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A Bipartisan List of the Five Worst Things About the Election, With Zero Statistics or Polls

November 4, 2012

This cartoon is republished from an earlier post.

That’s right, you heard it here. I’m going negative – slinging some mud and I don’t care who it sticks to. Instead of updating my status on Facebook about how fatigued I am by politics I wasted an entire evening in developing this blog post.

1)      There is a not a scrap of credence left anywhere for anything that subverts most Americans’ preconceived beliefs.

When Hurricane Sandy smashed us last week (what a night), and President Obama made uplifting public statements about managing the crisis, many conservative commentators complained that he shouldn’t have shown his face. In a Fox News interview, Charles Krauthammer said that since the White House really has no role to play in disaster relief, besides releasing funds, Obama was “playing the president, playing the commander-in-chief” in a disingenuous grab for voters’ sympathies. When he should have…what? Unplugged the phone and gone to bed? God forbid the President “play the president” when disaster strikes.

On the other hand, that rotund Republican ruffian, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, let himself be photographed touring devastated Brigantine Island with Obama. When he made the rounds on TV and social media, he applauded the President’s support and snapped that he doesn’t care about the hurricane’s impact on the election.

(He’s since been excommunicated by Republican pundits for this “treason.”)

“Today I’m touring NJ with President Obama,” Christie tweeted on October 31st. “Yes, he’s a Democrat, and I’m a Republican. We’re also adults, and this is how adults behave.”

“Especially adults who want a shot at the 2016 Presidential election…” a liberal friend of mine added when he shared this tweet on Facebook. He’s hardly alone in expressing the sentiment that Christie is playing nice not to do his job as an elected official when a record-breaking storm devastates thousands of his constituents, but to feed his own ambition.

So it officially does not matter what the hell anyone does. Elected officials doing their jobs with appropriate concern, resources and cooperation are pilloried for doing so simply because their political opponents can’t stand to see them sucking up one gram of positive media oxygen.

2)      Ungodly gobs of greenbacks

If we took all the money that’s been poured into the Presidential election and applied it to our country, instead of the question of who gets the power in our country, we probably could have wrapped up this recession two or three years ago. We’d probably all be in flying cars on our way to our $250k+ full-time jobs, while our kids skipped off to the world’s best schools, where meningitis, the flu and the common cold have been completely eradicated.

I get pretty steamed watching any political candidate talk about how American families are hurting…in ads that cost millions of dollars to produce and air.

How many hurting families could be set for life with the budget of one primetime ad for the Presidential race?

And the inaugural balls will top it all off. If you wish the incoming administration would take the cost of the string of glittering shindigs they’ll plan to celebrate the inauguration, and apply those dollars to homes lost in hurricanes, people dying for lack of health insurance, crime-ridden towns whose police forces and social programs have been slashed, or programs to keep families in their homes rather than in foreclosure, or ANYTHING else worthwhile, please share this blog post.

3)      Both mainstream Presidential candidates would have us believe that a single person can “fix” all our economic problems.

My Grampa’s bumper sticker reads “$1.83: Price of gas when Obama took office.”  The idea is that Obama’s to blame for the price of gas, and that if we elect Romney, he’ll magically shave two bucks off of every gallon. But no head of state can control all of the global and domestic issues that affect gas prices.

Romney claims he’ll usher in a golden age of jobs for all. Really, Romney? How about you resurrect the newspaper industry while you’re at it, so I can have a salaried job and benefits as a print journalist?

Not so simple, is it? And that’s just one field.

Both candidates want me to think that economic solutions are in their hands, as if any single person can shepherd the whole United States, from hedge fund managers to freelance writers to the homeless, to fiscal success.

4)      Election-year rhetoric would have me believe that the United States President holds the solution to violent, complex international disputes.

The debating candidates faced questions on Iran, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as if their policies will determine the course of history in those countries.

Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.

It has become sacrilege in American politics – for Republicans and Democrats – to utter the simple truth that the United States of America is just one country in the world. Why do Americans think that our foreign policy holds responsibility for peace and democracy in the Middle East, or anywhere else, or that America is the “greatest country in the world” and therefore has a special role to play in the government of every other country?

Greatest country in the world by what measure? Happy people? Economic stability? Health? Beautiful scenery? Life expectancy? Academic scores? Pollution levels? Gender and racial equality? Volunteerism? Military size? Crime rates? Popularity abroad? Tax rates? Birth rates? Cuisine?

It’s a subjective business, to say the least.

How would we feel if other democracies held debates on how their heads of state should manage America? You know, our frequent mass shootings, gridlocked political system, ballooning deficit, white supremacist groups, troubled education system, overstuffed prisons, devastating hurricanes and nuclear capabilities?

Longtime readers of this blog already know that I’m no American exceptionalist.  We may have the power to do a lot of good, but we’re not at the wheel of the whole entire world. I think a lot of our discourse on foreign affairs – including our demands that our President take responsibility or blame for foreign events – is nothing short of delusional.

So electing either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is going to solve the Syrian civil war, calm Al Qaeda and keep everyone safe from Iranian nukes, huh?

Give me a break.

5)      Oh and this e-mail from a political advocacy group

I got on this mailing list awhile ago, probably when I signed some petition.

Now they e-mail me every few hours, like this one from November 1st, begging me to donate money to them to get out the vote for [candidate redacted].

“Seriously – this is it. If [the candidate] pulls ahead in the polls later this week and you start to panic, it will simply be too late for us to change our plans in any meaningful way.”

Hm.

 “If you really truly can’t afford to give at this point—we understand,” it goes on. “But if you can chip in $5 today and you don’t, and then [candidate] barely wins…you won’t be able to live with yourself.”

You don’t say.

I consume bipartisan news sources and think carefully about what they say. I’ve often reflected on social, political and economic issues on this blog and elsewhere in my published work.  And I will get up at the crack of dawn to make sure I have time to vote on Tuesday before I have to be at the office. (Yes, I may complain about what’s wrong with politics, but I won’t refuse to participate in my small way.)

I think I can safely say that I’m a well-engaged citizen.

So I hate the base, desperate fear-mongering of messages like this on the eve of an election. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t give your organization five dollars to funnel into a political campaign?

We’ll see about that.

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Posted in Feelin' Grumpy | 3 Comments »

“Workaday Journalist” Goes McCarthy on Fareed Zakaria

August 24, 2012

If you don’t want to be liked to this illustrious senator, don’t call out famous journalists’ mistakes.

What with America’s usual crop of shootings and political pronouncements on the uterus, I felt like the discovery of plagiarism in the work of a major US journalist was hardly a blip on the screen.

But I quaked inside when I saw that NewsBusters.org had caught writer Fareed Zakaria transplanting a passage, nearly word-for-word, from a Jill Lepore piece in the New Yorker into his own piece for Time magazine.

