Anna's Bloviations

SORRY MADAME BUT UNCLE ERNIE ISN'T GOING TO FIT. I'm all for entrepreneurship but the notion that we now have Goliath Casket in the phone directory to service the deceased obese just really makes me crazed. In addition to the standard 28-inch wide coffin (which served Americans corpses very well for the last two hundred-plus years thank you very much), Goliath offers newly introduced 33-inch and 49-inch-wide coffins to the grieving families unable to stuff big Uncle Ernie into a standard-sized box. Goliath Casket's sales have been increasing 20% annually. Hearse manufacturers are now trying to get in on the action with re-designed vehicles that feature bigger rear doors. LINK

Span out your arms and think about what this means for a moment. You have a ballooning nation of the obscenely obese, all of whom will one of these days (probably sooner than later), be kicking the bucket. Rather than McNuggets, they will be gobbling up McSwaths of land 4x6-feet-at-a-time along with the Amazon forests cut down in order to build their SUV-sized caskets. Somebody call the Sierra Club! And no, cremation is not an option (yet). Turns out most crematoria cannot handle bodies over 500 pounds.

More disturbing to me is the thought that a new whole new generation is growing up to think that 4 ft-wide mega-coffins are as normal as everything else fat that they have been conditioned to accept: seatbelt extenders on airlines, wider stadium seats, bigger health care bills due to all of the complications associated with obesity, and of course the omnipresent gargantuan vehicles designed to accommodate Uncle Ernie’s fat ass.

The director of International Size-Acceptance Association, Allen Steadham, wants industries to adapt to America's widening girth. Well who do you think the industries are going to pass down their costs to? So in addition to my gym membership, now I am supposed to pay for Uncle Ernie's 100 extra pounds? If you think 100 extra pounds could be in any way, shape, or form healthy, try the following: tie twenty 5lb. bags of sugar to your body and walk around for a day.

My politically-correct-reared kids get mad when I go off on my tangent against the obese. Well I'm sorry. Just lose it. You'll feel better and look better. Goliath Caskets might go out of business but don't worry; there will be ten new business ideas to accommodate the new lethargic-free America.

Next week daughter and I move into B & B while bulk of face-lift renovations on house are completed. Said seventeen year-old-daughter is flipping out because how can she possibly commit to a week's worth of outfits without the option to change her mind fifty times? She has more or less decided to dump her entire closet of clothes into the back of my car in the event she needs to gain access to an alternative outfit. As opposed to dumping her entire wardrobe into her car trunk which she claims smells moldy.

Even so the guys doing the floors next week "do everything" I am nonetheless spending the entire weekend doing all of the "everythings" I know they would never have the imagination to anticipate. Like yes in their quote they have agreed to move all of my furniture but do I want them wasting an hour dumping the contents of my sideboard god knows where, because the sideboard can't otherwise be moved when it comes time to haul it out into the garage? There are just a million little details they would never see or get and which I must do because heh let's face it, when you are forty-something, you just know these things.

A part of me just wants to keep packing -- to load up the entire house full of contents into boxes, put the house on the market, and be on to a new adventure. But the aesthetic in me needs to see how pretty this house is going to look when everything is done. And there are certain people I would miss so much at this given point, and certain projects that can only be accomplished in my present circumstances, that I am not quite ready to move on.

Here is my updated To-Do List for which every required material listed below was bought and hauled back home by me because as I have said in previous blogs -- I AM my contractor's errand bitch... I post this list just so that prospective house buyers might know what they are getting themselves into:

 Put sealant on back deck and touch up stain

 Masonry work around house

 Paint electric heater in downstairs bathroom (special paint is in garage)

 Caulk kitchen sink and around back splash

 Repair new cracks incurred from sledge hammering reluctant tiles around bathtub in abutting upstairs hallway and re-touch with China White eggshell and China White semi-gloss for woodwork

 'Ditto' new and old cracks in our bedroom both on ceiling and on walls. Paint ceiling white (paint in garage). I will apply Pale Daffodil eggshell to walls now in garage (maybe)

 Paint little office off of kitchen: trim Linen White semi-gloss; walls same Coffee White eggshell we used in kitchen foyer

 Repair and refinish all downstairs floors including entryway thresholds, countertop trim, and kitchen table trim (and the outside of the bread box if you’re in a good mood). Please leave all chairs, and dining room table in storage – am waiting for rug to come back from cleaners. Please also put felt on bottom of any furniture that may scratch floors


To-Do in Bathroom

 Finish installing fan

 Change out bathtub, sink, and toilet

 White Formica counter tops

 Install vinyl floor and refinish wood threshold

 White tiles around bathtub area with decorative shell border ¾ ways up. Finish off with bull-nose tiles and counter tiles where appropriate

 Install new medicine cabinet, lights, glass shelf (below medicine cabinet), and wood trim around wall (similar to downstairs bathroom)

 Repair water-rotted wood door frame next to tub and change out rusted door hinges

 Paint ceiling white (use anti-mold additive). Use two coats high-gloss oil-based white on cabinets, inside of door, wood trim, as well as medicine cabinet (if enough paint is left over). Wall paper below wood trim around toilet area and behind back splash and right of sink (I changed my mind about tiling). Paint over wall paper and walls first with tinted Onion Powder primer and then two coats Onion Powder eggshell

 Replace window glass with milk glass, re-caulk, and paint wood with interior- and exterior paint respectively

 Find shower rod to replace one that got bent taking out tiles (old one in garage for reference)

Someone look up the telephone numbers of Judge Lee R. West and Judge Edward W. Nottingham. Then let's see what those two think about 'free speech' when the 50 million people who registered for the Do-Not-Call-Registry against unwanted tele-marketers call up these judges to complain about their having pronounced the Do-Not-Call legislation a violation of free speech!

Defiance of mathematical odds. I saw it with my own eyes and I forgot to mention it in my last blog.

There were lots of raffle contests going on at the golf tournament fundraiser I helped with the other day. One was a 50/50 raffle at both the 6th and 14th holes. For $5 you got a ticket if you got your ball on the green. If you didn’t get your ball on the green then you had just officially made a ‘donation.’ The winning purse was 50% of the total kitty.

Coming in after a long pleasant day on the course were more raffle tickets to buy. For $5 you had a chance at the "high end" prizes (Celtics tickets, DVD player, etc.). For $10 a Sheri-arm's-length of red raffle tickets, you had a shot at the lesser prizes (bottle of wine, fruit basket, etc.). As I mentioned before, the guys were very generous so their chances at winning were not all that good really. My boss called me up to the stage to be a Vanna-White-fill-in while he pulled out the tickets from a Tupperware bowl and called out the lucky winners. Well, I mixed, twirled, and shook those hundreds’ of tickets non-stop but contrary to what you would think, there was not an even distribution of winners. In fact the opposite happened. The same guy who won Closest-to-the-Pin also won the 50/50 kitty of $290 bucks. The same guy who won the "Most Balls Lost" contest also came up four times more to claim a bottle of wine, a case of beer, five free car washes, and a golf umbrella. One table at the back of the room held a cluster of most of the winners for the evening. Every time a repeat winner came up I shook the bowl even more rigorously. Finally a new face came up to claim the humidor (a hand-made cigar box). Only to find out that not two nights before he had been to my boss's house to smoke a nice cigar from Portugal. "You know I would love to have a humidor at home to properly store my cigars," he mentioned in passing. He bought only two blue raffle tickets the day of the golf tournament. And of the ten raffle prizes he could have won, he landed the humidor.

