Anna's Bloviations

Touché as they say. I got a response to my recent posting about the sailing regatta (Monday, July 28) from one of my millions of adoring fans yesterday – actually just from a friend who knows me quite well: “I note your struggle to differentiate yourself from the [sailing] elite. It is a little like Al Gore trying to convince people he is not like Bill Clinton -- completely different when examined closely, but distinctions blur quickly with a mere one step back….”

He may be right. For instance, if we pan out to the St. John’s Evangelist Church near to my subway station in the city, the nuances of what makes me much different from the yacht club crowd I described would probably be quite lost on the homeless people sleeping in the alcove of the church’s entranceway – especially if they knew the car I drive, the trip to London I have planned next week, the real estate explorations I’m making… “No but I’m different,” I would try to explain. “Here let me explain the differences…” Glazed eyes.

My encounters with the homeless are just one of the many perks of my new government job. I mean that. It keeps me appreciative of what I have. In the mornings, I circumnavigate past this potpourri of mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and fragile souls -- their holey socks poking out from underneath grimy blankets as I make my way up the windy hill to my office (in the winter I call it the arctic channel). By the evening, the homeless are up and about, having staked their spot which some unwritten law has given them title to, and are busy hitting me and other passer-bys up for money.

I only give change to Ben. Into his dirt-caked hands, I give him the .25 cents he requests (no more no less). Were my pathetic state salary not so subsidized by other sources, this extra twenty-five cents would add a significant burden to my exhorbitant weekly commuter expenses (about $70 a week including gas) relative to what I make. His magnified eyes stare out from behind coke-bottle thick glasses: DO YOU HAVE A QUARTER??? Ben enunciates not only every syllable but every letter as well. Let me try that again:

DOO YOOUA HAAVVA AA QUUARRRTER?????

Here Ben. Here’s a quarter.

ARRE YOU MAAARRIEED?

Yes, I’m married.

DO YOU HAAVE CHIILDEREN?

Yes. Two.

HOWW OOOOLD AARE THEEY?

High School and College. And then Ben’s sense of humor breaks through.

HOOW OLD WERE YOU WHEEN YOU GOOT MAARRIEED? TEN?

No, five I answer with a completely straight face. An almost imperceptible smile crossed his face when I said that and we’ve gotten along ever since.

Then there are the two drunks that every time I see them look like they’ve been in a recent fist fight of some kind. They have absolutely no qualms about passing out right in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Chinese restaurant they claim as their turf. Depending on how intoxicated they are, and how blurred their vision, you get either a really good complimentary catcall, or one you wish your forty-something ears hadn’t heard. On a good day: “Oh Girl you have a nice ass and a nice tan!” Bad day: “You’ve got a nice body for an older woman!” Those guys will never see a dime from me.

It’s kind of funny that there is another St. John’s Evangelist Church that also has a direct impact on my commuter experience each day. Unlike its sandstone sister in the city, this one is an iconic New England church located en route to my work. Its white steeple juts starkly into the sky across the street from the Atlantic Ocean and at 7:15 a.m. each weekday morning, St. John’s holds services there. UNFORTUNATELY, at about 7:40 a.m., (give or take fifteen minutes in either direction thus making it impossible to plan one’s commute around the service), services end and a small group of the doddering devout totter out to cross back over the street to get to their parked cars. The street they happen to be crossing is a major throughway to the city on which thousands of working Americans must come to a complete stop as the dodderees totter slowly across the STATE owned road on which a STATE trooper makes sure they make it safely to the other side. Now I was under the impression that there was supposed to be some kind of separation between state and church but apparently not. Nor has anyone seen fit to suggest that these retirees could perhaps possibly hold their service at say 11:00 a.m., after the commuter rush hour has passed. Doesn’t God listen at 11:00 a.m.?

A few months back, around the time that battle-ready American soldiers were parked just outside of Baghdad, (or maybe they had already rolled their tanks in -- I don’t really remember), the Board of Selectmen in my town approved a couple of miles’ worth of yellow ribbon to be wrapped around every tree that lines the two tree-laden main roads leading in and out of the town. All of that canary yellow fluttering in the spring breeze was a very touching and impressive sight at first, and certainly a proud show of town spirit and unity. Not to mention that this gesture really showed up the contiguous towns to the north and to the south who hadn’t thought to do it first. Yes, our little town was feeling very patriotic, and I think just a little smug.

Today on my way to work, I noticed that the ribbons that haven’t fallen completely off the trees are now a bleached-out, tattered white – a few months of sun and seaside winds haven taken their toll. In fact, the ribbons look like shit and I can see that the Board of Selectmen will soon be put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide what to do about it. Keep replacing them? Take them down? After all, we have to think ahead a bit here. We might be in Iraq for quite a while to come. Two years, five, ten, fifteen? Add a couple of Nor 'easters, a hurricane, and a few windy, hot summers into the mix and we're talking potentially a lot of yellow ribbon that will need replacing.

