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Periodic Pain Will Prevail

A particularly gloomy weekend forecast for Boston in today’s New York Times…

Periodic Pain Will Prevail

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By Meredith – November 12, 2009

Let Them Eat Cake

Betty walked into the lobby of her office building on Wednesday morning with an unusually high sense of purpose. Today, she would not just be a marketing database analyst, responsible for entering various bits of data into a vast information system and then extracting other bits of data for purposes of lead generation, email communication, and campaign optimization. No, today she will make a difference in the lives of her co-workers. She would win their respect and good graces. She would be the undisputed hero of the Marketing Department. For she bore cake.

Chocolate cake, in fact. Homemade, with enough butter to qualify as ‘fudgy’ and enough sugar to make children scream.

There was no special or celebratory occasion. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday. It was just a little gesture to brighten everyone’s day, to give them the extra kick they needed to get them through the morning. And how clever she was to bring a treat on a Wednesday morning, when the previous weekend was a distant memory and the upcoming weekend was still out of grasp.

Betty walked off of the elevator and directly to her cubicle, holding the cake in her arms. She was able to rest the tupperware container on her lap while riding the train, but she had to hold it with both hands as she walked to the office to keep the cake from sliding and the icing from getting mussed up. Her forearms ached, but this small sacrifice made her cause seem even more noble. Look what I went through, so they could eat cake.

During her commute, she had debated how she should distribute the cake. Should she cut pieces onto paper plates to hand out directly to her co-workers, with a little plastic fork tucked conveniently under the cake? Or should she simply place the cake in the kitchenette to allow for serendipitous discovery, and then send a floor-wide email out to her floor (‘Chocolate cake in the kitchen!’) to ensure that she receive the proper credit for her goodwill?

After evaluating the benefits of each scenario, Betty decided to leave the cake in the kitchen, then modestly alert her favorite co-workers to the cake’s existence, then send out an email to the entire floor. With the cake in her hands, she headed back to the elevators and then towards the kitchen alcove.  Voices drifted through the hallway as she approached, and she was pleased an audience would witness her cake’s arrival.

“Good morning,” Betty said, stepping into the circle of 6 or 7 of her co-workers. She smiled brightly and then looked towards the counter where she intended to triumphantly place the cake. Only, sitting on the counter was a large pile of bagels surrounded by 3 or 4 tubs of flavored cream cheese! She realized that everyone was holding a semi-eaten bagel.

“Morning, Betty,” John the Communications Director said, raising his bagel in her direction. “I brought in bagels!”

“From the Bagel Hut!” Kelly the Graphics Intern chimed in. “They’re sooo good. Like, nice and chewy.”

“What’s that?” Jamie the Junior Copywriter asking, peering at her Tupperware. “Is that a chocolate cake?”

Betty felt her face grow hot. “Yes, a, um, chocolate cake,” she said. “It’s homemade.”

“You made it from scratch?” Tina the Marketing Analyst asked before taking a big bite of her sesame bagel.

“Yes,” Betty said lamely, looking around the cramped kitchenette in vain for a place to set her cake down. “Does anyone, um, want a piece?”

Silence. “Maybe after lunch I’ll have a bite or two of cake,” George the Product Manager said.

“Yeah, me too,” Jamie said. “After lunch.”

“Did you want a bagel, Betty?” John asked.

“I, um… I’m okay.” Betty went over to the refrigerator, which was so crammed with lunch bags and leftovers that her Tupperware didn’t have a chance of fitting on the top shelf. “I guess I’ll put out the cake after lunch,” she said, hugging the Tupperware to her body as she inched her way out of the kitchenette.

“Mmmm, looking forward to it,” Jamie said, before turning to John and asking, “Which Bagel Hut did you get these from? The one off of 16 or the one over in Melrose?”

Betty stalked back to her cubicle. What a stinking coincidence! In the 2 years that John has been there, he has never brought in so much as a piece of leftover Easter candy, let alone bagels. And what did he do, anyway? He spent 5 minutes buying bagels, while Betty spent 2 hours sifting, mixing, stirring, and baking her cake, and she’s relegated to a mere after-lunch-dessert provider?

