Meat and Vampires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breasts Like Pizza Dough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Helping Consuela

(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)

The Curse of the PA

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

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

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.