OneSaneVoice

Lobby Tales

OSV — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:12:00 GMT

While we were down in Florida visiting my hospitalized father-in-law, we stayed at our favorite Hampton Inn with its lightning fast wireless Internet service and free tasty breakfast. One of us rocks the early evening manager’s reception complete with complimentary wine, beer, and chips with salsa. That one would be me. I like sipping a little sumptin sumptin while observing the lobby action.

One staple of my lobby time was an attractive young Asian woman who constantly walked around with a plate or cup in one hand while looking in a different direction from where she was headed. Which was nowhere. She was consistently headed nowhere. Along the way, she bumped into every other guest, obliviously spilling her food and then smiling wanly by way of apology. She even got me once. Dressed in little shorts, a cropped t-shirt, and cork platforms, she looked a bit like a lost hooker. There were business groups at the hotel but it’s hard to believe she belonged to any of them. Unless it was the Waif Call Girl Association.

Then there was the father and young son at breakfast every morning dressed in their matching khaki shorts, canvas sandals, and hair that needed combing. They seemed to have a sweet rapport, and the only remarkable thing about them was that when they left they took a HUGE stack of paper plates and bowls with them. No food, no utensils, just uber paper goods. Husband and I were thisclose to asking the father one morning what the deal was, but in the end it was not knowledge that would benefit us in any way and it was probably more fun to just speculate. We wondered about the number of hotel towels they managed to stuff into their suitcase. Was the mom in there too?

Then there was the full-figured woman who walked through the lobby every evening on her way out dressed in a get-up reminiscent of Dreamgirls. One night it was a sapphire blue sateen sheath adorned with fake jewels and spiked silver sandals so high it was hard to watch her try and walk. She looked way too uncomfortable to be a performer, and the geometrically challenged form she displayed as she moved made it hard to believe this was her dress of choice. She also didn’t look like she was inviting any conversation so finding out more wasn’t an option. Maybe if she happened to cross paths with the wan Asian girl so adept at spillage we’d have witnessed some revelations. But that was not to be so.

We also had an interesting room maid who lined up our toiletries with military precision, and even faced a few with their nozzles toward each other as if they were having a conversation. Husband came out of the bathroom and said, “Who’s putting my things in rows like toy soldiers?” I told him I thought we had a maid with OCD or at least a playful sense of humor. I’d have loved to talk to her about the room with all the paper goods. But I never did, so I will have to content myself with visions of maids sailing plates over shower rods. On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . .

Second in our series of Two Words Say It All Fotos by Daughter

lint man

tattooed kid

ship hole

some pills

All the Right Moves

OSV — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:03:00 GMT

We just went down to Florida to be with Husband’s 89-year-old father who took a spill while out shopping. Seems he was in the parking lot of Best Buy where he went to check out the latest flat screen monitors for his new computer. A car backing out of a spot startled him and he lost his balance. After his fall, he picked himself up, drove himself home, parked his car and called 911. Before the ambulance arrived he made sure to remove all the cash from his wallet. These emergencies in life require preparation, you know.

By the time we flew down there he was in the Intensive Care Unit and really appeared to be in danger. Walking into his room after we donned protective gowns and gloves, I noticed he was still wearing his pricey stainless steel watch and diamond stud earring. If this were a New York City hospital those items would have been gone in sixty seconds. Every time my mother was taken to a hospital in the city some cherished personal item failed to reach the safe place hospitals promise they have for emergency patients. The lovely gold watch my father gave her for their 25th anniversary is now someone else’s family heirloom.

My father-in-law is a feisty one as I wrote a while back in Hurry Up and Wait. He’s hellbent on reaching 100 and pity the fool who stands in his way. Shortly after we arrived, he said we needed to go to his apartment and pay the bills sitting on his desk so they wouldn’t be late. I told him I had stamps with me so we’d take care of it. He said, “I pay my bills online, don’t you?” Uh, no, actually I don’t. He looked at me like I was so yesterday he couldn’t believe it. I wanted to say, “Well, I’m on Facebook, are you?” but considering the fact he was hooked up to an IV and 3 monitors I thought it might appear childish.

Husband and I went to his apartment and logged onto his bill payment site. When we opened his mail, we noticed his most recent cell phone bill was a staggering amount. Husband called AT&T and they confirmed the total due was $4315.53. His previous monthly bills averaged less than $60. One might think something was amiss. The customer service rep asked Husband if we had a lot of family in Haiti.

Obviously my father-in-law’s cell phone was lost or stolen and a rogue bill was incurred. While Husband was on hold with AT&T, I said maybe a desperate soul trying to locate relatives in Haiti after the earthquake was driven to dishonesty and there was some divine justification for this larcenous action. Husband, a social worker with a deep sense of human compassion, looked at me like “Give it up, Gandhi” making me realize just how exhausted he was. AT&T reversed the charges and canceled the phone number.

It was a tough visit all around, what with Husband having lost his mother less than two years ago, and me with memories of my own mom taking her last breath in a different ICU. As I watched Husband struggle with his father's failing health, it took me back to 2004 when both my parents and grandmother were all dying in different places and I was frantically trying to be at everyone’s bedside. I predicted this trip would be difficult for me so I wore a little silver locket that carries pictures of the parents I think about every day. While we were down in Florida I opened my locket several times to look at their faces, never once missing that missing gold watch.

Today’s entry begins a series of Featured Fotos
by Daughter wherein Two Words Say It All

hoop tree

american glasses

animal parts

knock knock

Wash & Rinse, Lock & Load

OSV — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:00:00 GMT

I feel no end of amused affection for the male approach to domesticity. Unless you’re married to Bobby Flay, guys tend to have a stranger in a strange land thing going on in the kitchen that actually serves them well (“Where do we keep the spatula? Do we even have a spatula?”) Men know that appearing too comfortable around the pots and pans will only lead to trouble. Like magnified expectations.

To give you an example, Husband will pull a knife out of the block, cut something with it, give the blade a nice wipe on the dishtowel, and stick it back in the block. Maybe there’s some Palmolive in those knife slots I don’t know about, but I doubt it, so I wait for him to leave the kitchen and then wash the knife.

You may wonder why I don’t just ask him to wash it himself after he uses it, but I’m well aware I’ve been given a limited number of chips to redeem when it comes to criticism in this area and I save my stash for the larger issues. Like rinsing is not washing. Passing an orange juice glass under a tepid stream of water does not constitute pulp removal. Pulp’s job is to hang on for dear life with a force proportionate to the amount of time it’s been sitting around away from running water. Day-old pulp requires a blowtorch. We won’t even address hardened egg salad on plate rims. You see where I’m going with this and so does Husband. Now if only I could tell if you are as moved by my passion as he pretends to be.

Son took culinary classes in college and then worked in restaurants, so he seems to enjoy his kitchen and its accompanying utensils. One day when he came over to visit shortly after buying his own house, he picked up a measuring cup from my dish drainer.

SON: I could really use one of these.

OSV: A measuring cup?

SON: Do you have an extra one?

OSV: No, I don’t.

SON: You’re kidding. You have two of everything. You have around ten salt shakers.

OSV: And if you wanted a salt shaker you’d be in luck.

SON: (still holding the measuring cup) Can I have this one?

OSV: Then what will I use?

SON: Well, do you use it a lot?

OSV: Why don’t you just buy your own?

SON: Where?

OSV: Anywhere.

SON: Be more specific.

