Working it

My dad used to say in response to someone asking whether he was doing something special “over Labor Day” he would respond, “everyday is LABOR day“.

As I get older, I feel his pain ever more acutely.  I did relax a little during my week away at the beach, but time with family is a “trip” and not a vacation, as those of you with kids understand.  When my blackberry accidentally drowned (accidentally, I SWEAR), I really got to relax.

Unfortunately, my blackberry dried out by Saturday.  I thought that the horror (and the happiness) of drowning (did I mention it was an accidental?) a blackberry is that it never comes back to life.  But the new improved blackberry must be the computer equivalent of a cockroach.  Humans will be eviscerated by nuclear holocaust, but our blackberries will live on, buzzing with pointless meeting and birthday reminders. Maybe the cockroaches will sprout thumbs and use them.  Darwinism gone horribly wrong.  Yet, there is something poetic about this.  A little crazy and unhinged, but poetic nevertheless.

Just you wait, it will be on Syfy and a runaway hit.  Soon, it will be cool to be kind to cockroaches.  They will become a protected species.  Now, THAT is crazy.

Wait.  Labor Day.  That’s where I was before my mind took a dangerous turn.  Doing anything day in and day out for decades just has to burden one’s soul and dim one’s sense of wonder.  But you all know that.  So, why pick that scab again.

But my new Syfy thriller idea — now that could be entertaining.  Thoughts?

From Ben to Bust in 234 years

Benjamin Franklin, a rock star of his generation, said, when signing the Declaration of Independence, “United we stand, divided we fall.”  Our founding fathers and the colonies, united, defeated a great and mighty empire.

Throughout our brief yet notable history, the cities of our nation were known for the dog-eat-dog way that fellow citizens treated their neighbors, eschewing the cornerstone of religious faith, all the while claiming to be part of the most upright of Christian nations.  But, outside the cities (or so I would like to think), neighbors helped each other and generations of families lived together, all working to keep everyone afloat.  Maybe it is the romantic myth of the heartland.  But, I am buying it, lock, stock and barrel.

Today, we live in a society where people are more worried about their morning lattes than they are about ending our two wars, reducing our crushing debt and the stopping all politicking, all of which threaten to bankrupt out nation.

There is no silver bullet cure for our woes.

I heard today that people say that the Congress should not have saved the 300,000 teacher and firefighter jobs because their unions are too strong and teachers earn too much for doing too little.  Ok, so, make the unions feel some pain, but does that justify keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans?  The illogic is frightening and delusional.

So the great experiment started in 1776 is rounding the drain because of greed and me-first-middle-and-last mind think.

Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I will forgo my Bush tax cut that I never wanted and didn’t need to pay for health care and to start reducing the deficit.

How about this:  we make giving up the tax cuts voluntary.  Just like the optional $1.00 gift to Wildlife Preservation (or is it public campaign finance?) on our tax forms.  Just put a line item on the 2010 tax return that says, “This is how much more you would pay if the Bush tax cuts lapsed.  Do you want to pay this amount (a) to reduce the deficit, (b) to pay for health care for the uninsured or (c) 50% to each?” and publish the list of people who contribute to these funds.

Maybe neighbors will embarrass neighbors into paying the money (because if you’re not on the list, either you’re selfish or you don’t make enough) or we have a pledge drive and use positive peer pressure.

Either way, Mr. President, I am with you for letting lapse the tax cut I never wanted and our nation couldn’t afford.

Signs and Portents in New York

Yesterday I was walking past a building where a delivery was being made.  I couldn’t see the company logo, just the shirt backs of the two delivery men.

One said, “The First Guy,”

and the other said, “The Other Guy“.

Funny and true and sad.  We readily let two guys into our apartment and we have no idea their names.  If we had to talk about the delivery, we would say, “the First Guy asked where we wanted the sofa and the Other Guy brought it in on the wheely-thing and then the First Guy asked me to sign the receipt.”

Reminds me of my housekeeper years ago when I was a bachelorette.  I left a relationship (and moved out) and took over the lease of my friend’s apartment together with all of the contents that she wasn’t taking to her new apartment with her girlfriend.  I even got the housekeeper, Olga.  Except Olga didn’t do the work.  She had her “cousin”, Marta, do the work. I saw Marta once (Russian, bad blonde dye job) and wouldn’t recognize her if I fell over her.  I was embarrassed not to be able to recognize her, so, on Fridays, I would get up early and walk down the stairs so I wouldn’t run into her.  (Of course, she wouldn’t know me either.)  If I saw anyone of her vague description within a block of my apartment, I would smile and nod just in case.