Things like this scare this agnostic while all of the predominantly Irish/Italian Catholic participants seemed completely un-phased by the outcome…

I always thought the Irish and Italian didn't like each other much. At least that's what my eighty-three-year-old Italian uncle from Brooklyn used to say. Back in the thirties you wouldn't have dared step onto the wrong street corner in Brooklyn or have risked getting the holy Jesus kicked out of you, he used to tell me. I've heard similar stories about the Boston area from my days of doing city tours for German-speaking tourists.

But there they all were. The Mc's, O's, and the -ancy's along side the -liano's, -ezo's, and -ardi's. Indeed every local name I've come to know my first nine months here as my Rep's aide at the State House was there. This translates into about one hundred and fifty or so of the city's power brokers guffawing on the city golf course for my boss's annual fundraiser event in memory of his father yesterday.

Here is the story, according to Anna, of how the 'Mc's' and the '-iano's' came happily to the same event: Tucked away and out of reach from what my aesthetically sensitive eyes would call a third-world-skid row, is a hidden jewel. Others might say the hidden jewel is simply tucked away in your typical New England working class town of gnarled, pot-holed roads, past-their-prime colonials, and a hodge-podge of automotive garages, liquor stores, and apartment buildings in between. This hidden jewel of which I speak is a public golf course that many a private one might wish they looked like. From the 6th hole, one has a sweeping view of downtown Boston while the rest of the course is a verdant green that meanders through woods of acorn, birch, and oak. How this public golf course manages to remain so well kempt given the current fiscal crisis I can only speculate.

The Mc's and the -iano's who came to golf yesterday are hard-working, family men who have pulled themselves up a notch from their working class roots and who now own successful businesses, and/or are in politics, and/or are lobbyists (well maybe the lobbyists aren't so hard working). But they remain very close and connected to their roots -- and boy do they have the salty Boston-area accents to prove it. Most but not all looked to be in their mid-fifties and most requested XX-Large-sized vests as part of the golf tournament package to which they had sent at least a $200 check to play. These are also generous guys; during the day they bought raffle tickets freely in the name of a good cause.

Throughout the month of September and into October, there are dozens of such golf tournaments. Seems like sort of a lot of wasted paper to me (at least from a check-writing perspective) given that each participant is just attending each other's event, if you will, and ultimately writing out a check for approximately the same amount to each event. But obviously the social aspect is what is important here. Swirls of cigar smoke trail each little electric golf cart as it strains to tote twelve hundred Italian and Irish pounds to the next hole. Six hours later these guys have had plenty of quality time to network, or perhaps, I thought, as I drove back through this money-deprived town, to reinforce the associations meant to make sure that the ever-growing influx of new immigrants -- the Latinos and Russian, not find out where their beautiful golf club is. For now they are safe. The Latinos and Russians are too busy knifing each other up on the street corners as they fight to become the next heir apparent.

SQUEEZING IS FOR ORANGES Anyone need a job? On my windshield, and on the windshields of all the other cars parked at the T-Station yesterday evening was this flyer, replete with grammar errors (I wonder who came up with the Squeezing Oranges catchy tagline...):

Squeezing is For [FOR should be lower case] Oranges

Company downsizing? Merging? Let 'em! Put yourself in control of your own Home-based [Home should be lower case] business while your [it's you're, you idiot who wrote this] still working.

Work 8-10 hours a week
Earn $300-$2100 weekly
Must have a posetive [ever heard of spell check?] attitude

Please Call 1-800-211-1202 x 12556.

Heh I've got a positive attitude! Maybe I should give them a call. I wonder if anyone out of the thousand-plus cars parked around the T-Station actually rings them up... I'm tempted to just because I would love to know how I could be earning from $300 to $2100 working 8-10 hours a week... It would certainly be a nice supplement to my pathetically-paying government job I have now. On the other hand, such a job does have its perks... I am coming up on ten months and already have had about 3 1/2 weeks "unofficial" vacation. The health benefits are great too. Not to be scoffed at good health benefits...

WHAT IS HOT -- Fredrik Ljungberg, the Swedish soccer midfielder, now featured in Calvin Klein's latest soft porn underwear ad campaign. I am very sorry I don't have a link for you to said ad. I unfortunately couldn't find it anywhere online.

Daughter agrees that Fredrik is very hot but thinks the bulge in the front is probably fake (which didn't prevent her from absconding with the full-page ad to her room). Fredrik is looking straight AT YOU with those piercing steel blue eyes -- and yes they are definitely inviting you to step into the page even if he is standing against what looks like a cold, graffitied warehouse wall of some kind. He's got the three-day's-worth-of-stubble I've always been partial to (especially on a square jaw) and wonderful lips. Then he has this black panther tattooed onto his six-pack stomach . I'm not generally a fan of tatoos but this one we like. The panther is almost revealed in its entirety except for its hind legs and tail that you would obviously have to pull down the rest of those Calvin Klein pro stretch underwear to see. Fredrik is half helping the viewer accomplish this; his thumbs are hooked provocatively into the top of the orange Calvin Klein elastic band to reveal just a hint of the V indentation that is the border between his hard stomach and the bulge in those Calvin Klein underwear.

Hell yes I studied this picture long enough to notice all of the above mentioned details. Auto insurers should be licking their chomps. If they ever put this guy on an outdoor billboard he's going to cause major traffic accidents for sure. As the NY Times says this Sunday, "Ljungberg causes a flap even among the jaded photo crew -- a mix of men and women, straight and gay, who have seen their share of semi naked celebrities..."

Perspective Factoid

What was to be Richard Grasso's deferred pay and retirement benefits before the shit hit the fan: $200 million.

What government revenues for Liberia over the last four years would have been had not Ex-Pres Charles Taylor stolen more than half: $200 million.

It ain't always easy being super woman. No car keys to be found in the house this morning. Where... could ... they ...be? OK not in the trash. Daughter must have them. Drive to the high school. Rush into the office and have Not-the-Sharpest-Knives-in-the-Drawer call daughter from her study period. I am very late. Daughter sees no hurry in getting to the main office with my keys. Flash of perfect white teeth with not one cavity, thanks to good health care. "Oh sorry Mom. I borrowed your key and had it in my backpack."

I have no idea why but there were free NY Times newspapers to be had on the school office counter and so I take one as a little make-me-feel-better token for my inconvenienced morning. Reading it on the train reminds me that I miss this newspaper I am boycotting due to its homogenized content of late.

At work I am not there for more than three minutes come to find out that we can't have our big meeting with the hospital administrator big-wigs in the Senate reading room because the Senate reading room doesn't allow food or drink already ordered for the occasion. My colleague from the Senate side informs me that she has been to plenty of meetings where food and drink have been served but the bureaucrats to be seem to be playing the classic power play of who gets to have perks and who doesn't... OK, I wing-ding an improvisation no problemo. Boss walks in one minute before the meeting is to begin and asks me what is on the agenda and what he should say... "Well you should have all the administrators introduce themselves, thank them for coming, and stress that this is a great opportunity for health care administrators and the Legislature to exhange information and ideas on important issues that pertain to the regions of this particular caucus, blah, blah, blah." Do I have to breathe for you to?

My handyman didn't show up today. But I can't be mad at him. He knew my husband hadn't been home for ten days and thought we needed time to ourselves undisturbed. Gee gosh. My contractor the romantic. Unless he is two-timing me for another client... In which case it's back to breaking said client's knee caps if I find out who it is.

