Prunes and Prism

Ways in which the Comrade is like my former husband

2008-07-01T21:57:00.004-04:00

1. They love(d) to read about Hobbits.

2. They step(ped) back and let me fight with myself, like Ed Norton in Fight Club.

3. They both make(made) me listen to one Jean-Michel Jarre album on a continuous loop. To be fair, it's not the same album for both of them: For the former it was Oxygene, for the latter The Concerts in China. But isn't that so utterly random? At some point was there a Jean-Michel Jarre album offered as a bonus with a Lord of the Rings box set?

4. They both claim(ed) to have memories of early life that they couldn't possibly have, could they? My former husband always said he remembered pulling up in his crib to see the moon landing. He would have been a year old at the time. I'd forgotten about that until this past weekend when the Comrade said he could remember the pacifiers he liked as an infant. Would I have precocious early memories too if I were only soulful enough to appreciate Jean-Michel Jarre?

Well. It's funny how things are. I am glad that this blog is still around, and that I still remember how to get in here.

Is this thing on?

2008-03-16T08:25:00.000-04:00

Hello, helloooo ...

I've Been to Hell's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots.

2006-10-31T17:09:00.000-05:00

I never did get back here with those tales of ruined feeling, did I? I have a number of excuses, first and foremost: In 11 days I'm leaving New York City for western Massachusetts, in a desperate bid to reclaim my humanity. Next time I check in, I expect to have an apron of hand-picked apples.

If any of earth's produce has a better name than "Northern Spies," I don't even want to know what it is.

Fakt checking

2006-09-18T15:08:00.000-04:00

A couple of notes on that last post:

1. In the first photo, that's not a T-70 tank or even, as the Comrade witheringly pointed out, a tank at all. It's just a garden-variety cannon. What can I say -- in the '80s I took Joni Mitchell at face value and resolved to Study War No More.

2. The dozen brides, one of whom is in that last photograph, were at St. Michael's, not Lavra. No one is getting married in Lavra monastery, where one of those Ukrainian grandmas will read your (rosary) beads if you so much as peck your significant other on the cheek after making fun of her for souvenir-shopping in the house of the Lord. Just ask the Comrade.

A Country of Brides

2006-09-17T15:37:00.000-04:00

Dearest readers,

When I wrote that Ukraine was a country rife with brides, I wasn't one of them! An alert reader asked if that was my way of being coy, but it was just my way of being literal -- every day of the week the place is crawling with wedding parties being photographed in front of landmarks and especially picturesque trees, usually with an open bottle of Soviet champagne in tow.

As you can see, I was desperate to capture this phenomenon but didn't have the derring-do to just point and shoot, so the Comrade was pressed into service as my decoy. What that means is that here you miss the high points: the groom in the first photo who very gallantly swept his new wife off that T-70 tank; the bride in the second photo who, minutes before I snapped that picture, was sighing and smoking in front of the vending machine, carefully ashing outside the perimeter of her lame-trimmed gown*;or the day at Lavra monastery in Kiev, when there were at least a dozen brides swanning around in all that saturated blue.

* And seconds after I snapped that picture, she was being photographed in front of City Hall with her bridesmaid, back to arched back, in a girl-on-girl pose that I'm going to kindly refer to here as softcore, while the groom and groomsman stood placidly by.

The Orange(-Haired) Revolution

2006-09-14T13:00:00.000-04:00

When one is busy making the world safe for those who love freedom, it's difficult to find time to blog; thus, my regrettable extended absence. Last Sunday I was in Kiev's Glory Square, the most stirring WW II monument in a country rife with WW II monuments (and brides, and brides being photographed in front of WW II monuments). I don't think you can see, in this photo, the little guy perched in the cleft where the two cannons meet, but if you look closely you'll notice the tanks have been painted in a wheat motif: from swords, ploughshares!

The Comrade's brother lives in Kiev with his parakeet, Grisha; the two of them can see the gold domes of Lavra monastery from their window. The Comrade and Comrade frere are fast friends and really love each other, in a way that makes me only-child envious. On our last night there we sat outside at a gypsy festival (horseback tricks, dangling coins worn without irony), and the Comrade was cold, and Comrade frere just put his arms around him to warm him up. Their sweetness makes me feel a little ruined. One day in the metro we passed a television that was playing an old Ukrainian cartoon that featured wedding revelers and a drunken wolf, the hilarity of which was not immediately apparent to me, and the Comrade got terrifically excited and stopped C.f., who also got terrifically excited, and the two of them stood giggling like little kids. Not the way I would giggle at Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, though (Sid & Marty Krofft and their wacky tobaccy!) -- they laughed because they thought it was funny.

I thought of that when I passed three American college kids -- two girls and a boy, in the requisite hooded sweatshirts and windbreakers around their waists -- walking into Domashniya Kukhnya, a cafeteria-style restaurant. I was curious about them, wondering if they were doing a semester there or just passing through, whether they spoke Russian, and so I turned to gawp at them from the other side of the glass doors.

Just in time to see one of the girls gesture to the cafeteria trays and say something whilst making air quotes. Then they all laughed, and the boy repeated whatever she'd just said, and he too made air quotes.

"Oh, look, 'cafeteria trays.' What a scream!"

"I'm having a 'Big Mac Attack.'"

"Can we ever have an 'authentic life'"?

I was torn between exasperation ("Don't you realize all this compulsive satire is eroding our capacity for fellow feeling? And some lip gloss, girls -- we look like farmhands here!") and, well, envy again. I would have liked to make air quotes with somebody, too. Or at least a couple of Yakov Smirnoff jokes.

Readers, I know you understand. I'm sorry I've been gone so long. Watch this space for more photos, and more tales of ruined sentiment and eroded feeling!

Pinky-Swear

2006-07-26T13:11:00.000-04:00

When you get older, it's harder to keep your promises. You read a book that you love so much you're ready to move in, and you can't stop thinking about the characters, and your whole non-reading life just becomes an inconvenience that has to be endured. Then, 636 pages later, it's over, and you're grieving, and you have gone so deep with this book that you swear you will never discuss it with anyone, because to do that would mean it was not in fact expressly written for you alone.

And then you find yourself in an emergency room at midnight*, on an exam table with your feet in stirrups and a resident who is doing a well-meant but bad job of putting you at ease by asking what you like to do (when you're not in an emergency room with your feet in stirrups), and the truth is you don't like to do anything but read, and the cotton-tipped swab seems as long as a forearm, and you end up saying, "I really liked The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."

Then there is nothing for it but to press on:

"It's about two cousins. And one's from Prague. But now they're in New York. And they, they draw comic books. And it's about their lives."

"And it's a comic book?"

"No, they make comic books."

"Oh. Well, I'll have to check that out."

And one of those sterile things she's unwrapping seems to be spring-loaded, because there's a KER-PLOING!!!!!!! and something flies over to hit the wall and drop out of sight. You look at the little smudge of goop left behind and wish you'd kept your mouth shut.

*Five hours later, everybody will decide you're in fine health.

The Best Day of Their Lives

2006-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

Last night I found the Comrade downloading ultra-close-ups of the now-infamous head butt and its immediate aftermath, including one of the Italian guy (whose name I refuse to remember because I've heard it now so many times) writhing on the ground while Zidane stands over him smoldering.

"You see, he really hurt him," the Comrade said.

I said I could see that and pointed to the guy's jaw, locked as it was in agony.

"No, I mean Zidane," the Comrade said solemnly. "He really hurt him."

I decided somebody needed to be left alone, and it was me.

When I came back an hour and a half later, the Comrade was watching fan-made video montages of Zidane's greatest hits, one set, inexplicably, to "Bette Davis Eyes."

I told him he was acting like a girl after a bad breakup, mooning over the old letters and vacation photos. Instead of Haagen-Dazs, however, he has beer.

"Don't you have something like this in Russian -- 'There are other fish in the sea'?"

And he said*, "There are no other fish in the sea."

I vaguely remember reading about a survey of English men who, when asked to name the best day of their lives, cited the day England won the World Cup. Not the day their children were born, or the day they graduated medical school, or the day they caught the trout with Grampa. The best day of their lives.

*Just as I did over Chris Frey in 1985!

Winner Takes All

2006-07-10T17:28:00.000-04:00

In my tender formative years, one Sunday just as Alabama had Lost the Game, one of my father's co-workers called up and asked me to put him on the phone. The guy on the other end was positively tight with glee, and I figure he was either an Auburn fan, or Daddy had bet him money, or both. Either way, I had the unenviable task of knocking on the door of the room where Daddy had barricaded himself with his tiny TV.

"Phone," I said.

"Tell him I died," Daddy said.

So I knew a man could get in a real swirling, sucking eddy of despair over the outcome of a sporting event.* But still I was not prepared for the Comradely gloom and annihilation that met me when I came home yesterday, two hours after the World Cup.

I suggested that maybe -- since it was, after all, the World Cup and the last 15 minutes of our boyfriend Zidane's career -- it, strictly speaking, might not have been the thing to do, clocking that Italian guy in the chest with his bare, bald head and knocking him to the ground.

I was roundly dismissed on the grounds that (1) we don't know what that Italian said, and he doubtless had it coming, (2) exceptions should be made for genius, and (3) what do Americans know? Number 3 was never explicitly stated, but baby, was it ever implied. It was almost enough to send me to the couch with an ice pack, to watch Working Girl. Never mind; it was enough.

I happened to be on a school trip in Munich when Holland won the 1988 Euro Cup. The event left a great impression on a young girl: the beer, the body paint, the carousing, the free-form vomiting. I was sure it was the closest I'd ever come to Sodom and Gomorrah. The next day the whole city smelled like lager and the fans, still drunk, rocked our tour bus back and forth while we sat, thrilled, inside.

I've been careful to arrange my life in a way that will require me to have as little to do with sports as possible, so I can't say there's a madness that's unique to soccer.** Nevertheless it is tempting, when one is resigned to watching Melanie Griffith take over Trask Industries through the eyeholes in a gel mask, to draw those kinds of conclusions.

* I'm sure this could happen to women too, but I've never lived with one of those women.

**On a separate but not unrelated note, it was only yesterday that I realized the soccer players aren't the only ones out there grabbing each other's asses. Baseball and football players, I was told, do this all the time.

The rabbits discuss Gorbachev.

2006-07-06T11:48:00.000-04:00

This bunny comes from Disapproving Rabbits, a site much beloved unto me. The Comrade says this one looks like an old Communist granddaddy who grumps that perestroika made it all but impossible to get a decent carrot.

My apologies for the long radio silence.

A Tiger Beat Dream Date (With Lech Walesa)

2006-06-20T16:08:00.001-04:00

I almost sent the last disc of The Decalogue back to Netflix without watching Commandment 10, just because I'd had been having a WWF smackdown with the series for lo these many months and frankly, friends, I was growing weary. It's not that I wasn't appreciating them -- it's just that my attention span is borne aloft by helium balloons. So for me, a ten-part series in which the residents of one apartment block in Poland, in the waning days of Communism, break the Ten Commandments one by one is best doled out over a good long while. Not to mention that the four discs eat up one's Netflix allotment, thus making it difficult to cleanse the palate with a little Margaret Cho or some Season 1 Gilmore Girls.

I'm so glad I slogged through the last installment, though, because it turned out to be my favorite. Two brothers are reunited over their dead father's stamp collection, and one of them is Zbigniew Zamachowski, who just sends me, and not only because his character was the front man for a Polish metal band called City Death. Zamachowski also plays the hapless husband in White, which is by far my favorite of the Trois Couleurs movies*. I think he's so human and real and great to watch, and if I could I'd carry him around in my pocket and nibble on him like a potato pierog.

What is it with me and the Slavs? I hope the Comrade knows I love him for him** -- and not because I owned, and wore, a Solidarity T-shirt in 1987. ***

*I'm pretty sure I'm the only one on earth who feels this way.

** Frankly, if I met some Ukrainian who subscribed to The Oxford American and thrilled to Southern womanhood, I'd be suspicious.

***Have you visited the Engrish site and seen the Japanese guy in the T-shirt that says "BEWARE I'M ARMED AND I HAVE PREMENSTRUAL TENSION"? I'd say we were both about equally aware of what we were doing.

The Accidental Tourist

2006-06-18T20:12:00.000-04:00

Dearest readers, if you and I have ever had a conversation about my father, you know that traveling isn't his hobby so much as flying. To travel you have to leave the hotel, and Daddy has hunkered down everywhere from Seattle to Sao Paulo to watch CNN and eat the same room-service hamburger.

It's like business travel, but he isn't doing any business, and it isn't so much that he's some kind of nervous nelly who ventures out only on package tours; it's more that he'll go to someplace like Hamburg, spend the night in an airport Marriott, and fly home.

Once he flew to London, took a lap around Heathrow, and then got back on the same plane. The flight crew for the journey back was the same too, and were bemused if not suspicious to find him right back in coach an hour later, waiting for another bag of peanuts. He has been to Delhi* three times in the last year and, to my knowledge, left the hotel on only one of those trips -- and then only for half an hour, after which he hotfooted it back to gratefully towel off and fill his suitcase with individually wrapped soaps. (Traveler's advisory: India's hot, and it smells. You can thank him later.)

I have a hall closet filled with American Airlines toiletries kits, each of which contains a sleeping mask, cooling leg balm (?), and tiny little tubes of some kind of gel called Dry Shower, which smells like my Uncle Max -- heady and aftershavey, but not at all unpleasant. When I get back from a trip, Daddy listens to my packaged anecdotes and then asks what he really wants to know: What did you eat on the plane?

I guess flying can be meditative, if you'll let it; nothing and nobody requires you, and so you're suspended but still moving forward.

So, for Father's Day, what did I give the man who once spent one (1) night in Tokyo, just long enough to eschew raw fish and take some sweet pictures of a family who literally lived next to the airport? An engraved compass. Maybe this is funny only to me. He said it was beautiful but he didn't know how to use a compass, and I said he could always barter it for food. Say, those extra-nice mixed nuts they give you in first class.

(Happy Father's Day.)

*He has worked out some kind of complicated algebra in which he earns so many frequent-flyer miles during these trips, he gets a substantial return on his investment, which he can funnel back into more plane tickets to cities he'll never see.

Animal Husbandry

2006-06-15T12:45:00.000-04:00

I ran into an old neighbor of mine yesterday ...

{Hold on. Doesn't it sound like this is the talky intro for the country song I'm about to sing? "I ran into an old neighbor of mine yesterday, and he said things just ain't the same on the street where we used to live. There's no kids to run after the ice-cream truck, and folks don't sit out on the porch like they once did. And I had to tell him, well, the neighborhood died for me on the day you left. OH, SWEET, SWEET, DARLIN', WHY DID YOU GO AND MAKE A HOUSE OUT OF OUR HOME?"}

So I ran into an old neighbor of mine ...

{I just Googled, and do you realize that everybody from Molly Hatchet to Fantasia Barrino has a song with the lyrics "I ran into an old friend"?}

So I ran into an old neighbor of mine, who lived downstairs from me and The Man Who Was My Husband at our first apartment in Brooklyn. I was so happy to see him (I feel so divorced from that old life, it was like getting a message from the dead) that I ran across the street and hugged the stuffing out of him.

His oldest boy is 13 now -- when I moved into that place in 1996 he was just a little snuggly blob in a stroller. Childless hag that I am, I've had a soft spot for him since the time he announced to his parents after I'd gone, "That girl has on a dress. I like it when girls wear dresses and look pretty." Clearly, even then he had the makings of an ubergenius. Now he's a chess whiz, but not a chess champion because, my neighbor says, the pressure of competing freaks him out, and the pressure of losing really freaks him out. I'd never thought about the fact that being good at the game and being good at playing it are two different things.

We were talking about the old neighborhood (and he doesn't know whether the kids still run for the ice cream trucks there or not, since he decamped en famille to Fort Greene a long time ago), and he said to me, "I always think about how you predicted the fall of Carroll Gardens."