It’s really a shame Ann Landers isn’t around anymore because she would probably have known exactly what to do in this situation. I sure don’t. I mean you can’t take the ribbons down now can you? It would definitely call our sincerity into question – as if putting them up was nothing more than a nice Hallmark moment that made us all feel better at the time but now we've gotten sick of these faded rags drooping from all of our nice trees. Not to mention the message we would be sending to the soldiers still over there…Sorry Guys, but now that most of the CNN Iraq war coverage is over, the volunteers who enthusiastically tied on all of those ribbons have moved on to new causes. And besides those ribbons were really kind of making the town look tacky…

Good luck Selectmen.

The very impressive public relations' machine whose daunting job it is to make the president look good and sound articulate really missed out on a beautiful photo-op yesterday.

To start, there was the almost perfect east coast sunset – the kind that frustrates the hell out of writers because they realize with awe that they will never in a million years be able to describe in words the magnificence of all of those burnished pinky streaks they are witnessing. What Bush's PR folks probably would have liked about this particular sunset was the fact that it served as a breathtaking backdrop to all kinds of symbolic stuff that makes America look maddeningly desirable to the target audiences we are trying to make want to buy into the whole America-the-Best-and-Blessed concept i.e. lots of world-class sailboats leaning into a clear blue wind, lots of sun-lined sailors in Dockers busy unhitching their expensive boats from shiny big trucks, lots of tow-headed kids dressed in tennis white playing tag on verdant, dandelion-free lawns, and lots of pretty “blonde” wives with varicose-free legs herding their tow-headed cherubs toward the yacht club pool.

Welcome to my town where one of the summer’s biggest sailing regattas in the U.S. is hosted each July. This year, everything really was picture perfect – as if nature had decided that these lucky upper 5% of America’s wealthiest deserved a perfect four days of weather in addition to the lopsided tax break Bush has so benevolently bestowed upon them. They got a beautiful sunset to boot along with lots of American flags fluttering Viagra-stiff in the direction of their beautiful boats.

Wow, I sound jealous don’t I? I do have to admit that during race week, when I pass the yacht club along my four-mile daily dog walk, it is hard not to be slightly covetous of the laughter and chatter wafting down from the spacious deck that overlooks the postcard-pretty harbor -- everyone colored a beautiful bronze, hair highlighted flaxen from the sun, and all seemingly engrossed in lively conversations flecked with sailing terminology as foreign to me as Greek.

I think I am not so much jealous as I am fascinated. I am fascinated that running parallel right alongside my own life is this one – one so utterly different from my own reality that in turn is just a few miles from the reality of the struggling constituents I represent at work. You gain a fresh appreciation for the fact that we all get along as well as we do given the gaping divide of our perspectives.

Mind you for every curious glance I cast at the sun-drenched deck of sailing’s elite, I too get my share of stares back. What they see in me I have no idea but suffice to say that I and my un-golden retriever dog are the antithesis of the pre-requisite yacht club look; I’m lanky, dark-haired, and so sun-tanned that people often at first mistake me for the “diversity” the town’s logo purportedly celebrates (all 0.5% of it).

I actually know one of the sailors who races in this event – a guy I used to work with for a few years at the software company I spoke of. I don’t ever see him anymore but I think of him when my dog and I power walk past the boats. It’s funny that I would be acquainted with him of all the sailors who either live in or descend upon this little town each year. Leave it to me to know an anomaly of a sailor: he isn’t rich, isn’t blonde, isn’t from any long line of Brahmin upper crust New England stock, doesn’t belong to the yacht club and therefore not the sailor with whom I could try to nurture a friendship on the off chance of getting me and my family invited out for a weekend sail occasionally. Or to the club to watch a sunset and drink a long gin and tonic. What am I saying? This sailor doesn’t even drink!

The more I think about it, the more I am sure this wouldn’t have been such a good photo-op for the president after all. From the look of things, Bush’s PR guys are scouting for prime time footage of action heroes engaged in saving us from the world’s sinister forces. Somehow privileged recreational sailors vying to position themselves to catch the most opportune breeze as if their life depended on it just isn’t the right message to be sending out right now I don’t think.

It was all very picturesque though and I really do give sailors a lot of brownie points for their aesthetic contributions to the world – I mean what is more lovely than looking out at little white triangles set against a blue horizon? Or colorful spinnakers puffing out in unison as they make their way toward the windward mark? The world would simply not be as beautiful a place were it not for sailboats. So I’ll cut them a little slack for the fact that they seem to need those mammoth, gas-gulping trucks to haul their boats around (I guess in all fairness, a mini-cooper would be hard-pressed to tow a J-24).

There had to have been a few hundred of my inanimate adversaries parked along the road leading to the yacht club -- one more obscenly huge as the next. By the time I reached the top of the hill to where the evergreen bush shaped like a spouting whale resides, I was in a cold and seething sweat. Maybe it was my imagination, but I was sure the black Dodge Durango flinched when I paused next to it to catch my breath. I growled at it that it was lucky I wasn’t equipped with my enviro-terrorist bumper stickers that day – on this one's back bumper I would have slapped: “My better half is sailing...”