My poor handyman lost his glasses in front of my house the other day. Outside throwing the ball for my dog before work, he pulls up and comments that I am not throwing the ball very far. Before I can explain that I do this on purpose due to the danger of an occassional oncoming car, and the fact that if you throw the ball too far, my dog won't retrieve it because she rightly suspects you'll become distracted by something else to do while you wait for her to bring the ball back, he hurls the ball down to the end of the block. She looks up at us as if to say, "You must be kidding...."

We gather up on the sidewalk to discuss the day's itinerary. A car rolls by. We hear a crunch. We walk over to the middle of the street where lie an un-fixably bent and broken pair of eyeglasses. "Please tell me those were the cheap $10 drugstore kind of glasses." "Nope. Those were the $300 pair kind." He picks them up and puts what is left of them up over his nose and ears. "How do they look?"

I think I may have found a potential comrade in arms. Turns out my neighbor of fourteen years hates SUV's as vociferously as I do and lately has been quite vocal about it. To the owner of an enormous red Lincoln Navigator who left his guzzler idling for more than ten minutes in the parking lot while he talked on his cell phone, my five-foot-three friend went up to him and asked if he was ever going to turn off his damn engine as he was polluting the environment. Geez, the guy gets barely ten m.p.g and then burns what little he has left in his tank idling in a parking lot? What flagrant utter disrespect to this planet -- all in the name of what he would probably call exercising his personal freedom. And everywhere you look, there are more fat pricks on cell phones doing the same thing.

If my friend and I ever decided to go to the eco-terrorist-extreme to get our point across, we would be a perfect duo. Absolutely nobody would ever suspect us. My friend is pretty and petite -- both her house and her wardrobe Martha-Stewart perfect. I'm not very suspicious looking either. And because we've both been 'super moms' for so long, we would be great at coordinating all of the logistics of our eco-terrorist activities. Like fine-tuned Swiss watches, we would know right down to the nano-second when to detonate the TNT on the Hummer lot. Our combined experience in housecleaning over the last twenty-plus years would ensure that our tracks were traceless; I guarantee you wouldn't be able to find a fingerprint anywhere. And our both gym-buffed physiques would be perfect for scaling those SUV dealership fences!

I wonder if Prada makes a nice black ski mask. And I should check out the Coach website to see if they have a nifty midnight-black leather backpack we could haul our firebombs around in... I also wonder if I type in Tom Ridge, firebombs, eco-terrorism, and E.L.F. , I'll get a knock on my door tonight.

GETTING TESTED FOR ALLERGIES IS A TOTALLY COOL THING. I show up to the allergist's office at 8:30 a.m. -- right on time from my years of training having lived in a country that prides itself on being on time. No not Switzerland. Austria. Almost the same thing. To achieve this I haven't yet had any coffee, I forgot my umbrella, and didn't switch the dishwasher to the ON position before I walked out the door. The nurse takes my blood pressure. "I haven't had my Starbucks yet. Don't be surprised if you find that I am clinically dead," I half joke. Actually my blood pressure is really incredibly low from my athlete lifestyle. Take my blood pressure at 8:30 a.m. sans coffee and well... She weighs me -- still a steady-for-the-past-fifteen-years 128 pounds. She measures my height. Not shrinking yet.

Then comes a thoroughly-from-my-perspective enjoyable doctor's visit (I also love getting my teeth cleaned). Per request, I roll up my non-iron Brooks Brother's blouse sleeves to reveal still tanned arms. I place the underside of said arms up on the table while the He-nurse with the earring takes out the "caterpillar" -- an elongated piece of plastic that resembles, well, a plastic-art-rendition (what artist?) of a caterpillar with hundreds of legs. At the end of each leg is a prickle of potential allergen. The nurse presses the caterpillar against your tender palm's-up-skin which feels as though someone were pressing their fingernails into your skin momentarily.

Now I wait fifteen minutes to see whether any of the train-track of red dots will show me allergic to something. Three spots begin to swell up and are itching me big time. But the nurse has given me specific orders not to scratch. One spot seems especially unhappy as it turns into an angry red welt on my upper arm. Wonder what that is? If it is chocolate I am already contemplating sharp-edged objects in the doctor's office with which to slit my wrists. The doctor returns to proclaim his verdict and perhaps be the catalyst for ending my life.

"Does your mouth ever itch when you eat certain fruits?" the doctor asks.

"Why yes," I answer (maybe not so formally). "When I eat apples and peaches the inside of my mouth itches. But I've noticed this just in the last few years. Am I allergic to these fruits?"

"Well not really. You are allergic to birch pollen. And oak pollen. And mice. Do you have mice in your house that you know of?"

"No, but there is a whole colony of mice at the State House. In fact I have one who hangs out in my office named Fritz...But if I'm not allergic to apples and peaches, then...."

"When you eat an apple, the anti-bodies in your system think you are ingesting birch pollen. The structures are very similar. The same is true for other soft-skinned fruits, walnuts, and parsley."

"Ah-hah!" I exclaim. "I was eating walnuts by the fist-full the week I got this itching thing! They were for a Sunset Magazine pesto recipe I never got around to making!"

"Well, I think you know what to do. I am going to give you a prescription for an Epi-Pen in the event you ever have a more severe reaction to one of these foods you may mistakenly ingest at some point. "It could save your life," he says gravely (and what's your cut by promoting the Epi-Pen I wonder?). I watch the informational video and decide to avoid at all costs these few foods I am now allergic to because stabbing yourself in the thigh with a half-inch needle looks really painful...

Gee I can hardly wait for the next age-induced break-down to occur. Let's face it. I've probably always been allergic to birch pollen. But every apple I ate in my youth, my youthful cells scoffed at. "Bring it on!" they bellowed.

Anyone want to adopt a State employee mouse named Fritz?

HOWARD DEAN WHO? Having spent a good part of last week being my contractor's errand bitch, I must say it has taken a concerted effort to stay abreast of what is happening in the world. I forced myself to read an article about how the nation's huge surplus has become a vast deficit this morning even so my mind was 90% on paint chips. At the moment, such an article is RAIN ON MY PARADE -- the parade being the lovely little improvements I am making to the abode.

Thirteen years of living in a once-upon-a-time, move-in condition-1920's-house have taken their toll. One day we all woke up to scratched, darkened wood floors, chipped paint, and a deteriorating last-frontier bathroom we never had the money, time, and/or will to do anything about. The last-frontier bathroom is a 1970's remodeling hack job of bad-taste extraordinaire... Who in their right mind would pick Yankee Tour Bus brown-and-yellow to tile a bathroom? The countertops are a swirly marbled Formica disaster, and the floor a moldy, cracked nightmare of vinyl squares that even when new had to have been ugly. The bathroom has had to accommodate four family members ever since we moved in -- the younger of which used to take steamy water-all-over-the-place baths when they were really little, and now tend to take two to three showers a day as teenagers. We've had our share of house guests over the years too. There is no fan in the bathroom so the little summer bugs just get stuck to the beads of condensation on the ceiling by which there is now a polka-dot pattern of petrifying insects spattered across the porous painted surfaces.

