Archive for the ‘Brain Lint’ Category

Who knew? PNC Wealth Management has been publishing an annual Christmas Index for 24 years. Just for fun, bean counters tote up the cost of every item in the carol “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

The masterminds of the Christmas Index determine the prices of similar real-world items as stand-ins for those listed in the song when necessary. Those eight maids a’milking, for example, aren’t really scrub-cheeked virgins in pinafores, but farm workers earning 2008 wages.

Before you dismiss the whole exercise as a bit of frivolity designed to make NPR listeners chuckle archly into their organic-cotton dinner napkins, take note: although relatively few of us are throwing French hens (fresh, not frozen!) into our carts at Costco, The Experts maintain that the Christmas Index actually does an okay job of reflecting larger trends in the economy each year.

The news this year is not great. Get the full scoop here.

Why, even the lowly partridge is up five bucks, from $15 last year to $20 this Christmas. And if you want a place for your fine feathered friend to roost, that’ll be a cool $200: In ‘07, a pear tree could be had for $150.

So, my apologies in advance, giftees on my list. I just can’t swing any of the thoughtful gifts in “The 12 Days of Christmas.” In my desperation, I even clicked over to that old retail chestnut, Fingerhut. Surely, I could find some holiday tchotchkes there for a pittance….

But no. These days, they’ll trick you out like your favorite Real Housewife in 10 easy payments.

But wait! They do have goats: Seven-eighths-length goats, to be exact. Must be some cute pygmy variety, de-horned and ready for companionship. It lacks the cachet of calling birds, but when was the last time you got cheese from a bird? And they’ll cute up any live nativity, for sure.

Thanks Fingerhut, for getting me thisclose to the 12 Days of Christmas.

I remember my grandfather once told me that finding a job during the Depression filled him with a sense of triumph. That job was making buttons in a factory–and he was the first in his family to finish college. Back when a bachelor’s degree was more of a heavy-duty accomplishment than it is now. (I have trouble picturing young Grandpa plopped onto a contemporary couch via time machine, his admissions-essay consultant and an SAT-prep coach mopping his fevered brow. )

Be patient, gentle reader. There is a point lurking somewhere around here. I think it’s this: At the tender age of Pushing Forty, I find myself clutching at straws, employment-wise. The writing jobs that have afforded me some measure of income without having to shell out for childcare are ebbing away. This has never happened before, and now I’m competing with hordes of overqualified people for the chance to answer phones, to sell dog food. To do things I once considered swell endeavors for a struggling college student. 

Well,  college was back in the Jurassic Period for me, and I feel no small measure of shame for having failed to plan, failed to knuckle down and choose a career/life that had a definite trajectory, rather than enjoying all the side trips along the way. Having an abstract expressionist resume was cute back when I was cute, but now? My cheeks blaze and a sense of failure roils up in my throat with every online application completed.

But wait a minute. This just might be ennobling. I need to keep my family afloat, and it’s time to take care of business. There is no room for small, dumb, or awkward feelings here. 

One of my long-ago vocational side trips involved working as an activities person in a nursing home. The stories I heard back then have all melded into one emblematic voice. Never once did that collective voice complain about taking care of business during the Depression. In repose, glancing back over the yawning expanse of years, the men and women who talked to me seemed to be calmly enumerating corners cut and sacrifices made. But never was there any bellyaching: “We paid for milk with potatoes,” or “Mother would give us kids beer at the dinner table to keep the meat on our bones when food was scarce.” 

Back then, I thought it must have been resignation–the sense that there wasn’t anything better out there, so why not apply your fancy schooling to operating an elevator?

And so far, what’s going on now versus the Great Depression is a hangnail versus a decapitation.

What filled those gray heads was maturity. May God grant me some soon. 

With the Independence Day just around the corner, it’s time to turn to our spacious skies, slack-jawed and drooly, to celebrate America! Yay! I remember hopping from foot to foot at 8:50 every Fourth of July as a kid, waiting for the magical hour of 9:00 PM to approach. That was when sufficient darkness would envelop the land, and WHAMMO! It was showtime! Gold puffballs haloed by green, pink, silver strands of fire, all crumbling to the ground in crackly splendor. Ooooh, and the finale–almost every firework my small town could afford, detonated all at once. Yaaaaay!!!