OSV: Oh, for God’s sake.

You’re probably wondering if I wound up giving it to him. If I did, it would mean that even though he no longer lives under our roof, he still knows how to manipulate me to get what he wants. Like when I used to tell him he could only play one sport a season because I couldn’t drive him to more than that, and he played like twenty and I drove him everywhere. I am not a trained seal. If you’re thinking of throwing me a fish you will be disappointed. But not very.

Daughter visited the Gold Coast Train Museum in Miami, Florida where she channeled
her inner Choo Choo Charlie

locomotive

lounge car

dining car

loo

sleeping compartment

all aboard!

FYI: Husband remarked after reading this entry that he is still easier to live with than I am. So noted.

It's a Team Thang

OSV — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:15:00 GMT

Working together is on my mind lately, beginning with a group activity in my online History of Math class. Neither history nor math ever rang my bell in school before, but going back to college in my fifties has taught me I’m not who I thought I was, and things that previously held no interest are suddenly engrossing. Learning about which ancient culture invented the zero or discovered algebra and geometric relationships is truly absorbing. Go figure. It’s my first online course and my classmates and instructor are spread across time zones, age range, and learning experience. When a group project was posted with permission required to work individually, I opted to rely on my own efforts and bow out of the team spirit.

Now that it’s over and handed in, I’m happy that I had a report to hand in. A couple of the teams couldn’t get it together enough to hand ANYTHING in and the ones that did struggled mightily. All team interaction had to take place on a class message board so the instructor could ascertain the contribution level of each participant. There was initially a lot of What do you want to do? I dunno, what do YOU want to do? and then the cop-outs began, like I’ll be out of town the day it’s due so whatever the team decides is okay with me, and I’m an economics major so I’ll let the English majors do the actual writing, and finally, this frantic plea from one of the default team leaders HAS ANYONE ON THIS TEAM EVER WRITTEN A PAPER BEFORE??!

Two of the teams completely fell apart with the members having to turn in individual papers late, and one team effort was posted on time with the disclaimer of the aforementioned leader “Here it is and I’m ashamed to have my name on it. I’ll never do anything like this again.” Not quite the all-for-one project the instructor had envisioned, I’m sure, but the whole thing smelled off to me from the start. If adults haven’t learned what they should about group ethics by the time they’re adults, it won’t come just because others are depending on them.

We here in New York can look to our state government for proof of that. First we lost our governor, Eliot Spitzer, due to his penchant for pay-to-play team activities, otherwise known as prostitution. What we got for our trouble was Governor David Paterson, who guided the state into creative ruin while denouncing the frat boy antics of our overpaid senate. With Paterson admitting up front that he and his wife had both strayed outside their marriage, at least we knew what we were getting. But now he has been forced to bow out of the upcoming election and may even be removed from office before his current term expires.

Seems one of his aides beat up his girlfriend, and our governor told two state employees to try and coerce the woman into dropping the charges. As of today, the State Police superintendent and Paterson’s top law enforcement adviser have both resigned. If the governor resorts to claiming he acted out of regard for his administration’s continued ability to govern, he’ll have to deal with our outcry DOES ANYONE ON THIS TEAM REMEMBER WHO THEY’RE SERVING?

Daughter’s Featured Fotos offer Parting Shots of Winter we hope

snow trails

stacked

views

cozy café

Zip it

OSV — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:03:00 GMT

I read Husband a story this morning from the paper that cemented the end of another era in my memory, that of the doctor who makes house calls. The piece was about the passing of an 84-year-old area physician who conducted a successful medical practice for 61 years. He took no insurance beside Medicare, visited his patients at their bedside, and delivered babies who grew up to bring their own babies to him. The article was accompanied by a picture of the doctor in his later years walking down a street carrying his black medical bag, a design that Louis Vuitton copied long ago and will sell to you for about $1,800, stethoscope not included.

Both Husband and I are in our fifties and can easily recall childhood memories of being visited by doctors in our bedrooms. My pediatrician was a Dr. Meyerson, the scariest person I had ever seen. He was about six-and-a-half feet tall with a pencil mustache and a deep, booming voice. He filled the doorway of our Brooklyn housing project apartment, and I can still see my average-height mother looking up at him as she answered the door with her head tilted so far back I could see the part at the top of her hair.

As soon as I saw him I would always scream, “Did he bring his bag?!” because I knew that bag had a needle in it that was bound to wind up in my butt cheek. Looking back it was a crazy thing to scream out because OF COURSE he brought his bag, why else would he be there, but it strikes me as a classic moment of childhood magical thinking. If he had no bag, I got no shot.

My mom was intuitive and wonderful and never, ever lied to me. So one time when I was about five and had a horrible sore throat and high fever, I begged my mother not to call Dr. Meyerson so desperately that she said okay, she wouldn’t call him. I said Promise? and she said Promise. I lay there in my misery at least knowing there would be no terrifying, deep-voiced giant with a needle in my future.

Sometime that day the doorbell rang and from where I lay on the living room couch swaddled in blankets I saw my mother’s head tilt back as she opened the door, and the feeling of hot betrayal mixed with hot fever filled my senses with such a rush that I can close my eyes and still remember the anger and fear that welled up in my little girl brain. I screamed and cried the whole time the doctor was there and yelled bloody murder when he pushed his needle into my little girl butt. It was the first and only time in my life that I thought I might hate my mother.

She apologized through her own tears after he left and swore she would never lie like that to me again. After having two children of my own I can understand the depth of her worry for a child so sick that she needed a house call, and I appreciate the conflicted judgment call she felt she had to make. And certainly a lifetime of love and caring without further transgression should obliterate this memory, but here it is, still around.

After sharing it with Husband, I said, “I wonder if either of my kids have a memory like that of me that I don’t know about. Maybe I’ll ask them.”

Husband looked at me in total disbelief. “Why in the world would you go looking for that kind of pain?”

He’s right, of course. I hope I don’t ask.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos offer More Winter Views and a shout-out to Bobby’s Band

dedicated construction

ski dog

the 'hood in the 'sno

The Doonesbury Paradigm

OSV — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:59:00 GMT

I came of age with Doonesbury. Garry Trudeau's comic strip debuted in 1970, the year I turned sixteen amid the country's involvement with the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women's rights, and social activism. For the first time in the nation's history, the Funny Pages of the daily newspaper chronicled the everyday lives of people just like my friends and me. And if not exactly us, then our neighbors, our parents, our teachers, and our leaders. The characters were recognizable and relatable, mainly because they were based on composites of people from Trudeau's own life and student years at Yale. Beyond the characters that so eerily reflected our thoughts, the larger world was depicted, giving a semblance of reason and humor to those front-page trendsetters and decision makers out of our reach, our politicians and celebrities. Yale became Walden College. Duke was reckless power incarnate. Blind service to one's country was B.D. And Trudeau became Mike Doonesbury, observer and participant along with the rest of us, America's Everyman.

I recently wrote a paper for one of my classes about Doonesbury, and my teacher was fascinated because she had stopped reading the strip about ten years ago. She belongs to one of the generations after mine that no longer reads newspapers. My grown children fall into this category. If it's not online, it's not in their lives. As a former print journalist, it breaks my heart.

