They brought it back to their desks where the stench hung in the air for the rest of the afternoon. Microwave popcorn poppers can make a whole floor smell like a movie theater.

Who is a cleaning fanatic, and how much power do they have? The cleaning fanatics tend to be the same group that likes to celebrate birthdays, promotions, and departures with baked goods. Any excuse for yet another office cake is seized, but then they chase you down the hall with a vacuum cleaner because you dropped a crumb.

Are you being hired to do the job as outlined, or are there Secret Hidden Responsibilities, like watering the plants? I once had a boss who hired me for my computer skills but yelled at me every day because the office plants weren’t thriving.

How crazy are the coffee people? The Office Coffee Militia have notes pinned around the coffee area with warnings to pay for every cup, clean up after yourself, don’t leave cups in the sink, turn the pot off when the coffee is low, whoever takes the last cup has to make the next pot, and so on. Half their day at work is spent making coffee, complaining about the coffee area, policing other people’s coffee habits, or obsessing about the coffee situation.

Are the bosses big picture people or little pickers? In the big picture view, the job is getting done. It’s getting done well. It’s getting done on schedule. But that’s not enough for little pickers. They may want you to come in exactly on time. Not five minutes late, but exactly, and this may become an obsession. They may put a stopwatch on lunch or breaks.

Or they may require dozens of little progress reports, explanations of how your time was spent, budgets of how you expect to spend your time next week, time off requests in triplicate and signed by three levels of managers. The evidence that the work is actually getting done is not good enough. Staff meetings are spent discussing disappearing pencils or toilet paper supply. It’s like the Caine Mutiny Court Martial where the captain becomes obsessed with whether or not someone is stealing the strawberries from the food locker, right in the middle of World War II.

These are some of the questions I’d like to ask at job interviews. I want to know the personal quirks and habits of everyone who is going to sit near me, or make decisions about how I get the job done. I’m spending 40 to 50 hours a week with these people. I’ll see them more than my family. But if you actually asked questions like that, they’d think you were insane. You’d never get hired. And yet, it’s the basis of whether or not you’re going to be successful and effective in that position.

Good Enough is Good Enough

2011-06-08T11:24:00.001-04:00

“Good enough is good enough,” was the mantra of Urs Holzle, the first vice president of engineering at Google. In I’m Feeling Lucky, Douglas Edwards’ overwritten memoir of working at Google in its early days, “in those five words, [Holzle] encapsulated a philosophy for solving problems, cutting through complexity, and embracing failure.”

Holzle felt lists of projects longer than you could accomplish in a reasonable timeframe had to be prioritized, and then: “If you give a project a quick improvement, that gets you 80 percent of the way to solving the problem. You haven’t solved it, but it drops below the line, versus one you haven’t worked on at all. Once a problem drops below the line, even though it’s not finished, you should work on something else.”

Projects start big, he says, then “decay in importance” as some parts are fixed or implemented. Eventually, you will skim through all the most crucial elements of your above-the-line problems and what’s left is jobs that just need some final tweeks. That was Hozle’s definition of success.

Reading this made my head pop off with excitement because that’s always been my guiding philosophy, too. Get it done, get it done quickly, do what you need to do to get it working again because good enough is good enough.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been a vice president with the power to implement this philosophy. I’ve always worked under supervisors who wanted things perfect, not good enough, and their definition of perfect was as variable as their personalities, and changed with the time of day. We would keep redoing and redoing projects, trying to reach that ephemeral state of perfect in one person’s eyes, and there would be three inevitable results:

--The project would be abandoned, because we didn’t get to the perception of perfect. Or the supervisor would get promoted, and no one left behind cared about finishing the project.

-- The supervisor would lose interest in it and finally let it move forward in whatever was the last state it was in, even if it wasn’t the best state it had been in.

-- The supervisor would get distracted by other projects, and it would either be put on permanent hiatus, or someone else would take it over and actually finish it because “good enough is good enough.”

I often get this question at job interviews. They pitch a hypothetical situation of several different projects being thrown at you, all with similar, urgent deadlines. What do you do? Imagine if I said I would quickly move each project to the state of “good enough is good enough,” and then if there was still time before deadlines, tweek each a little more in the time allowed.

Instead of being dazzled that I was employing the same winning formula Google used to dominate the Internet and make a gazillion dollars, the interviewers would be appalled and feel my work would be done haphazardly and incompletely. I would not get that job, while the “big thinker” would dazzle them with the promise that every job would be prioritized perfectly and completed perfectly because he or she possessed that unique magic skill. And of course they don’t. They just want to be hired, and they will be. Getting hired is their unique skill, not doing work.

My husband is like this. No matter what the job, from replacing a light bulb to building a deck, he says, “It has to be done right.” He has no middle ground, no good enough is good enough, no temporary solution until there is time or money to do it right. He only has the expensive, time-consuming, beyond his ability fix that will satisfy his vision of a job done perfectly. But because of its awesome scale, it will never get started. The journey to perfection is too long and arduous. It requires much planning, many supplies and new tools. It requires friends who don't want to leave their sofas to come and help you on a task that has no clear ending. There is never enough time. And even if he gets started, he never gets finished.

You may think I am exaggerating about the changing the light bulb, but right now we have two burnt out in the family room. They require you pull the old bulbs out with a suction cup and then push in the new bulb. It is an annoyingly difficult job because you can’t see the connectors to line them up visually, you are balancing precariously on a stepstool while you do it, and your arms are above your head, a position that gets tiring quickly.

I struggle with it. He can do it easily, but it is not perfect, so he says if we bought the more expensive bulb that lasts longer, we’d need to replace it less. That is true. And that would be perfect. But that also means I have no light in the family room until we get around to shopping for those bulbs and he has time to put them in, whereas the old style bulbs are waiting on the table. We can put them in now and move this project “below the line” as 80 percent solved, and get the better bulbs at our leisure, but no. “It has to be done right.”

My son is driving my car this week, a car in which I feel comfortable because I am used to it, and I am driving his car in which I feel strange. His car needs repairs, and the repair shop is next to my bus stop. So I take it in every day. My husband wants it “done right.” The repair shop is doing it “good enough.” The car runs fine every day when I pick it up, but the oil light blinks after awhile. I have read on Internet forums about thousands of people driving around in Hondas with blinking oil lights, and no one knows why or how to fix it. My repair shop can only keep guessing, until:

--My husband, like my perfectionist supervisors, will eventually lose interest in this pissing contest he is having with our repair shop, or

--Another, bigger automobile repair on his car will come along and suck away all the time and money being devoted to the Honda and he will reprioritize by force, or

--I will just deliver the car back to my son without letting my husband drive it first, and neither one of us will tell my husband that the oil light is still blinking, or

--My husband will make me drive it to the next town to his uncle's repair shop, and I will spend the whole day sitting in the unair-conditioned waiting room while the uncle's mechanic goes through the same motions as our local repair shop. I will drive back the "fixed" vehicle; the light will start blinking again; my husband will call his uncle who will say the light means nothing, just put some duct tape over it and check the oil regularly, and because it is his uncle telling him this, he will finally let good enough be good enough.

Meanwhile, my son is getting comfortable in my car and will start suggesting daily that I just give it to him and get myself another one because I’m better able to make car payments. I do not want this to happen, which is why good enough is good enough needs to intercede. And I need lights in the family room.

Speak English

2011-03-07T14:25:00.000-05:00

Does it bug you that every time you want to get $20, you have to tell the ATM machine you don’t speak Spanish? Or every time you call your bank or credit card for a statement, you have to select “1” for English or “2” for Spanish? Or that all the signs in Home Depot and Lowe’s are now in English and Spanish?

I thought the United States was a cultural melting pot. You get in the pot and melt into a fairly homogenized stew, and somewhere along the line it was decided the stew would speak English. But now you don’t have to.

One way to jumpstart everyone into learning English as quickly as possible is not to have all this coddling with options! At least, that’s what my grandmother would say. Nothing infuriated her more than the proliferation of Spanish. She was living in Kissimmee, Florida, and Southern Florida might as well be a part of South America, so much Spanish is heard. I’ve been to supermarkets there where every magazine at the check-out was in Spanish, driven through shopping districts where all the signs were in Spanish. You could get along very well without ever learning English.

Things weren’t so accommodating when my grandmother came to this country from Italy in 1916 at age 12. Because she didn’t speak English, she was put in a first grade class, despite being a preteen, and expected to figure things out from there.

“Padrones”—self-appointed negotiators and problem-solvers for Italian immigrants—would visit the neighborhoods and conduct their English business for them for a fee. My grandmother’s family hired one to register the births, and he’d take his commission and make a stop at the corner bar first. By the time he got to city hall, he had forgotten the name of the baby he was supposed to register, so he’d make up a name, much to the surprise of my relatives when they had to get their birth certificates years later for military service or marriage.

My grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage at 14, got divorced when she was 22 and had four children. She supported herself for the rest of her life as a hairdresser. That required she learn English to talk to her customers, and by necessity, she did.

My grandfather did not. He came to America as a teenager and died in his eighties, and all that time he lived in Flushing, New York, he learned very little English. How could that be? How could you live in New York for 70 years, listening to the radio, watching television, and not learn English?

How? Because he lived in an Italian neighborhood, all the tenants in his apartment building were Italian, his first and second wives were Italian, every one he worked with at the wire factory was Italian. All his friends were Italian. He completely insulated himself from life in an English-speaking country. He never learned to read or write Italian or English.

I can’t tell you a thing about him, even though I lived with him for a year when my son was a baby and had breakfast, lunch and dinner with him every day. Our conversation in all that time consisted of a daily commentary on my non-supporting husband back in Virginia—“eessa bum,” and a daily weather report, “eessa louse day.”

My grandmother remarried him platonically 45 years after she divorced him just to torture him to death, and yelled at him in Italian all day. Sometimes he would mumble something back.

“What he’d say, Nana?”

“He says he’s going to chop up my car with an ax.”

It would have been nice to find out why—or maybe when—but he wasn’t talking, not in English anyway.

One day I visited Ellis Island—by way of the internet—to find out something about him. I had to guess at what his name was since I knew him only as Sam. I tried Saverio Matera, and there he was. He left St. Marco via the port of Naples on a ship named the Ancona and arrived at Ellis Island, April 6, 1914. He was 16 years old.

Eighty-six years of family history, 70 of it spent in America, and he couldn’t tell me anything and I can’t tell anyone anything about him now. Somewhere along the line he should have learned some more English. The ATM machines in Flushing now probably ask if you want your transaction in English, Spanish or Italian? Maybe even Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Klingon. I noticed the other day my ATM was now offering Russian. There is no large Russian community where I live. Why is this? Where does this end?

No need to melt in the melting pot now. We’ll keep you handicapped in America by accommodating your language requirements for some things, thus limiting your opportunities and keeping you segregated from the rest of us and even your own American-born family members.

Art - Real or Imagined?

2011-02-22T16:55:00.001-05:00

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir of her time with Robert Maplethorpe, from their amazing meeting – really, in a city as big as New York, how do you accidentally run into the same person three times in a short period in completely different places? – to right before they both became famous and went their separate ways. Just Kids was an astounding book. Some people just know exactly when and where to stand for lightning to strike.

Through the book, I again encountered the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith's hero, and someone who had also hovered over the life of Jim Morrison, another person I once studied for his uncanny ability to attract fame and fortune through poetry while in the middle of self-destructing.

I was a student of Morrison in the pre-Internet era, so this time when Rimbaud reappeared as the mystic inspiration and king of all poets, I researched him, only to find a callow, decadent youth who wrote the bulk of his poetry in his late teens and was burnt out by 21, dragging out his last years in the usual mayhem, decadence, poverty, and illness.

What do teenagers know? Smith and Maplethorpe were barely out of their teens when they spent hours together drawing sketches, making necklaces out of tackle shop beads and feathers, and taking Polaroids. And all this activity is somehow high art, important art, creating a world that is on a higher artistic plain.

When does the humble Polaroid become art? The difference between their photographs and the thousands on Facebook seems to be lighting and background. Plain, uncluttered, stark backgrounds, good natural lighting, an unsmiling person with a prop or two, that’s art. (It also helps to not have a television to drug you, so you actually do spend every evening cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages.)

So I examine my soul because I am unable to appreciate Rimbaud’s poetry. It seems so Anyone Can Do This. So much poetry is the recitation of things happening in nature that you then internalize to an emotion. My despair floats along the breeze like the withered maple leaves of fall. You are hopelessly in love. You are filled with desire to live life only on your terms, even if it means starving and dragging down everyone with you. You let go. You seize the day. You see the light. You plunge into darkness. You quoth the raven, nevermore. You contemplate a fork in the road and take the one less traveled by. Housework drives you crazy, white Godiva, I unpeel dead hands, dead stringencies, and then stick my head in an oven.

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted, he wrote on her headstone.

Really, poet laureate of Britain, that’s all you’ve got? What does it mean? Anything you want, I guess. It’s the fun of poetry, to decipher it through a lens of your own experience and take it anywhere you want it to go.

Like Jackson Pollack’s art, it seems to be an acquired taste. Why are the same ramblings, or the same splatterings, art in some people’s hands and not in others? It must have something to do with believing you are an artist. If you believe hard enough, hard enough to starve and disrupt and annoy, you’ll convince enough people that you are an artist. My Polaroid picture is art. Yours is a Polaroid picture.

Maybe I have just never believed deeply enough in my own Polaroid pictures. How often are artists discovered that have no idea they are creating art, other than Smithfield the pig? Smithfield the pig meet Jackson Pollack. No, you discover yourself and just convince everyone else.

So, in the spirit of believing, I went back in time to discover myself and pulled out a book of my poetry, written between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was in my tender Arthur Rimbaud years, so ignorant of life that I was still comparing my new emotions to nature, the starry nights, the gentle breezes, the babbling brooks, the silence of a forest, butterflies in a meadow. How amazing to be 15, to have only been on this planet such a short time, in a body still growing, being controlled by a brain with so little information. Everything really was new. If a born blind person suddenly sees, how do they put anything in context?

I try to see art in it, but there’s been too many years, too many experiences, too much pain since then to appreciate how first love felt, why some callow young boy would be so damn important or inspiring, or why losing my virginity left me so thunderstruck and conflicted, when girls today toss it out the window like fast-food wrappers. All I can think now is I must have been crazy insane to feel this way about things that ultimately became irrelevant. Well, if I had drank or drugged myself to death a short time later, or stuck my head in an oven, and left behind these crazy poems, I guess they would be pretty damn relevant.

Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, the musical poets of my youth -- if they had lived, would they still find truth or beauty in their songs? Or would they be as embarrassing to them as my poems are to me?

In a book of astounding sentences in Just Kids, one of the more astounding ones to me was when Patti leaves her bookstore job to apartment-sit for a musician/lover who is touring with Blue Oyster Cult. When she gets to that part of her story, she remembers that it was the last time she ever had to “work” for a living at a day job for the rest of her life. She was barely 21, if that. It was all music, poetry, art, and writing from then on, because she believed she was doing great work at all of that, and so did others. She never punched a time clock again. Not that life was easy all the time after that, but it was art. And for her, it still is.

Bad Poetry from 1970

2011-02-21T11:09:00.001-05:00

I'll probably be married before I'm inspired to write again
And continue my life in awkward and sometimes brilliant verse.
I'll probably be married with one baby or two and write about them --
Their innocent and darling ways,
Atrocious, mother prejudice-verse
That will not appear in McCall's, or Ladies' Home Journal or even Family Circle.

I'll probably also write a tragic eulogy for my parents
Who will be on the death roll then,
And a tragic eulogy for myself,
Who will be waiting for her own roll.

I'll mourn my childhood and tender years of youth --
Years I know now were nightmares --
This part I will forget.

And I hope I will be rich,
But I know I probably won't be.
And I hope I will be happy,
But I doubt that, too.

What It Takes to Get a Job

2011-01-28T21:04:00.000-05:00

The last time I was on unemployment benefits was 2001. I was laid off in August and didn't go back to work full time until March 2002. I had to put in job cards every week to show I was actively looking for work during that time in order to collect my unemployment check.

Tonight I found the notebook where I kept my job search records. It is an interesting saga of what it takes to actually find a job. Here's where I applied.

1. Pamunkey Library
2. Style Weekly
3. WHAN Radio
4. Virginia Department of Emergency Management. I had worked part-time here from 1997 to 1999, and a couple of months after 9/11, my old part-time job opened again, so I went back for awhile. Even so, the salary and hours were low enough that I could keep applying for and receiving reduced unemployment benefits.
5. Hanover County Sheriff's Office
5. Randolph-Macon College (I was willing to be a receptionist, but no.)
6. Cavalier Telephone
7. Some mysterious "marketing specialist" ad in the paper
8. Department of Conservation and Recreation
9. Henrico County Schools
10. Hanover Department of Social Services
11. Henrico County Leader
11. Christian Children's Fund
12. VCU - the position advertised was director of Alumni Relations. I was an alumni.
I could direct. But no.
13. Richmond Times-Dispatch - The job was taking in the wedding and engagement submissions. I had a degree in journalism. Didn't even get an interview.
14. Hanover County -- anything they had
15. Hanover School Board - anything?
16. VCU Health Systems -- position was public relations practitioner IV
17. Kwick Kopy -- Yes, I will make copies and I will make them quick, but didn't even get an interview.
18. Time-Life Customer Service - I have applied here at least four times in my life and gotten interviews, and even though I have done customer service by telephone for a bank and a mail-order pharmacy, they still refused to believe I could service orders for the complete World War II series.
19. Channel 12 - the position was assistant to the vice president
20. University of Richmond - anything
21. PharMerica
22. St. Joseph's Villa
23. Diamond Springs Water
24. Richmond Coliseum
25. James River Associates
26. Bon Secours Memorial Regional Medical Center -- admin associate in the Surgical Care Center, unit secretary at Meadowbridge Transit Care. I even applied to work in the gift shop, but no
27. Copier Care Company
28. Northside Magazine
29. Richmond Voice - I can do newspaper page layout better than anyone they have ever had in the past 15 years. I know how to size a photo without stretching it into distortion! But no interview.
30. City of Richmond, Office of the City Manager
34. Virginia Department of Fire Programs. I got an interview here, but no. Years later I would work with the guy who got the job.
35. Virginia Department of Health
36. Supply Room Companies
37. VCU Department of Student Affairs
38. March of Dimes - I got an interview here and if I am not mistaken, the person vacating the job had been hired as the new editor of Style Weekly. They had loved him, and his shoes were going to be hard to fill. And not by me. It was a no.
39. Virginia Community Policing Institute
40. Bankruptcy Court
41. Hanover Herald Progress
42. Capital Mac
43. Richmond Metro Visitors Center
44. Virginia Blood Services
45. New Kent County Planning Commission - I remember driving out there and thinking this would be a very long daily commute. I guess the no was a blessing.
46. Tobacco Company - Got an interview. They had a position that marketed their nightclub events. "Sex and the City" theme nights were big then. Are you a Carrie or a Miranda! But no.
47. County of Henrico
48. Inside Business
49. University News at VCU
50. Girl Scouts of America
51. Salvation Army
52. Valentine Museum
53. Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Administration
54. Glen Allen Cultural Arts Center

One of these places, I applied for the job in November and didn't get an interview. But in January, I got a call out of the blue about another job in the same office. They had kept my application on file. I know they always say that, but you don't really believe it. That was a part-time job, so I worked downtown in the morning and rushed over to VDEM way down Midlothian Turnpike in the afternoon, grabbing a $2.25 hot dog and soda along the way. I paid $10 a day to park in the Coliseum deck just in the mornings, which was crazy, but the only way I could make it work.

