As Little Harm As Possible

Another Go...

2008-10-29T14:55:00.002-04:00

The events of the week of my 50th birthday caused one friend to express, "With you, life is in the details." Another asked, "How are you still alive?" and all of this has lead me to start blogging again. But not here. Over here.

I've lost two years of solid personal material since I started writing for magazines, which means I've let the best stuff slip by. No more.

You Dress Your Age; I'll Dress Your Handicap

2008-09-16T21:42:00.004-04:00

Today I put a clean soup plate away in the microwave instead of the shelf. Lex and I looked at each other. The end is near.

An article out of Orlando, Florida tells us to be more covered up as we age. Don't go short or bare or tight after 35. It's unseemly, tacky, trashy, sad. What was sad were the outfits they demonstrated as our acceptable alternative. We are now limited to an up to the chin, three-quarter sleeve, below the knee skirt, and a clunky shoe.

As if.

"Tried and true" dressing tips for women of "a certain age:" "Find comfy but stylish shoes." Here's a writing tip. Never use the word "comfy" in the same sentence with "stylish." It sounds wrongly connected, like "the goofy IRS auditor." Or "learn to drape a big scarf," like over our heads, I guess Ms. Jean Patterson means. "Use a full length mirror." Actually, everyone who cares about how they look, regardless of age, should have one.

I have a better tip. Take your partner with you shopping. Buy something that he or she likes. If your big chested, get a great bra; if you are big-ended, find a jacket that comes down below your glutes. Don't rely on the salespeople at the store to be honest with you, unless you have an ongoing relationship or they are willing on your first meet to tell you that something doesn't work. And buy anything you want, even if it is trendy or a little bit trashy. The trick is more in how you fold it into the mix.

The College Essay

2008-09-12T06:00:00.003-04:00

We are down to five schools, with a pretty typical chance spread, I think. One dream school that Lex says is beyond her reach, one great school to which she will apply non-binding early admission, another that would put her in a great place and great school but not the best for her intended major, and two safety schools that I can afford.

We began working on the essay last night. Her first stab two weeks before was back to, "Now I am going to tell you everything I know about penguins" out of nerves. She hasn't written without saying anything in years. So I suggested my favorite technique, an interrogation about a critical and relevant experience. Suggested is an understatement. Insisted is the better word, and I'm constantly amazed she doesn't stab me in the back with the barbecue fork one night.

But there is a reason I'm such a pain in the ass. Sometimes it works. From "I don't remember any of it, Mom" we got five pages of reconstruction (along with two hundred, "Why do you keep asking me the same question over and over; I don't remember"), and some insight into her perspective that at the end made us sit back in our chairs and stare at each other from across the table. "Who knew?" I said. "I never thought of it that way, before. That's so neat," she said. It was like the college choice version of Law & Order, only no one would watch.

Way cool. From here I'll work backwards and forwards.

Notes from the Stacks and Racks

2008-09-09T03:27:00.003-04:00

I have been working for weeks on a fashion shoot at the new Burchfield Penney Art Center, a building that has gotten so much ill-directed dissing because of it's block concrete, oversized appearance. But the building looks so hot to me - and I'm not wrong about architecture, albeit unstudied, that I have to figure out why it seems so right. The finished product on the fashion piece gave me goosebumps, that's how good it was, and now all I want to do is defend the outside of the building. (The inside is not part of the dispute.) In the meantime, if I've had a spare second to post, it's been over at my magazine's blog, Spreeblog, but I so desperately need a place to put things I need to remember for later articles. I have a two foot stack of back reading material and an entire Sunday Times at my side, and Fashion Week to get to.

And then there is my day job and a bunch of family photo requests.

And I want to fix the house up, to prep it to keep the outside out and the inside in. I mean, me doing insulation and foundation grouting and varmit protection - so much goofball DIY, so much need, and I can't get to it.

And the kids say the most damning, funny stuff every day and I'm not getting it down - killer stuff that completely crucifies me, and I'm not recording it. And I reconnected with my childhood girlfriend thanks to the internet, and I need to get back to her.

I miss my quiet dark nights. I need a system.

Anyway, the rest is just notes for me.

1. "A Face Not Even a Plastic Surgeon Could Love" by Camille Sweeney, NY times 9/4/08, on how plastic surgeons must learn to spot a difficult patient (Scarface the Surgery Junkie, Litigious Louis, the Bad Mouth, The Wannabee, Greta X. Pectations, The Whiner) and turn them away. "Many times the motivating factor of someone wanting a change in their appearance has more to do with an emotional issue than the actual physical issue ... they may want to get a marriage proposal, save a marriage or hold on to a job, and no amount of surgery no matter how well done can guarantee that's going to happen," says Dr. Donn Chatham.

Now that doctors have pushed the lawyers around, are they going after those bad, bad patients? There is enough bad plastics results out there to justify sites like Make Me Heal and Real Self. Plastics is practiced for financial gain by enough doctors who don't have the requisite artistic eye, vascular surgery skills, or bedside manner, to make skilled plastics docs to cringe. Heal thyself, Doc, and control the trade performance, Docs, before blaming poor performance on the Wide World of Whacko Women who keep you in Beemers.

2. "I don't want to listen to what's selling," Miuccia Prada, 2007.

3. "It was the one thing that got me out of bed in the morning," said New York artist Slater Bradley. "I could take pride in walking out the door. It was the clothes that held me up when I had nothing else to."

4. "Whenever the economy gets tough, fashion responds by playing it safe," says Jim Moore, the creative director of GQ. Well, maybe the buyers do. See grunge.

Notes from the Stacks and Racks

2008-08-24T08:11:00.004-04:00

Eight year old Edit to seventeen year old sister, McAllister, as we drove by Buffalo's museum of modern art: I'm going to get married in the flower garden of the Albright.
McAllister: May I be your bridesmaid?
Edit: Sure!
McAllister: What about Mom?
Edit: I don't think she'll be alive by then.

Joel Stein, Time: "[Obama] is black which is not the old Jews' favorite minority. If [Obama] were an old Asian guy who knew Krav Maga, he'd take Pompano in a landslide."

Saddleback and Rick Warren. Because if you cannot trust the super-egoed evangelical pastor of a megachurch, who can you trust?

"They scream, the sing, they fall down, the take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit....It is only the British people - not the Germans or the French." Greek Island Malia's mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, as quoted in August 24, 2008 NY Times. Well, the cross-dressing was the giveaway. A better way to comment on this quote might have been:

"They scream, the sing, they fall down, the take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit."
"Who are the British on vacation, Alex."

A new pair of boots at Firebrand really bought me. This morning I spotted a pair of Chloe Beattle boots that flashed me right back to them. Sans buckle and cut way above the ankle, they aren't identical by any means. But trendsetting in their own way. It's the kind of boot you buy and spend the next four months telling people where.

Hard Landing, Run for Cover

2008-08-07T12:32:00.003-04:00

More confining than an Albanian blood feud.

More confusing than androgen insensitivity.

I hate July. It's as demanding, claustrophobic, and bank-busting as December.

Tomorrow is another college trip. I'm sure my daughter has spent the day bleaching her hair a lighter shade of white and getting a new push up bra for the event.

God, it feels so good to be back home.

Notes and Poor Moms' Month

2008-07-12T16:09:00.008-04:00

The Miss Lacy chair is so typically Stark. Great to look at, but horrendous to actually use as a seating implement.

I look at the stunning Miss Lacy and think, "Ow, ow ... ow, ow, ow."

In deciding whether to read King Lear or a collection of Disney Cliff Notes as a bedtime read, I decided it was time for my daughter to hear my lecture on why Disney is not such positive material on strong maternal figures. We laughed as we played, "Find the Missing Mom" and at some point my daughter looked at me with devilish, confessional eyes and said, "You know, sometimes when we play house, nobody wants to be the mom." No wonder. It's a great, best job, but from the outside it must have the allure of fish cleaning.

I spend so much time looking at materials on home furnishings that my house looks like a paper mill exploded inside. I study home decor but can't seem to live it.

Why do people get married?

Country is coming back, but somehow it is different: :refined and thinned out, as if stone wear is mixed with porcelain, and put all the floral patterns on a diet. I suspect that this is a result of going green. I'm seeing straw and natural fiber mats, which is harder to mix up with stainless steel and laminate.

Is vintage glamour just another name for steampunk, or are we moving past it, heading straight for baroque-tech. Okay, you come up with the new movement's name. Image from Cole & Son.

Boy, confess to one person that Paul Smith is a name unknown, and if he suddenly isn't on every other style sheet, in all shops. Recognizing Smith is mostly in the stripe. He uses vibrant colors in his thin, generally vertical line creations. But mod works as a descriptor too.

Inspired by all the back of the bra showing in the Sex and the City movie, I picked up a Miss Sixty dress that has done all the work for me. The bra is sewn right into the dress and visible. The label is Beebe trashy, only more avant-garde, to the extent trashy can be avant-garde. Anyway, I performed the usual test, and the dress passed in record time. In my closet, worn once, then *poof* gone. My eldest grabbed it. Afterwards the middle child said to her, "Don't take Mom's clothes. She doesn't have much."

Gandia Blasco makes living and sleeping and having sex on the beach look like an actual option. If I could choose a different life for a month, it would be a Gandia Blasco life. I can't capture an image that does the product line justice. Check out the site.

So you always have enough to spend on yourself, keep children's furniture costs to a minimum with conversions. The Oeuf collecection may look a little like School of Jailhouse Rock, but - or for that reason - I like it. Available at Room.

2008-06-06T16:00:00.002-04:00

Mutiny if we don't get to shop. And I did. $300 dollars worth of books, goddamn it. A history book about the islands from a non-white perspective. And a photo book. And a flag. And tee shirts and you name it. We had been denied the opportunity to shop and now I was buying up whatever we could find. Snow globes were a hard one in this part of the worlds. We hit Port Elizabeth.

Taking Notes

2008-06-06T10:19:00.002-04:00

Design Art. Art Furniture. Decorative Art. One of kind furniture pieces that try to meld two worlds and always seem to fail at both. "It's not really good looking art, and as a table, there's not much top space ...."

I need to find some that does work. Later. Researc Design Miami/Basel, Studio Job, Robber Baron, Maarten Baas, Studio Makkink & Bey, Peter Saville, Toolsgalerie.

Sex and the Family Guy, Season 17

2008-06-03T23:35:00.004-04:00

"You're like Carrie," my daughter Lex would say.

"That's nice, honey. Who's Carrie?"

Lex will grow up to be a comedy writer. She wants to be a doctor she says, a plastic surgeon, even, sucking up to me. But I am afraid I can sense that she is born to suffer a different life. It's not based on intuition or some other ether excuse, no. When she was five and six, when she was fearless and full of herself, she would say things that would stop adults on the spot. They would turn and look at her and start to belly laugh. Ten years later she was hooked on Family Guy. I didn't even know what it was, and I would walk in and say, "Hey, that little guy is a creep. Why is his head like that. And are people hearing what he is saying or is he using baby speak and it is translated for us for the humor value? This is annoying. That baby is annoying. Why are you watching this?"

"Shhhhh," she would respond.

Two years later, I get it. I don't want to get it, but I do. It's out there and sideways thinking and free association comedy, I don't hate Stewie. As much.

So she knows comedy. She has a gift. And when she is done with this teenage stuff, when she can write about me without the fear of instant and proximate reprisal, she will be set for life.

None of this was my point.

My point was that she watched two series when she switched to a new school and hated everything and mostly me: Family Guy and Sex and the City. And I let her. We have a rule in the house. Sex? Okay. Violence? No. Violent Sex? No. Animated crudeness and nudeness? Whatever. I can't keep up. In fact, the only thing she would ask for for a holiday gift would be a season box set of one or the other. No music. No clothes. It was all very sad.

But I wasn't following any of these programs, so when she would make remarks like the Carrie one above, it meant nothing to me. Now that I know who Carrie Bradshaw is, I think back and ask, "Why?" No, "How?" I ask, "How can I remind you of Carrie." She has great clothes, a fabulous career, and racehorse pony legs. She'll drop hundreds on a pair of shoes. I have three pair with worn out heels, and if I even think of spending more than $79.99 on a new pair, I start to hyperventilate.

Maybe she thinks I'm Carrie because I sit in front of the computer too much. Or complain.

But anyway, one cold winter weekend, as she rested completely withdrawn and wrapped to the max in my king size duvet, she said, "Come and watch with me. You'll like it." And because I sensed that finally a bigger thaw was appearing on the horizon, I did. That's how I know about Sex and the City series and that I'm nothing like Carrie (but Lex doesn't need to get filled in on that detail).

"C'mon mom," Lex texted, two years later. "We're seeing the movie tonight." Lex already had seen the movie, but was excited at the prospect of seeing it with me. "You're gonna love it. I cried. Oh, and if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything. No bad mouthing. No criticism. You will love it."

I've reviewed the movie here. I want to show it to Lex, but maybe it's best to think fondly of our time in the movie theater together, while I ate popcorn and bit my tongue, and she texted her friend.

2008-05-31T23:10:00.016-04:00

Car window smashed in, purse stolen.

Dog injured and on "be still" medicine.

Road trip to Wisconsin, via Columbus, for niece's graduation. Twenty-five hours of within 72 hours. The other 47 hours spent in front of a computer Photoshopping ten years off of all the relatives in the graduation photos. I can still feel my hips spread from that seat feast.

I returned from the trip and sat at the table, in a fog. The phone rang and I heard my eight year old daughter say, "Yeah I like my life! I mean, there are sleepovers, the trampoline, my yard, my dog. I like to plant flowers and there is playing and my mom and dad and sisters and friends..."

It was nothing short of excellent to hear her say that. But what prompted the kid on the other end of the line to ask the questions in the first place: "Are you happy? Do you know what happiness is?" Anyway, sleepovers and puppies, at any age, is a good answer.

2. Having a transcendentally happy white retriever, on the other hand, is weird. So big, so hairy, so witless and goofy, so spring-up-in-the-air energetic, and so white she looks like the perfect dog companion for Space Ghost, but big white hairy Pyranees-type dogs are usually humorless thugs, leash-walked around the city bearing a "Get out of my way before I stomp on you," attitude. Her energy is sufferable in the house only if she gets in two or three miles of grossly inadequate duck hunting and fishing a day (if only she had opposable thumbs or an understanding that, no - the animals do not want to play with her). So regardless of weather or schedule, she must get out and usually it is to Rumsey Field, as I did on Friday.

I rounded the park lake, and walked by a group of teenagers with down syndrome. The kids saw the dog and wanted to know about her. London went up to the last kid along the water and stopped. The boy took her head in his hands, then slowly worked his way down to massage her massively thick neck. London's entire back-side wagged. The boy lifted his head and smiled to the sky, then closed his eyes and kept rubbing the dog. If I had a puppy in my pocket, it would have been his. Heck, I walked away from the kids wanting to give each one a puppy. I was proud of my dog for giving some stranger such joy.