But first, there was always that damnable, mosquito-plagued waiting. And that hopping from foot to foot: it was the gotta-pee dance, since we’d been in the mall parking lot for so lo— –Alas, I’ve disclosed too much of my white-trashtastic roots. Yep, we pulled up lawn chairs at the local mall parking lot, “‘Cause why wouldja fight them pesky crowds at the park, when ya could see ‘em jest as well from the mall?” Ahhh, sweet youth! And if you’re anything like me, sweet youth also involved spying a Roman candle that belched out colorful balls of fire from a backyard near the public fireworks venue–and liking it better than the measly extravaganza your township put on that year.

Maybe most public displays are overrated. Besides, some of us are now thinking about the pollutants that these Conflagrations for Freedom release into the air. Sheesh! And I thought staying away from those roadside tents where sparklers are proffered by three-fingered merchants was the responsible thing to do! But now, we’re damned if we do patronize public fireworks displays and damned if we take matters into our own irresponsible, misguided, nanny-state-needing, potentially blown-off hands and set off those pretty Roman candles.

What to do? Well, maybe we should decouple fireworks from the Fourth and just blow up stuff for freedom whenever the urge strikes. The kids in my neighborhood blew stuff up on a year-round basis. In fact, I lost one mighty fine Muppets lunchbox to an M-80 and a majestic display of bad-assity. (I was fifteen; still tears me up to this day.). The point is, none of us has discovered the cure for cancer or become a captain of civics or industry. We’re probably of average or sub-average intelligence, all. And yet, we managed to retain our full complement of fingers, and not a singed eyebrow among the lot of us. It probably would have been even better and safer, however, had fireworks not been the slightly dangerous, illicit forbidden fruit that many state laws have made them. That way, we could have practiced our blowing-up of stuff without being sneaky–and under parental supervision. Who knows? Maybe we would’ve limited it to the Fourth.

Use common sense, be safe, but by all means, keep on exercising the freedom to blow stuff up in the name of America this Fourth of July–whether you outsource it (like it or not, there’ll probably always be a demand for those big old pollution-spewing monster displays) or take matters into your own powder-burned hands!

Apparently, the memo wound up crumpled at the bottom of Big Unit’s Backpack: we’ve got a four-alarm genius epidemic fulminating here in Southeastern PA. Maybe the smarts are raging across your pre-teen landscape like a California wildfire, too. Thank God I learned about it before ski mask-wearing MENSA goons come and haul away the neighborhood children like thieves in the night, indoctrinating them into the murky underworld of Proust and the Fibonacci Sequence.

Apparently, they won’t be stopping here. Oh, well, someone has to restock the black marching-band oxfords at Payless. And, whew! My spawn are safe! More precious years to spend eating Lucky Charms from the box and spinning around in the backyard till they topple over.

But oh, how exquisitely the Superparent™ tingles danced up and down my spine at Curriculum Night last evening:

Principal X, if we feed Festus intravenous Perrier and Boost to eliminate wasted time on that pesky eating thing, how many Advanced /Enriched courses can he fit into his schedule?

Will five Advanced/Enriched classes interfere with Madysson’s trip to Europe to serve on the Junior Mock-U.N. this fall?

I went into Middle School Curriculum Night thinking that the variety of classes they give these larval teenagers is pretty neat; I left feeling like the kid who got no Valentines in her shoebox. I was taking the gas, even though I knew better. Big Unit has enough of the ol’ ADD that waterboarding would be more Advancing/Enriching than one of those courses, despite knocking any kind of standardized test or IQ assessment outta the park.

Does any of this have anything to do with me, beyond my chaotic inner life and faulty DNA jumping into his chromosomes? With my success or failure as a parent, I mean? Probably not, unless I’m throwing raw meat on the floor, forcing the Units to fight it out with the dogs every night, and actively encouraging them to watch my DVD treasury of this for hours on end.

