Archive for March 2010

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Health Care Bill – End of Long Wait

March 21, 2010

My Quick Attempt At Obama Portrait (Sorry, Mr. President.)

I am so happy for President Obama.

I’ve been waiting all day to blog about the passage of the health care bill by the Congress.

I’ve waited through sleeping late since it was Sunday, through drinking tea and eating olive oil crackers since I had to do my Sunday morning yoga practice which I’m supposed to do on an empty stomach (and somehow tea and crackers don’t count), through hanging out with my sweet husband, through haranguing my sweet husband (in my day-before-the-work-week-starts-angst), through finally doing my yoga, and then, feeling guilty (in the peaceful shadow of the yoga) for haranguing my husband, so also through apologizing to him.

I’ve waited through walking the dog (twice), going to the gym (briefly, since I’d already done yoga), through making dinner for an old old friend, through taking another quick walk with her to a taxi stand—

Of course, it’s been a much longer wait than that; it’s a wait that’s lasted this endless year of characterizations and mischaracterizations and crazy characterizations;  of so many characterizations that how you feel about the bill to some extent depends upon whom you already trust.

Let me add a caveat to that last statement.   There are some characterizations thatI simply cannot believe—these are those made by people who act as if extending health care coverage will be the end of the free world, the destruction of America, the breaking of history, the extinguishing of Liberty’s torch, the termination of personal freedom—what are these people talking about?   Is it some weird rif on the “survival of the fittest?”  That, if people with pre-existing conditions receive health care coverage, the human race will slowly deteriorate.  (Although, weirdly, people who espouse this point of view tend not to believe in evolution.)

It’s a wait that’s gone on through campaign after campaign, administration after administration—so many many many stories of those who have suffered because of their inadequate heath care coverage.  (Some of us may even be characters in some of these stories.)

I actually kind of hate it when candidates try to personalize their speeches with these anecdotes—the thirty-seven year-old mother of two who’s lost her job, health care, car, savings, home.  It’s not that I’m not sympathetic; I sometimes just feel tired of the rhythm of these tales, the predictable cadence of both downfall and meager transcendence.  But I think what I have truly gotten tired of is the fact that the endings are always the same;  no fix has even been tried.

Yes, the bill’s not perfect.  (The world’s not perfect.)    But hey, it’s a start.  Maybe people on the other side will notice that the world has not blown up.

Great congratulations to President Obama for supplementing hope with persistence.

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Exercising (Restraint) – Creepy Calories

March 20, 2010

Calories Creeping Up

My husband discusses a recent inadvertent weight loss this morning.  He’s a guy who eats pastries.

Life is so unfair.

Maybe he doesn’t eat pastries every single day.  They are not available to him very single day.

He does eat butter every single day.  (Perhaps I should say every single meal.)

While me—I never eat pastries–except maybe the occasional bite of his (which doesn’t count.)  And I did not consciously taste butter until the  4th grade when I was staying at the house of a friend whose mother was French.  (“What’s that smell?” I asked, as she melted some in a frying pan.)

(I grew up in an age when margarine was considered edible.)

There are differences in metabolism, of course.  Some people (many of them seemingly men) are just lucky.  There are also differences in the way that weight is carried, bone structure, bone density.  (Did I mention my “big bones?”)

Did I also mention that I exercise every day?   I live in a city where a certain amount of exercise is necessary to function at all.   But I do more than just walk to and from the subway–I do special movements on machines to  exercise my arms, my legs,  my lungs.

But the one thing I may not exercise enough is restraint.

When you graze all day, even on “healthy snacks”, the calories simply add up.  My husband, a single-tasker,  tends to sit down to eat and to focus on what he’s eating  (if only not to accidentally bite the inside of his mouth.)  I, on the other hand, a multi-tasker, eat by stealth, taking a bite here and there, and here and there, and, oh yes, here, and there.

The problem is that calories, pounds, are also good at stealth.  They creep up on you.

