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Things I Think About on the Treadmill

  • Maybe I should start getting the Globe home delivery Thursday through Sunday instead of just Sunday.
  • Maybe I should just grow-up already and get the NYTimes delivered 7 days a week.
  • Do I have enough eggs to last until next weekend?
  • What would sauteed lettuce taste like?
  • I want a Godiva chocolate bar.
  • I am a huntress on the African veldt, chasing down a bucking oryx. My stride is confident, sturdy, and quick.
  • I should really tie my shoelaces tighter.
  • I haven’t done a heavy biceps workout in over a month.
  • Should I get the new Interpol album Antics?
  • That woman on the stairstepper is sweating entirely too much.
  • “Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.” – Mark Twain
  • Ever since my gym morphed from slightly-scary Club Fitness into a Gold’s Gym franchise, my opinion of the facilities has dropped. The random ceiling leaks, strange industrial smell, and antiquated bathroom fixtures were okay for Club Fitness, but I would expect a little more from a Gold’s Gym.
  • I wonder if Video Oasis has Mean Girls on DVD?
  • If Bush loses the election, will Mitt Romney run against John Kerry in 2008? The South would be forced to vote for a Massachusetts politician!
  • If Bush wins the election, how will we put up with him for another 4 years?
  • If my office had an arm-wrestling contest, I bet I’d beat all the other females.

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By Meredith – October 3, 2004

Yuppie Sumarai

I feel compelled to comment on the ever-expanding size of umbrellas wielded by Boston commuters. The diameter of these umbrellas seems to grow in direct proportion to the width of modern-day SUVs. In both cases, the mantra is clear: bigger is better… if you’re the one holding it.

Sure, standing beneath a table-sized disc of nylon ensures you’ll stay dry, impervious to even the most slanting sheets of rain. But in a downtown crammed with hundreds of commuters during a storm, wielding a beach umbrella is the epitome of selfishness. You block the flow of two-way foot traffic, bash into the sides of other people’s umbrellas, and commandeer an unreasonable amount of space, disrupting the delicate ecosystem of wet pedestrians just trying to get to work with their dignity intact.

If you’re out on a picnic or a leisurely country walk, by all means, carry your five-foot canopy and revel in its coverage. But if you’re in the Financial District, weaving through throngs of people, don’t try to assert dominance with the sheer circumference of your rain gear. Your umbrella’s size is not a proxy for power or status, no matter how impressive it looks when unfurled.

I once saw a man in a business suit with an umbrella so large it hung on his back in a sling. I imagined it starting to rain, and him whipping it out like a samurai drawing his sword—ready to shield his Hugo Boss suit at all costs. The Yuppie Samurai, prepared for battle against the elements.

Posted in Americana, Massachusetts.

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By Meredith – October 2, 2004

Corporate America Gave Me Unlimited Sick Days and All I Got Was Larry Elder

Yesterday, I took my first sick day of 2004. I had a slight fever, and every exhale launched tiny goblets of phlegm into the air like viral confetti. I’d hacked my way through a Monday meeting—almost certainly aerosolizing the entire conference room—before finally admitting defeat and surrendering to the couch.

I don’t like taking sick days. Two years ago, my company “generously” abolished the official sick day policy. Now we’re allowed to take time off “whenever necessary.” Which sounds progressive, but is actually a masterclass in corporate mind games. When you have five sick days in the bank, you feel entitled to use them. But when the pool is bottomless, any absence feels like theft. You’re not protecting your coworkers from a virus—you’re a dishonorable slacker who left the team hanging to drink DayQuil in your pajamas.

Still. I was sick and sounded contagious. So I stayed home. And like many the mildly ill before me, I did the only reasonable thing: I marinated in daytime television.

First up: CJ (Celebrity Justice). An entire show devoted to the legal woes of the famous. It was an endless parade of courtroom disasters and washed-up tabloid drama. A Barker Beauty suing Bob. Survivor (the band) suing Survivor (the show). Phil Spector calling prosecutors “fascists.” R. Kelly dodging charges. Janet Jackson getting invoiced for the FCC fine. I lost track after the fourth D-list scandal, but suffice it to say: everyone is suing everyone, and no one is paying child support.

Next, I stumbled into The Larry Elder Show, which I’d never heard of but briefly mistook for early-’90s Montel before it took a hard turn into trauma-porn. Larry’s guest was a mom worried about her 17-year-old daughter. Within 120 seconds, he was asking the girl, “How many men have you had sex with?”—which somehow wasn’t the most upsetting part. That honor goes to her mother screaming, “She’s destroyed her life! Whore! Whore!” at full volume. Larry nodded gravely, as if he’d done something noble. I fled.