Christopher Lamb noted in Changing With The Times: The World According to Doonesbury, "When the cultural wave shifts, Doonesbury moves with it. This does not apply to most comic strips where characters say the same thing in the same place day after day, year after year. Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown are always kids." But not in Doonesbury. Just like in our own lives, the campus liberals and hippies of the sixties and seventies got married in the eighties, had kids, got divorced, started over, changed jobs, dealt with aging parents, and on and on.

There are so many arenas where the denizens of Doonesbury parallel the lives of we mortals – Mark Slackmeyer coming out of the closet as the first openly gay comic strip character in history; Zonker Harris's well-worn reluctance to graduate college saying, "The only thing between me and the real world is one unflunkable ceramics course;" shallow journalist Roland Hedley's seduction by and ultimate abuse of Twitter; left-wingers Joanie Caucus and Rick Redfern, whose mercenary son works undercover for the CIA. The same ironies, twists of fate, and life decisions – good and bad, planned and unplanned – that flesh and blood people see pass through their own lives. Our comic strip counterparts wrestle with conundrums that resonate, such as Mike Doonesbury's lament upon being told in his first post-college job as an advertising copywriter that he had to sell Ronald Reagan to black voters. His plaintive response was, "This is a test, right? To see if I have no shame?"

Perhaps the most affecting storyline and character rebirth has occurred with B.D. Always in a helmet – be it a football helmet in college, a camouflage helmet in Vietnam, or in California Highway Patrol headgear – B.D. embodied the middle-American soldier, unquestioning in his ideals and service to a higher order. As a quarterback at Walden College, he told a fellow player who showed up to practice stoned, "Marijuana leads to communism." And when he was sent home heartbroken from Vietnam, he bemoaned his fate by saying, "This war had such promise."

But in Trudeau's 2005 book The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time, B.D. appears without a helmet for the first time, and also without a leg. Serving as an Army officer in Iraq, a grenade hit his Humvee near Fallujah, nearly killing him. The book, and the strip ever since, depicts B.D.'s coming to terms with his faith in the military as expressed by an Army officer's rendering of the present-day Catch-22: "We've got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not get killed." In therapy sessions, talks with fellow vets, and interactions with his supportive and sometimes confused family and friends, B.D. comes to embody Trudeau's love-the-warrior-but-hate-the-war sensibility which has been present through Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

A recent addition to the war scenario is Melissa, a young enlistee who suffered a sexual assault at the hands of an officer. Her road back to self-esteem, and her decision to return to the front, has elicited some of the most poignant yet knowingly humorous strips of late. Mirroring a situation that must go on more often than the public is aware, Doonesbury once again opens the door a crack for us to see in.

And then:

Why does it all ring so true? As far back as 1984, Gloria Steinem summed it up in her introduction to Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years: "Trudeau's people grow, take on new ideas, change their jobs and even their personal worlds. . . This gives us faith. If the Doonesbury characters we love and identify with can change and be redeemed, surely we the readers can change and be redeemed too."

Over twenty-five years later, it's a different war and a history-making President. Our lives have changed and so have the lives of our counterparts in Doonesbury. The only constant has been the reflection we see every time we read it. For as long as it stays around for us to read.

Daughter's Featured Foto says THINK SPRING

Sophisticated Times

OSV — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:40:00 GMT

The past couple of weeks have found me in a major rally to beat this nasty bug that has me lagging behind in my work and play. At home more than I’d like to be with a less than sharp focus, I’ve been watching so much TV that I’ve had real dreams of a future time when no one has even heard of a Kardashian let alone a whole clan of them. Reading makes my eyes hurt and music gives me a headache, which leaves only sleep or the vast frontier of televised companions I can either mute or totally ignore and still not be alone.

This morning my parade of one-dimensional visitors looked and sounded like this:

Are your nails brittle and weak? Grow healthy strong nails in as little as fourteen days!

Is your hair dull and lifeless? Give sparkle and shine to even the most damaged hair.

Do you have unsightly belly fat?

Are your drains clogged with your dull lifeless hair and belly fat? Why call a plumber when for only $9.99 the turbo snake can clear every drain in your house instantly.

BUT WAIT! Call in the next ten minutes and we’ll DOUBLE YOUR ORDER and you pay only shipping and handling for the second snake.

Have you ever taken advantage of one of these offers? I did. I got a second Swivel Sweeper for only $14.95 shipping and handling, totaling the same amount I paid for the first Swivel Sweeper. When they arrived Husband said, “We need two of these?” I said that the second one was free so now we could each have our own. He gave me That Look.

I’m confused as to why all the daytime sales pitches are aimed at women since the day when housewives sat ironing in front of their soaps has certainly passed. Or has it? With the unemployment rate what it is one would think the male population sitting by default in front of the flat screen has increased in proportion to the widely suffered layoffs in our current hard times. But even so, the beer and car commercials don’t come on full force until after dinner. Daylight hours are still reserved for cleaning products, sanitary pads, birth control pills, and lawyers to represent your case against the people who make the birth control pills. This cornucopia of concern for the modern woman is interrupted only by occasional warnings about identity theft and desperate people with structured settlements screaming out their windows that it’s their money and they WANT IT NOW!

From where I sit with my Kleenex, lozenges, and Vitamin Water, the only thing more pathetic than shouting out your window about your finances is blogging about fictional people doing it. But the Progresso soup commercial just inspired me to go downstairs and root around in the cupboard for something I can fool myself tastes like homemade. While I’m down there I think I’ll run the Swivel Sweeper around a little. And if one of the Kardashians shows up I even have a spare.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos offer Shades of Gray

snow day

absinthe

moon over israel

By the time I got to Woodstock

OSV — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:30:00 GMT

This past weekend was the first annual Woodstock Writers Festival, an event I bought a pass to way back when I was feeling totally healthy and not slinking around with this disgusting whatever it is I have and can't get rid of. The little condo Husband and I have upstate is less than ten miles from Woodstock, and since the festival fell on Valentine's weekend it seemed custom-made for a lovely getaway of cozy togetherness and meaningful separateness. As it turned out, it was neither.

Husband was recuperating from his own health crappiness and didn't feel like the three-hour drive. I didn't either but I would have had to be scheduled for an amputation to miss hanging out with a couple of hundred other writers and hearing several famous authors speak. The festival ran Friday to Monday, which meant Sunday morning found me in the empty library parking lot in my pajamas and winter coat trying to glom onto their free wireless so I could send Husband a witty Valentine message. I could have been an upright citizen and gone to Panera's which is also free, but that would have required clothing and lip gloss.

The festival was terrific despite the glitches inherent in the maiden voyage of any endeavor, in this case over enrolled workshops and one famous author who should have been reeled in and told there are more nouns, verbs and adjectives than fuck, fuck and fuck. I don't know whether her appearance at our festival demonstrated the real persona of Julie/Julia author Julie Powell, but after listening to her for far longer than was humanly necessary I will forever think of her as Boring/Boringer.

The best part was hearing everyone's story and the way they chose to tell it. The theme of the festival was Memoir, a writing form the reading public has embraced since the advent of reality television and the human devastation of 9/11. For whatever reason, people are interested, even fascinated, by the lives of others, and those others don't even have to be celebrities or circus performers. Although now that I've said that, one of my favorite readings was by a young woman with a Sarah Silverman thing going on who wrote a vibrant lust scene between a carnival worker and a society girl trying to find herself on the carny circuit. It almost made me want to go out and hug someone sweaty.