In March, I had to interview for my own job when it was upgraded to full-time. I recognized some of the other people who were interviewing from other job interviews or from working with them in previous jobs. I pretty much knew I had a 99 percent lock on getting the job because I was already doing it at the place. I was sitting in the chair. But the other five candidates didn't know that. I felt sorry for them, as I saw them come through, so hopeful. It dawned on me that many, many times, I was just one of the people Human Resources was interviewing as a fake-out, to look like they were actually trying, when all along, everyone already knew who was getting the job.

The journalism/public relations field for a long time was the same crowd of people who just kept rotating around. Several of the people who got the jobs I didn't get during that time ended up working where I am now. We all go 'round and 'round.

About four years later, the job I had originally applied for in November opened again, and I interviewed for that and got it. Again, I was already in the office. I was actually doing that job and my own and had been for months. And yet they interviewed five other people along with me.

So that was a very long trip to my current position.

Since then, there's been hiring freezes and no money in the budget for raises and I've been stuck in 2006 career-wise, except for completely recreating my job to be social media managing since the rest of it went extinct like dinosaurs hit by meteorites. Public relations and marketing in the 2000s was what journalism was in the Woodward and Bernstein years of the 1970s. Everyone and their grandmother playing Farmville on Facebook is now a social media expert.

Probably Less Human then Human

2011-01-24T21:21:00.002-05:00

Sometime in the mid-90s, I became entranced -- for the first and last time -- by White Zombie, more specifically, one particular White Zombie song, "More Human Than Human."

And somehow -- my boyfriend -- who we shall call B -- acquired free tickets to a White Zombie concert at the Nissan Pavilion in Manassas, which required we ride on a local radio station bus to the event with other ticket winners.

My boyfriend had a friend who listened to his radio all day long and had become the master of speed dialing. He was almost always able to win concert tickets by being caller No. 9 or No. 7 or whatever the number you needed to be. And that's how we acquired the tickets. He actually won twice for this concert, and since you can't win twice, he gave B's name for the second set.

B and I boarded the radio station bus at the Arboretum. C and his wife, J, were leaving later and driving themselves.

Much to my surprise, as soon as the bus pulled away from the Arboretum, all the bongs came out. I thought pot was illegal. The bus proceeded to Manassas in an internal fog, and we were late getting into the Nissan because the bus driver got so lost, we ended up in Washington for awhile. Must have been the fumes.

The amphitheater was packed; the bands were loud, and by the time White Zombie came on, I was exhausted from the crowd, the fights breaking out, the noise, the vomiting, everything. And we hadn't even been there very long. I vaguely recall White Zombie had a scary and profane stage set that upset my Baptist/Catholic sensibilities. I am thinking it must have been Christ on the Cross imagery that was blasphemously displayed. I have blacked that memory out. In any case, as soon as they finished "More Human Than Human," I was ready to go. It started raining as we retreated to the bus.

Back in the bus, it was almost as bad as the amphitheater. Refugees who were already too drunk, too sick, and too beaten up had already returned to the bus to continue being drunk, sick and angry. Some of them hadn't even made it to White Zombie. Just as we settled in our seats in this Hell Bus of vomit, I spotted C and J walking through the parking lot. We scrambled off the bus. There was much rejoicing, as we had not known they had won more tickets and were going to be there. They offered us a ride back to Richmond. By now, it was raining hard.

So off we went down the highway, and just like in the bus, the bongs came out and I found myself once again encased in fog and everyone except me was pretty mellow. I was particularly unmellow because it was dark and raining furiously. Visibility was zero. J was driving. I was terrified.

As the rain came down harder, C would give J words of encouragement about what a great driving job she was doing, and reward her with a nip off a flask he pulled out from under his jacket. So now I was hurtling through the rainy night in a carload of people who were stoned and drinking. And I was pretty sure when we collided with whatever we were bound to collide with and die, I'd be the only one who would feel it. It sucks being the sober one.

But that night, we did not. We were delivered back to the Arboretum where I retrieved my car and went home and lived to tell this tale.

I don't think about it much anymore, but it was one of the few adventures of my life since I tend not to walk on the wild side. I pace through life with training wheels and a helmet -- not that this trip to see White Zombie was even all that wild.

But tonight, someone on my Facebook feed posted a Morphine video, which made me go to iTunes to look up Morphine, since it seemed there was a long-forgotten song of theirs I really liked at one time, and iTunes suggested I might like Les Claypool, too, which I sort of do, so I clicked on "Winona's Big Brown Beaver" just to hear it again. Then iTunes suggested I might like White Zombie, and all this memory, so long buried, rushed back.

Giving Up

2010-12-31T19:35:00.001-05:00

It was a landmark year for quitting things.

I quit watching certain TV shows I had watched for years. Reality shows became so shameful, even shows that made fun of them became exasperating, so I quit "The Soup." Also, my new Tivo lost the ability to record the show only once a week, Ten episodes of the same "Soup" was too annoying.

I gave up on "Grey's Anatomy." I was marginally invested in the original group of doctors, but most of them are gone now. Horny doctors and gross medical cases doesn't do it for me anymore. Besides, as a writer, it drove me crazy that every character talked in the same tone of voice with the same phrasing. It was like how the lead character in a Woody Allen film always sounds like Woody Allen, even when it's not. I'm noticing this same acting flaw in "Gilmore Girls," but I am going to hang in there until it ends. Watching five episodes a week, I figure I have about three months to go until Rory graduates Yale. Then never again. I checked "Parenthood" to see if Lauren Graham really talks that way or if she was acting. She really talks that way. Sorry, that's not acting.

I gave up watching television news opinion shows...or television news of any sort. At first it was just because I was so sick of George Bush, I didn't want to see him or hear anything about him. Then I found out I felt the same way about Barack Obama. And I am sick of the opinion-mongers and how they twist everything to fit their predetermined positions. Also, I dislike weather and sports reporters. Here's a partial score, 12. And here's a weather forecast, hot or cold, dry or wet.

But all this year while I was not watching the news, something strange happened. Fat girls are now allowed to be reporters. Fat girls are reporting the news! Well, that's something. Now I am waiting for old women to be news anchors on cable.

I gave up "The View." I survived all through Rosie O'Donnell and the beginning years of Whoopi, but now I find Joy Behar so insufferable, I can't take it anymore.

I gave up being a blonde. I started being a blonde as a result of a well water accident in 2001. We had poured bleach down our well to clean it and flushed it out by running all the faucets in the house for an hour, but that wasn't enough time, or we used too much bleach. In any case, when I took a shower, the bleach fumes were so strong, it was practically a hazmat incident, and when I got out, the water had stripped all the color out of my hair. I was between jobs at the time, so trying a radically different look as an experiment was not disruptive. I didn't have to endure a day of shocked looks or comments. I just stayed blonde after that. But this year I decided it was making me look tired, so I gradually went back to my brown hair. Didn't the Kardashians bring brunette back anyway? (And who are the Kardashians?)

I gave up the newspaper. First I cut back to just Sunday. Then I got rid of Sunday, too, because it was like homework to have to page through it just to feel like I was getting my money's worth. Then I even stopped looking at the paper at work because there's just not that much that's engaging in it. Local publications need to have a lot of local news, local writers, and local opinions. In fact, that's all they need. Everything else is a waste. I am inundated with what's happening in the rest of the world through the Internet and social media.

Without the Sunday paper, I had fewer coupons. Then no coupons. So I stopped cutting out coupons. Okay, I pay full price for toilet paper now, but I also don't buy new products I don't really need just because I have a coupon. Besides, I found this website called alice.com that just ships all the basic household supplies to me, free shipping, and if there's any coupon sales, I automatically get them without even having the coupon. How cool is that?

Today I gave up XM Radio. Or I am trying to. I tried giving it up before, but the people who handle the cancellations tend to be incompetent. Either they don't speak English at all, bill your account anyway even though you canceled, or just do nothing. So my resolution is to call every single day and cancel until the cancellation actually goes through. I have this rare XM Skybox I bought in 2004 that is a huge boombox that only Best Buy sold, and I would fall asleep to some inane Fox News channel every night. That's all I ever used XM for, except for a once-a-year pool party where I would play the '50's or '70's channel, depending on who my guests were. Now I fall asleep to Twit tech news podcasts I pick up on my Internet radio.

Internet radio is free, after the initial purchase of the radio which was less than a year's subscription to XM Radio. XM started charging me a U.S. Music Royalty Fee on top of the annual fee. How come I don't have to pay this fee anywhere else in the world that I hear music? Elevators don't charge me a royalty fee. There's also '50's and '70's channels somewhere on the Internet radio, too. How come I can listen to music on the radio through the Internet without paying a royalty fee, but not via satellite?

I am pretty close to giving up Christmas. This year I finally told my family that I was not buying any of them gifts. They make more money than I do and they have everything they need. I don't enjoy shopping, especially when everyone has to have a gift at the same time, during a season when the stores are crowded, the weather is cold, and it gets dark so early. Why isn't Christmas in April when Jesus was actually born? Also, we did absolutely no decorating this year. None. Not even the little window tree came out. Which is great because this weekend I don't have to pack up any decorations.

There might be other things I gave up for good this year, but these are the big ones. I am at that good age now where I can say with all sincerity that,"I am too old for this crap," and not put up with annoying people, insane coworkers, pointless family traditions, and a host of other things that people do just to be polite. Unlike those gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," I do know how to quit you.

The Christmas Ficus

2010-12-21T22:50:00.000-05:00

I am not a plant person. To me, tending plants is like working in a nursing home. Your charges take a great deal of care and special attention, but will never get to the point where they can get along without you. And then they die.

One year for my birthday, a well-meaning relative gave me three very large house plants. I put the plants out on the sun porch where they took up all the space, and we had our first emergency immediately. One of my cats chewed up some of the leaves. She spent the evening throwing up. We went to the internet, researched plants that made cats sick, and sure enough, we had a cat-killing plant. It went outside. It was followed by the other two the next day.

I assumed they would whither and die over the summer, and that would be the end of it, but God watered them and they flourished.

Since my husband’s family had given us the plants, he took responsibility for keeping them alive, despite my ambivalence. He repotted the ficus and it grew twice as high over the summer. He bought more pots and potting soil for the other two, but lost interest in the project. So now I had thriving plants in the yard, and a sun porch cluttered with unused pots and potting soil.

I felt resentment toward pots and plants.

At the end of the summer, the plant-gifter came over to visit and we lied about how much we were enjoying the plants and how well they were doing outside. But, I confessed, with winter coming, they’d have to move back inside and one was a cat-killing plant. The plant-gifter volunteered to take that one home and return it in the spring. I prayed she would offer the same deal for the others, but she left with just the cat-killer. I prayed she would forget to return it in the spring, and that prayer was answered. I never asked about it.

Then my husband’s grandfather died, and his office sent over a plant to console us. We were back to three large plants again, the ficus, some leafy thing, and the dead grandfather plant.

The weather turned cold and the plants began to look endangered. Time to take them to the dump! Right?

No, my husband brought them all inside. His family had given us two of them, and the other was his comfort plant for losing a grandfather, he said. So they all sat on the dining room table, the only available space near a window, leaving no room for anything else, and still not getting enough sun since the dining room faced north. In the evening, we turned on desk lights to shine on the plants. They all perked up.

Will this ever end?

A cricket rode in on one of the plants, and periodically it chirped, getting the cats all excited. One evening when we were out, the cats went on a Cricket Mission from God and attacked the plants. We came home to dirt all over the dining room. Despite the attack, the plants thrived.

To make some room on the dining room table, we moved the ficus to in front of the fireplace. We did not have a fire in the fireplace that winter because it would ignite the ficus. We did not have a Christmas tree that year because the only place to put one was taken by the ficus. So we hung some tinsel on the ficus and made do.

It's the Rep You Get, Not the Rules

2010-12-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

Persistence sometimes pays off.

Once I noticed my credit card had charged me a $39 late payment charge. My checkbook confirmed I had written a check and it had cleared, but a day after my payment due date, even though I had mailed it seven days before it was due to a Richmond address just two zip codes away.

This wasn't the first time the post office had failed me. Once, a freelance check took 16 days to travel across town. I checked the postmark. Another check took 33 days to travel from Los Alamos, New Mexico to me in Virginia. Pricewaterhouse Cooper once took a survey and rated my postal district "the worst place in the continental United States for mail service."

So I called my credit card, Capital One, which is in my town, and explained to the customer service rep that I felt I had done my part. I had mailed my payment at least five days in advance, as directed on the bill, and it wasn't my fault the post office took from Monday to the following Saturday to carry my payment across town.

She said it didn't matter what the postmark on my envelope was, or when I mailed the check. All that mattered was what day it got there, and it got there late, and not one day, but two days after it was due. I had no answer for that, and she wasn't cutting me any slack, so I hung up. But when I looked at my statement again, she was wrong about one thing. I had missed the due date by one day, not two.

This was still not a winning argument by her standards-late is late-but for some reason I decided to call back anyway and tell her she had that part wrong. I knew I wouldn't get the same woman, so it's a mystery why I called. I was just mad. I got a man this time, and before I could even go through the whole saga again, he offered to remove the late fee.

Well, how nice! Apparently the rule about late fees only apply to people who don't call repeatedly until they get a cooperative rep...or a man. I have theories about what kind of customer service reps are more likely to cut you some slack, but we won't go into that.

Back in the early 1990s, I used to work in the customer service department of Signet Bank, and it was within our power to overturn bounced check charges if we felt the customer had a justifiable complaint. Some reps, like me, felt most excuses were just that, excuses. I only overturned the charges for elderly women on fixed incomes who had gotten confused. Other representatives were more liberal. They believed in keeping the customers happy. They didn't want to argue. They wanted everyone to literally have a nice day. So they removed all bounced check charges all the time, for any reason. All you had to do was call and they made them go away.

So these customers got used to having their overdraft charges erased like magic, and didn't worry about bouncing more checks. There was no penalty. That is until they got a rep like me on the phone who wouldn't budge, especially when their history of massive check bouncing came up on my screen. Then they were furious. I frequently didn't have a nice day at that job. The angry customers only had to go one step over my head to a supervisor, who would then overturn the charges for them. One frequent bouncer finally managed to even get me fired for not overturning her charges. I never understood why the supervisors backed her after all our training about using the power to overturn charges sparingly. And it wasn't a nice firing either. It was one of those deals that while you're in the office being fired, a flunkie is packing up your desk in a cardboard box and then two big men escort you out of the building and hand you your box and tell you never to show up again.

Why did we even bother to charge for bounced checks then? The only ones paying the fees were people too timid to complain. The meek may inherit the earth, but until then, they're paying all the late charges.

So the lesson here, which I was reminded of when my late fee was miraculously erased, is to just keep calling until you get what you want, especially if right is on your side. Thank the rep, hang up, and call again. And again. And again. Even if you're in the wrong, you can be righteously indignant and eventually you'll get a customer service rep who will fix you up because they don't want to talk to problem customers or get fired, or it's their passive aggressive way of getting back at their company, or whatever. Of course it's not fair, but as Jimmy Carter once said, life is not fair.

Living with Alcoholism

2010-12-13T12:16:00.001-05:00

“He died last November,” the little boy said through the storm door. He was home alone and didn’t want to say anything more to the strange woman who had knocked, asking if he knew where the man who lived next door went.

Every year when the new phone book came, I looked him up. One year there was no listing, so I drove over to the last known address and started knocking on doors. That’s how I learned my ex-husband of 17 years had died.

And I felt nothing. We had been separated for 10 years and there had been no contact for the last eight. They say you only remember the good things, but none of those memories came, just the bad ones. And when a tear finally came, it was a tear for me. Selfish to the end, he would have said.

My husband had a drinking problem. Even now I find it difficult to say he was an alcoholic. He so vehemently denied it. He did not hit me. He was not a violent drunk. He did not drink and drive. He did not embarrass himself in public. He did not miss work because of his drinking—much.

He just missed having a life. He was a secret drinker. When I first met him, he did not have a telephone even though he could afford one. Telephones enabled people to call him at home and catch him drunk. He did not drink in bars. He did not drink with friends. We didn’t have friends, because a secret drinker cannot start drinking until they leave.

I associate him with sounds, the click of the cigarette lighter as he lit up as soon as he woke up, the pop of a pull tab as the first beer was opened as soon as he came home. Then another beer, another cigarette, another beer. Pop, click, pop, click.

He did not drink for pleasure, but for purpose, as if there was some emotional pain he had to anesthetize. But his life was no more miserable than anyone else’s. His father died when he was young. There was a first failed marriage. He had given up music and the military, two vocations he claimed he liked, for a tedious job on the night shift, which gave him all day to recover from his drinking the night before. There was happiness to be found, but he didn’t look for it. It would have interfered with his drinking.

He bought the cheapest beer the 7-Eleven had, Milwaukee Best, a six-pack at a time. Sometimes that would be enough to get through the night. Sometimes a second trip was necessary. Sometimes tall cans were called for. He could not buy a case at a time because if he bought a case, he would drink a case at one sitting. We could not have a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the house for special occasions because it would not be there in the morning. It would be empty, and he’d still be in his recliner, too stunned to go to bed, his head hanging, his fly open because the mechanics of pulling up the zipper became too intricate.

But he could quit anytime, he said, so he didn’t have a problem. And he did quit, several times. And started again.

When I was very young and first married to him, I believed what he said. It wasn’t until after I left that I finally understood the disaster we had lived. He had me believe the drinking was my fault. I had come to our marriage with a child, placing the burden of having to pay for another man’s child on him. I did not make an adequate income. Even his failure to progress in his job was somehow my fault. His bosses didn’t like me.