"The paint-your-own-pot place!" I said. "When they put in the paint-your-own-pot place, I knew I couldn't afford to live there anymore."

"No, that's not what you said!" he said.

I've trotted out that paint-your-own-pot line a million times, so I couldn't imagine what was coming next: "What did I say?"

"You said that when the girls got too pretty in Carroll Gardens, you knew you'd have to move. And they did! Suddenly there were all these alterna-vixens walking around."

Now, friends, I guess it's possible that I've been having one long petit mal seizure since the late '90s (and frankly that would explain so much), but I'm almost positive I never said this. It doesn't even sound like something I'd ever have said. It was always all about paint-your-own-pot as Tipping Point for me, and then, later, the ratio of moules frites to city blocks.

I said I didn't ever remember saying that, and then that I was just going to have to get it over with: The Man Who Used to Be My Husband and I had split up. To my surprise, he said he knew it because he'd run him into a couple of years ago. The news would have still been pretty fresh then, and to think about TMWUTBMH having to break the news to people on the street, well, it killed (kills) me.

"It's just a case of two nice people who didn't make a good couple," my neighbor said kindly. I trotted out all the stuff you say, that it's better for both of us, that he's in grad school now, Morocco, house, and that we're cordial with each other, and that I'd just seen him a couple of weeks ago, but that I couldn't say we were at the point of friendship yet, because there was still just too much overarching weirdness.

"Which is not all that different from marriage!" he said.

Then I thought about the badgers the Comrade and I saw on TV the other night during a break from the World Cup. There were a couple of males battling it out for the right to woo a female (and they're adorable -- gray, fat, hairy like Emma), and apparently the less appealing of the two (I have no idea how a girl badger would gauge that sort of thing) won out and the couple grimly set to it. Then the voiceover said (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much), "The cranky pair make the best of it, and settle down to the business of furthering the species."

I'd been waiting to work this into conversation with somebody, but I never got the chance because the person who was accompanying my neighbor was ready to go, and so we had to leave it there. It was genuinely good to see him, but sad at the same time.

I was wondering why badgers were so waddly and how that could make evolutionary sense, but as it turns out all that thick, loose skin is what lets them wriggle away from predators. I guess the imperative to hitch your wagon to somebody else, though -- it gets us all in the end.

Joga Bonito

2006-06-13T16:24:00.000-04:00

I was going to write a self-congratulatory post about how cool I am as an American who likes soccer, but Dave Eggers got there first. (You shall know his velocity!) And anyway, I like it a lot less now that it's interfering with my nightly TV habits. It isn't that the Comrade watched the television continuously from 8:00 to 11:30 last night; it is simply that the television had to be on at all times and tuned to Fox Sports World, sometimes with the sound off, so he could stop his work on the computer and run into the living room to be continuously updated without the time-wasting drudgery of applying thumb to remote.

He didn't understand why this would so irritate someone who, for the love of God, hadn't even seen the season premiere of Entourage yet, and kept insisting (in that tone that means not "I'm sorry" but "I'm sorry you're being such a pill), "It's only once every four years."

Suffice it to say that we're only four days into this thing, a new episode of Kathy Griffin's My Life on the D-List is on tonight, and it doesn't look good. I was wondering what the non-soccer-watching women of Europe do during the World Cup, when it occurred to me that in Europe the men get out of the house and watch in a bar, where they can drink beer on tap and kiss with tongues when anyone scores a goal -- the way God(dess) intended. So much is wrong with this country.

Before I was personally inconvenienced by the beautiful game, I have to say that I was really getting into it, and nobody could be more suprised by that than I am. I've always thought the sound of TV sports in the house on a Sunday afternoon is one of the loneliest sounds on earth, and one of the best things about having my own household was that I didn't have to hear it anymore.

When I was growing up my mother had a hall closet full of books, most of them religious but a few devoted to feminine self-improvement. One of these, which I of course found irresistible, was Helen Gurley Brown's Having It All: Love, Sex, Success, Money -- Even If You're Starting With Nothing. It was published in 1982, so I must have been 12 or 13 when I read it. I could devote a whole post to the things I remember from that book*, but one of them was her advice about supporting and encouraging a man's interests, even (and maybe especially) when you couldn't care less. She cited an anecdote in which a female friend of hers was able to suffer through an entire season of courtside basketball tickets because she distracted herself by contracting*** her vaginal muscles.

Now, friends, even at my impressionable age, this struck me as (pardon me) bullshit of the highest order. But when, 14 years later, I found myself watching the Goals of the Week with the Comrade on Fox Sports World, asking prompting questions and patiently watching live living-room-rug replays of Maradona, Mexico, 1986 -- well, I couldn't help but wonder: What was happening to me?

I finally came to the conclusion that soccer just made me feel smug and cosmopolitan, and that, it must be said, the players are uniformly foxy. Really, do they just not let you play unless you're rumpled and thigh-intensive and louche and muffintastic****?

When I had zeal for the World Cup (that is, before it started), the Comrade and I were watching the surprisingly entertaining videos on the Nike football site, one of which is billed as "The World's Longest Soccer Video." It's 12 minutes and 26 seconds of videos spliced together to give the effect of a guy in Lima head-butting the ball to a couple of little kids in Dusseldorf, who kick it to a bunch of guys in South Africa, and so on. (There are three clips from the U.S., and one of them is just the ball bouncing into and subsequently scattering a flock of pigeons, a perhaps-not-unintentional homage to perceptions of Americans everywhere.)

I got kind of fascinated with it and wanted to film a link for the chain, with me in it. (As it stands, there are only three girls in more than 12 minutes, and they just watch the ball as it rolls past.) I'd put on an evening gown and do it in front of the big Public Library, maybe off the top of one of the lions.

The only thing is, I could never even play kickball, really, and I doubt my ability to "catch" the ball and propel it out of the frame. Maybe I'll just sit there and contract my vaginal muscles.

* How glad Brown was to get out of Arkansas (a place, she recalls, where people would say, "She give five dollars for that hat!"); the reason she was fired from her first job, in radio (because she was too lazy to get out of bed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor); the Christmastime she ate a whole box of Greek pastries when David was out of town (but she exercised the day after her D&C and the day her mother died)!; the reason you should just buy as many accessories as possible (because you just never know what's going to go with what).**

**Come to think of it, all the lessons here, both explicit and implicit, may have formed the blueprint for what's become my adult life. Remind me to think more about this sometime when it won't seem so devastating.

***And, one presumes, releasing

****There are a couple of notable exceptions that here I won't note.

In which I score another victory for international relations.

2006-06-12T13:15:00.000-04:00

I feel sure the Germans must have a word for the impulse that forces you to do, in mortifying fashion, the very opposite of what you meant to do, a propensity proportional to the amount of time you spent reminding yourself not to do it. I can't be the only one?

Last week at my totally hypothetical job, one of my purely theoretical co-workers alerted me to an intern I hadn't noticed before, and told me that she'd had a surprising and alarming conversation with him about his support of the Islamist government of his native country. It's not a country our interns usually come from, and I was intrigued, and so next time I went to the ladies' room I thought I'd get a load of him as he sat in his cube. And of course he picked that second to look up and meet me eye to eye as I gawped openly, and there was nothing for me to do but smile insincerely and feel ashamed by what he must have thought: the old lady was cruising him.

I felt like the female version of an alter kocker, whatever that might be -- think Kathleen Turner, the pillowy version, as the Wife of Bath. And not in a good way.

So today he was standing at the sink, and I went to put my frittata in the microwave but then, as soon as I punched in my coordinates, realized he had something on a paper plate that he had likely been getting ready to heat up before I jumped in line, and I was trying to process this information when he went to reach just inches in front of me, going for a paper napkin, and I blurted, "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!"

Him: "I just want a napkin."

Me: "Oh! I thought you were getting ready to put something in the microwave! And I just jumped in front of you! That's so rude of me! But now I see all you have on that plate is a kitchen sponge! HA HA! And I thought it was your breakfast."

Him: "..."

Me: "But it so obviously not. HA! 'Cause it's a kitchen sponge."

[Beat.]

Him: "Enjoy your meal."

Yeah. Enjoy my meal. I might as well have said, "The very smell of you makes me giddy!"

But it doesn't! Really! Blame it on the Offnungfreiheit.

Greetings from Choctaw Ridge

2006-06-11T00:52:00.000-04:00

The sad thing is, you get to feeling tired and overwhelmed and sorry for yourself, and one day you realize it has literally been years since you even thought about "Ode to Billie Joe," much less sang what parts of it you can remember.*

Today the Comrade and I drove up through the Hudson River Valley. I'd forgotten how beautiful it is, and how much I want a football jersey from Sleepy Hollow High School. Those valley towns are like quaint, sweet theater scrims that rich ex-Manhattanites have hung on the scaffolding so they can stage their own version of small-town America, one with day spas and tinned biscuits from Italy.**

We walked the Main Street of Tarrytown, over the commuter-train tracks and down to the park at the waterfront. At the edge of the river we could see a lighthouse way down the bank on our right, and on our left, the Comrade pointed out, far away on the other side of the Tappan Zee, there was Manhattan. From where we were it looked like the Emerald City.

We sat on a park bench to take big whiffs of the stinking charm, when the band under the picnic shelter began to play "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Werewolves of London" -- at the same time.

If I'm lying, I'm dying. I don't know how many of you spent your formative years stretched out on the hood of somebody's Trans Am talking to Mary J, but let me lay a bet that it wasn't enough time for you to come to the conclusion that the two songs have essentially the same beat (not to mention the same party-hearty appeal), and when the chorus of one is combined with the werewolf howl of the other, the result, anyone would be forced to admit, is kind of genius.

There we all were, some of us with our red plastic cups full of warm beer -- only blocks from an Aveda Concept salon, and yet so far away.

* My new favorite version is by Scarlett, which I found on iTunes. Who is this? Should I be ashamed?

** Which is a small-town America I would, make no mistake, embrace wholeheartedly if I made enough money. As opposed to the small town in America where I actually come from, which spent the '90s embroiled in a holy war between Strip Malls and Liquor By the Drink. Guess who won, and I'll take you to the Cheesecake Factory off Mt. Juliet Road. Daiquiris on me.

Hollywood Square

2006-05-24T14:23:00.000-04:00

I just pulled a big hunk of cardboard out of my prepackaged salad. Roughage indeed. Though I would be hard-pressed to parse the gustatory demerits of cardboard as compared to iceberg lettuce.

My disappointment is eclipsed, however, by my extreme excitement over having just ridden in my office elevator (the building has several film-editing companies) with Jerry Adler, best known to me as Hesh from The Sopranos. Now I can finally let go of some of the bitterness I've harbored ever since a co-worker claimed she had a cigarette break downstairs with Steve Buscemi.

Either I rarely see famous people, or I can't recognize them when I do. Here's my tally for ten years in New York:

_ Al Franken in the Rockefeller Center subway station (and this was my first week here, when I thought it was going to be a nonstop cavalcade of celebrities)
_ John Leguizamo in a Greek restaurant in Hell's Kitchen
_ Pierce Brosnan shooting a movie in the East Village
_ Janeane Garofalo in the West Village Urban Outfitters
_ Julianne Moore at the Strand
_ Neil Patrick Harris (you might know him as Doogie Howser) in a Times Square ATM
_ I can't count Michael Imperioli, because a friend and I were sitting in a diner, and he said, "Oh, there's Michael Imperioli crossing the street," and I lunged for the window and brained myself on the glass like a starling and was too dazed to focus after that

Can that really be it? Oh -- a few weeks ago I saw one of Linda Ellerbee's shirts hanging at my dry cleaner. Just one of the many rich rewards of living in The Big Apple.

Newton's laws of motion

2006-05-23T15:29:00.000-04:00

Je vous ai manquee aussi!* Or, ya tozhe skuchala po vam.

There's been quite a lot going on, not all of which I am at liberty to discuss in a public forum (but don't worry, if you were inclined to). What I am at liberty to discuss (e.g., making sure we have Land o' Lakes fat-free creamer in stock for when my mother comes to visit on Thursday) is so deadly dull you wouldn't want me to discuss it anyway.

I just had lunch with The Man Who Used to Be My Husband. He had on a hooded sweatshirt with a big backpack and Birkenstocks, and when I met him at the corner I immediately blurted out, "You look like you've been walking the earth!"

Beat.

"And it suits you!" I added.

Actually, I thought that after we split apart he might walk the earth for a while, like David Carradine in Kung Fu, but as it turns out I'm the one who's been wandering around; he should close on his three-bedroom house next month. At this news I had to put my forehead down on the tablecloth while I summoned the will to go on. In Athens, Georgia, homeowning is easier than squatting, apparently. It was enough to make me want to get up off the table and go walk the earth.

In July he'll head for Morocco, where he hopes to eventually spend a year working on his graduate research. I bet he'll learn some French there; I bet he'll learn some Arabic. I bet he'll eat monkey brains and run around in a fedora knocking over baskets until Karen Allen falls out in a pair of red harem pants. I expect it will be a life of high adventure.

I told him that sometimes I think I'm just about done with New York, but don't know where else I'd be fit to live, having been here most of my adult life and lost whatever taste I might have had for monkey brains. He said, "You should move to Gary, Indiana." I said why, and he said, "Because then I'll know somebody in Gary, Indiana."

These meals are so strange, utterly familiar and completely alien at the same time. The person across the table looks like him and feels like him but can't be him because I barely know him anymore. I have said before that it's like dinner between two people who have come back from the dead. Now that I think about it, it's exactly like that: When I sit down to the table I always feel like I've made a long, hard trip in the service of some higher purpose, but then the details look as trivial as they would if I were seeing them from the afterlife: the moules frites (always there seem to be moules frites) and the polite conversation and, today, the plastic cigarette lighter I gave him that had been autographed by the country's No. 2 air-guitar champion, Bjorn Turoque.

He was at the heart of my whole life, and then he wasn't. When an object is no longer accelerated by a centripetal force, it keeps traveling in a straight line.** Which is how you can go from being a person's next of kin to somebody he knows in Gary, Indiana.

*Again with the diacriticals: I don't know how to make them.

**Unless it sits inert.

The Heroin of My Own Life

2006-05-16T10:29:00.000-04:00

Despite the offensive advertisements, today I'm having one of the new Tab Energy drinks, the taste of which has been described elsewhere as Jolly Rancher mixed with Red Bull, or Pixy Stick mixed with Alka-Seltzer.

I've been a two-fisted caffeine drinker since childhood* (sometimes you need the Diet Coke and the latte, for hot and cold), but I'm halfway through this thing and I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it. Is there crystal meth in here? Why do I feel like I'm typing this from the top of a giant mushroom? I think I may be tweaking.

Speaking of recreational drugs, the other night I dreamed I got caught up in a web of intrigue with Christopher from The Sopranos. In a moment of downtime we were sharing our deepest fears, and he said, "You're afraid of becoming Miss Havisham, aren't you?" Then I guess we broke character because I said, "Would Christopher really say that?" and then he said he guessed not.

*Coke in the baby bottle. Really.

Hurricane Season

2006-05-15T17:46:00.000-04:00

I have a Park Avenue cardiologist* now, which makes me feel a little like a 52-year-old Master of the Universe. Without the cigars or the American Express black card.

I wasn't sure what to expect and was afraid they'd have me on a treadmill, Steve Austin-style, with electrodes under my brassiere. Can they rebuild me? I was so nervous I dropped one of the doctor's ArtForums on my foot.

As it happened, he only wanted to do an ultrasound, so I was smeared with goo by a technician who simultaneously related her mother's theory about this year's killer allergy season: a government conspiracy surrounding last year's flu-shot shortage. She seemed not to dismiss the possibility entirely, which surprised me since she was the one with the probe, and I had therefore thought her to be a handmaiden of science.