As an aspiring writer, I had admired Zakaria since before I was really old enough to understand his prolific articles. I watched him go from an omnipresent newsmagazine byline to bestselling author, TV pundit and host. It seems like there’s no topic, especially when it comes to deeply complicated foreign policy issues, which he can’t knowledgeably and credibly tackle.

I first saw Zakaria’s name in the Newsweek magazines of my youth. According to his bio, the India native is a Harvard Ph.D. and spent a decade handling Newsweek’s international editions before becoming Time magazine’s Editor at Large in 2010. He’s also a Washington Post columnist and is host of CNN’s international affairs program, Fareed Zakaria GPS. He tops all kinds of lists of America’s powerful and intelligent, writes bestselling non-fiction books, and is a sought-after speaker.

New York Magazine helped to lay out the charges first noticed by Newsbusters.org, whose mission is “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” (Since it was an article on gun control, they must have been paying close attention.) You can look at the passages in question here.

Zakaria owned up quickly – I think.

“Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”

I was shocked.

He was briefly suspended by Time and CNN, then reinstated. Why hound a man out of a stellar career for one little mistake?

That’s what Newsweek’s Tunku Varadarajan writes in an essay cleverly titled “Schadenfareed.”

It’s a play on the word schadenfreude, a German gem that means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune (hey, I’m not going to pretend that I was born knowing what that word meant).

Varadarajan is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and the current editor of Newsweek International. He writes the “World on a Page” feature in Newsweek which rounds up offbeat international doings in a pithy, entertaining way. So in my humble estimation, he’s well-qualified to comment on tiffs in the media.

I’m assuming that Varadarajan is acquainted with Zakaria, given their common experience at Newsweek and their work on foreign affairs, but he doesn’t mention a personal acquaintance in his essay defending Zakaria.

Despite being only a pipsqueak local journalist, with only 29 years to my name and no serious mane of gray hair, I didn’t like the piece.

Varadarajan criticizes Zakaria’s media colleagues, saying they “slobber[ed] and snarl[ed] for his blood” over a “trivial” act of plagiarism that shouldn’t have merited such “cyclonic castigation.” He calls the employers who immediately, albeit temporarily, suspended him “spineless,” and laments that now Zakaria will never be chosen for that national-security post Obama was eying him for.

He calls the angry uproar “a hideous manifestation of envy – Fareed envy.” Journalism, like academia, is a small, competitive world: “Media reporters who hounded Zakaria occupy the lowest rung and exult at the prospect of pulling people down,” Varadarajan says.

In defense of the embattled writer, Varadarajan lauds the scope of Zakaria’s “insanely successful” career: his widespread columns, famous cover stories, bestselling books “that presidents clutch as they clamber aboard planes,” and $75,000 speaking fees, not to mention his TV stardom.

Varadarajan aptly explains that as traditional media outlets fight extinction in the digital age, “celebrity public intellectuals,” all with their own nationally-known brand, are the only viable resource.  “Recognizable across all the mediums, the branded few [like Zakaria] become mini-industries unto themselves.”

So have some pity when they screw up, Varadarajan seems to say: it takes a hell of a lot of energy to maintain the kind of output that keeps you at the top of the world’s media circus. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop “a huge cloud of excluded people, regular civilians and workaday journalists alike” from venting their feelings on the internet. We’re “resentful” that journalists like Zakaria soak up all the airtime and we look obsessively to discredit them.

Varadarajan calls us the “plagiarism McCarthyites.”  He says that with such demands for quality pieces on so many topics, it’s no wonder Zakaria cheated just a smidge.

“So he cribbed a little: he read a lot; took notes; things got jumbled. Is that worth a man’s career? I think not, and to his credit he thought not too.”

I’m not convinced. I like what Huffpost pointed out, in response to people who declared that Zakaria must not write all that stuff himself anyway – doesn’t he have some interns? They must have made the mistake, not him. As Huffpost reports, Zakaria denies that anyone other than himself writes the pieces under his name, and says “his mistake came from mixing up different notes from different sources.”

“That account does not quite explain how the plagiarized paragraph was so closely aligned with its original source, nor how it was unattributed to the writer, Jill Lepore,” Huffpost concludes.

As someone who tends to get pretty livid over plagiarism, whether it’s the widespread cheating in schools and universities full of kids who don’t scruple to purchase papers or simply copy them off the internet, or professional writers who can’t be bothered to turn out consistently original content, I’m disappointed in Varadarajan’s defense.

I, too, am learning that success – or maybe I should say making a living – in the journalism world demands an almost super-human versatility. When people ask me how the heck one pays the bills by writing, one answer is that you have to be willing to write about pretty much anything. And that means learning about pretty much everything, from aquaponics to Stanislavsky to jet engines.

I am not saying that I am a journalist on par with Zakaria, in terms of my intellect or my experience. No way. But I don’t buy that he should get off the hook for lifting someone else’s work because the guy just takes so many notes. I’m buried in notebooks and piles of paper, and that’s not even counting my computer files. But you won’t catch me lifting what someone else wrote, tweaking a few words, and passing it off as my own idea.

Some of the ensuing coverage of Zakaria’s trouble points out that the plagiarism was not so much a lapse in his ethics as the natural outcome of having too many responsibilities. Publius Forum and The New York Times both report that the episode has taught Zakaria he needs to lighten his professional load, so he doesn’t get so stressed he mixes up his notes. Or something like that.

I suppose that’s valid. But I’d like to hear a little more focus on admitting that what he did was wrong, rather than indirectly excusing it by saying it was the outcome of an over-scheduled mind.

After all, it’s a perfect excuse for frazzled college kids everywhere.

I am not among the journalists baying for Zakaria’s blood. I don’t think the episode should sink his career. Rather, it can be a valuable chance for all journalists to remember their responsibilities.

But here’s what your piece says to me, Tunku Varadarajan, should I ever get famous and then decide that quietly nabbing somebody else’s passage would be easier than writing my own.

I should ignore the people who would call me out, because they’re just jealous of my success. I should get allowances for that sort of thing once I get to the top of the pile. It’s petty, cruel and McCarthy-ish for anyone to expect my stuff to be 100% original. Maintaining a mega-brand is more important than dealing honestly with my mistakes.

And all those excuses sound almost as bad as plagiarism itself.

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Posted in Expounding On Literature, Feelin' Grumpy | 3 Comments »

It Would Be Better If I’d Never Been Born: Depression and Parenthood

June 5, 2012

Perennially controversial comic Sarah Silverman touched a nerve this week in a TV interview that set off a new round of commentary on modern parenting. The Week magazine rounded up the perspectives under the online headline “Is it irresponsible for the depressed to have children?”

Silverman, who has flouted the American habit of keeping quiet about personal struggles with depression, announced that the trouble has led her to decide that she doesn’t want biological children.

While she says she’d love to adopt, she says she won’t have biological children because she fears passing the trouble on to them. “I know that I have this depression and that it’s in my family. Every family has their stuff but, for me, I just don’t feel strong enough to see that in a child.”