I was a whole lot better at being a sneaky teenager than my son is. If I were going to steal some alcohol from my parent’s liquor cabinet, for example, I would not have left the cabinet doors agape, the screw top to the vodka loose, and I probably would have thought to right the Schnapps bottle that fell over in the hurry to get to the Vodka. Not so my son. I can’t decide if I am madder that he filched the alcohol or that he botched the operation so lamely. I mean if you are going to be sneaky and steal, at least do it well! The illogicality in all this is that he can have an alcoholic beverage at home anytime he wishes. I guess it’s just more fun to sneak it.

Even the vast array of technology at my son’s fingertips (something I never had) doesn’t seem to help one iota in making him, or his friends, more precise sneaks. Via cell phones and IM, they can coordinate a complex beer run and 5-town party arrangements without lifting their Abercrombie butts off the couch, but you still have to be able to understand the environment in which you will be operating in order to be successful (I think there is an Iraq war analogy in that statement somewhere). Like a precision guided missile, these teenagers can hone in on some foolishly abandoned house for a party, but then they also need to have a backup plan in the event the abandoned house’s owners were not so foolish that they wouldn’t have warned the next door neighbors to be on the look out for twenty Jeep Cherokees pulling up along the street at 9 p.m. on a Friday night. The back-up plan comes in especially handy when they realize the street is a cul-de-sac and therefore not conducive for a quick get-away from the police.

I shouldn’t have to be passing on these tips to college-aged kids who one would think were getting smarter with the $30 - $40K tuitions their parents are paying. But apparently they need a few pointers from a former party animal from the seventies. Some basic tips based on recent capers of either my son or one of his friends:

1) If you’re going to go through the trouble and expense of securing a fake I.D, don’t have it mailed to your house for your parents to open.

2) If you’re going to have a beer party while your parents are away, take the trouble to bring along a large plastic bag to throw the empty beer cans in. Take the bag with you when you leave and pitch it in a dumpster somewhere. Under no circumstances should you throw the beer cans in the trash can located in the garage of the very house you’ve been drinking.

3) If you’re going to store a small keg of beer in the basement refrigerator that somebody’s parents hardly ever uses, don’t leave the shelf racks and refrigerated items you took out conspicuously displayed on the floor in front of the fridge. Nor should you try to sneak the keg in through the bulkhead in the middle of the night and not expect the dog to bark, especially when it’s your own house that you know has a dog who will bark at the sound of intruders.

4) If you are making secret plans and/or are discussing the girls you would like to give you head, DO NOT leave your AIM screen open on the desktop for the next person to view. Even if the next person really doesn’t want to read it, a few choice words are bound to be registered…

5) Not all towns have a donut-glazed police force that you can outrun without much effort. Nor are your parents always going to be around as they have for the last eighteen years to smooth out the road ahead for you. At some point, being able to outrun Officer Donut isn’t going to be enough. Make sure you always have a fake passport and a stash of cash with you at all times and/ or a really good lawyer.

I had a Confucius-like dream last night that made me feel a little guilty about yelling at my colleague the other day (see Tuesday, July 22 blog). The dream was this: I went back to work at my old job -- a software company that last I heard is still gasping air, although barely. I really liked that company. But it fell victim to not only ill-timing (i.e. just as they were ready to ramp up, the dot.com bubble burst), but also an unhealthy reliance on nepotistic staffing. In my dream, the personnel manager approached me at the end of my first day back and asked what I was doing there. She told me, in an uncharacteristically cross voice, that I should leave because unlike before, they were only taking people who were actually skilled.

That was the jist of the dream. I am leaving out the going-out-for-the-beer-afterwards part and other only-interesting-to-me details. I think the lesson of the dream was this: Confucius say you are either big fish in little pond or little fish in big pond… In other words, mediocrity is relative. So while my boss and the IS department at the State House think I am an efficient Über-Guru of sorts, somewhere else I am just a little tadpole in a big lake…My words of wisdom for the day would be that if you find yourself in a place where you are the little tadpole in the big lake, make sure you’re the best god damn tadpole you can be. Contrarily, if you find yourself the Über-Guru in the little pond, be the best god damn Über-Guru there is. Otherwise you are mediocre. Get it?

Near to the office where I work now, there is a little park tucked in between a flower-box lined street where I go to eat my lunch sometimes. Today there was a discarded Wall Street Journal lying on the granite bench which I promptly picked up and began to read. Two things caught my eye as I sat eating my mozzarella and prosciuto sandwich: nanotechnology and carbon sequestration… that and the article that was inexplicaably featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about how to properly bend in low-cut pants in order to avoid displaying your butt crack!

