I Wish It Came With Actual Weight Loss

Perhaps I was somehow prescient in buying a bottle of wine on Sunday.

"Don't get upset over a job that wasn't even paying you minimum wage," Dan told me over the phone. But hey, here I am, and I'm...kinda upset. I also know that I'm kinda breaking a paramount rule of blogging, which is don't blog about work. Ever.

Thing is, I learned a few hours ago I've been downsized. So here goes...

I loved my job, even though it didn't pay very much and I wasn't close to full-time. The people in the upper echelons of the place simply relied too much on the tourist dollar to carry them through - and, believe it or not, Hurricane Sandy threw a serious wrench in their financial works (I can believe it. Seriously, I can.)  Some good people who were there full-time and who worked hard are out of jobs, too, and the status of my boss - who is one of the great bosses of the world - has changed as well. And me? I'm back at home most of the week, wondering what in the heck happened to me in the past year.

There were some firsts with this job: it was my first time in a cubicle, behind a desk, looking at a computer screen and manipulating social media for a semi-constant paycheck. It was my first time in a work situation where I encountered more than one or two other people whenever I went into the workplace. My first web-published articles that I was paid over $10 for. This was also the year I dived into Twitter and swam in the sea of hashtags, higher-profile-than-we accounts, and other quirks of the 140-charactersphere - and now I can confess that my favorite hashtag EVER has got to be #CruiseLikeANorwegian. I somehow picture myself sliding about in floor-length furs on a freezing deck as I'm being catered to by Scandinavian cooking maestro Andreas Viestad, all while barely holding on to a 98.6-degree body temperature in the process - but I digress...

The ubiquitous "they" everyone talks about ad nauseum say that certain bad things come in threes, and boy, did I get them. It's definitely been one hell of an autumn. And I'll be kicking off my winter by turning forty. AH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

The good news? Thanks to my in-laws, I now own a Nook e-reader. Strangely enough, I tried configuring it to download e-books from the public library here and was able to start reading the NOPL's digital copy of Cloud Atlas - on my Android phone. I'll get there yet, but 'til then, I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice, which came with the e-reader. I haven't read it since the eleventh grade. Mr. Darcy, be ever-so-rude to Miss Bennet, make like Calgon and take me away...

Gilda

For the first time in nearly fifteen years, only two-legged humans live in my place. All of my pets were rescues. Only one was directly rescued by me, however...

Second Sunday of JazzFest 1998 and I was in the middle of my glass rat days...meaning I wasn't taking much advantage of the Fest, or of many other things for that matter because I was working constantly. This morning was no exception, as I was on my way to work. My then-boss loved animals and that love had infected me some, too - I'd just taken in a darling dark gray tabby kitten with green eyes a housemate of mine had rescued from a convenience store worker's errant broom and then gave up to me because she was allergic to cats. I figured one very sweet cat would be enough for me, but I didn't figure on sitting in my car at the stoplight at St. Charles and Henry Clay and seeing her, a medium-sized, long-haired black dog wandering back and forth across the wide expanse of the asphalt and the streetcar tracks and following people as if to say Hey, look here! I'm sweet and friendly! I'm meant for you! Can I be with you? 

Problem was, the people she was following didn't respond to her.

I pulled over in front of Loyola University, thought this over for a minute, watched her try to cross the street again, and something in me snapped. I got her into my car and brought her to work with me, thinking she was so friendly, someone must be missing their pet.

Later that day and all through the following week, my then-boss and I drove around looking for lost pet signs that might have her picture or description on them and turned up nothing; I got the four-legged girl a collar and leash and took her with me to a lot of places over the next couple of days - at each stop I made she instantly conked out and slept deeply, to the point where I had to shake her awake. The next week, my then-boss (and landlord) and I decided she was my dog and tried to figure out what to name her.

We sat in a back cottage where my boss' two dogs had been joined by the new girl, her eyes glowing happily in her black face, her tan paws dancing with delight at being home. The TV was tuned in to Turner Classic Movies, and a certain Rita Hayworth movie came on - which is when I looked at the dog and knew what she ought to be called.

Gilda and I shared some adventures. I brought her to march in the Barkus parade in the Quarter when it seemed that she was all right on the leash after a couple of obedience classes - her two big things were not wanting to walk over metal grates or plates in the road and wanting to be in the very front of the marching pack. I came home once to find her engaged in one of her favorite activities with my then-boss' dogs - being chased - but there was something extra that made the chase more exciting: a large, dead rat hanging out of both sides of her mouth. Disposing of the rodent was a real joy, as she loved putting her border collie-springer spaniel legs into gear and thought I was simply joining in the chasing game. She did get nervous with the dogs around, though, much preferring to be by herself, or even with my cats (I adopted a second cat not long after I got Gilda into my car), and it showed when she chewed the corners of two needlepointed seats on some dining room chairs that were in the back cottage. I learned to needlepoint because of her.

