I've been following the show this month in part because my son and a number of his classmates from his high school had gone down to New Orleans last year as part of Habitat for Humanity's spring break program, where high school and college students volunteer to spend their spring break building houses in different parts of the country. Most of his group's time was spent working in Musicians' Village in the Ninth Ward, a project funded by (among others) Harry Connick Jr.and Branford Marsalis. My son brought back photos of his trip, and I was a little shocked that even after two years (Chris' group went in March 2007) so much of the Ninth Ward was still in ruins---most of the wrecked houses were still standing, and there was junk lying everywhere in the streets and yards.
I don't understand why the Bush administration isn't a little embarrassed by this. We still have foreign dignitaries visiting New Orleans and touring the Ninth Ward as if it was a third world country. Though after watching the Bush family tour New Orleans and the AstroDome in Houston where refugees were staying, I thought that maybe they thought they were visiting a third world country as well.
When Chris and I talked about his trip---he was a very changed man after that, and maybe all high school kids should be required to put in some time in NOLA---I fretted about only musicians being allowed to live in Musicians' Village. What about the nurses, the cooks, the carpenters, the garbage collectors? Shouldn't they be allowed to live there too?
Chris explained that because New Orleans had been so dependent on tourism to propel its economy, it was hoped that if one sector---the performing arts---was encouraged to recover, then the others would follow as tourists would come in again to listen to music. Also, when artists and musicians move into a neighborhood and fix it up, the entire area becomes more desirable to live in. (Some might cry 'gentrification'---the neighborhood I live in now is sort of an example of that---but better a neighborhood full of yuppies perhaps, than abandoned shells and meth kitchens.) Connick and Marsalis also put money into building a music education center in the middle of the village in order to give local kids affordable music lessons. Since a Guggenheim study two years ago showed that kids who receive education in the arts do better in other academic fields, this can only be good.
I was troubled by the Old House interviews with current homeowners in the Ninth Ward who had to chain down antique garden gates and gingerbread trim on their houses due to thieves who stole the items and sold them to feed drug habits. Chris also observed that almost every night his group was in the Ninth Ward, they saw houses surrounded by flashing police cars and ambulances. So for people to come back and rebuild the place is in itself pretty courageous.
What would you do with your extra time off next time you are in-between jobs?
Submitted by Oleg Dulin.
My job is classified as "seasonal adjunct," meaning that, unlike the regular faculty, I don't get paid during the periods when classes aren't in session. I get laid off.
For three months in the summer and two weeks around Christmas and New Year's, I don't get a paycheck. But it's assumed I'll come back in January and the fall to cheerfully put the chains back on and throw myself into work.
What actually happens however is that I sweat and pray that I find something to tide me over during those times. Sometimes I've been able to find full time summer work. When I was in grad school I attended summer classes and got financial aid. But being between jobs is no fun. You might like being able to sleep in late and staying up to watch old movies for awhile: but when those bills start piling up on the hallway table you start thinking about freshening up the old resume and calling some of those contacts that you met at that conference last spring.
(And when they don't return your phone calls or emails, you start thinking, shoot, did that joke I told at the bar offend them? Am I starting to look old? Should I take some accreditation courses and get yet another license to teach something else? Several friends are going through this, and I'm worried about one of them, who's wondering if he should go back to selling ads for a TV station. I told him don't: the last time he did that, he was babbling about leaving the family and going to Tahiti to paint. He's a great salesman but a sensitive soul, and not being called back really hurts him.)
Anyway, the question seems a little too flippant at a time when the economy is going bottoms up. Vox really needs a reality check.
This was a difficult story to read if only because I regard my "pets" as family. I'd rather live in my car with them than abandon them in a vacant house or apartment.
I'd be tempted to adopt an abandoned animal, particularly a dog: but Eliza would probably kill me if I did.
(Actually she'd just make my life miserable: forget to use the litter box, yowl all night on a Monday, knock everything off of the kitchen counters, drink all the liquor. She owns me, not vice versa.)
What is the worst city you've ever been to and why?
Submitted by Soup.