When I accidentally put a dent in his new car, he called in sick and drank 18 tall beers in one sitting. I had destroyed all the joy he had in his new car, he said, and that joy could never be regained. He left the dent in the car as a rebuke to me.

He embraced any and every excuse to justify his drinking. The responsibility, the guilt, belonged to everyone but him. His mother liked his brother best. His first wife made him quit the military. A co-worker was promoted over him. His car was not the best and newest at the stoplight.

I was younger than he was, and he never took me seriously. When I became upset about the toll his drinking and smoking was taking on his health, it became a field of battle between us. I was the enemy, not the concerned wife.

And just as serious as the physical toll was the emotional price. There was no affection extended to my son or me since it was vital to the drinking scenario that we remain the root cause of it. We did little as a family. Days off were spent sleeping it off, and the waking hours spent in front of the television, putting the liquor back in.

It wasn’t until after it was over that I realized the psychological damage we had sustained from living such a dry existence in his wet world. I had no sense of confidence or worth. I gave my son a biological father who had run off and a stepfather who withheld love, praise and approval.

I kept a fill-in-the-blanks father’s day card my son wrote when he was 13. At the time we thought it was funny, but looking at it now is heart-breaking and tragic. “I think my dad knows how to sleep better than anyone in the whole world,” he filled in the blank. “I think he likes to spend his time worrying most of all.” The best thing they did together, he filled in was “watch TV.”

For what his dad does to make him feel better, he wrote, “Nothing. He never makes me feel better.” Under why he liked to hug him, he wrote, “I never hug him.” On another page, he honestly recorded that he didn’t want to grow up to be like his stepdad. This strange card ended, “Happy Father’s Day.”

Even after I finally left the marriage, I felt like I was at fault, that I owed him something for not hanging in until the end, and I continued to do his banking, pay his bills, buy his groceries and do his laundry. When he called me to ask if it was 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.— a disorientation he felt when he was on vacation and the drinking, sleeping, working patterns dissolved—I called an ambulance. They found more than 120 empty beer cans in his kitchen and a man who did not know who the current President of the United States was. It cost $14,000 in IV fluids to sober him up in the hospital, just in time to discover he was about to die of an abdominal aneurysm. He had masked the pain with beer.

As they loaded him into the ambulance that day, he yelled, “I’ll get you for this,” to me. I had brought strangers into his apartment and revealed his secret drinking. Never mind that I had saved his life. His work place found out, although I suspect they knew.

He was put into rehab and counseling after that, and his therapist must have told him he needed to get control of his own life, pay his own bills, do his own shopping, wash his own clothes. I did not hear from him again except through a lawyer who served me with divorce papers, and took my son and me out of his will. The lawyer talked to me like I was dirt.

Despite all this, you’d have a hard time finding anyone to say my husband was a bad guy. People he worked with liked him. He was easy going and quiet. As he often reminded me, he never hit me. He went to work and earned a living, supported his family. He provided us with a house, food, and clothes. Even now I feel like I am the bad one to say anything unkind. I am the traitor.

I thoroughly bought into the disease of alcoholism. If I had been a better wife, if I had been prettier, if I had made more money, or had a better personality, he would have stopped drinking for me. That’s what they want you to think. That he didn’t means I failed. I could not save him.

I know now none of that was true. I know I wasted many years of my own life living in the shadow of his drinking, and I sacrificed my only child to it by not looking for something better for both of us. But even that realization is accepting the blame. It always comes back to me. I am the guilty one. And he would have drank to that.

Adam Lambert at The National

2010-08-30T11:47:00.002-04:00

My story is on my other blog here.

Can I Get a Do Over?

2010-08-09T11:25:00.006-04:00

I thought my husband was a content soul who was satisfied with his life…until I overheard him telling a focus group moderator that he wasn’t.

I asked him about this later. He said he realized now that he had made some serious mistakes when he was younger – not going to college, not getting into a less physical line of work. As his body starts to prematurely wear out, he realizes he could have had an easier time of it and made more money if he had chosen a career that used his still sharp brain more, something like engineering or computer technology.

Now I feel bad about all the times I took shots at him for wasting his intellect. Don't most of us make crucial life-impacting decisions between the ages of 16 and 24, when we are most likely to be swayed by the stupidest of motives?

When my 19-year-old son got a small tattoo on his leg, I cried. This is a mistake, I told him. He didn’t believe me. When he dropped out of college a year later to travel around the United States, I told him this was a mistake. He couldn’t fathom staying in his boring hometown anymore. About 12 years later, he came home, though, and finished college. His legs and arms are covered in tattoos, and for his chosen career, he diplomatically keeps them hidden.

He gets frustrated that his career isn’t as far along as others his age, but I have to remind him he got a late start. While he was roaming free and unencumbered by physical possessions, the whole computer age happened. When he checked back into school, he had to learn the basic skills that kids are almost born knowing now. Things are moving so fast technologically, it's hard to keep up even if you had stayed current.

There’s nothing I can say now to undo decisions my son or husband made when they were in their twenties. When he was in the critical 16-24 years, my husband put a higher priority on getting unshackled from the control of teachers and parents than in continuing his education. Even now, a mental fog about being a rock musician has been the deciding factor on how he spends his weekends and evenings and has crowded out any ideas of picking up his education where he left off. His four or more nights a week devoted to practice or playing has taken away from our marriage, as well. I wonder if a decade or two from now, he’ll look back at that decision and think, gee, what did I miss, and for what?

For several years now, I’ve been saying this is a bad idea. How much more time and money can we afford to invest in playing covers in bar bands? But he still enjoys it. He hasn’t made the connection yet that his second chance to accomplish a career change is being defeated by the time demands of his hobby. By the time he does, it will be too late…again.

By why should anyone listen to me when I didn’t listen to me? At age 15, I had three priorities: a) get a boyfriend or husband, b) leave home, and c) become a newspaper journalist. If I could visit my 15-year-old self, I would plead with her not to put the goals in that order.

Maintaining the boyfriend and/or husband would repeatedly derail the pursuit of my career over the years, and in the end, neither one of the men I made so many sacrifices for turned out to be worth it. Staying closer to family would have made so many things easier. I chose difficult, frustrating, expensive, damaging romantic entanglements in a town where I have no roots or mentors over parents who lived in career hotspot cities who would have let me live at home for free, and subsidized my education and career search indefinitely.

If I had just stayed home! In Richmond, there were very limited opportunities to become a newspaper journalist while my parents lived where there were multiple daily papers, as well as weeklies and specialty publications, and huge tourism industries in need of publicists and marketers. If I had not locked myself into a less than ideal marriage with a person who wouldn't relocate, I could have expanded my job search to Anywhere in the Entire United States. Somewhere, I just know, there would have been a newspaper or PR job to be had when I was in my twenties, and I could have launched my career 20 years sooner and had that much more experience by now.

Once that was in place, there would have been plenty of time for boyfriends or husbands and children, and probably better choices, too.

Looking back at my life, I can’t believe I didn’t choose that…and for what?! A mysterious temporary chemical reaction called love? That passes, you know. There is no one I was in love with back then that I still love or even miss. Love bubbles up anew at each turn in the road. Or maybe it's just because now that I am the same age my parents were when I left them, I can imagine myself getting along with them. Why couldn't I be the person I am now back then? Things sure look different looking back.

The Myth about Death Panels

2010-08-04T11:45:00.003-04:00

The New Yorker, Aug. 2, 2010, "Letting Go," by Atul Gawande

Anyone concerned or inflamed about Obama's "death panels" or pulling the plug on grandma needs to read this article. The question is not about giving the medical profession and health insurers the right to pull the plug on grandma. The question is why do you want your grandma to die a long, suffering death, with, as Gawande writes, chemo in her veins, tubes in her throat, fresh sutures in her flesh, and swaddled in diapers?

Medicine can only go so far, and we as patients do not let our doctors be honest with us about science's ability to prolong our lives, or what the cost --physical, emotional, and financial -- will be to achieve a little more time -- or more often no actual quality time at all.

Studies have shown that there is no difference in survival time between hospice and hospital patients for the majority of fatal illnesses, and in fact, hospice care extends survival. Plus, you're more likely to be in less pain because hospice care involves comfort levels of drugs, less invasive interference, and all the comforts of being home.

In a program where terminally ill patients could choose hospice care in addition to invasive curative care, 70 percent chose the double coverage, and ultimately also chose to go to the emergency room half as much, and spent two-thirds less time in ICUs. Overall end-of-life invasive care for this group was reduced by 25 percent. Among the elderly in that test group, time spent in ICUs fell by 85 percent. Satisfaction scores from patients and their families skyrocketed. A large part of hospice care is a caregiver making the time to talk to the patients about death, help them plan for their death, discuss what is really important to them as far as comfort levels and quality of life, and explaining it to their families. And in the end, the very sick or very old really want to talk more than have stuff done to them.

The patients receiving this "discussion care" actually suffered less, stayed physically capable longer, and interacted with their loved ones longer, than those in hospitals still desperately hoping for a miracle cure. Family members were less likely to suffer major depressions after the loved one passed, or feel guilty about not having done enough, or putting their loved one through too much medical torture. That's because they had the assurance their loved one had made the decision themselves.

Healthcare reform can fund this added "discussion care," but those against health care reform characterized these covered discussion care sessions as the "death panels" we all heard so much about. The misconception was it was the insurance companies alone sitting on the death panels, not the doctors, the patient, and the patient's family. The funding was ultimately stripped out of the legislation.

Dr. Gawande's article gives an example of an oncologist who spent six hours in sessions with the patient, the patient's family, and then the patient's father who was in denial about his son's brain tumor, just to reconcile the entire group into accepting a plan for the inevitable death of the patient. The oncologist said it would have taken five minutes to sign off on another futile two rounds of chemotherapy she already knew would not help, but that six hour investment of discussion time resulted in a good, final month where the entire family focused on being together and the patient was kept comfortable and functioning in hospice care.

It is truly tragic that political firebrands, in order to advance themselves into positions of power, have inflamed the population against a rational consideration of how best to die. Medical science is keeping us alive longer, but if you're in a comatose state, full of wires and tubes, surrounded by strangers who are poking you with needles all day, sleeping under fluorescent hospital room lights with code-blues going on all night in the hallways -- is that really what you want for grandma, or for yourself?

It's a long article, and some of it is brutal information about what it is like to watch someone die, but it is well worth reading, for your own future death planning, if not for grandma's.

Bus Blues

2010-06-23T10:38:00.004-04:00

I've been to Hanover County Board of Supervisors and city of Richmond City Council meetings as an employee or reporter numerous times. I am well familiar with the battles of public hearings, where a few vocal opponents rage a ground war of words to persuade a ruling body that has already made up its mind to change its mind.

Still, the first time I attended an Henrico County Board of Supervisors meeting to rail against a cut in GRTC bus service, I was startled by the finality of the decision, even though from experience I should have known it was inevitable.

Henrico livestreams its meetings over the Internet, which I assume is the reason it doesn't have a time limitation on how long a citizen can speak during public comment periods. Because Richmond televises its meetings live, they are practically forced to gong people off the mic. Even so, there's a cast of regulars who will line up to speak at any and all public hearings. They even know where in the auditorium to sit so the camera is on them most of the time.

So I was surprised to find some people in Henrico had brought typed essays to read like they had all the time in the world. No buzzer, no flashing lights to get the long-winded off? One person read from what was easily three pages of single-spaced text and told a long, rambling story of the lives of the Parham 26 riders and how their existence would be disrupted if there were fewer #26 trips. The reading of his speech so lulled the Board and audience into a stupor that there wasn't even a small twitter of a laugh at any of the carefully crafted jokes he had inserted into his oration.

It's better to speak from the heart without notes and be brief. Everyone pays more attention. And if you ad-lib a joke, it might actually get a laugh.

The bus routes marked for death were clearly underutilized. There were statistics to prove not more than 20 people would be inconvenienced by the discontinuation of those routes, but those were the people at the hearing. Even though they only used the bus occasionally, they wanted to know it was there. Even if they had alternate ways home, they wanted to have this option.

I spoke toward the end, and by that time I was aggravated by the selfishness of people who wanted an express route to the Parham park and ride, and if it stops at Glenside first, then it isn't an express route. It's a circulator, and what's so bad about that? I would rather have all circulator routes in the afternoon because it makes no sense to wait 20 minutes for the Glenside bus and watch three Parhams and a Gaskins go by, each with less than 5 people on them -- sometimes nobody! All these buses are getting on 64 West. Why can't they just pick up and drop off everyone who's going to west end park and rides? That's what the #25 does, twice during the day and once after 6 p.m., which is often my last chance to get out of downtown. But #25 is on the hit list.

It turned out many of the people at the hearing were dependent on #25 not for a daily ride but just to be there for emergencies. The two mid-day runs got people home early if they had appointments or had to pick up the kids after school. The late bus was the salvation of several workers like me who don't like to walk out in the middle of a project at work just because it's 5 p.m.

I thought my proposal was ingenious, to have fewer afternoon buses, but all of them circulators, and after 6 p.m., have the Pemberton route take side trips off Broad to stop at the park and rides. I don't know where the Gaskins lot is, but Parham and Glenside are less than six blocks off Broad. It wouldn't be that much of a deal, and the safety net would be there. The Board made no comment on my suggestions after the hearing, but burned up at least another 30 minutes of time asking GRTC why they couldn't use smaller buses on the underutilized routes as some people had suggested.

GRTC laboriously explained that smaller buses don't produce appreciative savings. The bus driver still makes the same money. The bus still covers the same number of miles, no matter what size it is. The fuel savings is marginal. But still we had to discuss it and discuss it. After the meeting, a man in the audience congratulated me on my proposed solution, so at least I knew I had spoken out loud. Between stage fright and aggravation at some of the ridiculous arguments presented, I felt I had made shrill, whistling noises instead of words.

The ridiculous arguments were centered around the needs of the few, and ever since "Star Trek: Wrath of Khan," we have known that the needs of the few have to bow in front of the needs of the many. The buses are there to make money, or at least not lose money, and although there is much to be said about taking care of the poor among us in Henrico, underutilized bus routes costing in excess of $700,000 a year to run -- the county would be ahead to underwrite taxi rides for the few and occasional riders who have no alternatives!

These are trying financial times. We are lucky to have a bus, considering how high gas prices get, especially in the summer, and especially now when most of the gas seems to be pouring into the Gulf of Mexico to kill pelicans. That's why I kept flipping out when speakers tried to blackmail the Board. "If you don't keep these buses running, then I'll just drive to work, adding to the traffic and polluting the air! Take that!" Oh, please. The reality is you will do no such thing because gas is expensive, a daily commute raises your auto insurance premium, and parking downtown is anywhere from $80 to $120 a month! You can buy a new computer every year for that. You can buy an Apple computer for that!! You will change your schedule to adjust to the new bus schedule, that's what you'll do.

That's why I thought my work-around was the ultimate problem solver and the audience and Board would fall out in gratification and wonderment at having a workable resolution presented to them, but I had not considered that the Henrico Department of Public Works had labored eight months to arrive at their route-cutting proposal, and that was the only proposal before the Board, and it was either thumbs up or thumbs down. No time or room for modification. There is no try, as Yoda says.

Ga Ga

2010-05-25T19:08:00.004-04:00

When I read today that Adam Lambert was going to play The National at the end of the summer, I was buzzed, a rare feeling for me. And then I was confused, because now I have no excuse, really. I had been telling myself that if he came anywhere close, like Charlottesville or Norfolk, I would go. I might even go to D.C. or Raleigh. I just might!

I fantasize about leaving the house like this and then I never do. Still, I always regretted not going to the Coliseum to see the American Idols season 2 show. I thought, oh, I'll just wait until Clay Aiken comes through again and it's his own show, since I really don't care about the others. But he never did. And then I didn't care about him. And I think it sold out really fast anyway and I would have had to deal with ticket scalpers and crazy prices like $225 a ticket.

In my imagination, though, I thought I'd be going to the John Paul Jones Arena or the Verizon Center or Fedex Field to see Adam Lambert. Isn't The National kind of small? It's not like it's a fill-in gig between two bigger venues, just to keep some money coming in. Richmond is infamous for the Monday and Tuesday night shows. This is a Friday night at The National. A Friday night! At The National!

In Richmond, Va.! Where even Clay Aiken never came back. Where you rarely even see Elliott Yamin.

Oh, Adam, have we already come to this? Next year, will you be performing at the Godfrey's brunch?

How can I rationalize not going to The National? Am I that lazy? I work on the same frigging block! I will have to walk past his tour bus to get home. If he gets into town early enough, he might even be eating in Gibson's. Even if I don't get a ticket, I need to stand outside on the sidewalk and watch him get back on the bus since there is no way to leave The National that I know of without being on the street for a few seconds. It's not like the Coliseum where you can get into the bus or a limo from the tunnel and drive off.

And, oh yes, how old am I? And why are Clay and Adam, the gay contestants, the only ones I've liked ever? Liberace had female fans. Barry Manilow, who isn't even out as far as I know, has female fans. We like the show. And they've got show. Also, the gays don't ignore the old ladies in favor of the groupie girls. They are sweet to us. They like the boys and the mamas. We like the feathers and the sequins and the eyeliner.

I've always preferred an outrageous show to disgruntled young men in flannel, flailing at their guitars with their backs to the audience. I want you to look like you dressed for your show. I want it to look like you rehearsed something. I hate it when the band stops between every song and has a meeting about what to play next.

So I may have no excuse but to wake up too early on ticket day and go back to where I work -- which is what you never want to do on your day off -- and stand in line until the sold-out sign goes up, just to say I tried this time.

Too Much More about "Lost"

2010-05-24T14:53:00.005-04:00

The ultimate answer to all dissatisfaction with "Lost" is to just roll with it. Don't expect to understand everything. You don't need answers.

That's fine, but also don't tell me then that "Lost" was great storytelling or great television. Okay, it was pretty good television, but it was typical TV storytelling where you are at the mercy of actors. Some actors, like Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Mr. Eko, are so unhappy with the role, they are eventually written out even though for a season or two, they seemed like a key character.

Others like Malcolm David Kelley playing Walt grew up in real time, making it impossible to fit him into the format of flashbacks or reappearances, even though at first he was given a significant role. (Walt was considered "special" by the Others. We never got closure on that.)

(For awhile, it seemed a series of minor "Lost" actors were getting in trouble with the police in Hawaii for various reasons, DUIs being often cited. Inevitably, they'd be killed off.)