Always averse to being walked in damp weather - I teased her by calling her Ms. Dainty Paws - she was even more disgusted by the snow when we moved up north, giving me the dirtiest look one morning when I opened the door and we beheld a full-on blizzard in Queens. "WHY are you doing this to me?" she'd have asked me if she could talk. She was a Southern dog despite her long hair, and she remained friendly to other dogs and especially to people, presenting herself to passersby in New Orleans and in Queens on walks as a source of unconditional love - people would take her up on it in the former and ignore her in the latter.

Over time, she learned to live with a cat who hated her and another who decided to tolerate her, a human infant who became a child, and a move back to New Orleans that coincided with her doggie golden years. I walked her in one more Barkus parade when we returned to New Orleans, but she gradually lost patience with being around dogs for longer than occasional encounters along her walks. Even chasing squirrels became less of a priority. I noticed in recent months she was having a harder time going up and down our stairs, and I kept tucking away the thought that she might not be living forever after all...until I took her out in the late morning this past Thursday and she refused to climb the stairs.

I had to help her into my car and help her into the veterinarian's office where she'd first been checked out all those years ago. The doc had estimated that she was probably two years old at her first checkup...I was amazed that fourteen years had passed since then. She had given up - her teeth were bad and her back muscles had atrophied some. She'd never left that vet's office in pain, and I was going to make sure things stayed that way for her. My pain lingers, though...

I loved this dog of mine so much, I'd had a pet portrait made of her based on a photo taken of her at her first Barkus parade. I can't locate the photo, but I do have the portrait hanging on my wall. The artist, Georg Williams, captured her dog-onality quite well, despite missing the touch of black that was on the tip of her tongue...

I still keep thinking I have a dog to walk and feed and water. I still miss my Gildaleh.

Rest in peace, my girl.

Disasters aren’t “natural.” As disaster historians, we don’t even use the term. What makes something a disaster, as opposed to just a hazard, is the way it interacts with society, with the built environment. Much of Zone A, which was evacuated in Manhattan, is on landfill. Of course that’s going to be most likely to be flooded. People in the evacuation zone were about twice as likely to live in public housing as the rest of the city. That’s not natural; that’s about how we organize society.

Disasters are not blind. We have this rhetoric of disasters affecting rich and poor equally and that’s just not true. People who evacuated from Battery Park took a cab – maybe to summer homes, maybe to hotels. People who took crowded city buses from public housing are now sleeping on the floor of a high school gym. And we see the way class intersects with all these other groups: After Katrina, we saw rising rates of sexual violence. And the elderly poor and the disabled poor are particularly at risk. The people who die are the people who die alone.

Further words from me and linkage on how to help those who were in Hurricane Sandy's path can be found at NOLAFemmes.

In A Bind

I'll admit a couple of things, first off.

Last night, I didn't watch the second presidential debate. I've sadly become cynical about this election. I already have a darned good idea of how I'll be voting, and it won't be for the guy talking about...what was it again?...

Women in bondage?
A book of mail-order brides?
Great bookmakers (pun intended and not intended) who happen to be women?

Well, no, I mean this:

ROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?  

ROMNEY: Thank you. And important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.  

 And I -- and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are -- are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we -- can't we find some -- some women that are also qualified?" 

 ROMNEY: And -- and so we -- we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women. 

 I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

I want to believe that the man had some good intentions. It would be nice, after the past couple of weeks (hell, couple of months, couple of years, couple of millenia - take your pick...but I digress) that women around the world seem to be having.

I need you to get out of bed and go to school this morning for Malala. 

Grumbles and a slight roll over from the bed.  

 Hala. I need you to get out of bed today, without any whining, without complaining for Malala.

…and then a grumpy, whiny voice comes from under the blankets. 

Mom, what are you talking about, what is Malala.  

No. Not WHAT is Malala…WHO is Malala. Malala is a girl, just like you. She lives in Pakistan. And all she wants to do is go to school and learn. She wants to get out of bed every morning and learn. And the other day, she was coming home from school, and horrible men who think she should NOT be allowed to learn shot her. They shot her because she is a girl who dares to think she deserves an education. She dares to think she is just as smart as boys. She dares to think she should get to read every book and do every math worksheet and write every paper and do every report and learn and learn and learn just like every boy in Pakistan. But some of the people there do not believe that girls should learn. Malala stood up to those bullies. She stood up to the mean, horrible men who believe girls should not be allowed to go to school. And she went to school. So you, you will get out of bed, and you will go to school without one whine, without one moan, without one complaint…because you are lucky to live in a country where you CAN.  