Best dog. Best dog ever.

I walked another five minutes up out of the park feeling the bright moment of the day, when I spotted my car with a window smashed mostly into disappearance. I didn't usually leave a purse in the car, but I was multi-tasking that day. It was gone

Stupid dog I have to walk. Stupidier me. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

3. Mood ring after-purchase talk of eight-year-old: "I wonder what mood I'm in." At least now the ring will let her know. I should wear a mood amulet, as a warning sign for others.

4. Posh, called to tell me she had finally had enough nerve to say hi to one of the guys in her NYU summer program accounting class. His response, "You must have some kind of networking scheme going on to go from FIT to join us here at NYU."

Yeah, cause he just proved what an Einstein he is. Smooth. I'm thinking of suggesting to her that she gather what resume insight she could from the comment and then screw his best friend. Ok, maybe I should keep that to myself.

What's it called when you're not the cool mom, something way more dangerous?

2008-05-21T10:24:00.000-04:00

When filling out the Scholastic book order forms. Edit picks everything that has a bracelet, cd, or animal charm attached to the book.

"What is this, a 'Littlest Pet Shop' figurine?" I ask. "And this fairy bracelet?"

"Oh, I don't want that," She said, looking closer at the newsprint order booklet. "I thought it was a necklace."

I ordered her a rhyming dictionary instead. Give me four more years of parental overlordship and I'm sure I can produce a Silvia Plath.

.......

Comments from the Middle Child that almost get her killed, ##1-5:

"In the future, I would appreciate it if you would bring me my mail."

"I'm kind of ready to stop school and start my life now."

"Do you think that the rooftop outside my bedroom window would support the weight of a human being?"

"I find that teacher so frustrating. I think in the future I'm just going to do all the assignments and contribute in class. He'll be sorry."

"I know you said I couldn't go, but listen to me. I'm 150 miles from home and I think I'm driving the wrong way on the highway. You're not half as upset as I am."

(There are so many more, but they are temporarily repressed.)

More Proof that Photogs Sleep With Models

2008-05-20T00:08:00.007-04:00

The Danish Day, by Birger and Mikkelsen, enchants me. I finally figured out why. When I see the clothes I have a fairy princess flashback.

Not fairy princess as in prom dress or wedding cake topper. It's in the fabric - even without encrusted diamonds the pieces seem bejeweled and look as if they should be accompanied by a knight. This season the look is Marrakesh, which means Princess Jasmine. The sweater I have in my closet from three seasons ago is more structured, more Princess Aurora. (Do I really know my Disney this well?)

But getting to Day today was unintentional. I wanted to talk about Acne Jeans.But one of the Acne collection shots got me searching Scandinavian lines to see if Acne's approach was now the norm: actually seeing the outfit is so pedestrian.

I suspected this with my first Filippa-K catalog. It would arrive and get passed around the office. The shots looked of after-party parties, outdoors, tilted and in shades of dark grey, de-saturated indigo blue, and muted hunter green. "Tunic" the page descriptor would read. We would see only the toe of a shoe starting to come around the back of a tree. "We must have that tunic," we would say.

Here is Acne's denim jumpsuit on the left and a Day top on the right.

Party on. Cross posted at Spree blog.

Or Knitting. Knitting is Good

2008-05-19T19:50:00.004-04:00

Note to self: wait for The Landmark Herodotus to come on on tape. I barely made it through the New Yorker review, and it was terrific. Plus, going back in time means I'm going to have to relearn the map. Again. And that's frustrating. I like the name Persia, so it sticks. I listened to Thucydides on tape. It was a lot of "Then the ships landed at the seaside village and everyone was massacred," only in a deeper voice. It got to the point where I figured there had to be only 150 people left on the planet, all big, hairy mean guys.

"Listen to this passage," I said to my husband, who was trying to sightsee while I sat in a Taxi reading: "On hearing that the Persians were so numerous that their arrows would 'blot out the sun,' one Spartan quipped that this was good news, as it meant that the Greeks would fight in the shade. ('In the shade' is the motto of an armored division in the present-day Greek Army.)"

"Sure," he said. "All six guys."

"Yeee-ouch," I thought. "Euro-snotting." Life could be such fun.

I'm not completely Western centric, the love of "Persia" notwithstanding. I know there were like, eleven other continents with populations on then. Or penguins. But think about it. If it was happening on the tiny Aegean in such epic proportions and with a steady rollover from one century to another, it had to be going on everywhere else, too.

The next time someone complains about the evils of television, throw "The Landmark Herodotus" at them and remind him or her how important it is for some people to have a pacifying hobby.

Macletae

2008-05-18T23:44:00.003-04:00

"We're going to the opera," I said. "Macbeth." I started to pretend to hold a skull in my outstretched hand.

"That's Hamlet," my friend corrected.

"Oh, right."

"MacBeth's not such a Danish name," he mocked.

"Neither is Hamlet," I defended, completely defeated. "I know, I know. Macbeth's the one where the mom was bad."

"The wife. The wife was bad," he corrected, again.

"She looked like a mom the last time I saw it," I replied, faintly recalling some poor PBS production from two or three decades ago. Had I never actually read it? I must have. "But I remember the witches. There were three of them and they shared an eye."

"Greek. You're doing the Greek Graeae now," he said, suddenly keen on hearing my next plot twist, but I decided to stop talking.

"Go on. Do you know what the witches told MacBeth?" he pushed.

"Unto you a child will be born?"

In the week that led up to me accompanying some opera fans to hear the Metropolitan Opera sing Verdi's Macbeth at Lincoln Center, I heard a lot of debate amongst others over who was worse, MacBeth or his Lady. Fortunately by that time I had learned enough to know to offer no opinion at all.

When I get alzheimers, no one will be able to tell.

Tweet Tweet

2008-05-18T23:11:00.006-04:00

Everything in print these days seems to be gaga over superhero costuming. Michael Chabon provided his caped apparel perspective in his New Yorker's "Secret Skin." Cathy Horyn of the New York Times reviewed the Superhero show at the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I don't have a cape.

I don't have any interest in wearing star-encrusted underoos and a red bustier when filling the gas tank and manning the copy machine.

Can't I just pretend to be the Black Canary on parent teacher conference day?

How much I would kill to be able to do that for my kids, as long as they never found out.

Cate Cate Abate

2008-05-18T22:23:00.005-04:00

I've had a bunch of wine and discussed bad sports parents with complete strangers for the past few hours. I love being the single person at the couples dinner table. I always end up drinking too much.

Oh, heck. I always end up drinking too much.

I have a stack of product literature to get through, like a brochure from J Beverly Hills. It's a collection of necessary hair care products from the think tank capital of the world. I'm not above the study of good product from any tank, but the company's owner is Juan Juan, and he created the Juan Juan Salon. The product names are, "Leave On," "Everyday," and "AddBody."

Mystery is apparently overrated. I'm thinking the same of alliteration.

It's over. My research is stalled. I cannot get past the "Juan Juan Salon" and its "Leave On" conditioner without the aid of a Shel Silverstein and Brian Regan.

Product Finds

2008-05-17T18:12:00.004-04:00

Great desk, comes with a name: Milk. Clean, with its pedestal and capable of supporting a small fish tank. There's a catastrophe in here somewhere, which is half the desk's charm.

Or the Seed lamp, something more inviting to sleep with than bare alumunium.

Balenciaga Up On Blocks

2008-05-17T13:41:00.002-04:00

I ventured into the Balenciaga shop in Chelsea almost by accident. It looked like a whitewashed cave entrance, guarded only by a vault-shaped glass door. An auto repair sign hung on the building wall above the entrance. At first I figured BMW or Rolls repair. Then I saw the name on the glass and started to jump up and down like a four year old in front of the Disney store. I walked through, with a solemnity reserved for an art gallery, because the pieces seemed exactly that: extremely not massed produced, pieces of art.

Founder Cristobal Balenciaga died in 1972, and family ran the business for years afterwards. In 2001, Gucci Group, in partnership with Nicolas Ghesquière as creative director, acquired the House. Such big business, such little pieces. I can't really wear the look, sometimes like Chanel (and often more saccharine), other times more S&M (and often S&M with lolipops.) Always novel and inspired. What I saw in person was a bit more office friendly, acid-colored, and big floraled than what I clipped here. But no matter what the pattern, it is very itty-bitty and structured like a child's colored building blocks.

2008-05-15T23:12:00.002-04:00

When GD II (the second Great Depression) hits, I'm sure that spas and cable internet access will be the first to suffer. For the love of Google we need to be doing something to fix this mess.

I don't know why I'm so pessimistic about the state of the economy. but I suspect it has something to do with excess. I just found a piece I had ripped out of some Sunday paper magazine about over-wealthy mothers taking their pre-pubescent daughters to a salon for a "But there's nothing there yet!" bikini wax. (No, really. They should list it on the spa menu that way. How fun!) I vaguely recall wanting the reference for some piece I was writing, but it didn't get used and now the tale it contained is nothing but a sad suggestion of "Let them eat cake."

Let us spend money on something unnecessary with psychotic undercurrents and neurotic results.

They'd All Starve

2008-05-15T23:02:00.002-04:00

I hesitated to visit Free Rice out of concern that it might turn into a new solitaire addiction. No worries. I felt like I was playing Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader or the Millionaire show, breezing through the first few then SMACK, a word I'd never seen or heard uttered or made up on a bad spelling day. Then I began wondering if I was taking too long to dissect the etymology of the word - actually thinking that someone might think I was looking up the correct answer on the Internet.

Either the game's too hard and I'm too stupid. But either way, people will starve.

I'll make my kids do it. That'll make for some good material.

Notes

2008-05-14T16:20:00.002-04:00

Crate & Barrell Ikea, or as it prefers itself to be called, CB2 has Andy Warhol butterfly plates for $1.95. This is an item that I will never own. I'm not washing those things curvy odd-shapen things, and can't you just see the spillage? Put the heavy steak on one of the wings and start sawing away. "Plop" and "Fido, stay away from that" will be the next two sounds you'd hear. Hurry, before they're sold out. www.cb2.com.

Passages

2008-05-14T01:30:00.000-04:00

Sorenstam is leaving the LPGA tour, Henin is retiring from tennis, and Robert Rauschenberg has died. Rauschenberg, whose American Flag painting might be the most readily recognizable, grew up so poor that his mother often pieced together his clothes, making them from scraps of material she had sewn together.

Art - no matter how abstract - is always firmly planted in reality. Someone's reality.

Sorenstam is 37, about to get married, and wants to start a family. Oh, and she is designing her fifth golf course and plans to produce a line of golf clothing, too. Living the good life of hotel rooms and elevator dings just doesn't have the luster it once did. I know nothing, really, about her. Nor do I get any sense of her beyond appreciating that she was the shot of youthful Wie before Wie. I just spent the morning out on a golf course doing a fashion shoot with pretty young non-players who could make even steel blue polyester look great, a local hall-of-famer pro who did her own stint with the LPGA and could wear clothes like a mannequin, and two stylish boomer players who generated more energy and pop than a room full of Fisher-Price kindergarteners. With so few stars to look up to, it's a shame to lose one. "I'm second on the money list," said Sorenstam. "People who know me know I don't settle for second."

On the other hand, maybe it is time for her to leave.

But as for Henin, I am saddened. A regular, slight, fit, quiet, hardworking professional athlete solid enough to win Grand Slams and grounded enough to not try dress to entice a male audience to yell out, "Show us your tits!"? She may be the last one and at 25, she is done.

Current Events

2008-05-13T22:37:00.002-04:00

I just spent two hours explaining to the Dean of Students why my high-schooler is tardy a lot. Now I'm going to be late for bed.

I shouldn't have offered any excuse. As my high-schooler says, "There is no excuse for being late." But she's up until midnight studying every night. (Lately she's been falling asleep to the Confederacy of Dunces assignment.) The alarm goes off at 6 am. She is getting dressed by seven and she has to take her younger sister to elementary school. Any worse hours and she might as well be a farmer. I suspect straightening every strand of hair on her head each morning doesn't help the rush hour flow so much, and then there is the time it takes to find the top that reveals the most cleavage possible, but the morning sounds around here are happy, energetic sounds and I don't want to mess that up with a lot of yelling "ARE YOU READY YET" up the stairs. We are so civilized lately, I can't stand it.

And that's not easy. I have two modes (just ask the dog): sweet and yellalish. Really. It's hard to explain. I'm nice and almost calm most of the time. But if I have to educate someone on something they should already know, like a clean white towel is not a eye-make up remover pad, or about something ridiculous, like the fact that piano keys are not wider and hence the location of the notes at variation from one Steinway to another, I can go straight to loud without any warning.

And because being loud is as stupid as being stupid in the first place, trying to stay calm is important. And to do this I cannot disturb the current operations of the household, no matter how dysfunctional they may appear to someone on the outside. The girls and I are all quite fine 'round here, and that's a very, very good thing.

Ohhh, I miss you, blog.

In the Blink

2008-04-14T18:57:00.005-04:00

About a month ago I suffered the second of two falls. The first was a foot skate across a suddenly frozen back porch. During my traverse, I focused on the stairs in front of me and the concrete patio at its base. I quickly realized that if I slipped the four feet to the top of the landing, I would pitch forward, bang my head on the planks, and lay semi-nude and unconscious in the 10 degree air. Because I was only up to let the dog out and it was 2 in the morning, I knew that no one would know I was there - except my "I'm no *bark bark* Lassie *bark bark*" dog - and I would most certainly pass away as the dog whined softly to get back into the warm house. All this went through my brain as my body traveled the short course. I have no idea how, but I managed to throw my upper body weight in a way to send it slamming into a wall edge and breaking my fall. I breathed hard for a few seconds, after which I probably yelled at the dog to hurry up and pee already, and most likely went back to bed.

I didn't remember any of this until 1 1/2 days later when I noticed that my mid-back felt as if I'd been dropped from an airplane onto a bed of door handles. And because people really don't care about this sort of thing unless you really do die, I kept quiet about it. I thought it was fascinating, the part about how much problem awareness and solving can be done in the passage of a second of time or less, but still, no one really cares unless you die. And then mostly they just worry about the survivors.

About the time that my back ribs felt mended, I slipped on a piece of paper left on the hardwood stairs. Up I went, like a respectable cartoon character, and again, the brain went into action. "If I fall this way, then I might tear out my rotator pins. Besides, that half took the biggest hit on my last adventure. Let's go for an ab crunch and try to stick most of the landing on the other side, and yeah, use the forearms and hands. It's a stupid move, but screw it; they haven't been hurt in a while. Oh, and darn it, there's the makeshift dog gate with the sticking out metal parts, all fallen over and pointing up the stairs. I really should try to avoid getting impale...." Down I went, into the stairs. I avoided the claws on the dog gate, but two bats swung simultaneously by a hormonally charged MLB player, cracking across my glutes, shoulder blades, and forearms couldn't have done more damage.