So it seems the environmental activist Greenpeace is starting a big flap about nanoparticles, manmade structures a few billionths of a meter in size and which will be used for all kinds of new manmade products. They think inhalation of this stuff might be carcinogenic or bind with poisonous metals which would then disperse like pollen through the environment. There is no proof of this but I guess the environmentalists think they should be proactive. Ironically, it’s thanks to Greenpeace and others that one of the bigger nanotechnology firms, International Business Machines, has now become the exciting new buzz company of the VC world. I guess the VC guys figure if the environmentalists are going after them, the company must be further along with the technology than they thought. So they are investing…

Carbon sequestration was the other item that caught my eye. This one is just great. It’s where industrialized countries too lazy to do anything about reducing gas-house emissions tell the public not to worry because any day now they are going to have the means to suck excess CO2 out of the air and shoot it into crevices in the earth that can absorb CO2 until said day we can figure out a way to make cleaner, more affordable energy alternatives. Never mind that you have to store this shit in obliging nooks and crannies of the world for one-hundred years before it dissipates (the first C02 farts of Model T’s are still circling the globe today). Is it really that great driving in an off-road sports utility vehicle to get to the supermarket that we are willing to make future generations pay for it? Just asking…

Heh I said I wouldn't complain about the crummy conservatives and I think I have been remarkably good about keeping that promise. I did not say, however, that I wouldn't occasionally provide compelling evidence backed by an exhaustive study by prominent researchers that they [conservatives]really are worth whining about. From the hallowed halls of the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman's School, Stanford University, and the University of Maryland comes this report from four top-gun researchers who have just completed a study of what makes a conservative tick...

What a conservative tick makes:

Fear and aggression
Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
Uncertainty avoidance
Need for cognitive closure
Terror management

The researchers concluded that although conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded."

See more: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml

BTW, on a completely unrelated matter, do you think this (see link below) is what is meant by the hand of God? Further evidence that being an agnostic is a better bet than being an atheist. You just never know...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030630.html

Uday, Qusay Killed in Fierce Firefight! Well this ought to keep the media busy 24/7 for the next two weeks -- just long enough to detract from growing questions about the shaky intelligence that served as the spring board from which we justified war against Iraq. Let's just everybody glory in the fact that we have taken out two evil, evil, bad, bad, evil-doers and not think about the fact that the aftermath of Iraq is pretty much exactly what those against the war warned would happen! No, we won't be hearing much about that over the next week or so. I predict instead that we will be seeing a media splash of lots of brawny, heroic-looking American soldiers. I can live with that. Hopefully they'll have a few day's worth of stubble growing on their manly square jaws. I find that very sexy.

One thing is for sure. Whatever miniscule amount of media coverage Democrat presidential contenders were getting will now evaporate faster than spilled nail polish remover.

I promised I wouldn't be a whiny liberal complaining about the conservatives all the time but do I get to gripe against my co-worker? I'm pretty sure he is a Democrat anyway. He falls into the appallingly large category of state employees who have spent their entire careers getting good at absolutely nothing. After spending two and a half hours cleaning up after his incompetence yesterday, I told him right to his face that if he wanted to spend his life aspiring towards mediocrity, that was fine by me but that he should kindly not make it my problem... OK, that was somewhat harsh, I admit, and I did afterwards take a deep breath and again try to show him for about the hundredth time, the naming convention we use to save electronic files and how to file them i.e. last name, first name_subject.date. He asked why I was speaking to him like a four-year-old. I couldn't hold my tongue.... "Well," I replied, "our sixteen-year-old intern who comes in twice weekly seems to have mastered our electronic filing system. So can you suggest why I shouldn't speak to you like this?"

I'm thinkin' my personnel file just grew another quarter inch...

I have a woman from the Canary Islands to thank for teaching me how to iron correctly and that is a story I would like to tell sometime. But first I'll tell you about my other favorite household chore I like doing, which is going to the dump. Top that with a yard sale the next day and we are talking a cathartic experience. I did both over the weekend. After I finished ironing.

For those who don't know me, I am a diehard agnostic. As Bandit would say, an agnostic is someone just too chicken to be an atheist. A true statement. But I digress. Going to the dump, I've decided, is equivalent to a confessional for agnostics. I've never actually been to Confession but by all accounts, one feels purged and cleansed afterwards, which is exactly what you feel after you've unloaded fourteen years of collective baggage -- heaving it as it were from the back of a borrowed Ford Ranger pick-up truck into a gaping, un-judgmental mouth below.

Few would recognize me when I'm at the dump. First off no one would expect to see me in a grungy dented Ford Ranger pick-up. At least it is not the worst transgressor against the environment, but not exactly a Mini-Cooper either. But what's a liberal, environmentally conscious S.U.V. hater to do when she's got four truckloads of accumulated crap to get rid of?