Over the course of the weekend, I met a woman from Chicago who is writing a memoir/cookbook as a tribute to her mother; a Michigan mom who plans to blog about leaving the corporate rat race to run the family farm; and a woman who looked very familiar to me who is writing the story of her dramatic weight loss. When I told her I felt like I'd met her somewhere before she said, "Did I look like this or was I 300 pounds?" Not a question you expect to hear. It turns out she lives on the same street as my brother and sister-in-law so I probably really have seen her. And I think she was thin.

The real revelation for me was that I have something in common with golfers, fantasy football leaguers, quilters, and Trekkies. I like being with people who are passionate about my passion. Hard to believe I didn't already know that.

Today's Fotos show us Signs of Woodstock

retro festival logo

bearsville theater staircase

but remember to put them back on

love the one you're with

Familiar Strangers Revisited

OSV — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:32:00 GMT

I'm sick with something miserable this week so please accept a reprint of an entry that ran in the winter of 2007. Daughter's pictures are new, but the entry and the memory it recalls are gently used.

Today as I was waiting for the light to change on the way out of my neighborhood there appeared in the sky in front of me a flock of geese flying in that perfect V formation with precision spacing between each bird that can only be primordially determined. There was a Barry White song playing on the radio and just as he hit the chorus, the place where his voice does that soulful sexy throb, the entire formation dipped to the right. It was so unexpected it made me gasp. Boy, do I live for the unexpected.

I think the longer we're on the planet the more we hope we still surprise people. I love when people tell me I'm different from the way they thought I would be. We can all be such prisoners of our preconceptions that there's something freeing about discovering we're not at all the way someone first imagined us. At one of my high school reunions a woman walked by me who I recognized right away and greeted by name. She seemed shocked that I knew her and said so. I was shocked that she was shocked and I asked her why she reacted like that. She said, "You were one of the smart kids. You were a class officer. You always sat in the front row and raised your hand with the answer. I didn't think you noticed any of the people who sat in the back of the room." I was stunned. When I told her I was just passing time answering questions waiting for the bell to ring so I could go smoke in the girls' room it was her turn to be stunned. Someone else that night remembered me as being athletic because I spent an entire semester senior year running the track at lunchtime. Yeah, that would be because I had cut gym since 10th grade and couldn't graduate unless I made up the time. My best friend would meet me behind the scoreboard with a pack of Newports. Then I'd begin my pole-vaulting practice. Remember?

Generally, people seem to perceive me as classy but that's only because they haven't seen me eating cold Chinese food over the sink in my underwear. The first time I can recall coming up against someone's perception of me was in the sixth grade. My family had just moved from the Brooklyn housing projects to Westchester County and it was the beginning of the school year with me being the new kid. We were standing on the playground at recess and one of the girls was saying she knew a boy who said he did something but she didn't think most of the other kids would know what it meant. Everyone was pleading with her to say what it was but she wouldn't divulge it. She said it was too advanced. Then her eyes came to rest on me and she said, "You're from the city. I bet you know." She came close and cupped her hands on either side of her mouth so no one could see her lips move. Then she pressed them against my ear and said, "Fuck."

What? Why is she telling me this? Because I'm from Brooklyn? Is that where people fuck? Or that the people there so relentlessly talk about fucking that I couldn't help but overhear? And more importantly, am I absolutely certain of my facts? Is it really what I think it is? Could I be misinformed? And what's with all these other kids? Are they Mormons? WHERE AM I?

Pretty much Hooterville as it turned out, a town with an annual Grange Fair where you could see a sheep shearing demonstration. Or sit on the roof of the junior high school and watch the Fireman's Carnival Fourth of July display. A town with one movie theater that changed features once a week where your high school quarterback was the usher. One day in my junior year I went on some errands in town and noticed the movie marquee announcing "Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" was showing and I figured it sounded like fun. I went in and saw it and loved it so much that after it was over I decided to stay and see it again if only for the Oompa Loompas. The lights went up and when the quarterback started checking the rows for debris he saw me sitting on the aisle. He greeted me and we chatted for a while about how cool the movie was and I said I was seeing it again. He looked around and asked, "Who are you here with?" I said nobody. He persisted. "No, I mean are you with your niece or something or you're babysitting?" I assured him I was alone. "And you're seeing it again?" he asked. When I responded yes he leaned in closer so no one in the empty theater could overhear. And in a whisper reminiscent of my sixth grade playground days he said, "Are you stoned?"

I couldn't believe he asked me that. Everyone knows I'm an athlete.

Daughter's Fotos take a tour of our Collective Imagination

hide and seek

bleeding colors

attack

son of man

Abracadabra

OSV — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:29:00 GMT

This past Thursday I got a call from someone at the college I’m getting my long-postponed degree from telling me that the main admissions office just called and said they’re missing a transcript from one of my previous schools. All my transcripts were sent by the schools I previously attended way back in August, and I glanced at the calendar to confirm that this was indeed February of the following year and why was this coming up now? I was told that admissions, located in a land far, far away, was only able to find page two of the transcript from my last school.

No worries, I said. They probably don’t realize it’s a double-sided transcript, so whoever is looking at the original just needs to turn it over and page one is on the other side. Several phone calls later I was assured that admissions did indeed have the original, but only page two. I’m taking a History of Math class right now and I’m certain there must be some law that states one side of a double-sided sheet can’t just disappear into the black hole of zero, but since it was hardly the time to engage in mathematical philosophy, I just asked what needed to be done to correct the situation.

I was told to fax the unofficial copy I had (also double-sided) over to the school and they would forward it to admissions. I booked it over to Staples forthwith and did just that. On my return home I had an email waiting for me saying they really needed the original, but far away admissions had contacted my former school and was told they would waive the $10 fee and send another one with my authorization.

Friday morning I called my former school to give authorization, but was told it needed to be done in person. I would have been shocked to hear otherwise. On my drive over there my cell phone rang and I pulled to the side of the road to take Daughter’s call. She was recovering from swine flu, as I mentioned in Eat Drink Mom Kids, but had been able to return to her job as a special ed teacher during the week. While at work she lost her balance restraining an agitated student and crashed backward into a wall hitting her head. She went home and proceeded to sleep for 18 hours straight, interrupted only by her boyfriend, whose job it was to poke her every two hours to make sure she was alive. Now she was calling me so I could stop worrying. As if that would work.

DTR: I’m just walking back from the doctors' and they said everything is fine. The CAT scan was negative. My brain is okay.

OSV: So they said it’s the flu that’s making you sleep around the clock?

DTR: It was a CAT scan, Mom. They don’t do swine flu.

OSV: Who does swine flu?

DTR: My regular doctor who sent me for the scan. Don’t worry, Mom. What are you doing?

OSV: Oh, you know, the usual. Get some rest.

DTR: That’s what I'm all about.

I walked through the front door of my former school and was greeted by the Director of Admissions who gestured me into his office.

DOA: Here you go. Sign this form and we’ll mail your transcript right out, no extra charge. Just answer this question: how does one side of a two-sided original disappear?

OSV: It’s a math thing.

The mysterious tagger known as BNE strikes again in Daughter’s Featured Fotos

BNE in chel-sea

BNE on TV

DJs at BNE

i am BNE

Eat Drink Mom Kids

OSV — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:09:00 GMT

This is Restaurant Week in New York, the time of year when eateries citywide offer specially priced selections to strut their stuff and bring in new patrons. Restaurants that may be rather expensive on a regular night devise prix fixe menus of appetizer, entrée and dessert for a set amount well below their standard price. Daughter and I always try and zero in on a new place during Restaurant Week, and this year Son joined us while Husband honored a work commitment elsewhere.