The next day I called for a referral to the ER x-ray room, where I am apparently contributing to a new wing.

The bruising and swelling lasted two weeks. The muscles leading to my neck danced like popping corn whenever I tried to use my arms. I developed a crushing, three day migraine, but with a deadline looming, I couldn't take to bed with a six pack of Vicodin. I used ace bandages and kitchen towels to tie bags of frozen vegetables to the top of my head and across my back and triceps. My kids didn't even blink. Long ago they stopped wondering what I was experimenting with, and ignored the Birdseye bags and Civil War-style attachment apparatus.

"Can someone bring up the laundry?" I asked.
"Hunh?"
"Grocery store, anyone?" I begged.
"You look fine, Mom. You can do it. Just take off the peas and corn. They'll think you're stealing."

Enough, I thought, and broke open the bank vault for both chiropractic and massage therapy. "I think something inside is way off," I said to both medical practitioners. "Stuff like this doesn't happen to me. As soon as I'm better I'm back in the gym. No more sitting in front of the computer all day."

On my first day back in the gym, I took a couple of shots at the basketball hoop in what I affectionately call my fat burning boots, a pair of platform, curved sole MTB shoes that make me feel like Tiger when I'm on the court. But it had been a year since I could shoot a basketball, and I forgot how the shoes rolled. Too much effort to catch a short ball forced my body into one of those cheerleader reverse "C" contortions. Something low snapped and I stopped breathing for a while. This time, instead of being able to think forward as to how to avoid a worse injury, I only had the chance to fire off a rapid reprimand: "Stupid shoes, stupid me, stupidier shoes. How could I be so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid." I actually needed a cane for the next few days, but was too vain to visit the Old Broken Body Store.

"Do you know what your hip flexor muscles are?" the therapist asked.
"Am I going to be learning all the parts of the body this way?" I replied.
"You have to start more slowly," he said.

And I'm starting right here.

Luftwaffe Pilots and USA Today TV Critics

2008-03-17T11:40:00.004-04:00

Horst Rippert, an 88-year old former pilot of Germany's Luftwaffe, thinks he may have shot down French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery in 1944, as Saint-Exupery flew near Marseilles. but the nerves of steel rat-a-tat-tat man isn't sure. So he's taking credit, backing away, apologizing, and saying what he big fan he has been all these years, while hoping he didn't kill him. That story is so odd, could I have been confusing the Times with the Onion?

The USA Today's television critic, Robert Bianco, also has me confused. John Adams was short, unattractive, often confounded, and brilliant enough to be vexed at being confounded. And that's what I'm seeing on my television screen. Perhaps the real problem is that Robert Bianco has a low tolerance for people unpretty. Meanwhile, David Morse (Washington) could have done just as well holding up the famous First Man's portrait and cutting out the lips to talk. I've only seen one expression so far from Stephen Dillane (Jefferson) - spoiled malaise - and hasn't the same actor played Franklin in every Franklin role, ever? It's a can't go wrong part. In fact, these three men were physically imposing figures who because of our familiarity with them can be portrayed almost as thinly as charactertures and be accepted. Adams couldn't get away with that in real life, and on screen he shouldn't be presented other than as he was just for the sake of our viewing tolerance. Review the work, not the looks. If I had wanted America's Next Top Model - God Save These United States - I knew what channel to select.

Oh, and "facts are stubborn things," is one of my favorite quotes, and it's his. I had forgotten.

Summer School

2008-03-16T13:24:00.009-04:00

"Hey, Mom, I checked it out. NYU has a summer program I can get into, with the finance courses I want. I can stay at my FIT campus, or move over to the Village ... but anyway, if it is ok with you, I'd like to sign up for a class."

"Well, yeah, it's ok," I told her, "but just one class? You'll be down there the whole summer and just one five-week class that meets twice a week for two hours?"

Helicopter mom? Please. I never even liked pushing swings in the park. "Pump! Pump, damnit," I used to scream at them from just beyond kicking distance. But I guess already at 18 months they wanted to play mind games with me and wouldn't cooperate. It seems that no matter how old they get, the need for me to send the "Try Again" prompt is always surfacing.

"Well, um, each class I sign up for costs four thousand dollars and change. If I sign up for two, that would be almost ten thousand dollars and that's just the first session."

I paused long enough to see the figure "$10,000" hanging above me in the air, just beyond my reach. I had to wait longer than usual for "never say die" to surface.

"Look, we've got grad school covered with your eggs, right? You'll be 21 by then and the free market will kick in. Do you think you can find a summer gig outside of the glamorous world of minimum-wage retail, you know something that actually pays, something with "VIP" in the name? I've heard big numbers in the news lately. Two courses each session, and you'd be golden. C'mon, c'mon. Try again."

PTSD

2008-03-15T14:59:00.003-04:00

I've got Post Traumatic Spitzer Disorder.

I think I'm coming out of it, but I'll never vote again. Ever. I've already informed the kids that it's now up to them to carry on with silly notions of a vote having a voice. The only thing that has sustained me over the past seven years is that there was a man in government who did what the entire SEC couldn't/didn't/wouldn't do, and his presence told me that even in the Land of Bush, all was not lost. The Ring had not fallen into the wrong hands yet.

And then, "Doh!" A really, really big I am such a naive stupid-head, "Doh!"

My football team is the Buffalo Bills and my governor is/was Eliot Spitzer. I should just go out somewhere and find the I'm a Loser Bridge to jump from. Oh, yeah, I can't because it hasn't been built yet. In this city we actually have bumper stickers that read, "Build the Damn Bridge" because for the past decade or so no one has been able to decide which design is prettiest, cheapest, least offensive, most full of graft and pork barrel, or easiest for hiding those pesky illegal Canadians. Meanwhile all the job-bringing commercial traffic is finding other, far away ways to enter the country.

It's amazing my heart continues to pump at all.

I spent Monday through Friday shuffling paper from desk to desk, unable to complete a thought, giggling like the man who sets up camp behind the concrete sidewalk barriers by the nearby movie theater. I've been coming to work in slippers. I eat food off of everyone else's plate. I am depressed, I think they call it.

Today's mental image is the result of my new Mommy 'n Me Pole Dance business concept, and the sister company, Pimps We B'. For women, run by women, like Avon only the customers are men, people with real money. I can see it now, Mom and the six year old daughter finishing up dinner, getting all tramped up and into the minivan. "Where you goin' hon? A Halloween party?" asks the husband.

"No. It's career night. Michelle's gonna be a star and I'm going to be her manager! Or maybe a mother-daugher act. We're not sure yet, but we are sooo excited. Don't wait up."

Nope. I'm not coming out of it at all. Build the damn bridge.

The Albany Curse

2008-03-10T17:00:00.007-04:00

Aw, Eliot. You went and proved it. There really aren't any bigger than life heroes anymore. We believed in you because you had the stones to stand up to big time crooks in ridiculously overpriced white collars, but in the end you sweat over how to hide your call girl cash? I can't figure out what is worse, that the whole thing was exponentially hypocritical or stupid. Like it matters.

Nope. No big heroes. And nothing new under the sun, either. John Adams, the closest anyone else has come to a superhuman hero in my eyes, earned his cape by using his wit and tenacity, while risking his neck to fight for what he believed in. But then, having gained the prize, he allowed his own insecurities ("Why doesn't anybody like me, really like me?") to lead him to so greatly challenge the freedom of the American press with the Sedition Act of 1798. Exponentially hypocritical or stupid? It doesn't matter. We owe the existence of the Declaration of Independence more to him than Jefferson. But when Adams' term was up, he hit the road for home under the cloak of darkness.

Silda must still be smashing governor plates in the mansion, with the former Albany first lady Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost trying to calm her with, "There, there, old girl. At least he wasn't sleeping about for years and years under your nose with your own personal secretary - you don't have a secretary, do you? Anyway, wasn't that a funny discovery. Enough to drive one off to Appalachia. Now find your best press suit - no not the pleather - and stiffen that upper lip. Hmmm, maybe not so stiff. Have you heard about those new fangled injections?"

Worth Waiting For

2008-03-10T09:31:00.006-04:00

Ahh, March. Finally the kind of morning worth getting out of a cozy Sunday bed for; the image is from a larger piece I have created. I have a whole memory stick full of Calvin and Hobbes shots. Not sure where the goofball dog (Hobbes) was when I took this one. But my daughter (Calvin) had trouble getting air. Some of the best hill bumps around, but the overnight snow made 'em all slow.

What I Meant to Say

2008-03-08T22:58:00.002-05:00

"Whether the end is nigh is rarely the point. What matters is that, when people fear shifts in the cultural tectonics, they tend to reach for myth and the verities. And, while it may seem like a stretch to extend this observation to a sphere as ostensibly superficial as fashion, it was hard to come away form the season just ended here without thinking that dressmakers are spooked by he cold breath of change....And there were good reasons for this. Faced with overwhelming shifts in the way clothes are manufactured; with the widespread dispersal and pirating of information on the Internet; with markets broadening to encompass not just familiar consumer elites, but entire swaths of the globe; and with the knowledge that their boldest efforts seem puny compared with the chess moves being enacted by the multinational titans who employ them, a lot of designers are befuddled."

Guy Trebay can get under my skin. But not so much when he writes like that. NY Times, March 6.

The Women on the Web. FMI (For My Information) Already doomed for failure?

Buying more to have less. Yes, Muji. I'm familiar with the look, and the hook. Being complicated to become simple. Eschewing isms in order to be the best ism. Can't we just have the clean lines and purposeful design without the pretentious doublespeak? I don't have the philosophy chops or time to do the verbal deconstruction. Mon dieu, has the Bush Administration made is so that marketers feel we won't notice if they treat every day as Opposite Day? Anyway, internationally, there is nothing novel about Muji, but the result is appreciated.

Where's the Auto in Autopsy?

2008-03-07T18:17:00.002-05:00

I wish I could take myself apart and figure out what's wrong and put me back together again before I toxicology myself to death. It's so hard to be sick when there is no one around with the authority level to send you to bed. I treated myself to enough anti-symptom cocktails that something should be working, or my heart should be stopping.

Enough about me. I'm going to focus on another for a while. Chic, according to Cathy Horyn: "a particular or informed point of view that makes the heart leap or the mind curious to know more." I didn't know. When there is no chic, she continues, it's like sitting down to an expensive meal and not tasting a single flavor. Prada is fashion in the abstract, Versace and Gucci are about luxury. but nothing was produced that would make someone want to change the way they dressed.

Ok, I'm starting to get it. I think. Is chic a movement, a collective? I don't know, but I'm so congested that I'm breathing through my mouth. Liquid will begin to drip from my nose any second. My dry lips will swell without the aid of any injectible or bee sting. Then she says it, that thing I have been yelling at myself about for the past two months: know the emerging markets.

I'm not ethnic enough. I'm not worldly enough. I have no sense of Indian designs beyond a $10 wrap skirt I and every other girl bought in 1979, Or Chinese or Japanese. or the difference between the two.

Leonard Sax and Sex

2008-03-06T17:29:00.003-05:00

Leonard Sax is a dangerous man. Anyone who draws a bright line distinction between men and women and calls it science is a dangerous person. Sax fails to address the nuances created by variations in hormonal make up, the impact of socialization, and the backwards future that all this separation will ultimately create. What he does appreciate is a meal ticket at a time when the ills of no money for schools only war has finally visibly metastasized. Just because we don't spend the time or money on kids as individuals, doesn't mean we should be setting up a blue camp for boys and a yellow camp for girls. Pigeonholing is what gets us into trouble in the first place.

I know because I wasn't, and there were far too few of us girls allowed to roam at large with the boys as kids. I believe that that freedom to, as a child between the ages of 5 and 10, explore the world without a strict gender code has probably made the most wonderful difference in my life compared to the lives of so many other women I have met along the way.

To the extent that there are blocks of differences among different groups of children, we have to learn to take all that information and make those distinctions work towards a positive within a group, not to separate and isolate. To use xx and xy as a basis for a wholesale segregation, let me ask this. Would we be doing this with any other form of physical or mental distinction without more sophisticated medical science, social science, and long term peer review of both?

Hell, people are still debating margarine versus butter and its impact on veins. Don't talk to me in absolute terms about what a brain scan is telling you.

The UO Catalog and other Notes

2008-03-05T21:59:00.003-05:00

UO Through the Mail Slot. When it comes, the Urban Outfitters catalog, the world stops. I go through the pages trying to break the code. What is this company's message? Why am I always reluctant to embrace it? Why sometimes does everybody looks sexy; in other catalogs everyone looks like dressed by monkeys? The current catalog works, and its a 70's (again), boho, 20's approach. It's the heavy reliance on the 70's, again, that gets me, I suspect. The catalog starts to feel like a yearbook. Half of me can't breathe and the other half of me is pissed off that we didn't have better styling back then. As for why it doesn't always work for each season? Staying fresh and cutting edge is difficult when each piece has such a retro feel, so the attitude has to come in the combos - which is not really what mass market retail and catalog is all about.

Drunkorexia. "These are women who are afraid to put a grape in their mouth but have no problem drinking a beer." Douglas Bunnell, quoted in the NY Times, March 2, 2008. I had a nightmare last night. I had edged too far into an intersection waiting for the light to turn green. So I put the car in reverse to get back behind the stop line. Only it was as if I had gunned it, and the car went screaming in reverse. Trying to get the car back into place, I put it in drive, but then again, it was as if the gas pedal was glued to the ground and I could not stop. Suddenly, I was going so fast that as I was wiping out sides of cars all I could see were sparks and then I realized that those hazy dark figures that looked like silhouette cut outs from a 50's educational poster were people I was knocking off. The dream shifted over into a DWI and, before I awoke, I accepted in utter despondency (while the vehicle was still wildly out of control) that I was going to spend the rest of my life behind bars.

I'm going with grapes.

Benefit Cosmetics. Jane Ford: "A lot of women think if they're wearing a geranium pink trench, they have to match their lipstick with it. No, it's the reverse."

The reverse of what? What is the complimentary color of geranium pink, celery? Do I not wear a trench? Do a lot of women have geranium pink trench coats? Did I miss the big sale?

Actually the entire Pulse section of the Times failed to produce anything new - the new colors? yellow with gray, sea-blue with lime, coral and yellow, pink and black, sky blue and brown - all these have been alive and kicking for the past few years, past few millennium. The good news? This summer wear your favorite bright colors, give them Urban Outfitter names, and use the word "inspired" a lot, as in "I was inspired by the wondrous colorings of the underwater sea creatures we saw this June while on holiday," or "I was inspired by my love affair with the laundry basket and color of my favorite bottle of detergent." You can do it.