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The Problem With Signs (Seeing Tips and Imagining Icebergs)

March 19, 2010

Regret Life?

I sit outside the World Financial Center facing a sign built into the rails of a fence that says “REGRET LIFE”.

This is an odd sign for a public space, even in public financial space.

In fact, it’s only my side of the fence that urges this vital remorse; if I look at the other side of the bend, slightly to my left, I read the words “SOME OTHER SIGN THAT PEOPLE DO NOT TOTALLY”….  (There are more words on that side, words that precede “SOME OTHER SIGN” but the glare’s just too intense for me to make them out right now.)

This is a problem with signs.  (And, maybe, life.)  It’s often hard to see the complete message at one go.

It’s a particular problem if you are relatively quick in the gaze area, someone who jumps to conclusions, who sees tips and imagine icebergs.

This tendency is made exponentially worse by even the slightest poetic temperament.  Such a temperament is generally accompanied by a confirmed belief in synecdoche;  it looks hard for the symbolic and nearly always finds it.   In the world  of the poetic, a single act is found to sum up an entire relationship, even a lifetime;  the minor escalates to the global.

Ah, drama.

The sun still shines brilliantly, but the air has shifted suddenly to the chilly.  It’s not a matter of clouds;  some (literally) minute change of solar angle has simply reduced the light’s warmth.

Still, it seems pretty darn sunny over the Hudson.  And beautiful.  People wear sunglasses around me!   At almost 6 in the evening!

“TOTALLY/ REGRET LIFE,”  I read now in the bend of the fence,  the actual corner, until my  gaze broadens again (almost instantly): “DO NOT”.

Have a Nice Weekend!

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A Tale Told By An Idiot: Full of Bull(ock)? The Rielle Deal?

March 18, 2010

Michelle Bombshell McGee

The news, lately, is full of tales of men acting like idiots.  Following up on Jon Edwards and Tiger Woods… well, following up on Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Jon Edwards, Tiger Woods, and too many others to be mentioned… (wait a second, this is news?)  Okay, okay… .  Following up on a whole bunch of idiotic famous males, the American populace now has Jesse James, cheating husband of Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock.

The media, completely sick of health care, is making a big deal of Jesse James’ betrayal of Bullock.  Is there an “Oscar Curse?” reporters ask, a curse that afflicts Best Actresses?

The reporters’ voices are somber, knowing, smug (as if to say, of course, there’s an Oscar Curse.  How can a man be expected to deal with a hard-working, super-successful, wife?)  One suspects, however, that this question is mainly an excuse to flash a backdrop of Michelle Bombshell McGee, Jesse’s lover—who, for some reason, is called the tattoo lady rather than the tattooed lady (as if she inked them on others, rather than simply had the ink covering a super-majority of her personal surface area.)

A friend has been haranguing me throughout the day with the question of how Bullock could have been stupid enough to marry someone like James in the first place.  He understands James’s defection—”a jerk is a jerk is a jerk.”  What he doesn’t understand is how someone as seemingly charming, smart and successful as Bullock could have ever married someone like James, a motorbiker reality star, the twice-married ex-husband of a porn star, a man covered with tattoos even before his trysts with the tattoo lady.

All I can come up with is low self-esteem.   But it does make me think that maybe the news is not just full of tales of men who are idiots, but women who’ve also been a bit idiotic.   Which, in turn, raises the specter of Rielle Hunter

Who now, unfortunately, feels more than comfortable talking about her affair with Johnny Edwards.  “Had I spoken [before],” Rielle says, “I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him.”

Do I really need to hear this?

The Oscar Curse.  The Rielle deal.

And maybe it’s not just men and women being idiotic, but the taletellers too.   The news stories begin to seem almost Shakespearean.

But not quite.

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Subway Blog – St. Patrick’s Day/Ground Zero

March 17, 2010

Tassled Boot

St. Patrick’s Day.  Spring.  (Crocuses in the small park in front of my Battery Park City building.)