If you've ever had one of these, you know that when they turn the volume up, you can hear your own blood pumping, and it sounds a lot like scrap metal blowing back and forth in hurricane winds. Every one of us is walking around in our own little storm.

* Don't be alarmed. My GP just heard a little murmur in my heart. I don't think of it as a murmur so much as a kvetch and kvell.**

**And I don't know why the mere mention of cardiology makes me want to trot out the Yiddish. One thing I do know is that I won't be marrying mine -- he is notably handsome and certainly gay.

From Anne Sexton, 1969

2006-05-14T09:19:00.000-04:00

Wed – 2:45

Dear Linda,

I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her "I know, Mother, I know." (Found a pen!) And I thought of you – someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me.

And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won’t be flying, maybe it will be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40. Anytime.) – I want to say back.

1st I love you.

2. You never let me down.

3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 and with a dead mother who I needed still.

This is my message to the 40-year-old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely, I know that. Now you too know it – wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I’ve had a good life – I wrote unhappy – but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda – Live to the HILT! To the top, I love you, 40-year-old Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are! – Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her – or she me! Silly Anne! So there!

XOXOXO

Mom

(Happy Mother's Day.)

We went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to live deliberately.

2006-05-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

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Fat Editor

2006-05-09T15:48:00.000-04:00

I was just tottering down Leroy Street feeling 15 months' pregnant and wondering why Showtime hadn't sent over my contract, when I got catcalled from a Manhattan Fruit Exchange truck.** At this point I'll take what I can get.*

I want to apologize for my absence -- my mojo is missing. I am also very far behind on e-mail to people I love, and if this includes you, I am heartily sorry! It's just that my Summons to Nashville was complicated in some ways, and also that my purely theoretical direct supervisor in my entirely hypothetical job has moved away to a fantasy Amelie apartment in Paris, thus leaving me at sixes and septs. It's taking me a while to get back on top of things.

*Last week I dreamed I was Carnie Wilson, pre-gastric bypass.

** A few months ago on this same block, a guy walked by with a dolly and asked in a matter-of-fact way if I was single. I said no, and he said, "Okay, I just thought I'd help you out!" and walked away. I've been puzzled ever since, because I don't think "help you out" was some kind of euphemism; he was too businesslike for that. Was he going to put me on that dolly and wheel me to where all the single straight men are (presumably in a holding pen in Madison Square Garden)? We'll never know. In the meantime, single ladies looking for "help" should frequent Leroy between Seventh and Hudson.

Hallmark Hall of Fame

2006-05-02T14:56:00.000-04:00

I swore I wouldn't blog about work, and I don't want to even admit that I have a day job here. So obviously I haven't written about the lone, partially deflated green balloon that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY and has been aimlessly drifting around my totally theoretical office.

Finally I wondered aloud where it had come from.

A colleague thought he was responsible for it, though he couldn't think why -- had it actually been somebody's birthday? -- but then remembered he'd bought a pack of them for someone's going-away party, got them back to the office, and blew them up only to find the HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the side.

He used them for the party anyway, figuring it wasn't the worst mix-up in the world: That had already happened at one of his previous offices, where someone always seemed to be getting married or getting promoted or having a baby or a birthday or moving to France, or engaging in some other endeavor that necessitated a greeting card surreptitiously circulated in a file folder. One of his exasperated co-workers fended off the deluge by writing on every single card, "Best of luck."

Including the time somebody's mother died.

Meet the Mess

2006-04-30T00:53:00.000-04:00

If a headache lasts for two days and doesn't respond to painkillers -- but you can apply eyeliner and make a pot of coffee without seeing flashing lights in your peripheral vision or puking -- then is it still a migraine?

Friday my head hurt so badly I couldn't remember Joe Lieberman's name when I saw him at the American Airlines departures area at LaGuardia. All I could think was, Hey, hey, it's ... it's ... The Grand Nagus!

I said to the cab driver, "Hey, that's Al Gore's running mate -- what is that guy's name?" He whipped around and said, "Bill Clinton's here?" And I said, "No, that other one -- " And here, again, I could only think, The one who's married to Hadassah!

Finally the driver yelled, "Lieberman!" and I yelled it too, and we both did that thing where you throw your hands up in the air and repeat the obvious thing you couldn't think of and bob your head a little.

This is one of the many reasons why I will never be a talking head on Meet the Press. The first and foremost being that I am not, strictly speaking, the press.

Then I went inside and got a real Coke from Sbarro and put my head down on a table in the food court. I was looking at the headlines in Hudson News (Britney pregnant, again! Angelina Jolie, not pregnant anymore!) and thanking the baby Jesus that no paparazzo would profit the dollahs from catching me slumped over with my hair making a big Kewpie-doll spray in my fist (one of the few poses in which my head didn't hurt).

When I got home my dad gave me one of the pain pills left over from his bout with pleurisy(!), and despite a fitful night of dreams in which Grace Slick narrated just off camera, the headache is, for the most part, gone.

On a sad note: I called the Comrade before dinnertime, and he thought I was coming home tonight. I'm not sure how he could have thought I'd be turning around and coming back the following day, but now that I think about it, I do remember him saying something like that, and I'd had no idea what he was talking about but vaguely agreed. I think we both have gotten so used to not understanding what the other one is saying all the time that we're too quick to affectionately ignore each other. I called him again after dinner and he'd eaten a whole Entenmann's pecan ring. "Are you depressed?" I said. "No,"* he said. "I just wished to eat.** And I wanted some hydrocarbates."

My mother laughed so hard at this she turned red and lifted her feet off the floor.

*Somebody thinks very highly of herself, I guess.

**Oh, to live in the country of men, in which a pecan ring can be just a pecan ring.

And Ain't I a Woman?

2006-04-25T11:57:00.000-04:00

Today on BBC Online there's a story about pole dancing as cardio, and whether practicing it is a betrayal of feminism. I feel comfortable sharing here that I had absolutely no opinion on this matter (save idle envy of the legs on the woman in the accompanying photos -- I don't know if they belong to reporter Jacqui Head, but if I had them I'd be hanging upside down from a pole all the time, and no one could stop me).

Then, four-fifths of the way down, an Arena magazine editor-at-large* scoffs at recreational pole dancers as "'fake dirty' -- it's a big men's saying because there are so many of these girls who are not actually very sexual."

If I'd gone to graduate school, I might have thought we were trapped in a Lacanian hall of mirrors; as it was, I just thought this guy should sod off. He followed that remark with "It's disingenuous in that the same person that goes to a class would turn their noses up at a pole dancing club," and what I believe he meant to say is that he thinks stripping-as-tourism is foolish and contrived. But I was thoroughly irritated by the implication that he and the rest of the men who say will decide what's really sexual, and n.b., it's only really sexual if someone's getting rewarded with a sweaty tenner at the end.

So girls take classes where they learn to mimic sex workers -- workers, as in for pay -- because that's what feels sexy to them; meanwhile, the men who edit the copy that runs underneath Jessica Alba's nipples insist that those girls aren't "very sexual" at all, since the pole-hanging is something they do simply because it's sexual, and not because they pay the rent doing it.

Yesterday I sat down on the subway across from a strikingly pretty Lady Who Was Not, Strictly Speaking, a Lady -- hands just a bit too big, jaw just a tad too there. She had chosen the best costume for the day, which was made up in part by purplish lipstick and, on every finger, multiple gold rings, one of which was shaped like a snake. This she pointed to when she fixed me with a look and said, "I-Like-Your-Bag-It's-Snake-See-I-Have-a-Snake-I-Like-Snakes-Too!" This came in one great rush that was oddly affectless -- it was like she'd been given a line of dialogue with {enthusiastically} in front of it but chosen to ignore that part.

With a sinking feeling I realized that she was a Lady Who Was Not, Strictly Speaking, Sane. This feeling was not alleviated by her further ejaculations about her pet snake, or the way snakes "aren't-slimy-at-all-they're-smooth-and-dry," or the purple snake miniskirt she had once owned. I was actually relieved when she got up and sat down next to me, because that alleviated the meta-misery of knowing that everyone in the car was smirking at my great good fortune (unless they were Arena editors, in which case they must have wanted to pay us to make out).

As girls will do, we fell on the topic of lotions for sensitive skin; she likes St. Ives. "Can you use it on your face, too?" I {eagerly} asked. "No-no-just-your-body," she said.

Now, here's the thing: I knew the lotion she was talking about, and I also knew good and well you'd never put it on your face. I asked because I was nervous, but also, I think, so she could tell me the answer -- beauty tips being a currency between ladies.

*You may be familiar with his work if you've ever picked up the British comedy fanzine Shoreditch Twat.

Laying Waste My Powers

2006-04-22T12:37:00.000-04:00

When I think of it, I like to log on to my own blog to check the Quote of the Day, and I noticed today's is Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

I'd like to confess here that last night I went out to get a good kitchen knife, and instead bought a bottle of Un Jardin Sur Nil. I can't decide whether this is glamorous or quietly desperate.

In other weekend news, the Comrade is in the process of moving offices from the Flatiron District to New Jersey, so this Saturday finds me alone again, naturally. I thought I'd cook us up some lamb tonight, but the Fresh Direct order just came, and when I unpacked the French-cut chops I'd ordered, I was dismayed to find that they are just about the right size for Saturday-night dinner in a dollhouse. It's one of those moments when I realize my hausfrau drag is just that. Speaking of drag, I guess I'll have to venture out into Brooklyn for more lamb.

Requiem for a Dream was on IFC last night; I may be the last person in the Western Hemisphere to see it, but doubtless not the first to want to promptly stick her head in an oven after the credits rolled. I got into bed where the Comrade had fallen asleep listening to our Sharper Image white-noise machine and cried.

Trivially speaking, unless I miss my guess, the Comrade and I looked at a place in the very building on Brightwater Court where poor Sara Goldfarb lived. The apartment was a windowless Skinner box, shared by a Russian lady (who must have sold cosmetics, judging from the army of potions) and her pretty little pigtailed daughter. If it hadn't looked on an alley we might have wound up sleeping there every night, in a tunnel of artificial wind.

Number Our Days

2006-04-19T22:28:00.000-04:00

Tonight when I was walking home I passed a little army of Hasidim gentlemen, some of them brandishing big yellow flags with blue crowns and Hebrew lettering underneath. When a red-haired and -bearded one (why do I always go for the redheads?) had his little yarmulked son pass me a flyer, I figured they were Lubavitchers, and so they were. FYI: The King Messiah is already here, and for our generation it's Rebbe Shlita. Spread the Word.

For a split second I thought about taping the flyer to the door so the Comrade could find it when he comes home (the way I taped up pictures of Sasha Cohen during the Olympics), but then I thought better of it since (1) it's blasphemous and (2) the neighbors might think we're serious.

So I'd barely gotten the Good News about the Rebbe Shlita when I turned on the TV and flipped on to TLC's Shalom for the Home, with Shmuley Boteach, "America's Favorite Rabbi." Am I the last goy to know about this? I caught only the last minute or so of the episode, but apparently he'd reunited this family of indeterminate religious orientation sufficiently so that the dad was hugging the teenage daughter and the mom was salting a chicken. At the end Rabbi Shmuley left the parents with a little wisdom: A mountain is neither an obstacle nor a place to build a chalet, but just beauty to behold.

I'm a total sucker for this stuff. Isn't every fish-fry Methodist? Would it be so compelling if I were Allegra Goodman?

Let me see if I can explain: I was looking at another blog earlier this week on which the Texas blogger posted a video clip of her very cute and endearing family, and a number of posters pointed out the sexiness of her husband's Southern accent*. It floored me because for me, when I hear a man with a Southern accent he is always, always going to be (1) saying grace before the homecoming game or (2) ordering some extra Corona limes for the Deke kegger. Regardless of what he is actually saying. I make this point not to illustrate that Southern men aren't appealing, but that sex and faith both ride largely on mystery, which is why I perk right up when Rabbi Shmuley has something to say about the best way to love a mountain. Put that in Joel Osteen's mouth and I'd have already flipped past him to Bridezillas.

I wish Rabbi Shmuley could talk me out of the kitchen cabinets, from which I am eating baker's coconut with a spoon.

* I think maybe one person who reads this blog has never heard me talk, and so let me hasten to add that I have a middling-to-thick Southern accent myself, so no judgments.

help.

2006-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

I feel like the scene in 2001 when the apes finally discover tools. Okay, I figured out how to get the photostream from Flickr up, and if you click on the "More of frostine99's photos" link, you should be able to see the vacation pictures (in reverse chronological order, so my swift descent into madness will be traceable only in reverse).

I also figured out how to title this link "Vacation Photos" ... but somehow it also looks as if I managed to bump the font size up, unless I'm hallucinating, and I'm unable to get rid of that ghastly Flickr error message in the Recent Posts sidebar. If anybody can offer advice, I'd greatly appreciate it. Otherwise I'll be rocking back and forth in my French Provincial-furnished suite in outer space.

Vacation photos

2006-04-17T23:42:00.000-04:00

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Trembling Before God

2006-04-17T15:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I went back to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Rather than deprive the parishioners of their last drop of hooch, as I did at last year's Midnight Mass, I strolled coolly past the lady with the goblet. As coolly, that is, as one can stroll when one is consumed with white-hot rage, as I was when the two eight-year-old boys in the pew behind me could not seem to just shut up and behold the lamb of God.

Friends, it's not like I enjoy hating children. Frankly, it makes me feel like Elmira Gulch cycling through a cyclone. But if I'd acted like that in church, my Mama would have made sure I wore my ass for an Easter hat. Why couldn't the adult who kept half-heartedly shushing those little hooligans just separate them? "Some people are just lazy," said Mama (who taught fourth grade for 30 years) when I pressed her later for answers. "I would have just turned around and said, 'Do you think you two young men could settle down?'"

This is a measured response indeed from a woman who used to literally wring my jaws* when I was insolent -- she'd put the meat of one thumb in the middle of one of my cheeks and four firm fingers on the other, then squeeze until my facial fat puffed up like Gary Coleman's. (This is an incredibly effective technique because not only is it humiliating, but it hurts like a mofo. If Donald Rumsfeld had just consulted Mama, he wouldn't have to be worried about criminal indictment today, now, would he? Mother knows best!) However, I don't recall ever getting wrung in the jaws for being at play in the house of the Lord, because that's when Mama liked to invoke her considerable gifts as a rhetorician: "The Lord gives you seven days a week! Can't you give Him an hour?"

Anyway, I'm not a member of that congregation, and the last time I attended church regularly I wasn't nearly as cranky as I am now, so I don't know what the protocol really is: Can you shoot dirty looks in church? Or do you need to pretend that you're drinking a cupful of the Lord's infinite grace? Or, worst of all, is this not even supposed to be an issue because one is presumably already actually filled with the Lord's infinite grace?

I didn't know, and I was pretty sure Jesus was ready for me to leave. So as soon as I gobbled down the host I walked right past my pew and out of the church, and realized I should have sat outside in the glorious weather reflecting on my blessings and listening for the imam over on Macdonald Avenue, who manages to speak to my inner pilgrim without kicking me in the back of my pew.

Today I related this story to a co-worker who told me that once when he was at mass, an old lady got so irritated with some pesky kids that in the middle of the service she moved up a few pews and slam-dunked her raincoat into the seat, then either was or was not prodded by the missalette of her new neighbor, which prompted another huffy exodus and another slam-dunk, and the missalette-wielding neighbor muttered something about why she'd even bothered coming to church, and so Slam Dunk turned around and hissed, at full volume, "How DARE you tell me when I can and cannot worship!"

"This was right before we exchanged the peace of God," my co-worker said.

Christ's love! Good times.

*Let me hasten to add that jaw-wringing was invoked only when I really deserved it; exempli gratia, the fateful day I stuck out my tongue at her retreating back, only to have her turn around and catch me, thus turning me into a pillar of salt. She was far too wily to believe I was "pretending to be a snake."