I imagined how I would answer a detective’s incredulous questions on Law and Order.  “How could you not know Marta’s last name?” “You have no address for the woman who has a key to your home, and access to your jewelry?” ‘Tell me again how you could not possibly know the full name of the woman who cleans your underwear?” “How did you know it was Marta every week?” “Based only on the fact that she ruined your whites with the same hue of blue, you are telling me that it was always the same woman?” Unfortunately, the answers are yes, “I could” and “I did”.

I did have Olga’s outer-borough phone number.  I used it to say that I was moving and I wouldn’t be needing Marta’s services.  I left two weeks’ pay and Marta left a thank-you note written in a scrawl that suggested that she didn’t know so much English and was just as happy that she didn’t bump into me (even if she recognized me).

At least I know her first name.  That is something.  But not really a lot.  A nameless immigrant in the sea of New York, doing work that most people won’t do.  If you want to see strivers and the role that nameless immigrants — legal or not — play in our society, come to New York City.

Let’s Party Like It’s 1929

If I read the news, I will go into that bad place in my head that holds all my fears of being destitute and homeless.

The stock market is tanking, confidence is tanking, the economy is sputtering, unemployment is high and nerves are frazzled.  At first, everyone was talking about a double-dip recession, then about, PHEW, how we escaped the double-dip and now, how it looks like a triple-Lutz-followed-by-triple-pike-nosedive recession.

No prognosticator today can know for sure what the Monday morning quarterback will say with a certain smug clarity (after all, he who survives gets to write the history). 

But that doesn’t stop the pundits from scaring me to distraction.

Lunch with Stinky

I was at a business lunch today and the guy next to me was flatulent.  I was recovering from a very bad reflux attack last night and so the — er— the — um — the — ok, I’ll say itstink bombs nearly did me in.

I survived, barely able to keep down lunch.

At least I didn’t have to pay to gag.

I love the camera on my blackberry

Today, I was walking with a colleague to catch a bite at lunch when I saw two ladies, somewhere between the ages of older and ancient, crossing against the light with their backs to a truck that fast approaching.  I wanted to take a picture of this insane scene (after I made sure the truck stopped).  I took out my blackberry although the ladies were going slow enough that (after I made sure the truck stopped) I could have gone to a camera shop, bought a camera and come back in time to catch a live “action” shot, as it were. 

My colleague looked at me as if I had three heads (I only have two).  Then I started showing him the pictures I have on my blackberry — a colleague standing in front of a life-sized Catholic icon for sale, urbanites eating outdoors next to the garbage and the vagrants, a sign about septic danger, a scary food store somewhere on Cross Bronx Boulevard in Scarytown, NY where another colleague and I looked for Advil on the way home from a business trip. 

Lunch was quick and awkward.  I think he was scared I would take a picture of him with food falling out of his mouth.  So, in an effort to try to calm what I thought were his concerns, I talked with food coming out of my mouth.  I think I just grossed him out.  And made him more afraid.

I’ll let you know if he asks me to lunch again.

Wall Street Cab Driver

It was too beautiful this morning to get into the subway (and, surprise, I was running late), so I hopped a cab and asked the driver to drive through Central Park, so that I could enjoy the beauty that the car exhaust was destroying.  But I digress.

The cab driver mentioned how New York has changed since the 1970s even though he believes that there is more crime than the official statistics would suggest.  I asked him if he had always driven a cab, knowing in the back of my mind that anyone who didn’t know that you could get the Park Drive going south at 100th Street and Central Park West hasn’t been a cab driver for too long.

No, he was a bond trader and was laid off in 2000 when the bond markets were rocked by one thing or another.  He was a golf caddy for a while and he turned down a job back on Wall Street in 2001 because the pay package was too low.  Yup, you guessed it — at a firm in the World Trade Center.  Ok, Gordon Gekko, in this case, greed saved his life.  Actually, he isn’t really Gekko-esque.  After all, he is driving a cab.  He said the pay package was too low because bond traders were a dime a dozen and people were scrambling to get work.  But he had paid off his mortgage and cashed out of equities as soon as he was laid off, so he was ok.  Not rich, but ok.  Clearly, because he is driving a cab.

A serene cab driver who would rather compete for fares in New York City than go back to Wall Street.  Now that is saying something.

Out at Work

I “out”ed myself today at work — not as a lesbian [remember, I am here, I am queer and I am over it] but as a blogger.

While I didn’t give away the site, apparently some of my coined phrases, like “schlepic” — in the passages I cut and pasted for a colleague — can lead straight to this blog.  So, the secret is out.  I will never be on the Supreme Court as a result of my writings.  That’s okay.  First, I am not qualified.  Second, I am one of the few New Yorkers who doesn’t look so good in basic black.  Phew, intellectual and sartorial disasters averted.  Our nation is safe again.