She stared at the Tupperware, small fury welling in her throat as she sat down in her chair. The silence in the cubicle farm was deafening. Soon her coworkers would emerge from the kitchenette, their spirits lifted, their morale boosted, and their stomachs full of bagel.

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By Meredith – November 11, 2009

I Don’t Care if You Don’t Care

My regular readers of this website (or “Mom” and “Dad,” as I call them) may have noticed that yesterday’s post about being accused by a local teenager of listening to the Backstreet Boys received a record-breaking number of comments: Eight! That’s eight times the number of comments that any other single post on this website has ever received! (In stock market parlance, we’d call that an ‘eight-bagger’ and proceed to demolish a bottle of fine Romanée Conti in celebration. But I’m taking it in stride.)

So maybe my regular readers are wondering if the deafening silence that greeted every painstakingly-crafted post for the past six years finally caused my already-fragile personality to cleave into eight imaginary commenters to keep me company during my slow descent into madness, hmm?

Actually, I’m receiving some attention from Universal Hub, a website that semi-selectively aggregates blog posts, Twitters, and news items from around the Boston area. Yesterday’s post was featured here. A previous post about wet cat food was featured here. And another post about lobster baroness Linda L. Bean was featured here.

As casual as the attention may be, it is gratifying to have a stranger’s tacit appreciation for my writing. But… I actually received more than eight comments. Several people felt compelled to say things along the lines of “Who cares?” and “This is stupid.” I didn’t approve those comments to display on my website, and I was surprised at how angry they made me. I didn’t ask anyone to care. I don’t write to make anyone care. To borrow a line from Green Day, I really, really don’t care if you don’t care.

I abide by Kurt Vonnegut’s seventh rule of writing, which is “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” 90% of what I write on this website is to please my bff Amy, who became my muse in high school when we’d write each other long notes while idling away in classes. I developed a narrative voice solely for the purpose of entertaining her. It’s all quite unconscious, really… I don’t hold an image of Amy in my mind and imagine her reading what I’m writing. But my writing style is infused with a well-honed sense of what she’d like to read and how she’d enjoy reading it. And I instinctively knew that my imaginary Amy (as well as the real Amy, who is as faithful a reader as Mom and Dad) would get a kick out of “She’s listening to the Backstreet Boys,” even if most people would say, “Who cares?”

So I’m trying not to get distracted by the comments or by the idea that strangers are picking through my writing in search of arcane grammatical mistakes with which to taunt me. I write for myself and for one other person, and the day she says “Who cares?” or “This is stupid” is the day that I’ll take up a new hobby, like bull riding, crack pipe collecting, or listening to the mother-effing Backstreet Boys.

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By Meredith – November 10, 2009

She’s Listening to the Backstreet Boys

On Friday afternoon I took a non-purposeful yet nimble stroll on the bike path. After a week full of meetings, appointments, errands, and a nagging pile of work, how quenching to bask in the crisp autumnal daylight while listening to an instructional French-language podcast about helpful phrases to know when dropping off clothes at the dry cleaners (or “le pressing,” a delightful cognate) and enjoying my penultimate freedom Friday before my new full-time gig picks up.

I walked about 3 miles to the border of the town of Lexington before turning around. As I neared the Arlington High School, groups of teenagers began to pass me as they retreated from their school day — some grim faces, others festive, others utterly void. The path runs adjacent to the high school’s well-groomed athletic field, and a large section of the perimeter chain-link fence has been pried open to allow unofficial access to the grounds from the path. During and after school hours, students congregate here to do teenagery things like flirt, aggrandize, smoke, and plot to destroy their young lives before they have even started.

Ahead of me, a gaggle of teenagers sat perched on the railings on both sides of the path. It was mostly boys, dressed and groomed in a cool, casual, sloppy style. They struck me as smart kids; none of them were strikingly attractive, or large, or ugly, just pleasant-looking kids with normal-sized skulls and the understated mannerisms of future collegians. Yet the way that they flanked the path was odd and disconcerting, and a self-conscious reflex from my own youth kicked in as I approached them. Silly, I chided myself. Why should they take notice of a thirty-something woman with no aberrant physical traits who is just one of many recreational users of the bike path, passing by them as she minds her own business?