Hound

2008-03-05T21:24:00.002-05:00

My big white dog ran ahead of me about 30 yards, up to an older man who was walking alone through the park. It was just about 7 a.m., and exactly 15 degrees. Everything that morning seemed white, even the air. Still, I could tell that the man who had been kind enough to hold out his hand to my excitable puppy held her attention for only a second before she bounded off towards another moving figure further off.

When with quick paces and bent heads our paths came as close as they would to crossing, I said apologetically, "She's disappointed that you aren't a dog."

"Well, maybe in a little while ... ," he said in a deep voice, not breaking stride.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about him since.

Love My Look

2008-03-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Researching whether there had been any new press on Nia24, a skin cream I had found a year ago, I came across a link for the Personal Body Model. Now I can see what I would look like with a boob job, except for the whole body thing. It's hard to tell what I would really look like, what without a hair color option and that model's crossed eyes and everything. Is that what my nipples would look like post-op? Hmmm. I just don't know. I hate it when she wears my - well, not my hair - that way.

You Get a Timeout Time Out

2008-02-29T11:20:00.003-05:00

I never finished the Boston story, but I'm going through receipts and I cam across the Rachel's Kitchen card. The joint got what seemed like columns in the Time Out Boston travel book. And photos - at least three.

The place holds six people. Max. And those six will already be there because they live in the neighborhood. Just so you know. Just so you don't go to Boston and walk a mile with are we there yet kids in below 10 weather and expect anything, well, bigger. Just in case.

It's a cool spot, but if visiting, treat it as a take out destination and be pleasantly surprised if it turns into anything else.

Parenthood Should Require Some Type of Test Besides Urine

2008-02-28T10:44:00.004-05:00

It's 10 degrees outside, Farhenheit. A 15 month old bundled up like the Michelin kid is standing on the sidewalk crying. Why is he crying? Hmmm, my guess? Mittens. He wants some. Someone decided that his thick middle part needed protection, but not the tiny digits at the far end of his upper extremities.

No, no, now stop that. Don't give him a cookie. He doesn't want a cookie. He wants the pins and needles to stop. Whew. Thank goodness the light turned green.

Another One Shelved

2008-02-26T20:13:00.008-05:00

Although Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the all time favorite for belly laughs, A & C Meet Frankenstein got it's share of repeat performances around here as humor training for youngsters. You can't do comedy without the physical. Timing matters. But I completely missed that its screenwriter, Robert Lees, had 1. been blacklisted thanks to McCarthy and then 2. in 2004 met with such a horrible end by a crazed murderer. Beheaded, mon dieu. And of course the naive idiot that I am used to think that such a death meant - nay required - a clean machete type swing, but no. Some recent article about a now-banned, pro-terrorist London blogger advised me that, if you want, it can be done in a slow, painful, sawing way, the way I sever turkey parts with bandaged fingers every year. My guess is, the hard way is how it's done by a crazed, Bible-n-mace carrying schizophrenic.

Gosh darn it. It's not like the talented guy'd been through enough. I am so sickened.

Another movie I'll never be able to watch again without wanting to vomit. Or any others in our collection for that matter, like when A&C think they've blasted off to Mars, but really the rocket lands in Louisianna during Mardi Gras but because of the costumes Bud andLou can't tell the difference. Think of the high concept pitch for that one.

During the red carpet for this year's Oscars, the youngest - the one who years earlier had spent a winter watching the The Mummy on continuous loop - looked at Diablo Cody and said, "I know her. She played the bad lady on that Hey Abbot Mummy show." Well, She wasn't too far off the mark. Photos of Ms. Wilson via IMBD and Diable from the LA Times.

Glamma Blitz

2008-02-26T08:36:00.002-05:00

I posted on the Oscar red carpet here. Last night I watched E!'s Fashion Police and found out I am a bitchy gay fashionista.

Now I'll have to redo all the curtains in the house. I hate chintz.

Ray and Charles? A Little Help, Please

2008-02-24T15:31:00.004-05:00

It's official. It's a worldwide epidemic or idea theft. Every design magazine, from home to furniture to clothes is telling me what the new classics are. How delightfully pretentious. I really expect to see some gray in the hair and some fat around the edges of these guys and gals before I'm going to agree that their chair/suit/lanai solor roof pattern creation is a classic.

"Oh, yes. Have I shown you this. It's my latest. Made it last night. Yep. It's a classic."

There's just not enough room in the room for that kind of blow. There's a slow food movement a foot I've heard (I'd know more about it if I had any tastebuds). Maybe there should be a slow taste movement. Let the product live, swell, ride the currents and survive or die. I think that's what the word classic kind of, um, means.

I'm not giving an inch on this one.

Like Cat Woman, Fer Sure

2008-02-24T15:10:00.005-05:00

According to the LA Times,

Wintour has been under attack this week for her influence over the Milan show schedule. Top runway presentations here, once stretched over seven days, have been compressed into four days this season after Wintour wrote to Italian fashion designers asking them to group shows closer together to save editors a long, expensive stay in Milan.

The shortened schedule has left some younger designers out in the cold, unable to attract editors to their shows, and has prompted journalists and some designers to speak out against Wintour.

So, it sounds like corporate is getting ugly American cheap and pushy, but, as with everything else, there is likely to be more to it, such as five hour breaks between shows, perhaps? Milan is the closest thing one can find to a New York attitude in Italy, but it is still Italy and has it's own internal clock. The NYC Fashion Weeks run like a machine, and feature designers from nine in the morning to nine at night, both on and off site. Front rows are filled with trades people filling out their forms, along with some press and a handful of celebrities. It's mostly about moving product with the showbiz blitz only the topping.

It's probably the last thing Anna wanted to do but the first order of business she felt necessary. These semi-annual fashion shows, like film award festivals and tennis' grand slams, have all become part of a series, so get a new job it you can't figure that uniformity is right behind.

2008-02-23T13:13:00.003-05:00

I need a place to write down this fascinating phrase, Super Sofas. That's how stupid my life is.

I just wrote a whole piece spelling "couch" as "coach." I am a retard, although my brother - who called me that incessantly when we were kids, told me not to use that phrase any more. He's right, so I'm going with metard instead - it's something about the long "e" and the "t" sound and the "ar" that makes it work so as a bad word. Some words just swing that way. Simply irresistible to the lips, tongue and jaw. I'm not sure if that change saves it. I'm not a mean person at all; just terminally stuck in my childhood 70's.

Anyway, there is an entire series of sofas with metal legs surfacing. They cost a fortune, and they come on spindly metal, cheap looking legs that look as if they'd run away if Pee Wee owned 'em. Or crack your toes open in the middle of the night. Super Sofas need Super Bases - whatever happened to symmetry and balance. And they're up so high off the ground and so exposed that dust bunnies will show for miles. I'll have to clean. Now I'm just crabby. Back to work.

There'll Be Stahs in Your Pahk

2008-02-21T14:14:00.006-05:00

That's right. Every sound uttered by a Bostonian was repeated with aplomb and a hand gesture by the 7 year old. "I know he's from Boston 'cause he said 'heah' instead of 'here'."

"I'm sure he did honey. Now stop that. You're gonna get us hurt."

"Heah, heah, heah, Bawston, Bawston Bawston."
"Stop that right now."
"Heah, heah. Bawston, Bawston. Motha, can we go to a pahk?"

It's a testament to the good nature of the city folk that we made it home in one piece. And it was such a great place to visit. I had been there once before but that was two decades ago when visiting my student brother and the entire memory is one of dark basement bars. I didn't say it was a bad memory, but anyone who has ever survived a pub crawl would understand that now that I have entered damnable, respectable tourista age, this absolutely qualifies as a first visit.

I fell in love with Boston when I fell in love with Johnny Tremain. It's a simple as that. Now that my chances of scoring more likely fit within the catagory of a toothless and tenacious John Adams, the city still holds its sway.

I walked about violating my most sacred of travel rules, displaying a crumpled up map at all times. (I didn't care. The streets got confusing. I kept getting lost. I didn't care looking like a tourist. With one in five individuals being students or connected with the universities in and around the city - I can't remember what the tour guide said - I figured that another 10% had to be visiting next of kin and almost fogotten lovers and then another 5% cheap tourists, what with it being the discount month of February.) So I was open season for a well intentioned local who saw me fumbling. I had already passed the Omni Parker, the haunted hotel where Dickens was to have placed A Christmas Carol and was looking for the Old South Meeting House. I could have hit it with a stick, and kind of knew it, when the man said to my daughter and me, "Can I help you ladies?"

(con't after I get some work done)

Notes

2008-02-15T10:33:00.004-05:00

Seems Cintra Wilson from the Times agrees with me on Victoria's Secret. I'll upload the link when I retrieve my computer with my dumb ol' bookmarks. "Victoria’s Secret has not made its money by being subtle. Its apparent formula for mass-marketing fantasies is to turn the erotic into the banal."

As for Westminster, is it my imagination, or did all the toy and non-sporting breeds have wooley mammoth sized handlers, while the wooley mammoth size working dog breeds have airily-attired tiny handlers. Must be my imagination ... I'd go through all the films (the video that the site offers is amazingly complete), but after a while the dogs within each breed seem to look identical and the video stuck in a continuous loop.

Clothing: explore J Brand for a plain and elegant thin-legged jean. But then Fashion Week news suggested that raggedy, barely holding on jeans (such as from Maison Martin Margiela) are the new look. I could have sworn massively distressed was two years ago, but I think what is new is the "barely holding on" part, which is supposed to be killer sexy. Well, yeah. (Just avoid thinking of cobwebs and that gown worn by a Marilyn Manson date a few years back.) Except how can I recreate the look? One rip I can do, but the shredding seems complicated and suggests that what I will end up with is a closet full of Daisy Duke cutoffs, which really isn't what I had in mind (or the butt cheeks to pull it off). I'll find a way. Now, when I wear dress pants, the kids say things like, "Are you a court clerk today?" Really, most dress pants give the suggestion that one's bottom stretches from the thoracic to the hamstring. One solution is a slightly lower and very wide waist band. Seriously, it creates a much better look, and And Alice + Olivia carries such a style.

Victoria's Sad Secret and Other Notes

2008-02-11T13:38:00.000-05:00

Walk into Victoria Secrets lately, and the place looks more like pajama party-land than sexy runway or Super Bowl Party hubba-hubba. All those sweatpants, all the "PINK" plastered across the ass of everything. Bubble gum, bright stripes, and polka dots, oh my. I've noticed. My girlfriends have noticed. I don't know if guys have noticed. They have a tendency to be an inanimate lot once amidst the racks. Of clothes.

And now, the catalog, entitled "What is Sexy," confirms my fears. If you have to tell us you're sexy, dear VS, well, then maybe you're just not sexy enough.

The Slow Chair. Go to "Projects" and pan down.

The history of black as the outfit color of choice, from Suzy Menkes' Cross Currents (NY Times): Japanese designers rebelling against floral formality. Coco Chanel and the little black dress. Black surfaces as a color of choice as the rituals of mourning-wear wans. I can't get my eldest, who works in Midtown Manhattan during her studies, out of black. Black is sexy, black is strong, black allows the head and arms to take command - all good things. But it also suggests a hide-away comfort zone and conformist mentality which I never want to see, although I certainly can empathize. I came back from a brief work time in So. Cal., wearing tangerine sweaters and off-white pants, or yellow shifts with grass green belts, or baby-blue jeans with dark pink blouses. And darn if those shades didn't disappear from my wear list as quickly as a governor can butcher the name of his adopted state. I felt like an idiot in Upstate New York, where the color of choice is neither black nor bright, but beige and denim and none of those other who-do-you-think-you-are-missy hues. I long for my time of color, and so applaud the neon pink Raf Simons (for Jil Sander), YSL (burned orange), Gaultier (vintage red/maroon), Prada (bile green, a favorite on the name alone), Valentino (red carpet red), and all shades by Marc Jacobs - a true color hero.

Urban Outfitters beget Free People, Anthropologie, Leifsdottir, and Terrain. My spellchecker (already always screaming at me in red, and ignored) is going to go nuts if UO keeps reproducing.

White House Weddings for All

2008-02-05T15:09:00.000-05:00

"Oh, gosh - I have to vote in the primary," I said to myself out loud this morning.

Right after trying to answer the "What's a primary?" question of the second grader in the car with me, I had to field the next question.

"Do you get to vote for yourself?"
No.
Why not?
I'm not running for president.
Why not?
Because I have stories to read at night and other things I want to do, things I couldn't do if I were president because I would be too busy.
But if you were president, we could live in the White House and you could do anything you wanted.

Let's see. She is seven years old. I guess that's the only kind of presidency that she has ever known.

NYC Notes

2008-02-05T06:39:00.000-05:00

We crawled up out of the R Train stop at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, to be greeted by cool air, weak sunshine, and industrial park emptiness. A tumbleweed could have blown by, had we not been in Queens, or it could have been a setting for an old black and white WWII movie, except for the Queens part.

"This doesn't feel so good," said my FIT student, with a rare display of survival instinct.

It was eerie, and there was no sign for the Museum of the Moving Image, but I had an address. "We have to find 35th Ave., and straight ahead of us was 37th Ave., so it's either that way further down into that abyss or 36th St. picks up on the other side of this, this monolith, and we have to find a way around it."

"I vote that 36th St. starts here and there's only one way to go," the eldest decided.

Because a blind vote seemed as solid a choice as any, abyss it was. Besides, the deadness was probably only because it was a Sunday. Mid-week, the place was likely to be loaded up with commerce and trucks and fast moving cars without mufflers and taxis trying to beat some jam on some airport-link highway. So we shuffled, my old self, my poshy college girl, my pretty 'n brilliant exchange student ward, and the seven year old. "I'll have to die, you understand, if there is a problem," I sighed in resignation, as a pit bull terrier tried to jump over his chain link encasement. "That's the game plan; I'll take the hit, you guys run for help. Or blackberry someone. No run, then blackberry." I imagined the jaws of that beast around my throat and a lot of blood. Yes, it's good to have a contingency plan, especially when you don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain or stay out of a deserted, body-dumping kind of hood.

But as we walked 36th St. and crossed 36th Ave. so obviously going in the right direction, the area seemed to go from black and white to color. People were building this up into living space, with a hip looking restaurant, condos in what was some old government building with columns, and an expansive 50's type diner that pulled in lots of local folks. And there it was, right on the corner: one of the coolest, hands-on museums I have ever been to, where we learned about how moving pictures were discovered, how television works (which still makes me insane thinking about how fast the image information travels), sound editing, and special effects. There was also plenty of movie and tv memorabelia. I loaded up the camera with tons of stock images. We did not participate in any demonstrations or sit through any of the kids or adult movies that were airing that day, but we could have.

As we walked back down lonely 36th St. towards the subway entrance, again past the troubled terrier, the seven-year-old said between hops and skips, "This has been the best day."