Maury Povich offered no reprieve. He looks ten years younger than he did ten years ago, which is disorienting. That day’s episode: “I’m Sorry… Our Disabled Son May Not Be Yours! Pt. 2.” Within seven minutes, Maury was delivering a DNA test. I know it’s a cliché to say Maury does a lot of DNA tests, but Jesus—we were mid-paternity by the first commercial break. There was yelling. Crying. Collapsing into stage-side cushions. By the end, even the cameraman seemed winded.

At that point, I turned to CNN, hoping for dignity. What I got was a soft-focus montage of hurricane damage and Tony Blair pressers. Apparently, mid-day CNN is just Lifetime for people who also like graphs. I dozed off and woke up to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on screen, which reminded me: American women allegedly find Tony Blair sexy. I do not. But Rasmussen? Strange, stern allure. Would hit.

Then, finally, Court TV delivered local flavor. The Alexander Pring-Wilson murder trial was airing live—from a courthouse roughly 1,000 feet from my apartment. Despite the proximity, it was stunningly dull. I turned it off.

At some point, I made soup, coughed like a Dickens orphan, studied GRE algebra, and gradually returned to life.

Doing algebra on a sick day? Wild. Ten years ago, I would’ve spent the afternoon writing Dawson’s Creek fanfiction and calling it literature.

Posted in Culture, The 9 to 5.

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By Meredith – September 29, 2004

Sprawl

Yesterday’s trip to the White Mountains took us out of the City and into the Sprawl. And then into the woods.

I’ve lived without a car for so long that the mere activity of driving in Sprawl is novel. As we drove on I-93 approaching Concord NH, we were hungry for dinner and decided to find a restaurant. In Cambridge, such an inclination would unleash a flurry of planning and haggling: What kind of food, how close is the restaurant, do we have to take the T or walk, etc. But when you’re mired in Sprawl, you just pull off the highway and there is every chain restaurant ever conceived. And if you pull up to one and see a long line or have a last minute change of heart, you just get back into the car. Decisions are easy when your choices are right there, not a 30 minute walk or subway ride away.

Need gas? In Cambridge, gas stations are few and far between. Gas stations are the lifeblood of Sprawl; they flank every intersection so you don’t even have to make a U-turn. All have more islands than the Bahamas and a brightly-lit convenience store with hundreds of promising goodies.

Sprawl just makes you want to buy things. It makes you want to consume, because it’s easy and there’s really not that much else to do. Need wood for your campfire? Drive across the street to the Shaw’s supermarket. Want to update your camping outfit? There’s an LL Bean Factory store and an EMS. Anything, everything you could possibly need is never more than a five-minute drive in the car.

As an outsider to Sprawl, I must say that it’s gotten exponentially worse in the last four years. There are too many stores. There are too many restaurants. And of course there are too many cars. And the result is that Sprawl is making suburbanites sick.

Though Sprawl is connected to many health ailments, interestingly “The study found no link between suburban sprawl and a greater incidence of mental health problems.” Because if I lived in a place where every other person you see is either driving or shopping, I’d go effing crazy.

Posted in Americana.

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By Meredith – September 28, 2004

Noise Makes Animals of Us All

One of the more dispiriting discoveries of adulthood: the creeping intolerance to noise. When I first moved to Boston five years ago, the city’s sonic chaos barely registered. I slept through sirens, tuned out construction, rode the T without incident. Now? I can feel my blood pressure spike with every honk, every overheard phone call. My body responds like an over-caffeinated zoo animal: tense, twitchy, low-level enraged.

Some noise still feels like a gift. The good kind:

  • Music, as long as it’s mine, or at least coming from someone who respects volume as a social contract.
  • Kids laughing, as long as they haven’t eaten Skittles in the past thirty minutes.
  • Birds, leaves, wind, crickets. Nature’s white noise.
  • That warm, indistinct hum of conversation in a crowded restaurant, the audio equivalent of ambient light.

But then there’s the rest. The bad noise:

  • Music that arrives uninvited: car stereos, leaky headphones, subway buskers with dreams unmoored from talent.
  • Drunken bellows, performative laughter, people who speak in all caps.
  • Children whining like broken sirens or shrieking near my food.
  • Sirens, car alarms, souped-up engines, idling buses—the mechanical chorus of modern life.
  • And of course, construction. Always construction.

It’s not just annoying. It’s destabilizing. See: the spike in neighbor-on-neighbor violence over speaker volume. See also: yesterday’s commute.

In just 25 minutes, I was ambushed by no fewer than a dozen assaults on the eardrum. Jackhammers, honking, a car alarm, some godforsaken meringue track that appears to be the only one ever produced, playing on loop from a too-loud sedan.