I picked Son up at his house, and when we got a few blocks away he realized he had left his wallet at home. I asked him if we should turn back and he said, “Why?” Hey, nobody has to draw me a picture. Since Daughter suggested it and Son agreed to come, it was my dinner party.

SON: So what’s this upscale Mexican restaurant we’re going to? Did you check out the menu online?

OSV: It’s Dos Caminos on Park Avenue South. And yes, I think I’ll be having the appetizer of grilled squid, plantain and papaya salad with wild baby arugula and smoked chile-mint vinaigrette. I haven’t decided on an entrée, but dessert is definitely banana bread pudding with pecan toffee and mexican vanilla bean ice cream.

SON: I’m starting with the grilled chicken tortilla soup with creamy pasilla tomato broth and chihuahua cheese.

OSV: What, was this a quiz? You looked at the menu?

SON: It’s all about the preparation, Mom. What’s my sister ordering?

OSV: I don’t know. Have you talked to her this week? She’s just getting over swine flu.

SON: WHAT? That’s terrible. Is she up to going? Is she contagious? This is terrible. Are you going to kiss her when we get there?

OSV: Don’t be silly. She’s my daughter. I’ll see how she looks.

SON: You go in first.

Daughter greeted us at her apartment door and I gave her a big hug. Son walked in behind me.

SON: I’m going to pass on the physical contact.

DTR: Your hands in your coat pockets were a dead giveaway. Let’s get going.

Dos Caminos was fresh and lively, and dinner was outstanding. Daughter observed as the shapely hostess bent over a nearby table in her low-cut top that something else might be out soon as well. Son commented he couldn’t be that lucky.

On our way out we all took a magnet printed with the signature Dos Caminos guacamole recipe, the best I've ever had. Here is your own souvenir of Restaurant Week to enjoy at home in whatever top you choose to wear as you bend over your table. Print it out, stick a magnet on the back, and slap it on your fridge. Now you’re one of us.

From New Year’s Eve, Daughter says Let Them Eat Cake

To Phoebe, With Love

OSV — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:30:00 GMT

J.D. Salinger died this week. Friday's paper said it happened on Wednesday, but he was such a massive recluse it figures he wouldn't tell anyone for two days. I imagine he was a difficult guy, maybe depressive or even borderline according to those who got close enough to know. Still, it would be hard to come up with five words that command the kind of singular yet universal response as The Catcher in the Rye. Four decades after first reading it I still smile at Holden's description of his sister, Phoebe, as being rollerskate skinny. I guess because I was too. RIP J.D. You never wanted my admiration but it couldn't be helped.

Two other stories this week seemed to feed off each other, if you will. First, Glen W. Bell, Jr., the founder of Taco Bell, died at 86. I didn't even know the Bell in Taco Bell was someone's name and I've consumed my weight in Beef Meximelts over the years. Life changed when I had to start substituting Lipitor for guacamole, but we all must know our limits and manage them, right? Which brings us to the second story, this one written by a recovering anorexic who took up half a page ranting that the calorie content of restaurant meals shouldn't be posted because it causes her anxiety. New York eateries have been posting this information for two years to promote health awareness and encourage better meal choices. At the risk of appearing insensitive, my lunch is not about your phobias. Pack a yogurt.

Even the Non Sequitur comic fit my cynical mood

But Cash Cab saved me. I wrote here about New York City's game show in a taxicab in Take the money and ride, but the episode I watched while doing my math homework was classic. A very elderly couple got in the cab, a fragile looking pair easily in their eighties. When the lights started flashing and the sirens squealing inside the car, I was afraid one of them might throw an embolism and expire right there. They looked around panicked, like, "What’s that?" and the cabdriver/host, Ben Bailey, told them they were in the Cash Cab, a television game show. To which the woman replied, "You can't afford a studio?"

Ben explained he'd be asking them questions on the way to their destination, and if they answered correctly they'd win money. He said, "What are your names?" The woman said, "I'm Arlene and this is Julius," and she turned to Julius and said, "These questions are easy." She was hilarious. The best part was that the questions were tough and they got them all right and won $550. When asked if they wanted to go double or nothing on the video bonus question, Arlene replied, "Just let us out at the museum and give us the money. We're too old to take any more chances." Don't bet on it, Arlene.

Daughter's Featured Fotos say Explain This

stylized mantis

basquiat

brain waves

walk, no, wait, no, walk

Existential Cowboys: A Conversation Between Sigmund Freud and Quentin Tarantino

OSV — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:08:00 GMT

The following discourse takes place in the late night Green Room of a parallel universe. Present is auteur film director Quentin Tarantino, dressed casually in vintage jeans and a stonewashed cotton pullover. Dr. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, sits opposite him wearing a three-piece black suit that smells of cigars. The two men are comfortably seated in chairs left over from the set of Conan O’Brien’s recently canceled talk show.

QT: Sigmund, I’m told you just saw my latest movie. I can call you Sigmund, right?

SF: Only if I can call you Quentin T. and write about you later.

QT: Deal. Just don’t try and read too much into what I say.

SF: You’re not familiar with my work, are you?

QT: My mother always kept a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams in the bathroom, but I never needed any incentive. Well, let’s discuss the work of mine we’re both familiar with, Inglourious Basterds. Were you taken with the movie’s plot detailing the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy?

SF: You know, as a Jew, and especially a Galician Jew in pre-war Austria, I had my own fantasies about retribution for the despicable manner in which my superior intelligence was dismissed by those in the golden kingdom of academia. Pishers. It’s clear their mothers let them sit in dirty diapers so long the befoulment beneath them retracted so far into their bodies it reached their brains.

QT: Okay, so you’re a fan?

SF: I rocked the scene where the theatre burned. All the Nazis and their pathetic hangers-on vaporized while watching their glorious propaganda film. Genius.

QT: (smiling broadly) You’re too kind. That’s what the critics called me. And my grandmother always said, “If two people say you look sick, lay down.” So it must be true.

SF: (stroking his chin whiskers) You know, it’s very interesting that in this brief conversation we’re having, you’ve already mentioned your mother and your grandmother. In the dreams you’ve had of these two women closest to you, what were they wearing?

QT: Bear suits.

SF: And in light of that, do you find it significant that one of your characters, the Basterd who smashes Nazis’ heads with a baseball bat, is called The Bear Jew?

QT: You know, I wanted Adam Sandler for that role, but he had a conflict.

SF: Loved his Hanukkah Song. Such a kibitzer.

QT: Sweet guy. But actually, the backstory to The Bear Jew is that he was rumored by the Nazis to be a vengeful golem summoned by an angry rabbi. So it has nothing to do with me. Tarantino is an Italian name.

SF: Same thing. Overprotective mothers, fanatic religious guilt, big food. Meat balls, brisket, no difference. Let me ask you this: When the Basterds killed a bunch of Nazis, why scalp them? Was this a symbolic gesture regarding the brain, in other words, the big brain behind Nazism, Adolf Hitler?

QT: No, I just thought it was cool. I’m all about the blood, always uber blood, especially when you don’t expect it. I like to pair violence with a comical scene, so the audience is laughing but they don’t feel right about it because of all the blood. Also, if the Nazis got scalped it gave me a reason to give Brad Pitt a kickass name – Aldo the Apache. He was nuts for that, I’m telling you, nuts.