Las Vegas: I was there years ago for the Consumer Electronics Show as a tech reporter. The convention people put
As for the town, it was hell for someone who thinks a great city is comprised of a good art museum, great architecture, and distinctive city/cultural landmarks (think the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, the Sears Tower and Wrigley Field in Chicago). Las Vegas was and still is a pile of kitsch. There were a lot of faux European-style buildings and the glitz that you see in movies like Oceans 11, but it reminded me of an adult Disneyland: nothing was quite real and the amusements were all for thrills and money. The only things that seemed authentic were the old reminders of Rat Pack Las Vegas: the neon cowboy over the Pioneer Club (also no more) and the winking cowgirl with the swinging leg.
But what really bothered me were the people I ran into there: the cocktail waitress who took my $20 bill and wouldn't bring me change for a $6 drink until I demanded it---she snarled at me and called me a "cheap bitch" (no tip for her fersure); the guys from Florida I had to share a cab with who said the funniest thing they saw were the "Japs taking pictures of everything at the electronics show;" the cab driver who thought I was a Japanese tourist and tried to overcharge me; the guys at the porn booths in the "adults only" section of the show who kept making ugly remarks to me and the other female visitors unlucky enough to wander by them. Most of the entertainment in the casinos was directed at men primarily as well: lots of topless showgirls, g-strings, and cards handed out on the sidewalks advertising strip clubs and escort services. I was recently married and missing my husband a lot during that junket, so this stuff made me even more homesick. I finally left after just two nights, and except for occasional layovers when traveling west, I never have gone back.
"What happens here, stays here?" Gooood. Stay there. Stay and don't cross my path. Ever.
Severe Weather Warning
It's not so much the cold that's killing everyone now as it is cabin fever. We've been locked indoors since Friday night, and even though the Weather Service says it's going to let up tomorrow---the high is supposed to be 12 degrees instead of the measly 5 we had today---we still have a couple of nights of subzero temperatures to get through.
My bedroom is freezing since the miserable window won't close properly. You can actually see the blinds waving around as the wind blows through. The building maintenance guy says it's an old window, not much he can do about it now, and left a box of plastic to put over the frame, the kind you blast with a hair dryer to make it shrink to fit. The problem is that the window is 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide. The building used to be an old factory, so the windows are all industrial-size. There's not enough plastic in the package to cover the window.
So I sleep in the living room on the futon. That's not terrible, except that the people in the apartment above me bought over the weekend a new TV with theater-quality speakers. You can hear whatever it is they're watching and more. The walls vibrate, the window panes occasionally shake. I asked them to turn it down, and they did for one afternoon. The next day it was back on, even louder than before.
I'm not going to go back upstairs and ask them again. The guy is belligerent and spiteful: when I was drying my hair in the bathroom the other day, he began ramming something on the floor above me. After I turned the dryer off. This afternoon when I came home, the guy almost immediately turned on his TV so I could listen to the Honda commercial on the air. So I called the head manager, who is a pretty nice gal though somewhat ineffective. She promised to write them a notice, but somehow I am not hopeful. I hate neighbor wars---I'm just not mean enough to win them---but I anticipate that the following weeks are not going be pleasant.
Not that it matters: I want to get out of not just the apartment, but Minnesota as well. I'm tired of having to walk around in 30 extra pounds of insulation. Everyone looks like they weigh 200 pounds in this weather, unless they're one of the dumb ones who walks outside in just a hoodie and canvas sneakers. I'm sick of salt and ice covering the car and getting on my coat, pants and shoes. You spend an extra ten minutes every morning brushing yourself off before walking into the office. And all those weird little things that happen in weather this cold: the locks on your car freeze so you can't get in (tip: carry a cigarette lighter with you and use it to heat up your car key so that the heat thaws out the tumblers in the lock); your pens stop writing because the ink inside is frozen (keep a pencil handy); and no, don't even THINK of licking that lamppost, not if you value your taste buds. There's a similar phenomenon that occurs when you try to open your car door with wet or damp hands, so make sure you don't wash them before you go outside, or at least cover them up with insulated gloves.
And don't nobody say, "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Whatever doesn't kill you gives you post traumatic stress syndrome. You flinch every time you hear a loud noise: or in my case, the silence of a winter night.
After just a week of living under The Compact, I'm somewhat on the verge of quitting. No, not because I really really have to have that $7,000 Fendi handbag: but because I've been locking horns with a couple of people on The Compact's Yahoo forum.