Slowly my daughter got out of bed. Looking at me with confusion. She got dressed with me watching, and we went into my room where she brushed her teeth and continued to get herself ready for school. So far, she hadn’t said a word. She was still processing everything I had told her. The silence was deafening. 

I wasn’t sure I was going to tell her. She is only seven. A seven-year old should be not burdened by the evil in this world. But she is also old enough to understand that she is extremely fortunate to be able to get an education in a world that still does not treat its females with the respect and reverence it treats its males.

Would that this were confined only to Pakistan. It'd be easier to dismiss it as something belonging to another country, or another religion. Another religion...ohhh, I wish I had that smokescreen. While the Obama-Romney debate was finishing up, however, I got this news from a member of the Jewish clergy:

On the eve of the Jewish New Month of Cheshvan, 16.19.12, at 11:00 PM Anat Hoffman, Chair of Women of the Wall, was arrested while leading a prayer along with members of Hadassah, some of whom have travelled to Jerusalem from all over the world to celebrate Hadassah’s centennial convention. Over 250 women joined Women of the Wall for a late night prayer which started off beautifully, until Hoffman was detained during the Shema prayer. Hoffman was held in police custody for over 12 hours, much of the time in handcuffs and has sustained bruises from violent and aggressive treatment while detained.  

This morning, 17.10.12, at 7 AM, while Hoffman was still detained, Women of the Wall gathered for the monthly new month prayer service. Though the services went smoothly and quietly with no disturbance, police arrested Lesley Sachs, Director of Women of the Wall and board member Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, in the middle of prayer. The two women were detained and questioned for several hours. Upon release, the women were asked to admit to the crime of disturbing the public order, which they refused.  

In court proceedings today, following her detainment, Anat Hoffman was accused of disturbing the public peace for singing out loud at the Western Wall. She was finally released and issued a restraining order from the Western Wall for 30 days.  

The leadership of Women of the Wall remain committed to their struggle to gain the right of all women to pray at the Kotel, each according to her own custom, with Torah, Tallit and voices raised in song. Violence, intimidation and threat will not deter the group of women from joining together and praying together to celebrate every new Jewish month at the Western Wall.

Rosh Hodesh, the celebration of the new month, is sacred to women. So is their right to pray, to take on the obligations of prayer (tallit, kippot, tefillin) so long reserved only for men, to say the blessings that were meant to be said only by men, to gather and read Judaism's most sacred text at Judaism's most sacred site. Their only crime at the Kotel? Doing those things as women.

And then we go right back to Romney.

Sure, I laughed over "binders full of women." So did most of the internet. So did Tumblr. Hell, I may have helped create the Sacred Krewe of Binder Femmes as a marching bunch via Twitter. Look for lots of 36-to-48-to-50+ inch bindered broads come Halloween in New Orleans.

My question once all our giggles die down...

When do we do something other than make jokes about these acts and these lies?

And in Romney's case, I DO mean lies.

I know where I can keep on keeping on on all of this. In the voting booth next month.


cross-posted at NOLAFemmes

Granddaddy

The last time I recall seeing my granddaddy, it was my brother's college graduation, and his dementia was only apparent when I showed him pictures of his great-grandson, who couldn't make it to the event. "And who is that?" he politely asked me in the student center, and it hit me that, despite the overall happiness of the occasion, I had to momentarily face a reality my step-grandmother was valiantly dealing with each day - and I was ready to buckle under that moment right then and there. It would have crushed me if I hadn't done what we in my family tend to be too good at doing: I fast put it out of my mind and focused more on his merely being there and the miracle of his reaching the season of his next-to-youngest grandchild's commencement.

I would have taken in far, far more if I'd have known I wouldn't see him again.

How do I prefer to remember my granddaddy? Well, I'd known him since a little after my birth - the tall man who would fondly recall when I got just tall enough that he could place his hand on my head and simply turn me to where I needed to go. The man who would bring me to visit his aunt Ruth, a bright, happy redhead who lived at the top of a small mountain on Little Switzerland Road off the Chapman Highway, driving his huge blue Caprice up the frighteningly winding one lane road and honking the whole way to better warn those who might be driving down. He had faith in the power of technology - not to mention some good luck on his side, as we never encountered any cars going the opposite direction on Little Switzerland that I remember. Even if we had, driving in an early-70's Detroit heavyweight with extra former-pace-car horsepower at a low speed probably wouldn't make much of a difference if we did hit anything head-on.