In the Snake Pit

2008-01-31T18:44:00.000-05:00

I'm heading off to shoot runway at Fashion Week, Fall Winter/08. I'm taking the youngest, meeting the oldest at college, have invited a high school Swedish girl to join us (she's at boarding school in North Caroline for a year; her mother died a year ago), and I hope to catch up with an old colleague who let me crash with him in Dresden one weekend long, long ago. He has come over to NYC for the weekend.

I already have a hangover. How is this going to work out? I'm crashing now and getting up in a few hours. I must remember to write. . . .

Color Wheel

2008-01-30T14:05:00.000-05:00

Every year Pantone tells us our color psyche

2000 cerulean blue (we were reminded of this in Devil Wears Prada)
2001 fuschsia rose (boy, that's disorienting)
2002 true red (well, now that that's clear)
2003 aqua sky (is that possible?)
2004 tiger lily (isn't that a Disney character?)
2005 blue turquoise (as opposed to green turquoise, ok, I actually get that one)
2006 sand dollar (where I will always be)
2007 chili pepper (where I will always want to be)
2008 blue iris (I swear, f/k/a periwinkle)

As much as I love Scandinavian seating when they get it right, no one can say "Only stay a moment" better when they get it wrong. Meet the Spline, which must be Norwegian for "split spine."

Refinery 29. Must explore more.
I want the Smeg refrigerator for so many reasons, including the childish use of refrigerator magnets.

One of the kids left a glass of milk on the arm of the inexpensive Ikea leather couch my husband insisted on getting instead of a Ligne Roset or Roche Bobois "are you insane?" piece. I lifted the glass up to escort to the dishwasher, and half a sheet of cow accompanied the glass and me. Man, I should be dunking my leathery face into milk acid every hour on the hour. Anyway, I just set back the chances of getting a dream couch, oh, about ten more years.

Louis Poulsen, a Dane, makes beautiful light fixtures and is referenced in an advertisement as a furniture architect. I love that phrase. I wonder what the architect architects think about that. Probably not so much.

Colon Blow Hard

2008-01-30T13:11:00.000-05:00

It has been suggested that I write a piece about colon cleansing. I suggested that the suggestor write a piece about colon cleansing. Besides, I don't think I can put together anything more entertaining or off-putting than "She's Gonna Blow", an article I saved for the collection of words for "arse" alone.

A week before I read the article, my youngest spotted one of those rubbery bags in the drug store, and in front of a large group of people waiting for the pharmacist asked me, "What's this for?"

"It's a water bottle for a sore neck or ankle, I guess," I answered, thinking it was. How was I supposed to know? Growing up, we didn't even have a thermometer in the house. "If you don't have a thermometer, you can't have a fever," Mom would reason. Living as we did with the good Dr. House, why would we have anything as sophisticated as an insides cleaner-outer?

Anyway, that colonic guy needs to get out of his mom's house, right after he tries a few more funny 'speriments
And now that I think about it, what do my kids do when I'm gone?

More Notes

2008-01-14T01:02:00.000-05:00

I never met a Lamaze class I trusted.

"the Tate (think MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney all rolled into one[.]" Alice Rawsthorn, NY Times Style Magazine, Holiday 2007. Now I have to see the Tate because I refuse to believe on word alone that anything is as breathtaking and monumental as the moment one realizes what the MoMA houses. As my husband put it, "It's not just that the MoMA has all the greats of modern art; it has all the greats from the greats of modern art."

Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, Prada, Lanvin, YSL, Comme Des Garcons - repeat three times each in a sentence and commit the 2008 lines to memory.

I've Been Such a Waste of Cake

2008-01-13T18:34:00.000-05:00

Eye Dialect - spelling a word as it sounds when sloppily pronounced.

I want to wake up the house tomorrow with The Kills' U R A Fever.

In my long life, "senescence," ironically enough, is a word I've never come across.

When it comes to ignoring pain symptoms, "stoic" is just another way to spell "stupid." (It was a better quip in my mind, where I thought that each word had the same number of letters, but now I realize that I was just being stoic.)

But what I really want to be when I grow up, Mommy, is a beard: At a hotel convention, the man behind me in line at the, gack, buffet claimed that the number of vacationing single-women was way up. In response to me asking him why that was so, the man explained that it was because more men were coming out of the closet and didn't feel compelled to have to live with woman anymore. I had noticed, before he offered me this explanation, that the man, a professor at Paul Smith, a college within the SUNY system, exhibited a gay affect. The whole scene was one of those wire-crossers: too many messages, impulses, and responses all jumping about at once in my brain, forcing time and my mouth to grind to a halt. I don't really think that all men hate women or that most heterosexual acting men were closeted gays. Maybe women actually make enough money now to go on vacation by themselves, or their husbands have left them for other women, or that more women won't settle for just any guy for the sake of a "Mrs." degree, or the husband has traveled his butt off for work and wants to stay home, or the husband who actually kind of loved his wife died of a heart attack because that's what some men do, I guess, but only when they aren't all so busy trying to come out of the closet. It felt so mean what he said, like in a perfect world we girls would be so unnecessary.

Stay Young, Staycation. To save money on ski vacations, don't pay for unappreciated chic, fly as little as possible - think "large airport endpoints" and look for ski resorts with all amenities at the mountain base, or so today's NY Time's travel section advises. It would be even cheaper if I could just stay home. Besides, I don't need the reminder that I could be dead in less than two decades. There is nothing more convincing on the topic of my own mortality than feeling nausea-level muscle fatigue by the simple of act of letting gravity do its thing and push me downhill. Or how about the 53 places to go in 2008, from 12/9 Sunday Times? (I haven't had the time to read a Sunday paper since 12/2, it appears.) I'm certain to get to Laos, Lisbon, and Tunisia, right after my 49 trips to the international food aisle of the local Wegman's supermarket. Maybe I can substitute one airline ticket to Rocky Mountain Death Camp for something at Mid-Beach, Miami, something like the Fountainebleau.

Geneology - 23andme.com or genetree.com or ancestry.com. Someone did an extremely thorough job on my lineage. It's a heartbreaker to find out you're not a princess. It's sickening to find out that a long ago, distant relative married a woman who hacked up their six-year-old son in the barn, after dinner one night. (They had ... a barn?) It's sad to know a great-great uncle rode a train engine down off a trestle, the way a captain goes down with the ship, except without the water. Or the ship. The princess fantasy was working my life-drive way better than what yellowed newspaper clippings had to offer. No nobility, and barely a whiff of good judgment in the whole lot.

Botox as a gateway drug: (1) Must do research on the medspa mall (?) chains - Sleek, Sona, Pure, Dermacare, Skin Care Clinics, and American Laser Centers. HealthWest and SkinKlinic closed. Medicis about to get FDA approval for Reloxin, which will be the first US competition Allergan has had for its Botox. (1) Must remember to tell Dad to sell Allergan stock, although it seems that anything Allergan does, like Annie Oakley, it does better.

I can't imagine ever having a home theater. I'm not sure I'd ever get out of the seat.

Quote

2008-01-12T16:53:00.001-05:00

Mark Hanna - McKinley's 1896 campaign manager: "There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is money and I can't remember what the second one is."

McKinley is important to people from Buffalo because we killed him here at our Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and we've never recovered from the hit. He didn't die directly from the assassin's two bullets, but from the gangrene that set in because the doctor only found one. Our better surgeon, Dr. Roswell Park, was performing cancer surgery in Niagara Falls that day. The end result is a lot of things named McKinley to remind us of our bad timing and hapless fate, big things like high schools, monuments, streets, traffic circles, engraved site markers.

"Here is another reminder of how we screwed up. Again. Sorry. So sorry."

We should have similar endowments for all those blown Super Bowls, too. Anyway, I liked the quote.

College Trip

2008-01-10T09:16:00.000-05:00

I have no choice. I have no time, but if I don't find some to write every day, my head it going to pop off. We're now into college search for kid #2.

"I'm thinking Miami," she said.

Miami of Ohio, right? Right? Right? Please add "of Ohio."

"... I want to be warm.

She would be the queen of cigarette boats. I suggested she look at the schools in Massachusetts and New York for starters.

"These places aren't so warm. How about Kansas?" She asked after spending a little time exploring the University of Michigan and Ohio State.

I wanted to respond, "How about it? How about Idaho, Missouri, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, too? What I know about Kansas is that you have just suggested studying biology in a state where evolution hasn't been invented yet." I held my tongue and for a second considered getting the wooden map of the United States down off the bookshelf. I could blindfold her and we could play pin the tail on her future alma mater. Would she feel out of place in Texas? Would she get religion jammed down her throat in South Carolina? Who will inspire her? Who will take her? Who can I afford?

This is going to be one hot mess.

What To Do With Leftover December Cash

2008-01-08T20:09:00.000-05:00

Found The Jewelry Blogger looking for some info on David Yurman. The JB makes for a great PR person, actually, for all the designers featured so far.

I was just trying to clear out some catalogs, not my bank account.

Remembering What?

2008-01-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

Deciding to look at 2007 books before Fall, I came across a receipt with the word "strattera" written on it. Thank god for the internet, because of course I could google the word and feel compelled to take the "Do you have adult ADHD?" test.

That's why I never finish the books until the third quarter, the following year.

The Piano Teacher

2007-12-19T20:50:00.000-05:00

"Do you know what a Bible is?" the piano teacher asked the pupil, attempting to launch into an explanation about how the music clefs were denoted "G" and "F."

"No," she answered.

I dipped further into my chair.

"Well, do you know what a monk is?" he asked next.

"The animal?" she asked back.

I opened my copy of the New Yorker and stopped paying attention. There was a courtroom drama and movie trying to get out of this conversation, but I wasn't having any of it.

It's Not About the Naughty, Chuckleheads

2007-12-02T21:51:00.000-05:00

WTF, I almost didn't go see Fred Claus because of the reviews. All of the them except for Carino Chocano at the LA Times missed the mark. And passing on the show would have been a shame because it seems to me, the rest of the reviewers were too busy wanking off to Siblings Anonymous, explaining how this wasn't Elf, and concerning themselves over the inaccuracy of immortality for family members of saints (because reality is what we look for in a solid Santa movie) to get the point.

So I was walking with my youngest who still wants to believe in Santa, but is probably just past the point of no return, when behind us we heard a parent threaten a younger child with Santa's Naughty and Nice Star Board. When a child is good, apparently, a child gets a star. When a child is bad, or so it goes in that household, a star comes off the chart.

"What a bunch of crap," I said to my daughter, in so many words. "It's not about behavior leverage. It's not about being naughty or nice. It's about having a chance to do something special for someone, and every child should get a gift." The movie took it an important step further, with Fred convincing his brother Santa that there really aren't any naughty children in the world; just little ones that never caught a break and ended up adults processing a different code of behavior.

Vince, with his stilty legs and baggy, lined eyes, was perfect in his desperation, resentment, and reluctance. Bate's zingers were coming from someone's experience. And if Vaughn had ended up with the blonde assistant, then everyone would have screamed over the predictability. Instead, he didn't get the girl. The midget did. And the guy reviewers complained, "Hunh?"

I have three more kids' movies to see. I'm beginning to think this might be my favorite. Go Vince. And way to call it Carina.

Wide Stylin'

2007-11-29T18:21:00.000-05:00

Oh, right. That's just what I was looking for. I dress that ballooned at the hips and puffed out in front like those gigantic aprons of skin that take a abdominoplasty to remove. And the length, please let it hit somewhere other than at the narrow part of the leg, immediately above or below the knee. Choose a more unflattering location for the hemline, s'il vous plait. Then stick the sides up into my armpits so any nervousness I feel at a cocktail party will become noticeable. Oh, and make sure it is difficult to tell from the material sheen if it is a $3k piece from Barneys or something more readily accessible from my local mall's Cache.

I knew a man designed (Martin Grant) it before I looked at the NY Times description.

Make Them All Go Away

2007-11-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

My seven-year-old and I walked out of the restaurant into the pitch black, bitter cold air. As we walked up the sidewalk, a stocky man moving past us at a fast clip turned back in our direction. We could see part of his head under a plaid hoodie. His whole face seemed to smile. His teeth were huge. His eyes were large and spaced far apart, looking just a reach beyond his control. He began talking about a television show from the 1970's, and how, because he was 43 and I was close to there, we both should be familiar with the program.

I did what I do in the face of questionable lucidity: I nodded in polite agreement.

My daughter looked up at me and laughed, "You're not 43. You're 68!"

I made him take her.

American Beauty Moment

2007-11-28T23:13:00.000-05:00

It doesn't just happen to middle-aged men. This kid used to come over to the house when he was in high school and disorientation would strike with a vengence.

"Can I help you with that, Mrs. B?"
Ah...ah...ah...

"Thanks for having us over, Mrs. B.
Ah...ah...sure. Would you like an orange?

I would stand there feeling three inches shorter, 30 IQ point lighter, and giddy, which put me somewhere about twelve. When I needed two models for the style spread for Buffalo Spree, my eldest grabbed me a pro from NYC. Imagine my surprise when I later learned it was Ben, who asked me,

"Do you have a look for the shoot in mind, Mrs. B"

Well, you choose the nonsequitor.

Gross Factor

2007-11-28T22:03:00.000-05:00

I've had two children that when they were younger I could have held by the heels in a vat of slime and they would have come out looking as pristine as Grecian statutes. I have a third kid who at the elementary age level picks up every disease and microbe and parasite and germ and virus possible - things I never knew existed, things I will not repeat in public. She's like a sponge, the perfect victim, an unwittingly cooperative host. I don't know why her natural defense mechanisms are so low. Or why she seems to attract whatever it is that decides to plague her a particular quarter. Our latest battle was with a plantar's wart. She had to have been on the disinclined junior swim team about 17 seconds before bringing home the ailment that required twice daily dosing of high concentrations of salicylic acid for, gee, was it only six weeks?

Yesterday it hit me. What about STDs. I mean, I suppose I am just being incredibly neurotic, but if she is such a magnet for the miniature bad stuff ... A bubble pre-teen is born.

Quote of the Week

2007-11-26T22:51:00.000-05:00

"It would seem logical to assume that common ingestible ingredients like olives or soy would naturally be healthier for the skin and body than hard-to-pronounce, multisyllabic industrial cosmetic ingredients like the preservative methylchloroisothiazolinone. But representatives for the government and the beauty industry, as well as some environmental activists, acknowledge that there is no published scientific proof to support the notion that plant-based cosmetics are safer, healthier or more effective for people."

NY Times, Nov 1, 2007. Author unknown.

Okay, not exactly the quote from this week. I save things I think I might want to read should the sky ever open up and dump on everyone else giving me some peace. I've lost the front page and hence byline of the piece along the way.

Organic food inside, chemicals on the surface, and a toast to hoping that somehow they synergize in a good way somewhere at the dermis level.

Notes on Links

2007-11-24T16:20:00.001-05:00

Not a post for anyone but me. Strictly notes.

The GT Table from dnmark. No one with fingerprints or a coffee cup need apply for a job.