I work at home in the morning, so miss the main parade rush (usually bright green with hats), and go into the office late.   A small group of teenage girls stand beside me  on the platform with tight jeans tucked into knee-high boots, slightly wavy hair swooping across broad foreheads. Vague green (a dark shade on a shirt, or just eye shadow on a lid) is worn by the ones who look Irish, a brighter viridian on the girl who looks Italian.  “Like” is said frequently, and large slouchy purses are held protectively.

Their smiles slacken in the subway car as they become quickly aware that all seats are taken, mainly by very large men who are not giving them up.  They are not small girls, and there is only one small channel of grey plastic bench, which, after a minute or so (and a nod from one of the men),  I nab.

It’s amazing to me how men can take up so much space on the subway.  Even men who are not particularly large take up huge spans, their legs spread wide as a matter of course.  They never ever cross these legs, or even press them together.  (It may be a physical thing, but I always think it’s ego, ego stretching wide.)

The girls congregate by one of the poles, looking young, pale, and a bit subdued, under the fluorescents.   I want to shout out “Robert Pattinson”, to see if that would perk them up again.  But there is something about the way they hold their large purses which makes me think that they probably wouldn’t react (except to think I was nuts.  Hmmm….)

A friend at my office, male, who is completely immune to, and somewhat obtuse about, Pattinson’s charms assures me that the poor showing of Pattinson’s new film Remember Me is a sign that (i) Rob doesn’t really have it; and (ii) that the celebrity fixation of our culture is exaggerated.  (“People may look at little blogs about Pattinson,” he says contemptuously, “but they won’t shell out ten bucks.)

$12.75 in Manhattan.

Maybe he’s right.  I still think that the emphasis on 9/11 may have something to do with the poor showing of Remember Me. I walked by Ground Zero on the way to the subway today, before encountering the Irish/Italian girls on the subway.  I walk by Ground Zero every day, but today for the first time (perhaps because of the suddenly blue sky),  I realized that the site has turned into “Above Ground Zero”, or really “Above-Ground-By-A-Couple-Of-Stories-Zero.”

Big rust-colored girders are now extending into the air.  I know enough to recognize that the girders do not stand on the “footprint” of the old towers, but they are close enough.

My heart caught in my throat, my breath in my chest.  I was amazed, and embarrassed, that the sight of the girders almost brought on an asthma attack.  (I’m not someone who commonly has asthma attacks, but I was genuinely panting.)

I called my husband as I crossed Church Street.  He said something about pollen in the air.

“It’s not pollen; it started right here,” I insisted.

I told him finally the terrible feelings came because I didn’t like to feel like a target.  (As a non-New York City person, he doesn’t fully understand.)  I didn’t talk about the sadness that encompassed me.

But all of that was before the subway, before the Irish-looking, wavy-haired girls, and their Italian looking friend, before the possibly pregnant Hispanic woman just across from me on the train, who crooks her arm in her man’s arm, whose sweet smile is punctuated by braces and quick laughs.

Before too, the little girls on the platform as I get out, who wear green shamrock vests, and black and white polka-dotted dirndls, and white much-tassled cowboy boots.  They hold hands as they wait, behind their parents, for the next train, one of them tap dancing.

Categories: New York City, Robert Pattinson
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Orange, Foot, Chickpeas – Poem For the Busy – Labor Leader in Ahmadabad

March 16, 2010

Orange, foot, chick peas

The getting-more-sleep venture that I discussed in yesterday’s post isn’t really working, but the driven, drinking-lots-of-strong-tea, business is going gangbusters.  Tonight, I make the overly-busy person’s hummus;  this consisted of leftover (canned) chick peas poured into a seemingly-clean mug, topped with a couple of spoonfuls of tahini, sprinkled with roughly minced garlic.  Yes, it sounds pathetic, but was actually very good, the mug turning out not to have been truly cleaned but instead to contain a very thin residue of  Emergen-C (a Vitamin C drink).  Okay, that too sounds kind of awful–even I was a little grossed out when I connected the mug to my morning’s Emergen-C–but it turned out to impart the whole combination with a delicious citrus-y flavor.