Yes, I'm opinionated. Yes, I tend to step in it and make a mess out of things sometimes. But I had no idea that people could turn what seems like a good idea for reducing consumption and waste into a test of moral purity.
It began this evening when one member asked about the recession and the theory posed by certain pundits and economists that not spending money is bad for the economy. What about the people who are losing jobs because of the downturn in consumer spending? the member asked. Do we have a moral obligation to buy stuff? How does The Compact fit into this?
These were good questions: does my not buying coffee anymore from the family-owned corner coffee shop have a negative impact on their employees? Is my refusal to buy that cute little jacket at Macy's even though I want it really really bad responsible for the 100 jobs lost this month at the Macy's local corporate offices? Will the local deli start laying off employees because I've started brown bagging my lunches to work now?
The exchange started out well: people offered well-thought out responses about the greater good and how not spending your money on pointlessly expensive stuff is better for both the individual and the community in the long run; that it's strictly a personal choice, and one had to decide for oneself about what is the "greater good" and what a person regards as really necessary to one's daily life. No one thought designer shoes or a flat screen HDTV was necessary for existence, but there were some humorous thoughts about that.
Then someone brought up credit cards and mortgage foreclosures, and she began ranting about how greedy and irresponsible people were, that they thoughtlessly spent money that wasn't theirs on stupid stuff and now they expected the government to bail them out. I know that not everyone now in trouble with their debt load or on the verge of bankruptcy was very smart or careful with their money: but there are concrete reasons for why we are in a recession right now, and they don't involve HDTVs or designer bling. Since 9/11 wages have been stagnant---many families actually saw their annual take home pay drop in the last 4 years---while the price of commodities have jumped, in some cases as high as over 30 percent. The average person doesn't make enough money to cover the daily cost of living, much less a medical emergency or a large expense like car repairs. Increasingly, the middle class are turning to credit cards and loans to cover expenses like medical and dental procedures, prescription drugs, educational costs, and home repairs, particularly as fewer people are insured or insurance companies decline to cover such expenses. The main reason given for declaring bankruptcy these days is the inability to pay hospital bills. A single accident or serious illness can impoverish a two-income middle class family.
Anyway, I brought all of this up in my response, and I probably didn't help things by starting out, "I find that post to be a bit judgmental...." (My friends complain sometimes that I sound "starchy" in my emails, probably because teaching grammar all day long make me overly conscientious about my own writing.) But I essentially beat the person up with my bagful of stats and links, which was probably unnecessary. A couple of hours later, the person apologized, said she didn't mean to seem judgmental, but she was thinking about the credit card and mortgage companies as well. Oh, okay, that's different, sorry. (But try to be more clear in your post next time.) She was fine, I was fine, it seemed like it was over. Except for this one member whom I'm guessing lives in a small town and maybe went through hard times. She started a rant about how PEOPLE DO NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN LIVES: they spend too much money on junk food, which causes health problems; they don't floss and take care of their teeth; they fill up their carts at Wal-Mart with useless junk and think they've paid for it with a credit card. ("Wal-Mart" is always a class marker: a lot of people who shop at Wal-Mart are blue collar or lower income, though not necessarily: the stores just seem to pop up more often in rural areas and proletarian suburbs where they suck up the local economy with their "low low prices" that family-owned businesses cannot compete with.) Oh, and if they have kids, "they should have thought about that before they started having sex." She closed by saying no matter how many times Dr. Phil and Oprah tell people they need to take responsibility for themselves, PEOPLE JUST DON'T LEARN.
At this point I was cracking up. Not ROTF but enough to make my cat sit and yowl at me. ("Knock it off already.") I admit my respect for people who watch Dr. Phil and Oprah and take them seriously is not high. (Though I thought Oprah's Book Club was a good idea: anything that gets people to read more gets props from me.) But I was also bothered by the general tenor of the post and others, which inferred that if you go around spending your money on things they don't approve of, there must be something wrong with you---not just wrong, but horribly bad. And if you are now in financial trouble and can't pay your credit cards or your stupid car loan (you must be stupid if you bought a new car---there is a simmering prejudice against new cars in the forum) or that mortgage you couldn't afford in the first place, it's your own fault. There was virtually no acknowledgment that people get laid off, get sick or injured through no fault of their own, can't possibly control or plan for every hiccup in life.