Why? Because they’re teenagers, emboldened by the proximity of their cutthroat high school, fresh from a day filled with bloodthirsty banter and contemptuous posturing, and just plain bored.

As I walked through the gauntlet, I felt eyes on me. Oh yeah, they could sense my unease: the too-rapid gait, the eyes trained on the ground. Someone had to seize this opportunity to comment wittily on this awkward adult, to exploit her weak fortitude, to funnel their angst into cowardly cruelty. Someone had to say something.

“She’s listening to the Backstreet Boys,” one brazen youth announced (which I clearly heard because, in fact, I was not listening to the Backstreet Boys. I was still listening to instructional French language podcasts on low volume so I would not get a headache from the farcical French enunciations.)

Hot rage flooded through my body as I plowed ahead on the path. The Backstreet Boys! I listen to a wide range of music, from hardcore punk to classical to traditional Indian to experimental rock to pop industrial to post-trip hop to lo-fi indie to new wave to cabaret to breakcore to big band to cock rock to French hip-hop. In fact, just about the only two things that I don’t listen to are country & western and the Backstreet Boys.

The middle finger on my left hand sprung erect, although I could not muster the requisite gumption to turn around and brandish it in the direction of my harasser. Impassioned retorts involving four-letter words rose to my lips, but they could not attain the necessary clearance from the rational part of my brain to be vocalized. After all, it wasn’t my race, gender, appearance, religion, or family that was being slandered. I can’t call a minor “you little f**k” because he grossly underestimated my presumed musical taste.

Still, the Backstreet Boys! Did he seriously judge me to have such a moronic undeveloped taste in music, or did he just have a bully’s instinct to know that I’d be severely perturbed by such an unjust smear? As I walked through the town center, I took stock of myself in the reflections of the store fronts. Sure, I’m sort of frumpy in my Adidas track pants and fleece sweatshirt, but did I look that… lame?

(I know… listening to French podcasts doesn’t exactly make me cool.)

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By Meredith – November 9, 2009

An Afternoon with Al Bore… I mean, Al Snore… I mean, Al Gore

“Wanna go see Al Gore?” I asked Mr. P over breakfast, trolling the Harvard Book Store event calendar for visiting authors I could tolerate listening to for an hour without committing mental hari-kari.

Mr. P shrugged. I shrugged back.

“Okay,” he said.

Sure, we wanted to go. Al Gore is a global name, a respected leader, and a key figure in one of the most urgent movements of our time. He’s got Nobel Peace Prize energy. He’ll appear in history books—possibly with his own volume. So yes, we wanted to see Al Gore. But we weren’t excited, like OMIGOD EFFING AL GORE!

We arrived an hour early to line up at the Unitarian church in Harvard Square. We wanted (and got) good seats. The man behind us installed solar panels for a living; the woman in front of us was an environmental science professor. Their eco-cred made me feel a little fraudulent. Sure, I recycle. I take quick showers. I buy local arugula and avoid fast fashion. But like 99.9% of Americans, I’m not doing the planet any favors. I had, in fact, just bought a brand-new internal-combustion car the week before. And now here I was, waiting to see Al Gore.

In person, he doesn’t really look like Al Gore anymore (see photos below). The beard is gone. He’s slimmer, balding, and visibly graying. He opened with a warm anecdote about being recognized at a café in California:

“You know, if you dyed your hair black, you’d look just like Al Gore!”
Big laughs. Because yeah… it’s true.

Then came the humblebrag:

“I was on the phone this morning with the Prime Minister of Denmark…”
Of course you were. You’re Al Gore.

His hourlong talk? I won’t say it was boring—impending global doom is hard to snooze through—but his delivery is famously… dry. The voice, the pacing, the tranquil hand gestures—it’s like watching a very earnest robot explain compost. I lost the thread somewhere between alternative fuels and oil prices and gently floated in and out of consciousness.

He did light up when he got to the solution: Collective political will.

“It’s important to change the lightbulbs, but it’s more important to change the policies,” he said. “We have a democracy problem in America.”

He blamed television.