Even Kendall Square, with its illusion of quiet respectability, couldn’t deliver peace. The T offered a pre-recorded scold about unattended baggage, a preschooler testing the limits of indoor voice, and a woman muttering “uhhmigod” like an incantation. I emerged downtown to what is essentially one continuous construction site, all of it threaded together by a wall of buses, trucks, and type-A drivers who believe horns are a form of punctuation.

The final insult: an ambulance wailing through gridlock, inching forward at 5mph while the rest of us clutched our skulls.

This city is aging me. Accelerating the decline. If I’m lucky enough to make it forty more years, I’ll be spending them on a hobby farm, where the only things that beep are egg timers and maybe the goats.

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By Meredith – September 17, 2004

NY Fashion Week 2005: How to Look Ridiculous Without Really Trying

Fashion Week is once again underway in New York, and designers — never ones to resist a nostalgic misfire — are deep in their 1970s phase. The Spring 2005 collections are full of synthetic slink: fabrics that cling, colors that offend, and silhouettes best left to Studio 54.

I’m not particularly fashionable. But I do have a sixth sense for when something looks bad. And in the age of mass-market fashion trickle-down, being able to identify a ridiculous trend is its own form of survival. I may not be stylish, but at least I’m not a lemming in a polyester jumpsuit.

Boston isn’t a fashion capital, but you’d be surprised how many women here try to translate Vogue spreads into sidewalk look. And with deepest respect to everyone just trying to get dressed in the morning: some trends need to be buried. Deeply. Preferably with a stake.

1. Pink.
Pink has finally trickled down to the demographic least suited for it: the old, the overworked, and the overstimulated. There are two groups who can reliably pull off pink: girls between the ages of one and eight, and blondes. The rest of you are gambling. The other day on the T, I saw a Hispanic woman — slim, well-groomed, clearly stylish — wearing a candy-pink sateen pleated A-line skirt. She was probably in her late forties. It was… jarring.

2. The Scarf Belt.
Every time I see someone thread a scarf through her belt loops, I flash to a QVC presenter raving about “versatility!” and “feminine flair!” Like she’s going to tie it around her waist and her handbag and maybe later her Yorkie. A scarf belt is not an accessory, it’s a warning sign. I see it and wonder how often she re-ties it after washing her hands in a public bathroom.

3. Butt Words.
There is perhaps no fashion trend more revealing than Greek letters stitched across the rear of a pair of sweatpants. I don’t need to explain it. The joke writes itself. Or rather, embroiders itself in varsity font across someone’s backside.

4. Dysfunctional Shoes.
Boston is a walking city. Boston is also a minefield of cracked sidewalks, cobblestones, and crosswalks that dare you to make it in one piece. So when I see someone navigating downtown in spike heels with no ankle support, I feel a complicated mix of pity, rage, and orthopedic concern. If you’re being chauffeured to a party, fine… strut like you mean it. But if you’re actually walking more than 50 feet, know this: unless you are a gazelle in a past life, you look one misstep away from a slow-motion sidewalk collapse.

5. Flip Flops.
Wikipedia calls flip-flops “a kind of flat, backless sandal… held on the foot by a V-shaped strap.” Which sounds fine if you’re at the beach. Not, say, on a subway platform in a city with 400-year-old rat burrows and questionable liquid seeping from street corners. Flip flops are for sand. Not sewage.

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By Meredith – September 14, 2004

Book Review –  Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan

I picked up this book because I enjoy histories of cities and had, shall we say, a passing curiosity about rats. I put it down two days later, a reluctant expert on rodent sex lives, extermination techniques, and NYC’s most tenacious scavengers.

A few unsettling rat facts I now know:

  • In 1979, a tugboat union strike left New York City’s garbage festering in the streets, providing a buffet for the rat population. One woman was allegedly swarmed by rats so aggressively she fled into her car. New York: where being car-jacked by rats is not outside the realm of possibilities.
  • Rats are prodigious reproducers. They will mate up to 20 times a day. Twenty. Times. A. Day. With litters of 8–10, every 21 days. It’s not so much a mating season as it is an ongoing bacchanal.
  • Rat math: For every rat you see, there are 10 more. If you see one in the daytime? You don’t have rats. You have a situation.
  • The “cat solution” is a myth. The only thing that reliably works is poison. Or, in some parts of NYC, apparently, firearms.
  • Their favorite foods? Scrambled eggs, mac & cheese, and cooked corn. Least favorite? Apples. Though preferences, like accents, are regional: rats near a Chinese food dumpster might favor rice; those in Hispanic neighborhoods develop a taste for spice.

The book is journalistic, not scientific, which means we get vivid storytelling but also a few too many introspective detours into the author’s personal rat musings. I skimmed some of those. Sorry, Sullivan. I came for gore and history.