I was a little worried when I signed up for the Compact that I wouldn't be able to live up to the rules, which was to not buy anything new for a year. But now I'm worried that my dirty little habits---purchasing name-brand toilet paper instead of generic or recycled, getting the daily newspaper delivered to my door instead of reading the free copy in the library, eating junk food between meals and not flossing my teeth---will never match the high standards of the other members. And if I need a root canal or end up in some Dickens-style debtors' prison, well, it must be my fault. Or wait---didn't Dickens make it clear that kind of thinking was wrong-headed?
Our neighbors to the west are in froth over this article in this January's issue of National Geographic, which paints North Dakota as this god-forsaken wasteland where everyone and everything are dying.
Myself thinks they don't have to worry. For one thing, the story is so full of cliches about the prairie it's almost unreadable. I thought this stuff died with Willa Cather, but folks on the right coast are so provincial.... For the other, as long as I-94 runs through North Dakota and people like me have to drive through there to get to places like Seattle, the state will always be an anchor, a place to fill up the tank, eat dinner and look at the giant fiberglass animals on the roadside (see right).
North Dakota probably should be more worried about its reputation of anti-Native American racism, given the controversy over the University of North Dakota's sports team, the Fighting Sioux. The Standing Rock Sioux have already said they don't like it, and the NCAA has more or less sent the college into tournament exile until it changes its name. Unfortunately the school has accepted a lot of money from local alumni who don't want the name changed, and alumni bling is more important to most colleges than what the locals, especially marginalized locals of color, have to say.
That said, my own experience with Nodakers has been better than average. Two summers ago, my just-graduated younger daughter and I were driving from Tacoma to Minneapolis in a U-Haul truck that should have been junked 90 thousand miles earlier (there was 175,000 miles on the odometer, and when I objected, the clerk told me it was that or go to another place). The truck suddenly died on the side of I-94 30 miles east of Bismarck. There was a thunderstorm coming in---we could see lightning touching down on the horizon, and rain began coming down---and the U-Haul emergency person I called was less than helpful.
("Open the hood and check the belt." Uh, it's starting to rain and it's getting dark and we're on the side of a really busy freeway. Can't you just call a tow truck now? "But ma'am, you might be able to fix it right there...." Right: the Pep Brothers are just a three hour walk from here, I could get a couple parts from them.)
Then a North Dakota Highway Patrolman pulled over, and, not having the greatest experiences with cops, I thought, terrific, he's probably going to harass us about blocking the road or being from out of state. He did not: he asked us if we were okay, then said he was on his way to the station to report for duty but would come back in an hour to check on us. He was so sweet and reassuring I wanted to bawl, since I was on the verge of losing it anyway talking to the U-Haul dorks. About 10 minutes after he left, an 18-wheeler pulled over: the driver, a Canadian vet recently back from Iraq, stopped and asked if we needed help. We said a tow truck was already on its way, but he said he'd wait until the truck came, and we spent 40 minutes chatting about his wanting to start a ministry in Winnipeg.
(This is why I think road trips are superior to flying: only on the highway are you going to meet people like this.)
When the tow truck driver finally got there, it was pitch dark and I was really really grateful for the Canadian truck driver's company. (I wrote his name down on a card but can't find it now. It's strange too about these encounters: you meet these people once and never see them again, but the moment you met them seems so extraordinary, it's hard to believe it happened by chance.) I was worried the tow truck driver would have an issue with the rats in the U-Haul---Monty, Ernie, and Mr Smithers, all refugees from the University of Puget Sound psych lab, were in the cab with my daughter and me, long story won't go into it here---but he picked up their cage and set it into the tow truck's cab, and away we all went to Bismarck---never was I so happy to see city lights on the horizon. The dead U-Haul got dropped off at a rental center, and we got dropped off at a nice motel. The next morning the overworked but friendly rental center owner, who apparently got no help from U-Haul either, gave us a shiny new truck and loaded all of our stuff into the back. We drove back to Minnesota that day, and I kept thinking about how dependent we are on the kindness of strangers, pace Blanche DuBois.