Commentators, including contributors to the websites Mommyish and Jezebel, conceded that the choice to have children (or not) is a very personal one that, in general, should not be impugned by outside parties. Writer Anna Breslaw sympathizes with Silverman because of her own experience with depression. Since the latest science does indeed point to the fact that depression has a genetic component – people with immediate family members who suffer from depression (especially repeated bouts) apparently have an off-the-charts risk of developing it themselves – it’s not unreasonable that people who have experienced depression should think twice about conceiving somebody new.

Kudos to Sarah Silverman for talking openly about depression, and promoting adoption. But immediately after reading the commentary on her interview, I strongly felt that I had to speak up as a person who has suffered from depression on and off for about twenty years and still wants to start a family.

Fears of burdening our children with depression are a valid topic, but I’m afraid that this debate about whether or not depressed people should have children oversimplifies a lot of the issues.

I can’t speak for other people, but I can comment on my own long history with this terrible problem. Nowadays kids are stuffed with all kinds of drugs at the first sign of melancholy or distraction, but when I was a kid in the eighties and nineties, depression was not necessarily a diagnosis that parents and pediatricians were on the lookout for in very young people. But having carried cycles of the same devastating feelings from grade-school to my senior year of high school (when I saw my first psychologist), I know without a doubt that I was depressed as a young child.

The first major bout of depression that I distinctly remember (defined in retrospect, of course) was at about ten or twelve years old. Since then, I’ve cycled in and out of pretty severe depressive phases every two or three years, alternating with a fairly relentless case of generalized anxiety disorder. So I suppose that by the dictates of modern science, that makes me a pretty high-risk future parent.

By now, the symptoms of my recurrent depression are as familiar as a head-cold. My habitual anxiety loses its grip to a listlessness that infuses everything from my marriage to my work. Everything seems strangely drab and the things I usually enjoy, like writing, seem pointless. Whether it was school-day classes back then or days on the job as a journalist now, I feel a distinctive mental fuzziness and drift, as if I’m a hologram of myself and not really part of whatever’s happening around me. I find it difficult to maintain my customary focus during interviews, and articles that I can usually wrap up in an hour become a day-long effort. Putting my fingers to the keyboard feels like trying to touch the wrong ends of magnets together.

The thoughts that accompany these changes are as stupid and pervasive as reality TV.

I’m a failure.

The world would be a better place without me.

I’m always going to feel this way.

My joints ache as if I’ve got arthritis, I skip meals because I can’t muster the energy to cook or eat, and I don’t call or message anybody unless I have to. It all lasts several weeks at least.

I’ve been on lots of medications over the years, but I never saw noticeable improvement from any of them. Their most notable effects on me seem to be the flat-lining of my remaining mental and physical faculties and a burgeoning obsession with suicide.

Other people may find the antidepressants helpful and that’s fine. But now I stick to therapy.

One reason the don’t-have-kids-because-you’re-depressed viewpoint worries me is that it reduces depression to a factor of our genes.

The first problem with that is even if you’re genetically predisposed to depression, it’s not a guarantee you’ll suffer it. Secondly, “genetics” is increasingly becoming the answer of choice for so many disorders, when we really should be considering a range of environmental or situational factors in addition to our bodies’ hard-wiring.

When I was first diagnosed with depression, practitioners emphasized to me that I should view it like a medical illness that I have no control over. A big part of depression is undoubtedly rooted in our brain chemistry, so there is merit to this view, especially given the unfair stigma that depression sufferers continue to face from luckier citizens who believe that, given the willpower, one can just “snap out of” those desperately blue weeks, months or years.

But now that I’ve lived with bouts of depression for many years, I would say a key to managing it is realizing that, like many illnesses, there are measures you can take that make you more or less susceptible to its ravages.

Just as diabetics or heart patients or those with certain auto-immune disorders can avoid foods, lifestyles or activities that exacerbate their symptoms, folks vulnerable to depression should realize that their environment and actions can hurt or help.

My secret to managing those dark bouts is to keep working no matter what. That might not be right for everybody, but forcing myself to focus and be productive, even when it seems impossibly hard, keeps my demons at bay until some light seeps back into my existence, as it usually does after awhile, often as the winter turns to spring.

I am not at the mercy of my depression as a dictate of my genetics. It can be managed like a chronic illness. An awareness of having climbed up out of the depths before eventually helps me remember that the worst phases aren’t permanent. I try to dwell on this instead of dwelling on the hopelessness.

This is not to say one can simply wish oneself out of a depressive episode. And my experience may be milder than others’. But whether it’s you or your kid, I don’t think anyone should sit back and say, well, it’s just a matter of genes. The truth is somewhere between your genetic destiny and the environment and lifestyle you cultivate.

But I’m worried that that middle-ground truth is getting trampled if we declare that depressed people shouldn’t be passing on their genes.

Besides, what makes depression so special? We’re hardly calling for people with a family history of cancer or diabetes to eschew child-bearing.  Speculating on depression as a worthy reason for not having a family, when you’d want one otherwise, just seems to increase the disorder’s stigma.

“Sarah Silverman Considering Adoption Makes Me Respect the Crap Out of Her” is the headline of Alexis Rhiannon’s piece on Crushable.com.  Silverman’s comments on depression are part of a larger discussion on her support for adoption.

What I hope folks realize, as they debate her comments on adoption in light of her depression, is that adopted kids don’t have a blank genetic slate because you didn’t birth them.

Adoption is a fabulous thing. My own mom was adopted in infancy.  But I don’t think parents who adopt should do so assuming that their kids will then be free of problems. That’s a glib, de-humanizing view of adoptees, in my opinion. Everyone is predisposed to something. If you choose to try to avoid whatever medical boogeyman runs in your family, who’s to say something else doesn’t run in your adopted kid’s genes?

I accept that any kid of mine will have a heightened risk of depression. I hope that with sensitive and empathetic parenting efforts, I can recognize the signs and, with the help of my own experience and caring professionals, get my kids the help they need, just as I would if it turns out they have asthma or celiac disease.

I dislike the implication that life can’t be lived with depression. I and millions of other people prove every day that it can.  Like other illnesses, it has many dark days. But even if it’s recurrent, as my condition seems to be, it’s not insurmountable – whatever society says about people who are depressed. While I still fall into some pretty bad places sometimes, the bouts of depression I have now do not last as long, and are not as intense, as the ones I had a decade ago. I think awareness of my weaknesses, as well as my strengths, in addition to productive coping strategies, help over time.

If we took everyone who was ever depressed out of the world’s history, we’d lack for some brilliant writers, artists, thinkers and leaders.

The stigma of depression is surely alive and well if, by the time we’re discussing its possible genetic roots, we’re suggesting that it is better not to be born than it is to be at risk for depression.

I don’t buy that. So my future kids can take their chances.

P.S. check out “Adventures in Depression” at one of my favorite blogs, Hyperbole and a Half. 