He liked where technology was going, jumping into mastering personal computers just as much for the joy of experiencing them as well as the fact that, in his fifties, he was starting to get shaky hands and writing out what he had to say via keyboards was far easier. He adopted email communications pretty early, fell in love with playing with flight simulators, and got a kick out of seeing what the internet could provide on occasion. His first technological love, however, remained airplanes...he couldn't become a pilot, so he went for the next best thing during World War II and became an airplane mechanic, stuffing his brain with so much knowledge of how they worked that it got him into trouble when he got into University of Tennessee and began engineering courses. A report card from his freshman year that popped up amid family photos passed around during a reunion occasion showed that he had a series of Ds and Fs.

"Granddaddy, what on earth...?" I asked him.

"I'd just come out of the army and thought I knew it all," he said in a manner tinged with a little humor.

He turned it around really quick, eventually becoming the chief engineer of the Rohm & Haas plant in Knoxville. It gave him license to do the things he loved: getting a pilot's license and going in on maintaining a Cessna with a group of like-minded friends, singing in a barbershop quartet, and doing some things that I'm sure would have made my grandmother tear her hair out if she hadn't been so concerned about her appearance.

One afternoon, my grandparents, in town for a visit, came to pick me up from high school in Houston. Before I came out of the building at the end of the day, a sophomore came out to the student parking lot early, got in his car, and turned on the stereo. It instantly had all the other cars in the parking lot literally jumping a little on the pavement, and Granddaddy was intrigued.

"I'm gonna go talk to him," he said to Grandmother.
"Oh, no you won't!" she said, a tad embarrassed and very focused on watching for me.
"But...I just want to ask him how he managed to turn the entire car into a speaker."

When a friend of mine in college needed advice on how to make electromagnets for an art project, the first person I thought to call was my granddaddy. My friend talked to "Mr. Nichols" for quite a while and handed me back the phone, jazzed by the possibilities of hooking up an electromagnet to a car battery, or plugging it into the wall to see what would happen. Amused and a little horrified (I knew my friend and knew he would likely try those things), I got back on the phone.

"Granddaddy, what did you tell him?"

"Nothing I hadn't already tried before," he said cheerily. "Just like opening an umbrella and jumping off a pile in the hayloft - everyone should try these things once."

I learned later that he'd plugged an electromagnet into the wall of the house just to see everything momentarily jump three feet in the air before all the fuses blew. And yes, he'd tried the Mary Poppins umbrella bit as a youngster, too.

I could go on and on, and with many tales of my granddaddy that weren't exclusively mine. It seemed, though, that from what I'd heard, he carried the same demeanor he'd always had throughout his alert days into his dementia days. It helped that he had a loving woman in my step-grandmother caring for him.

He died peacefully yesterday morning, a son of Knoxville, Tennessee. A part of its history, born prematurely in 1924, so small he'd had to be incubated with warm bricks. He grew to be the tallest of his brothers and sisters, always curious and full of life.

Rest in peace, Granddaddy Hal.

Third-Hand News From First-Run Bands

We would fly along the interstates, windows down, the rough noise of passing through the air buffeting us beyond the windshield as we pushed along to Galveston on the weekends, or, occasionally, Tennessee in one extremely long day-to-night to see family. When Dad wasn't working the CB radio and chatting up any truckers he could conjure through the airwaves, we were adding to the roaring in our ears by playing cassette tapes on the Bronco's stereo. The tapes of choice? The Beach Boys' Endless Summer compilation comes to mind. Also, as I recall to my chagrin, a collection of John Denver's best.

But then Mom would pull out the homemade Maxell tape with the two albums she'd occasionally blast on the turntable at home, the ones she'd prefer over the two shelves crammed with late '60's - early '70's albums Dad had collected from his after-college days working at Sam Goody's. Depending on which side it was, "Monday Morning" would shout out first, or "Second Hand News," both of them displays of Lindsey Buckingham's virtuosity and his particular infusion of power rock.

The music on Fleetwood Mac and Rumours didn't end there, either. It was the women of the group as well as the men who shined. Though these days, Stevie Nicks is now a cliché-d witchy woman swathed in scarves and swirling skirts sounding as though she's singing (gracefully!) in gravel, she had a voice then that, cradled sometimes by bandmate Christine McVie's backing vocals, was a beautifully rough revelation. And McVie herself...well...