"Lost," like most television, was originally conceived as a premise without a set ending. You don't know how many years you have to tell a story, so the story wanders along through good and bad seasons, depending on the changing writers for hire and the life changes of the people in key roles. Many a show has taken an unlikely turn because an actor decides to quit, overturning all the plot development. "ER" comes to mind.

"Lost" seemed to renew itself each season by its ability to introduce new characters to the stranded-on-the-desert island premise. We had The Others, then The Tailies, then the Dharma Initiative, and other people arriving in planes and submarines. It was possible to have a continuing saga about the original core group, but keep bringing in all these side characters for subplots. By the time you told their back story and either killed them off or otherwise finished their story, you had burned off a three or four episode arc with guest stars. This could have gone on for years and years.

But somewhere along the line, the core story began to get too involved and too crazy. It had to focus, and to focus, there had to be resolution. You couldn't, after finally getting your cancellation notice, suddenly send them all back to Los Angeles in a final rescue episode, like "Gilligan's Island." Well, actually, you could, but that would leave a lot of the island hocus-pocus unexplained. There were too many things that had to be explained. So it was decided to select a ending date and slowly, slowly resolve things. I remember thinking when the ending date was announced, gee, am I going to be alive to see it? It seemed so far away.

And they tried. They had to make up things to explain things they probably never really intended to explain. They had to deal with critical characters they couldn't bring back because of growth spurts or salary demands, and bring back some dead ones somehow. The result was the mishmash two and a half hour season finale (which after commercials are subtracted, was really barely two hours.) Some parts were very satisfying but the mystical, afterlife, afterworld spin to explain Jack's presence in the Sideways World when he so clearly died on the island ruined the happy ending. For me, anyway.

And why did they shoot plane wreckage on the beach as the final shot over the credits? It got everyone on the Internet confused, thinking everyone actually died in the original plane crash and the whole series was afterlife.

The Los Angeles Times reviewer tried to positive spin the finale, but I couldn't buy his explanation that Hurley, in his role as the island's "Jacob," gave everyone what they wanted in the Sideways World, a waiting room before eternity. Hurley was also in the Sideways World, not knowing what was going on until Desmond arranged for him to meet Libby again. So why was Hurley sitting with Libby in the pew at the church? Can he be the island caretaker and still pass into the light? And why didn't Hurley know more about what was going on in the beginning of Sideways World if this world was his own creation?

(The Time magazine reviewer suggested when the protective light was unplugged, enabling Locke and Jack to kill each other , as well as restoring Richard's mortality, it also made Hurley's reign as the new Jacob a mortal one since he drank the water while the light was off. Okay, I'll buy that.)

What would have happened if the smoke monster did get off the island? And who's the new smoke monster? Why do you need an island caretaker if there's no more smoke monster?

If Daniel was not going into the light, why did he see the dead Charlotte at the concert, who was? Was that just to wake up Charlotte? And Kate was still a wanted criminal. You have to wonder what her life was like after escaping the island. Surely it was more than the few days in Sideways World. Was she in jail? How could the last plane with Frank, Richard, Miles, Kate, Sawyer, and Claire have actually landed anywhere without notice and these people blend back into some kind of lives?

I thought Nadia was the love of Sayid's life. What's with the superficial Shannon rocking his world and bringing him eternal peace? And why are Shannon and Boone even in the church when the other minor characters from the first season or two who died are not? The original group of survivors was a larger group you never really saw from the waist up, so from time to time the writers could bring these faceless people forward for subplots and guest star roles, an idea that was abandoned when the show had to start wrapping things up.

The only TV show I can think of that was carefully plotted from beginning to end was "Babylon 5." That was originally scripted to take five seasons to tell, and even then there are a lot of irrelevant, padded episodes, like the ones with Penn and Teller. You can't expect a television show to be as well crafted as the Harry Potter books, which are an amazing recent example of a huge fictional project, written over a decade, that fits all the pieces together in the end.

J.K. Rowling didn't have to deal with cranky actors, actors with other plans, child actors who ceased being a child -- any of those real life problems, in order to tell her story. I often wondered over the run of the movies what would happen if any of the main characters died in real life. What would they do? (Dumbledore was so heavily in costume, the transition from dead actor to new live one was not that difficult, but what if the actor playing Ron had died? Then what?)

Television, by its very tenuous nature of having too many variables, cannot be great literature when told over the course of many seasons. I'd be just as happy in the future with great stories told in a single season. Why isn't that done more often?

Why Men Cheat

2010-05-11T15:36:00.003-04:00

Your husband could be one of those dogs who, no matter how good you look, how well things are going in your marriage, how much attention you give him, or how willing you are to meet his sexual fantasies, he will cheat on you. Your problem is you are you, and he wants something new. Doesn't even matter if she's not as good as you; she's different.

It's hard to compete with different. Or it could be the other woman is there, and you are not. It's hard to compete with there when you're not there.

Men are really no more complicated than that. Some may have morals or restraints or inhibitions that make them resistant to women who are a) willing, b) different from you by just not being you, and c) there when you are not. Many men do not have inner cops. They may be, for the most part, good husbands and fathers. They just have this impulse and no moral compass to keep them from acting on it.

Then there are the men that we push into the arms of other women who are a) willing, and b) different. They may be even very similar to us, like a younger version who happens to be around, even if we are also around.

How does that happen? We let it. Consciously or unconsciously.

Last night, my husband and I were discussing a friend we had not seen in awhile, and to my surprise, he told me this friend had left his wife. How could he leave his two children, I asked? I grew up in a time when couples stuck it out until the kids were grown or 'til death did them part. My parents did. His parents did. Both marriages were doomed from the get-go, but they put in 25 years before making their escapes through death or divorce. But my husband said he understood how you could leave your little kids behind.

How?

Well, if she's nagging you all the time, if things are never good enough for her, he said.

I was stunned. That's all it takes in his mind to break up a marriage with kids?

Which brings me to the marriage of Elizabeth and John Edwards and the mistress Rielle Hunter. If you were ranking this trio in terms of who is most at fault, you'd probably rank them 1. Rielle 2. John 3. Elizabeth. Or even 1. John 2. Rielle 3. Elizabeth. What bastard would put Elizabeth first? I would.

Elizabeth was once slim and lovely, and with such a family fortune, she could hire a trainer and a plastic surgeon and stay slim and lovely for a long time. But after the awful tragedy of their teenage son dying in an auto accident, she was determined to replace him. It took two tries to get another son and she was 52 by the time she accomplished it, after years of hormone treatments and rumored egg transplants.

You can imagine that in John's eyes, a replacement son probably wasn't that high a priority, especially if it turns his wife into a lab experiment and their sexual relationship into a breeding chore. Maybe he knew no new baby could ever replace the one that was lost, and the best thing to do would be hug each other a lot and move on. After the physical punishment of two pregnancies followed by menopause, Elizabeth ended up looking exhausted and shaped like a sack of potatoes.

Then they go through a second major disappointment of not being elected vice president of the United States, and she then she gets cancer. (And you have to wonder if all the hormone treatments to carry two more babies late in life had anything to do with that.)

And in the middle of all this, a dumb blonde waltzes into John's life, her video camera pointed at him all through the campaign, and tells him, and I quote, "You're so hot." That's all it takes. Really. That's all. Men are that easy.

Let's put that dynamic on a scale and weigh it against the cancerous, shapeless, exhausted wife who tried to replace your beloved son with a couple of new babies that you've been too busy to bond with. Which way does the scale tip? "You're so hot" or "You failed to make me First Lady"?

Tiger Woods cheated because he could. He's away from home being fawned over by pancake waitresses. David Letterman's wife is frumpy looking for a woman married to a multi-millionaire. It can't be because she can't afford a pilates class. Meanwhile all these happy, eager, young interns are working with her husband, a man whose ego needs massaging because Leno is beating him in the ratings. Hilary Clinton is busy and bitchy. Monica is adoring, brings pizza, and isn't opposed to trying new things like thong shows and cigar sex. Like Chris Rock says in one of his comedy routines, it was Hilary's job to give the president blow jobs. She wasn't doing her job. Angelina is beautiful, has lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Brad is beautiful, wants lots of babies, and wants to save the world. Jennifer wants to make another crappy romantic comedy and doesn't have time to save even one Third World baby. Who's trying and who's not?

It's a cautionary tale, and it crosses my mind whenever I am less than thrilled with my own husband's accomplishments, or I nag, or I take stock of how much weight I've gain since we met. I'm not really trying, am I? You may say I shouldn't have to keep qualifying for the job of wife that I already have…but that's in a perfect world. In the real world, we are married to men.

Walking

2010-05-11T12:47:00.002-04:00

People don't walk anymore. Recently I read that Willow Lawn is taking out the center, covered area of the mall so customers can drive from the Starbucks on one end to the Kroger's on the other. This is just two blocks, but I guess you want your car nearby if you're buying groceries.

I'm more mystified by the people who get on the bus on Broad Street, pay $1.25, and ride four or five blocks and get off. On nice days. Really, you couldn't walk that distance? When I was a pregnant college student, I lived 12 blocks from campus, and I used to walk it. Later, I'd put the laundry and the baby in an old-style baby carriage and push it from the corner of Shields and Grove to the laundromat on Strawberry Street, four blocks there, four blocks back. Piece of cake. Well, it was back then.

When I'm home during the week, I watch the strange phenomenon of several cars gathering at the end of my block every afternoon at the same time. They're waiting for the school bus. On my side of the main thoroughfare, 15 houses is the most you can fit on a side street, and on the opposite side, there's less than eight houses before the neighborhood ends. Can these kids not walk one to two blocks home after school? Or do we now live in such an unsafe world, they need adult escorts from the bus to the house?

There are amazing walkers -- a neighbor walks or bicycles 7 miles to work. A group of retirees, hobos, or bored people in my community walk from Wendy's to Panera Bread and back each day just for something to do. It's 6.5 miles round trip. I see them coming or going as I drive my lazy ass along the same route

We Are What We've Been Traumatized By

2010-05-04T12:56:00.002-04:00

Not long after finishing Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone," which is a massive excuse for bad behavior caused by trauma, I started thinking about my own traumas and how much bad behavior I could attribute to them.

Then Sunday night I watched the episode of "Ruby" on the Style network where all the fat ladies went to a six-day intensive training retreat to free themselves of their food addictions. The exercises were nearly identical to the alcohol rehab sessions the drunk mommies on "20/20" had undergone a couple of nights before. First, we find out what events in our childhood traumatized us. Then we get our revenge by slamming an ottoman with a rubber bat. Then we cry. People hug us. We're cured of our addiction.

Most of the traumas included abusive daddies and people we are dependent on dying and leaving us adrift. Childhood sexual abuse didn't come up on TV, but I'm sure it's a big one. It's the centerpiece trauma of Lamb's book.

In the early '90's, I tried to get some psychological help, but since I couldn't afford it and had no health insurance, I had to go to almost equally crazy people affiliated with various charities and religious organizations. We tried hard to unearth a childhood memory of sexual abuse -- there were adequate outward signs -- but I never could find a memory or a culprit. They'd give me crayons and I would draw ducks.

I've been thinking about listing all my traumas here, but it's too hard to do it succinctly without each one becoming a long story to itself. But let's try.

My mother slaughtered my pet ducks. What I took away from that is the person you would think should have been most protective of me was devoid of any empathy for me.

My first dog was run over. That probably happens to a lot of children, but maybe because of the cold way my family handled the situation, I never attached myself to a dog again. To this day, I'm afraid of dogs -- not that they will hurt me, but that I will love them. The dog was buried outside my bedroom window and for the rest of the time we lived in that apartment, I never slept in my own room again. I slept on the floor of my sister's room. You would think that would give my parents a clue.

My first divorce. It was actually a relief that the relationship could now be declared over with a reason my family would accept -- infidelity -- and it's not like it came as a surprise. I had sacrificed everything that did mean something to me -- my future -- for a relationship that actually didn't mean much to me, ended up losing both, and having no idea why I didn't have the strength to get out of it before the damage was done. Being a single mother at 22 with no family support in town is a tough way to start a career in a demanding profession, especially prior to women's lib.

My second divorce. This time I had no good reason my family could accept, so I was ostracized. I was escaping from 17 years of a co-dependent relationship with an older alcoholic, and finally thought I had found a safe place to land if I jumped, but I was wrong. I quit the husband, the job, and sold the house to pursue a dream which fizzed out spectacularly with a huge helping of betrayal from people I trusted. I was knocked for a loop that lasted for two years. Then the person who picked me up and shook me off also left me, which knocked me for another loop, but out of those ashes, I finally found the strength to create for myself what I most wanted instead of waiting for someone else to give it to me.

Good things happened for awhile, and then I got to the point where I actually had something to lose again and couldn't take the risks anymore. With security comes the death of creativity. With security comes the fear of losing that security. And with fear comes inertia. Hmmmm. So gradually, I am becoming the fat lady, and although I am not quite in need of an intervention yet, I might be in another few years if I start waddling toward ridiculous poundage. What pain am I feeding? Which trauma on my self-image board is to blame here?

What should I be yelling while I slap the ottoman with my rubber bat?

She's Come Undone

2010-04-30T19:00:00.003-04:00

There's already literally 2,000 reviews of this 1992 Wally Lamb novel blessed by Oprah on amazon.com so I'm not going to add to the clutter or go into detail, except to say this has got to be the least appealing heroine of a novel since Scarlett O'Hara, and at least that bitch saved her family during a war. Although Delores Price has some trauma in her life -- a stillborn baby brother, parents divorced, her mother going into a mental institute for awhile, her own rape by a tenant -- even so, I never felt like that was an excuse for her to be the nastiest person on earth to everyone she encountered. Cutting herself off from the people around her just made her situation worse.

I kept waiting for her to finally get her comeuppance, as if all that came before wasn't enough, and it wasn't, and yet she still has a somewhat happy ending.

It made me think about my own traumas. There has been spans of time where I let myself use them as an excuse, but no one should because you can get past it.

It also made me think about where the publishing industry is going. Pocket Books has this priced at $7.99, and I can assume they made their money on it when they sold it, but since then, it has been bought and resold on amazon.com several times over. I bought it from someone for $1.99 and I'm reselling it for $1.98, and Pocket gets none of that. The book industry should be embracing the electronic book platform because it eliminates all this aftermarket reselling which takes away from their sales.

Wrong Turn, Great View

2010-04-21T21:03:00.002-04:00

Although I was told the Springfield Landfill in Western Henrico was hard to find, my Google Map driving directions couldn't have been more clear, and I went straight to it in the rain this morning, with one small carload of household cast-offs. Much to my surprise, I was asked for $3 to get in. I was used to getting into the great dump in Hanover County for free, so this was annoying. You would think the clerk would notice my tiny car couldn't possibly hold much junk.

I immediately got lost. I saw a holding pen for tires straight ahead, and a road off to the left. A truck had just taken the road, so I followed it. It was a long and circling dirt road that got progressively muddier and I was climbing a grassy mini-mountain. By the time I was making the last loop to where the top flattened off, I could see literally for miles across Henrico County. I was way, way up. What kind of dump was this? It was really muddy up at the top, and there were a couple of bulldozers, and some debris, like a clothes and shoes, but not the amount of garbage I was expecting.

"Where's the dump part?" I asked one of the bulldozer guys. He was startled to see me. "At the bottom, you should have made a right turn when you came in."

I turned my little car around and headed back down the mountain. It was then I noticed that this muddy road I was going down -- well, one side was a sheer cliff and there wasn't much between me and a very long roll down. I had to trust my little Mazda to hang onto the road.

Back at the bottom of the mountain, I saw the ramp that took me to a more traditional dumping place, a place where you just threw your trash into big trailers, and another area where you could put things that others might want. I was sad that it cost $3 to get to this junk display case. Some of my favorite lamps and furniture came from the shed of possibilities at the Hanover dump and it didn't cost me $3 to pick over it.

I had planned to make several dump runs that day, but between the rain and the $3, I gave up after one. I told my husband about my misadventure when he came home, after stopping to hose all the dump mud off my white car. "What if you had slid off the mountain?" he said, shocked that I had made such a colossal wrong turn.

"I thought about that," I said. But I didn't. And that was quite a view. Are there any other really high places you can go and see Henrico?

Craigslist Evil People

2010-04-11T11:52:00.006-04:00

I put up the camera on Craigslist since there are 13 of them on Amazon.com, and even at the lowest price, no buyers after two weeks. I immediately get three responses, one from Sam asking for "shutter actuations." I have to look this up to find out it's how many photos the camera has taken. There's no way to find that out without a piece of Windows freeware. I do not have a PC and often that freeware off the Internet is full of spyware.

I tell the guy I can't tell. He tells me to send him a recent photo taken by the camera. So now I have to find a recent photo taken with that camera that is going to give him that information -- although if I can't figure out how to interpret actuations from the photo file data after doing numerous Google searches, I am not sure how he is unless he has that Windows software.

Meanwhile, I get another email from Mike from a yahoo account that has a peculiar email address, like two foreign names alessandraazh. He just wants to know if I still have the camera. Well, yes, I just posted it 5 minutes ago late on a Saturday night.

Then I get an email from Mario also asking me if I still have the camera. Mario has a gmail account which is also two names, johnandjacob. I say I do.

Within minutes, I get another email from John, also from the johnandjacob email.

Hi,
Thanks for the mail...i was introduced to this site by a friend at
work and i will like immediate purchase of this item for my Niece
'Bella' who is away of the state and been requesting for this item...i
will offer you $500 including the shipping charges to her.. there
because she is in need of it as a matter of urgency and due to my work
i don't have time to handle the shipping..i will want you to help me
handle the shipping very well to her..Get back to me with your
confirmed PayPal email address so that i can send the payment..
Get back to me asap...

That's pretty fractured English for someone with the very English name of John Powell. Mario, at the same email address, had a street address in Boyertown, PA on the bottom of his email and a telephone number. John has no location. I do a reverse search on the telephone number and I get all hits about Nigerian scams. Apparently many people are trying to buy things on craigslist from this phone number. Some pages say the phone is located in Jupiter, Florida, others in Seattle, Washington. Not surprisingly, the middle three digits of 206-666-5748 are demonic.

(Area code 206 is actually in Seattle, so John and Mario of Boyertown, PA have a very, very long extension cord.)

Also, I am amused that the niece's name is the same as a currently popular character in vampire novels and the offer is for more than I am asking for the camera. Who pays more, plus shipping? Where does Bella live that she can't find this camera locally? There's 13 of them on amazon.com right now. Even so, I write back a reminder that the ad said cash only and I meant to sell it locally. If this person wants to buy it electronically, they can buy it off amazon.

John writes back immediately and now he is getting bossy.