SF: Speaking of nuts, I’m glad you brought them up. When the Basterds encountered a company of Nazis, they would kill and scalp all of them except one. That one they would cut with a knife and let go so he could tell his superiors how ruthless they were. The first time Aldo raised his knife and told the Nazi, “I’m going to give you something so everyone will always know what you are,” I thought he was going to –

QT: Circumcise him? That’s what a lot of people thought. I try not to go for the easy joke. Besides, who would know he’s got a pecked pecker? Just the chicks he convinces to sleep with him. Isn’t it better to carve a swastika into his forehead? Then everyone knows. Anyway, that kind of humor is beneath me. It’s unsophisticated. I leave that stuff to Judd Apatow and the Superbad crew. What’s the word Jews use instead of pecker – you call it a schmeckel, right?

SF: I call it a penis and so should you. In your dreams, what do you call your mother’s genitals?

QT: In my dreams?? Christ, that’s no dream, that’s a nightmare. What do you call your mother’s genitals?

SF: Watch your filthy mouth and leave my mother out of it. The woman was a saint. You have no idea what a handful I was. I started smoking cigars at ten.

QT: Where does a ten-year-old get money for cigars?

SF: We lived on a busy street. Lots of men hanging out. Men with money.

QT: You worked the street? Jesus, I had no idea. Believe it or not, I try to be sensitive to people’s issues, people in the audience. Maybe you noticed there was absolutely no sex at all in Inglourious Basterds. The two main female characters were a double agent and a young woman who escaped the Nazi slaughter of her family. Noble women who fought for their beliefs with courage and strength.

SF: Excellent device, albeit unlikely. When they’re not hysterical, women are busy marrying men to fight for them in the hopes their wives will give them sex. This movie you’ve made, it’s fiction.

QT: Of course it’s fiction. Hitler wasn’t murdered in a burning theatre.

SF: He wasn’t? I wouldn’t know that. I died right before the Holocaust.

QT: It’s just as well, Sig. You went through enough.

SF: Tell me about it.

Daughter's Featured Fotos hover on a Higher Level

glo-cone

leftover

merging contours

the scaffold dance

Finding Safety in Numbers

OSV — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:42:00 GMT

It's only in the last twenty years or so that the general public has embraced the word 'breast'. Until the mothers, sisters and daughters of our nation began falling into the pit of breast cancer, the word was mired in an aura of sophomoric sexuality. Saying it out loud brought on a wave of nervous giggles, so common language opted for the Playboy Magazine euphemisms of hooters and boobs. But the appalling and seemingly unstoppable onslaught of a disease that has reached into a society's soul and ripped out its heart has at least succeeded in killing its shyness.

Yesterday was my yearly mammogram, part of the pact I made with my body to do everything I can to dodge the 1-in-9 bullet, one in nine being the statistical odds for a woman in my part of the state to be stricken with breast cancer. When the wizards on the recent government-appointed preventive health panel came out with their recommendation that yearly mammograms and self-exams were not only unnecessary, but might in fact be perpetuating the disease, words failed me. But not written words.

At the radiologist's office, I sat in the anteroom with a group of fellow soldiers, all of us in pants and shoes with our purses in our laps, and the open-in-front blue gown fastened any way it would fit around our various shapes. Female conversations begin much differently than men's, which are often sparked by news or sports events or work-related topics. Our group share began when one of us said aloud, "I'm very anxious. Does this make anyone else feel anxious?" The floodgates opened.

One woman said she'd been unemployed for a year and finally landed a job two weeks ago. She was worried about asking for the morning off to keep the mammogram appointment she had made back in October. So yes, she was doubly anxious. Another woman spoke of her 60-year-old sister who meditated, practiced yoga, and refused to have a mammogram saying she didn't want to know; an ironic choice on the path to enlightenment. I told of the other measures I take to stay informed about my health. The Department of Health is all about men including a PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) test in their yearly physical to detect early prostate cancer. But a woman has to ask her primary care physician to include a CA-125 test in her blood screening and most women don't even know it exists. CA-125 detects the specific cancer antigen that is an early indicator of ovarian cancer, known as the silent killer because by the time a woman has symptoms, it's usually too late to treat. There's no extra charge to include this test in your blood profile, yet it's not publicized and doctors don't think to tell their patients about it. So we have to keep thinking and advocating for our own health.

Breast cancer is something that affects us all one way or another, be it in our own body, that of a family member, coworker, friend – even just seeing the news footage depicting an ocean of pink hats marching in the Susan G. Komen or Avon Walk for the Cure. I once received a promotion at work because the employee who held the position for 15 years died of breast cancer. I have never been sadder to get a pay raise in my life.

All of us in the waiting room expressed similar feelings about the whole process and its accompanying internal chaos: making the appointment months in advance; seeing it written on the calendar every time we walk by; preparing that morning to go; sitting there waiting; having the test and then waiting for the films to be read; being called back in to repeat one of the views and seeing the x-ray hanging there with circles drawn around possible trouble spots; sitting back in the waiting room; hearing our name called to come speak with the doctor.

We talked about how hard it is for our husbands to know how to support us. If they ask, "Does it hurt a lot?" we squash down the urge to say, "Would it hurt to put your testicles in a vise? Four times?" If they say, "Don't worry so much; I'm sure the results will be fine," they're guilty of minimizing our anxiety. If they say, "Whatever happens I'll be at your side," it fuels our fears of what if? And if they're silent because they just don't know what to say, their inability to comfort us leaves us feeling alone and vulnerable. They're doomed to be damned, unfair victims of our unspoken misery. Here is my own personal Partner Primer, which Husband does so well: Hug us when we part and call later to say you love us. We'll tell you everything. We with the breasts are not shy.

After the week off, Daughter's Featured Fotos are Back With A Vengeance

late night

ipod graffiti, oh my!

style wars art show - live painting

infinite time

Modeling Modesty

OSV — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:57:00 GMT

People have different styles, and some may be quirkier than others. The definition depends largely on who is describing the behavior, the person with it, or the person living with the person with it. In this instance, I would be the first person, which makes Husband the second.

Here's the story. We have five windows in our upstairs master bedroom. After a protracted discussion (battle) over how to shade these windows, we reached a decision (compromise). Husband wanted no shades at all, and I wanted those privacy blinds that allow only enough light in so you know you're not in a coffin. What we settled on were silhouette shades that allow in filtered light while obscuring vision from outside.

This would be a good compromise except Husband wants the shades pulled up all the time we're not sleeping. One of the windows looks out onto the path that students walk to the local high school and another looks out onto our neighbor's roof. I told Husband I want those two shades down all the time because I don't need packs of teenagers looking up into our bedroom. He gave me a look that said, "Are you kidding? They're busy selling drugs to each other," which I can't argue with so let's move to the other window, the one facing the neighbor's roof.

These neighbors are very nice people who have sorely neglected the back of their house, the side our bedroom faces. They've done all manner of landscaping and design to the front and sides, but the back looks like it belongs to a foreclosure. We've carefully mentioned this to them in a non-critical way, like, "You know that rotting wood attracts termites and carpenter ants, right?" and they just nod and ask how the kids are. So we've had to let it go. But that doesn't mean I want to look at it.

Being in the field of social work, Husband often likes me to explore the underlying meaning of my preferences. Sometimes I go along with it and sometimes it just gives me cramps. Saturday morning I pulled up all the bedroom shades except the roof-facing one. Noticing Husband looking at me, I explained.