George Gold Furniture Design, the Alto convertible crib. Damn, this crib is not too anything, not too cute, fussy, oversized, undersized, basket-y, or Disney-fied, and yet it's for like, a baby and then a toddler and then a child. Bravo.

FX Magazine, the business of design. Now, how do I change my links ...

Dauphin for ergonomics in office furniture; the new TakeOver chair is not featured on the company website yet. I can never figure out if this stuff rocks or it is mostly made-up physiological nonsense that we swallow because we really don't know. Plus the high back versions of these kind of office chairs make me think of a lab disaster involving a dentist chair and a preying mantis. Must learn more.

I don't agree that Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair is the most remarkable chair in the history of 20th Century furniture, or however Linvingroom24 cares to honor it. Groundbreaking, yes. Iconic, certainly. But it is too gimmicky for the top honor. It's part chair, part bed, and part separate room and although I don't mean to suggest that being difficult to categorize takes one out of the running, I think it a harder task to design a chair that soothes the body, works in a variety of spaces, and allows the individual to exist as or retract from being a participant in an overall living space with a simple turn of the head. No emergence or climbing back in required.

Trend Bible for forecasting. Paper, plywood, and felt shades; Organics, origami, and nature for glassware; plywood and plastics for furniture; and soft yet textured fabrics and materials for the finishing touches. The future is going to look an awful lot like country club communities in Tampa, Florida.

Londonewcastle won the award for Britain's best emerging interior designer 2008. How prescient.

Tom Dixon is my lighting hero.

Armourcoat Perlata bounces light off of its surface. Could it be perfect for aesthetic lighting? Or perhaps their polished plaster effect. Mader Construction is a listed applicator for the product line in Western New York.

In Luxury Design has a belt I would love to own. Sometimes I hate this job. So many beautiful things to find and say goodbye to without enjoying even the slightest of a relationship.

Now that everyone is a photographer, the big dilemma is how to show off all the precious pieces of art. Gemma Fabbri and Chris Ager created the Socialite light box, complete with building facades and randomly lighting bulbs. Insert photos of family and friends and see who shines out from the apartment window across the, um, coffee table.

Uncrate website for stuff.

Make Rai nsky work here, Mr. German Company Dorn Bracht, please, pretty please.

I have a passion for screens. I work in an open office and sometimes I dream about having these about, able to throw into place so not everybody needs to see my messy desk. This one from Alison White folds on the hinges in both directions.

It took a visiting puppy to remind me that I live in the acoustical equivalent of a cave. Anne Kyyro Quinn has developed paper fold acoustic wall panels. This pattern on the ceiling of my 12 foot high Victorian living room would be a knock dead design-wise, and also let me ignore the world beneath my second floor bedroom.

The two Turkish designers behind Autoban have designed a chair, 1.5 that I have completely fallen for, especially in what they call a lacquer but looks more like a moss stain. Anyway, it looks hard and uninviting and I have completely fallen for it. Actually, this is so exciting because their Box Sofa couch which I just spotted after creaming about the chair might be my new very, very favorite. It's contained so it gives off a sense of being held - always nice for my psyche - but it is low enough not to be stifling - also nice - and deep enough to let you bring your legs in. The wood grain is perfectly subdued. OMG, now I am in huge trouble. How can I get this beautiful thing.

Black + Blum Design Ltd throws us a series of cheery, tongue-in-cheek, affordable, lighting and home decor items such as door stops, wall hangers and message board products, available in US specifications when applicable.

Bob Crooks: First Glass for glass works.

Bocci is working on innovations on light switches. Check back for info.

Boss Deisgn Ltd has two chairs, the Eye and the Kruze, worth taking a peak at. The Kruze comes up at the sides, a work station chair design that is too rare. I hate having my sides exposed all the time. The Eye, pictured here, curves up even more. It has an open bottom, something I don't care for, but the chair looks inviting and enjoys a new design. Way better than plastic, way better than the same ol' same ol'. I think it's a Jackie Choi design. Yep, it is. Note her Fontana sideboard.

Wall can't support the plasma screen tv? See if someone local has something like this.

David Mellor Design for cutlery, for that day when I finally go beserk over our own heavy, callous causing, finger-injuring tablewear and elect to write a review of other options.

Pop Quizzes

2007-11-24T14:07:00.000-05:00

Why does the word "day" end in a "y" my seven-year-old asks. If you say the "d" sound with the "a" sound, it should be enough.

"There are people who study the evolution of language and spelling," I told her, adding that I did not know the answer but wish I did.

I think about her question as I read the 100% London Design books from the September design exhibition. Lots of extra vowels in the English spellings, vowels that we in America dropped, again, I haven't a clue when. But I don't have time to investigate.

But because days get lost in the exploration of the interweb, I take the time I do not have. My mental dictionary is called a Lexicon. The smallest unit of a constant sound with a constant meaning is called a morpheme. "Day" is a morpheme. Where do I go to find information on something smaller than a morpheme, or is anything smaller than a morpheme simply reflective of pronunciation and spelling derivations?

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives us "day" from Old English "daeg." I guess what I would like to experience is the transformation. How did it sound and under what circumstances did it change? Someone knows, somewhere. Maybe entire language departments.

These are the things that I need to study to be prepared to answer the questions of a child. It's like an entire future of pop quizzes to fail.

How to Shut Up Anyone Who Thinks You Can't Cook

2007-11-19T20:32:00.000-05:00

Need to impress someone in about 72 hours? Can't cook? In a panic. Try this.

City Ham, Recipe courtesy Alton Brown
Good Eats
1 big, grocery store ham, with a bone.
1/4 cup brown mustard
2 cups dark brown sugar
1-ounce bourbon (poured into a spritz bottle)
2 cups crushed ginger snap cookies
Heat oven to 250 degrees F.
Remove that plastic piece that covers the bone (no one ever tells you that), and put the cut side face down into the roasting pan. Using a small paring knife score the ham from bottom to top, spiraling clockwise as you cut, then spiral counterclockwise. Confused? Just think "gotta make a diamond pattern all over." Or do 1 inch squares, no biggie. Loosely cover the ham with foil, so it looks like it has a little pup tent over it, and cook it in the 250 degree oven for about 3 or 4 hours.

Then take the ham out of the over, throw the foil away (using over mitts through all of this, and then pull off the diamond (or square) pieces of skin and fat. This will be really hot on your fingers, so let it cool if you have to. Meanwhile, turn the oven up to 350 degrees F. After you have the skin and fat off, take a brand new 1 or 2" inch paint brush and slather on the mustard. Then pack on brown sugar, loosely. Then spritz the bourbon over the brown sugar. Then pack on the crushed ginger snaps. Return the big mess to the oven - uncovered - and cook for another hour. When you pull it out, the kids make fun of how ugly it is because it will looks like a dull brown boulder). Let it rest for 30 minutes. Then cut. Most of the pieces will have this wonderful wisp of sugar, honey and ginger cookie.

I can't cook, but I can do this and everyone loves it. I have paraphrased it from the Food Network's site, but only out of fear it will someday disappear and I won't be able to find my notes.

Notes

2007-11-19T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've always wanted to be a Tod's girl. But athletic legs, the lack of a trust fund, and a fond appreciation for sex leave me hovering somewhere between an H&M and BCBG type.

I wish animal prints would make up their mind. Moreso I wish they would make up their mind to stay away. There are about three people who can carry the look off, and they three along with the animals that provided the real thing are all dead.

I've been carrying around the photograph of a suitcase I fell fond of. A Globe-Trotter on wheels. I thought it looked sophisticated, understated, and functional. Next time I have about 2k to drop on luggage, I'm heading right there.

If a guy wearing the Zegna BT iJacket ever shows up at a dinner table near me, the milk is going to come streaming out of my nose so fast I'll be asked to leave the restaurant. Maybe it is the future, but can't we really just get a life?

Wheelchair Fashions

2007-11-18T08:15:00.000-05:00

I've just found these two sites, BeautyAbility and Wheelie-Chix Chic. Wheelie-Chix is on to something here, but the designer needs to study the optical illusions created by some of her tops. Only a handful of designs - and one strikingly so - pull the eye of the beholder up to the face of the woman in the wheelchair. Other designs either sag the breasts with questionable placement or crossing of silk trimming or pull the eye down to the waist, or - worse - both (see right). And the pants - excellent construction and fantastic idea with the silk roll down material, but stripes? Nothing showcases bulging thighs and a rolling stomach more than the white line. Pin stripes are tough enough to carry when standing As soon as we are seated, the stripe curves and bubbles and pouches are created even where they don't exist. (I'm not even going to get into the only other option, a plaid.) Wheelie-Chix managing director Louisa Summerfield might want to consider adding a solid color pant. And with so little competition in this field, designer Amelia Ursache shouldn't overlook the opportunity to do everything right.

I'm Just Not Smart Enough To Figure It Out On My Own

2007-11-12T20:56:00.000-05:00

I just spent the day at a lecture being told that there is a male brain and a female brain and that despite what I think, never the twixt shall meet. We now, contrary to the level of knowledge I had accepted as acceptable from Margaret Talbot's article, understand the brain fully enough to be able to categorize the genders into two distinct camps. Snip snap, pish posh, off to bed now.

"Honey," I heard as I hung up my apron, "Get me beer."

I have three weeks to learn a foreign language. As much as I would like to get to the bottom of this recent round of hogwash, I'm open to some help.

Orhan Pamuk: The Hunk and the Drunk

2007-11-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

He's so dreamy. The 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature spoke in Buffalo last night, at Babeville. His novel Snow was part of the City's "If All of Buffalo Read the Same Book." When snow is a powerful force in one's life it is difficult to find descriptions that are precise enough to place the reader outside at night experiencing a familiar particular pattern of a snowfall and the isolation it creates. He spent three years writing Snow. It reads as if he divided his research time between Kars and Greenland.

I dragged my husband and high schooler kicking and screaming to the pre-event cocktail party. I listen to history books on tape. My husband reads books in Swedish. The high schooler deals with five hours of homework every evening. She reads what she has to and not a sentence more. We really aren't so inside the area's literary community.

"We won't know anyone there."
"I have a quiz in every class tomorrow."

And it was awkward. Feeling like a bunch of clog wearers at a disco reunion, I decided to ramp it up and pretend we were there on business. Like any good sociophobe forced to small talk with strangers, I drained two glasses of wine, fast. (I explained to my jaw-dropped daughter that this was my MO and yeah my bad.) Once pumped giddy, I walked about the room finding victims to introduce myself to and push over to meet my family who ended up enjoying themselves and appreciating the chance to meet such a great, personable author. I hate that it takes alcohol to unfreeze my legs and hand-shaking arm when I stand in a crowd, but it works.

What did the author say? To the assembled group he described a novelist's roll as one where the writer cannot stay in his or her own shoes and offer a storied description. He must stand in the shoes of others and tell the tale. Pamuk offered no answers on how to fix the problems of the world, but suggested that a good starting point is to try to at least begin to understand another's perspective. In the novel the writer can combine all the forces that oppose each other from whatever direction, stand in the position of each force, and create a beginning, middle, and end that can help the reader gain new insights. When asked about the influence of television and video on reading and the future of literature, Pamuk's answer focused on the act of writing. People will always want to shut out the world and put their feelings down on a piece of paper. As long as they want to do that, literature will survive. The greatest novels ever? Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, and Demons.

That and more he said to the assembled group in the sold-out hall. To just the three of us he confided that the King of Sweden's sister is a terrible bore as a table mate.

She probably just needed a little more wine.

Photo via Hallwalls.

Pucci, Schmucci ... It's Saarinen Who Rules

2007-11-07T10:43:00.000-05:00

The Style Issue has gone to print, so now it's time to get ready for home interiors. As a child, I was forced to wear saddle shoes and my brothers' galoshes (the only word for the footwear that was black and buckled enough to make a fireman proud) for a long enough period for it to have a scarring effect. Furniture, however, ran from Scandinavian to Wright to French Country veins, so although I can - after years of therapy - talk the talk and walk the runwalk walk about fashion, interior design feels as natural as sunshine.

"Yours in the only house where the people call the furniture by name," a friend once said after hearing someone refer to the foyer table as "The Saarinen." It doesn't matter that we load it up with keys, mail and every piece of crap that makes it in from the car or the corner store. What matters is that we recognize who created the workhorses that hold up our precious nonsense pocket fodder, reams of paper, multiple PCs and Macs, or tired bodies, and we do it with the precision that others demonstrate in spotting a Canal Street LV from 50 paces.

Furniture is, to me, more important that haute couture or knowing where to score a knock off. Furniture has the potential for a soul. Well designed pieces can take you back to mom's arms or daddy's lap. If created by a master, it can look like art in the process. But just because it looks like art doesn't mean it's well designed. I have made mistakes. Plenty. For example, I've learned to avoid most things transparent. And I finally figured out why Philip Starck's bubble creations - as wildly successful as they are as trend pieces - bug me. They look like something they very much are not, and it irritates, if only for a subliminal second, my brain. His hard plastic furniture extruded into the shape of overweight sofas creates an internal conflict that the functionality of the piece does not overcome. Go ahead, just try to get cozy.

But I am still in awe of the pair of Wegners that my husband collected. (Image via here.) I didn't think much of them at first. They were precariously close to wicker-looking and in isolation seemed milquetoast. But then I sat in one during a football game and for the first time in a decade elected to watch the entire match. I didn't want to move. The arms were sturdy, the grain was well marked, the caning secure but giving, and the comfort was incredible. Something about the drop between my knees and the low back of the chair, then the angle of the upright made me feel like I was being carried. By a professional. Then I realized that because of their simplicity the chairs went with anything I put them next to. They stood strong on their own without taking command.

It's a whole 'nother world out there with furniture. The trick is to find the time to find and test run. But keep in mind that there is often a reason something has been called a classic.

Election Process

2007-11-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

"Now please, when we go into the booth, don't yell out the names of the candidates whose levers we pull," I begged the seven-year-old, faintly recalling last year's complete lack of voting privacy. In New York we have these fabulously mechanical machines that offer me some hope that my vote will be counted.

I never have any hope that it matters, but that is an altogether different discussion.

My daughter walked down the sidewalk with me on the way to our polling place, thinking. "Well, how about if when we get inside I say, "[Candidate's last name] ROCKS!"

Nice try.

In front of us on the sidewalk stood an older man passing out fliers. He was covered in a long hooded jacket to protect him from the morning's assault of rain and hail. He offered me a pamphlet and I thanked him. I couldn't remember when the last time was I volunteered for anything. I looked at the materials and noted that they were for the opponent. The silent steadfastness of that man alone made me double check my resolve. "We don't always need to be so out loud," I said to my daughter, meaning it more than she would understand.

Social Terrorists

2007-11-05T03:09:00.000-05:00

The NY Times Style Magazine, Alexandra Jacobs, wrote a piece about Eco-Terrorists at the table. Really, could you ever satisfy enough people that you were doing what was necessary to reduce your carbon footprints about the kitchen, patio, and dining room?