2006-04-11T15:34:00.000-04:00

At the top of "the world's most crooked street."

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

2006-04-11T11:30:00.001-04:00

(In which I go West, and live to tale the tell.)

I spent last week in California, the place a stogie-smoking ex-coworker of an ex-coworker used to call "the land of fruits and nuts." There's been so much rain this year in northern and central California that yesterday Governor Schwarzenegger declared a second state of emergency. I'm just glad we got out before the levees broke. (Not to mention our relationship.)

The Comrade grew up in a city apartment block and got a driver's license only a few years ago, after he moved to this country. I don't mean to undermine his macho credentials here (he rolled under tanks in the Soviet army!), but I just don't trust drivers who learned as adults. Like gymnastics or French, driving is something you need to pick up early or it's never going to feel natural. Sure, you can learn any of those three skills at age 30, but your joints will always pop, you will always sound like a foreigner when you try to hawk out the r's in "crème fraîche," and you will always, always break a sweat when merging into freeway traffic.

I'm not going to bore you with the details, friends: Suffice it to say that the roads in California are not clearly marked; that when one is uncertain about which way to go, it is best just to pick one, for God's sake, rather than veering right down the middle; that, even though I understand one must be able to parallel park in order to pass the New York State driving test, there were times when we got out of the car and had to hitchhike back to the curb.

I'd say things came to a head at the rainy, dreary Glen Ellen intersection where I screamed, "What the FUCK are you doing!" and the Comrade stopped the car and screamed back, "Say you're sorry!"

But they also came to a head in a Sonoma picnic ground, at the intersection of Haight and Stanyan streets, and in the parking lot of the SFO Marriott on our last night. Drinking later in our room, we decided that maybe this wasn't the best kind of vacation for us. Not only was it driving-intensive, there was a lot of planning and negotiating to be done, and I found myself doing most of it, which engendered so much resentment I poured our leftover shiraz into a VitaminWater bottle for the plane trip home and swilled it along with big fistfuls of sourdough bread.

This isn't the Comrade's fault: he can't help it that English isn't his first language, and when one doesn't even know the difference between valet parking and self-parking, it's hard to form a coherent question about which one happens where, and even harder to get any kind of meaningful answer. Also -- and it hadn't occurred to me until this trip -- being a foreigner in New York isn't like being a foreigner elsewhere in this country; New Yorkers are used to foreign accents and pride themselves on being surly and disdainful toward everyone, compatriot or no*. But this time I noticed people would do a little double-take whenever the Comrade opened his mouth, and at the Glen Ellen Market (a place where they give out free samples of French vanilla granola), I even caught the sensitive New Age checkout guy giving him a look that, while I wouldn't necessarily call it dirty, was somewhere between suspicious and perplexed. I know I'm not making this up because the next day, a propos of nothing, the Comrade said, "Why was that guy in the market looking at me like that?"

Then there was the snack bar in Guerneville where he asked for coffee and the well-meaning proprietress handed him two paper cups of water with lots of ice. "Your 'coffee' and your 'water' don't sound the same to me," I assured him as we drank it on the freezing veranda. I know I should have gone back in and ordered him a cup of coffee, but frankly, by that point I'd had all the human interaction I could take. Sometimes one does long for the golden age of automats.

Lest you think there were no best of times, let me mention:

_ City Lights bookstore (There is NONE COMPARABLE. I don't know how they get everything you want, plus hundreds of things you never knew you wanted, in a fairly small space and arranged in unconventional categories that make perfect sense and are exactly the way you'd group a bunch of books if you only thought of it -- but they do.)

_ Lemon Pellegrino. I can only imagine how much better this would get coupled with a hot day and gin.

_ The Crepe House. We ate there four times in three days.

_ Stumbling on Alamo Square Park and the damned Full House houses, which I felt I really shouldn't leave San Francisco for the second time without seeing, but couldn't remember where they were and so led us on a wild goose chase through Pacific Heights, all the while thinking fondly of Michael Keaton with a chainsaw. We have a picture of me jumping up and down in front of them with my arms in the air, drunk with victory.

_ The farmland of northern California, which has perfectly round green hills dotted with perfect storybook cows. When the sun comes out (which it did, for at least half an hour), the clouds make huge shadows that float over the landscape.

_ The Napa Valley Wine Train. Easily the most bourgeois thing I've ever done, if not in fact the nexus of the bourgeois universe. It's pretty empty this time of year, so the Comrade and I had the little outdoor platform on the back mostly to ourselves. If anybody else came out we'd just get a little handsy so they'd get uncomfortable and leave. Handsy with each other, that is, not the other passengers. Though we might have tried that if we'd stopped first at the $5 tasting car.

_ The Napa Target. While there I recognized some of our fellow wine train passengers, which means I wasn't the only drunk woman who bellowed "TARGET!"and made her man stop so she could ogle Isaac Mizrahi throw pillows. They have a full wine selection, incidentally. Do northern Californians in recovery just have to move down the coast to L.A.? Because there is booze EVERYWHERE, even at ...

_ Taylor's Refresher, one of those picnic-bench roadside hamburger places with a notable espresso milkshake. And a wine list. Which means that it's actually not as much a roadside hamburger place as it is a bougie simulacrum of a roadside hamburger place! Northern California seems to be full of that kind of thing.

_ Repeatedly asking each other, "So, why are you so into pinot?" and knowing we had likely been the 80,000th and 80,oo1st people to make that joke in the Napa Valley since 2004.

_ Boozy, intense conversations about Russian cat names versus English ones ("Fluffy" = "Pushok"), the Pepsi Challenge, and the virtues of Alice Munro (I guess these last two were less conversations than lectures, from me, as I sat in the Jacuzzi with a gallon jug of Bull's Blood).

_ The Polish waiter who, in a show of Slavic solidarity, brought the Comrade a free orange brandy, which I promptly slurped, and some free caramelly ice cream, which I slurped also. You have to move fast, here in the free market.

So, dear readers, the upshot of it is that we had a few spats so bitter that I looked at an especially cute photo of the Comrade at the Golden Gate Bridge and told him he could use it for his Match.com profile after he broke up with me.

Yet I think we are, oddly, the better for it, or at the very least no worse. While I was on the trip I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes that at times she and her beloved late husband wouldn't speak in any meaningful way for two days in a row, and that even at a point that would prove to be relatively late in their lives together, he wondered aloud why they weren't having more "fun." And on the plane home both the Comrade and I became engrossed in the Vanity Fair article about the mysterious disappearance of honeymooner George Allen Smith IV from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean. The night before Smith either fell or was pushed from the balcony of his stateroom, he and his new wife, Jennifer, had a brouhaha in the ship's disco about whether she had or had not been making googly eyes at a studly South African croupier. According to eyewitnesses she'd had too much absinthe and kicked her new husband in the groin. I guess every relationship has its attendant challenges.

*Once I believed this gross stereotype. Then I moved here and rejected it. Now that I've lived here ten years, I'm back to believing it again.

An open letter to dear Fritz

2006-03-31T14:04:00.000-05:00

Please, beloved readers -- all four of you -- don't desert me! I had the epizoodie* AGAIN, and I've been slogging through one of the most discouraging weeks of my professional life, and in four hours will be on a plane bound for San Francisco. The Comrade and I are going to spend a couple of days there and then drive north to see some redwoods and get drunk. (The Comrade, designated driver, worries that he'll be too lit to navigate the winding roads.)

We'll be back next Saturday, and I promise things will get back to normal around here.

Lately we've been watching Seventeen Moments of Spring, a Soviet-era miniseries set in the waning days of WWII and chronicling the adventures of Stirlitz, a Russian spy who poses as a Nazi officer. On the DVD case Stirlitz is billed as "the James Bond of Russia," but this couldn't be further from the truth -- the action, beautifully shot in film-noir black and white, moves at glacial speed (two characters will sit at the table for 60 seconds and just chew), and our hero can outbrood any Bond, even Timothy Dalton at his pissiest. In one scene he sits next to the fire with a cognac, puts some potatoes in to roast, and tearfully sings of how he longs for Mother Volga. I'd never make this up.

This doesn't mean that Seventeen Moments of Spring doesn't fascinate me; it's just that I wish the Comrade would stop quizzing me about it (on Saturday I just wanted to be left alone so I could figure out if the avocadoes were ripe enough for guacamole, and snapped: "You're making this feel like homework!")

Another way in which Stirlitz is the anti-Bond -- he has a wife he loves in Moscow whom he can't see lest it blow his cover. In the series' most erotically charged scene, Stirlitz is having a flashback in which he is about to be dispatched to Spain and the KGB arranges to have Mrs. Stirlitz brought to the German bistro where he goes to smoke and ruminate. Alas, the two cannot exchange embraces: They simply sit at opposite tables and look moony-eyed while the officer who was Mrs. Stirlitz's escort discreetly retires to the bar. My favorite part is that Mrs. Stirlitz is no Ursula Andress (who looks good enough in Dr. No but frankly always strikes me as mentally challenged when I see it) -- she's chubby-cheeked and lush of hip, and has bobbed hair and a sensible little suit. "She looks like you," the Comrade said affectionately. And she does.

*bird flu?

Planet of the (Shaved) Apes

2006-03-23T16:47:00.000-05:00

I love that smarty-pants Caleb Crain and will have to tell him so, should I see him again at a House Jam. He's recently written about both monkeys (Arctic Monkeys, that is) and journalist Celia Farber's piece for Harper's about scientists who discredit the theory that HIV causes AIDS.

Both of which remind me of a temp I once hired, a blowsy lady of un certain age who was bravely lipsticked and lousy with free-floating crazy and faded glamour (and did she shake a little? I swear that's how I remember it). One day in the office we were talking about the heart-wrenching case of endangered diana monkey Cookie Flikshtein, adopted as surrogate daughter by Roman and Inna Flikshtein of Manhattan Beach and now facing court removal and repatriation to the wild, where there would be no ice cream or nightly news.

And Frau Blowsy said tonelessly, "Monkeys are dirty and they cause AIDS," then went back to work.

Sometimes to keep the peace you keep your own counsel, and there is nothing to be done but run to the co-workers with whom you have been making nasty jokes about her imaginary Vicodin habit to share the delicious news.

And so (on the other side of the barrier): "... and then SHE said, 'Monkeys are dirty and they cause AIDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'"

And my Esteemed Colleague said, "But that doesn't mean she wouldn't let one buy her a drink."

Sisyphus, not Sissy-Fuss

2006-03-23T15:33:00.000-05:00

Say one is burdened with an onerous task (say, painting Willem Dafoe on the side of a blimp), pelted with the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism, and then told not to take any of it "personally." How else is there to take things but personally if one is, in fact, a person?

Les Jeux Sont Fait

2006-03-22T11:31:00.000-05:00

Apparently I've been divorced since March 16, but wasn't aware of it until I opened yesterday's mail.

Prince of Peas

2006-03-15T20:58:00.000-05:00

Dear friends who know me told me I should see Junebug, and they were so right I've seen it three times now: the first time alone, the second time alone with commentary, and the third time with the Comrade, whose notions of the South up to this point have been informed by Doc Hollywood. (For those who don't have TNT, Doc Hollywood is the Michael J. Fox vehicle that falls in the first category of movies about the South; namely, those that feature quirky characters and art-directed county fairs. The other category involves racial tension, murder, and ceiling fans, and everybody sweats a lot.)

Before Junebug I don't think I'd ever seen such an honest picture of the South (don't watch these people quibbling over an empty carton that should have held Vantages and think you know the whole story -- I give you fair warning before you attempt them further), and I don't know that any other movie has ever gnawed at me for days afterward. I think it spoke to me because it's a movie about home, but also because I could see myself in both George, who comes back to the place where he grew up (with equal, or unequal, parts longing and suffocation), and Madeleine, who comes in as an outsider (with equal, or unequal, parts fascination and exasperation, cut with a little shame and a dash of never knowing how to "do"). Of course it didn't mean as much to the Comrade, who has never been trapped in a baby shower feeling like a female impersonator, but I think it functioned as a kind of travelogue nonetheless.

Since the movie I've been singing hymns around the house. ("Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling ...") On Sunday the Comrade was elbow deep in the $40 worth of cheese* he'd bought at Garden of Eden market** and chimed in with "Earnestly, tenderly, cheeses is calling, calling for you and for me: cut me ... cut me ..."

I guess he isn't the first person to come up with this, but I thought it was pretty good for somebody who's not operating in his native tongue. And it's a joke with a lot of mileage: "What a Friend We Have in Cheeses." "Cheeses Is Just All Right With Me."

The Comrade wondered why Southern Christians are so hung up on hymns, since in the Eastern Orthodox church hymns are sung only by priests, as a form of prayer. I told him to compare it not with the Russian church, but with Communism: all those songs for Dyedushka*** Lenin weren't prayer but they were certainly praise, as well as something rousing to do at assemblies. But I felt a pang of guilt (see also: longing, suffocation) at comparing "I Come to the Garden Alone" with Soviet propaganda. So I told him he shouldn't assume Southern Christians don't have real, gut-level faith, no matter how glad I am that I never have to go to another dinner in a church basement (see also: fascination, exasperation).

Incidentally, I got that butterscotch Tastycake, and I wish I could be more articulate about this, but: holy crap. I didn't get much butterscotch per se, but it's so sugary and light, like a grocery-store birthday cake. I'm glad they're kosher -- I'll have something to eat when the Christians throw me out for the blasphemy I've just committed and I have to seek refuge in kabbalah.

* Friends, this is nothing -- I've watched him leave that place $70 lighter. I think we can all agree that this is a lot of money for anybody to spend on cheese (cheese that doesn't conceal weapons-grade plutonium, that is), but for someone who ate potatoes for a couple of years while the ruble was hurtling through the core of the earth, it's downright sinful. The man loves cheese.

** Why, oh why, didn't they call it Garden of Eatin'? A low-down, dirty shame.

***"Grandfather" Lenin. Really.

Papa, Can You Hear Me?

2006-03-10T12:55:00.000-05:00

I was commenting on Butterscotch Krimpets below and went on for so long I thought I'd just put it in a post.

I think I've seen these for sale at the CVS right next to my subway stop. I have to pop in on the way home for some toothpaste, and who knows what will leap into my basket? Maybe I'll just brush my teeth with Tastykakes and eliminate the middleman. Speaking of Tastykakes, do we have these in Nashville? I thought they were a suspicious Yankee brand like Drake's Cakes.

Does anybody else think the Tastykakes Web site seems rather fraught with innuendo, what with all the Kreamies and Chocolate-Covered Pretzel Rods? Like Candyland* meets The Red Shoe Diaries. How funny, and profoundly American, is it that Tastykakes are available in Sensable lo-carb form and a Doublicious version with twice, twice, twice the icing? For those who don't mind being buried in a piano case!

Also, you'll be relieved to learn that Tastykakes have been kosher-certified by the Orthodox Union, because God forbid you should defile your corporeal temple with a traif snack cake.

Once when the Comrade was still living in an apartment block on Avenue U, I was leaving his place one Saturday morning when two giggling college girls in kerchiefs and long denim skirts** stopped me in the hallway. "Are you Jewish?" they said. They seemed faintly hysterical, which made me a little hysterical myself because it seemed there was only one right answer to this question but Yahweh knew what it was. (Also, there's something disarming and weird about talking to strangers who live in your building, because you know you're not going to be able to make a clean getaway if they turn out to be needy or crazy.) I told them I wasn't Jewish***, and they started giggling even more maniacally and asked if I could come in and turn their oven on because they weren't allowed to do it themselves on the Sabbath.

I had been tapped for Shabbos Goy! My New York fantasy was complete.