OSV: I'm going in to take a shower and I don't want to come out with that window shade up. The roof is ugly, and besides, who knows if they'll be having work done and there's someone standing up there.

For a Certified Social Worker, this is the Aha! moment since everyone in the psychology field knows the part that comes after the 'besides' is the real deal.

HUSBAND: They never have work done. Why don't you just admit you're a little paranoid about privacy?

Just to show him, I pulled the shade up and went in the shower while he left on errands.

After my shower, I entered the bedroom in my towel and something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. Directly to my left, right out that freaking window, were two guys standing on the neighbor's roof. One had his back to me and the other one looked away quickly when I appeared. No young guy wants to see a woman in her fifties in a skimpy towel unless maybe she's Michelle Pfeiffer or he has Cougaritis. I found out later that a pregnant raccoon had found its way into the neighbor's attic through the rotted fascia board. The guys on the roof were with an animal removal service, and at least one of them was going to need an extra beer at lunch.

All things considered, I fared better than the woman who submitted the following response to a magazine asking about readers' most embarrassing moments. She had taken a shower, and then ran down to the basement in her towel to get the basket of clean laundry. While there, she noticed her son had left his football helmet on the washer after putting his dirty uniform in. Since the basket was full and she knew he'd be looking for the helmet after school, she put it on her head and went to go upstairs.

Unfortunately, as she walked the towel came loose and fell to the floor. Not having a free hand to retrieve it, she just kept going since it was only her husband in the house. But unaware his wife was in the basement laundry room, the husband had let in the meter reader. As the woman approached the stairs, she was stunned to see a strange man standing there. Equally stunned to see a naked woman holding a laundry basket and wearing a football helmet, the meter reader said, "Lady, I don't know the game you're playing, but I hope your team wins."

Today's Featured Fotos add alliteration with Cousin's Costa Rican Catches

The next voice you hear

OSV — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:27:00 GMT

One of the side effects of relentless communication is phantom phone calls. During the recent holiday school break, my friend with younger children at home must have had her hands full. Two times in the same day my cell rang and the screen indicated her number was calling, but no one was there. I could hear a lot of activity on her end; unfortunately none of it included me. In the past, Husband's phone has called mine while he's driving home in his car unaware of the conversation he's missing out on. Every time this happens I yell HELLO! as loud as I can but no one cares.

The theme for advertising this past Christmas was the new generation of iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, Nexus One, you name it. Very shortly, it will be impossible to buy a cell phone that just makes phone calls. A friend of mine who is a longtime attorney just outfitted his New York office with webcams so he can run things from his out-of-state vacation home this winter. Although it's an experiment for now, he's looking toward the future and that's never a bad move. With technology always on the rise and the economy circling the drain, business as usual is anything but usual. Shortly after we spoke, I watched the powerful Coen brothers movie No Country For Old Men. I've seen it before, but my favorite piece of dialogue remains the same.

"What are you doing?"

"Just looking for what’s coming next."

"Yeah. Problem is you never see it."

In the morning newspaper, the comic strip Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman struck a familiar chord.

It reminded me of a story told by another friend, this one with a grown son who just became a psychiatrist. Last year during his hospital rotation, my friend's phone rang and she saw that it was her son's cell number. She greeted him, but when he didn't respond she realized he was speaking instead to someone in the room with him. She called out, "Hang up the phone!"

She then heard her son the doctor ask his patient how the new medication was working. The patient said he was feeling okay. Not wanting to eavesdrop, my friend hung up. But a few moments later her phone rang again, once more accidentally redialed. And once again she called out to alert her son. Suddenly the patient yelled, "They're back! The voices are back!" With great interest, the doctor asked if he could discern what the voices were saying. The patient called out excitedly, "Yes! They're saying, THIS IS YOUR MOTHER TELLING YOU TO HANG UP THE PHONE!"

My pal Blondie sent these photos along to remind us of Retro Before Robo

Don't make me laugh

OSV — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:36:00 GMT

One of the classes I'm taking when the new semester begins is an advanced study called Comedy: Theory and Practice. I got the reading list in advance and picked up one of the required books over the weekend at Barnes & Noble. I have to admit I was a little surprised to see Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud on my Comedy reading list. Not that I expected to spend the semester getting down with Mel Brooks movies, but one can hope.

I'm almost through the book and believe me, Freud was no Henny Youngman. Even though the iconic picture on the cover shows him in a mustache holding a cigar, there's no mistaking him for Groucho. Not even Harpo's brother could pull off a joke that ends with, "She could abschlagen nothing except her own water." They must have been howling in the streets of Austria with that one. Even the hunchbacks. Forget the Jews. No, really, forget them. Two Jews met in the neighborhood of the bathhouse. "Have you taken a bath?" asked one of them. "What?" asked the other in return, "is there one missing?" You're killing me Sig.

Knowing what's funny is serious business, and who better to get to the bottom of it than the father of psychoanalysis. After all, no one can resist a guy who hypothesizes, "An examination of the determinants of laughing will perhaps lead us to a plainer idea of what happens when a joke affords assistance against suppression." What, you want repression? Try this: "But if we are to judge by the impressions gained from non-tendentious jests, we cannot possibly think the amount of this pleasure great enough to attribute to it the strength to lift deeply-rooted inhibitions and repressions." Don't say later I never told you.

All jesting aside, Freud presents some gems of illumination that transcend time and place. And without even listening hard, you can hear Henny and Woody in the background. On the subject of returning an insult to someone of a higher class without getting hanged, Freud offers us this snappy repartee: A German royal was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked, "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?" "No, your Highness," was the reply, "but my father was."

In its simplest terms (a place Freud never goes) anecdotal humor needs three things: an incident, someone to tell about it, and a listener. The motive and manner can differ along with the content. In the following joke that the book uses to demonstrate a mixed-meaning play on words, it is the listener who appreciates the satirical irony, which in turn pleases the joke teller: A doctor, as he came away from a lady's bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head, "I don’t like her looks." "I've not liked her looks for a long time," the husband hastened to agree.

To further quote Freud, "In laughter, therefore, on our hypothesis, the conditions are present under which a sum of psychical energy which has hitherto been used for cathexis is allowed free discharge." In other words, bring on Young Frankenstein. But first, as long as you're listening, a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. . .

Daughter's Featured Fotos examine Concepts And Sunsets

angry, angry claudette

propaganda

james marshall-dalek, and there was war in heaven

first sunset of 2010

TwentyTen

OSV — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:24:00 GMT

My two New Year's resolutions are to exercise a half hour every day, and maintain my composure when retail customer service does not meet my expectations. Like if the cashier won't hang up the phone with her boyfriend, I will just say no to register rage. I have also resolved not to instantly download every update Microsoft throws my way because some of them are half-baked and cause trouble. It's enough that pharmaceutical companies rush their drugs into the marketplace without sufficient test trials or knowledge of long-term effects on our chromosomes. There's nothing I can do anymore about future generations of turtleheads, but I refuse to play guinea pig to the latest version of Internet Explorer.

In the midst of all this careful New Year planning, Sunday morning I went to log onto the website where I check our health insurance claims so I know where we stand with our deductible. I entered my member ID and password as usual and the screen said to try again. Because all my screen names and passwords are written down near my computer, I looked over to make sure I wasn't missing anything and entered it all again. No go. I then repeated these same steps five more times, as if the computer would eventually say, okay, what the hell, you're logged on. So you already know two things: one, that didn't happen, and two, I'm a one-trick pony.