Ms. Jacobs' vignettes of neighbors and acquaintances chiding each other for never doing enough found a resting space behind my heart, between my lungs and in front of my spine - or thereabouts - and began to gnaw away. How is it that we believe that we can be nice to our planet when we are completely incapable of being kind to each other?

On the Subject of Fires ...

2007-11-04T16:20:00.000-05:00

Does Peter Arnell truly believe that people don't have fire extinguishers because the latter are so ugly? Don't give us so much style credit. There are plenty of houses with crock pots, electric can openers, and over-sized 1990's era refrigerators. "Maybe people don't have fire extinguishers because they don't plan on ever having to use one," I suggested to my husband.

"Then explain to me the fish knife in our knife block and the expresso machine."

The HomeHero, via the Daily Olive
The anti-HomeHero via Murketing.

I agree with Murketing. What's to stop me from grabbing a carafe or coffee bean grinder by mistake in a frenzied panic? Does it contain anything that works? Are my kids going to know what do do besides think it is part of the precious wireless booster system and take it outside to save it from the fire?

Well, getting product specs on the actual fire extinguisher part was difficult, but it does work on flammable liquid and electrical fires, both necessary in the kitchen. As for pure power, however, would it stand up to HalGuard's MaxOut? Certainly not in promo beef:

Who says safety has to be boring! It contains a siliconized sodium bicarbonate based dry chemical with free flowing and non-caking additives. This chemical smothers fires in flammable liquids and pressurized gases and will not conduct electricity back to the operator.

Boring? Right what was I thinking. Cabinets on fire. Yawn. And I never even thought of the Three Stooges reality associated with putting out a toaster fire with water and having lightening blow me back out the windows, although the kids would like it.

Somehow, when I look at the MaxOut I think, "Whatever I am faced with, this baby's gonna help me." It's chrome and sleek and has clear instructions to review in a freak-out. Plus, it comes in red if I decide we really should have the dangerwillrobinson visual. When I look at the HomeHero I think, "Pull the plug and flllyyyppzzzz, or that sound that shaving foam makes when its all about empty. The only solution is to order one of each and give them a test run.

Pieces and Quiet

2007-11-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

Rose and Radish stocked a sink stopper, by Dutch designer Joana Meroz, that was featured in the New York Times style section this Sunday. Anyone who offers beauty in the mundane deserves further investigation, so I looked to see what other things the San Francisco store offers. Peaceful things, it seems.

French Translation

2007-11-04T14:04:00.000-05:00

ligne roset means, "Not until the kids leave home. For good."

It is the perfect antidote for empty nest syndrome.

Tickity Tocks That Can Stay In Their Box

2007-11-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

It's what Dr. Seuss would do with 18 carat white gold, 117 diamonds and a watch face.

The Breguet Reine de Naples from Tourneau. I'll pass.

2007-07-31T15:56:00.002-04:00

The flight from St. Vincents back to Grenada. We packed up and took the open van back to the ferry, which gave us another chance to look at the dropping off point. I watched the boat as it came around the island, showing finally the most inhospitable backside imaginable, a cliff. I watched the water, again, wondering how people could dare travel from one island to another in the bad days.

Day 2 Grenada

2007-07-21T08:30:00.000-04:00

We arrived at our hotel after dark. I have stopped mistaking our destination for the Falklands. We are surrounded by lush land and poverty. The hotel is a little oasis that is supposed to look across the bay at the Grenada Medical School, another oasis.

I hate oasises. They make me feel like an overpriviged jerk, and I enjoy not feeling that way in my surroundings at home. These trips, I guess, put things in a better perspective, I guess. I am, certainly, in the big scheme of things, overprileged. I never would have handled a plantation well, or being a princess, either. Then again, I never would have handled being a slave with any degree of flair, or a maidservant. I'll work in my garden for eight hours at a time, but if forced to cut cabbage for two hours, I am reduced to a whiny brat looking for the nearest gallon of ice cream.

It was dark and quiet, and the man showing us to our room carried -carried - at least 200 pouns worth of suitcases up and down a curvy sidewalk to our suite. He insisted. There is no nightlife here for the high school and college aged kids. There is no town they can walk into. There is a town, certainly, at St. George, but we are not there.

I must go now. Breakfast is included and is served at a particular time. We must all go together and be dressed. There is a coffee pot up here in the beautiful second floor living room, but no coffee. So as I must go and there is no coffee here anyway, I will go.

Back. We followed a different walkway this time, one that cut across other hotel suites and rooms, by the dive shop and yacht store. When we came to the part of the walkway by the water, we saw dozens of crabs, scampering to get out of our sight. I goosebumped immediately. Anything crustacean looking terrifies me. It must be the odd, leggedy walk that does it. The restaurant is buffet, and it is always fun to see what is offered in different parts of the world. There is always glass jars of flake and granola-based cereals, yogurt in plastic tubs, and fruits. And to satisfy a large English tour, there are eggs and breakfast meats, too. And breads. I have decided to subsist on yogurt and honey and coffee.

We are back for a two hour break to swim in the hotel pools. I'll take photos now.

Family O'Broads

2007-07-20T01:01:00.000-04:00

We are going off to the Caribbean. We leave today. Or sometime later today. I am, as usual, half elated at the prospect of so much copy material from the trip, and half in dread of how exhausting this will be. For me. There is very little about a trip with three children and a husband that will allow me to rest on a chaise lounge all day, soak up the sun, and sleep, read, and write. These trips are programmed. Event-filled. And making sure that everybody has whatever is needed and is ok with the next event and survived the last event and remains in the proper frame of mind in general, falls on me. And I must hide all my feelings of fear and dread because these trips are the only demand that my husband makes of my time. So long ago I stopped being unable to breathe at the thought of getting ready to leave, being gone, and cleaning up all the while I was gone mess upon my return, and learned to go, take a pen and pad, and turn these events into a working trip.

We are going to an area I've never been before, the islands not far off the coast of Argentina. It is mid-summer and we are nearer to the equater than I may have ever been in my life, so I have packed solar protection swim wear and purchased underwater gear to help me learn how to use a new underwater camera for competitions.

Cheesecake Factory

2007-02-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

I took my six year old to dinner for Valentines. The Cheesecake Factory is nice for a mall restaurant: sufficiently dark, a bit sparkly, cozy, and with enough complicated items on the menu and television sets visible from the bar. Sure, it's schizophrenic, but let's remember the venue. It's in a mall. So the mix of chandelier and ESPN, hey, welcome to the Midwest. We had a round booth facing the bar and felt like offspring of Bobby Knight.

We shared a shake, however, and something in it wasn't right. So despite the great service, view of the basketball game, and mini-burger and thai entrees, we boxed most of our food and left a little earlier than planned.

The wait-system is a horror show, so cattle-callish, what with the buzzers and mutliple on-holds. I'm not sure how else to accommodate the kind of foot traffic they get, though. Avoid the booths along the perimeter - totally cold atmosphere.

Burberry Brit

2007-01-15T11:31:00.000-05:00

I had to try the scent, fully expecting to say enough with the plaid already. But I really like it. It's fresh and crisp, without citrus (which I like) or musk (which I don't). Why the order form said, "assorted colors" I'll never know. The computer must have issues with plaid. Smart computer.

I Miss My Brain

2007-01-10T23:40:00.000-05:00

Today I tried to open the office door with my car unlock button. I know there is a more efficient name for the car unlock button fob thing, but I don't have it right now. I had trouble driving without unnecessary impact. I showed up with my daughter for ballet at the wrong time. And the wrong day.

I used the suddenly vacant space of time to take the dog and the never-to-be-professional ballet dancing daughter to the sub-freezing dusk "no dogs allowed" park, instead. We ran from one end of the frozen tundra golf course and back, with a 4 month old puppy running circles around us. The air was biting, the light was low. It was hard to see the white puppy in the white snow. It felt wonderful. My daughter and I looked at each other from across a space of field, knowing that we had done the dog good. There was a big stone, the size of a resting cow, that I had never seen up close before. The inscription on the side said something about in memory for all the solders of the war of 1812 who died in hospital, or camp, or something like that, "and are buried here." I think I am going back tomorrow with the dog and reading it again. I saw the placard and year, but thought Teddy Roosevelt and wondered why folks from the Spanish American War infirmaries would be brought up this far north and put in the middle of the golf course. I decided that there must be a reason, and then ran after the dog.

See, I miss my brain.

I am giving up all my cookbooks except for an old Martha Stewart comfort food soft bound. I keep it on display, near a picture of me in a vase full of deep pink pebbles, no water, no plant. The stones keep my small, incredibly photoshopped smiling face pushed up against the vase wall. It's the only picture of me in the house, and it sets beside Martha because I think it is funny to have us together. She is pre-indictment. I am in a vase full of stones. It's perfect.

The cookbooks are unnecessary. I will never understand food like Nigella, or be a vegetarian as all kind folks. The Four-Ingredient Cookbook gift is too sad to open. I have a cookbook from Marlboro, something about chili and carne. It's called Evening Lights, which is even sadder commentary than the Four-Ingredient number.

Fill 'Er Up

2007-01-04T17:19:00.000-05:00

I seem to be holding out, at twice a year for Botox, but I can't say that I need less as time goes on. That's gotta be a suburban myth. Maybe I've just given up so much hope of accomplishing anything in my short life, that I've lost all expression inside. Soooo, nothing shows up on my face.

Right, I know the routine. Don't lay down for a few hours and if anybody asks, those needle marks in the forehead are all about doping. Or heroin. Something respectable.

Hi Tech Hair

2007-01-04T11:46:00.000-05:00

With all the noise over straighteners (I've been getting press releases for $300 units), I thought why not see what the noise is all about.

I look like a Disney character.

Because first you straighten your hair and it gets all shiny and glow-y. But then because my hair is layered and thinner at the bottom, it looked kind of low rent and trampy, so I curled it with a curling iron - as I was told to try.

You'd think someone put a Sleeping Beauty wig on this 40+ face. Charming. Just charming.

Next I'll have to chop it all off from all the damage. I'll play around with it some more. I do like that shine thing. It last until I was my hair and the fuzz look returns.

Off Center

2007-01-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

I walked into the DMV, looking for the eldest child who had called me to come in and sign the "It's ok" papers for the middle child to get her driving permit. The eldest was standing in the test-taking area, and I yelled out, "Did she win?"

We awoke pre-dawn to take the eldest to the airport. My brain was foggy, my eyes were tearing up from shear computer exhaustion from the night before. I turned the corner near a highway and spotted the lone house on the block with a thoroughly adorned front yard. Icicles, snowmen, Santa, candy canes. You know those kind of houses. The place grabbed my face, and what came out of my mouth was, "It is beautiful!"

Well, technically, no, but kind of wowy in a "wish I were a kid" way.

The steroids are supposed to reduce inflammation in the brain. I thought by day four I had made some progress, but no. No wine, plenty of sleep, clear system, and still, things are the same. I have never been diagnosed right the first time, for anything in my life, and I suspect that this will be no different. It will be fun. Anyway, instead of continuing my assaults on the automatic spell check, I am going to clean the house out to bare bones. I figure if there is less in, there is less to lose, less to miss, and less to screw up.

Hamlet, By Any Other Name

2006-12-13T17:43:00.000-05:00

I am stuffing the kids on the train from Malmö over to Copenhagen and up to Helsignor, where we will visit a castle with more names than Elizabeth fill in the blank Taylor. We call it Kronborg Slot, Shakespeare called it Elsinore. Hamlet called it Destiny. To encourage the kids to fall asleep faster, I told them it was haunted.

In searching for any haunted references on the internet, I came across a site that claimed San Diego as the most haunted place on Earth. Wikipedia has it fairly far down the list, except one entry gives it some credence. "The Whaley House in the "Old Town" section of San Diego, California, is a reportedly haunted house. The house was one of the region's first court houses as well as hanging grounds before being converted to a residence. The Whaley House is one of only a handful of homes recognized by the federal government as being undoubtedly haunted

The Whaley House does not consider itself officially haunted. Not sure why Wikipedia would allow that stuff to come in.

Sankta Lucia

2006-12-13T17:17:00.000-05:00

It is a dangerous holiday. Saint Lucia honors light, and is therefore secularly envoked by Scandinavians during the darkest month of the year to work a break. The eldest daughter of every family enters a room with candles encircling her crown, bringing light, a bit of fire risk, and a tray of gingerbread cookies to the rest of the family. We do it in a safer way, with batteries and midget flashlights. It is also a moment of clear choir vocals and candle light in an otherwise dark and cold time of year. Last night, as I lay awake fighting jet lag, I heard them sneaking out of bed to steal the pepparkakor cookies. Ha, ha, ha, Mom will never know. Except for the lamp they broke, maybe.

Then, after the youngest visited Santa, she confided to me that it was not the real Santa. Santa would never wear a gold bracelet and have hair on his arms. A real Santa would have soft, smooth arms. A watch at most, and soft, smooth, hairless arms.

Here is to all the guys who don the Suit, hairy arms or not. Merry merry.

Do Re Mi

2006-12-10T16:25:00.000-05:00

Overheard today coming from a daughter in the back seat of the car:

If Mom is mad at Dad
If Dad is mad at Mom
And Mom is really mad at the Sisters
Then come with me and switch
To the happy not horrible fam-i-ly.

I'm not always really mad at the girls.

When I Tremble in Awe and Fear

2006-12-04T19:10:00.001-05:00

It's more apt to be in front of an incorruptible Federal Agent.

C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled The Problem of Pain. I picked it up from a used book table near my office. I walk by this table every day, check the titles, grab whatever is odd, historical, or funny, pay a dollar and add it to the office library.

The book, I soon discovered and should have anticipated given the whole Narnia thing, was not so much about herniated discs and glass slivers. It was more about religion, which, Lewis explains, requires these three things: numinous (a trembling, fearful type of awe), a sense of morality, and then the numinous-er standing in judgment over one's fealty to morality. With Christianity, there is a fourth element: an historic event, like, oh, I don't know, Jesus, I guess.

In getting the reader to an understanding of what is meant by numinous, Lewis starts us down the path that leads to shock and awe by explaining that when someone says there is a tiger in the next room, one feels danger and fear, but that is not the same fear one feels at hearing that there is a ghost in the next room. With a ghost, there is not the same sense of physical danger.

I beg to differ. If someone tells me there is a ghost in the next room, I am equally concerned for my physical well being and would high tail it out of that house in an equally snappy manner. If there is a ghost, my experience from every movie I saw in middle school tells me that I will be a ghost soon, too. If there is not a ghost, then the person telling me such is insane and about to get out some type of limb-separating device and turn it on me.

He says, "I used to be an atheist, but then I realized, that had to be a reason that the three elements of awe, morality, and reckoning have been around forever and cross-culturally."