My friend's truck has matured to a point where looking worn and dilapidated have become character-building and endearing features: the tan seats are a dirt-worn gray; the stick-shift handle spontaneously disengages itself from the "stick" to land in your hand just as you are shifting from first to second gear; and the motor doth protest when you too quickly move it from second to third gear. My hubby commented that I looked like a happy country bumpkin as I coaxed the junk-laden truck towards the town dump Saturday afternoon, and the truth is I was. Well let me qualify that. It's fun to play-act.... Once in a role, however, I take my part seriously. When I backed up the truck and then nimbly jumped up onto the load in back, one would have thought that I came from a long, proud lineage of garbage collectors. Even my can-do-all hubby was impressed as I heaved our irreparably cracked dining room table off the flatbed. I think he got the same rush that I did when the table then thunderously crashed amongst its refuse brethren below. I can see why therapists sometimes send their patients to the dump. Hurling large objects and seeing them break into splinters below is a great way to blow off steam.

I am amazed at the amount of garbage the little town I live in is capable of producing. I am amazed at the amount of garbage I can produce. It is when I multiply my town by X-thousand towns and cities across this country that I become distressed that in spite of the vastness of our country, we cannot possibly absorb or sustain so much waste. Like a little toddler who is fascinated by his potty achievements, I stand spell-bound at the edge of the cavernous town shit hole, as truck load after car load belch forth an unmitigating stream of materialistic residue.

The dump experience is a visceral one. Acrid odors assault the wary nose as the eye tries to make sense, but can't, of a mountain of broken context. Which leads me to my theory why yard sales are so popular... The yard sale brings a sense of continuum back into the equation. What the coffee house is to the European, the yard sale is to the American. It is a comfortable, authentic place where people come together to klatsch: I will tell you the story of what I am selling to you. You will tell me the story of who you are and why you want to buy my junk. Even better we will barter and strike a deal. It makes no difference that I have sold you a silk scarf for .25 cents that once cost me $40.00. I am happy because for .25 cents, someeone now knows the stories I couldn't bare to just throw away into a landfill. You are happy because you have a slightly frayed but beautiful silk scarf that will go nicely with your dress and which you got for almost nothing.

My Yard Sale:

I wake up at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, make a cup of coffee, and contemplate which male muscles I am going to wake up first to help me move my yard sale fare from the garage out onto the sidewalk. Turns out my daughter is the first to arise and I immediately enlist her former swim-team muscles to start the job. I'm lucky she woke up first. What she lacks in physical strength compared to the eighteen-year-old glob of muscles still asleep upstairs, is more than made up for in her ability to 'know' how I want things arranged. We silently lift junk of different sizes and shapes and arrange them into a most logical order: Two faded worn couches we place in a neat L-Shape configuration -- setting an old teak coffee table in front on which I place my coffee mug and Sunday NY Times. Then we set up an 'office of junk': two old computer monitors on top of a cheapo-computer table surrounded by an array of miscellaneous good-for-nothing office paraphernalia (pencil holders, lamps, discarded answering machines, etc.). The list goes on: the "kitchen" consists of Yuppie has-beens -- a bread machine and pasta maker. Then the sports section: a mish mash of old skis, ski boots, deflated soccer balls and discarded tennis racquets. The master bedroom walk-in-closet consists mostly of my daughter's, God-I couldn't-possibly-wear-that-Abercrombie-outfit-again throw-aways, as well as a few, What-was-I-thinking-when-I bought-that outfits. You get the picture.

Anyway, yard sales do something a visit to the dump can't. When you throw your broken dining room table into a steel pit, NOBODY knows or cares about the stories that went with that table. Like the fact that it was made in Salem, Massachusetts sometime in the late 19th century and that it somehow made its way to an antique shop on the west coast. The fact that hubby and I happened to walk into that little antique store about twenty years ago and bought it for about a hundred dollars. The fact that it moved from one start-up company opportunity to the next until it made its way back to a stone's throw from whence it was born. The fact that it watched a young, struggling family grow, and dream, and fight, and make Thanksgiving dinners. I can't remember how the base of the table broke, but it got replaced by a newer table, and sat for years in the basement. Once someone tried to fix it by gluing the base but it didn't work.

A lot of customers came by my yard sale. The first were an English couple on bicycles (he on a very cool, mint condition 1947 Swiss army bicycle). They bought a broken lamp that they were sure they could repair and which they wanted for their bedroom in the house they were renting for the summer. There were the early-birders who professionally scanned our selection for any Van Gogh paintings we may have ignorantly pulled from our attic and put on sale as "some rubbish painting from Aunt Jules." The neighbors who are renting the house across the street came by. They bought one of our old bikes for one of their kids. The ten-year-old who was the lucky recepient came over to thank me and tell me how great the bike was (you gotta' love kids who haven't been spoiled...). A German couple bought my old Singer sewing machine I got when I was a teenager. She was genuinely excited and I was touched to know that people still sew. There was an elderly woman from Chile and her family who bought ten curtain rods. And there were many more. And as usual, they bought the things I never expected to sell, and left the things I thought would fly off the sidewalk. But whatever they bought, I made sure they took the story that I wanted them to take along with their purchase.