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Posted in Feelin' Grumpy, Follies and Excrescences Involving Children, Medical Crisis | 10 Comments »

The Millennial Bitch Corner

May 22, 2012

My brother, cousins and I back in the 80′s. A fine young bunch of Millennials, before we grew up to wreak havoc on the world’s respectable citizens.

“Narcissistic, broke, and 6 other ways to describe the Millennial generation,” reads the headline of a round-up on Millennials from The Week Magazine’s website, citing sources like The Fiscal Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Gospel Coalition.

According to the article, other ways to describe us include “spendthrift”, entrepreneurial, stressed-out, and less religious than our forebears.

As Rachel Krause writes at The Frisky,

“We’re broke, we’re unemployed, we owe student loans, we’re living off our parents, we have degrees in things like English and Philosophy, we’re unprecedentedly narcissistic, and as if we couldn’t get any more charming, all the money we do have we spend on luxury goods: welcome to Generation Y, bitches!”

Millennials were born in the 1980’s and 90’s, though some people add in babies from the late 70’s and even the early 2000’s. I was born in 1983.

More stressed? Sure, I can buy that. If I stopped feeling anxious, I would probably get someone to check my pulse, to make sure I was still alive. Less religious? Yeah. In my experience, peers don’t say, for example, “I’m Catholic.” It’s always, “I was raised Catholic.”

Sometimes Millennials are branded as parasites who can’t launch their own lives, but squat eternally in their parents’ houses. If this is true of my generation (and I suspect that a long-term multi-generational household was not always the oddity that it is today in America), I say so what? Due to advances in medical care, our parents are all going to live until they’re 110. Guess who’ll be taking care of them? Let us stay in our childhood rooms awhile. It’s not like there’s going to be any Social Security left for us, by the time we’re caring for our parents. We should save while we can.

Other writers come down hard on Millennials as greedy for luxury goods and technology that nobody needs. iPads and the like have become standard equipment instead of fancy privileges. Here’s where I begin to get irked a little more. As ol’ Ford was rolling the first mass-market cars off the assembly line and Americans began to snatch them up, don’t you think there was an older generation somewhere tsk-tsking about the folly of such contraptions becoming commonplace when a horse and cart would serve just fine?

How about the members of the Greatest Generation who came back from the war and made suburban home-ownership the new American norm, and then, after getting educated in unprecedented numbers on the GI bill, began sending all their kids, boys and girls, to college?

I know it’s not necessarily the same as the hottest smart-phone or the high-end clothes Millennials are supposedly obsessed with, but the point I want to make is that every generation of the 20th century has probably begun purchasing something en masse that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of buying. Why heap ire on the Millennials for doing the same?

Plus, if you piled up the dollars required to pay for a single undergraduate degree, the stack of bills would reach from here to Jupiter (according to the New York Times, US college grads now owe well over $1 trillion in federal and private tuition loans). Perhaps my peers and I have become inured to the impact of paying too much for things.

Sometimes Millennials get grudging praise for their entrepreneurial ways – apparently we’re more likely than older generations to take the risk of founding our own ventures. Some writers cast this as the logical result of growing up in the world of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and the heady days of the 90’s dot com boom.

I say we should also consider that more Millennials are founding their own businesses because the moment they graduate with $100,000 degrees, they rightly perceive that the job market is a shit-hole and unless they conjure their own jobs out of thin air, the best they can hope for is a year-long unpaid internship.

And this brings us nicely to the thing that irks me most about Millennial stereotypes: apparently our narcissism is the only psychological characteristic that can be seen from space.

Generation Me! All we care about is our own money, comfort and fame. With the hand of a master conductor, each of us presides over an orchestra of social media, and each new day is a stunning crescendo of self-promotion.

Many people opine that it’s probably our parents’ fault: the “work hard and prosper” message delivered to previous generations somehow transformed to “you’re special no matter what!” by the time my peers and I were born. Our rampant self-centeredness is only a logical outgrowth of our fawning parents.

But that doesn’t make us any more palatable to people over thirty-five.

I’m crying foul on these accusations of Millennial narcissism – and not necessarily because we aren’t narcissistic. Rather, I want our accusers to realize that our narcissism may be the natural effect of today’s professional world.

I’ve heard that long ago in the misty past, people applied for jobs by making up a single resume and then distributing it to appropriate companies. An untailored resume?? I know, I know – I’m more likely to believe that the Chupacabra, and not a local raccoon, left that chewed hunk of watermelon rind on my doorstep.

Now, every career guru who ever purchased a web domain exhorts us to agonize over customizing every last detail of every resume we submit. It’s not enough to prove that we’re capable of doing the job and are a reasonably well-adjusted person. We must Market Ourselves with a top-to-bottom personal brand.

“We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us,” writes William Deresiewicz in last fall’s New York Times article, “Generation Sell“. “We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted. The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.”

Perhaps I feel this more keenly than others, given the quicksand of the modern writer’s professional world, but I think it applies to many of my peers, regardless of their field. The online world, where every status and photo and tweet can be mined by “friends”, authorities, employers, educators and marketers, is probably at least partially to blame.  Getting anywhere in the insanely competitive modern job market requires a ceaseless, sophisticated branding strategy that pervades everything you do.

But as soon as we take this advice to heart and become a 24/7 personal marketing firm in hopes of landing a job that will move us out of our parents’ house, we’re roundly criticized for being self-centered – unlike those solid citizens of yore who graduated college, landed a job with a nice company, and worked there until retirement.

It must have been nice to have the sense that a lifelong career would be there for you if you got yourself educated and proved your work ethic. I wonder: would a person be less inclined to anxiously self-promote if he or she didn’t have to scramble for every last dollar at three different jobs while paying off an average educational debt of $30,000?

I am 28 years old. My husband and I rent an apartment. I have spoon-fed and changed the diapers of relatives in their 80’s and 90’s, and I’ll do it all over again as my parents’ generation ages. I’m $25,000 in debt and I’ve never bought a house or a car or even a designer shoe. The traditional career path of my chosen industry was collapsing just as I finished college, so I’m making up my own job day to day. I don’t have employer health-care, a 401(k) or vacation time, but I often work past midnight.  I know too many other Millennials who are in exactly the same boat.

This has been a special presentation of one Millennial’s bitching. I may be less religious than my parents and yes, I’m stressed out. It’s true, young Millennials will txt u until ur thumbs fall off. But please, quit calling me a broke, narcissistic over-spender because I was born in the 80’s.

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Posted in Feelin' Grumpy, Follies and Excrescences Involving Children, Young versus Old. | 9 Comments »

The Five Levels of Guilt Occasioned by Canvassers

March 15, 2012

I spot them from a block away, in their matching t-shirts with their backpacks, folders, pamphlets and clipboards, assailing the passing crowds with all-to-cheery greetings.

Hired canvassers.

While I’m making my way to my next downtown meeting, they want me to pledge money to save the rainforest, Planned Parenthood and everything in between.