“The average American watches five hours of TV a day. And someone’s making up for me.”
(Pause for laughs.)

He explained how 80% of campaign funds go toward television ads, forcing candidates to cozy up to special interests.

“I’m not talking about corruption,” he clarified. “I’m talking about a serious defamation of American democracy.”
Which—okay—but also… is there a difference? Or just fewer subpoenas?

Despite the lack of oratorical sizzle, I walked away inspired. Everyone got a copy of Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis—a glossy, textbook-style tome with photos, charts, and sidebars. No Q&A (boo), but Gore did stay to sign books. No personalizations allowed, but he looked Mr. P in the eye and said, “Thanks for coming out.” Then he looked at me and asked, “How’re you doing?”

I’m fine, Al Gore. I just bought a gas-powered car and now I’m reading your climate crisis textbook on recycled paper. We’re all doing great.

Al Gore, Saying Something
Al Gore, Saying Something
Al Gore, Saying Something Else
Al Gore, Saying Something Else
Al Gore's Signature
Al Gore’s Signature
This picture from Al Gore's book says a million words
This picture from Al Gore’s book says a million words, one of which is “revenge”

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By Meredith – November 7, 2009

Linguistic Pet Peeve #82918: Seasoned Professionals

“Firm XXX has appointed three seasoned professionals to help grow the company…”

“I’m a seasoned professional with 25+ years of experience…”

“We’re looking for seasoned professionals who can handle the demands of…”

Is there anyone under the age of 40 (an unseasoned professional, I guess) who is not chafed when someone describes themselves as a “seasoned professional?”  We all know that is just a kind-hearted euphemism for “has years of irrelevant experience and obsolete knowledge.”

When I hear the term, I cannot help but to picture business people being shelled of their suits, placed naked on a broiler pan, and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and maybe a touch of cardamon.

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By Meredith – November 5, 2009

Freude! Freude!

Tonight we attended a working rehearsal of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus performing my all-time favorite, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Despite having listened to the Ninth Symphony at least 500 times, I’ve somehow managed to never actually see a live performance of it, owing to schedule conflicts, sold-out performances, and one luckless trip to Tanglewood foiled by killer traffic on the Mass Pike on a steamy hot Sunday in August several years ago.  Freude! Freude!

So I was excited, but a tad chargined that we were going to a rehearsal rather than the formal performance. But, you know what? The Ninth Symphony is the Ninth Symphony. Its power cannot be blunted by uncombed hair and street clothes. The chorus may look like a bunch of sad sacks, fresh from the toil and monotony of their day jobs, but the sounds that emanated from their throats is the universal anthem of joy, and I got shivers. Freude! Freude!

Tanglewood Festival Chorus

Tanglewood Festival Chorus

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By Meredith – November 4, 2009

Driving By Myself

Today I drove my new Jetta for the first time, alone. I’m still trying to master its sensitive manual clutch. Mr. P has given me several tense lessons during which I repeatedly stalled at traffic lights, shifted to the wrong gear (i.e, shifting from fifth gear to second gear while going 45 mph on the highway), and just generally spazzed out in traffic. “Driving’s not supposed to require this much thought!” I whined, my left foot pumping, my right hand shifting, my heart racing with certainty of impending fiery crash.

I had a 9am appointment in Waltham, so I started driving at 8am. Traffic was particularly heavy this morning, or so it seemed to me, because normally I’m paying no mind to the gridlock that I cruise past on my walk to the subway. Near a school, a cagey crossing guard who could change the traffic light to red with the touch of a button caused a 15 minute back-up. On Route 2, a broken-down van in the left lane created wicked gridlock that had me despairing for my future as a car commuter. “How do people do this every day without going mad?” I agonized, fiddling with satellite radio (free for the first six months), no song being able to distract me from the misery and frustration that is stop-and-go highway traffic, not even “Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland.”

But the manual clutch is becoming more automatic, as everyone has assured me it would. I’m starting to feel it. I made it to my appointment and back home again with no major incidents — just a few stalls and a several moments of “hmm, am I in third or fifth?” Pity the drivers behind me, though. I drive like an old lady with a texting addiction.