I then clicked on Forgot your password? which I hadn't, but I figured at the very least I'd have them email me the link to set up a new one. Amazingly, the screen responded with the news that this account did not exist in the database. Hmmm. Not one to embrace failure, I clicked on Register Now figuring I'd make an end run around their constitution and set up a fresh account. I filled out the entire registration form using the plastic ID card they sent us, the one we present to our doctors, and the next screen told me there were no such members or claims or hernia surgeries or anything else we've shared with their website for the past eight months. Which makes me wonder: If our insurance company says we never existed, is my hernia back?

While I waited for a weekday so I could speak to a live person, I hustled over to Target and bought the AirClimber, a step exerciser from the people who inflicted AbRoller on the general public. Now that Son owns his own home and his room is empty, I set it up in there opposite his old TV with the DVD player. I'll let you know how that goes as soon as I start using it. In the meantime, since it's a new year, I flipped through the folder of blog ideas I keep on hand for future entries. Most of them are no longer topical so I'll start a fresh collection, but one of them is too strange to let go unmentioned.

The following is almost verbatim from a Newsday blurb this past November: Police charged a gang in the remote Peruvian jungle with killing people for their fat. Once the victims were dead, the fat was drained from their corpses and offered for sale on the black market for use in cosmetics. Although medical experts expressed skepticism that a major market for fat existed, three suspects confessed and told police the fat was sold to intermediaries in Lima.

And if that's not incentive to haul ass onto the AirClimber, I don't know what is.

Daughter's Featured Fotos say Think About This

divided faith

painted layers in the subway

empty faces

save us!

Come Fly With Me

OSV — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:03:00 GMT

Imagine this scenario: You have an adult son who has become very secretive, hangs out with a gang, and frequents a location linked to a radical group. You haven’t seen him in months. So you call the police and tell them everything, begging them to find your son and return him home before something terrible happens to him or those he comes in contact with. The cops thank you for calling, hang up the phone, and order in a pizza. Eventually they call the district attorney's office who says, "No anchovies for us."

I don’t think it’s overreacting to say this is pretty much what just happened with the 23-year-old terrorist who tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker, called every authority he could think of to warn them about his son’s frequent visits to Yemen and increasingly extremist behavior. Word trickled across our Homeland Security network and sure enough, the son was found to be on a “generic” list of possible terrorists. Instead of moving him to the “DO NOT FLY” list months ago when his father started making phone calls, our Intelligence leaders opted to sit on this warning until it exploded.

Perhaps the banker’s son didn’t act suspicious enough in Amsterdam before boarding. Yes, he paid cash for his ticket. True, he had no luggage. And right again, his passport showed recent trips to known terrorist hubs. If only he’d asked the flight attendants to show him how to get ON the plane without asking how to get OFF. That would have been the tip-off.

In contrast, our media seems determined to alert the world to how badly our system screwed up and how vulnerable we are. But they can’t do it alone so our government officials have to help. On a news program the day after Christmas, I watched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano attempt to dodge the issue of our Intelligence breakdown while the anchor kept hounding, “But shouldn’t the public know what went wrong? Are we living with a false sense of security that our government is protecting us? Doesn't this show that the system didn't work?” Finally Napolitano said, “Yes, the system failed us.”

Okay, pit bull anchorperson, happy now? In this world of bionic communication do you not think Al Qaeda watches TV? You think maybe they skip the news and go straight to Lost? All we need next is for Homeland Security to go on Larry King and say EXACTLY how it's all going to be fixed. Why don't we just drop fliers over Yemen that say, “We're morons! Our leaders answer to people who get paid to interview them in makeup! You win!”

Maybe we should take a page from Israel’s book. Pre-boarding security for an El Al flight involves observational profiling. This means screening passengers with regard to their body language, gestures, attitude, and repeated visits to destinations evidenced in their passports. Because of this nobody gets to blow up El Al flights. Which is great for Israel since they’re a country that seems to piss a lot of people off just by existing. A position the U.S. is swiftly moving toward if we’re not already there.

Not to mention the fact that if something did go wrong, Israeli reporters wouldn’t be on TV grilling the Prime Minister about where the failure occurred. Israel knows its enemies are always watching. Making officials discuss security in a televised setting would be, you know, telling.

Am I taking a chance writing all this publicly for the terrorists to see? Aren’t I doing exactly what I say Al Qaeda counts on? I doubt it. I’ve been on the Taliban’s Facebook page, and they don’t read me.

Daughter's Foto of The Lights of Tiberius wishes you a safe and Happy New Year

The Devil Don't Deal

OSV — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:06:00 GMT

The ironies of life are not wasted on me. Some I can hardly avoid. At least one of them haunts me every day when I sit behind the wheel of my car and fasten my seatbelt. As I reach over to place the buckle into the lock, the small, bullet-sized hole in the middle of the passenger seat stares back at me. The mark is not from a shooting, but from a drive-by of a different sort. Husband borrowed my car for a few days while his was in the shop and he returned it to me with the passenger seat hole. It’s a cigarette burn.

Smoking stirs up a myriad of emotions in me, some of them nostalgic. My parents smoked, chain-smoked even, and by the time I was 17, I was also a smoker along with my older brother. Sharing an after dinner cigarette was a family tradition in our lovely home with the yellow drapes that used to be white. The drapes that matched my parents' fingers. It was our little act of dysfunctional bonding, like a group of alcoholics sharing one for the road. This was back in the seventies before the public smoking ban. Before tobacco companies started getting sued for wrongful death. Before people read food labels and worried about drinking water. Back when we were happy to be ignorant of the fact we were killing ourselves.

My mother required oxygen before the end of her life. My father died of lung cancer. For many years, my brother traded his cigarette habit for a Nicorette habit. Very smart people, all of them. Intelligence is not a factor. Smoking is the Spanish Inquisition of addictions. The one that takes no prisoners while its victims deny they’re in a war or feel powerless to desert. Despite the $10 a pack cost, it’s actually a bargain of self-destruction. It’s two addictions in one. For no extra charge, you get to gamble that you’ll beat the odds and live.

Husband has tried to stop in the ten years we’ve been together. He never lights up in my presence. He knows the primal spark of dread it ignites in me. Even so, there's the smell on his clothes, the way he guards his kisses to avoid recrimination. I miss him. I always used to smile in the mornings watching him from the window as he walked down the driveway. The day he lit a cigarette before he reached the street I stopped watching. I miss that too, the fond lingering memory of him to carry through the day.

In the midst of chemo and radiation, my father would wait on the bench in front of the hospital as I went to get the car. My heart ached as I drove up to the entrance and watched him try to put out his cigarette before I got there. Husband’s first wife died from the same disease at a young age, another painful irony. The turning point for me came at 26 when I got married to my ex. I'm no monument to willpower, but I wanted children and knew I didn’t want to miss a moment of their lives. It was very hard to stop, miserably hard, but the need to create a healthy environment for those who depended on me was stronger.

I ask Husband how I’m supposed to deal with his smoking. His answer is, “Love me anyway.” It may be the answer for now, but it won’t fill the years I will have to live without him.

Daughter's Featured Fotos show the work of Younity, the all-female art crew
making magic on the streets of Brooklyn

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aiko

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shiro

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