Once a bathroom gets to such a point it wins.... i.e. you just give up trying to really clean it. Such is our bathroom. The once-white caulking is NEVER going to turn white no matter how much you pour bleach onto it. It's time for the sledge hammer.... With the help of my contractor*, I am going to get my bathroom transformed into a resellable, whistle-clean-white-tiled delight. The new white tub, sink, and toilet will be accompanied by the decorative splash-of-color of my choice and will cost about $2,500 total thanks to my extraordinarily evolved shopping skills (I frankly rock at finding good quality goods for cheap [I also rock at finding good quality goods for lots]).

Not two weeks ago hubby and I were all about selling this place and moving to a house in a quieter location that might also have some of the amenities lacking in this house (an open floor plan for entertaining, a quiet, private deck off the kitchen to read the paper and drink a cup of coffee, etc.). Come to realize that not even three-quarters of a million dollars will get you much more than a house you will have to plunk another $50K minimum into to make it livable. To make things more difficult, hubby and I constantly vacillate. We are both afflicted with profound Wanderlust: One week we want to go west. Then it's Europe. Then no, we want to stay here. Our kids used to freak out when they would overhear these conversations of ours but now they hardly glance up from their MTV reality show. I want to be there, and there, and there. All at once. There is a wonderful expression a good friend of mine said to me once (which is applicable for any ocean): "Once you have crossed the Atlantic, you are always on the wrong side....."

So last week I decided what the hell. Let me plunk ten or fifteen thousand dollars into this house and spruce it up. It's a win-win situation. If we decide to sell, the house will be in great shape and we will certainly re-coup our investment. If we stay put, well then we enjoy the face-lift. So as I speak, my energies are entirely devoted to restoring old oak floors to a lustrous golden blond, turning marred, faded walls fresh again with gleaming coats of Benjamin Moore paint, and morphing my bathroom into an aesthetically pleasurable experience. As an added bonus, I just today found a great hand-woven rug ON SALE that has turned my bedroom from nice to, "Oh my..." Some of the painting I am doing myself. Just because. I've always been very good at house painting and once in a blue moon I enjoy doing it.

This momentary distraction (perhaps call it momentary passion) -- this choice to be distracted -- this innate-creative-ability to be distracted -- this hunger to be distracted -- a hubby who subsidizes my distraction; well it's an interesting thing. I am creating something beautiful but to do so must use new supplies and jettison out the old I do not like. One more commode to the town dump. Ten more empty cans of paint. And on and on multiplied by everyone else using toxic chemicals to stain their floors, and solvents to power wash their wood decks. All in the name of creating what we as 'man' perceive as beauty.

Can one even fathom the toxic cloud emitted when both the Twin Towers imploded to their fiery collapse? Office furniture, computers, carpeting, heating systems, cooling systems, office kitchenettes, cleaning products, plastics, light fixtures, artwork, synthetic fabrics, sewage, insulation, glass, steel beams, molten airplanes, fuel, rubber, acoustical ceilings, stained wood, pressed wood, wall paper, glue, office supplies, fax machines, telephones, paint, tar, concrete, granite, brick, sheet rock, fiberglass, ceramic, aluminum, copper, lead, human remains, and god knows what else born into the air in one thunderous moment -- the implosion so great that the above-mentioned was compounded into ONE inescapable cloud of microscopic particles that lodged into each and every soft tissue lung of every fleeing New Yorker that day. A few weeks after 9/11, New Yorkers were told that the air quality was fine. What? ARE YOU KIDDING? I smell a cover-up by a government too chicken to tell thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers that were blasted with the biggest carcinogenic ka-pow-cloud ever imaginable on US soil.

WHOA tangent.... How did I get from my bathroom makeover to the Twin towers? I guess my point is that every man-made accomplishment that employs non-biodegradable man-made materials that I can think of, no matter how beautiful, is in essence an environmental disaster on some scale. Look around your desk as you read this. Everything you see on your desk is likely destined for a landfill sometime in your lifetime (probably sooner than you think). I admitedly see nothing in my office that has a life expectancy of more than 50 years: computer (two years), printer (two years), telephone (one year), catalogues (out tomorrow), cork board (ten years), lamp (five years), CD player (three years), speakers (three years), throw rug (six years), picture frames (twenty years), plant (doesn't look like it's going to make the year let alone fifty), pencil holder (five years), pens and pencils (six months to a year), calculator (five years), scanner (two years), coffee mug (ten years), phone book (one year), car key (three years to coincide with a trade-in of my car), daughter's Coach purse (five years), wine glass (could go at anytime given how often I break them), notepad (two months), artwork on wall (maybe fifty years).

Next time you go into a Toys 'R' Us, or a COSTCO, or a Radio Shack, just look around. EVERYTHING in that store is going to end up in the trash in less than ten years. I'm not asking you not to buy something you need. Just take a moment to THINK about what you purchase and what it means to the planet...


*My contractors were being held captive (by me) until this last Friday when they appear to have made their escape just before I got home from work. I have not heard from them since. I am encouraged that they have left a good deal of their equipment here and am hopeful that this means they will be back on Monday. If I find out whom they have ditched me for, I will break their knee caps...

FOLLOW UP ON KUNSTLER. Check out James Hower Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month. See also related article from previous blog or CLICK HERE

Wee Little House and Big Furniture I was really curious how they expected to get the inharmonious grouping out on the brick pavement in through that tiny doorway, beyond which was a very narrow stairwell. And I could see up higher a hairpin curve that the super-sized Crate 'N" Barrel couch didn't have a chance of getting up. Nor did the king-sized bed, two king-size mattresses, an armoire, an executive desk, and a beautiful one-piece antique dining room table for twelve. A policeman directed pedestrians single-file around the obstacles, all of which looked (the furniture I mean) as if they were feeling rather self-conscious in this peculiar setting. Yeah right that furniture is going up those stairs I thought.

But then along came the way you get big furniture into 19th century row houses and so I put off my favorite sandwich place for a few minutes to see how this all worked. They call it a 'moving dock.' It's a compact crane that can reach up about four stories and has attached to it a large steel 'docking station' -- a room-sized steel sheet that is suspended from four burly chains. The links are as big as a giant man's hands. So what they basically do is pop out the windows of the house and then load up the dock with an assembled room e.g. the master bedroom consisting of bed, mattresses, reading lamps, armoires, etc. Along with the furniture are lifted two movers who carefully direct each piece to the waiting hands on the other side of the no-longer-there-window. When I asked one of the guys what such a moving job cost he told me $3000. Not bad really. You get the crane (includes attachable loading dock), movers, and your very own policeman who will direct foot traffic below. I don't think that quote included the popping-out-the-windows-part. Forget the grand piano though. No way one would go through a window, would it? Yet I'm sure a lot of these 19th century homes had pianos. Did they build the houses around them?

Speaking of moving, my daughter and I are about to try a week's worth of close-quarter bonding in a little bed and breakfast while the floor guys refinish our downstairs. Hubby is conveniently in Europe so we only need one small room with twin beds. We'll be as cozy as college roomies up in our little loft replete with its own little kitchenette. The inn keeper gave us an excellent price for the week and every penny will be well spent: Little Gary the floor guy comes in and moves all of your furniture, repairs and then sands your floors, puts down three coats of polyurethane, puts back all of your furniture, and then dusts!!

This week I am holding my carpenter and his wife hostage so that they will finish all of the projects I assigned them. They of course think they are staying at my house out of the kindness of my heart so that they won't have to commute two hours each way. In actuality I just want them in my CLUTCHES so they can't get away to the other waiting customers I know they have. Things are moving along even so I am running ragged being my handyman's errand bitch. Given that he earns more an hour than I do on my paltry government salary, it is much cheaper if I get all the supplies myself rather than pay him to do it....