It is important, when stressed, to maintain a cheerful attitude.   Here’s a poem at least tangentially about that:

Have I learned anything?

Ah this is better.
This is sitting down.
This is getting some tea.
This is biting into an orange peel, just slightly, before peeling.
This is biting into the orange.
I think about the labor leader I knew in Ahmadabad.
How they would bring him his coffee
in the morning, me my tea.
He had given up tea, he said,
when Gandhi said to, and ever since,
taking a hot slurp,
he had never drunk it.
Because of the British.

In the same way, in the car,
he took out all his toiletries, one by one, handing
them to me for examination:
a small soap still wrapped in its green labeled paper,
collected from an Indian hotel,
his razor, his comb—he combed
his close cropped hair before handing it to me as if
to show its use—a small towel–
he really didn’t have very much–a small
scissors.  His feet were up
on the seat.  Now
he brought one to his knee, shifting
his white cloth dhoti, and
clipped the toe nails quickly, first
one foot then the other.
He collected as he clipped
the small white crusts of nail, then
opened the window a bit wider
to toss them out.

“You see how I am always busy,” he said.  “Never
a moment idle, wasted.  I am busy all the time,
you see how I am doing it.”
He took the toiletries back from me.

I finish my breakfast slowly,
just sitting.

All rights reserved.

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Sleep-little Nights, Thinking of “Other Rooms”

March 15, 2010

My Attempt at Drawing Forlorn Pakistani Woman. (Sorry it's so sentimental.)

At a bit of a loss for a blog today.  Part of the problem is simple brain fatigue.  For all of the manic person’s mockery of sleep, for all of the insistence that we absolutely must  extend our waking time to fit in all we think we need to do, for all of our resulting delight in staying up into the wee hours, being blissfully (in the end) nonproductive, the body, which, by the way, also contains the mind, has a very definitive answer:  Duh.

Inadequate sleep combined with frantic days leads to mental muzziness—the electric currents just can’t make the synaptic leaps; they get their little electrical feet wet, slow down, trip, short circuit.

I compound this muzziness with some darker-than-usual-reading.  Lately, I can hardly stand dark reading;  still I make myself start, on the subway, In other Rooms, Other Wonders, a National Book Award Finalist book of linked  stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin which take place in Western Pakistan.  I intersperse these with Jane Brody’s article (published today in the New York Times) about the recent death of her husband.

I’ve not yet finished the Mueenuddin stories, but at least one common thread already stands out–each story describes a palpably feudal culture in which both a serving class, and women (women especially), lead lives hinged upon the favor of a dominant man.   The man is the source of protection, livelihood,  survival; his death, downfall, disfavor will quickly bring down the lives of these dependents.

The stories are not sensational, or even particularly dramatic; it’s their matter-of-factness, their verisimilitude, which makes them so painful.

We are relatively immune from this kind of dependence in many parts of the West.  Of course, there are situations of dependence, but women have possibilities of their own; can have some kind of independent life, can be the dominant character for themselves and others.

And then I read Jane Brody’s article about her husband’s diagnosis and death from cancer all in a matter of weeks, reminding me forcefully that even here (with both our greater feeling of control and de facto control), we’re very subject to the vicissitudes of life.  Although perhaps we are not quite as subject to the vicissitudes of other people’s lives, the prospect of sudden loss is still ever present.   (Sorry.)

As I read, I tell myself to be happy that I’m tired, overworked, brain-fatigued, and maybe, just maybe, to even get some more sleep.

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Feeling Special, If Not Free

March 14, 2010

Plane

Agh!  (Translation:  Ugh!)   A rainy weekend with lots of work-work (as distinguished from fun-work.)

There is something about working on both days of a week-end which makes one feel automatically deprived, even when also feeling extremely grateful to have the job.

We like to feel special, not, in other words, like drudges.  A week-end of work makes one long for the magical escape, that liberation that waits just around the corner.