I followed them into an airless one-bedroom apartment where everything smelled warm and coddled, like stewed food. Two or three other modestly attired twentysomethings of both sexes sat around a table expectantly looking at a toaster oven with a lone piece of chicken inside. There was an air of barely suppressed mirth, as if I were about to be the target of a practical joke, so I tried to look pleasant and noncommittal while surreptitiously sweeping the place for rubber vomit and onion gum.

My new clients showed me the button to press, and I did, and they were grateful, and I left. But I left with a Talmudic burden of unanswered questions: If they're supposed to rest on the Sabbath, why was it okay to put the chicken in the oven, but not okay to turn the oven on? Were they all going to share that one chicken breast? What if they hadn't been able to find a wandering Gentile? Did they have some backup Tastykakes?

After all, as the Yiddish proverb says, Mann tracht und Gott lacht.****

*The alert reader will note that there's a Queen Frostine in Candyland, but that's not how I got my Internet name. My mother used to talk about her friend "Frostine," which I always thought the biggest hoot -- imagine how devastated I was as an adult when I found out it wasn't Frostine but Fostine. Which is funny in its own way but lacks the deluded grandeur afforded by the extra consonant.

**Live in New York long enough and you come to recognize this look as Hip Orthodox.

***There are four Jews in Tennessee.

****"Man plans, and God laughs."

The Philadelphia Story

2006-03-07T11:49:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry for having fallen halfway off the face of the earth again. Remember the sinus malady that got replaced by the epizoodie? Well, the epizoodie has given way to some mysterious ailment characterized by exhaustion, headaches, and periodic bouts of nausea. A hasty Googling revealed that I must have carbon-monoxide poisoning. Yesterday I napped on the office couch with a shawl over my head.

I could just be allergic to 36, which is what I turned on Friday. If 33 was significant because it was Christ's age at crucifixion, 36 is significant because it's the first age I can remember my mother being; that is, when I first became aware that she had an age just like I did, and got older every year just like I did, and had been 9 once, as I was. Once the Comrade went to the zoo with co-worker Vronsky and his 4-year-old son, Little Vronsky, who on the subway became enraptured by a baby in a stroller. He turned to the Comrade and said wistfully, "Dva goda nazad, ya bila babechka." ("Two years ago, I was a baby.") I know the feeling!

The Comrade and I celebrated by spending the weekend in Philadelphia, which has the twin virtues of being (1) there, and close, and (2) accessible via the $12 Chinatown bus. I'd hoped the bus would be full of old Chinese people on holiday, but alas, everyone was just cheap like us. There was Chinese-restaurant music piped in, only barely audible when we slowed for a toll booth.

The Liberty Bell is smaller than you think it is.
The entire time I was there I could not stop thinking about thirtysomething, heretofore my main cultural reference point for the city of Philadelphia.
We ate three Philly cheese steaks apiece in three days*.

While we were planning the trip I was giving the Comrade the run-down on the Philly cheese steak and what I had theretofore considered the gold standard of non-Philly Philly cheese steaks; id est, the one from In the Park Grill at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Most of the UT cafeteria food would drive you straight to the soft-serve machine, but this cheese steak was sublime, a real diamond in the rough. The grill guys (who in my mind I have conflated with those garage attendants who steal the car in Ferris Bueller's Day Off) used to keep a kitchen sponge on a handle in a big vat of melted butter that they would use to first thwack and then sop your hoagie bun before filling it with fried meat, peppers, and onions and then (Readers, I want no secrets from you) squirting mayonnaise on top. By the time I moved off campus I was so fat I needed to be airlifted to my hilltop classes.

We first went to Jim's on South Street, supposedly the nexus of the cheese-steak universe, and after waiting in line for half an hour, sat upstairs underneath Sinbad's autograph and bit in. And friends, it was good. Jim's cheese steaks are more deliciously steaky and less satisfyingly squishy than the ones at the "New York Deli," and both were edged out by the ones at Rick's in Reading Terminal Market, which gets even more bonus points because you can take it to the beer garden in the back.

But you know what? In a cheese-steak death match, I would put any one of them up against In the Park Grill, and I'd bet my money on the latter. This was an epiphany worthy of Dorothy Gale. Full of Yeungling-induced goodwill, I was in the ladies' room trying to wash the onion smell off my hands and thinking of that buttered sponge. Gosh, what kind of sponge was that? I wondered dreamily. What kind of sponge has a handle as long as a man's forearm?

With age, wisdom: As I scrub-scrub-scrubbed I realized the butter sponge must have been originally intended for toilets. This didn't leaven my nostalgia nearly as much as you might imagine.

The Comrade, who's never eaten butter from a toilet sponge, didn't understand why I wanted to go to the Mutter Museum to see the world's largest colon and thought we should go to the Philadelphia Flower Show instead. Guess who won. It'll be even more fun next year when we can get the AARP discount.

*Could this be the source of my "carbon monoxide poisoning"?

Your Show of Shows

2006-02-28T21:56:00.000-05:00

As soon as my sinuses cleared up, I was hit with a case of what my Aunt Goldie would call "epizoodie." I ache, I hack, I drift in and out of a NyQuil twilight punctuated with back-to-back episodes of Footballers' Wives and gigantic bowls of fat-free ice cream. This must be what it's like for Liza Minnelli all the time.

Around 11 on Saturday (in the 12-hour window between sinus and epizoodie) I was locking the door to my apartment when three strangers came around the corner and started talking over each other -- "That's her!" "Do you live here?" "Is this apartment XX?" I was simultaneously startled, annoyed, afraid that they were the rightful owners come to reclaim the place (in New York you never feel too secure about your real estate), and hopeful that I'd won some kind of prize.

As it turned out, one of them had lived in my apartment 45 years ago and just wanted to come in for a look. He lives in Florida now, and he and his wife were in town to see their thirtyish daughter, who lives in L.A., give a reading*. The trip down Memory Lane had been the daughter's idea; she surprised them with a car service, and after they left my building they were going to look at the mother's old place in Queens.

I got most of this information after they were in my kitchen, because of course I let them in, as soon as I raced back and yelled at the Comrade to get his pants on.

The former residents of Apartment XX kept their kitchen table where we have our Target cart, the one the Comrade slipped a disc assembling. The parents slept on a foldout couch in the living room, while the two boys had the bedroom, just the way the Comrade and Comrade frere** did when they were growing up. They had the very first TV in the building, and everybody used to come over to watch Sid Caesar.

I had to run out to meet the accountant, leaving them with the Comrade, who would later tell me he tried to offer them the rest of an opened bottle of Montepulciano in celebration. (They declined, as I guess they wanted to have all their wits about them when they got to Queens.)

Until the epizoodie crept in, I was on some kind of high, like I really had won a prize. I felt lucky and happy to have been there, and also reassured. The past couple of years have brought all kinds of enormous changes at the last minute. Enough horse doses of uncertainty, and you start to feel like you're choking on your own future. But people watched TV and brushed their teeth and ate oatmeal in this place 45 years ago, and they'll likely do it in another 45. It's like Wilford Brimley just sat down and offered me a bowl of Grape-Nuts.

*She'd written a book on how women bond over body issues but spilled out the title so fast I had no idea what she said, and no amount of Googling can recover it.

**Je jure, I still don't know how to make diacriticals on a PC. Forgive me, French majors; I know you're out there.

Notes From Underground

2006-02-24T15:34:00.000-05:00

I always feel sorry for poor little unloved blogs that sit fallow for weeks at a time, and here I've abandoned mine. I'm sorry about that -- it's just that ever since I made that Prophet Mohammad Shrinky Dink, there's been a fatwa on my head and I've been lying low.*

Also, I have an unwritten policy of refraining from anything that's on the cover of New York magazine. Especially cuddle dating.

Finally, my will to go on has been wavering more than usual. This is partially due to my ongoing allergy problems. I will not bore you with the details, friends, but a desperate situation was alleviated somewhat with garden-variety Claritin-D. Who knew? It cleared my head but also made me feel as if I were on some kind of experimental Army drug that eliminated the need to eat and sleep. I'm still trying to decide whether it's a pleasant sensation or not.

Maybe I'm working through the impurities I sweated out on Sunday when I finally went to a Russian banya, where I neither (1) was beaten with birch leaves nor (2) rolled in the snow. (I did see Leonid Brezhnev, however, who is apparently alive, well, and living in Midwood.) For more details, watch this space!

Shizuka Arakawa skated a very nice program, deserved the gold, and can't help it that she's a fembot. I wanted Sasha Cohen and Irina Slutskaya to wrestle her off the podium and make her faceplate pop off. The Comrade and I were crestfallen last night and fell into a troubled sleep, only to be jerked awake by a caller with the wrong number. The Comrade said he sounded Japanese.

*As soon as the death threats are lifted I plan to marry a model and go to a lot of Vanity Fair parties.

2006-02-17T17:17:00.000-05:00

Snowbound

Life During Wartime

2006-02-17T14:21:00.000-05:00

I never write about politics, and whole days go by when I can't even care about politics. (There, I said it.)

And yet: Just this morning I heard a story on Morning Edition about a group home for women with HIV, remarkable in that it is not part of the 141 federal programs that George Bush has proposed to eliminate in the next fiscal year. Why spend $14.5 billion recklessly feeding and medicating the elderly, who are after all just scrabbling around for the last Social Security dime with their arthritic little claws?

I wasn't truly disheartened, though, until I walked through the turnstile to exit the West 4th subway station and found two beefy guys in fatigues and berets, handing out Army recruitment pamphlets as if they were flyers for a topless bar. (I guess the enlistment numbers really are as low as reported.) I was embarrassed for them, and ashamed for all of us.*

So far the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the nebulous war on terror, have cost the Dr. Seussian sum of almost half a trillion dollars.

Once when the Comrade would extol the dubious virtues of Communism (and they are dubious -- Soviet dentistry so macabre you'd pay not to get it), I'd counter that it was a society where the citizenry were all-important but the people were expendable, and that maybe it still is -- how could Putin just let those men in the Kursk die at the bottom of the sea, without asking for help?

You can imagine what happened to that infantile argument after Hurricane Katrina. When the Comrade came home he found me crying in front of the TV (unlike me -- emotionally labile though I am, I'm far more likely to cry over figure skating than natural disasters or genocide) and said the Russians had done a better job of evacuating Chernobyl.

So as not to end this with a nuclear accident: Flying in the face of this year's global-warming trend, we had a two-foot snow on Sunday. The Comrade and I went wading out in Prospect Park while I bored him with stories about Mary and Laura Ingalls, and how they used to put maple syrup out on the snow to harden into candy, and how this seemed to me the finest treat on earth. Also, snow cream, which is what Southern people make with snow, heavy cream, and a little vanilla flavoring. I don't know why, either, and Prospect Park snow would probably give you babies with nine heads -- speaking of nuclear accidents, which I can't seem to tear myself away from. It was beautiful, though.

*One of my therapist Father Intintola's most astute observations was that you're embarrassed by things you do, and ashamed by what you are.

There's a special place in hell ...

2006-02-15T14:41:00.000-05:00

for people who recount movie plots.

Why I'll Never Be an Olympic Figure Skating Coach*

2006-02-14T15:45:00.000-05:00

Dear Zhang Dan,

You rock the house.

Love,

Your Humble Narrator

*Because I was on my couch with a glass of port screaming, "Get off the ice! You're 20 years old! You'll have other Olympics!"

Ten Thousand Things

2006-02-13T15:25:00.000-05:00

Checking out at our Brooklyn Foodtown is not unlike getting through the intake at Ellis Island: huddled masses of people from many lands, yearning to get out of there with their cartloads of Huggies. There are impossibly narrow spaces; there are disaffected teenage clerks, also from many lands, dreamily eating pilfered Reese's cups. If you have any self-preservative instincts at all, you start bagging your own groceries as soon as the disaffected teen scans your Greenpoints card*.

Which is why I felt white-hot rage pooling in the backs of my knees on Saturday night when the older lady in front of me and the Comrade paid for her box of something, plucked another plastic bag off the rack, and then promptly fell into a K-hole as she tried to pull it open along its unhelpfully underperforated edges. We all stood there while the world slowed and finally stopped, and our groceries piled up, and our fellow shoppers piled up, and I prepared a fresh clip for my imaginary tommy gun.

So imagine my shame when the Comrade said, "Here, let me help you -- you have gloves on," took the bag, opened it and handed it back. Now imagine that shame multiplied tenfold when she said in a matter-of-fact way, "I just can't get it together, I have no money, and everything's falling apart."

I patted her on the back and said, "Well, your bag works now!" She laughed, and I laughed, and the Comrade laughed, and we all laughed.

I am naturally Chip-and-Dale polite, friends, but maybe not naturally kind. Imagine my disappointment in myself. Now imagine that disappointment multiplied tenfold when I realized I was wearing an overpriced Ganesh medallion I bought on Bleecker Street.

*I understand there are places here in our own United States where the teenager bags the groceries for you, and another wheels them out to your waiting car. O, to push a cart through those Elysian Fields!

Brokeback Molehill

2006-02-08T14:05:00.000-05:00

The Comrade's co-worker -- let's call him Vronsky -- wants to buy a ring for his new girlfriend in St. Petersburg but has no idea what size she wears and no way to surreptitiously measure. They printed out a ring-sizing guide, they called me to ask what I wear, they measured Vronsky's pinky.

Finally the Comrade said, "Well, didn't you take her hand at some point?" Vronsky said he had, and to help him better guesstimate the dimensions, the two of them solemnly held hands. This didn't work because Vronsky said the Comrade's fingers were too chunky, but I find it precious nonetheless.

Miss America

2006-02-07T19:31:00.000-05:00

My shoe guy from Tashkent -- let's call him Ivan Denisovich -- tells me some people never come back for their shoes, even when they've already paid for the repairs. He had a nice shoulder bag, the same olive green as the faux Balenciaga (the shame!) he fixed for me last winter, and it's been there for two months already.

"America," I said. "We can't remember how much stuff we have."

"Look at this big bag," he said, pointing to a big sports duffel on a top shelf that looked as if it would smell of Sock. "You need a big bag like this? And this" -- he hands me an ABC Carpet & Home sack -- "this has been here for a year already! Nice shoes, too! You see anything you like ..."

Then he went to help a customer who'd come in with a watch.* My mother says that, like Emily Dickinson, we should dwell in possibility, so I dug in.

Inside:
_ One pair of Victoria's Secret platform espadrilles, with laces that would tie up the ankles
_ One pair of round-heeled stiletto pumps, Bananarama pink
_ One pair of high-heeled Lucite mules (which looked for all the world like the plastic shoes that came with the Miss America dress-up set I had at age six**), studded with tiny criss-cross rhinestones

I imagine whoever owned these shoes hasn't returned for them because she's too busy Turning This Mother Out. Everything was at least a half size too small, anyway, and I told Ivan Denisovich so. "Everybody in this neighborhood is so rich," he sighed, pointing out at the adorable West Village. "Everybody has 40 pairs of shoes!"

What I didn't say: I wonder if I could come up with 40 pairs of shoes, including both the summer and winter rotations and the unloved box underneath the bed.

The Comrade thinks I'm a woman of moderate spending habits, but that's only because he has no idea what I buy. Five days out of the week he comes home so late, I'm sitting around in nightclothes already, and if he does notice something new I just wave my hands around and look vague, like I found it under the tire of a bus.

When I wanted the faux midcentury-modern couch from the SoHo shop, the Comrade gently suggested we check the furniture places out in Brighton -- those nouveau showrooms that cater to his garish compatriots. Gentle readers, I'm 35 years old and well past the point in my life when it would be funny to have a red velvet sofa shaped like lips. Eventually he just lost the will to fight, so we're getting the couch. Though he threw his entire body over the $99 throw pillows before I could even pick one up.

I dread showing him the modest split-level where I grew up***: The refrigerator has one of those automatic ice things. Hardwood floors not because we couldn't afford carpet, but because we had carpet and my parents, in a fit of irrational exuberance shortly after I left home, ripped it up because it was ugly! Downstairs, friends, there is a free-standing globe with a mini-bar inside. Do you know what that will look like to someone who spent the early Eighties trying to get his hands on a D-cell battery?