They are now projecting that the $40.6 billion dollar 'Big Dig' project in Boston is going to cost $40 million dollars more (so said an in-house State House newswire today). What is everyone getting so upset about? One year in Iraq and Bush wants $87 Billion. So Boston is comparatively still ahead of the game and actually may see some tangible infrastructure built out of this astronomical investment (which still remains to be seen in Iraq).

I unfortunately couldn't find a link to the text below but felt it was important enough to paste in all its lengthy entirety below:

Big and Blue in the USA
by James Howard Kunstler

Having just returned from a week in England where, among other things, walking more than ten yards a day is quite normal, I was once again startled by the crypto-human land whales waddling down the aisles of my local supermarket in search of Nabisco Snack-Wells, Wow chips, and other fraudulent inducements to "diet" by overindulgence in "low-fat" carbohydrate-laden treats. And they did not look happy.

To say that Americans are shockingly obese is hardly a novel observation, yet it is discouraging to see so many of your fellow citizens in such a desperate and unhealthy condition, and I'm sure it is even more discouraging to be in such a state. Related to this is the recent disclosure that one-third of all Americans are taking prescribed antidepressant medications, specifically the SSRIs of the Prozac family (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, including Zoloft, Paxil, and Celexa). That's one out of every three men, women, and children! The American media routinely regard the scandalous levels of both obesity and emotional distress here with befuddlement and even indignation, as though it were inexplicable and even unfair that such a friendly, generous, valiant, humorous, and enterprising folk as we should be so mysteriously afflicted with The Blues.

Have any reporters noticed how we actually live here in America? With very few exceptions, our cities are hollowed out ruins. Our towns have committed ritualized suicide in thrall to the WalMart God. Most Americans live in suburban habitats that are isolating, disaggregated, and neurologically punishing, and from which every last human quality unrelated to shopping convenience and personal hygiene has been expunged. We live in places where virtually no activity or service can be accessed without driving a car, and the (usually solo) journey past horrifying vistas of on-ramps and off-ramps offers no chance of a social encounter along the way. Our suburban environments have by definition destroyed the transition between the urban habitat and the rural hinterlands. In other words, we can't walk out of town into the countryside anywhere. Our "homes," as we have taken to calling mere mass-produced vinyl boxes at the prompting of the realtors, exist in settings leached of meaningful public space or connection to civic amenity, with all activity focused inward to the canned entertainments piped into giant receivers -- where the children especially sprawl in masturbatory trances, fondling joysticks and keyboards, engorged on cheez doodles and taco chips.
We've sunk so much of our national wealth
into a particular way of doing things that we're
psychologically compelled to defend it even
if it drives us crazy and kills us.

Placed in such an environment even a theoretically healthy individual would sooner or later succumb to the kind of despair and anomie that we have labeled "depression" in our less than honest attempt to shift the blame for these predictable responses from our own behavioral choices and national philosophy to some more random "disease" process. But the misery is multiplied when these very behavioral choices -- inactivity, isolation, and overeating sugary foods -- lead to disfiguring obesity on top of despair. And it must be obvious that I am describing a self-reinforcing feedback loop that generates evermore personal misery and self-destruction.

Another way of looking at our predicament is as the result of a high entropy economy -- entropy being provoked by huge "free" energy "inputs" in the form of a hundred years of cheap oil, and entropy being expressed in forms as varied as toxic waste, ruined soils, and buildings so remorselessly ugly that the pain of living with them corrodes our souls. Depression (despair and anomie) and obesity are as much expressions of high entropy as the commercial highway strips, the Big Box stores, the housing subdivisions, the hamburger chains, and all the other accessories of the wished-for drive-in Utopia.

It doesn't help, of course, that this entropic fiasco of self-reinforcing feedback loops, and diminishing returns have been labeled the American Dream -- because neither patriotism nor all the Prozac in the world will immunize us from the consequences of our own behavior, our foolish choices, and our self-destructive beliefs. This particular American Dream more and more looks suspiciously like a previous investment trap -- we've sunk so much of our national wealth into a particular way of doing things that we're psychologically compelled to defend it even if it drives us crazy and kills us.

It was interesting to note over in England how many people were out enjoying themselves in the public realm, with other people. By public realm I mean in the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the parks, the riverside promenades and other places explicitly designed for humans to enact their hard-wired social proclivities. Everywhere I went in Oxford, Cambridge, and London I was amazed at the hordes of young people so obviously enjoying the company of groups of their friends, and what a contrast this was to the current culture back home where you hardly ever see anything but a couple, or perhaps two couples, out in a bar or restaurant, and where the Starbucks cafes are filled with solitary individuals, and the streets are for cars only, usually with lone occupants. It was also startling in England to see groups of old people walking together in the streets or sitting on a blanket in the park, because in America old people have been conditioned to go about outside of home only in cars. Today's older Americans have spent their entire lives in a car-obsessed culture in which walking is seen as uncomfortable at least and at worst socially stigmatizing, something only winos do.

In Europe, people make 33% of their trips by foot or bicycle, compared with 9.4% for Americans. American suburbanites weigh on average 6 pounds more than their counterparts in walkable cities. They have higher blood pressure, are more susceptible to diabetes, and live two years fewer on average than Europeans. Pedestrians in the US are three times more likely to be killed in traffic than in Germany, six times more likely than in Holland. Bicyclists here are twice as likely to be killed in traffic than Germans, three times as likely as Dutch.

Statistics hardly tell the whole story, though. The emotional toll of the American Dream is steep. What we see all over our nation is a situational loneliness of the most extreme kind; and it is sometimes only recognizable in contrast to the ways that people behave in other countries. Any culture, after all, is an immersive environment, and I suspect that most Americans are unaware of how socially isolated they are among the strip malls and the gated apartment complexes. Or, to put it another way, of what an effort it takes to put themselves in the company of other people.

This pervasive situational loneliness, of being stuck alone in your car, alone in your work cubicle, alone in your apartment, alone at the supermarket, alone at the video rental shop -- because that's how American daily life has come to be organized -- is the injury to which the insult of living in degrading, ugly, frightening, and monotonous surroundings is added. Is it any wonder that Americans resort to the few things available that afford even a semblance of contentment: eating easily obtainable and cheap junk food and popping a daily dose of Paxil or Prozac to stave off feelings of despair that might actually be a predictable response to settings and circumstances of our lives? (I'd add pornography to the list also, a substitute for sex with other real people who cannot be accessed in the condition of pervasive situational loneliness).

How depressing.

If it's any consolation, I repeat what I have said in this space in previous rants: that we are headed into a social and economic maelstrom so severe, as the people on this earth contest over the remaining oil and gas supplies, that everything about contemporary life in America will have to be rearranged, reorganized, reformed, and re-scaled. The infrastructure of suburbia just won't work without utterly dependable supplies of reliably cheap oil and natural gas. No combination of alternative fuels or energy systems will permit us to run what we are currently running, or even close to it. The vaunted hydrogen economy is, at this stage, a complete fantasy, and at the very least there is going to be an interlude of severe disorder and economic discontinuity between the unwinding of the cheap oil age and anything that might plausibly follow it.

We will be driving a lot less than we do now and cars will generally be a diminished presence in our lives. The automakers and the oil companies can lobby all they like, but history has a velocity of its own, and it is taking us into uncharted territory where the GM Yukons and Ford Excursions will be useless. When the suburbs tank, they will go down hard and fast. The loss of hallucinated wealth is going to shock us to our socks, and the fight over the table scraps of the 20th century is liable to entail a lot of political mischief here in the USA.