"I always loved her maiden name: Perfect," Mom would sigh occasionally when she'd hear tracks from McVie's solo album on the radio or when she'd hear "Songbird." It seemed McVie was perfect, beyond correct, able to slip into another softer realm that could be sentimental without being cloying. Whether she was backed by a great rhythm section (and boy does that get downplayed in the Mac's history, how solid the bass and drums were in their sound) or simply accompanying herself on the piano, Christine McVie was the center of the moment.

Those two albums were well crafted, yes, but they were also great to listen to in their entirety. Period. If I had a tape deck that didn't eat cassettes, I'd hunt down that old Maxell and really wear it out. Thank goodness for MOG.com.

I consider all of this now because, since I've been reviewing albums and books for a certain local publication for over a year now, I've had to come to terms with albums composed entirely of remade covers of a single band's oeuvre. Oh, I'm not unfamiliar with them - there was the Sweet Relief album for Victoria Williams, Red, Hot & Blue, as well as this personal favorite of mine that horrible, thieving movers stole years ago - but I do question making those types of compilations businesses in themselves, especially when ones like Just Tell Me That You Want Me are released. There are great moments on this tribute, don't get me wrong, but not enough to justify the album's existence ("Gold Dust Woman" done by the particular artist the producers chose sounds no different from the way it did when it was first cut. The point of that is lost on me.). From a straight critical blurb standpoint, that's where I am.

...but then I read reviews like this one and am struck by something else: compilation albums seem determined to amplify nostalgia whilst exploding it - and the best ones walk that tightrope so well, delighting you and giving you a shock all at once, that anything less is simply sad. Asking only indie rockers to handle classics like "Tusk" is catering to a lowest common denominator of interpreting and listening - it insults everybody involved. Where were hip-hop artists on this? Jazz musicians? Come on.

Compilers must keep in mind why the originals were so memorable in the first place, before they got consumed in commercials, abused as presidential campaign theme songs, and overcome by the band members' salacious backstories. It's what many bands do when they occasionally cover songs: play it in their own way, but with that window onto why they're playing it in the first place. Hopefully, the results will reach your heart and transform it a little, as any good performance does.

Unfortunately, I find that, in the particular instance of the Mac tribute, if I tried it out on a similar road trip today, the album wouldn't last me more than a few exits off I-59.

Compilers, artists, you can do better.

Anniversary Alive

This is an auspicious day. Remembering one storm while being buffeted by another.

We stay here now because our house survived storms for over 100 years. We stay because our son's school initially only gave him three days off. We stay because I lived through one category 1-2 hurricane when I was a kid and felt that we could do all right with this one, despite my mother's worried texts from Oklahoma City. We stay because most people we know here are staying as well, because we all know what evacuating for Gustav was like - and the mess that was the return.

We still have power, amazingly enough. I've been on Twitter most of the time 'cause that's where my people are. Everyone in range of the storm, stay safe.

Also, here's hoping everyone in the area of Braithwaite got out all right. It went through hell four years ago.

In Cars

Being in and around vehicles was, at one time in my life, a relaxing thing for me. I had a stressful job I loved and then grew to hate - and through it all, the one time I didn't have anyone nudging me, asking me to do "just one more thing, baby," or just giving me some kind of hell when things were going badly was when I got into the car, sat down, blasted the radio, and put the pedal to the metal.

It's probably helped that no one has put impossible time constraints on my ETAs to this very day ("You HAVE to get this package there in ten minutes!" when, in reality, it takes twenty minutes, has never been slapped on me), and, when I have to be somewhere at a certain time, I plan accordingly.

A memorable midweek trip I once had to take with members of my Yiddish chorus had us traveling from midtown Manhattan to a place in New Jersey to perform, and we had no choice but to muddle across the Hudson River (well, actually, under the river via the Holland Tunnel) during rush hour. The chorus members I ferried to Jersey and back couldn't believe how calm I was the whole way. I've simply learned over time that I can't do a thing about traffic, so there's no point in getting crazy over it. It felt better to chat with my passengers during the 45 minute wait to get in the tunnel than it did to agonize.

All of this was well before I had to reckon with things happening inside my car, though. These days, stuff going wrong under the hood seems guaranteed to put me on the road to bursting a blood vessel or two. If my mechanic hadn't just told me how incredible my car is even after all the times it's been repaired, I'd be a perfect candidate for a padded room. I'd give anything for one year - one measly year - without anything more serious than an oil change.