Perhaps as a result of that longing, I actually opened and read the Nigerian email that I received this morning.  As a practicing attorney, I get one of these almost every day.  (They seem to be mainly generated from Nigeria, but come from other places as well.)   They involve millions of dollars or British pounds which are awaiting my pick-up if I will only co-operate in some scheme to help a widow, orphan, business partner, collect some mysteriously elusive inheritance, or lottery winnings.  Sometimes, as in today’s mail, it’s an inheritance or lottery winnings actually intended for me.  Today’s subject line  read “dead or alive!!!”  Its sender “Mr.Ron Mills” from “Standard International Bank PLC” warned me that someone named John K. Wheeler was claiming I was dead and trying to collect $2.5 million dollars held in my name.  Mr. Mills, though about to accede to Mr. John Wheeler’s claims, asked: “Did you sign any Deed of Assignment in favor of (MR JOHN WHEELER). Thereby making him the current beneficiary with this following account details….”

Who writes these emails?  What do they hope to gain by them?

On top of the fantastic  elements of the stories (Cinderella diving into Ocean’s Eleven), there are always telltale signs of the scam—awkward word usage, punctuation and grammar mistakes, generic addresses,  as in the email from “Timothy Geithner”, asking me to reply at a  “yahoo” address.  (You know how the Treasury Department always uses those for their high-level employees.)

The urge to feel lucky, singled out, is a deep one.  (An example that comes to a brain suffering from the renewed imprint of Robert Pattinson is the whole Twilight craze—certainly a huge part of that mania arises from the very ordinary-seeming heroine turning out to have special blood, a not-visible-on-the-surface quality which elevates her from the humdrum to the extraordinary.)

My mother calls me excitedly this morning, telling me of an offer received in the mail from her favorite credit card company–free airplane tickets.

I assure her that the tickets are probably not truly “free”.  She checks out the offer’s “details,” reading aloud some fine print about the continental United States.

My mom is a child of the Great Depression;  if something is free, it feels almost a sin to pass it up.  Accordingly, even though she and my father have not felt up to plane travel for the last several years, she immediately begins making plans (at least theoretical plans).

I tell her that there really is a probable catch here, something you need to buy, subscribe to.   She explains that they “have had that card for a long time.”  (I think this means that they are due a thank you from the company.)

“Yes, but—”

“Maybe they just want to get more people on the airplanes?” she answers.

“No.”

“It says ‘free'” she tries again, “even on the envelope.”

Why should I cast a shadow over her sense of good luck?  Just because John K. Wheeler is trying to steal my 2.5 million?

“So then, maybe they are,” I sigh.

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News/Olds – New York City Cab Drivers – Texas School Board

March 13, 2010

Extra!  Extra!  In The New York Times yesterday:  (i) not all New York City cab drivers are honest, and (ii) Texas will be Texas.

In the first “amazing” news item:  New York City cab drivers have cheated millions of riders in the last two years.  This has been accomplished by illegally charging an alternative (doubled) meter rate applicable to Westchester and Nassau County within New York City limits.

Some drivers have excused these overcharges on the grounds that the buttons activating the meter rates are small and that it is easy for pre-occupied fingers to accidentally activate the wrong rate.   (The excuse, which doesn’t take into account the higher bucks received,  smells like those sometimes sent to car insurance companies:  “a pedestrian hit me and went under my car.”   “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.”)

If New York cab drivers being New York cab drivers is disheartening, Texas being Texas is even more so.  As reported by James McKinley Jr.: “the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.”

Example:  the new rules will replace the term “capitalism” as a description of, you know, capitalism, with the term “free enterprise system,” (to avoid the negative connotations of phrases like “capitalist pig”.)

Example:  Thomas Jefferson (not liked because he coined the term “separation between church and state”) will be cut from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries.  (I guess the Declaration of Independence doesn’t count.)  (Is it worth noting that there are no historians on the Texas School Board?)