The physical arrangements for daily living will have to be revised and re-ordered accordingly. We're going to have to return to traditional human habitats: towns, villages, cities, and agricultural landscapes. We will have to walk out of necessity, or at least ride some places with other people. We may be too busy to indulge in the blandishments of television and the other entertainment narcotics we've become addicted to, and even the Internet may be made irrelevant in a world of regular brownouts. We may have to grow more of our food closer to home and do some of the physical work ourselves. As far as I know, there is no such thing as a Cheez Doodle bush. We are going to be living a lot more locally and thrown on our own resources.

We're going to have to do this whether we like it or not, because circumstances will compel us to. There may be a lot of hardship and difficulty, but in the process we are going to get some things back that we threw away in our foolish attempt to become a drive-in civilization. And most of these things we get back will have to do with living on more intimate terms with other people, getting more regular exercise, eating better food, leading more purposeful lives, and rediscovering the public realm that is the dwelling place of our collective spirit. Paradoxically, when that happens fewer of us will need Prozac or the Atkins diet.

WHY THE RICH GET RICHER (ON A SMALL SCALE)

Example One: Hubby and I sold our 'King Kong's Banana' last summer -- a top-of-the-line Sea Lion kayak, which including miscellanea once retailed at $1200 dollars. And may I just say as an aside that we set the trend on the whole kayaking thing. Hubby is what is known in marketing as an 'early adopter' and so he was the first bright-yellow elongated fiberglass kayak to make its way past the gawks of the sailors rigging their boats for a sail. Today where I live, kayaks are as common as seagulls; they've even set up a kayaking school for the singles looking for a kayaking mate, and/or the already-happy-paddle-synchronized kayak duos.

Needless to say, hubby tired of the sport after a few seasons although to his defense it was in part due to the fact that a broken leg while playing an over-40-something soccer game put him on the sidelines for quite some time. He mostly stopped because he couldn't get the wife to share his enthusiasim, and he soon got rather lonely paddling with the waves all by himself (I decided that kayaking with the current was a lot more fun than paddeling against the current).

So hubby decided to sell it while he could still get top dollar because the market wasn't yet flooded with yuppies who had themselves grown tired of their latest toy (anyone wonder what happened to all of those bread machines so popular a few years back?). Since we live on a main street it was easy. I hauled it out to the corner, secured it to a telephone pole, and put out a big sign that read FOR SALE along with our telephone number. We got many calls over the next few weeks. Blah blah blah voices of desire. Then they asked the price. "Let me think about it," and would hang up. There was one young woman who was very interested in our kayak -- a student with no money who stopped by often to look at the boat. Later she brought by her dad in the hopes that he would be as enamored as she was and buy it for her. But I guess dad didn't buy into it because I never heard from her. Then out of the blue pulled up a I-don't-remember-what-brand S.U.V., with a late thirty-something well-dressed man accompanied by his fabulously gorgeous, skinny Asian girlfriend (how unusual for these parts I thought -- he must be divorced). "How much?" he asked. "$800 for the boat and $100 for the extras," I answered. By this time the novelty of tying up the boat each weekend to the telephone pole had worn off along with the thrill of playing hard-nosed on the price. "How about $700 cash for the whole lot? I'll go to the bank and get you cash." "Deal." The young girl who had been so interested in the boat called me about a week-and-a-half later. "If the boat is still available I was wondering if you would accept an offer of $800 for the boat and gear? "Sorry," I said. "It's gone."

Example Two Staples just had a sale on 24-bottle flats of bottled water -- two for ten dollars. I bought twelve flats at once without batting the eyelash someone on a budget would have to, even so it would be such a good deal if they could afford it...

YOUR DAY COULD BE A LOT WORSE. Got a call from a constituent -- a very upset woman who was very hard to follow because she kept interchanging her he's and she's until you had no idea who she was talking about. She lost her housing [in my boss's district] and now lives on a campsite, plot #13, up north (the worst thing you want to do in this state is to lose the roof over your head since wait lists for affordable housing are one year or more, and the alternatives dismal). She had driven down here with her foster son, whom she adopted eleven years ago, to visit her grown biological son for the weekend. While out visiting some friends, the biological son and his girlfriend locked her out of the house and got a court order for temporary custody for the boy, citing she is unfit because she hasn't enrolled him in school yet and is physically unable to care for him due to a mile-long list of painful afflictions. She claims biological son and his girlfriend are drug addicts who met each other in a failed de-tox program. She is worried about adopted son (now sixteen and smoking pot) who has all kinds of behavioral issues and needs medication which she fears he isn't getting now because drug-addict son is probably taking it himself. Adopted son gets violent without his medication. The girlfriend of the alledged drug-addict/biological son has her own kids living in the same house and whom she beats regularly. The word 'father' never came up -- just a tangle of broken dead-end lives. She just loves this kid and wants him back. And heaven help the person who has to drill down to the truth let alone to the best interest of the kid.

BAD LUCK IS SOME PEOPLE'S MIDDLE NAME. Then there is my Haitian car mechanic -- a wonderful guy and great body work specialist who works hard and loves his family. About a year ago, a piece of metal splinter hit his son in the eye and partially blinded him while he was working on a car (mine I hate to say and I have felt guilty ever since). Today I called the shop to see how my latest body enhancement project was going, and he told me that the reason my car wasn't ready was that one of his workers (probably a relative) drove one of the cars that had been left at the shop across town and got involved in an accident where two bicyclists were hit. The owner of the car has contacted his lawyer. My friend the mechanic has one less employee at the moment, a huge family to support, and is behind schedule on his workload.

GULLIBILITY AS YOUR GUIDE. Tonight I attended one of those way-left political assemblies held at a high school in my boss's district. He didn't want to go to it because he says the organizers are all "crazy whackos" i.e. grassroots groups, really-intense-labor-leaders, and the like. He's the elected representative and I'm the underpaid aide going because my PR instincts tell me that you don't want to piss these people off given their toehold in the ever-growing Latino community. I can see what he doesn't like about these groups. "CLOSE THE CORPORATE LOOP HOLES!!!" they shout. Don't let in-state corporations off the hook by letting them pay minimal taxes! That's a nice emotionally charged issue you can get behind, right? -- make the greedy companies pay! The problem is that if you don't offer these corporations tax incentives, they go bye-bye to open shop in Alabama or never come here in the first place. Period. Even with the present tax breaks, this state is one big headache for corporations trying to do business here. Try to recruit a well-qualified person here only for her to tell you that "gee thanks for the generous offer but housing prices are so outrageous I can't afford to live here." Whoa girl I'm sounding like a Republican! Not. Raise the state personal income tax. If you're going to revolt against taxes, start with the $87 billion dollar bill just handed the American public (call it tax or call it deficit -- it's all coming out of your pocket one way or another). I left the forum just before anyone caught sight of said Representative's aide climb into her hubby's Beamer to drive home to a glass of Chardonnay (don't worry -- I'm feeling like a very shallow Democrat these days).

AND HERE I WAS DISTRAUGHT because the Home Improvement center I went to on Sunday didn't have the exact bathroom tiles I wanted.... plus I have this inexplicable rash that manifests itself by a wave of itching that makes itself indiscriminately, and with no apparent rhyme or reason from one end of my body to the other. Which makes me think I'm going pre-menopausal, or have a never-before-now unidentified food allergy. Wouldn't be so bad except when it makes its way to parts of my body that are not conducive to wild scratching on the subway. Don't go to the gutters guys. The worst is when it goes to the nape of my neck. Doctor's appointment tomorrow.