I suspect growing up without any luxuries could lead a person to (a) conclude that they're vastly unimportant or (b) fetishize them, and that the Comrade is the former and that I'd be the latter.

When we were in the Kiev airport heading back home, we stopped in the duty-free and there was a leather Dior bag that was so especially soft and transcendent, I wanted to cradle it like a little animal. Its softness and transcendence and Dioressence were thrown into bold relief, of course, by the fact that I'd spent the week in various post-Soviet apartment blocs without a tub or a hair dryer. If it had been thrown on the pile in Ivan Denisovich's shop, I'd have probably just stepped over it.

I'm always lusting after something but have never wanted for anything, unlike my mother, who when she was a little girl used to cut watches out of the Sears catalog and tape them to her wrist. She has a number of actual watches now (including one from Coach that I got at my first magazine job -- the company handed them out to the employees, who lined up like serfs), and I like to think it's because she has always dwelt in possibility.

* To a man, every single shoe or watch repairman who has availed me of his services in this city has been from Russia or a former Soviet republic. I happened to be on the subway with Ivan Denisovich one night and asked him why this was so, and he said it was because the Russians know how to fix and make do. This theory seems to be borne out by (1) the Comrade, who claims his brother built his own running shoes out of spare parts in the Eighties and (2) this old joke: During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, NASA decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero-gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of $1 million. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

** Also included: flame-retardant floor-length "gown," red, white, and blue Miss America sash, and, of course, tiara. Tendencies all this frippery was doubtless meant to encourage: Pretty Pretty Princess. Tendencies encouraged: Drag Queen.

*** In a less fashionable subdivision with a custom car-detailing place at the entrance

2006-02-06T17:07:00.000-05:00

Emma, thwarted.

Mistress of No Grand Schemes

2006-02-05T12:15:00.000-05:00

Dear Readers, Angry John Sellers may be full of free-floating rage, but he's got a heart o' gold! The recent posts are in a sidebar now, and I have a blogroll! He told me what to do, and I did it, and then the Comrade came in and advised me to do some more stuff AJS had already suggested, and it worked. Two sticks together, and -- fire!

(I must admit, I feel grateful but also sheepish. I know it doesn't take a Y chromosome to work the Internets, so why can't I act like it? And did I sit on my couch two weekends ago reading In Style while the Comrade dislocated a shoulder blade assembling our new kitchen cart? I did, friends. I did.)

It sounds like I'm due for another seminar in Deconstructing Feminist Ur-Texts. (Incidentally, that book I couldn't remember last post is Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, published in 1969.)

Anyway, thanks so much, Angry John Sellers, for your help. It's worth a price above rubies!

Red Lobster, Mon Amour

2006-02-03T12:31:00.000-05:00

I missed the original airing of this week's Project Runway because I was busy drinking that gin martini, but I saw it last night and afterward lay in bed still laughing out loud. I knew Santino's impressions of Tim were funny, but last night when he crafted an imaginary scenario in which Tim and Andrae went on a date to Red Lobster? And Andrae threw a plate of lobster in Tim's lap? And Andrae ran crying into the bathroom? Comedy gold, folks.

I'd also like to acknowledge the bonus video on the Bravo site the week of the Sasha Cohen challenge (and yes, my life is kind of without form and void, thanks for asking!) in which Santino makes up a spiritual dirge, a pastiche of "Go Down, Moses" called "Don't Let Emmett on the Serger." Santino is the kind of hilarious semi-friend who scares you because he might turn on you next. ("Don't ... Let ... [Your Humble Narrator] Near the Doughnuts.")

Finally in Project Runway news, Tim's latest podcast is a real gem:

a) He refers to himself as "Big Daddy," and
b) decrying the Frank Gehryness of Santino's construction, utters the withering "This doesn't have to be Bilbao!"

It's enough to make me forgive him for saying Rachel has "Gumby legs." If Rachel has Gumby legs, I have Vienna sausages. Actually, I do have Vienna sausages, so let's move on.

Emma and the Comrade had grown so close that I joked about her loving him more than she loves me, but now it's just painful enough to be the truth. Sometimes she doesn't run to me when I come in at night, just lazes out of the bedroom ashing her Parliament all over the floor. Then as soon as the Comrade comes in she shoots to the door like a fat little beaver hurtling out of a cannon, and as soon as he sits down, she's crawling into his lap like Daddy's little girl.

The Comrade assures me this is just a mama thing. "Mothers are always doing things -- they're khazyaushki,"* he said. "My mother was the one who fed us, but I couldn't wait for my father to come home so he could throw me up in the air. When I got older I realized everything she did for us, and now when I call home she's the one I talk to."

This is heartfelt logic, and yet there's a big hole in it because (1) let's face it, Emma has a brain the size of a walnut and (2) will never bring her laundry home from Bard College and have an epiphany that I loved her best all along. Of course, she's also never going to take a seminar in Deconstructing Feminist Ur-Texts**, either, so I'm glad she'll never grow up.

* housewives, but more than that -- sort of like domestic majordomos

** What is the early-Seventies "feminist novel" in which the heroine is a promising philosophy student who builds a timeline of great thinkers on the walls of her dorm room, but by the end of the book she's married, and a mother, and her great subversive act is to leave the dishes for morning so she can engage in marital relations with her husband? Anybody? I've Googled every combination I can think of.

Hit me with your best shot.

2006-02-02T10:29:00.000-05:00

A dear friend mixed me the finest gin martini last night. She served it in a perfect tiny glass bought in an estate sale, embossed with what must be the monogrammed initials of some couple who were parted only by death.

There's nothing like an alcohol-sodden Spanish olive to get you thinking about what a lousy wife you turned out to be, and what a lousy wife other people think you were, and what everybody must have said about it, or only thought.

Then I was leafing through Bust magazine on the bleary train ride home and saw that you can get your wedding ring melted down into a bullet! (Engraving available, as well as a drilled hole suitable for a chain around your neck.) Simply point your browser, embittered friends, to Goddammo.com. Either this is just the funniest thing in the world, or I don't get out enough.

The Year of the Dog

2006-01-31T17:34:00.000-05:00

Every time I schlep to my Chinatown psychiatrist I wonder why I'm going all the way down there; the office is half a mile from any feasible subway station and I'm always picking my way through hordes of people, and stepping over the odd pile of discarded sea urchins, in deeply unsuitable shoes. When I turn onto Mott from Canal, though -- especially if it's gray and rainy, the way it was today -- the signs and the lights and the mess are so cinematic I'm sure there's got to be a cameraman following me on a dolly.

When my mental-health insurance provider offered Dr. (let's call him) Wong Kar-Wai, I guess I got excited because I'd seen Woody Allen's Alice too many times and I guess I was hoping he'd cook up some herbs that would make me all whispery-voiced so I could seduce Joe Mantegna. (And I suppose everybody has seen the Seinfeld when Jerry is going out with Donna Chang, whose advice Mrs. Costanza takes as gospel until she finds out Donna is Caucasian and therefore no wiser than the rest of us.)

As it turns out, Dr. Wong Kar-Wai is merrily churning out prescriptions in an office festooned with Cymbalta promotional calendars, just like his colleagues over at Cedars-Sinai. It makes what happens in there seem as banal as it really is: I'm experiencing sexual side effects. My sleep patterns are erratic. If you give me another SSRI I will hunch under the piano and rock back and forth like Sybil.

I'm fond of him, though; he talks to me with as much interest and animation as if I were his only patient (which I must not be, because he'll stop our sessions to answer his own phone: not "Dr. Wong Kar-Wai!" but "Hello?" in a slightly paranoid how-did-you-find-me-here? kind of way).

He always asks about work, and that always turns into a one-sided harangue (his) on how print is becoming a dead medium. Last month he blamed it on MP3s, and this month it was Google. I can't follow this logic, either, and when I'm in there I'm even slower on the uptake than usual because it's this tiny little Skinner-box office with no windows and fluorescent panels that emit a purplish sort of bug-zapper light. Also, I'm stoned with allergy problems lately, and so it's like sitting in a field of opium poppies all the time (and not in a good way).

Which is why I was startled today when he told me I couldn't let my depression keep me from sharpening my technical skills, and why didn't I take a class at night? Have I seen what they're doing in the schools? Look at the PowerPoint presentation his ten-year-old daughter made!

He had some problems pulling it up on his laptop -- and I was unable to help him because the pull-down menus were in Mandarin (yeah, that's why) -- but at last he loaded it, a nice little full-color eight-slide show about Chinese New Year (Gung hay fat choy!) with a bar chart about how many people celebrate Chinese New Year worldwide and a bulleted list of the holiday's benefits (#3: "People want to get stuff").

"At ten years old!" he said. "And I can't even get it out of the computer!"

I tried to get him to teach me how to say "Gung hay fat choy" and said I'd rather learn Chinese than PowerPoint.

"Chinese is a very difficult language," he said."My kids don't even speak Chinese. I send them to Beijing to learn, they say it's stupid, they don't want to learn! I say, 'Fine!' You know, I have no expectations. I tell them, I save money for your college, you don't get into college, that's fine! Be a pizza boy!"*

I asked him if it bothered him that his children didn't speak his native language, and he said that it didn't because he resented Chinese culture anyway; when he was six and his brother eight, their parents were removed to the remote countryside "for political reasons" and didn't come back for five years.

"But why?" I said.

"For political reasons!" he said. "So I say, what culture? A culture of killing people! My grandfather was executed! Five-thousand-year-old traditions? These scholars should slit their throats! Always looking back, never forward!"

I must have said something about Confucius then, because he said, "Confucius is a dog!"

My silent Well, all righty, then! hung in the air between us.

"People call me crazy," he said then, "And I always say I have to be crazy to be a psychiatrist."

Meanwhile, a co-worker says if I want to see an acupuncturist, there's a great one over on St. Marks. Her name is Barbara.

*He also said something that I now can't recall exactly about "mediocre colleges," and I asked him where he'd want his kids to go, and he rattled off Harvard, Yale, MIT. "Or Stanford," he added reluctantly, the way my parents might say "Or Hiwassee College." Which kind of gives the lie to "no expectations," which proves that all parents everywhere rewrite history even as it happens.

Freak Love

2006-01-27T14:26:00.000-05:00

I missed Freaks and Geeks during its one season on NBC in 1999-2000 and on a whim recently added it to my Netflix queue. I'm only a third of the way through the episodes now, but feel tremendous affection for it and am heartily sorry it was over before I knew it had begun. (I'm guessing I'm not the only one, since somebody out there posted on its IMDb message board just 10 minutes ago.)

The show got a lot of attention from critics, who lauded it for casting real teenagers* who didn't trade in snappy dialogue but talked and acted like real kids, doing what real kids do; i.e., having alternate bouts of inarticulate mortification, irrational exuberance, and mind-altering boredom.

I like it for that reason, but also because it happens in 1980, in that weird liminal period between the dazed-and-confused Seventies and the New Waved Eighties, and it's not full of self-congratulatory nostalgia that overtakes the stories. Though I was heartened immeasurably to see, in the den (the den!) of John Bonham devotee Nick, a big wall clock made out of a slab of lacquered tree stump. It's at the base of the bottom of the stairs (the ones you have to trudge up so your parents can yell at you) , and the camera pans right past it -- but it's a great throwaway detail that was so evocative, for me at least, of what it's like to try to have a Rich Inner Life when you're basically under house arrest.

I also like it because it's a love letter (on your locker in Liquid Paper, with a Van Halen logo underneath) to Freaks everywhere. Long may they rock! I thought middle Tennessee was the only place where the kids passing a roach at the pep rally were called Freaks, and apparently I was wrong. The Freak, if you ask me, is a grievously underrepresented archetype. You could watch the whole filmic pantheon of the high-school experience and come away thinking that nobody ever put on a Journey (pre-Escape!) baseball jersey and drove around in a Gremlin.**

* Remember thirtyish Gabrielle Carteris as Andrea on 90210, shuffling along in her walker? She had to be sacrificed, Logan's Run-fashion, so she was promptly impregnated and married off. A fitting comeuppance for smart, dowdy girls everywhere!

**I deduct verisimilitude points only because these Freaks are so much more attractive, and showered, than the ones at my high school. If our Freaks had looked like James Franco, I'd still be in the back parking lot listening to "Comfortably Numb" and doing Whip-Its.

A Purely Hypothetical Question

2006-01-26T17:10:00.000-05:00

Say you're doing a story, and your primary source (in fact, your only source) -- a character, a Real Dame -- has a stage name that, for some, brings up unsavory associations with the porn industry. And say your queasy editor wants to use that source's given name instead.

So you e-mail the publicist (and your source has one!), and she e-mails back to express dismay and ask if The Dame has approved this. And your queasy editor responds (copying you) that you'll just call The Dame and ask.

This leaves you in a bit of a conundrum, because in order to ask The Dame whether it's okay to use her full name, you're going to have to give some reason why, and you don't want to insult her by saying her stage name is too porny, even though this must be obvious to her.

What would you do? The hypothetical floor is open to hypothetical suggestions.

Existential Nausea on Ice

2006-01-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

In the February Vogue: "From Poland with Love," or "How a Girl from Kansas Ended Up with a Boy from Katowice." The author pictured in a Duro Olowu-esque slipdress.

From the bathtub I yelled, "Jesus Christ, I should have written this!" (the way I'll tell Emma she should be the cat on the Fancy Feast commercials) and made the Comrade come in so I could read aloud:

"Men raised in formerly Communist countries make wonderfully patient shopping companions."

"Yes," he said, "Just tie us up like ossliki*."

Then he went back to obsessing about the European weather patterns and left me to wrestle with the crippling awareness that I will likely never be photographed for Vogue, and certainly not with my upper arms bare.

Friends, it's a short trip from rudderless wanderer to embittered crone. Sunday night the Comrade and I were watching the U.S. women's skating championships (out of consideration for my feelings, the Comrade pretends to be only half as enamored of Sasha Cohen as he really is), and so we were watching Emily Hughes, and so we fell to discussing Sarah Hughes and the 2002 Olympics.

The night she won, the Comrade was watching with some emigre friends (doubtless over herring salad in someone's Sheepshead Bay living room) , and his friend Senya maintained that Irina Slutskaya wuz robbed of the gold by a cabal of Long Island Jews. ("I am one old Jew myself!" said Senya. "I have cheated more people than you have kotleta po-Kievski** eaten!"***)

I squarely faced the Comrade: "Sarah Hughes was fucking awesome."****

The Comrade agreed that she was, and then, dear readers, I started to tear up, remembering. I think crying over an ice-skating routine that happened four years ago is part of the DSM-IV definition of "emotionally labile."

The Comrade asked if I was tearing up because Sarah Hughes was a triumphant underdog in the classic American tradition (to wit: Rocky II, III, IV, and V). Probably, I said, but also because she skated with such unleavened joy, and it was so pure and exhilarating and transcendent. How often do we get to see somebody be so passionate and brilliant without a thought for who's watching? How often do we get to experience that ourselves?

"You know how you watch the skaters and you sort of imagine you're them?" I said, and the Comrade said he did. "Well, I don't imagine the skaters as me anymore. I imagine them as my daughters."

"Well, let's have a daughter, then," he said.

With my therapist I tried again, five minutes before my session was up: "I think of them as my daughters," I said.

"Well, have a kid then," he said.

What I meant as despair apparently reads as longing. I guess they skate as a pair.

* donkeys

** chicken Kiev

*** This grotesque cultural stereotype is simply a verbatim account as related to Your Humble Narrator.

****For reasons I don't really understand, I prefer not to use profanity in this blog, but here I think it's sort of revealing.

addendum

2006-01-25T15:25:00.000-05:00

If you have questions, as I did, about What Happened Next to the Great Zucchini, you might be interested in this chat session with Gene Weingarten, the writer who followed him. There are some interesting insights here about the reporter-source relationship.