Without further ado, here are the successive levels of guilt they provoke in me.

1)      Guilt in the Face of Poverty and Disaster: I should give money to such a worthy cause, and yet here I am, studiously examining something on the other side of the street until I’m past the canvassers.

2)      Not-Doing-Enough Guilt: I don’t make any pledges to the canvassers because I already make a monthly donation to the charity of my choice, plus a dollar or two at every check-out counter in town that’s raising money for abandoned pets, gardens for inner-city youth or care packages for US troops. But almost half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 a day. Surely I can do more.

3)      Interpersonal Guilt: I am annoyed by the irreverent familiarity with which the canvassers address me, but then, what am I doing to make a better world? They’re just using any means necessary to get money for a good cause.

The following images are true stories:

4)      First-World Sympathy Guilt: I should have pity on these idealistic, hard-working kids and help them meet their quotas by making a pledge. Canvassing must be a grueling job – little respect, quotas to meet, outside on the street all day and low pay (I read an article about it once).  The unemployment rate for young Americans is sky-high and I want to support the work they’ve managed to find.

5)      Self-Directed Mental Guilt: As I swing wide over the sidewalk to avoid them, I upbraid myself for the onslaught of useless thoughts that just prevented me from making a difference in the world. What other opportunities am I missing because I’m mired in selfish over-thinking?

I feel a follow-up statement is warranted here, given the response to this piece. While walking down the street of a nearby neighborhood where I was on assignment, canvassers assailed me: “do you have a moment for the Appalachian forests?” I demurred and passed by. Later, in a fitting finish to the ruckus over this post, I found myself seated next to the very same canvassers on the train home. I have yet to completely vanquish the five levels of guilt. 

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What Nobody Will Ever Say About Me After I Die

February 27, 2012

I don’t know if, in the course of my life, I will ever become notable enough to warrant a published obituary (and God knows some people whose obituaries make the front page didn’t exactly achieve their fame in a wholesome way).  At least, especially if I mellow in my later years and become less of an uppity smart-ass, someone will give a nice eulogy at my funeral.

I’m not sure what my mourners are going to say, assuming there will be any. But I know what they most definitely will not say.

No obituary of mine will ever start like this:

Alaina Mabaso, freelance journalist and polymath….

The journalist part is true. But alas, I will never be a polymath.

I went to school with a polymath. If you don’t know what a polymath is, listen to this. This guy excelled at writing and English, science and math, and was a wonderful artist. Adding insult to injury, he was handsome and athletic. He was good – no, excellent – at everything on campus. Now, there are plenty of brilliant people like him – however, they sometimes lack social know-how. But as a final, stinging injustice to ordinary people everywhere, this guy was universally liked.

Whenever anyone exclaimed over his abilities, he insisted with humble sincerity that he wasn’t smarter or better than anyone else – in fact, quite the contrary; his wits were sub-par – he simply worked very hard to overcome his failings. He never lorded his brilliance over anyone and could usually be found sitting quietly in his dorm room, studying.

I’m sure I could’ve benefited from his example.

Instead, I spent most of my own school years in a searing cloud of self-hate every time I lost points on an exam, which was pretty much every time, and keeping mental lists of what I was and wasn’t good at.

These are the subjects I was good at:

  • Writing
  • Languages
  • History
  • Art
  • Anatomy and Physiology
  • Philosophy

These are some of the subjects that I muddled through:

  • Chemistry
  • Arithmetic
  • Algebra
  • Functions I
  • Biology
  • Geometry

These are some of the subjects in which I consistently humiliated myself:

  • Music
  • Functions II
  • P.E.
  • Sewing
  • Dance

These are some of the subjects that would have probably killed me had I ever attempted them:

 

  • Pre-calculus
  • Calculus
  • Trigonometry
  • Computer science
  • Physics
  • Probability and Statistics

My greatest intellectual shortcomings seem to echo out of the very word “polymath”.

It may be that my hatred of math, and my persistent numerical incompetence, was rooted in an elementary school classroom. My third-grade teacher didn’t exactly enjoy catering to the slower kids. If, in the course of the morning math period, you became confused and put up a hand to say, “I don’t get it,” she’d bury her face in her hands.

A sound like the hissing of water in a hot iron pan would emanate from between her fingertips. Then her face would reappear above her hands, pulsing redder than a sunrise over the African savannah.

“What,” she would intone with quiet menace, “don’t you get?”

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I would’ve turned out to be bad at math no matter what. It’s a plain fact that most of my music, science and P.E. teachers were fine individuals, and it didn’t stop me from turning out pathetic in those classes.

Adult life has shown me that, so far, most of the subjects I hated in school have had little impact on my actual career. And I’ve found out there are other things that I’m good at: like hospice care, networking, raising goldfish and making soup.

However, the problems continue apace, like my failure to keep the house clean and meet my deadlines, my failure to successfully grow plants, a failure to understand the world of fashion and attire myself accordingly, a definite failure to make lots of money, a failure to embrace my parents’ faith, and a failure to learn how to drive a manual transmission that’s plagued me since I was 16. Plus I am terrifically bad at counting change.

Give me a challenging crossword puzzle and I’ll fume because I’m never quite able to fill out the whole thing: I totally suck at geography, general sports knowledge, and the names of TV stars past and present.

For ten years, psychologists and psychiatrists have been asking me the same question. Why I am so fixated on demanding perfection of myself? Flanked by Kleenex boxes, clocks and Abnormal Psych texts, all those years on tasteful couches seem to drive home yet another personal catastrophe: my obvious failure to solve my glaring psychological problems despite a decade of therapy.

Damned if I know why I feel the way I do. You should know the objective truth about my work in, for example, my high-school math courses. The fact is, I would get some help – kind teachers, a math-savvy-boyfriend, an extra-credit assignment – and then usually pull an A-.  This information isn’t meant to subtly imply my self-deprecating smarts, which would be super-irritating to everyone. It’s meant as a glimpse into the dark, stinking perversity of my mind. Instead of being happy that I got an A- in a class that was extremely challenging to me, I wanted to drown myself because it wasn’t an A+.

All I know is that when I’m not beating myself up for being good at a few things instead of being good at many things, I’m haranguing myself for having that crazy mindset in the first place. Who can be good at everything? (Except for that kid I knew in college and maybe Leonardo DaVinci.)

The worst was when I realized that the very act of tabulating my shortcomings is moving me even further away from the polymath label I always wanted. Not only am I rotten at math, most sciences and anything requiring a modicum of physical coordination: I clearly lack inner emotional expertise as well.

In this case, berating myself for every imperfection doesn’t encourage humility – it actually seems like a terrible kind of arrogance. Why should I of all people be perfect? It’s a total conundrum. I won’t expand my skill areas, and therefore my self-worth, unless I relentlessly pursue new knowledge. On the other hand, I’ll be a much better person all around as soon as I stop wanting to excel at everything.