Dear EMAIL ETIQUETTE Abby,

I have a friend who regularly sends fantabulous hyper-links -- one's that transport me to the far reaches of the political spectrum, to the morbid extremes, to the funny, and to the just plain dumb. I am gratefully part of his email distribution list but do not know anybody else on it (save for occassionaly one person).

The other day my friend sent me an email regarding Johnny Depp's recent comments about the U.S. One of the people on my friend's distribution list responded by hitting Reply All. I won't bore you with the details but I found myself caught up in an EXCHANGE with this complete stranger. I don't know him from a hole in the wall and yet ended up calling him a brain-washed white ass. I was just overcome with Reply-Rage and now my friend is regretting that he ever put us on the same distribution list. Please help. Should I apologize? Is it wrong to hit Reply to All? Are there any drugs that you know of out on the market to medicate my Reply-Rage bouts? What should I do? Below is his correspondence and my reply. Do you think I was being mean?

His 2-Cents: The French supported Saddam Hussein because they had cozy oil deals and had created this fraudulent UN program called the oil for food program. France made 10's of billions per year on these deals. I can't think of anything more corrupt than turning a blind eye to that sadistic mass murderer for monetary reasons. Also, how can they call themselves an ally when they supported a brutal dictatorship that funds terrorism and murder throughout the world and against the US with French investment. France claims to have disagreed with the war on grounds of principle, but that is blatantly false -- they opposed the war because of $$$. In my mind, their behavior is the most disgusting since the days of Vichy France. Its just shameful behavior and Johnny Depp says nothing about it. I'm sure Depp is well meaning, just very biased.

My view regarding the war is that we had to take the Saddam Regime out because they were assisting or would assist terrorists in getting nuclear or chemical weapons. We just can't take the chance. I don't think it can be contested that the world is a better and safer place without Saddam in power, and that the war benefits the Iraqi people in the long term. Its just demeaning to call our efforts to take the war to the terrorists a "puppy with teeth." Don't we have a right to defend ourselves?

I read the NY Times (especially Tom Friedman), the Toronto Star, the International Herald-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. All are liberal leaning. The only news I get from the conservative side is Fox News, but I balance that against PBS and NPR. So I am getting pretty balanced view and try to make up my mind only on the facts, not on the rhetoric.

I hope you don't really think I am brain-washed. I think of myself of more of social moderate and foreign policy conservative, and I like to keep an open mind. America is the best in my view because we have brought more peace, security and freedom to the world than any other nation in the history of our planet. In my view the two most positive transforming events in the history of mankind were the advent of Christianity (the most important) and the founding of the United States. So the US is not anywhere near perfect and has to stay true to itself, but to this point it has been a very positive influence on the world. England at least brought the world the Magna Carta, but what influences did France or Germany ever bring the world but colonialism (France was the last country to give up colonialism in the late 1950's) and Nazism (still seething beneath surface in Germany)? I would be interested in learning if you can name a single positive influence France or Germany has had in terms of world security, freedom and democracy.


MY RAGE RESPONSE REPLY: First of all, and in spite of the many millions of dollar's worth of precision bombs that have been dropped everywhere but on top of Saddam Hussein's head, we haven't 'taken Hussein out.' He is alive and hiding someplace along with all of those weapons of mass destruction nobody has been able to find. Yes those weapons of mass destruction, remember? The United States of America launched a preemptive war, a PREEMPTIVE war, against a country on the grounds that it was purportedly a powder keg of chemical and biological weapons ready to blow up in the faces of the western infidels. Now your argument (along with the PR machine that planted it into your head) is that no, no, no, it wasn't about weapons of mass destruction. Forget Powell holding that vile of talcum powder. The justification of war was that 'the Saddam Regime were assisting or would assist terrorists in getting nuclear or chemical weapons.' Interesting. If that's the case we should also be taking out our 'ally' Saudi Arabia. And BTW, no, I do not think the world is safer without Hussein. I think America's tactics have only spawned a couple of thousand more wavering fanatics to die a martyr's death.

The Germans and French morally bankrupt? Please. I'll let my resident researcher [I'm referring to my friend here] provide you a list about a mile long of all the brute dictators and whacko regimes the American government have propped up in the name of "democracy" whilst furthering their economic interests in said area over the last couple of decades. Until things went awry for Bush Sr., WE were the one's courting dictator Hussein and negotiating all kinds of oil deals. So what are you talking about?

And so what if France was the last country to relinquish colonialism in the 1950's. Turns out that at just about the same time the wondrously democratic United States via the same Supreme Court was desegregating buses for crying out loud. I could be wrong but I'm guessing you're white. Do you know how morally reprehensible it is to tell a person where they can sit on a bus based on their skin color? Can your white male ass even imagine being told to sit at the back of the bus? This in a country whose democratic foundation is liberty and justice for all... So what's your point about moral bankruptcy and who has been guilty of it when?

And you think Christianity is the best thing since sliced bread? Well I'm thinkin' I could find a few Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists, etc. who would heartily disagree. Hence the reason we have been bashing each other's heads in over the last few millennium (and Christians are most definitely not excluded from the violence). So I disagree with you there as well. In fact I think organized religion has been one of the greatest harbingers for carnage than almost anything ever invented by mankind. So let's just agree to disagree on that one.

I notice that all of your news sources are confined to the US and the UK. And yet you still believe you are not brainwashed. You might think that NPR is rounding out your world-view education with its liberal bias but don't delude yourself into thinking that this is enough to give you the big picture. One size just may not fit all i.e. sit down [mister]: democracy may not be for everybody; freedom can be hazardous to your health e.g. soaring anti-depression prescriptions for all those people with a lot of freedom on their hands, global warming thanks to all those drivers with the 'freedom' to drive their gas guzzlers around, etc. And 'world security' is in the eye of the guy pointing the gun at your head. Imagine if you will a military force coming to the U.S. to 'liberate' us from whatever they felt we needed liberating from (materialism, obesity, complacency, corporate greed, [wanton energy consumption] you pick). Would you not be incensed by nineteen year-olds brandishing guns, wearing wrap-around sunglasses, and parading down YOUR street -- NO MATTER WHAT 'IMPROVEMENTS' AND 'FREEDOMS' THEY WERE PROMISING TO BRING YOU? It would be particularly annoying if you realized that other than a lot of flashy "Plan A" fireworks, the occupying force didn't have much of a "Plan B" in terms of getting the country up and running ("Excuse us while we get the American public to buy into a $60 BILLION DOLLAR restructuring plan for you guys") -- so sure were they that the indigenous oppressed would be falling to their knees and weeping with gratitude that they had been 'saved.' As for for the educated elite of the occupied country, they might note with some cynicism the entourage of Bechtel/Halliburton-corporate-types driving through the countryside in their roll-over prone Hummers scoping the terrain...

Sorry but I really DO think you are brainwashed.

DEAR ANNA BLOVIATIONS,

It is absolutely fair to hit Reply to All so long as the initiator of the email has not specified otherwise. Never hold back on your opinions. It is good practice for learning to say from the heart the things you want to to the people you actually know but are afraid to because you're worried about hurting their feelings or losing them. However once you have voiced your opinions, no matter how vociferously, it is important to retract your claws, lay low for a while, and most importantly crack a joke. Otherwise you risk gaining a reputation for being a hysterical-raging-whacko-liberal. It would behoove the Democratic presidential contenders to follow this advice.