If a body catch a body, coming through the rye

2006-01-25T13:26:00.000-05:00

The man who will soon be my ex-husband just sent me a link to an article from the Washington Post magazine that should not be missed. I beg you not to be dissuaded by the fact that it's a five-page story on a children's entertainer called the Great Zucchini.

A Lavender Marriage

2006-01-19T16:50:00.000-05:00

Dear Tim Gunn,

When I worked on my college literary magazine, one of the lady poets' submissions had a line that went something like this: "In another time and place, I would show your hand the way." And then I believe it went on to talk about moons and huntresses, but nevertheless I recall it every week during Project Runway when I fall in love with you all over again, and then fall upon your blog and podcast like a ravenous wolf in a pile of table leavings.

Your silver-fox elegance. Your compassionate critiques. Your steadfast humanity. The sensitive yet unflinching way you totally called Andrae on the carpet when he threw that weeping fit on the runway! (Though I'm going to have to respectfully disagree and say I don't think it was "contrived" -- it was such an ugly, humiliating snot-cry, and I just can't believe anyone would mortify himself so utterly on purpose. Anybody manipulative enough to use his burned-down boutique for pity points would know that a couple of silent, climb-ev'ry-mountain tears would be far more effective. Or maybe that's just what I'd do.)

Tim! I want to hear your take on everything! The Argentinian maquiladoras! Wheat Thins vs. Triscuits! The Decalogue! Il Divo! Big Pharma! Why Slobodan Milosevic is still on trial!

In another time and place, I would have your baby, which we would swaddle in a nursery tastefully appointed by Banana Republic. The two of us would look down at our baby, Elsa Klensch Gunn, and marvel at what we've made together, this little person with absolutely no athletic ability and a closetful of onesies cut on the bias (so flattering!). I'd lay my head on the lapel of your velvety bathrobe and get my lungs all full of you. I bet you smell so good.

Love,

Your Humble Narrator

I Think I'm Turning Japanese

2006-01-17T17:54:00.000-05:00

I really think so.

I'm seriously considering joining the ranks of Japan's hikikomori, disaffected teens who for years at a time hole up in their rooms eating leftover dumplings and building model cars. Psychiatrists and social critics think the kids, mostly boys, must be alienated by their dim prospects in Japan's sagging economy, coupled with the pressure of culturally sanctioned gender roles.

I'd like to humbly submit my beloved late grandmother, Della Mai Agee, who holed up for years at a time eating chicken and dumplings and watching The Price Is Right while she smoked Pall Malls. It's a safe bet this had nothing to do with the falling yen, but was simply the only sensible lifestyle choice: Life inside the house is really just about as interesting as life outside, and certainly far less tiring.

At the heart of the Times magazine piece linked above is Takeshi, who used to spend 23 hours a day on his bed listening to his stereo; after four years he was finally spurred to leave (the logical conclusion to 1,460 days of nonstop Radiohead).

"It's not hopeful," he says, "but I learned that the world is not such a good place, and regardless we have to move on. That caught my heart."

Mine, too.

The Dame of Maiden Lane

2006-01-12T15:01:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from the office of my divorce lawyer, which is on Maiden Lane. Getting a divorce seems like far too Tanqueray-drenched and dame-y an endeavor to happen in a place called "Maiden Lane," where everybody should be wearing Bo-Peep outfits.

While I was filling out a form in the outer office, one of the other lawyers answered the telephone and the conversation went like this:

"Oh, hi. Yeah, yeah, I'm still waiting for your police report."

"Well. Well, you're not supposed to share that kind of information."

"Uh-huh."

"Uh-huh."

[muttering]

"Listen, I don't think we should discuss this over the phone -- you should come in. It sounds like you've just dug a bigger hole for yourself at this point."

At least I'm not that guy, I thought.

Something you should know if you're planning to split up in New York: No-fault divorce doesn't exist here. The closest thing is to file a marital separation agreement, be legally separated for a year, and then file for divorce. If you want things to happen faster, one party has to file a claim against the other on one of a few specific grounds. I won't go into what they are, but suffice it to say they're humiliating.

What's happened to me? A retainer should be something you leave on your cafeteria tray.

Such, Such Were the Joys

2006-01-10T13:48:00.000-05:00

On Sunday the Comrade and I finally made it to the Russia! exhibit at the Guggenheim, which ends tomorrow. I highly recommend it if you can (1) stomach the outrageous $24 admittance and (2) get there early, before the line snakes around 87th St. I love that Laurence Fishburne narrates the audio tour, which is well worth the extra $5.

If I had it to do over, I'd start at the top of the spiral, with the contemporary stuff, like Ilya Kabakov's installation The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, which depicts the plaster-strewn communal apartment out of which Homo Soveticus has just hurled himself with a catapult. Or Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe's "Pirat TV" videos, one of which features the artist as Marilyn with plastic pearls, having a soundless telephone conversation with a Jack Kennedy we can't see (And then Bobby's in the doorway! With a gun!).

As it was, I burned up a lot of my zeal downstairs with the icons, and was already waning when we got to the 18th-century Wanderers. By the time we reached the Social Realists, I had a bad case of Museum Face and really thought I deserved a sandwich. The Comrade, for whom the receipt of knowledge is not as great a burden as it is for me (is this why all the Russians I meet are electrical engineers/architects/nuclear physicists AND computer programmers?), was still fresh as a daisy four hours in, darting into one last gallery while I slumped on a stool like an old man shopping with his wife.

I find museums fulfilling and exhausting in equal measure because I feel chronically undereducated. It's so seductive, the prospect of cramming in all those facts, but I just don't have the grasp on history or geography that I wish I did, and without it there's no psychic Velcro on which those facts can stick. So they slide right off and into the gift shop, which always perks me right up. I wish I'd had one of those classical old-school educations like George Orwell writes about in "Such, Such Were the Joys." I know I'm not the only one with this kind of anxiety, else there wouldn't be U.S. History for Dummies or The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Life of Christ.

So I was looking at the paintings and pressuring myself to have an original thought, but I just kept recognizing people I knew. Peter the Great = Señor Swanky (whom I do not, come to think of it, know after all). The Von Dyck Christ with the stigmata looked much like the husband of a dear friend of mine, in the naked pictures she'd send me in the mail (not nearly as insane as it now sounds). A Wanderer's portrait of a fellow painter reminded me of the Japanese art history professor from Moscow who was my landlord/roommate, for whom I acted as Cupid ex machina to reunite him with his married girlfriend (just as insane as it now sounds). Then I heard a woman turn to her 12-year-old daughter in front of this portrait of Vsevolod Garshin and say, "Hey, that looks like Marina's dad."

The last time I felt burdened by my ordinary mind was the first time the Comrade and I tried to see the Russia exhibition -- it was too crowded to even think about lining up, so we went to the Met instead. And I saw this tender Toulouse-Lautrec painting of two reclining women whom I took to be a mother and a daughter; when I got close enough to the card, I saw that they were in fact a couple of prostitutes. The Munch painting that I thought was a man in passionate embrace with a redheaded siren was actually getting his life blood sucked out through the tooth holes in his neck. I began to realize, gentle reader, that I might not really be all that perceptive. The next weekend I was talking about this at a dinner party hosted by another dear friend, and the assembled company suggested I call this blog, as yet unborn, "I Didn't Know They Were Whores." Then I told my host how delicious the pork had been, and could I have the recipe. And reluctantly she said, "It was lamb."

Opposable Thumbs Be Damned

2005-12-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

If you like blogs about cats, you'll love blogs by cats. Even suspiciously fluent ones.

For some reason, a long time ago the Comrade and I were talking about what if a rabbit had a computer, and what kind of keyboard it would have (and there were no peyote buttons involved, I swear it). We decided that it would just have two big keys for the two big, plushy paws, one labeled CABBAGE and the other CARROT.

So our rabbit could type a story that would go like this: CARROT CABBAGE CARROT CABBAGE CARROT CABBAGE, and all the other rabbits would understand how beautiful it was. But then I pointed out that it wouldn't be much of a narrative without conflict, and so she would need a third key that said something like FOX! So: CARROT CABBAGE CARROT CABBAGE CARROT CABBAGE ... FOX!

Mea Maxima Culpa

2005-12-28T14:19:00.000-05:00

Dear parishioners of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, Brooklyn:

My mother and I, fresh-faced WASPs with a romanticized Thorn Birds understanding of Catholicism, have made a Christmas tradition of attending midnight mass in your house of worship. It's a lovely service, made even lovelier this year by the tiny boy in the kilt and brogans who carried the Christ child to the altar.

The moment when the lights go out and your cantor begins to sing (this year, jolting me from a shameful reverie in which I was wondering why on earth Sarah Jessica Parker had worn that positively dowdy striped sweater earlier on Larry King) may be my very favorite part of Christmas. For a couple of minutes every year, I feel -- to the extent that a fish-fry Methodist understands these things -- Christ's mystery.

I know I'm not supposed to take Communion in your church unless (1) I'm Catholic and (2) I've confessed. And every year I do it anyway, and every year I wonder if you guys can tell. I know you noticed that I didn't genuflect when I sat in my pew, and I know you think I'm cupping my hands to receive the host with a little too much cinematic gravity. But I've never believed my fish-fry Methodist God would mind if I just slipped in with everybody else: Only say the word, and I shall be healed. *

And that is why I am so heartily sorry that I drank the last drop of Christ's blood on Saturday night.

You know, when I take the wafer I always feel that mild anxiety that I'm not passing as Catholic, and in the relief that follows wonder whether I should chance it with the wine. (I've noticed quite a few of you take the wafer without, and the drinking of the wine just seems like a much more fraught transaction because you have to drink it under the watchful eye of the one who administers it, and it's unclear how much you're supposed to take, and then there is the ritual wiping-away of your Protestant saliva.) But this Christmas I decided to go for it, and that is why I was so flustered when, as "Silent Night" swelled around us, the lady with the goblet said, "The blood of Christ, given for you -- and there's just a little bit left."

My first impulse was to wave my hands around and say, "Oh, that's all right, I'm good," but then I would be not only a Methodist carpetbagger but one who treats the blood of Christ as something optional, like chastity, fidelity, or salvation itself. So I tipped the cup to my mouth and saw that there was indeed just the tiniest, feeble little drop, barely enough to trickle down to me.

So, good people, I didn't take it! I didn't! I just put my lips to the rim and pretended I did! I saved the miracle for the real Catholics!

I'm not sure what will be more offensive to you: (1) that I pretended to be Catholic so I could take your Communion or (2) that I just pretended to take your Communion because I wasn't Catholic.

Whichever, I am sorry.

Peace be with you,

Your Humble Narrator

*Maybe this is just my own version of the crapped-out relativism I decried in my last post.

Nolo Contendere

2005-12-20T17:41:00.000-05:00

The New York City Bar Association is at 42 W. 44th Street -- for those keeping score at home, an olive's throw from the Algonquin Hotel. Where is Dorothy Parker when you need her to meet you for a cocktail after your appointment at the Monday-night legal clinic?

The free lawyers had set up a table with Christmas cookies and Sprite, and the guy with the clipboard thanked me for coming -- really, card-carrying liberal New York at its best. I couldn't stop thinking about this quote from Annie Hall:

"You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself."

My lawyer wore a natty winter scarf with his blazer; think Jack Albertson, circa 1965. I told him I needed a simple (!) divorce, and he told me I need not rush into anything, and I realized with a sinking feeling that he must be assuming I was a Wronged Woman. I also realized he was letting his gaze linger on my decolletage, which was admittedly straining against a shirt that fit before I cultivated this bumper crop of new fat. I decided to be flattered. (I have long found Jack Albertson charming, perhaps because he had the courage to love blubbery, blubbering Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.)

I thought I could keep us away from the specifics of my situation, but as my 30 minutes of free legal advice wore on, I realized that was short-sighted and stupid. Would I go to be fitted for a brassiere and then refuse to show the saleslady my boobs? Because I didn't seem to mind showing them to my free lawyer!

And so I said, "I need to be frank with you. I'm actually the one at fault. I'm the guilty party. This is all of my own design."

And he said, "You have to stop thinking that way. Blaming yourself doesn't do anyone any good. These things are never one person's fault."

As I click-click-clicked out of the marble halls of justice, this felt less like absolution than empty moral relativism. It might have offered succor if I'd ditched Vacation Bible School for socialist summer camp.

Found in Translation

2005-12-19T11:55:00.000-05:00

Last night Emma didn't sleep in our bed the way she usually does, and so after ruminating about it for half an hour after lights-out, I got up and went into the living room to make sure she was still breathing.

Two hours later, both the Comrade and I were awakened by throaty, all-points-bulletin meows so loud he could hear them through his foam earplugs (which he always, Papaw-like, wears at night, sometimes with an American Airlines courtesy sleeping mask). We bolted in like the house was on fire to find her just sitting next to her food, and after we blearily petted her for a couple of minutes and she began to purr, we thought maybe she'd just been disoriented and went back to bed. Shortly thereafter I heard her placidly pushing her water bowl across the room.

Then the Comrade began snoring, not robust snores but broken, phlegmmy ones, the kind I imagine he'd make if a housecat were trying to suck out his breath. I prodded him and hissed that he should wake up and stop snoring like that, because he was scaring me -- Stop dying! Stop it right this instant!

After that I never did get back to sleep, because it seemed incumbent upon me to lie there in the dark and make sure none of us perished in the night. I used to refuse to sleep on airplanes because I thought that as long as I maintained consciousness, we couldn't crash, and in all honesty I'm still not totally convinced this isn't the case.

The Comrade: "Can't you feel my love evaporating?"

Your Humble Narrator: "Evaporating means it's disappearing."

TC: "What does the sun do?"

YHN: "It emanates."

TC: "Can't you feel my love emanating?"

When one person is not operating in his native language, the stage is set for all kinds of wacky misunderstandings and opportunities for poking gentle fun. Isn't it?

Also, there are the times when I realize I have not been heard at all. For instance, on Saturday I told the Comrade that we still had Red from Netflix, and also Closely Watched Trains (which I got because I think we have worked our way through every Russian film worth seeing, and this one won an Oscar though the jacket copy makes it sound like a Czech version of Rochelle, Rochelle). And yet we seemed to be watching Scary Movie 2.

I thought your people were supposed to be SOULFUL, I thought as I stalked off to the bathtub with the latest issue of Budget Living and a biography of Mao Tse-Tung. It would later be revealed that the Comrade had never heard me say anything whatsoever.

This happens, sometimes with repercussions swift and terrible, about every week or so, and then I find myself casting back to the moment I originally said the words and trying to remember whether it should have been obvious that we were trapped in radio silence. Had the Comrade responded with some non sequitur that should have indicated to me he'd misunderstood? Had he murmured something noncommittal? Or, worse and, it must be said, most likely, had he met me with the same glaze-eyed goodwill you extend to well-meaning yet unintelligible foreigners (to wit: the sweet Peruvian lady who works in my office building or, God help me, my Chinese psychiatrist)?

Then again, it could be a simple case of blah-blah-Ginger. The Comrade, incidentally, loves The Far Side. I fear that here he is coming off a little Balkie from Perfect Strangers, which is certainly not my intent; in fact, his English is usually good and often lyrical: He will stick his head out the window and proclaim that the air smells like "wet grass and dying leaves."

In the spirit of cross-cultural exchange, a Russian lesson:

The phrase for "Molotov cocktail" is butilka s goryuchey smes'yu, which literally means "bottle with flammable mixture."

But while you're reeling from how pedestrian that is, consider the words for ladybug: bozhe karovka, which means "God cow."