I made about $200. Not bad. I sold a broken lamp, a sewing machine, a teak coffee table, some SAT prep books, a pasta maker, curtain rods, a gold plated brooch, a woven rug, a bicycle, two computer monitors, a computer table, a Gap skirt, some baskets, and various trinket jewelry and knick knacks. The British couple who came back after their bike ride to pick up their lamp had me take a picture of them in front of my junk collection to send back home to their friends. At the end of the day I packed up a few passed-over goodies and gave them to the neighbors across the street. What remained got stuffed back into the garage. I can't imagine why nobody wanted my hand-sponge-painted dresser for $6, and I guess nobody needed an off-white leather couch with a few claw marks from the dog that day either. Maybe the Salvation Army will have better luck with this stuff.

The woman from Chile who bought the curtain rods almost had tears in her eyes when I told her the rods were ten cents a piece. Little did she know that the rods had been sitting up in my attic from the previous owner and so had cost me nothing. I think had I given her the rods, she would not have been nearly as pleased as by the notion that she was getting such a 'great deal." Now there is some social commentary worth talking about..."

There are exactly two household chores I actually enjoy doing. One is ironing and the other is going to the dump. This Saturday morning I am going to iron.

The place where I iron is called, not surprisingly, the ironing room. Slightly larger than a closet, the ironing room is located on the second floor of our 1920’s colonial-style house and looks out to the main road below. The real estate agent who sold us the house years ago had described it as a "telephone room," and there was in fact an old avocado green rotary phone somebody had left on the windowsill when we moved in. As if I could predict then that in a few years we would collectively own two cordless, and four mobile phones that would render the need for a telephone room obsolete, I staked my claim by parking the ironing board smack in the middle of the little room the first week of unpacking.

Ironing dress shirts is my forte. At peak performance, I can iron a shirt flawlessly in about three and a half minutes flat. I can’t even imagine since the time I got married twenty years ago until now, how many dress shirts I’ve ironed. Thousands...

Admittedly one of the stranger things I do while ironing is to envision an overhead video camera taping what would be equivalent to watching a professional sporting event on television, but a sporting event that requires the commentators to speak in a soft-spoken voice – much like golf. I am the Tiger Woods of ironing. I imagine two moderated whispers giving play-by-play commentary with respect to my intricate ironing finesse. Occasionally they also make reference to the inferior techniques of my inferior invisible competitors.

“Well, Larry,” starts the first moderator. “Notice how Anna is prepping the shirts today with the water squirt bottle. I think she is counting on the high humidity to give her just the right amount of dampness in the shirts because she is only giving each shirt a couple of squirts from her spray bottle.”

“That’s right Dave, because each time she has to re-fill that bottle with water to dampen the shirts, she loses precious time. I notice too that she is using a new starch product this year. The shirts come out crisp but not overly stiff.”

“Here she goes, Larry. Watch how she ques up each shirt. She has one of the most unusual sequences in the sport. Most people start with the sleeves, but Anna does the inside of the collar first.”

“Wow, Dave. No creases anywhere. She has ironed each section of this shirt flawlessly so far. This one is a tricky one too. The thinner cottons don’t seem to have much body and are harder to work with. But Anna is doing an absolutely phenomenal job here. And look how effortlessly she buttons the shirt. Every other one and then a quick lay-out on the ironing board so she can attack the sleeves. Like we pointed out earlier, Dave, unlike her other competitors, she does the sleeves last.”

After returning from a quick commercial break (for some environmentally friendly car of some sort), Dave and Larry comment on the expert folding job and final burst of steam administered around the collar area.

“Larry, that shirt is perfect. I think the judges will have to give that a nine or higher. You could package that shirt in cellophane and sell it in a department store as new!”

I also just daydream a lot while ironing. The iron and I become partners in our quest to smooth out the wrinkles at hand; the iron steams across the crinkled plane of another blue dress shirt, this one a pale sky blue, as my mind wanders across the folds and creases of my strange life. We flatten and press until the next time a cacophony of blue shirts make their way up to my little room.

I'll have to come up with some kind of new word for when someone is a cyber no-show i.e. Bandit has stood me up! And isn't that just like him. Like I said, he only shows up when it good and pleases him -- no drum roll entrances for that one! Which means that there will be no discussion on Alberto Gonzoles today (Bandit would have put his two cents in on that one by now had he wanted to).

Fine...That gives me time for State House anecdotes... Let's start with the Homeland/Tom Ridge color-coded terror alert system. Since launching my career as a government employee back in January, we've been at the 'Code Orange' level twice. This means that every visitor and every employee are asked for identification; everyone is searched; and everyone has to go through one of those metal detector things. Now, in case you didn't know, we are presently at 'Code Yellow' which means that the level of security precautions at the State House has dropped markedly to reflect this new status. Based on the behavior of the security guards, it seems very apparent that they also expect any would-be terrorists to oblige by these relaxed security precautions as well because let me tell you that if they didn't, we would be in BIG trouble. For weeks now, I have been whizzing by security guards who barely look up from his or her wretchedly written daily newspaper. OK, so perhaps they know me by now and figure I'm alright. I guess they also think that all of my six summer interns are OK too given that all I have to say is, "They're with me," and they're in. This includes the one who looks a whole lot like any one of those mug shot photos from the fifty-two card deck of America's most wanted.