Although, come to think of it, I would dispense justice, tempered with mercy.  As in, “would you like extra fries with your LAST meal?”  I fear that most people would be horrified if every opinion from the bench started with, “Schmuuuuuck, what were you thinking when you . . . ?”  I would imprison people who tortured the words of laws or statutes beyond all recognition to fit their desired ends as violations of the Geneva Convention.  You know, the Geneva Convention, the so-called “quaint” doctrine discredited by Dick Cheney and his highly educated legal “scholars”.  Just using fancy words doesn’t make an idea good; it just makes it high-fallutin’ bullsh@t.  But I digress.  See, I would get on a roll and mayhem would ensue in my court room.  Maybe I should get the Presidential Medal of Honor for having the patriotism not to seek a judgeship.

Anyway, today was a regular day without many gross things to report.  Other than the fact that the Virginia governor forgot that slavery was part of Virginia history.  That’s like a Texan forgetting the Alamo, for G-d’s sake.  But the governor’s omission did hit an impressive trifecta:  gross, idiotic and inflammatory.

And then there is the mining company that put profits ahead of lives and now 25, possibly 29, miners are dead. I think Lady MacBeth found that blood stains your hands forever.  That crazy Bill Shakespeare.  Our very own Elizabethan Nostradamus.

Starvation in the Sudan is at a humanitarian crisis level.  (There are so many centers of humanitarian crisis, wouldn’t it be easier for the UN to list where there ISN’T a humanitarian crisis?)  We really should think about how lucky the majority of us are in this nation (and remember and help the less fortunate).  But, tea party-ers are crying over taxes, which most of them don’t pay anyway.  Children starving in the Sudan.  Spoiled Americans are protesting a functioning government that protects their liberties and provides a safety net from starvation.  Let’s put these two concepts on the scales and balance them.  Ok, why are the tea party-ers still talking?

Associate Justice 40andoverblog of the United State of America.  It has a nice ring to it.

Diversity

I was at a company meeting and people were excited to have me on the various client teams because “we need diversity”.  I realized they were talking about being a woman and I said, helpfully, that I satisfy two boxes.  “Which other one?”  “Gay,” I responded.  Then I was asked if I wanted to join the GLBT affinity group.  “No,” I said, “I am very comfortable being gay, and my only interest is satisfying client diversity requirements to get more business.  But if you have a working mothers’ affinity group, that’d be great.”

So, I’m here, I’m queer, they are used to it, but they don’t get it.

Tiger

Does anyone care if Tiger apologizes?  Why is it news?  Other than his family, whom did he let down?  Certainly not the women who wanted their 15 minutes of fame by having sex with him.  His fans?  Didn’t people root for him because of his athletic ability and his personal story?  Did anyone root for him because he was a faithful, family man?

The unfortunate truth is that if you know something sordid or unappealing about a person, it affects you more than if you knew something positive or simply neutral.  I didn’t listen to Tiger’s apology, but if it took this long to come up with one, then it is a public relations apology to regain sponsorships and not a soul-searching mea culpa.

A dear, wise friend once said, “you do it, you live with it.”  She also said, “the strong eat the weak,” although she has mellowed from that position.  But she is right, life is about taking responsibility and standing up for what is right or taking your lumps when you blow it.  We lived across the hall during senior year at college and I was having an — how shall we say — indiscretion and she cleared the hallway of people for me to avoid embarrassment.  (I am not giving details, so you need to read between the lines and draw your own conclusions.)  The next morning, she was knocking at my door, booming, “if you want to dance, you need to pay the fiddler,” which means if you can’t do something in the light of day (as it were), then don’t do it.

This friend probably doesn’t know that she caused me to look deep inside and start the process of coming out of the closet.  She continues to have high standards, tempered by compassion from life experiences.  She is the standard bearer and I adore her.  She and I have had professional upheavals these past few years and I admire her willingness to take on new challenges in new places.  She is my measuring stick for success and hard work.  If she reads this, she may be surprised that she had such a profound effect on me so many years ago and through to today.  I hope that she puts me in her “win” column.

She could have taught Tiger a lesson or two.  And she would have shaped him up faster than an army drill sergeant.  And, she has perfectly puffy hair.  So, Tiger (if you know what is good for you), be afraid, Tiger, be very afraid.

And, to my friend who is always in my court, long ago you re-directed my life on a bumpy but, ultimately, very happy course.  You make a difference just by your presence among us.  I love you.