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Judgment Day!

May 12, 2011

“Judgment Day, Judgment Day, ten days to Judgment day,” the woman said, clutching a stack of brochures. Everyone else sitting on the train station benches hunched down and ignored her.

“Judgment Day? Really?” I said. “I had no idea. Please, tell me more!”

Walk around Market East in a fluorescent yellow shirt that says “Judgment Day!” telling everyone that they have ten days to turn to Jesus, and I just can’t help myself.

The woman looked at me warily. “If you read the Bible, it be right there in it. God is coming to destroy the world in fire. 200,000 will be taken up and billions and billions will burn in torment.”

“Why would God do that?” I wondered.

“It is in the Bible,” she said. “200,000 are taken up by Jesus. The earth will open in fire and earthquakes. God is going to destroy the world because of all its sins.”

“200,000, wow, that’s not very many,” I said.

“The world has six billion people,” the man on the bench next to me roused himself. “And the rest are all just going to die?”

“It is the judgment,” she said. “God is going to smite the world in torture and fire. You read the Bible, you see it there.”

“Me, I’m a humanist,” said the man. “All you need is love. But boy, I guess you hope you’re one of the 200,000.”

She raised a palm to the ceiling. “I pray, I pray.”

“How did we get this 200,000 figure?” I asked.

A train pulled up to the platform. The man got up. “Nope, I’ve got time for this,” he declared, and sat back down.

“God says in the Bible that the Judgment is coming in ten days, and the 200,000 will be taken up,” she replied. “It is because of his anger because of all the man trying to marry man and woman trying to marry woman.”

“Here we go,” the man said.

“I see.” I said.  “Is it just all those bad homosexuals who are going to burn in the rapture, or are some of the good heterosexual people going to be sucked into the earthquakes with them, just because God’s so pissed?”

“There is still time to turn to Jesus,” she answered. “Pray, pray to Jesus. It is in the Bible that the great rapture is in ten days. Seven billion people will burn, they will all burn.”

“Six billion,” the man corrected.

“Please tell me – so, are all these earthquakes and tsunamis, like in Japan, are they just like a little free sample from God about what he’s going to do to us after next week?”

“Now you be mocking the word of the Bible,” she said.

“Well, I just want to know, how are you preparing?” I asked. “I guess you’re not worried about the June rent?”

She walked away, declining to give me the pamphlet which I assume held some tips on joining God’s chosen. I wanted one, but I lost her in the crowd until I saw her boarding the very same train that the man and I were boarding. She was silent.

“Have a great night,” the man called to me as he entered another car.

When I got home, I Googled “May 21st, 2011” and was soon engrossed in a website titled “Judgment Day!” and featuring a giant hourglass trickling its last grains of sand.

The opening quote was a riveting one: “And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.”

I caught up on the real history of world. “The Bible’s calendar of history is completely accurate and trustworthy,” I learned.  How do we know the world is ending next Saturday?  “It was in the year 4990 BC that God revealed to Noah that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon the earth.  Now, if we substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, we get 7000 years.  And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, we find that it falls on the year 2011 AD.”

Need more proof?  “The amount of information available is far too abundant and complex” to explain here, the website says. But it is important to know that God left all churches on May 21st, 1988 and Satan took his place – perhaps God couldn’t stand all the acid-washed jeans and fingerless gloves.

Never mind, on to the good stuff. On May 21st, “true believers elected by God” will be “raptured”: that is, taken up to be with the Lord in the air.

Jesus, this is boring!

The other “billions” will begin five months of the worst tortures imaginable, including mass earthquakes. Then, just when you thought that at least you’d get to go Trick-or-Treating while all the goody-goodies are floating with Jesus in the candy-free air, the Earth itself will be destroyed on October 21st. “God is tenderhearted and full of mercy,” the tract finishes. But “there is no possibility that God will not follow through on His intention to destroy the world in 2011.”

This leaves me to consider what I will do on May 20th. I think I’ll stomp on my calculator, since I’ll no longer need to figure out whether I can meet my student loan payments and still pay the electric bill. Then I’ll write a few e-mails without bothering to read them over for typos. Next, I’ll spend all the money that would have gone towards June bills on a flight. At the airport, I’ll eat two Auntie Anne’s cinnamon sugar pretzels and a Cinnabon. Once I arrive in the U.S Virgin Islands, I’ll go to the nearest store and buy an umbrella, a cooler, and six cartons of Häagen Dazs ice cream, each one a different flavor. I’ll sit on the beach and eat them one after the other while reading “Pride and Prejudice”.

BRING ON THE APOCALYPSE.

All this makes me realize that Ms. Judgment Day did not cut a very convincing figure. If I truly believed I had less than two weeks left on Earth, I would not spend it riding SEPTA trains in a bulky neon-yellow T-shirt with a foot-high stack of brochures in my arms. I noticed the woman’s hair: it was beautifully braided. My sisters-in-law are African and I know how many hours it takes for them to get their hair done. Personally, I wouldn’t waste that kind of time in the face of the Rapture, unless I thought good hair would give me a leg up with the Lord.

As the train reached my stop and I stood up to exit, I saw the woman’s shirt glowing in the back of the car. She was watching me with narrowed eyes, watching me fall into the fiery pit and writhe with scorpion stings.

I’m sure it’s just the attitude God is looking for, come next Saturday.

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Going Postal: It All Makes Sense

October 5, 2010

The co-worker sitting next to me was fixing his breakfast at the morning staff meeting. He took out one Tupperware full of peanut butter cereal puffs and one full of milk. He pried the lids from both, poured the milk on the cereal, replaced the cereal’s lid, and shook the container like a maraca.

“Don’t get cereal milk on me,” I said, moving my things just a little farther away.

“You’ll go postal, right?” he said as he dug in his spoon.

I work in the hospitality industry, but my coworker didn’t worry that I would go hostal. Despite centuries of atrocious acts committed by husbands or wives, no-one says Jack Torrance went spousal at the Overlook. If an oral hygienist had a meltdown, we wouldn’t say she’s gone dental. If a realtor has a tantrum, has he gone rental? No: they’ve all gone postal, and to me, this makes sense.

It’s more than the nosy comments from my present mail carrier on the days I happen to be home. “You join a book club or something?” “You’re not really gonna read all those books, are you.”

The number of books I order online is, of course, part of the postman’s continued livelihood, but it’s also none of his business.

There are also the endless trials of actually going to the post office. I don’t mean just waiting in an acres-long line at a center city location because two of about sixteen windows are intermittently in service. There’s the difficulty my husband and I have mailing packages to his parents.

“And what country is this going to?”

“South Africa. The address is already written on there.”

“Yes, but what country in Africa?”

When I, an apparent dunce, am not sure which envelope is the right one for international versus domestic or standard versus priority versus express, the worker behind the counter at one office helps by pointing at three nearly identical envelope racks and saying, “That one!” over and over again, a little louder and angrier each time.