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By Meredith – November 4, 2009

The French Re-Revolution

Perhaps you can tell from the banner of this website that I’m a big fan of the French Revolution. Best. Revolution. Ever. Not that I support mob vengeance and indiscriminate mass executions, but I get a warm glow when I think of starving serfs bucking against the political excesses and conspicuous consumption of the aristocrats by whacking off their heads with a guillotine, which I cannot help but to view as more of an instrument of justice than of death.

Let us not (ironically) forget Santayana’s Aphorism on Repetitive Consequences: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. These are shaky times for French politicians. Given the French citizenry’s particularly terrific history of revolt, I’d recommend that anyone connected with the French government to wear iron scarves and stay clear of bloodthirsty mobs.

France’s leading society magazine is preparing the tumbrel for French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Italian heiress/pop chanteuse/former oft-naked model whom Sarkozy married shortly after ascending to the Presidency and divorcing his second wife Cecilia. Carla’s penchant for luxury was originally viewed as an asset to Sarkozy’s rather ignoble public persona. But Point de Vue condemns Bruni-Sarkozy as the “new Marie Antoinette” and points out some striking physical and biographical similarities between the two fashion-obsessed socialites, including the “same posture, same look, same smile” (here). Same neck too, perhaps? In any event, the chief difference between the two women is that Bruni-Sarkozy has been with many, many, many, many more men.

Also on the chopping block is Sarkozy’s 23-year-old son Jean Sarkozy, a law student who was recently tipped to head the public agency that oversees Paris’s La Défense, one of Europe’s biggest business districts. Why, the President’s son’s meteoric rise through the ranks of French government is nothing short of amazing! After the public outcry and charges of nepotism, ‘Prince Jean’ backed down from the job (here), though he maintains that he is succeeding based on his own credentials, which is so touchingly naive that it transcends callowness. Whatever. I want to take him home and feed him soup.

Meanwhile, the Mitterand clan — the preeminent ‘royal’ family of the French republic — is faring no better. Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of the late socialist president François Mitterrand, was one of 37 people convicted last week of involvement in the illicit sale of $790 million worth of Soviet-made arms to Angola in the 1990s (here). More sensationally, his cousin Frédéric Mitterrand is resisting calls to resign from his post as the French culture minister over mounting public disgust about his 2005 autobiography, in which he described paid encounters with “young boys” in Bangkok (here). Mitterrand admits paying for sex in Thailand, but he claims that he calls all men “boys” and that he was not referring to minors, a defense that might have a sliver of plausibility had he adamantly defended admitted-pedophile Roman Polanski a week earlier. Still, it looks like Mitterrand will survive his Reign of Media Terror with his head if not all of his other appendages intact.

And even former President Jacques Chirac is being hauled out of retirement to stand trial for corruption charges, in which he faces 3 to 10 years under charges that he awarded fake jobs to political allies back when he was the Mayor of Paris (here). Shockingly, 7 out of 10 French believe that Chirac — France’s most beloved living politician — should stand trial. The French are getting feisty, it appears. They’re sharpening the guillotines.

(Sidenote: If America thinks France is a socialist country now, just wait until after the next elections…)

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By Meredith – November 2, 2009

Pantless

Last night I had my first ever ‘pantless’ dream. Strange how I managed to go 32 years without experiencing this notorious neurotic nighttime specter, and it should manifest on Halloween night no less, when my slumber should have been interrupted by brain-hungry zombies, criminal clowns, unrelenting serial killers, and rogue Republicans, not by inexplicable public nudity.

I was in a posh bed and breakfast with a lavish brunch buffet. Streams of people were pouring in through the front door and into the dining room. I wore a sweater and my heavy raincoat, but I had believed that pants were optional. Or at least that what I rationalized as I paraded around the dining room, nude from the waist down, feeling incredibly self-conscious about any ripply subcutaneous tissue that may exist on my exposed buttocks (only in my dreams, of course.) I considered tying my jacket around my waist to hide my shame, but I was convinced that this would make me look even more ridiculous. No, I needed to find my pants.

And then my dream ended as they all do: I woke up. And indeed, my legs were bare, but my closet was simply brimming with pants. What a relief. The end.

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By Meredith – November 1, 2009