Regards,
Abby

Now this is the ultimate driving machine. It's very hard to be a conscientious consumer and environmentalist when nice toys like this get put out on the shelf to buy. Maybe it's solar powered?

If about a third of my millions of fans would kindly like to send in a dollar each...

REPENTANCE FOR ANNA! for she has committed unspeakable acts (at least from the standpoint of a liberal environmentalist). It stemmed from the shock of my boss being back after a month-long sojourn in Europe. He was giving me a deadline which meant that I was going to miss the John Kerry presidential announcement kick-off and couldn't leave at my accustomed time of 4:20 p.m. Not that I am particularly partial to Kerry. But now that my new government job affords me V.I.P tickets to see said candidate up-close and personal tell me why he can beat Dean, I thought I would go check it out. Instead I found myself in a mail-merge-morass. I hate mail merge projects. They make you REALLY hate Bill Gates. On the other hand one has to commiserate with the unfortunate souls who used to have to type individual letters to X-hundred recipients with no Delete, Spell-Check, or Un-Do functions.

So back to the 'unspeakable' act: I let 600 pages print out before I realized that the greeting line was unsalvageably fucked up. Turns out I am a very good slinker... I slinked to the nearest recycling bin down the hall and buried the incriminating evidence two layers under. Then I slinked back to the office, fixed the error, bullshited a nice little story as to why things were taking so long, and Voila!; the perfect legislative aide presents boss with 800 perfect letters he wants sent out to prospective attendees to a charity event (do the math folks: it ain't pretty).

COLOR COORDINATED TO MATCH THE GIFT -- I am the only person I know who could manage to color coordinate herself with the gift she was giving someone for 30th birthday.... DAY 1: buy vase from Crate & Barrel (see Sept. 1 blog), DAY 2: buy pink gift bag and black tissue paper; store said items at office to have ready to wrap present still at home next day, DAY 3: Get dressed for work and remember to bring along present to work; get to work and wrap present; take present to recipient's office on other side of building; notice while I am walking to her office that what I am wearing is perfectly color-coordinated with present i.e. pink button-down blouse is perfectly matched to pink gift bag, matching pink sweater is perfectly matched to gift bag, and striking black sandals are perfectly matched to black tissue paper aesthetically peeping out of pink gift bag.

Ah the sub-conscious mind at work...OR, too many years spent in Europe....

I SWEAR IT WASN'T ME! 20 Hummers Worth $50K Each are Set Aflame by Earth Liberation Front

Said West Covina's assistant fire chief Jerry Johnson,"Whether terrorist act or just vandalism, it was an offense against the community." Hmmm. By offense against the community does he mean the firebombers or the Hummers? I would argue that a Hummer is much worse the offender.

And to those who would have us believe they are buying Hummers because they are 'safe,' and because they make petite soccer moms feel more patriotic, they ought to listen to the news a little more often. A whole lot of the soldiers and imbedded reporters who have been killed in Iraq have died in Hummer roll-over accidents...

OK let's talk about weddings...

"THE PROVERBIAL VASE"

Some of the table cards read "Cool Beans," while others read "Warm Fuzzies." I sat down at a table designated with the latter name. 'Cause I'll take a bowl of Hershey Chocolate Kisses (which is what 'Warm Fuzzies' referred to) over jelly beans ("Cool Beans") any day. I am speaking of a wedding ceremony I attended this weekend. I'm at an age where getting invited to weddings is a scarce occurrence. Not only that, unless there is a direct blood relationship, I can't get hubby to go to these rare-occasioned weddings and so I'm on my own when there is one to go to.

Everyone has their own ideas for what they want their wedding to be and this one was certainly quintessential and the very essence of my former co-worker. By the doorway to the old farmhouse, a toddler's purple plastic swimming pool was filled with drinks across from which was a table where lay a hand-made photo album/guest book filled with snapshots and exclamational sub-text of the couple's three-year courtship, along with old photos of their childhoods. There is a significant age difference between the two and so two different eras unfolded in the same album conjoined at the end by a good-looking balding man holding hands with an exuberantly smiling young woman on a craggy knoll in Ireland. "Oh look, 1973!," said my girlfriend looking at the picture of the groom as a young man, "that was the year I was born!" Whereas 1973 had me thinking about high school. The couple look happy in the photo and you wish with all your heart that the neatly stenciled cover page of their album will hold true: All You Need is Love....He is a forty-eight year-old musician -- she a presently unemployed high-techie who really isn't a high-techie; she just fell into it.

They said their vows under a tree -- a ceremony thankfully kept short I have to say given that we all were standing throughout. I normally wouldn't have minded really but my shoes were uncomfortable and on more than one occassion I had to suppress the urge to slap a mosquito off the person standing right in front of me. Which made me wonder if the person standing behind me was thinking the same thing. I hadn't eaten either and so the thought of maudlin drawn-out love poem exchanges was making me queasy. The home-written kind tend to do me in e.g. "You are my star from afar...." whereby I end up having to discreetly cough to stifle the laugh and/or gag reflex making their way up my throat.

But their vows were a tame affair. The bride had written her thoughts out on a large index card which she read to her husband-to-be. She expressed love, respect, and her enthusiasm that the relationship was getting 'funner and funner.' The groom chose the impromptu route. I don't remember all that was said but he was going to "work hard at making the relationship work" (spoken very insightfully, I thought, from a man almost twenty years her senior and married once before). Before exchanging rings, he ferreted out a gold-spray-painted wish bone from his pocket which they had been saving from a Thanksgiving feast for just such a special occasion. He asked the audience to make a wish (on the bride and groom's behalf he qualified). We laughed. They tugged. She dominated the match -- a tiny fragment of turkey bone was all that was left in his hands.

The band was really good but I was too hungry to dance. I scarfed down a barbecue-style wedding dinner consisting of three stiff gin and tonics, grilled goods, chips, potato salad, and watermelon. In lieu of myself, I pushed my girlfriend and her husband out onto the dance floor for half a dance before we left. As my designated drivers swirled, I people-watched -- me a voluntary wallflower scrutinizing the subtle interplay of mothers, fathers, step-father, siblings, bee-stung kid, and stratified worlds converging in one place to celebrate two people who at one point or another had touched each of us and invited us to share their special day.

As my friends drove me back I listened as they gently quibbled about the best route home and how he was driving. It was only a few years ago that I had gone to their wedding, one that was dreamy and fairy-tale-like with perfect photo backdrops and thought-out details. I made a note to self what just-the-right birthday gift would be for my girlfriend's upcoming thirtieth birthday. In keeping with the tradition of my late and great Aunt Tauty, I think it is time she had a moderately-priced flower vase.... My aunt always said that the key to a good marriage is the periodic smashing of the proverbial glass vase across the room. "It's the only way," she explained, "to get through to them. But you have to be smart about it or you will simply find yourself sweeping up glass without having gained anything." My aunt was an imposing, interesting, and intelligent woman who knew well when her well-articulated words were better transmuted into flying glass. "It makes a dramatic, eye-opening impact without anybody getting hurt."

I found a vase at Crate & Barrell today. Pretty enough to hold flowers for a while but cheap enough that you won't mind hurling it across the room if you need to. She probably won't need it but just in case.

Perhpas I should open a vase shop....