The most called in problem of the week from my constituents was in regard to the education of English language learners. My irate callers let me know that the majority of voters who last year made it very clear that they wanted to see a change in the way the state educates non-English speaking children were none too pleased that the Legislature saw fit to make changes to the ballot question they had overwhelmingly passed demanding English immersion in schools. A paraphrased quote from one caller: "I'm sick and tired of the arrogance of these Legislators who think they can just un-do the will of the people. I don't follow politics much but I feel really strongly about this. Non-English speaking kids need to learn to speak English. I came to this country only speaking Italian. They put me in a classroom and I had to learn English. Period. Why can't they?"

It turns out that in polarized situations like this, a lot of people are emotional but few have the facts. Not ONE constituent of all the constituents I spoke with could give me any detail about the English Immersion program they had so strongly advocated for. Had they frankly delved just a little below the surface, they might have realized that the Legislators' amendments actually strengthened the new law, and in addition held schools more accountable in assuring that English immersion is successful. I spent the whole day drafting a letter to try and explain things. As a curtesy mind you. The language of the state constitution allows the Legislature to amend referendum questions...

OK, I've banged a bit against S.U.V.'s, and bashed a little against Bush's syntax skills (or appalling lack thereof). It's time to invite Bandit into the mix. Bandit is my Constructionist/Conservative friend I promised would make his appearance at some point. But be forewarned. I cannot simply command his appearance no matter how much 40-something-sass I dish out. Bandit shows up when he wants to and you just never know what will spark a response. And let me tell you he can spark.... Imagine a glass tower intellect well versed in the Constitution arguing against someone with intuitive intelligence from the gut...

Maybe I can bait him here with something very dear to his heart: the Constitution.

There was a very interesting article recently in my beloved Atlantic Monthly magazine (right up there with Harper's and which used to be right up there with the New York Times before they went homogenized bland).

The intro from the Atlantic Monthly article in question: "As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales, widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee, prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. They suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand" --
by Alan Berlow -- http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/berlow.htm

What say thou Bandit? We seem to have come to a point where we have entrusted nine people with all the decisions Congress is too chicken-shit to make on behalf of the American constituents they purportedly represent (your words more or less). By all accounts, Alberto Gonzales is a serious contender for the next Supreme Court slot (even so no one from the present Supreme Court has stepped up to the plate to retire [thank god]). . .). What's your take, and what do you think of the recent shift towards America's acceptance of nine people having the power to decide elections, affirmative action, gay affairs, and perhaps the ultimate: the right of a society to take another life?

OK this is just tops. Looks like we have another 'support group' on our hands folks, only this time it is from an unexpected source. It's not enough that the S.U.V. drivers don't bat one guilty eyelash whilst driving their gas-thirsty, rollover-prone, better-you-die-than-me road hoggers. No, now their wittle feelings are getting hurt with all the negative publicity these vehicles have been getting of late (even mainstream 60 Minutes went after them), and they have created their very own wittle Wah-wah page! http://www.suvoa.com/ Good grief, you don't hear the penguins complaining each time they lose an iceberg the size of Rhode Island to global warming, do you?

In Anna's ideal world, these SUV owners would just chalk up their gluttounous purchases to one of the more frivoulos and ignorant they have made in their lives. Then they would walk, not drive, to their nearest recycling center and donate all that good excess steel to a good recylable cause.

But unfortunately the reality will more likely be that all of the millions of aging SUV 's are going to make their way to used car lots across the country. Then once Teenager-with-used-SUV gets tired of said used S.U.V, that vehicle makes its way still to a tertiary market e.g. across the border to Mexico where oil changes and muffler replacements are considered luxury items. Used cars rarely run as efficiently or as cleanly as their newer counter parts which means that millions of these guzzlers will be on the road for global-warming decades to come -- getting more and more dirty and fuel inefficient every year. Me thinks Santa is going to need new digs soon...

Heh, I just got hold of Michael Gerson's template he uses for Bush's speeches! And I stand corrected (see previous post). Gerson actually employs fewer than 200 garble-proof words for any given speech. Click on link below:

http://www.actofme.co.uk/bush_speech/bushspeechwriter.html

If I could think of a way to get handsomely paid for the time I spend making other people look good, I most certainly would: friends send me their resumes to improve upon; my husband seeks my input on marketing strategies; my boss relies on me to fool the world into thinking he is an articulate politician (and for this I am paid most pathetically). I bet Bush’s speech writer, Michael Gerson, gets handsomely paid for making the president look good, but I sure wouldn’t want his job. Not in a million years. It must be a nightmare having to recycle the same 200 garble-proof words in ever new and creative ways for Bush to use. Thankfully at least the expression ‘evil-doers’ seems to have once-and-for-all been jettisoned. I was really getting close to the edge on that one.