I have already confirmed shipping cost to her which is not more than
$60 to her via usps..kindly get back with the confirmed paypal email
so i can send the fund..Kindly go to www.paypal.com and set up account
and get back to me with your paypal email so i can send the fund..my
husband have already sent the fund into my paypal account thats why i wanna pay via that..

John has a husband? The husband must be Mario. Who am I to question a gay marriage in Boyertown, PA. And anyone can figure out my Paypal account without my telling them and send me money. Something else is going on here. They are either going to also ask for the password and think I will give it to them, or assume I will ship the camera before their payment has cleared because they are using stolen credit card numbers.

It's probably a mistake that I continue to talk to them out of my email address, but I remind them the ad said cash only. It is now 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, but busy John gives it one more try. Never once have we discussed the condition of the camera.

but i dont mean to hurt human beign like me..is just that am a busy
person that work trice in a day..get back if you can help me out..

If John is working thrice in a day, he must be working inside a Dickens novel. Who works thrice? I lose interest in helping out Bella.

Meanwhile, I have not heard back from Mike, but since his first email started the same way Mario's did and he also had a double-named, free email address, he was probably a Nigerian operative who went to bed early or found a deal that was actually going down. As for Sam, I'm beginning to wonder if I walked into a well-known -- except to me -- craigslist arrangement where you pretend to put a camera up for sale, the person asks you for shutter actuations, which might be a code word for porn, and you send them a sample photo. Sam is probably disappointed to get a photo of a sports mascot waving at the camera.

A Life Measured in Junk

2010-03-01T14:57:00.003-05:00

Saturday I went to my first estate sale because I wanted the cement benches that were pictured on the estate sale website. I want cement benches, but I want them cheap. My husband said if I decided to buy the benches after I got there, to call him and he would come with the van. This is his passive aggressive way of not participating without flat out telling me he doesn't want to go and doesn't want the benches.

It was very likely that when I called, he wouldn't answer the phone under the guise of being asleep. He can conveniently go into a deep, coma-like sleep when he doesn't want to do something.

But first he tried a Jedi mind trick on me. Why buy someone else's used, dirty cement benches? By the time I spent 10 hours cleaning them up, I could have easily bought new ones.

Wait a minute. First, I would never spend 10 hours cleaning anything up. After 30 minutes, anything I'm cleaning is as clean as it's ever going to get. And if I did spend 10 hours cleaning my dirty, used benches, how is that losing money I could have used to buy new ones? Am I taking time away from doing something else that would have paid me money? Was someone going to pay me to clean their benches, but instead I used that time to clean my own? I don't get the math here.

My husband is clearly not an economist.

So, a little bitterly, I set off for the estate sale, was shocked at how many cars were already there, and by the time I found the benches, a woman was taking the tags off them and declaring them hers. I could have had two benches for $50 if I had spent less time arguing with my husband over his bizarro theory of economics.

So it wouldn't be a total loss, I wandered around the place looking at the remaining stuff, and I do mean stuff. What happened to these people that suddenly everything they own has a price tag on it, including the house? Their property was called a "farmette." It had six outbuildings, all in various states of decay. Two of the buildings once served as kennels for multiple dogs. There was an old speed boat in the yard. An equally old tanning bed was in one shed. One shed was full of neon signs advertising beer and barbecue. From these meager clues, I tried to imagine who these people were. And what happened to them?

The house itself didn't seem particularly large and had long ago ceased being modernized for paint and carpeting. The narrow dining room had a humongous and ornate dining room set in it that would look overpowering in a castle dining hall. The 10 huge chairs were fit for royalty. There was a triple china cabinet and not one but two matching sideboards. It was not possible to sit in four of the chairs and if the table was pulled out to the center of the room, it would not have been possible to sit in eight of them. What crazy day was it when the owners brought this dining room set into this house?

But what struck me the most was the number of glasses, glass vases, glass bowls, china sets, knick knacks and figurines in the house. Shelves and tabletops in every room were loaded with them. There were boxes of them out in the sheds. The going price was $1 or 50 cents a piece, and not many were being purchased, because, frankly, who needs more than six glasses, one vase, and one set of dishes ever? And you never need figurines. Nothing good comes of all this junk except eventually having them all in a dusty box at your estate sale, marked down to 25 cents a piece and still not selling.

How much money do we spend on this stuff? I suppose if we all took a vow to never buy another glass or vase or figurine again, it would destroy the knick knack economy and jobs would be lost, but truly, what is the point of household debris?

I try to limit the amount of junk I accumulate. Moving to smaller places has forced purges, but when you get settled in one place too long, even if you never buy this stuff, you get it as gifts. Like these two statuettes I have of life-sized kittens sitting on their hind legs, wearing glued on Santa Claus hats. Someone gave me those. And one day, it sits at an estate sale, languishing. Whatever meaning it had for you is long forgotten. In the year 2040, someone will be at my estate sale, looking at those cats in hats and thinking, what the heck?

Why are you doing this to me, MCV?

2010-02-17T16:20:00.003-05:00

My husband suffered a slight injury on the job in the spring of 2008 at VCU and was sent to the campus clinic at MCV to check it out. I didn't even know about it until a year later when the Virginia taxation bureau sent me a letter saying my state refund check was being held because MCV had a claim on it.

I called MCV and found out about the 2008 incident. It was a workman's comp claim, but had been billed to my husband's personal insurance, which never paid it, never told us they hadn't paid it, and MCV never billed us. The lady at MCV's finance office found paperwork on file that everything I had told her was true and assured me she would take care of it.

I assumed all was well because the state released our piddling state refund check to us about a month later.

A year later I get a letter from Guitar Center saying my husband's credit line had been slashed by two-thirds because of "serious delinquencies" on his credit report. I was entitled to a free Equifax report as a result. I requested it online, looked at the delinquencies and there was MCV with a $350 "charge off" from that same workman's comp incident in 2008. "Charge off" is a bad word in the world of credit reports.

I called MCV again. Oh yeah, she says. I see all that. Well, workman's comp never paid it, so that's why it's listed as a charge-off. They requested your husband's medical records and I don't see that they were ever sent.

In other words, MCV never sent MCV the health records, so it's labeled as a "charge off" on my husband's social security number and reported to the credit bureau as a "serious delinquency." Now I have credit cards crashing all around my head. They need any excuse they can find to jack up rates to 33.33% on outstanding balances.

Well, it's not really MCV asking MCV for health records, she says. Workman's comp for VCU employees is handled by Managed Care Innovations, an outside contractor. They asked for his health records.

And MCV didn't send them? I asked.

Hmm, no, she says.

Do I need to call them? I ask. Who do I call? How do I fix this? Because I know you feel like the case is closed because you've charged it off, and Managed Care Innovations doesn't care because without medical records, they don't have to pay, so they feel like the case is closed, but this is destroying my credit. Plus, Equifax is blabbing this all over credit land, and they could care less about what screw-up is behind this charge off, and now Guitar Center feels the case is closed. They've branded us with the scarlet letter of Serious Delinquents, even though I have paid off many years of guitar strings, reverb pedals and road cases without ever being late once.

I'll handle it, she says.

Where have I heard that before?

JC Penneys and the Creepy Guy

2010-01-21T12:14:00.002-05:00

Goodbye JC Penney catalog center in Midlothian. Channel 12 is reporting the office will close at the end of March, putting 256 people out of work. Penneys has apparently suffered a 78 percent drop in third-quarter earnings, which seems huge. I tried my best to help. Easily 90 percent of my clothes for the past six years or so came from the catalog. They have a size that fits me perfectly, so it's just easier to shop there. I hate trying things on in store dressing rooms.

But I don't call in to the catalog center. I order online. I am guessing most people do that now so the catalog center can't keep those 256 people busy.

I used to be one of them. Whenever I was in an unemployed situation, I'd apply to call centers for temporary jobs. It was an easy-in, easy-out situation, (although as many times as I applied and even interviewed, I could never get hired by Time-Life on Parham Road.)

In the early '80s, I did get hired for Christmas rush at JC Penneys on Alverser Drive, across from the Chesterfield Towne Center. Christmas rush lasts from September to January. You could not specify a day or night shift. You could not ask for the same days or weekends off. You had to have 24-hour, seven days a week availability, and every week your work schedule was different, depending on projected sales call volume. The number of hours you worked also varied. And you were paid just a little above minimum wage.

You had to punch into a time clock within 5 minutes either way of your shift starting time. If you punched in 6 minutes or more late, you were flagged. If you were flagged late three times in a six-week period, you were on probation, and if you were late again while on probation, you were fired. Panicky women would pull up to the entrance door, double-park with their motor running, run in and punch in, then run back out to park to avoid being flagged.

I forget how long training was, at least a week, maybe more. We tediously went through the manual of how to answer the phone, put callers on mute or hold, take an order, process a return, and upsell a customer if an item wasn't available. The computer would give you alternatives to offer. We learned the jargon of catalog numbers, sizes and color codes.

The computer terminals were tiny boxes with black screens and glowing green Courier looking type. The training only went as fast as the dumbest person in the room, and there was always someone who couldn't follow, who was totally lost. The instructor had to explain things over and over while the rest of the class snoozed. Nevertheless, eventually we were all set loose on the floor to take orders, in long rows of computer terminal semi-cubicles.

You never sat in the same cubicle, so there was no decorating your workspace. The bulletin board by the time clock assigned you a cube number for the day, and there you sat with your headphones on. Your headphones came in a disinfected bag, but you brought your own alcohol to clean your keyboard and phone set each day. Tissues? Check. Lozenges for scratchy throats? Check. Some women brought their own seat cushions. No food or drink in the cubes. At the end of the shift, everything went home with you. Only the full-time year-round employees had lockers.

By the time I made it to January, I was on probation for being late three times, but I managed to find a full-time job just in time to get out before I was fired. Christmas rush was over and I was going to be laid off anyway.

In many ways, I enjoyed the job. You stayed busy. The calls were constant. It was interesting to see the kind of things people were buying. It was interesting to see how some women seemed to have endless money and would order dozen of things regularly. And they'd return dozens of things, too. Some accounts were flagged, so if an item was out of stock, you didn't suggest another one. They were only going to bring it back anyway. For some reason, the early-early morning shift was always full of calls from women in New Jersey, ordering drapes and bedding. It was very curious.

Then there was the Creepy Guy. Creepy Guy usually turned up on the evening shifts. Sometimes Creepy Guy got right to the point and asked what was I wearing. Sometimes he pretended to be ordering women's underwear and would ask for descriptions of bras and panties on certain pages. What do you think of this bra? Would you like this one? How would it feel on you? What are you wearing under your clothes now? What color is it? Is it tight? Is it see-through? Does it have lace on it? He had a thing for lace.

Creepy Guy was relentless. I got a call from him at least once during every evening shift. I could hear from the chatter up and down my row that other call-center women were getting calls from him, too, so he was a nightly serial caller. He kept calling and calling. That's because every so often he would strike gold. Someone would be bored and actually tell him what she was wearing. It only encouraged him. Even I got enticed one evening and told him, and then he got creepier. What did I look like under my underwear? Okay, enough of you, Creepy Guy.

One evening, while Creepy Guy was trying to get me to describe a bra in the catalog, I could hear on his end of the line the sound of children's voices. He was startled -- apparently the arrival home of the wife and children was unexpected. Flustered, he said he had to go. Creepy Guy, I exclaimed, you have children? And you're making these calls? Shame on you, shame on you!

After that, when he called, I asked him about his kids, and he hung up on me.

After the catalog call center shuts down, what will Creepy Guy do?

The Silent Type Revisited

2010-01-09T12:44:00.003-05:00

I was contacted recently by a reader who remembers this story from November 2003. I think it appeared only in one place, The Hook in Charlottesville, Va. She wanted to know if I was still married to this man because her strong, silent type was getting ready to retire from the military and she didn't think their marriage would survive now that he was home all the time not talking to her instead of overseas not talking to her. Well, I am still married to this one. Here's a reprint of the story:

The Silent Type

This is not a Hurricane Isabel story, although it starts like one. Two days after the hurricane, my entire county was still without electricity except for one small area, an intersection near the expressway with a fast food restaurant and gas station on each corner. Everyone in the county descended upon it.

McDonald's was under siege, and Burger King was only marginally better, so we went there. The line for the drive-through wrapped around the building twice. My husband directed our car to the end of the line, and I began squawking.

"Why are we getting in the drive-through? The line will be shorter inside. I even see empty tables!"

"I don't like to eat inside."

"Why? It has air conditioning. And lights. Things we don't have at home." That should have settled the argument right there, but he was still in the drive-through line. So I spelled out more reasons for eating in.

1. You get to eat the food while it's still warm.
2. If they make a mistake in the order, you can correct it on the spot.
3. After you eat, your garbage is their garbage.
4. And I can enjoy a meal with chicken without four cats breathing down my neck, purring, "Bird? Bird? Is that hot, dead bird? Give me bird!"

My husband passively listened to all this, then, with great reluctance, began circling for a parking space. I graciously offered him equal time.

"Why do you always want to take it home?"

"I can watch TV at home."

Ordinarily I might have given him a point or two on the Marriage Scoreboard for that, but on this particular day, the television he was so eager to get home to was a very small, black and white, battery-operated one that was picking up a single local channel. We had no electricity, remember.

Then it dawned on me it wasn't about the television at all. He wouldn't be expected to make conversation if we were eating in front of the television.

I suppose there are men who are both good conversationalists and heterosexual, but I've encountered very few in my life. I think they must all get jobs as talk show hosts, the skill is so rare and unique.

The last time I persuaded him to actually enter the Burger King, I spent the entire meal performing my favorite monologue, "My Very Stressful and Horrible Day at Work." He said nothing, no matter how hair-raising and incredible the events of My Very Stressful and Horrible Day at Work became. So I switched to a topic guaranteed to get a response, "My Last Boyfriend Was an Excellent Conversationalist, Unlike You."

"He was a great listener," I concluded.

"I was listening," my husband finally spoke.

"But you weren't responding. You didn't participate. You don't comment on my comments. It wasn't a ping-pong game of thoughts and ideas. It was hitting golf balls off a tee."

"I was listening," my husband said. And that was, if nothing else, an improvement over silence in front of a television, so I grudgingly awarded him a point on the Marriage Scoreboard.

But it got me to really think about that last boyfriend who was the excellent conversationalist because, in reality, he was only an excellent conversationalist on the phone. He called when I got home from work and we talked until 9:30 at night. I thought we were having the most incredible relationship of sharing, only to find out after it ended that the bands start playing in the clubs at 10 p.m., and he was only killing time with me until he could go out and rub elbows with some happening babes.

He was a master of the art of the ping-pong conversation, showing interest in a woman's comments, responding, contributing, encouraging, just to keep the phone call going until it had served his purpose of passing the duller part of the evening. When we did go out, it was always to a movie, which is like television only bigger and louder. You can't have a sparkling conversation during a movie. The people around you would club you with their super-size popcorn boxes.

And to my horror, I remembered that the ideal boyfriend and I never ate in fast food restaurants either. Even though the nearest Wendy's was 20 minutes from his apartment, he always ordered out. I'd finish my meal in the car while it was still hot. (When a relationship is in the fragile beginning stage, you can't really squawk about wanting to eat inside.)

He, however, patiently waited until he got home, unpacked everything, and rearranged it on his own plates before settling down in front of the television (not only creating garbage, but dirty dishes). And there I sat, with no food, since I had eaten it already, and no conversation, since we were now in television-mode. This was hardcore anti-conversation! I had been deceived.

Good conversation is such a precious commodity, sometimes even a man craves it. That would totally explain the mystery of why Wilbur spent all his time in the barn with Mr. Ed when he had a hot babe like Carol in the house. (Did you ever notice the body on Carol?) But Mr. Ed talked.

It's been a long, slow learning process. I'm reporting this discovery to womankind as a warning. If you hear of an impending hurricane, gas up the car, fill up the bathtub, pack a cooler with ice, stock plenty of batteries, and marry a man who talks.

Being a Writer is a Curse

2009-12-19T16:15:00.003-05:00

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

2009-12-11T15:53:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-01T11:31:00.004-05:00

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

2009-11-27T22:32:00.005-05:00

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. There were 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 the spacious ground floor a series of reception rooms for entertaining. 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 find out that 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

2009-11-22T19:00:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-20T17:17:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-15T14:04:00.005-05:00

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.

Baby, I'm Amazed

2009-11-14T20:29:00.002-05:00

I missed a critical episode of a TV program, even though I have Tivo. I was bummed out for half a day, but then thought to check the Internet to see if it was online anywhere. It was.

One day at work, I brought up a local news website and watched a breaking news story on the corner of my computer screen while I continued to answer emails.

Both of those things are amazing only if you, like me, have lived most of your life before the Internet was invented. Today's college students have no memory of a time when there was no email, cell phones or Internet.

My parents were born before television was invented. My childhood TV was black and white and round like a porthole. In New York City, we had the luxury of five channels. When we moved to North Carolina, we had two. Daytime television was either a game show or a soap opera. There was nothing else. Now I have more than 300 channels. I watch late night talk shows during the day. I could say Tivo is the greatest, most liberating invention of my lifetime, but there's so many other amazing things.

I've had email only since the early 1990s, and at first there were many days when I didn't get an email at all. Now 80 percent of my work is email: answering them, sending files, photos, and press releases out by email -- things I used to do by phone, letter, or physically walking or driving to another office.

What do encyclopedia salesmen do now? Because I can find anything I want to know on the Internet. The whole time I was in school and college, I had to go to the library and find books and magazines in order to research anything. It was a time-consuming process, and you were limited to whatever resources your particular branch library had available. How quickly I can find information now is amazing.

For people who pay their bills online, that must be amazing. I haven't reached that point yet, but I am delighted that I can check my bank balance online now instead of calling in to a robotic answering service or a grumpy human being. I like shopping online. My store is amazon.com. It has everything. For years, I was a big-time eBay buyer and seller.

Cell phones are amazing. How did we move through our lives without being in constant contact with people? Even the poorest people huddled at my bus stop are all talking on their cell phones. On my bus ride home, everyone is on the phone. In the supermarket, everyone is on the phone talking about what to buy. I do that, too. I call home to see if we have mustard. How did we manage before? We had a lot of extra mustard, I bet.

I used to go to the movies. Now the movies come to me. Sometime it's on Netflix. Sometimes I download a movie to my TV.

iTunes is amazing. Most albums (I still call them albums) are two good songs and dreck. (Nirvana excluded. Their whole album was good.) Now I just buy the two good songs. And I don't even have to go to the store.

Video cameras and home movies are not new, but you can edit them yourself, add music, and upload them to YouTube. It used to be you had to invite people over to torture them with your home movies. Now you can just send them a link. It's amazing to me that a video of my cat batting at paper coming out of a printer has been viewed more than 14,000 times and is on a website in China.