This is what it means to be a mother with some part-time jobs, a child in a school that is not in the neighborhood, and some after-9-to-5 activities because, by God, I'm still a person despite the parenthood and all: I have to drive. An adage of fairly recent vintage - "Only degree I need when I have a child is a driver's license" - is so damn true it hurts. It hurts even more when the car isn't working, your mechanic is in the next city, and it takes a good day or two at least for your car to simply be looked at. And my husband wonders why I want to scream when a single warning light flicks on on the dashboard display...

Before I had a family, this wasn't a horrible cross to bear. It could even be funny.

My first car needed a ring job so badly it shouldn't have been funny. It was held together enough, however, that I still drove it, adding a quart or two of oil every few days just for good measure. A trip to a local oil change place proved that I needed to take it to the shop for something far more serious - with the hood up, one of the greased-up guys put the transmission in gear and took in my face as I saw the entire engine block nearly jump out of the car due to a broken motor mount.

Towing my car? There wasn't much point to that if it was still drivable (and I didn't have Triple-A service), so I drove it. "I couldn't believe it," my ex-boss told me after she followed me across the Huey P. Long Bridge to my then-mechanic's garage in Avondale. "Smoke's pootin' out the back of your car from all the oil burning off, the engine coulda fallen out right there on the bridge, and you STILL drove that car like a bat outta hell!"

Duh. It needed the repairs. "It was a quart low," the mechanic's wife/office manager said to us after the engine was secured and the oil was no longer burning. My ex-boss and I guffawed in unison. "It's always a quart low!"

This week...things are different. The "low oil" light blinked on and things went to hell. Within 48 hours, I had to add ten quarts of oil. Monday morning found the dashboard lighting up like a slot machine as the car hit bottom. True to form, after adding a few quarts, I drove it to the mechanic's with my pal Edie following me. I wasn't mortified when I was told I probably should've had it towed, but I hated having to call my current boss to tell her I wasn't coming in.

Two days after I get the car back, it has to return. There's no driving it once it massively overheats after ten minutes on the road. There's only me, forcing my husband in an instant to pick up my son from school and take him to his baseball game. There I am again, waiting over an hour for the tow truck to arrive. And once more, when I beg Edie to pick me up from the mechanic's for the second time this week and she tells me I need to find a good mechanic who lives much closer to my house.

I hate that I can't do anything except ask the people close to me to rearrange their lives for a 16-year-old car's occasional ailments. I hate that all of this is still cheaper than getting a new car. I hate that I don't have a job that pays well enough so that these troubles are less worrisome - although, the way this car's going, I'd have lost that kind of a job by now.

Just give me a working car for a year, I say. And a good traffic jam.

Anything but this.

Spring Thing

A softball team made up of 9-10 year old girls is wearing the team shirt pictured below this season. We in New Orleans don't have a sense of humor to go with our sense of outrage over Roger Goodell's penalties from on high? Don't say that to these girls and their parents.

I'd like to see the NFL trot out a cease & desist letter to the local kids' sports organization over the Saints Bounty Hunters and their use of Saints' mascot Gumbo on their shirts of - get this - "Vegas Gold." If they do, it'll only show that Saints fans can't even own their indignation.

As for my son's baseball team, they are busily putting the "tie" in their team name (Tigers) thus far. Two games, two tie scores. We'll see how this marathon weekend of games treats them...

Psychopath Day

I've got to give it to the New York Times for their perverse sense of timing here.

“In the beginning, I thought it was us,” Miguel said, as his two younger sons played loudly with a toy car. “But Michael defies logic. You do things by the book, and he’s still off the wall. We became so tired of fighting with him in public that we really cut back on our social life.”  

 Over the last six years, Michael’s parents have taken him to eight different therapists and received a proliferating number of diagnoses. “We’ve had so many people tell us so many different things,” Anne said. “Oh, it’s A.D.D. — oh, it’s not. It’s depression — or it’s not. You could open the DSM and point to a random thing, and chances are he has elements of it. He’s got characteristics of O.C.D. He’s got characteristics of sensory-integration disorder. Nobody knows what the predominant feature is, in terms of treating him. Which is the frustrating part.”  

 Then last spring, the psychologist treating Michael referred his parents to Dan Waschbusch, a researcher at Florida International University. Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.

Happy Mother's Day! Is your child throwing terrifying tantrums one minute, eerily rational and charming the next? Welcome to a world where your progeny has no empathy!

Still, (Dr. Paul) Frick (of UNO) acknowledges that it’s not yet clear how best to intervene. “Before you can develop effective treatments, you need several decades of basic research just to figure out what these kids are like, and what they respond to,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing now — but it will take a while to get real traction.”  