In spite of Bush’s propensity towards garbled syntax, I do have to hand it to him for his flawless enunciation of what has become the Republican’s new brilliant tagline: “compassionate conservative.” Whoever came up with that one should be up for some kind of marketing award:

 The tagline is clear, concise, compelling, and very good use of alliteration.

 It accomplishes just what a positioning message is supposed to do in that it establishes meaningful and valued differences to distinguish itself from the competition's offerings.

These two simple words have also put the democrats in a real pickle in terms of coming up with their own desperately needed tagline. I mean if Republicans are now compassionate conservatives, what does that make the liberals?

7-Up had it easy. All they had to do was to say the "Un-Cola" and they were on their way. But the liberals can't say the "Un-compassionate conservatives" or "Un-Liberals" can they? The other problem is that the letter L doesn't have nearly all the complimentary alliterative modifiers that the letter C does i.e. compassionate, courageous, courteous, caring, charismatic, communicative, etc. What the letter L does have is a litnany of adjectives that only serve to reinforce the negative image already associated with the liberals i.e. lax, loose, lollygagging, libertine, etc.

The paltry few L-words that are somewhat positive give us likeable and loveable… Likeable Liberals? Loveable Liberals? Nah. Too self-congratulatory. And too mushy. The conservatives have it hands down with “caring” which implies a certain emotional sobriety; I picture a benevolent patriarch. For L-words we also have logistical, lion-hearted, or linch-pin. Ugh. Back to the drawing board.

In the meantime I suggest the Democrats start attacking the credibility of the Republican's compassionate conservative claim. How about this for fodder? During Bush’s whirlwind tour of Africa, he went to visit the Slave House on Goree Island in Senegal which was the holding pen for upwards to a million slaves en route across the Atlantic Ocean. Bush spent all of 15 minutes there. “Very emotional, very touching,” Mr. Bush said as he headed off the island… He then spent 60 minutes at a popular Game Park in Bostswana. I'm thinkin' callous conservative...

I also think someone should get a hold of the footage of Bush and entourage coming across a male elephant unsuccessfully trying to mate with a female. Not a giraffe. Not a gazelle. An ELEPHANT. This might not be as damaging as Mike Dukakis in the tank but certainly symbolically good for SOMETHING I should think.

Saturday, July 12th 2003

Well here I am -- posting my maiden blovinational blob on the internet.

In case anyone was wondering what 'bloviations' means, it is the noun form of the verb ' to bloviate,' the definition of which is to speak verbosely and windily. My dear conservative friend, who likes to refer to himself as a constructionist rather than a conservative, claims that the word bloviate sounds like some kind of ebonics creation i.e. 'he be bloviaten' about the illrectitude of the latest supreme courtification..." Anyway, it was he who decided that it was time I start expousing to the rest of the world on the off chance that anyone else might listen. And it is he I have to thank for taking care of the technical details so that I could have the opportunity to blog my thoughts. Probobaly he was just tired of being one of a handful subjected to my daily earfuls and forwarded jokes. He clearly wants others to suffer as well. But he's a good guy. I am sure at some point you will no doubt have the pleasure of meeting him as a 'guest speaker' here on this blog page. Because what would a blog page of a sassy forty-something-year-old be without the tempered views of an always right constructionist cognoscente with a wicked sense of humor?

But back to the word 'bloviate.' The fact is that the word first made its appearance in America as early as 1850. Apparently US President Warren Harding was known for bloviations throughout his presidential tenure in the early 1920's and it was at this time the word became popular. So to the extent that anyone can remember what the hell President Warren Harding bloviated about on behalf of our great United States, there you have it.

Perhaps I'll change the name for my BLOG page at some point. I rather like to think of myself as pithily descriptive than as windily verbose, but I'll let the world be the judge of that...

There are a lot of things I want to talk about here: my loathing of SUV's, why Americans are so fat, anecdotes about being a legislative aide/government employee going on seven months now, teenagers, C-Level corruption, the environment, high tuition costs, America's class divide... Uh-oh. I already see my millions of fans getting glassy-eyed. Well there IS my foray into pornography writing that we might talk about some time. Did that wake anyone up? But no matter what I post, I promise that in spite of my utter frustration with Bush the president and the lack of any compelling Democrats who might have a chance at unseating him, I promise I will try very hard not to sound like a whiny liberal.

To be continued... I have a hair appointment I just remembered. Color and cut. Cost: $120 (or more if I buy their hair products). Cause' it costs a lot of money to look hot and sassy at 40-something... And unfortunately not a luxury very many of my constituents who call me at work can even entertain the thought of. They're just trying to figure out how to pay $650 rent while making $849 a month in salary.