My grandmother thought an indoor toilet was amazing. A washing machine was amazing. Getting on a plane and flying home to Italy in half a day when it took her almost two weeks to get to America on a boat the first time was amazing. Every generation has its mind-boggling advancements. I'm sure my grandchild will find my Internet-less childhood amazing to think about when he's coming to visit me in his flying car. I'll be in a nursing home hooked up to a virtual reality machine simulating Waikiki.

Things Bosses Have Made Me Do

2009-10-25T23:23:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-31T12:38:00.005-04:00

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

2009-07-25T13:54:00.005-04:00

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

2009-07-21T17:23:00.001-04:00

Would You Get Divorced Over This?

2009-07-08T16:23:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-25T22:29:00.003-04:00

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.

Sorry to Make You Click Twice

2009-06-09T22:28:00.000-04:00

You must read this, except I put it on my other blog.

Missing Mechanicsville

2009-06-02T00:53:00.007-04:00

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

2009-05-26T12:40:00.005-04:00

Who didn’t see this coming? The demise of Jon and Kate. Because of the eight. Or not. (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, and then the series. The money would go a long way into creating a better life for the kids, supplying current and future needs. But then things got out of control, and it’s about way more than the kids now. There was no way they could predict they would become the most popular show on TLC since previous multi-kid shows didn’t develop cult followings. Who’s stalking the Duggars? And they’re even more of a freak show than the Gosselins with their 18 robotic kids who look like extras from an episode of “Little House on the Prairie.” How about “Table for 12,” the family with two sets of twins and then sextuplets, except one of their sextuplets has cerebral palsy, which also gives the show an unfortunate subtext that multiple births are hazardous. True, but not fun to watch.

What the show doesn’t address because it would turn off viewers is that Jon and Kate, or at least Kate, were once very religious. Decisions to promote the family were made on behalf of the “testimony.” I have very 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 you a big hand, you have to show thanks by testifying. So Kate and Jon went on the road, accepting 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 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 were willing to pay more for them to speak. Then talk shows wanted them. Then other organizations. The talk shows and other organizations didn’t want to hear about God so much.

Part of getting the religious testimony of the book out there – since the TV show would not let them speak about religion – meant Kate had to promote the book. Being the articulate, educated, confident one, Kate was the natural choice to write and promote the book. She was probably 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.

Maybe this is her Gethsemane because Kate didn’t back away from testifying when the media put the spotlight on her instead of her God. She let the supreme way she was able to handle her family become the new secular testimony. So now it’s all going to fall apart on her for stepping off the path of faith and letting 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. As with all media, I will now offer the secular viewpoint. 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 pretty much 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. People you think would be part of the show, like family members, are not around and the couple hints there’s a good reason. It has always been Kate’s way or the highway. Jon must have just been so overwhelmed by having a cute, bubbling, blonde, white girlfriend with a really good job, he overlooked all these early warning signs of Castration Up Ahead. The Kate of the early footage, pre-babies, 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 much anymore. 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, but maybe he’s also not that great an IT employee. Who knows?)

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 bitch wife of his? (Because that’s what man-with-no-plan originally agreed to when he married her, buster.)

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 probably thinks. If you really loved me, you would not ask me to live this way, Jon probably 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.

It doesn’t matter if he physically cheated on her or not. He’s been disloyal. He has not sacrificed himself for her. He has embarrassed her in public. It’s all unforgivable to a controlling woman. Being one, I know. It is the worst thing. And Jon may think the next wife will be all about him, but she never will be. She will be all about being the new wife of Jon from Jon & Kate Plus Eight. Jon is doomed to multiple marriages, impending baldness, irregular IT jobs and living off of alimony provided by Kate for the rest of his life.

Can this marriage be saved? The secular scenario says no. Years down the road, there’s a religious come-to-Jesus possibility that may make reconciliation possible, or create a humbler, more modest Kate who returns to testify for the Lord with a new husband who knows to let her stand in the spotlight and knows to say “how high?” when ordered to jump. The financial rewards of being Mr. Kate can be handsome if you just ignore the catty comments from the public.

You may hate her, but I’m scoring this one in terms of lifetime resiliency for Kate. They both reaped what they sowed, but within the context of both religious redemption and/or continued fame, Kate’s got it.

Chesterfield County Morality Police

2009-05-24T09:44:00.002-04:00

A post on my Richmond Music Journal blog chronicles a decades-old run-in with the Chesterfield County morality police.

This Makes Me Strangely Happy

2009-05-23T15:46:00.000-04:00

I Don't Need Mother's Day

2009-05-10T19:18:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-05-01T23:07:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-14T16:18:00.000-04:00

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.

I Tweet, Therefore, I Am

2009-04-07T21:29:00.000-04:00

The social media website Twitter is like being at a cocktail party where you don’t actually know anyone, but you’ve heard of them. You stand against the wall with your drink, or you walk slowly around and listen to fragments of their conversations. You’re always coming in at the middle of a story, and you can’t stay for the end because they may look at you rudely for eavesdropping, so you keep moving. Very few people speak directly to you, but when one does, you feel very happy, as if you connected, even for a moment.

Some of the people at this party do know each other, and their conversations are lively and fun. You enjoy just listening in.

And in the end, you feel like you had a good time. You were with people who ordinarily wouldn’t include you in their reindeer games. You heard interesting things. You picked up some tips about how to live a fabulous life, how to be more like them, what you have to do to have a career like they do. Maybe next time you’re at the party, more people will speak directly to you. It's like being with the King of Comedy without having to physically kidnap him.

After awhile, as you spend more time at this party where people drop in and out, you begin to notice there are people hovering near you. They think you are interesting, but they don’t know you to speak directly to you, so they’re just hanging out nearby, listening to you talk to yourself, listening to you pretend you are the center of attention and everyone is hanging on your words. You are flattered.

It’s not that peculiar a social networking model. It’s the traditional after work mixer, only ported to a virtual world and the mixer goes on night and day. The ways to get popular in the Twitterworld are the same ones as in the real world. You can be funny. Someone who is fast and culturally current with the quips gets followed by many. You can be the wagon train leader, out in front of the Internet exploration, sending back appropriate links to interesting pages and articles.

You can be a news service, either an actual news service like a blogging TV reporter or CNN, or a limited area reporter (which is probably the future of journalism). I follow people who write about the weather, several who tweet about what’s happening in their neighborhoods (crimes, accidents, fires, traffic jams, lost pets), and others who seem to be home unemployed all day breaking the news of what’s on TV.

Then there’s the people I call the cool crowd, the same group you yearned to be part of in high school. They all know each other, so you follow everyone in the crowd and you know what they’re up to, where they’re going for dinner, what’s the latest popular bar, who’s doing what this weekend.

Then there’s the salesmen and scam artists, trying to figure out how to play the room to their advantage. There’s a Twitter philosophy that says you should follow everyone who follows you, but this clutters your feed with their sales pitches. I see no point in following people I don’t know from other towns either. Where they’re going to dinner in Palm Beach or Irvine doesn’t add anything to my daily experience like a rave about a local restaurant could.

Yes, there’s fake celebrities on Twitter, but there’s also several genuine ones – actors, comedians, musicians, tech columnists – who have eliminated the Catholic Church model of communication. You don’t have to go through a priest to communicate with God. These celebrities have eliminated the entertainment reporter and the magazine editors who filter their stories back to the fans. They talk directly to their fans, but in a nice, safe way, which preserves their privacy and guarantees they’re never misquoted or misrepresented by someone with an agenda.

Newspapers should be afraid, be very afraid. I would hazard a guess many bloggers are frustrated reporters who couldn’t get hired by the almighty paper or had other careers to pursue but still wanted to write. Even if no one is reading them, they are self-fulfilling their desire to communicate. Several have amassed faithful readerships any newspaper columnist would envy. Twitter flings open the communications portal even more – to those who don’t even have the verbal wherewithal to blog, who haven’t got the skill and talent to put together an informative, tight, well-thought out 1,000-word Style Back Page. They don’t have much to say, but they have this to say, and dammit, they’re going to say it, and what do you know, a couple of hundred or more people will read it.

It’s the Mini-Me Newspaper, all about just me and what I think is interesting. Subscribers come onboard, whether you’re a celebrity, the life-of-the-party, the wagon train leader, the scummy salesman, the lonely girl, the frustrated reporter…doesn’t matter. You are the center of your universe and a galaxy of Tweeters will revolve around you in an exchange of news, ideas, jokes, secrets, sighs and lies. It’s your party within a party in an ever-expanding chain of parties where the conversation never stops except for the occasional sighting of a whale being carried by birds through an azure sky.

Marley & Journalism

2009-04-05T17:18:00.000-04:00

"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

2009-03-31T09:04:00.000-04:00

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.

Old People Are On The Internet!

2009-03-25T14:55:00.000-04:00

I went to a focus group recently to see what kind of advertising people were seeing, and was amazed to find the over 50 group wasn't reading the newspaper. Even the retired people no longer subscribed to the newspaper and were getting their news online and on the radio. What the newspaper perceives as its last solid market is eroding.

In fact, the only person in this focus group, a thirtyish young bachelor in a baseball hat, said he only subscribed to the Sunday paper for the coupons. Me, too, and only because my husband is still addicted to the Best Buy Sunday ad insert which is like his letter to Santa. (And Santa keeps writing him back, "show me the money.")

The old guys in the group said they were "immune" to all advertising, and when they wanted to buy something, they researched it on the Internet. They checked their stocks on the Internet. They checked sports scores on the Internet.

Breasts Like Pizza Dough

2009-03-19T18:01:00.000-04:00

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.

What about OctoDad?

2009-03-06T16:06:00.000-05:00

The one thing never mentioned in all these feature stories about the notorious new celebrity, OctoMom, is the lack of OctoDad and what the impact will be of growing up fatherless for these 14 children. Not even Dr. Phil, on his recent round of all the talk shows, addressed the subject. Is it because saying being a single mom is not okay is so politically incorrect? You are immediately inundated by the wrath of all the single mothers and the kids successfully raised by single mothers. Who needs fathering? We don't need no stinkin' fathering. We're doing fine.

Well, I don't think so. I think on the whole, if you look at the majority of fatherless children, you see a pattern of boys without leadership or discipline and girls making poor choices in relationships because they're looking for a father figure. I don't think it's a good thing. It's the two-parent households of Jon and Kate Plus 8 and the extremely fertile Duggars -- even Brangelina -- that make multi-children set-ups seem workable. There's a team there, not just one crazy woman. The thing that disturbs me the most about OctoMom is not that she chose to have a baby every year, but that she chose not to make a family, that she is incapable of having a loving relationship with a partner -- male or female -- in this enterprise. She's just out there spinning out the babies alone, living in a child's world because she doesn't know how to have adult relationships.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work We Go...Sort of

2009-03-02T14:43:00.000-05:00

A forced snow day is a good time to reflect on office work.

I’m not an early person. I tend to be late, not because I can't get it together but because usually it doesn't seem critical. I never seem to get out of the office at the designated time either, so I figure what labor is being lost at the front end is being recouped at the rear end, although some supervisors don’t appreciate the logic of this.

And no one appreciates it if I call attention to the fact that those who come early are not actually working. They’re doing the same things that we who are late are still doing at home on our own time: reading the paper, going to the bathroom, eating breakfast, and -- a major time-killer -- talking about everything they did since the last time they were at work.

For several years I worked at a non-profit office of 30 women divided up into rooms of three or four. After the bathroom, newspapers and breakfasts were taken care of, and the news of the night before shared with their office mates, they would then go to the other rooms to converse with the people there. This took up the entire morning, and then lunch was convened in a lounge where a television played the noontime soap operas.

The hour after lunch would be consumed by discussion groups about the activities of the soap opera people. By this time, school was out and everyone was calling home, checking in with their kids and making plans for after-work and dinner. By now there was about an hour to go to actually do some office work and everyone is complaining how much work they've got and they can't possibly catch up. We're swamped, swamped!

I keep seeing a variation of this same pattern at subsequent jobs, and often it actually results in more people getting hired to catch up with all this work, and yet the same amount of work gets done because the new people fall into the same pattern. It also explains why I watch my email, waiting for replies and information I need to move forward on my projects, and nothing happens -- I get nothing at all -- until 5:05 p.m. Every day. Without fail. For years and years now. The pattern is still in force.

The more people you have in an office, the less work you get done because it increases the number of birthdays, weddings, new babies, house warmings, promotions and transfers. Every one of those events requires, if not a covered dish luncheon, then at least the ubiquitous yellow cake with white icing and pastel roses. During the two years I worked at Signet Bank's operations center, I think I set a new lifetime record for the amount of yellow cake with white icing I consumed. It got to the point where it seemed truly unusual if there wasn’t a cake each day. I couldn’t work. I’d have yellow cake withdrawal pains on no cake days. What, there’s no cake? No where in this building? There’s gotta be cake somewhere.

There's the coffee pot and microwave wars. A cottage industry in any office is the maintenance and supplying of the coffee. This can tie up one or two workers most of the day. Coffee has to be made, then remade, filters dumped -- preferably in the water coolers so there will be the traditional office water cooler clog -- and then pots washed. There’s always someone who will do all this, in lieu of their actual work, and complain the whole time about it, as if they actually wanted to be doing their actual work.

Then there's the who got the microwave all dirty crisis, which can consume hours of time trying to, by power of gossip, guilt the offender into cleaning the microwave.

Another time-killer is the sales force. I don’t mean the salesmen who are selling the product manufactured by the office. I’m talking about the auxiliary sale force. I have never worked anywhere where there wasn’t an Avon lady or women leaving catalogs of stuff on your desk, proceeds to benefit their child's school. I make a forgiving exception for band candy, although I haven't seen one of those long, almond-studded chocolate band bars in a long time.

Finally, there's the Odor Patrol: People have decided they have a civil right not to smell anything, or at least, not anything they don’t want to smell. Cigarettes were the first to go and after that heady victory, with some basis in health considerations, they went berserk with power and started going after everything. Now we have Fragrance Free Zones. You’ve seen the memos.

“There are some employees who are allergic to fragrances, and request other employees to refrain from the use of colognes and hairsprays.” This, of course, is no fun for the Avon Lady. (See The Sales Force above.)

I worked with one woman in a telemarketing sales maze of cubicles who kept requesting a new seat assignment because she couldn’t stand the odor of cough drops or throat lozenges co-workers were using. When I'm trapped in a cubicle waiting for a phone to ring or a 5:01 p.m. email to arrive, I have a bad habit of removing and reapplying nail polish. I’m surprised I haven’t been clubbed to death by the Odor Patrol yet. I like the stench of nail polish remover. Others don’t. What I don’t like, and have often contemplated joining the Odor Patrol to protest are:

Microwave popcorn and Chinese Take-Out. Years ago, a T-D columnist (probably Ray McAllister) wrote about the all-encompassing, breathtaking stink of burnt microwave popcorn that can overtake an office and linger all day. He received so many heartfelt responses, it was apparent this is a common office hazard. (In fact, 90 percent of the fire evacuations in my current job are popcorn-related).

I find successfully nuked popcorn just as disruptive. The seductive odor of hot butter belongs in a movie theater, so it’s distracting to be overwhelmed by it twice a day during mid-morning and mid-afternoon munchy periods. You can’t think of anything else but popcorn, popcorn, popcorn.

But at least it's preferable to the horrible stench of Chinese take-out! Ever wonder why all Chinese restaurants have take-out? Because even the people who work in Chinese restaurants want you to take it out! This food smells worse than it looks, and it looks like regurgitated animals from Dr. Seuss books. There’s always somebody in an office who has Chinese food delivered to their desk several times a week, and you can smell it the rest of the day.

Staying Alive in Richmond

2009-02-28T23:26:00.000-05:00

Don't eat dinner at New York Chicken at Broad and Belvidere

Don't go for strolls in Byrd Park at night (Binstead)

Don't go to Chimborazo Park for a romantic view of the city skyline after dark

Don't leave your front door open and unlocked even if you are expecting guests (Harvey)

If you are a female alone, lock all the windows, even the upstairs windows (Southside Strangler)

Avoid driving on the Boulevard (see 10 S. Boulevard website)

Pass on iBook giveaways at RIR

It's getting so you may also have to pass on attending basketball games at the Siegel Center

Don't tell anyone you meet at a bar, or piss off at a bar, where you work. And if their car pulls up in your parking lot at the same time you do the next morning, jump back in your car and take off.

Political Houses on Sand

2009-02-26T21:44:00.000-05:00

Politics is like building a house on sand, as in the Biblical story. All your work can be undone by the next administration faster than it took you to do it. Within days after Obama took office, he was reversing Bush administration directives and policies.

I doubt Bush himself cares because he was never really The Decider. Back in Texas, he’s just missing all the deferential attention, while Dick Cheney is sitting in his dungeon with Karl Rove plotting on how they can make Sarah Palin controllable (good luck with that because she’s a woman) and aghast that Bobby Jindal, their Republican Obama Replica, crashed and burned so soon following his comical Republican response to Obama’s address to Congress.

Here in Richmond, we’re seeing the same thing. The New Mayor unravels and trashcans much of the work of the Old Mayor. Old Mayor disappears overnight from the City’s website. A staff of public relations specialists labored for four years to produce glowing annual reports, website stories, blogs, and videos – one even mass-produced on DVD – praising the Old Mayor. He was the brand. His photo was on everything. Some of these PR people were the same ones who labored to produce glowing reports and videos of the former city manager. When the mayor took office, they turned on a dime and began dissing the city manager and all that he had done, all that they had previously praised, even on keyring fobs. Now all of that effort is in the trash can. Again.

To ease the transition from political omnipotence to political impotence, the PR staff even set up a new blog for the Old Mayor to populate in exile. After its initial appearance, with accompanying news stories trumpeting it, it hasn’t been updated since Dec. 31 (as of this writing two months later). It floats abandoned on the Internet like a pink tombstone. (Yeah, it’s kind of pinkish.) Maybe he has no one to help. His once devoted Sancho Panza blogs restlessly from Ellwood Thompson's, puzzled that he can get anyone elected but himself.

This is what happens to most politicians, except Senators and Congressmen who can cling to office until they are senile (looking at you, Robert Byrd), or espousing decades-out-of-style philosophies (looking at you in hell, Strom Thurmond, who left his half-black illegitimate daughter in the shadows in order to keep his S.C. seat). The true monarchies are in Congress. Caroline Kennedy, you know, must have been shocked, you know, by the difficulty ascending to the, you know, throne. Should have been easier! (I was pushing for Bill Clinton, myself.)