 And there are other challenges. Since psychopathy is highly heritable, Lynam says, a child who is cold or callous is more likely to have a parent who is the same way. And because parents don’t necessarily bond to children who behave cruelly, those children tend to get punished more and nurtured less, creating what he calls “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”  

 “It reaches a point where the parents just stop trying,” Lynam said. “A lot of the training is about trying to get these kids’ parents to re-engage, because they feel like they’ve tried it all and nothing works.”  

 Anne admitted to me that this had been her experience. “As horrible as this is to say, as a mom, the truth is that you put up a wall. It’s like being in the army, facing a barrage of fire every day. You have to steel yourself against the outbursts and the hate.”

Sure, I say it time and time again: children are a crapshoot. The raising of children is no easy task. My own depression and anxiety made the prospect of having kids worrisome for me on that level alone, forget the whole day-to-day grind of basic child care. It turns out that my husband and I rolled the dice and came up with a sweet, bright child who has ADHD. It hasn't been until recently that I've begun to reconcile myself to this fact of his and our lives. He has thus far gone an entire school year on medication and the changes at school have been wonderful for the teachers to behold.

But trying to raise a child with no empathy whatsoever? At a time when the whole prospect of it is, in the minds of most, reserved for one of two extremes - those of, as mother Anne says in the article, "a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer?" When what really happened at Columbine High School could be largely written up to the psychopathy of one of the perpetrators? It's scary, really.

Initially, I was angry that such an august publication had decided to run with something like this on Mother's Day, for crying out loud. I was wondering who was ambushing this Hallmark card holiday when WWNO chose to air this episode of This American Life and I caught the tail end of it near the end of the day. Was all of this cosmic revenge for Joan Crawford's actions or something? Really...


Really, this wasn't that big a deal, though. What was a bigger deal was hearing about parents who were getting help, psychiatrists and psychologists who were treating this disorder with a great deal of decency while trying to get to the bottom of what makes those without empathy tick, and those who were less scientific about it all but no less interested. The very idea of being empathetic to those with mental illnesses and disorders is very new; that of being empathetic to those who would have no clue of how to return those feelings - who, at best, would fantastically mimic their outer manifestations - is still not easy to come to grips with. I don't know if we'll ever get there as a society.

Until we get there, though, the front lines will, as always, be the parents of these children. They deserve a great deal of empathy and assistance. Especially the moms, who, despite a greater division of labor between moms and dads in most homes, still do most of the work.

Stories like the one the Times published only drive home that, now more than ever, every day is Mother's Day.

Our Own Fun

I told Dad the other day how much attending the JazzFest cost.

"Ohh, no. Locals have been priced out. Only good for the tourists and the rich," he said.

"Yep."

"Well, it'll probably tank, then, like the Newport Folk Festival did. The people there finally got fed up, so it died."

Dad wasn't very accurate on this one, actually. Though it did die after a melee ensued during a Dionne Warwick performance, of all things, it returned after fourteen years and is still going strong.

Dad was also wrong about something else, and it's a common mistake people who don't live here - or who haven't been around here long enough to understand - tend to make.

The JazzFest, despite all the locals' kvetching over what an overpriced juggernaut it is these days, is a ways from tanking. It's too entrenched a part of this city's selling of its culture to die just yet. Many musicians trying to get somewhere here still position themselves locally as JazzFest performers or not-yet there. It takes books like Michael Oliver-Goodwin's, and especially Jay Mazza's recent publication, to put that into perspective. Within a few decades, music went from being something New Orleans as a whole merely tolerated publicly to something that is a serious economic engine, and JazzFest was a major vanguard in that transformation.

As for whether locals will mount some kind of major offensive against the Jazz & Heritage Foundation, that's not happening, either. What contributed to the rise of Mardi Gras as an economic engine applies to JazzFest - if you can't entirely join in in one way, you go off and do your own thing. This is a creative city at heart, and people are more likely to bring back any energies they could spend grumbling over past JazzFests into other sorts of fun. It wells up in other organized mini-festivals like ChazFest and Noizefest, in craft tables & performances at places near the Fair Grounds like Liuzza's By The Track, and it resides in the collective ability so many have around here to gather some folks together and serve up a good time just absorbing the atmosphere around the track. There's no sound-proof barrier around the place yet that I know of.

Hence my answer to him...

"Well, Dad, people around here will make their own fun. If they're kept out of JazzFest by the prices, they're more likely to turn around and do something else that's just as good, if not better, without spending that money."

Pause.