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By Meredith – June 15, 2004

Advertising Age

At what point does the omnipresent push to make us all walking wallets demean humanity?

When college students start “headvertising” by getting ads temporarily tattooed to their foreheads (guaranteed to “get you individually noticed in any crowd”)?

When movie-goers who have just paid ten bucks to see the latest Hollywood inanity must view a slew of commercials before the previews start?

When you’re in a bathroom stall at the pool hall, sitting on the toilet and staring at an ad for Yasmin birth control pills?

Or did advertising get out of control a long time ago, when product peddling became empyreal and began polluting the skies, the ultimate reminder that we are just shoppers?

I looked out my window yesterday to admire a perfect New England day with a luscious cool blue sky… An ad for Ameritrust is circling the sky above Fenway Park for the Red Sox game (which they lost, 14-5). The blimp hummed importantly as it maneuvered turns. It was there all day long.

blimp


Of course, ads on blimps are nothing new. We’re accustomed, so we never stop to think it’s disgusting. Kids like to point at them and maybe adults feel important, like they’re at event special enough to warrant a blimp.

But it made me think: Since the dawn of civilization, humans have pondered the truths of the universe while gazing at the skies… should we be forced to think about mortgages?!?

Our first morning at the beach on the Outer Banks a few weeks ago , I marveled to en that no planes flew above the shores towing ads: “At the Jersey shore, planes fly by every 5 minutes with ads!” I spoke too soon, or too early in the morning, because about an hour later, planes started flying above us towing ads for Hooters.

I wonder what would Pythagoras would think of that [insert celestial body joke here].

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By Meredith – June 13, 2004

Enron: And Today’s Travesty of Justice is…

After reading Pipe Dreams by Robert Bryce, I knew everyone involved in the Enron scandal deserved to be sent to prison. And not a fenceless white-collar prison, but a dank facility where murderers constantly size them up and maggots wallow in their morning gruel.

Those Enron effers not only felt entitled to steal astronomical sums of money, but thought they would get away with it. They are essentially leeches who contribute nothing to society because they cannot control their greedy-bastard egos.

Take Lea Fastow, wife of CFO Andy Fastow. She took it upon herself to make bad artistic investments and decorate Enron’s offices despite the impending bankruptcy: The Fastows were the driving force behind an amazing art-buying binge. They spent $575,000 on a soft sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. They paid $690,000 for a wooden sculpture by Martin Puryear, a record amount for his work sold at auction… by August and September 2001, the company had spent about $4m on 20 different pieces.

She fancied herself a real bit of culture, this one. Then, Lea helped hide her husband’s crimes, for which yesterday she was sentenced to a mere YEAR in prison. Her husband, indicted on what eventually grew to 98 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading, money laundering and others for engineering widespread schemes to hide debt, inflate profits and enrich himself on the side, got 10 years in prison.

Welfare Moms we vilify… Drug Addicts we lock up… Prostitutes we marginalize… Martha Stewart we crucify… but Enron crooks we slap on the wrist? If this country strives to be a capitalist democracy, we cannot tolerate criminal acts of corporate greed. Just because a crime is non-violent does not mean it is victimless. Ask the people who lost their retirement funds because this rich bitch bought art.

Posted in In the News.

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By Meredith – June 10, 2004

But-oh-oh those summer nights

I remember when summer television was nothing but re-runs, and nobody cared. It was accepted. It was summer.

To watch television on a summer night and miss out on the prolonged, resuscitative evening sunlight and sweet atmospheric coolness would be insanity. There were pools to swim in, bikes to ride, fireflies to catch, tents to pitch, playgrounds to roam, balls to throw, and air-conditioned malls and movie theatres in which to hide if the heat was unbearable.

I sound like an old fogey but I don’t care. There’s something genuinely wrong when people want to watch television during the summer, and the networks oblige by unleashing over 20 new series for people to suckle on.

And we wonder why the children of America are dumb and fat? Why we’re dumb and fat? This isn’t a case of networks and advertisers trying to foist must-see TV on an innocent public. Over the years, ratings during the summer have risen to the point where our proclivity for crap is making it worth the network’s time to compete for viewers.

Terrified that their kids will suffer from abduction! drive-by shooting! marijuana smoking! sex! freak accident! if they venture outside, parents all over the country would prefer their precious offspring watch 2 brainless sluts parody the good folk of this country in Fox’s Simple Life 2. They themselves will gladly escape from the drudgery of their 9-to-5s by immersing themselves in Fox’s The Casino, dreaming of a job that’s essentially also a vacation.

I guess I understand if you stay in to watch FOX… it looks so damn appealing. Better that you miss summer to watch sexy new stuff instead of a Malcolm in the Middle that you’ve seen twice before.

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By Meredith – June 9, 2004