It makes you wonder why anyone goes into politics, except for the bribes, corruption, and fellowship, especially when you are blessed with a wide stance in an airport bathroom stall. Unless you are FDR and can finagle 12 years in power and create something truly addictive like Social Security that no one who comes after can change without peril of being clubbed by the AARP, it seems a very futile profession.

The Woes of Sports Marketing in Richmond

2009-02-26T16:33:00.000-05:00

Richmond Renegades President/GM Allan B. Harvie Jr. made the rounds of the room, talking to everyone personally. That morning the Times-Dispatch had announced that Harvie was requesting permission to suspend hockey operations next season. No money. But by the time of the PRSA luncheon, just a few hours later, he was saying he had calls from possible benefactors. Plus, if we all could convince everyone we knew to sell out the last three Renegade games, with everyone sitting in the lower level $10 seats, that alone would save the team for another season.

(Just a few days later, Harvie announced the possible benefactors had backed out.)

The we’re-outta-here press conference and the pitch for sell-outs were both good evangelical telethon marketing techniques. That in itself was a lesson to be learned by the public relations practitioners in the room: how to put on the desperation appeal.

The lunch panel also included Matthew Becherer, RIR Guy, and Scott Schricker, Sportsbacker Guy. RIR Guy said they were marketing northward since the Southern market for NASCAR was oversaturated with events to attend. RIR has only a year-to-year agreement with NASCAR. They can be cut out of the loop anytime! There’s a desperation appeal for you. The economic impact of NASCAR on Richmond is “huge, and yet the community doesn’t always cooperate.” They jack up $80 rooms to $350 and limit length of stays. Track survival means getting a variety of races in there that appeal to locals and families.

Sportsbacker Guy said they started as a lunch club in ’92, selling tickets for guest speakers to raise money for scholarships. Then they started bidding on bringing sporting events to Richmond before realizing it’s better to operate your own event because then you always win the bid! They picked up the Richmond Marathon when the Times-Dispatch dropped it, invented the Monument Avenue 10K, and it was onward from there. Yet the lack of good sports facilities in Richmond is hampering them. The Coliseum (1971) is old and there’s still the perception that Downtown is not safe. (Especially if you’re not good at dodging spit. Downtown people are the spitting-est bunch I’ve ever seen, and they don’t even turn their heads.) Why, there’s only been one fatal shooting after a Coliseum event! And it was a domestic quarrel!

(I beg to differ on crime. My son’s camera bag was stolen right off the sidewalk while he was unloading his car at the Coliseum, and this was the circus crowd! You’d think they’d behave with their children right there watching them steal. Although the last time I went to the Coliseum it was for a KISS concert and nothing bad happened except it took a very long time getting out of the parking deck. The smart rednecks just partied on top of their cars until the deck cleared out.)

The Coliseum also notoriously banned the Grateful Dead because their fans liked to camp out around the building for days and left a lot of garbage. Now John Paul Jones Arena is eating the Coliseum's lunch.

Helping Consuela

2009-02-21T13:49:00.000-05:00

(This piece I wrote and published 1998 is reprinted by request for someone who emailed me looking for it.)

You see the ads, a bedraggled but darling little Latino girl, sitting in a slum, staring steadfastly at the cameraman while a voice describes her impoverished life and then gives you an amazing statistic: that whatever you spend on, for instance, a cup of coffee every day will feed and clothe this kid, even send her to school. A few pennies a day will save this kid’s life.

The fundraising organizations that funnel your money to Consuela and her cousins will claim that 80 percent of their revenue goes to child care services and only 20 percent to advertising. Buried in that 80 percent, though, is a vast assortment of expenses that are peripherally related to routing the money to Consuela. It's a long, long funnel and down that funnel are many outstretched hands, not belonging to needy children with big eyes and empty bowls.

When I worked at one of these foundations, my own salary was included in that 80 percent. How did I help Consuela? I sent you your receipt when you sent in your money. If you complained that you hadn't gotten a receipt, or you wanted another photo of Consuela, or you wanted a letter from Consuela, your complaint went to my desk and I checked into the problem and wrote you back. And it wasn't just me being supported by your generosity. There was the mail sorters who brought me your complaints, and the mailroom that mailed out my responses, and the supervisors over me, and the supervisors over them, and the field representative in Consuela's region, and the supervisor of the project, and the workers under the supervisor. They all get part of your money and this is considered helping Consuela.

Then there's the payroll department that cut my check, and took out my medical benefits and taxes, and cut the checks for all the people along the funnel. That's part of helping Consuela, too. Then there’s the travel budget. To send a committee from the fundraising organization around the world to visit the projects means airline tickets, hotel rooms, room service, bellhops and taxi drivers. All this is helping Consuela. Then there's the obvious things, the office buildings, office supplies, office furniture, the utility bills for the offices. All this comes out of your help for Consuela.

Where did you think it came from?

There's this myth about the cost of living in other countries. Why, you can feed a family in India for a month for what you pay for a cup of coffee each day!

Maybe so. If you have 300 children under a project umbrella and at least $2 a month finally filters down to them, that's $600, and perhaps that does pay the lunch tab for everyone, or buys enough pencils and notebooks for the crowd. Have you significantly made this child's life better?

It's too much of a variable. In Consuela's case, she is probably one of six to 15 children, living in a predominantly Catholic country that discourages birth control. She'll marry young, and even if -- with your encouragement, lunch and pencil money -- she finishes school and learns a trade, she's going to have her own family of six to 15 children and won't be able to work for very long.

Charities are big businesses that benefit many people, primarily the people who work at the charity or the people who do advertising or fundraising for it. Show me an all-volunteer organization with all donated materials and supplies and perhaps they're really making an impact on those they're helping.

People give because it makes them feel good, or they want that tax deductible receipt because if it comes down to giving it to the government or just about anyone else, they'll go with just about anyone else.

How do I know this? Say there was an organization that helped needy children, but the contributors received no photographs, no letters, no reports, no receipts, no television programs with a weeping Sally Struthers stumbling in the muck, because all the energy and money that goes into providing those things would go instead to helping the child. How many people would sign up?

If there were no advertisements of dirty-faced urchins that cost $20,000 a week to run, but instead just a collection box in the church or local community center, how many people would faithfully put in their check every month?

There are some success stories. There are some people who go to extraordinary measures to actually help. They will give more than the monthly allotment and take the time to personally monitor how the extra money's being spent. They will travel to the child, and with all the tact and determination they can muster, work their way through and around the protective bureaucracy to do something truly useful on a grand scale for the child and his or her family. They use the charity as a springboard, but quickly figure out they have to personally take control of the situation if they expect their financial contribution to not be dissipated in a vast downward funnel.

Charities fill a need, all right. They are filling your need to feel like a humanitarian. They are filling your need to feel like a good guy at a discount bargain price. I've seen ads that let you buy into a child for as little as $10, so there's a sliding scale of feel-goodism priced for your budget. You, too, can be the next Mother Theresa in the comfort of your own home. I don't think many people really care where the money goes, as long as they are getting what they need -- their warm fuzzies, their receipt, their urchin's photograph or Christmas card. And the charities know this.

(Copyright 1998)

Time Out for a Facial

2009-02-16T19:04:00.000-05:00

I got a free facial at the Merle Norman in Willow Lawn today. It used to be when you let make-up sellers make you up, you came out looking like you were ready for the stagelights, but this make-over is so subtle, it was hard to tell I was wearing make-up. Getting my face steamed was awesome.

And that's how I celebrated President's Day. Valentine's Day I got a banana split at the Carvel down on Staples Mill. Thumbs up for Carvel and Merle Norman.

All day Sunday I did taxes for the whole family on Turbo Tax. It makes tax preparing fun! Now I need something to make tax paying fun. The economic stimulus bill has not yet reached me and made anything stimulating. It seems to be a gigantic barrel of political pork right now. Are we still all happy with Obama?

One Flew Over Patient First

2009-02-04T21:20:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in the waiting room of Patient First while my husband is seeing a doctor about a persistent nosebleed. There's a mentally disabled young man in the waiting room who, between phlegm-filled coughing spells, shouts out nonsensical phrases so he sounds like a giant parrot. Either he learned to be loud from his mother, or over the years, his mother has become loud to be heard over him. She's on the cell phone, shouting a conversation between bellowing at her son to "Shut up your mouth!" and "Cover your mouth when you cough!"

She even places an elaborate take-out order during which we all learn the family enjoys extra extra bleu cheese on their salads.

The woman sitting across from me is also on the phone, except it's in her ear so to me she looks like a crazy woman talking to herself. She is also not using her indoor voice. Why do people think they have to project their voice on the phone, as if it requires volume to get into the airwaves? Her daughter text messages the whole time.

I hope the father and son behind me are actually talking to each other, but when I turn around to look, he, too, is on the phone. Everyone in this waiting room is talking on the phone! Loud enough for me to hear! The disabled boy starts bellowing, "MA. MA. MA," trying to get his mother's attention, but she's not hanging up until the nurse comes out and calls them. A man in a baseball cap approaches the father-son behind me because they are also wearing baseball hats indoors. "You inda automo bzzzzn?" he asks.

Second Hat says, "What?"

First Hat repeats it twice before he's understood. "You inda automo bzzzzn?" Indeed, he is, so they begin talking about automobile repairs. First Hat is a car salesmen in Colonial Heights, except "ain't nobody got no money ta buy no car."

Blessed Mary, finally everyone except First Hat is called back and the waiting room is quiet. Waiting rooms used to always be quiet. There weren't even TVs in them like there is now. People were sick, quiet, and read magazines. The nurse calls in First Hat and he responds by showing her a finger gun and making a loud clicking noise when he pulls his thumb trigger. Would you buy a used car from this man?

Now I'm alone, convinced my husband is dead or forgotten somewhere in the back because it's been 90 minutes. Oh no, Larry King is coming on the TV and I can't even change the channel. In the end, we learn that nosebleeds can be stopped with an ice pack, something we forgot because no one in our house has had one in years, and I didn't Google it. That lesson costs a $50 co-pay. Make a note of that: nosebleeds, ice pack, always Google it first because ain't nobody got no money for co-pays.

Capriccio's Has Good Pizza

2009-01-31T20:32:00.000-05:00

The ad in the Clipper coupon booklet said it was "the best New York-style pizza in Richmond." Most pizza in Richmond is so not-good, you wouldn't have to do much to be the best, but claiming "New York-style" is ballsy, so we clipped our coupons and headed to the Capriccio's on W. Broad. We had never heard of the place.

It was in the TJ Maxx shopping center, which was packed with cars around David's Bridal Shop. Why are there so many people in the bridal shop in January? Anyway, at first we couldn't find the place because their roof sign was in red letters, which doesn't show up well. There wasn't a luscious smell when we entered, but the pizza arrived with little specks on it, which is always a good sign. Someone remembered a sprinkle of basil or oregano makes a pizza. Without it, I don't know what you've got. The only other place in the South I've ever seen specks was at Busch Gardens Ocktoberfesthaus, and that was only when they first opened. Jo Jo's downtown used to have good pizza, or maybe it was just better than what you normally get around here, but then they went downhill.

The first slice was delicious. The second was very very good. The third was okay, which is the problem with pizza. It's best oven hot. I shouldn't have had the third slice anyway.

I only lived in New York for 10 years, but that was enough time to be permanently branded with what food is supposed to taste like, and there are some things no other city seems to be able to do as well as the New York of my memories: Pizza, big salted pretzels sold from poles on a cart, Italian bread in paper tubes, Hoffman's or White Rock cream soda, bagels, soft ice cream.

The Holy Grail for soft ice cream is Carvel's. Carvel has made a few attempts to come to Richmond before and never stayed in business long. But in 2005, the same time I moved to the Dumbarton area, a Carvel's opened in the Crossridge shopping center way down on Staples Mill. It is still there. My birthdays are resplendent with Fudgy the Whale cakes once again, after decades of being Fudgy-deprived.

Screwed by Chase

2009-01-29T21:52:00.000-05:00

There's a credit card more evil than Bank of America. It's Chase. Not only has Chase bought up all the Washington-Mutual cards, now it's doing evil, like increasing the minimum payment from 3 percent of the balance to 5 percent, and charging a $10 fee EVERY MONTH just for having a balance at all, and charging the purchase interest rate -- which in this case was 13.49 percent -- on that monthly mounting $10 toll.

The trigger for all this evil was I had used this card as a balance transfer card only. Shifted a debt to it at 4.99 percent and then never used the card again, so I was merrily carrying a big balance at a low interest rate and paying it off very slowly. Chase no like that. They offered to transfer the whole balance to 7.99 percent, and they'd forget about that $10 a month, but I said no. You are dead to me.

Unfortunately, though, when I went through my shoebox of special offers, there were no life-of-balance low rates like there used to be. I went online and checked out some of my other cards that I wasn't doing anything with and didn't find a deal better than 7.99. But out of pride, I transferred the whole balance to an 8.99 card anyway, so I guess I screwed myself over on that one just because I was so mad at Chase. The SunTrust guy who handled the transfer said I was the third call that night trying to get out from under a Chase card that had turned rogue. One guy had $41,000 tied up in Chase credit. How do you get that kind of credit line?

When he ran off the terms, and I sheepishly verbally agreed to it all without understanding, I asked for his compassion. "Now SunTrust is never going to do anything like this, is it?"

He didn't say anything except, "Have a nice night." Dearie me. My economy is in trouble.

Fat

2009-01-21T12:45:00.000-05:00

I am fascinated by documentaries about the morbidly obese, those who literally cannot get through the door anymore and need rescue squads to get them out of the house. So I was mesmerized by Discovery Health's "Half Ton Teen," the story of 800-pounds plus Billy Robbins last night. Finally, a show that puts the blame somewhere: 19-year-old Billy's equally obese Mom who buys the groceries and brings him his food since he hasn't been able to leave his room in three years. For a teenager who is almost a man, he is totally childlike. Somehow this mother has completely controlled and emasculated her son. I am amazed since mine starting rebelling against me by age 15 and I haven't had a lick of influence since. Billy was fat going into high school, teased by everyone, and dropped out as a result, so the mother found a successful way to prevent losing her influence over him to his peer group.

Billy is so childlike, he doesn't appear to have any teenager traits at all, or any shame. The camera catches him nude, being washed like an elephant by orderlies. You actually don't see anything because the stomach fat is like a curtain down to his knees. (Note to self: exercise more!)

The documentary left me hanging about his fate, but I read on a UK website that after being forced to diet at the hospital, literally having fat cut off his body, and finally being a safe enough weight for a stomach bypass, he was then moved to an outpatient facility to keep him away from his mother. Good move. That was one toxic mom.

Nixon Did Not Have a Dream

2009-01-16T20:24:00.000-05:00

"The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep."

-- From one of Richard Nixon's inaugural addresses.

The third to the last sentence in John Adams' inaugural address has more than 700 words.

John Quincy Adams was the first to wear pants at his inauguration. (Less you think those who came before had the answer to "boxers or briefs" apparent, they wore knee breeches.)

George Washington added "So help me, God," to the oath of office.

Franklin Pierce was not sworn in on a Bible.

Nothing says you have to give an inaugural address.

William Henry Harrison, age 68, did not wear a hat or coat and gave a more than two hour speech. He caught a cold that same day, never got better, and died a month later. Let that be a lesson to you about long speeches.

Louis Howe actually wrote FDR's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Ted Sorenson, Adlai Stevenson and John Kenneth Galbraith crafted Kennedy's inaugural address.

Presidential speechwriter first became a full-time position under Nixon.

George H.W. Bush's inaugural addresses registered on the 6th grade level on the Flesch Readability Test.

Clinton finished writing his inaugural address at 4:30 a.m. on the morning of his inauguration.

-- Thanks to the wonderful read, The New Yorker

The Curse of the PA

2009-01-09T22:09:00.000-05:00

I often curse the day my husband got his PA. He claimed he was going to make money running sound for other bands and it would pay for itself. It would also provide him with band security, because he'd be the one with the PA, i.e., harder to kick out of the band.

So, for years, an entire room in the apartment became the storage room for the PA. Now in the house, I have to walk through a maze of PA equipment to get to the washing machine. One of the cars always has to be big enough to haul the PA. And it never really pays for itself because things break, things have to be replaced. Bands that make money buy their own PA, and bands that don't make money don't want to pay anything reasonable for PA. So you end up just being the guy in your own band that always brings the PA.

And if you're the girl dating the guy in the band that brings the PA, and you ride with him, then you're there two hours before the gig starts and at least an hour after it's over. It's a long night. Lately there's been few paying jobs and more freebies running sound for friends' parties.

Musician parties are tantamount to Woodstockian events. Musicians know musicians, so there's usually eight to 20 bands. These things start early in the afternoon and go into the wee hours because people won't go home. They camp out. They drum circle. They sleep on the lawn. If you're bringing the PA, you go in at 11 a.m. to set up, and when the final band gives up at 2 in the morning, then there's another hour or two of amateurs -- people who can't play, people who can't sing, people who are drunk -- who want to take advantage of the live mic and live out a fantasy for awhile. If you're a nice guy like my husband, you don't pull the plug on them until everyone at the party is comatose.

In the beginning -- when I was working on our relationship, or felt I needed to be supportive -- I would go to these ordeals, but I am notoriously and famously the Least Fun Person at Any Party. Now I don't go. I fantasize about going to parties in a normal way, arriving when things are well underway and then leaving before they get stupid. I fantasize about having a date for parties who actually hangs out with me, who isn't either chained to the PA for 15 hours or on stage himself. (Probably the key was to date someone who likes music, not someone who plays music.)

So my husband comes back from these things and says, "Everyone asked about you." He thinks they missed me. But I know, being the Least Fun Person at Any Party, that's not the case. I tell him, "They ask about me because they think we've broken up. They're just checking to see if there is any way possible we could still be together."

iPod App Saves Marriage

2009-01-08T20:59:00.000-05:00

I kept my head down tonight all the way to West Point playing Bejeweled on the iPod Touch. Did not look up once. Did not get upset about my husband's driving.

My husband likes to yell at all the other drivers on the road because they are all clearly dumbasses. This makes my blood pressure percolate. He also drives in the left lane.

The left lane is for passing, I say.

I'm passing everybody, he says.

But when you're finished passing, you're supposed to get back in the right lane.

No, he says.

So he and 40 other macho drivers are all in the left lane, bumper to bumper at 70 mph, even when there's no one at all in the right lane. Not one of these macho left lane drivers will get on the right. If one person hits their brakes, we're all smashed up, 40 car pile up.

Please get over into the right lane, there's no one in that lane.

No.