(Up Against) The Fourth Wall

2005-12-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

I interviewed Lili Taylor today! She's just as thoughtful as you want her to be, and speaks in eloquent, fully formed quotes. She worries about teenage girls.

Your humble narrator could not resist asking what she thought about the fate of her character on Six Feet Under -- didn't it seem unlikely that Lisa Kimmel Fisher (the way we had come to understand her) would have had an illicit affair with her dopey brother-in-law back in Coeur d'Alene, only to die at his hand? I know, I heard the words leaving my mouth and I tried to run after them, but there they were, having dislodged from my brain and fallen out like gumballs from a machine. And besides, I wanted to know.

Well, gentle reader, she said that she hadn't really kept up with Lisa after she went missing. She didn't go to the read-throughs after that, and people told her what happened on the show but she hadn't really watched. In fact, she does not own a television.

I'm afraid there's a lesson here, and I plan to stop my ears up and sing until it goes away. Why do I care more passionately about Lisa than the person who lived between her ears for three seasons (plus the one epi in season 1)? I mean, it's almost like TV characters are made up by people who get paychecks.

So maybe I should stop talking about them in therapy and think about something else. Like the plight of teenage girls!

Women Who Run With the Sopranos

2005-12-14T13:42:00.000-05:00

I had a therapist (n.b.: This blog is not going to be all about my unruly emotions and how I'm failing to manage them! Eventually we're going to get around to other things. Like cosmonauts.) lo these many years ago who would recommend books about how to heal the wounded woman within through Jungian archetypes, or literary characters (Your father as King Agamemnon: discuss). I can't say these helped or hurt, but I nonetheless read them with great relish, being fresh from college, where I took classes in which I wrote poetry based on my dream journals. (Really, for credit.)

Dear reader, it won't surprise you to learn that I have another therapist now, and we have never once talked about La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. Because apparently my heroine's journey is informed only by HBO.

My phantom back pain -- just like what Big Pussy suffered in season 1 when he was ratting to the Feds (and Dr. Melfi told Tony that back problems are often a manifestation of a psychological burden)!
The way I wonder how happy families look -- just like Brenda did when she ate with her boss's hyperfunctional family and then went home and tried, sadly, to recreate that hyperfunctionality with a new polenta recipe!
The Gordian knot of parental relationships -- just like the all-consuming love and corrosive resentment Carmela feels toward Meadow!
That hideous ponytail that the Comrade would not cut off -- just like Furio's!

Then a couple of weeks ago we were discussing free-floating rage, and I brought up the Sopranos episode in which Janice beats one of the other mothers at a soccer match and has to go to court-ordered anger-management classes --

And my therapist [who reminds me of Claire's high-school guidance counselor from Six Feet Under seasons 1 and 2 -- though I can also almost see him as Father Intintola] says, "And Tony goads her about her abandoned French-Canadian son until she blows up, and then he walks away smirking? We've talked about that before! [Beat.] Wasn't that you?"

Now, friends, I'm sure it wasn't me, and that means I am not the only analysand out there destroying my inner life with cable television. My therapist says TV characters and situations come up often, especially from The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, the devastating last episode of which got a lot of play on his couch in the weeks that ensued.

I asked him what he thinks about Tony's sessions with Dr. Melfi -- don't a lot of therapists think they're unrealistic? Didn't I read that in Slate? I thought he took this the slightest little bit personally, because he shot back, "They don't? Why not? Do you think they're realistic?"

"I -- I guess," I said, though I have never tried to (1) strangle him or (2) mount him, which Tony managed to do to Melfi just in the first season.

Last week I was watching the first episodes of the new Project Runway and I found myself tearing up at the false(tto) bravado of Heidi, the uber-enervating Alabamian, after she was booted out -- snapping right back with that chirpy "Let me hug y'all anyway!" How many times have I made that cornbread-fed chirp-chirp-chirp in the face of disappointment, I thought, and then: The line is drawn here.

Just like Captain Picard did in Star Trek: First Contact!

To reward you for reading this far, let's have a cosmonaut story:

When the Comrade was six he had to have his appendix removed. He says the doctor led him by his little hand into the operating room, where he boosted him onto the table and told him they were going to play cosmonaut, with a special mask and everything. The doctor said, "Don't you want to be a cosmonaut when you grow up?" (I swear that in a previous iteration of this story he said, "Don't you want to be like Yuri Gagarin when you grow up?" but the last time it was recounted this version was, Politburo-style, discarded.)

Anyway: "Don't you want to be a cosmonaut when you grow up?"

And the Comrade said, "No, I want to be a janitor!"

He said he wanted to be a janitor because Kolya, the janitor in his apartment block, was such a cool guy, in a special coverall with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, all [and for this next untranslatable bit, he swaggers forth, eyes squinted, looking not unlike Steve McQueen were Steve McQueen pushing an industrial-size broom].

I guess the doctor wanted to honor the Comrade's proletariat impulses (lest the doctor find himself in Kamchatka eating shoe leather), so he said that seemed like a fine thing, but wouldn't it be fun to play cosmonaut?

The Comrade agreed that it would, and so the doctor put the mask on, and he doesn't remember another thing. Poor tiny cosmonaut! It kind of chokes me up.

Better Than the Movie

2005-12-13T12:10:00.000-05:00

I've just finished the new book from Joyce Carol Oates (the writer so prolific that she may not in fact be a writer at all, but a head in a jar). It's set in the suburbs of upstate New York, and I realized that while I was reading the parts that take place in the narrator's mother's house, I was picturing the first suburban house I grew up in. I was six; it was a two-story brick house on a corner lot. Then I realized that whenever I read a book about suburbia, I picture it happening in that house. Does anybody else do this?

Ripeness Is All

2005-12-12T14:42:00.000-05:00

This weekend I couldn't stop cooking, or ruining the food. I thought I'd make a trifle but the pudding would not thicken (I didn't know this was negotiable. I didn't know pudding came in anything other than instant!), the brussels sprouts didn't caramelize the way Ruth Reichl said they would (they just charred on the outside while the inside remained intractably cabbagey), the eggs for the salad refused to boil (there was a warp in the time-space continuum, because they were in that pot for at least 30 minutes, my hand to God). The food had a life of its own, and it defied me.

When I was with [the man who is still my husband] I didn't even know how to boil an egg. Once I tried to stir-fry some frozen vegetables but left the bag sitting on the stove, where it caught fire, and then I lost my appetite because everything smelled like burned plastic.

When we split up, it became apparent that I was going to have to learn to cook if I ever wanted to eat at home again. And then, with my Comrade in Arms, something happened: this Italian-mamma alter ego moved in and wouldn't leave. I say "Italian mamma" the way Nigella Lawson would understand it: she wore a black slipdress with cups and was always pushing a wooden spoon around in something delicious, hip jutted out provocatively.

I guess this is a normal part of the courtship ritual, as I might have realized earlier in life had I not (1) married soon after the first time I left the menstrual hut, (2) been living in a dormitory when I met [the man who is still my husband], where we weren't even allowed hot pots, and (3) married a terrific cook who was kind of proprietary (though this is not the way he would remember it) about the kitchen.

So what I'm saying, and maybe this is news to no one, is that for the first time in my life, cooking seemed like a Womanly Art. And so I set about to learn it, getting elbow deep in flour and proudly setting the results in front of the Comrade as if I were a housecat and this was a bird I'd killed in the yard.

In a sad confluence of events, food is not at the heart of the Comrade's existence, and this was especially true in the early days of my life as a cook. When he was growing up in Odessa, meals were a rotating selection of three items, most likely stewed, and they did not stand in for love, sex, social interaction, or comfort. Food was fuel that was necessarily ingested so that one could get on with the business of propping up The Great Soviet Athletic Machine.

Which is why there were tears and recrimination, O, reader, there was HEARTBREAK(!), when the Comrade rejected the macaroni and cheese (four cheeses! hand-grated!), when he proclaimed the beef in the stroganoff "too tough," when he suggested cooking the salmon in the casserole a little longer next time. It didn't feel like disappointment or garden-variety humiliation, but rejection! Sexual rejection! The Italian mamma within slunk out to the fire escape to hang up her laundry, a cigarette between her lips.

Usually if I can't get anything on the first try, I pretend I never wanted to do it in the first place; with the cooking, though, I didn't have that luxury. We had to eat. And that is why I threw out the mealy buckwheat kasha and boiled another batch right before the Comrade came home, just so he could say it was perfect and I could say, "Better than your mother's?" And why I gathered tips on chicken cutlets in kitchens all over Odessa, while the Comrade translated. I got better, and the Comrade came to understand how important the food was to me, and together we talked the Italian mamma down off the ledge.

[The man who is still my husband] and I were chow-happy chowhounds. I could probably reconstruct our lives together through meals we ate, and wouldn't consider that an impoverished way to do it. The pineapple we ate on our honeymoon, the apple cake his mother used to make with one-and-a-half cups of Wesson oil, the truffle risotto at the Central Park West restaurant we couldn't afford. I ate hundreds of meals with him, and honestly never had a better dining companion.

My favorite scene in Kramer vs. Kramer is toward the end of the movie, when Ted and Billy are expertly making the French toast together -- as opposed to the mess they made at the beginning, when they'd been thrown to their own devices. You're meant to watch how effortless the cooking is and understand how far they've come, and I think of that now when I cut up an onion in an especially efficient way. Sometimes when I'm deglazing a pan I'll think, how do I know how to do this, and then I realize I must have seen [the man who is still my husband] do it and it's like he's out there guiding me in a Kung Fu flashback.

Last night I saw him for the first time since he moved away. Neither of us were hungry but we fell on our dinners like wolves. About the brussels sprouts: He says I should have boiled them before I put them in the oven.

(He's thinking about doing his dissertation on the Geechees, who live on the coastal islands off Georgia, and maybe he'll work in a trip to their homeland, Sierra Leone. "It's much better now," he said airily.)

He also says we need to get divorced. "I think I could be a better friend to you if we did," he said. "I feel like the sword of Damocles is hanging over my head." Then he said he couldn't remember who Damocles was.

I stupidly replied that the albatross was from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And then: "How much mental real estate does this [this, this awful thing I did to us, and everything that followed] occupy for you these days?"

He said not that much anymore, and then asked the same thing of me, and I said a lot, and that it had been a bad year, much worse than the first year after I left.

He said wouldn't it be good to get closure, or put it behind me, or whatever it is you say, and I said that I didn't think I ever would. (The brussels sprouts at this French bistro, incidentally, weren't any better than mine.) I told him that he could have filed for divorce if he'd wanted to, the way I used to say, Well you could have paid the ConEd bill yourowndamnself, and he said he hadn't wanted to, and of course I know why. In front of the restaurant I told him I was proud of him, and he told me I should start writing again, and then I had to get away so I could howl.

A cafe opened up around the corner from our apartment a few months ago, a sweet little place with yellow ribbons and patriotic effluvia on the door and in the windows. When I finally got around to eating there, I saw on the wall a photo of the family who owns the restaurant, behind the podium at the most recent Sept. 11 memorial service. Standing on the far right was the harried lady who cooks the eggs. In the corner of the photo was the family's surname, which I also found on a poster that listed the firefighters who had died that day.

I had kind of a, I don't know, Formal Feeling about that place after that; I can't eat a piece of bacon there without thinking Life Goes On! It's not maudlin, and it's not inspirational, either; it's just the living example that after devastating loss, there is still a blackboard out front waiting for the pies of the day, and that this is at once awful, unfathomable, and the entire point. With grief, pancakes.

Nothing New Under the Sun

2005-12-09T13:50:00.000-05:00

I began this blog when I failed to write a novel during National Novel-Writing Month. I thought 50,000 words in 30 days would be a good way to keep expectations low while pulling myself out of the Slough of Despond I've been in lately. I've never written fiction consistently and in fact stopped thinking of myself as a fiction writer a long time ago (which is where the low expectations come in). But it seemed like the right thing at the right time, and of course I couldn't be satisfied until my cousin agreed to do it, too. (And now she's done with hers, by the way, which is the difference between those who Do Things and those who sit, paralyzed, while fruit cup dribbles from their chin(s).)

But the morning before November 1, I woke up from a dream in which I was shelving books in the library as part of a work-release program. (I'm not sure whether I know this because we were wearing orange jumpsuits, or because it was just a given, as sometimes happens in dreams.) I kept pulling one big, complicated volume or another off the shelves and thinking I really should get around to reading this, but (shoving it back in place) I'm just too tired. And then, on one of the lower shelves close to the Periodicals section, I found a little heap of stale doughnut holes, just for me.

Feeling shame and good fortune in equal measure, I popped one in my mouth after the other, and though it was like eating cinnamon toast made from particle board, I don't think food has ever made me happier. Then the whistle blew, signaling the end of our shift; my colleagues finished their work and filed out, on the way to vocational school (and this was definitely one of those dream-dictated givens), where they would learn general secretarial skills. I felt so forlorn, because my stale doughnuts were gone, and because I felt like Cinderella being left at the hearth.

And when I woke up, I had to ask myself, how did I get so low that I mourned being cast out of the earthly paradise of vo-tech? And why was I making do with not even stale doughnuts but holes -- the little scrap pieces of dough that had been cast out of actual, actualized doughnuts?

I realized that I had been down so long, down did indeed worry me. Could National Novel-Writing Month save me?

We'll never know, because that night, when I ostensibly could have started the novel that would have restored me from hole to whole, I watched The Four Seasons (with Alan Alda and Carol Burnett, who I so wish were married in real life) while I made a pot of Weight Watchers 0-POINTS soup and drank brandy out of a tiny, tiny teacup.

After this had gone on for a few nights (with varying movies and pots of food, but consistent tiny brandies), I realized that this wouldn't be the month when I wrote a novel. And after begging my cousin's forgiveness, I promised I would start a blog.

This was easier said than done, because to have a blog I needed to name it, and gentle reader, you would not believe how many people are out there on Blogger blogging away with domain names that should have been mine. After a while, I stopped trying to find a name and just began randomly entering text (scarface.blogspot.com) just to see if someone had thought of it, and most of the time someone had.

A random sample:

Unreliable Narrator
Reliable Narrator
Humble Narrator
Jolie Laide
Fishwife
Shrew
Sotto Voce
Nota Bene
Mirabile Dictu
Rosetta Stone
Wage Slave
Family Album
At Sea
Sea Legs
Tall Cotton
Odessa File
Water Water Everywhere
Antidote
Stockholm Syndrome
Bluestocking
Puppet Master
Newspeak
Doubleplusgood
Girl Detective
Letters Home
Dear Diary
Slim Pickings
Nothing New Under the Sun

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: That you are dreadfully like other people. ~James Russell Lowell, "Democracy Address," Birmingham, England, 6 October 1884

When I found the Dickens quote "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips," I was kind of enchanted by "Prunes and Prism" but rejected it because I believe most Americans, including this one, associate prunes with laxatives. Then it occurred to me that since I'd been walking around calling myself "spiritually constipated," prunes might be somehow fitting. (And I hope, though I cannot promise, that that is the only scatalogical reference you will ever encounter in these pages.)

Finally, I came across the reference to "prunes and prism" that you see underneath the blog's title, on the entertaining and informative site Merrycoz (and I would like to thank its proprietress for allowing me to quote her). I've never read Little Dorrit, and when I saw "prunes and prism" in context, it just rang like a bell that this should be the name -- because this blog, like those young ladies' exercises, is a hopeful and probably misguided attempt at self-improvement, and also because we all so earnestly believe that we can reshape ourselves through words.

Chapter 2: Emma

2005-12-08T18:35:00.000-05:00

Now let's see if I can upload a photo. I love this picture of Emma! She looks so beautiful and damned.

Chapter 1: I Am Born

2005-12-08T18:10:00.000-05:00

I am humbled by my blogging ignorance. Next time my mother calls and wants me to explain how to save a Word document, I'm going to have more compassion than I did the first 108 times. Let's see if I can link The New York Times.