Despite what I see as a history of surly and unreliable service, some postal workers exhibit enormous, even aggressive pride in their infallibility.

Once I sent a package that never arrived. I mentioned the lost package the next time I was at the counter of that office. The postal worker froze and looked at me the way Senate Republicans must look at Olympia Snowe when she votes for health care reform or a review of the prison system.

“The Postal Service. Does not. Lose. Packages.” She said.

I was feeling feisty and I flashed my gauntlet. “Well, this package was never delivered.”

“Did you ask the recipient if it arrived?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, that package was definitely delivered. That person lost it, and didn’t want to tell you, or else it just got buried on someone’s desk after it was delivered.” It was a bit much to assert that the USPS has never lost a single item, but implying that my friend was a disorganized liar was adding insult to injury. (Why, may I ask, does Netflix maintain a link to report “shipping problems” on its DVDs?)

I met a postal employee with similar assurance just last week, when I had to mail sensitive documents to a government office to obtain a new passport in my married name.

“I’m nervous about putting these documents in the mail,” I said at the counter. “I think I’d like a trackable, guaranteed overnight service.”

The postal worker looked at me as if I’d just asked her to babysit her infant godson, but demanded that she keep him helmeted in a padded room full of Nerf toys. Clearly she had caught the subtext of my request: I’ll give you a chance, but I really don’t trust you.  “We are not going to lose your paperwork,” she said.

“So are you saying you think it’s not necessary to pay the extra fifteen dollars for overnight service?” I asked.

“Well now, that is YOUR decision,” she said. “I cannot advise you on that.”

“The Post Office has lost a package of mine before,” I announced.

“Oh, really,” she said, in the exact voice I would use if I met a real live Creationist and he told me that the Grand Canyon was made by Noah’s flood 6,000 years ago.

“Did you have that package insured and tracked with Express service?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well then.”

In other words, it’s my fault no matter what.

“The US Postal Service is the best in the whole world,” she said as she handed me the label for overnight service. “And I don’t just say that because I work for them. Other countries, anyone can just rip into your mail. But not here. Your mail is protected.”

I thought about mentioning the time a letter to me arrived weeks late and mangled, with the envelope ripped open down the side and stapled back together, but filed that under “unproductive” and kept quiet.

Sometimes my aggravation with postal workers is not due to their irritating insinuations and denials. It’s an apparent refusal to exert themselves at all.  Once, the interruption of our mail coincided with a minor snowstorm that left about three inches of snow on our apartment driveway. At first, I thought the next three or four days were an inexplicable respite from credit card offers and supermarket circulars. But when the resuming of our mail coincided with the melting of the snow, I realized that our postman had been disdaining his usual walk to our front door mailbox. Throughout the winter, whenever there was any snow at all in our driveway, we had no mail. The Pony Express it wasn’t.

But some former post-college roommates of mine may remember our most harrowing postal interaction to date. This postman would also skip our house if there was ice or snow in the yard. (So perhaps my expectations are too high, and it’s a settled postal regulation that nothing stops the mail – except for ice or sleet or snow and if the postman therefore doesn’t feel like walking up to your mailbox.) But in good weather, we noticed a curious phenomenon. The mailman would leave our incoming mail, but nothing would induce him to take our outgoing mail. He simply added our incoming mail to it. I tried propping up the outgoing envelopes, or making it stick out of the box a little, to tip him off, since the little red flag obviously wasn’t enough. When that failed, we tried putting a Post-It (an appropriately named sticky note, in this case) on the box which said “Please Take Outgoing Mail!!” The end result of this was that I called the local post office to complain and then took my mail with me in the morning, to drop into a city box.

On Halloween that year, I was feeling festive, and decided to try an experiment. I put some candy in a bag with a note: “Happy Halloween to the mailman!” and left it in the mailbox. If he couldn’t be bothered with taking our mail out, would he take an item meant for his own self? I also wanted him to know that there was more to us than our patronizing, emphatic little Post-Its and complaints.

Things came to a head that day. We had a mailbox like this:

and instead of leaving our incoming mail comfortably vertical in the box, the mailman had jammed it horizontally down in the bottom of the box with what could only have been the force of a karate chop. Once I pried the scuffed and bent envelopes out, the candy was revealed mashed in the bottom of the mailbox. My roommates and I convened that night, and we discussed the terrifying turn the situation had taken. It was not the last time we would come home to karate-chopped mail – obviously, we had pushed the mailman too far.

Sometimes when I was home on Saturdays, the mail truck would pull up opposite our house. I could see the mailman in there, just sitting. What was he doing? I could never figure it out from behind the curtains. Eventually he’d pull away. My housemates and I agreed that it was probably best not to leave the house for any reason until he was gone.

And there you have it. The term “going postal” is not simply a mysterious quirk of the English language which adapted a few tragic workplace events of the 80′s and 90′s into an enduring idiom. As a body of people who, in my experience, seem uniformly averse to going the extra mile or taking any responsibility, perhaps postal workers have a naturally lower tolerance for life’s challenges than other professionals. You can trace the origin of the term “going postal” to the obviously threadbare patience of nearly every postal worker I’ve ever met just as surely as you can trace the roots of modern English through the Norman conquest.

I work in tourism. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never delivered a letter. If droplets of someone else’s peanut butter cereal milk got on my notebook, my co-worker was right: I would have gone postal.

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The Answer. To Everything.

April 15, 2010

I watched an elementary school teacher lead her charges across a gravel lot. “Lisa! Carlos!” she said as soon as the kids’ sneakers crunched the stones: “DO NOT throw rocks!” As far as I could see, no child had so much as stooped to finger the ground. But this teacher’s pre-emptive strike bore astute witness to a principle which, in broad application, would solve many of the world’s woes.

Each of the following situations could be prevented by a single, utterly simple principle. “I didn’t know it would get this cold!” chatters the woman who left her sweater at the hotel because the morning was sunny. A family arrives at a highly anticipated event or restaurant, only to learn that you needed reservations. Or, as I have experienced more than once behind the register at more than one fine establishment, a customer arrives to pay for a service with a single, pre-written personal check. Not only has she incorrectly estimated the cost of the service (forgetting the sales tax, for instance), she has not brought an extra check, a credit card, or even her purse, because “I didn’t think I’d need it!” Are these blunderers bad people? Certainly not. What do they all have in common? They did not think ahead.

A commitment to thinking ahead would quickly solve a majority of the world’s present and future woes. The abandoned sweater, the neglected reservation and the insufficient check are minor hiccups in the grand scheme of things. But thinking ahead can also be the key to widespread economic problems. I’m no economist, and I’m still not really sure what a credit default swap is (something about insurance for default on an insanely risky debt), but if banks and massive insurance firms had practiced a little more thinking ahead, perhaps we could have bypassed the financial meltdown. Ditto for the signers of impractical mortgages (and the banks that winked at them) and those who ran up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. If an 18.9% variable APR isn’t enough of a clue to think ahead, what is? “Let’s Move”, Mrs. Obama? Want to fight obesity in America’s kids? Keep plying your kids with Happy Meals, pop tarts, Super Big Gulps and Oreo cookies made into milk straws, America, and see what happens. Think ahead, parents.