If you cared about me, if you LOVED ME, you would GET OVER INTO THE RIGHT LANE.

NO!

So now I am all sobbing, in tears, because it is a dark day when you find out your husband has chosen the left lane over you and doesn't love you enough to get over into the right lane, that he doesn't care if you die as long as you die in the left lane.

This scenario has produced many a very tense car ride. But now...with ear buds in, I hear nothing about dumbasses. I see nothing but the colored shapes of Bejeweled, telling me I am a wonderful matcher of threes, that I have advanced to another level, that I am doing EXCELLENT. I do not know (or care) what lane I am careening to my death in because all I see or hear is Bejeweled.

My Richmond Police Story

2009-01-06T21:54:00.000-05:00

My husband was driving down McCloy and stopped to turn right onto Cary Street at 2 a.m. It was right after he played a gig and he stopped at the bank there to get money to pay the drummer, who was in the van. They see the cop in the Cary Court shopping center. Now my husband is a by-the-book driver and he doesn't drink at all when he's playing music. (Yes, call Ripley's Believe It or Not, it's true!) He's always yelling at me about my driving. And no one wants any trouble in the middle of the night when you have a drummer in the car. He's eyeball to eyeball with a cop car, so you know he's not going to blow past the stoplight. That would be crazy ass stupid.

He comes to a full stop before turning. The cop pulls him over ANYWAY and gives him a ticket for not stopping because it's 2 in the morning and two guys in a van have to be up to no good, right?

Well, he goes to court to contest the ticket. He tells the judge he made a full stop, honest to goodness. My husband is a short haired, sincere fellow who looks like an old Harry Potter. The judge asks the cop, is it possible he did stop and you just didn't see it? The cop says, yeah, it's possible. He might have stopped.

The judge finds my husband guilty, ANYWAY! The drummer was supposed to go with him as a witness, but court starts at 9 a.m., and he's a drummer, so...not gonna happen. And if the drummer had testified, my husband might have gotten jail time for being in possession of a drummer at 2 a.m., so maybe it was for the best.

Go West, Young La Siesta

2009-01-03T19:33:00.000-05:00

It turns out La Siesta is not so much closing as relocating farther down the road to somewhere near where 288 intersects with Midlothian, or so said our waiter today when we went to the restaurant to pay what we thought were our final respects. He said the place was so slammed Friday night, they ran out of food. Saturday at lunch was crowded, but we got what we wanted and the sangria was particularly tasty. There was an email sign-up sheet at the register so all the loyal customers would get word when La Siesta reopened again far to the west. For some reason this part of the story was not told to the Times-Dispatch.

Is urban blight creeping so far up Midlothian that businesses are now abandoning the Powhite interchange area and moving west of Midlothian village? It appears so. We just don't want to say that out loud, in case Chesterfield County becomes alarmed that the part of it that snuggles up to blighted Richmond has caught the blight. And without even a GRTC bus to blame!

Around 1983, I built a "solar house" off Providence Road on the Southside. There were three solar neighborhoods: the solar slum off Court House, where the houses were priced in the 40,000s, the middle solar off Providence where I built (50,000s) and the fancy solars off Arch Road (60,000s.) We got a big tax credit for this house the first year. Everything solar-related was deductible. In our case, most of the walls facing south were actually big plastic tanks of water, and other than all our big windows being on the south side of the house, that was the only solar thing about it.

Anyway, we were in the Southside, and La Siesta opened there and it was my favorite Mexican restaurant. I always ordered the Enchilada Suizas. I seldom tried anything else on the menu. When I got a divorce and moved to Carytown, and then on with my life, it was still the only restaurant on the Southside I liked. Of any kind. My husband can eat at any Mexican restaurant and be happy, but I only found satisfaction at La Siesta, although after I found out this particularly creepy Goth boy I knew was cooking there, I didn't go as often. And then there was the green onion scare, and when it was over, the green onions never returned to the Enchilada Suizas. What made that dish, beside the mild white sauce, was the sprinkling of tomato bits and chopped green onions.

Lean Cuisine makes an Enchilada Suiza which is kind of good, but not as good as La Siesta's back in the day when green onions didn't poison you. I am on my own now, forced to replicate the Enchilada Suiza at home, which I can in all ways except the suiza sauce, although I suspect it may be the same white stuff they give you with your chips in addition to the salsa. If so, that will make life easier since I read in the T-D that La Siesta sells their chip dips at Ukrop's. I've never seen them, but now I will look. This will either work or be a culinary disaster.

Mad Santa

2008-12-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

I am not a fan of Christmas.

Shopping in cold weather is not fun.
Having to do regular errands, like buying mailing envelopes, dishwashing liquid, and return a malfunctioning storage drive means no place to park and long lines no matter where I go to do it this week.
No one in my family has small children, so Christmas is adult-oriented. Adult presents cost more than children's presents, and you're shopping for people who already have everything they want. When money is tight, the person who ends up not getting a gift is my husband. That doesn't seem right.
Did I mention neither of us got a raise this year? Well, neither of us was laid off, either, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
I have a double set of in-laws, since my husband's parents are divorced and remarried. That means double in-law presents. Double road trips over the river and through the woods...
I have never been able to establish any family Christmas traditions of my own because I've never been able to have a Christmas at home with just my immediate family. I have been on the road for 29 years, a visitor to other people's traditions, except for a six year break between husbands when my Christmas tradition was happily home alone with my own turkey and dressing, and three movies, Coal Miner's Daughter, Manhattan, and When Harry Met Sally. I was never sad to be alone.
Sometimes I just want to cry. And then the bills come in January and I really want to cry. (When I worked at the Times-Dispatch, back in the newspaper prosperity days, they used to give you a Christmas bonus of a week's salary. That was very helpful. I'm pretty sure they don't do that anymore.)
I don't put the tree up because then I would have to take it down. Or I could be like some of the people in the Fan District who leave their Christmas lights up all year.
Aren't I pathetic. Grinch has nothing on me.
My favorite holiday is Martin Luther King Day. I get a three-day weekend and I'm not expected to do anything, not even have a dream.

Why is Ukrop's Being So Benevolent?

2008-12-21T12:27:00.000-05:00

What is it with this milk of human kindness coming from my local seller of milk, Ukrop's? Yesterday I filled up my gas tank when it was light-on empty and it cost me $8 and change. When I bought this car new in '02, it cost $15 to fill the tank. At the height of the gas prices, I was paying between $45-50 to fill up.

True, gas is $1.50 a gallon at my local Exxon right now, but I had 80 cents a gallon off in Ukrop's fuel perks. Ever since they started that program, at the height of the crazy costing gas, it has resulted in helpful savings to me.

What are they gaining from it? Are they seducing people away from Kroger's and Food Lion? But I seldom shop there. Except when I lived in Highland Springs and had to go to the A&P on Williamsburg Road (A&P! Imagine!), Ukrop's has always been the geographically closest store. Sundays, of course, you experiment with the competition. Ukrop's and Chick-fil-a still believe in Sundays.

Even if I am paying more, I tend to gravitate to Ukrop's. The aisles are clean. The baked goods look real, not peculiarly plastic-coated like at the other stores. The deli seems cleaner. The no-tip robotic baggers go with you back to the car (always appreciated in the dark of night). And now, for however long it lasts, Fuel Perks!

Google-Blocked from Mr. Christmas

2008-12-21T11:30:00.000-05:00

You can't get to Mr. Christmas with Google maps.

My caller had the most unimaginative, been-there, done-that photo assignment this week for a local publication, to get photos of people enjoying over-the-top Christmas displays. I consulted the T-D's list and emailed him a few addresses in his neighborhood, then told him to come get me and I'd drive him to a few places in my area of town. I knew the streets, I thought, and it'd go quick with me behind the wheel. He refused. (I guess it has something to do with not wanting to be seen with your mother, or something.)

Instead, I had to provide directions over the phone. The first place went okay, then I provided directions to the famous house of Mr. Christmas on 2300 Wistar Court. Since he was coming from the highly decorated houses of Pine Grove Drive, I instructed him via Broad Street. Right turn off Broad onto Wistar Street, four blocks down, left on Wistar Court. I am looking right at Google maps.

He calls back and says the street dead ends on Biscayne. That's not what the map says, I tell him. I'm right here, he says. Well, I can't tell what your situation is because I'm not there and the map says....and then he shouts at me that I purposely misdirected him because I wanted to go. But the map says....

Next night, as I'm getting ready to go to the boring office Christmas party, I see the Crazy Lights show on TLC and there's Mr. Christmas. I know it's an old show because they interview Cynthia McMullen in her messy little Times-Dispatch cubicle, and she's gone, but surely Mr. Christmas is still there. His street wouldn't have disappeared like Brigadoon. All I can think of at the boring Christmas office party is leaving early and finding out what happened on Biscayne Road.

We get there, and sure enough, Wistar Street dead ends at someone's driveway, which has a street sign on it that says Wistar Street. (Who ever saw a street sign at the end of a driveway?) We turn the brights on and can see Wistar Street continues right on the other side of this driveway, but there's a metal barricade keeping you from driving on the driveway, over a little stretch of this house's lawn, and back onto Wistar Street. We go up and down Biscayne but cannot find another street that will hook us back up to Wistar.

Back at home, I Google-map it again, ask for directions, and Google Maps innocently draws me a route right through this person's yard. On the map, Wistar Street goes right through to the end from Broad. In reality, you can't get to the end of it with the Wistar Court and Wistar Place cul-de-sacs unless you enter from Skipwith. And here in this conundrum is where Mr. Christmas abides, ever elusive to those of us Wise Men coming from the North. That just ain't right.

The Santa Lie

2008-12-18T19:49:00.000-05:00

It all starts with the first great lie, Santa Claus.

We have lost faith. We do not know whom to believe. We do not know whom to trust. Our parents, our ministers, our teachers, our politicians, our lovers, our car dealers, our anchorman--who among us is worthy of our trust?

And it's all because of Santa Claus.

Who can't remember when they first realized there was no Santa Claus?

For me, it was when I discovered a secret cache of gifts in a closet. I carefully unwrapped the end flaps on one, read the lettering on the side of the box and re-taped the package. On Christmas morning the card on this same box said it was from Santa Claus. How could Santa have brought this from the North Pole just hours earlier? And if there was no Santa, who was devising this elaborate hoax, who was drinking the milk and eating the carrots I left out for the reindeer? Who was leaving me thank you notes written in a feathery Santa hand?

My parents? My own parents were doing this to me? The same people who had selected my religion, mandated my moral values and set our standard of ethics?

Herein lies the crux. In our formative years, two similar controlling factors are presented to us, God and Claus. They both see you when you're sleeping, know when you're awake, know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake. They both reward you for faith and sterling behavior, and punish you for lack of both, one with fire, brimstone and eternal damnation and the other with a mini-version of the same thing, a lump of coal. When Claus is revealed as a fraud, can God be far behind?

Some of us desperately need to believe in something. I dealt with the loss of Claus. But I clung to the big Santa in the sky. When I became a parent, I decided not to tempt my own child with a similar crisis of faith. I would make life easy for him. I would tell him upfront there was no Santa Claus. I explained very carefully, or maybe very vaguely, it was just a Christmas game. I met direct questions about Santa head-on. Is there a Santa Claus? There are lots of Santa Clauses, Santa Clauses in every mall.

Unfortunately, in the end, it didn’t work. Whereas I continued to cling to the Santa in the sky with diamonds, he rejected everything I believed in. Did it all stem from the original loss of Claus, even as careful as I was to prepare him for it?

The Santa Claus conspiracy is the first conundrum we encounter on a lifetime journey of losing faith, and that's the only thing in life you can trust, the true and certain knowledge that you can’t believe in anything.

(I originally wrote a longer version of this about 15 years ago, and ever since, I keep seeing it floating around on the Internet, usually attributed to The City Paper, which never bought it from me, so I hereby lay formal claim to my own essay.)

Christmas Lights in Overdrive

2008-12-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

My retired father-in-law works occasionally for a limo service and one of the cars wasn't rented Monday night so he took us around the West End to see part of the tacky lights tour. After about four houses, I had light fatigue and put the camera down, but the Lauderdale house which has its lights timed to music you can pick up on the car radio is posted on YouTube, so here's a few I saw before that one.

It's fun, and a vast improvement from "old Richmond," when I first arrived here several decades ago. A lone white light in the windows was all that was allowed. With the influx of so many damn Yankees, things changed. (If you're ever in Miami at Christmas, go on all the light tours. They really know how to do Christmas down there, plus the still warm evening air smells beautifully of night blooming jasmine. The National Enquirer, which is based up the road from Miami off I-95, puts up a tree so huge, you can see it from the expressway. I don't know if they still do, but it was one of my stops driving back to the Amtrak auto train north of Orlando. It was even more fun to peek through the windows of the National Enquirer office and see the quite ordinary looking work stations.)

Traumatized by Bass Pro Shops

2008-12-13T20:11:00.000-05:00

I had forgotten a couple of things in my enthusiasm to go see the Bass Pro Shops on Lakeridge, a redneck Disney Land of sorts. I am creeped out by animals that were once live and now stuffed, and big, grey fish with mouths that can swallow your fist.

Background: My maternal grandparents had nine children and no jobs. They lived off what they grew and butchered themselves. Then they converted their house into a hunting lodge and my grandfather let men pay to shoot on his property. And sleep in his house, which must have gone over great with his six daughters. There was a twin bed or a cot in every space of every room of that house except the kitchen.

And there was no privacy. The house had no hallways. Each room opened up into the next one in a square, with the closets and storage rooms filling the center of the house. Part of the kitchen was converted into two adjoining bathrooms with curtainless shower stalls. (A luxury since before that there was an outhouse.) But they didn't have a proper door with a doorknob. They had three-quarter swinging doors with hook latches. By the time I was four, my grandparents had died (both at age 56) and the hunting parties ceased.

My youngest aunt kept the house just as it was, with all the beds and the creepy, curtained walk-in closets. If you wanted to change your clothes in private, you had to go into one of them, and every one had a mounted deer head on the wall (with eyes that saw me). This spooked the heck out of me, and I didn't like sleeping outside that room either, knowing that head was in there and could float out at any time and get me. I had to spend two weeks of every summer in that house until my aunt had the good sense to burn it down for the insurance.

Back to the Present Day: Bass Pro Shops has a lot of stuffed, mounted deer heads. On stuffed mounted deer bodies. All over the place. Everywhere! As well as turkeys, and birds and other stuffed stuff. I got to the point where I just kept my head down, but not before I saw the stuffed baby bear. Not a stuffed teddy bear. A stuffed baby real bear. Ahhhhh, that was too much. My husband tried to claim it was fake. "They wouldn't stuff a faun." Because, ohmygosh, there's even a stuffed Bambi's mother and a stuffed teenager Bambi. Thanks for pointing that one out, honey. Now I need therapy.

Look at all these guns. This is freaking me out. And whereas I usually like to look at brightly colored tropical fish, a tank full of evil gray fish with whiskers and big gaping mouths...well, I am going to see that in my dreams. Sheeeesh.

The place was packed. My husband doesn't eat fish, so we weren't planning to wait the hour to 90 minutes for the restaurant part, and there were a boatload of kids in there anyway, even sitting at the bar in front of the giant aquarium with friendlier looking fish. Right after stuffed deer and big fish, I don't like restaurants full of kids. Santa was there, too. (Not in the restaurant. In the boat section.)

The Nascar driving simulation looked very fun, though, and was only $5, but my husband didn't want to try it. We watched one car repeatedly slam into the virtual wall and spin around in the grass before crossing the road again, only to slam back into the wall. When it was over, two preteen boys got out of that car. How many years before I'm sharing I-95 with that driver? Two?

The one thing I thought about buying, a tin frog on a stick (don't need it, but it was a good price, $4.95), I didn't because most of them were already broken by obliging kids who had pulled the bobbing frog tongues out. And I almost bought a bag of marshmellows labeled "Snowman Poop," but then I couldn't think of anyone who would appreciate such a gift. It sort of puts you off marshmellows.

So that was my holiday outing this year, although there's a possibility I might get a free Tacky Light tour next week. I assume there will be no stuffed deer along the way.

Mystery of the Missing Portrait

2008-12-11T23:24:00.000-05:00

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.

My Holiday Video to You

2008-12-07T16:21:00.000-05:00

What Fascinates Me This Week

2008-11-16T23:24:00.000-05:00

AC/DC!

Remembering how much I used to love Nirvana. (Yeah, I've been cleaning house to VH1 Classic.)

Eating leftover Halloween candy. All these Tootsie Rolls are making me sick. But it's like heroin. I get such a mouthful of Tootsie Roll, sometimes it actually suffocates me for a minute. Now I have to go to the dentist with a toothache. Literally. My appointment is this week.

Eating golden raisins soaked in gin. Is this folk remedy for aching joints actually going to work? Or am I just getting such a pleasant buzz, I don't notice anymore?

The lady at the ABC store said she had to make a Better Than Sex cake for a party. I looked up the recipe on the Internet. There are half a dozen different cakes that are called Better Than Sex. Most of them are either yellow cake with vanilla pudding and coconut or chocolate cake with chocolate pudding and pecans. The ABC lady said there was Dream Whip in it, but I can't find that recipe.

Scrubbing the carpet in the walk-in closet on my hands and knees to get rid of the cat pee smell.

Is Obama the Antichrist? How can one person be so charming and engaging? (I saw the "60 Minutes" interview.) He said the most annoying thing is he can't go for a walk anymore.

I had to go to Clear Channel and get them to give me telephone line filters so I didn't pick up WRNL on my telephone. They were nice about it once I showed up in their lobby. The filters actually worked, although it took a lot of testing to find the culprits were the fax phone and the old cordless in the bedroom.

I'm reading Roger Moore's autobiography, but he's kind of dull. And to me, Sean Connery was James Bond and that's it. Moore was a fop.

With my Ukrop's Fuel Perks and gas prices going down, I filled up my tank for $18! This is quite a change from the nearly $50 it was costing for awhile there.

I could never be on The Amazing Race because I can't eat disgusting food. Tonight's losers were a very competitive couple who got eliminated because the guy was a vegetarian and couldn't get through his lamb's butt stew, sitting across the table from people who seemed to be eating sheep heads. This is revolting. Phinish Line Phil said, "You couldn't eat meat even for a million dollars?" (Yes, the winner gets a million dollars, which barely buys a house in Montpelier or Roseland these days.)

Richmond for me this weekend was a limited universe consisting of PetSmart, Target, and Einstein's Bagels. And my sofa. I thought about getting up and doing 30 minutes of Wii Fit. I thought about it several times. I replayed seven levels of Legos Star Wars instead.