"I guess you're right." he said in a low voice.

Update, 9:11 PM: Thanks to ale{atori}c, we've got a clear graph as to how much JazzFest prices have jumped. Sure, they ran at an embarrassing financial loss for quite a while (hippie-esque vs. capitalist origins rearing their head? The specter of George Wein, a founder of Newport Folk, lingering over it?), but there probably should be a locals discount to keep some sort of goodwill going...unless the argument is that picking up tickets from the Ticketmaster at the Superdome ahead of time is locals' discount enough. In which case...fine. Locals keep voting with our dollars.

Here Comes Girls

I am simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the HBO show that's premiering tonight.

Entitled Girls, it's not meant to be Sex and the City despite their both being set in New York City - for one thing, the ages of the women in Girls are far younger than those in Candace Bushnell's fantasy Manhattan. These are just-out-of-undergrad women trying to find their places in the overwhelming environs of real life. Along the way, many less-than-stellar decisions are made, which is possibly why they are still just "girls."

I was in the same place the characters of the show were not too long ago - busting my buns working three jobs just to live two stories above a fish store in Brooklyn, in a room the size of the bathroom in my first apartment in New Orleans. Many decisions were made then, good and bad, that ended up bringing me down south - who to associate with and who to drop like a hot potato, what was going to sustain you long-term and what wasn't, when to keep plugging and when to just give it up. I lasted nearly three months in the rat race that was NYC, not counting the nadir: that month and a half I was at my aunt's place trying very hard to get jobs so that I could get out of her hair. Another low point was working a register at Dean & Deluca in Soho for three days before quitting because the catering jobs I was getting were netting me three times more money per hour - the nice yet stern Indian man in charge of the cashiers turned darkly furious as he yelled at me over the expensive groceries that he never wanted to see my face in the store ever ever again. I'm curious to see how the Girls will get tossed about job- and career-wise, not to mention some of the family conflicts. Relationships with the opposite sex, though? Of COURSE crappy decisions will be made. I more or less stayed celibate, too damned exhausted to even talk meaningfully with guys, forget dating. I could only dream about sex, when I could dream.

I am repelled, however, by some of what seems to be running through the most popular comedies today that star women, and I doubt that they are signs that things are being "equalized" between the sexes. I don't know that we have reached the point where female characters can screw up just as badly as men can without some major consequences being built into their stories, and without "redemption" including a relationship of some sort as in the movie Bridesmaids. It's kind of what comedies such as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and Ally McBeal tried to do yet didn't really succeed at: presenting women as people that don't have to be complete airheads or complete superwomen, all one thing or all another. Also - women of color, of other nationalities, of other creeds, anyone? New York is full of those women. Perhaps no one wanted to attempt that for fear of offending any of them. Or, more cynically speaking, they just didn't sell. Not much proven entertainment value.
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So I did watch it. Let's hear it for the trustafarians of every generation. I am so, so glad I had the sense to decide not to come home and, especially, not to ask my parents for a damned thing. Yes, I sound like a crusty elder about to tell anyone within hearing how many miles I had to walk round-trip to get to school. I'm just very happy the internet wasn't as huge as it is now - it would've given me something else to go insane over when I was trying to work.

Will I watch it again?

Probably.

Why subject myself to such a painful thing?

Something in me still feels like these unformed characters. Where will they go? Will they continue to let everything beat them down? Is there still something to be learned from basic naivete and naked ambition (or is it naked naivete and basic ambition?) Or will this all become yet another cautionary tale for women writ large? It's a trainwreck, a car wreck across the highway that, unfortunately, I'll be rubbernecking at like most others as I pass it. Because every terrible mess is different.

Update, 4/16: Came across a phrase from critic Glenn Kenny referring to Lena Dunham's film Tiny Furniture that encompassed many of my misgivings about Girls' premise: "...it does represent the Cinema of Unexamined Privilege, let's face it." Yep, following in the footsteps of Metropolitan, Francis Ford Coppola's short(er) film Life Without Zoe, and - one that dates me some - Reality Bites.

In the interests of examining my own privilege, my parents did pay for my health insurance and the charges on one credit card that I rarely used. There was no way in hell I was going to try to lobby for total support from them after college, though - I felt somehow guilty that I was still getting the insurance and the credit card from them. It was in large part what made me uncomfortable when I met people like the guy who had a storefront in Soho that clearly was not doing well selling his wonky glassware. I asked him if he was at all worried about that state of affairs, and he blithely replied,"Oh, I'm not worried. My family won't let me starve."

The guy was definitely drinking too much delusional opium-pod tea.