Or else he realized that people don't buy as many books from atheists.

I would like to have some fun with this book, but right now I am mighty tired of religion. So, Mr. Lewis, for now, it's back on the shelf. I think I saw a used book on that table that promised 365 Ways to Be Ready for Christmas. Much more practical.

Notes

2006-11-30T09:54:00.000-05:00

Writing, for me, is like tantric sex, if I knew what it was, I mean. The process is so extremely slow, almost maddening. Every little detail, every word combination, every bit is tweaked and retouched in an obsessive manner. When I am satisifed that the piece is ready to ship, I am so extremly happy, so thrilled and relieved at the same time. And I never think that I will be repeating it. I mean, it's not like 60 minutes on a stationary bike, or getting through a years finances for the accountant. The next venture at the computer will be a new assignment, another piece completely different and maddening and rewarding in its own way.

I understand there is a Rachel Ray Sucks Community, an anti-fan club, as coined by Rob Walker of the New York Times. I am not much of a cook, so I like her. I thought, as lately I keep seeing her face peer out from every book jacket and magazine cover, "Wow, she's shoved Eva Longoria right off the cover of everything." Thank god.

In the Maudsley approach (Maudsley Hospital in London) to treating anorexia, family members take the place of nurses, and encourage and calm the sufferes into eating. Harriet Brown's experience is also in the Sunday Times Magazine, and she talked of separating the demon from her daughter, and teach her daughter to not listen to the anorexic voice. It took me back to working on my father's disease, thinking about him as two people. I sensed that the drug dependency had actually so interwoven itself into my father's neuron efficiency, that the two could no longer be separated, but maybe for me, there was still time to talk to my bad selves: "What? Do you really need to eat an entire bag of all anything? Don't give me that all natural nonsense, either." "And you will drink that red wine because you have no recollection of how awful you will feel in the morning, or what?" "Would it kill you to be nice and bite your tongue, to not have to always say somehting?" I am up for treating the demons, but I will probably invest in a head set so people will not think I am always talking to myself.

Letter to Puppy

2006-11-13T14:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Junior Dog,

This is just a reminder that when we are outside, we are outside to urinate. We are not there to sniff air, bitch slap bushes, bark at leaves, bite the tops off boots or listen to passing cars. I have already had children. No one told me it would be like having another. Yet here it is, 4 a.m., and we just came in from a slightly above freezing, soggy backyard waiting for you to do whatever it is you are waiting to go inside the house to complete. We did the same thing at midnight. We did the same thing seven times yesterday. I am crabby. The only difference between a baby and a puppy is that nothing is swollen. My body is fairly intact, except the face, though. I will look deathly tired in the morning. I look deathly tired now. Nothing will cure that, certainly not time. The sooner you learn how much that upsets me, the better. I don't expect perfection. Just ask the kids who decided that I would appreciate an act of emptying nest replenishing. Nope, no perfection. A touch of cooperation and a bit of best effort, sure.

No one told me about your, um, odor, either. When I get to bed I can still smell you on my hands. I wash them again and again, but sometimes I forget and they are already dry and cracked from washing floors after all the accidents. I thought houses that smell of dog smell of old dog, the kind with bad gas and excema. This smell must come from your habit of stepping in everything that passes from your body and quite probably from eating it, too. No one warned me that puppies eat their own excrement. So the first time you turn around to look at it, I was not prepared. I did not move fast enough. I don't know how many other times I have missed that trick, so I have to warn everyone not to accept your little puppy e-coli kisses. Maybe you are a defective one? Is it possible that only my puppy eats poop?

Perhaps you have noticed, too, that since you arrived I have been stuck in permanent gray. I can't get out of sweatshirts, sweatpants, muddy gray boots. And don't get me started on the shower or anything close to a hairstyle. Getting less than awful looking would require me to go upstairs and leave you alone. I have to pull it together when you are asleep and not likely to chew electrical cords and fry, or, oh, I don't know, poop again and spoil your feeding schedule.

I am not sure I understand your leash skills, but I will do some research. "Heel" does not mean sit and stare up at me, with your butterball belly showing and floppy ears lifted forward as if to question my intent. My intent it to walk you and wear you out, out, out. In doesn't mean hauling it at full speed when in sight of a human child, either. The only other mode you seem to have is a slight gravitation pull sideways to the street. I don't see that in the product documentation anywhere. Perhaps another defect.

I hope that you can take some of this to heart and get with the program just a bit faster.

Adoringly,

Your Master

Where bad jokes come from

2006-09-21T20:42:00.001-04:00

Hey, you have a spelling test tomorrow. You don't know your words by heart?

I don't know those words.

No, I mean you have to be able to spell without looking

Are those words on my list?

Turn off the tv and get over here.

What They Say Notes

2006-09-18T10:06:00.000-04:00

"What could we buy Papa so he won't go to Sweden anymore?"

"Relationships are so political."

"No," she said to the clerk on the phone. "'P' as in 'Pig' and 'B' as in 'Big.'"

While comparing Sir Walter Raleigh's poetry to that of George Gascoigne, "It's so obvious."

Plan-O-Sphere

2006-08-16T05:55:00.000-04:00

I qualify as a junior geek. Way junior. My math skills are comfy only to long division and multiplication and in science I got as far as learning that iron is Fe, not Ir, and there I stopped. The last time I entered a science fair was the 4th grade. I filled huge black poster boards with the night sky, one of the Northern Hemisphere, one of the Southern. I was so proud, but I also realized that it was certainly not inventive. Still, it captivated me. But how things are fascinates me more every year, enough to read books like Earth, Annals of a Former World (McPhee), and the Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson).

I hadn't been to the Greek Islands in seven years. Back then, I traveled the more obscure Dodecanese, a group of islands that run up the most easterly parts of the Mediterranean, off the coast of Turkey. The night sky mesmerized me. I would stand on the old walkways along the tired ports and look up. Once ferried away from Rhodes and on up to Simi and Patmos, we would be far enough from city lights to see skies were filled with stars. I would romanticize over how they must have traveled those seas three and four thousand years ago. I never would have thought of it or figured out how to do it, but just standing there became one of those moments stored not so deeply in my memory. It's always there.

On this trip we limited ourselves to the more populated Cyclades, and therefore did not have the night vision needed to see all but the strongest constellations. So the Big Dipper and Casseopia's W/M really stood out. (It's amazing to think that that are comparatively close to where I live latitudinally, so the constellations were familiar.) I wish, however, that I had had this planosphere that I recently found at the Washington Jefferson College site. I am sure it would have impressed the group of people I was with, especially given the resounding, "uh, hunh" when I pointed out the rare glimpse of the Milky Way. Yep, would they have been impressed.

Time Off For Good Behavior

2006-08-10T08:24:00.000-04:00

"If I can stay at this job a year," the kid said in the thick, diction-challenged voice of a tenth grade graduate, as he jumped out of the big landscaping truck, "then I get a vacation. I've never had a vacation before. How about holidays? Are the paid, too?"

I heard this as I rode my bike to work, just back from an indulgent two week trip to the Greek Islands. Part of me cringed because I forget sometimes how lucky I am. Then my brain shifted over to wondering if that kid would ever last a year in his newfound, seasonal and competitve position. The boss part of me got annoyed over the fact that for so many people, the most exciting part about work is the time off.

I wanted to write every moment of the trip down. I carried a dictaphone and a tiny notebook with a Keith Haring-ish cover, but the truth is (something I discovered with my camera), if you focus too much on capturing the moment, you miss it. So I promised myself over and over again to remember this, to not forget.

Don't Do the Crime if You Can't Do the Time

2006-07-20T05:44:00.000-04:00

Whose mom came up with that one?

Interaction

2006-07-20T04:42:00.000-04:00

1. Stop by Prescriptives to get replacement bronzer. Last one.
2. Stop by Estee Lauder to get new self-tanners to test.
3. Wait for older woman to complete a purchase. She completes, but does not leave. She talks to me about Estee's old line of products, how nice they were, how much she enjoyed them when she used to go to the islands. Which islands I wonder, and is her story sad or sweet? Her dress is nice, and her hair is done, but her legs are thick and marked, an odd mix. She got the orange sun bag with purchase. Was I going to get the sunbag with purchase, she wanted to know, circling about behind me, moving to my right side as I face the counter and wait for cosmetics man with the pierced eyebrow to return my card. No, I explain, not wanting to offend. It doesn't have a zipper close. I am kind of scatterbrained. I need a zipper close. I look at her. We smile. She leaves.
4. I continue to wait for the eyebrow man, thinking of the woman, feeling an unidentifiable pang, some mixture of I should be her friend, I hope her life isn't empty, am I looking at my future, and so on.
5. With utmost approval (I knew enough to ask for the lotion and the complementing spray without being told), he hands me my card and overpriced vanity collection.
6. I turn to the right to collect my Prescriptives purchase from the make-up chair next to me.
7. It's gone.

Notes from the Dictaphone

2006-07-13T15:49:00.000-04:00

Every trip we take starts with the same ritual: a call to American Passport Express and the writing of several large checks. We are on file. "Oh, hi, Mrs. Berlin. Which child this year?" the man on the other end of the phone asks. "I love you guys," I say. And its true.

Givenchy jewelry for something pretty and inexpensive.

In honor of a a visiting dog, Edit cleaned the house with Windex and covered the glass coffee table with an Incredibles fleece blanket so we humans wouldn't mess it up.

The oldest has decided to add anorexia to the list of summer activities. She can't quite finish a whole sandwich at a restaurant, so the balance comes home in styrofoam and rests on a refrigerator shelf. Three days later, the middle child asks to finish it. I authorize with a "Sure. I guess." The oldest notices the next day and throws a tantrum: "Who ate my sandwich. You know that there are very few things that I can eat!" Actually, I didn't know that but now I am on notice that three-day old take-out is on the "Yes" list. Then I took off some nail polish and made the mistake of throwing into the bathroom garbage the used remover pad. She bent down, picked it up and rinsed it off, instructing me to do the same in the future Apparently OCD includes taking the time to wash the garbage.

"You are going to buy white pants for your six year old?"
Well, um, yes. Yes I am because I live in a fantasy world of Ralph Lauren print ads.
"Well, I know how your husband would come down on this one. He would agree with me. White on a six year old is just a bad idea."
Forget prepubescent couture, let's get back to when exactly did you start picking my husband for your team.

"That mother/daughter set was so bizarre, they made us look normal, Mom."

"Why don't you want to go play paintball with us? It'll be fun. You like competition; you'll get into it."
"Don't get me wrong, but I don't really think of cars and guns as sports."

Am I the only one who hates "The Safe Side of the Sidewalk"song by Kelly Clarkson?

My recommedation for this year's family vacation was horseback riding through the Mounument Valley canyons of Utah and Arizona. My husband assured me that most of us would die of hunger and dehydration and wondered if we couldn't we pick a time other than the middle of summer to visit the desert. How could we die? Is there a place in the northern half of the western hemisphere where construction companies haven't built a home for Chuck E' Cheese?

Intermittant Explosive Disorder, aka Road Rage, Spousal Abuse, and Homicidal Tendencies. I remember once misjudging how fast a car was driving. I pulled out a bit too close in front of a car going the other way, and barely missed him. The 50-something driver did a bat turn then came after me, trailing me for ten miles before I pulled - for safety sake - into my brother's driveway. He got out of his car to lecture me. I had a defense, sort of. They had recently increased the speed limit there, it was dark, and I miscalculated just how fast he was going. After he left, natch, I came up with: "How long do you think your heart is going to take this? You'll die of a heart attack sooner than a road accident." I wonder if that remark would be more effective than, "Take it easy, buddy," "Hey! It was more your fault!" or "If you have this much time to follow a girl around, then how come you were going so fast?"

The Puma sneaker was the first brand anything I had as a kid. I wore them out on the basketball court. No, that's not right. They wore me. I sucked at basketball. I just couldn't tolerate all those people in my face that I could not (1) hit or (2) grab the ball and run away from. No air, no support, no arch - just a piece of cloth, a sole, shoelaces, and the cat. The new designer retro Pumas feel the same, only I'm not buying them for basketball. I am buying them to walk into the gym and hear, "Wow. Those are so cool."

I am stuck in traffic jam with a mug of coffee and a box of office doughnuts. What kind of torture is this? The donuts are just, there, sitting next to me. They should probably be belted.

My daughter wanted one of these words to hang in her dorm room. http://www.kiaralinda.com. I was ok with the fact that the artists enjoy a vibrant decorating scheme. Heck, cookie cutter is so tedious. But Whimzee Twinz? Unless they really are twins, that's creepy.

I like Michelle DaRin's jewelry http://www.michelledarinjewelry.com/necklaces/index.htm because it is more like art. It is vibrant and fluid and out of the ordinary. And should be hung on a wall. How can anyone wear it and breathe? I would fidget with it until my fingers moved to the back of the clip and work the piece off of my neck onto the desk and where it would meet an untimely death under a stack of papers.

I volunteered to go with the kindergarten class to a local farm. I hate farms, by the way, but I went anyway because I figured of all the city kids' parents, I was probably the most familiar with farms. When I was 10 years old my parents moved us from Cleveland - a mulitcultural section full of neighbors and friends and walking-to-school distances - to another state and another state of mind. I remember arriving at the new house in the middle of the night. The next morning I woke up to see a deer and a dairy farm out my bedroom window. On the other side of the house was another dairy farm. I have never forgiven my parents. Never.

Where was I? Oh, right, the field trip. I thought I might be able to make sure that none of the kids get bitten or kicked, keep them from falling into dung or puddles of urine, and teach them that farm dogs and pretty swans are never to be trusted and chickens are too stupid to bother with. I mean, does anybody really think that a pony is easy to look at? They are dwarf horses, and, forgive me for I know I am not being sensitive here, I only like the full grown horses. The regular kind. And what kind of hobby is a rabbit? More work than a doll collection, but not much more interaction. We also took a hay ride along a country road, which gave us the slow motion view of people's yards festooned with all the things I hate about the country, like old conversion vans with for sale signs, plastic lawn chairs, ceramic deer, and cheery bunny front door decorations. Frankly, I don't think anyone's front yard needs more decoration that what you can't get by nature. Trees, grass, stones, and flowers. Nothin' storebought, thank you.

What valuable lesson did we learn from the farm? Pigs roll in the mud because they can't fetch the sunscreen from the bathroom counter. Certain lambs are just for eating, and that's the kind we were looking at. We never say "poop"; only "manure" and don't touch the mommy goat. That was fun.

Me: Seems the recorder was left on in my bag. I have a lot of me walking around in the house. god it sounds like a tomb. sorry. recorder all better now.
He: It goes like this, "Where are my keys? Have you seen my keys? Put that down. What are you doing? Stop that. Leave me alone. Here. Here, watch tv." (Sound of cork pulled from bottle)"

I'd like to buy into the minidress scene, but first I have to buy into a butt lift. Damn.