It’s the underlying principle of the now-ironclad social entitlements that took shape in 20th century America. I bet the most fervent Tea Partier doesn’t want Obama to revoke his Medicare or Social Security, because even Tea Partiers don’t really think America is going to go up in flames before they retire. Schooling for our youngsters?  Kids are pretty tough to deal with, but someone has to run the world when we die – it’s thinking ahead on a massive scale. Checks and balances via Judicial, Executive and Legislative branches? Way to think ahead, Founding Fathers.

This is not to say that the exceptionally effective power of thinking ahead cannot be abused.  When Hugo Chavez campaigns to remove his term limits and to muzzle any of Venezuela’s opposition media, he’s thinking ahead to the day that someone, somewhere, might whisper that it’s someone else’s turn to be president. When John McCain declares that the GOP will refuse to cooperate with Democrats on any piece of legislation in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage, might he be thinking ahead to an election packed by an angry conservative base?

Thinking ahead takes experience, and the ability to project the outcomes of our behavior in the past into our future. Perhaps those who irritate me by getting on the train without any fare, or vomiting drunkenly on the platform, are committing a first-time offense. Perhaps, instead of habitual stupidity, I am witnessing someone’s seminal think-ahead experience – a moment that will forever haunt them when they get on the train (with cash or ticket in hand) or step into a bar (at which they will drink moderately). Perhaps. I can only imagine the scene of that elementary school teacher’s first outing with Lisa and Carlos. Her piercing vigilance is a tantalizing clue to the stony transgressions of the past, but today, this soldier for the future of a projectile-free field trip is protecting me and everyone in the vicinity by her outstanding commitment to thinking ahead.

NOW FIND ALAINA MABASO’S BLOG ON FACEBOOK!

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These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

February 22, 2010

Commuting on snowy sidewalks and slogging through work while sick for the sake of my anemic bank account do not inspire a rosy view of the world. In fact, negative thoughts slid into my demoralized mind just like the city’s snow-slush pools into a treacherous mini-glacier where the sidewalk dips to the street.  When the barely-plowed streets are piled with gritty, blackened snow and I’m getting through the day on Advil and Halls, I realize that there are a lot of things to hate in this world. Dwelling on them is the best part of the day, and also the best way to realize that, hard as it might be to believe, some women have it worse than I do.

For example, instead of having a stylish young husband and five goldfish in a quiet apartment, I could be the mother on a kid-factory reality show, single-handedly birthing an Arkansas army for God with a man named Jim Bob. Despite their egregious license in matters of reproduction, I had vaguely felt the Duggars of “19 Kids and Counting” relatively benign, despite their apparent belief that the Bible says a woman shalt not have a moment of the day (or marital night) to herself. But recently I read an item about a little girl who almost choked to death at the Duggars’ car dealership. Apparently, one Duggar called 911 and helped the EMTs, and another grabbed his cell phone camera so the tragic incident could be properly filmed.  I’m also looking at you, Jon and Kate. Instead of getting married, conceiving a reasonable portion of the next generation, and striving to be decent parents, you engineered yourselves a human litter and then exploited that litter so that every theme-park meltdown and proud little poo is broadcast to the world. Has anyone in the history of the whole human race ever suffered a loss of privacy as profound as the Gosselin kids have, who were TV fodder before they left the NICU? And then Jon and Kate proceeded to blow up their marriage in a tabloid bonanza, all the while claiming that the exclusive magazine cover stories on their own exquisite pain were done for the sake of the children. And as for Octomom Nadya Suleman, it’s a classic “chicken or the egg”: did she birth 14 tots with no means of support so she could land a human litter reality show, or did excessive viewing of human litter reality shows lead her to birth 14 tots?

Speaking of the dangers inherent in packs of half-grown children – teenaged skateboarders should be consigned to ranches in Montana. They flout posted laws wherever they feel like hanging out, and they usually feel like hanging out around a center city bus stop at rush hour. There, harking to nothing but the haphazard, rumbling zoom of their wheels, they show not the slightest awareness of how close they come to running down the grown-ups trying to board and exit the bus. And for what? None of their attempted jumps ever, ever works, and the sidewalk rings with the sharp wooden clatter of skateboards landing between oversized sneakers, puffy as mushrooms on the ends of skin-tight jeans. Why do they have to bring their mayhem to center city? Isn’t there a skateboarding app for the iPhone they could play in their dad’s kitchen?

Skateboarders are not the only thing which should be kept out of the public sphere – there is something I hate even more.  America is a wonderful land where you are entitled to believe what you want. If you want your children to grow up in execrable ignorance, if you want them to deny vibrant, fascinating truth as godless nihilism, and if you think God can only be found in the rapidly shrinking gaps of our human knowledge, then by all means, be a creationist. Rot your kids’ minds with “Of Pandas and People” and pray for the hell-bound Darwinists. But don’t push your fundamentalist religious agenda onto other citizens in the realm of public schools. Every faith has a creation myth which holds a human and spiritual allegory. But tell me why some Americans believe the Christian creation story should be taught as an “alternative” to science in public schools. Why are creationists, including some people who are purportedly fit for public office, willfully blind to some of the world’s most interesting, well-founded facts, and why do they want to force their faith on other Americans’ children as scientific truth? There should be a law. Oh, right. Thank God. There is.

If I made the laws things would be different, particularly during intermission, and by different, I mean much, much better. At intermission, men breeze in and out, blithe as frogs popping in and out of their own personal pond. But the ladies’ room is a crammed, paper towel-ripping tumult of flushes as the lucky ones who beat the line try to squeeze out the same doorway which is packed by the queue. Most theatre companies in Philadelphia compound the problem with rickety, warren-like passages to the bathroom, horrible slatted saloon-style doors that lock with a single rusted hook-and-eye latch, and water-stained print-outs advising all concerned that the simmering toilets are very temperamental and shouldn’t be flushed in quick succession. The fact that men and women are offered restrooms of equal size is one of the blatant inequities still facing western females, and if Obama cared about me at all he’d leave off that tired equal pay crap and send some stimulus dollars to double the number of ladies’ rooms in America.

I could go on – actually, I already have: see the archives for my feelings on centipedes, cilantro, and New Jersey gas stations. I’m beginning to wonder if this blog site is anything other than a conduit for my most grievous exasperations. But I do feel lighter for having shared my woes with you, on all counts, so thanks. I realize that you may not hate the same things that I do. You might even hate blog entries that lack a discernable narrative or theme.  But don’t hate me for trying to pull something together when I’m grumpy, sick, and tired of the snow.

NOW FIND ALAINA MABASO’S BLOG ON FACEBOOK!

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