If you were suddenly granted the day off today, how would you go spend your free time?
It's a little late for New Year's, but the January Hanafuda design is filled with Japanese New Year's symbols, which I thought was interesting: the pine trees and crane represent long life (cranes in East Asian and Taoist mythology are supposed to live a hundred years); the strips of paper, which you're supposed to hang on the pine boughs, have wishes for the new year written on them.
Vox excluded the the stack of rice cakes (mochi) with the mandarin orange on top, which you're supposed to put out as an offering to the old gods, the barrel of sake, and the throwing of beans to drive out last year's bad luck from one's home and welcome the good luck. I miss the latter, which was fun for kids: you got a box of toasted soybeans, which you took to the front door and began throwing out in handfulls while yelling, "Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi!" meaning, "Devils out, luck in!"
(Though this sometimes resulted in throwing the beans in your sibling's face and starting a fight, which my mother said was a bad omen of things to come. But the male head of the household was supposed to perform the ceremony anyway, and Dad was always in the living room, hiding behind a newspaper or watching one of the Bowls. In retrospect, he wasn't so much of a head of household as a male accessory we called "Dad." Mom ran the household and by all rights should have had the honor of throwing out the beans.)
The beans you didn't throw out, you were supposed to eat. I liked toasted soy beans, so that was no problem compared to eating the boiled mochi soup and black beans cooked in soy sauce broth for New Year's breakfast. The mochi was gooey and glutinous, and if you weren't careful, you could choke on it. The black beans were nasty, a bowl full of overcooked, tasteless yuck (well, they tasted like soy sauce). I don't know why beans represent long life and good luck in Japanese culture, though every twenty-first of the month we also had to eat mame-gohan, bean rice, supposedly in honor of my paternal grandfather, who died on the 21st of August. (My father's birthday is August 25, which might explain why he's never enjoyed birthday parties.) I've asked my mother why the bean rice, and she said, "Because your ba-chan (Dad's mom, my Grandma) says so." It's nothing like say, the black beans and rice from Latin American and Caribbean countries, or even like Indian dal. It's bland, maybe flavored with a little salt, but not anything I miss from my childhood. I wonder if my mother even bothers fixing it anymore, since she doesn't even know when the 21st of the month rolls around.
I'm a little curious why Vox doesn't explain what Hanafuda means, given they've titled an entire series of blog designs around the theme. It's a card game in which you match cards with similar monthly themes---January for example is typically represented by pine trees and cranes, so you try to get the set of four cards with the pine and crane pictures (see card at far right). So there are 12 sets or themes, and the object is to get as many matching sets as possible, kind of like a Japanese
(The new Windows Vista has in its Games package an electronic version of mahjong, which got a little too addictive for me. Another reason not to upgrade to Vista.)
How do you feel about your birthday? Do you look forward to it and remind all your friends, or do you dread it and try to keep it a secret?
I don't do either. I'm officially over 50 now so birthdays are in some ways a memento mori for me, especially since several friends have died recently. (I am a late baby boomer---some demographers say I'm not even, but most of my friends are in their late 50s through 60s, and unfortunately, some of them didn't even get to collect their Social Security checks.)
I don't dread or hide my birthday anymore, however. I finally realized that numerical age has nothing to do with the way you feel, and I don't feel "over 50." My hair is still pitch black (well, except for the one silver strand poking up now and then), I don't have crow's feet or wrinkles, and my health is mostly good, touch wood. I sometimes see little touches of my parents in my face now: a spot there, a deeper frown line here, my father's pug nose, my mom's drooping eyelids. Some days I cringe and wish I had a few thousand to blow on plastic surgery, but most days I smile and wonder what part of me my kids will see when they're my age. ("Oh my god, I have the same little bare spot in my hair.")
I still can't stand surprise parties though. For my 35th someone lured me to a restaurant, where my so-called friends and the waitstaff screamed "Happy Birthday!" as I walked through the door. It was a casual restaurant, and I had come dressed in a t-shirt and coffee-stained jeans. (Couldn't help it, the cup fell in the car and landed on my lap.) EVERYBODY in the restaurant turned to stare at the birthday girl with the brown-spotted pants.
I was mortified. I never went back to that restaurant and was relieved when several years later the building caught fire and destroyed it.
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