But…so….hard…not…to…get…sucked…iiiiinnnn. And yet, Glory be! The Black Plague of Genius has passed over our mediocre abode!

Aliza Shvartz: Did she or didn’t she? (Only her hairdresser knows for sure!)

Well, maybe not even that many people. This is stale news, but the questions it raises have been festering in my brain for awhile. Does Ms. Shvartz’s ill-fated senior project at Yale constitute art?

I’ve gotta hold my nose and say “yes” on this one. The very idea of her alleged products of conception–which would’ve been lovingly displayed with the goal of starting a dialog about choice and mastery over one’s body–makes me reflexively gag. The blood, plastic cube and video diary of abortions-as-sporting events, in and of themselves, are art.

And so is me peeing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to protest the war in Iraq. Which is to say, the materials responsible for such an uproar are sooo not art. But the uproar itself is, totally. The web of lunacy that Ms. Shvartz has woven around this nonevent (with a little help from university officials) is an unparalleled example of performance art for the 21st century.

By allegedly admitting that it was all smoke and mirrors to Yale brass, and then asserting that she really did inseminate/clean out her uterus, Ms. Shvartz has masterfully crafted a shitstorm of epic proportions. And in the end, she didn’t even have to unveil the material piece at all. Brava!

Still, I hate performance art with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. And the worst part is, you never know when it’s gonna sneak up on you. There you’ll be, innocently watching a new “play,” then, WHAMMO! “It’s incomprehensible, therefore, it’s art!” sneaks up on you in all of its black trenchcoat-wearing, Smiths-listening glory.

Yep, it happened to me one time in the early ’90s. The scene of the crime was a large university’s black box theater. I was watching a bunch of thesis projects in directing. On comes a “play” whose dramatis personae consists of Man and Woman.

Uh-oh. Gallagher smashing up watermelons is starting to look like George Bernard Shaw.

They’re wearing masks a‘ la Ultraman. And they’re fighting…on the isle of Crete (insert cretin joke here).

Man: Submit to me, you damned woman!
Woman: Never! You cannot oppress me!

Repeat oh, I dunno, 25,000 times and you’ve captured the theatergoing experience that day.

What made it art was the question-and-answer session that followed. A young woman stood up on trembling legs, stammering and blushing as she asked:

“Um, no disrespect to the playwright, but what the hell did I just see?”

The theater erupted in applause and laughter. Brava!

Maybe it’s not so terrible after all. I just got back from a reunion (not college-sanctioned–the best kind evah!) with about eight of my close associates, or my posse, as the young people would call it these days.

Met up at a bar, then progressed to the host’s hotel room. My husband thought it’d be all “immature” and stupid, but I think he was just pizzed about having to stay home with Big, Medium, Little and Micro Units while I (gasp!) had fun without him.

Turned out he was half right. It was totally immature! But it was also wonderful, and about a day too short. We’re all reaching that age where some lofty aspirations have been traded in for pragmatic concessions. Lots of our 21-year-old selves would call our 35-plus selves “sellouts,” but nobody went on an American Beauty-style bender about how their lives had played out.

This was a happy bunch of people! And I don’t think it was all attributable to the Molson. Or to a steady run of zippity-do-da events. There was plenty of sad intermixed with the good stuff, but I’m proud to still know these folks because of the way they respond the the maelstrom of life swirling around them. I drove down feeling nervous and vaguely frumpy and friendless, but I left reluctantly in the wee hours, just as the beer muscles were popping out and choice bons-mots like, “Man, how’d you get so fat?!” were wafting around the room like so much love-dust.

My only hope is that they derived the same reassurance that they were, in fact, still abundantly “friended” out of my presence. That I listened as much as I talked.

That they will stumble into the unlocked gym again next time. I want to stay for the second annual shirts vs. skins game.

What’ll Pennsylvanians do after the 22nd? We’re like the spawn of besotted yuppie parents committed to having only one child, citing “environmental concerns.” But then, whoops!