The proposed changes in Texas make me almost as upset with the left as the right;  I can’t help but feel that,  in the last decades, the left has also actively pushed for a politicization of history texts, and now is being hoist by their own petard.   (I’m sorry to those readers who disagree with me.)

Yes, the old 50’s and 60’s texts were incredibly jingoistic and one-sided; many of the changes of the last decades created a much  more historically accurate, as well as broader, picture of the past.   (Some terrific history texts resulted, such as Joy Hakim’s wonderful The Story of US.)

However, attempts to right old sins, and to emphasize the accomplishments of groups and genders who had historically been overlooked (as well as oppressed), also sometimes went overboard.  My children went to a grade school, for example, where every child knew of Rosa Parks, but extremely few had knowledge of FDR (except, perhaps, for his disability) ,  World War II (other than perhaps Japanese internment camps), or even, though it was a secular school, Thomas Jefferson (except perhaps for his relationship with Sally Hemmings.)    (An attempt to be inclusive, in other words, sometimes seemed exclusive, and to almost perversely avoid a broader historical context.)

Of course, an even bigger problem (to amplify on a quote by the great education president and Texan, George W. Bush):  “Is our children learning” anything at all?

In The Truth, a Discworld satirical fantasy by Terry Pratchett, the tyrannical Lord Vetinari warns a budding newspaper publisher that what people crave is not “news” but “olds”.   “They like to be told what they already know,” Vetinari explains—not man bites dog, but dog bites man.

I’m not sure I completely agree with Vetinari here;  while both these stories are certainly “olds”, they only offer a kind of painful satisfaction, the kind available from from scratching a bite, picking a sore.

For more on this subject, and one of my best paintings ever (of George Washington), check out my post on George Washington, Sarah Palin and Christian With a Capital C.

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Further Spoiler Alert (“Remember Me”)

March 13, 2010

Continuing briefly with my Pattinson binge (and I promise I’ll stop soon), I’m happy to report that the sinking feeling I felt in my stomach when contemplating seeing the new movie Remember Me really did not need to be so pronounced.

I’ve seen it now and my stomach is okay.

Yes, it feels way too early (especially to a New Yorker) to see 9/11 used as a kind of stupid plot device.  (I guess some screen writers will go to any length to get family members to talk to each other.)

Yes, the movie does make New York out to be a horrible place, where violence not only breaks out on random street corners but also in board rooms,  bookstores, private school classrooms, and lower school slumber parties (not to mention in nearly everyone’s home.)   Oddly, the most peaceful place depicted in the movie is probably the jail cell where Rob a/k/a Tyler Hawkins winds up every once in a while.

And yes, Pattinson’s hair is on the flat side, and he looks beaten up for much of the film.

Still, well, Rob has a certain charm.  He is not embarrassing.  That’s a pretty low standard, and frankly, it’s also unfair, because really he’s better than “not embarrassing.”   He simply has, well, this certain charm, which is enlarged by an ability to project a kind of sweetness.   He’s extremely likeable.  (The camera loves him, but he is able to seem unself-conscious of his looks.)  This caring quality seems especially genuine in the scenes with his movie sister, Caroline (played by Ruby Jerins) who is winningly awkward and knowing at once.

Granted, all the characters in the movie are pretty typed.   They hardly need to open their mouths in order for us to know their parts.

And, granted, there is much that is difficult to swallow for even the most willing to suspend belief.  (If the sister lives in a town house in Greenwich Village, why are they always up at the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park?   How can those other little girls be so catty when Caroline is dropped off and picked up by Robert Pattinson?  How can New Yorkers with no clear lock on their door never ever get burglarized? )

One of the most refreshing  of these odd details is that Tyler (RPatz), the incipient young writer and diarist, always writes by hand in little crumpled notebooks.   The only computers shown are not in the NYU student centers or in student apartments, but in  his father’s corporate office.    Perhaps this is meant to show that the movie took place at an earlier time?   Unfortunately, that’s a point you’re not really allowed to forget.

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