Keystone, say hello to your new brother, Indiana! He’s little, so he needs a lot of attention right now, and we’ll be carrying him around, feeding him and sleeping with him for awhile. But you know how much we love you, too! Right? We’ll do lots of special things together, too. Just us. Promise!

Okay, dumb metaphor. (Besides, I really like creative names like “Ashton” and “Caden” better than “Keystone” and “Indiana!”) Before my great state goes into attention withdrawal, it’s worth checking out some remarks made by Obamessiah in San Francisco more than a week ago. He was characterizing “these small towns in Pennsylvania” as bereft of good jobs and having been left behind economically by Presidents Clinton and Bush (Good strategy so far).

But then,

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

RUT-ROH!

Cue the hyenas (I mean, Merry Christmas in April, McCain and Hillary!). Republicans accused the Chosen One of being an out-of-touch elitist. Hillary alleged that he was arbitrarily judging people in whole swaths of the state as unenlightened.

Really? When I’m bitter, I cling to this and this.

Seriously, I think maybe Ed Rendell (a Hillary fan) had a closer take. He pointed out the obvious when he said that rural Pennsylvanians have always valued hunting–which requires firearms, more often than not–and have their own rich religious traditions. Those things have always been part of the cultural fabric, not the crutches of snaggle-toothed yokels in the backwoods.

And really, hunting is a way of keeping game populations in healthy balance, since we have encroached on the territories of natural predators. What should we do, shoot birth-control darts into deer (I’m talking to you, Main Line!)? As for religion, didn’t Obamessiah just silver-tongue his way out of a little Preacher Problem himself? Antipathy towards people unlike themselves? (I’m talking to you again, Main Line!).

Anti-immigration and anti-trade biases? Well, those things are growing among the disappearing middle class in PA and, uh, everywhere. I don’t think either one is right; I’m just sayin’ that maybe people feel threatened when the brutal gulf between the haves (who can afford to be all self-congratulatory in their embrace of “diversity”) and the used-to-haves (who may be looking for anything to explain the unraveling of their lives: if they can eradicate the causes, maybe things will go back to normal) threatens to swallow them whole.

Probably not an intentional slap at Pennsylvanians on Obama’s part. Just. Very. Dumb. coming from someone who’s very anxious that voters not view him as a stereotype, or hold his particular brand of religion against him.

Read the transcript of Obma’s comments here. I’m-a gonna load up my Winchester, tromp out to the old quarry and pray to Xenu before bed. Aaaargh! So bitter!

Blogs. Everyone I ever met in sophomore year of college who was “working on a manuscript” that moldered in their sock drawer prolly has one now.

And now, for my 39th birthday, my present is a bigger forum for self-congratulatory navel gazing than the same old four walls. (Jeepers! 2003 is gonna be great: I can just feel it!)

Funny, I’m not sure how this will turn out yet, but navel gazing does sorta tie in to something that’s been weighing rather heavily on my mind:

GRAY PUBES!!!!

WTF? A formerly demure brown beaver has transformed into a geriatric alpaca, lurking beneath gray, worn-out “hipster briefs.” Hawt!

It was a slow, insidious transformation. The postpartum inner tube had deflated just enough to permit a downward glance at the damage. The intervening weeks and months hadn’t been kind. My once-dandy landing strip had become a curly rainforest teeming with silverbacks.

The the ever-widening gunmetal stripe overtaking the top of my head, I dunno, that’s manageable. It’s like a cancellation stamp that makes my latent “invisible to teenage checkout boys” status official once and for all. And there’s always nice ‘n’ easy, or whatever’s on sale in the health and beauty aisle. But this puts the “closed” sign on the shop doors in bold type: never again will a new, bandbox-perfect person emerge from my own personal Dark Wood of Bad Grooming.

It’s not like I’ve taken to bed clutching a bottle of mouthwash, but jeez.

“On a very special Golden Girls, Blanche dyes her mound of Venus for a big date.”

No thanks. Guess I’ll just age with integrity from the waist down. But check out this shite, in case that’s not in the cards for you.

How to cope with this betrayal of youth, sweet youth?