Archives for the month of: January, 2006

With Democrats like these…

January 30, 06 //
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…who needs Republicans? (Okay, that doeesn’t quite work, because really, who needs Republicans anyway? Nonetheless…)

Courtesy of Salon. a sampling of reasons provided by Senate “Democrats” on why they wouldn’t support a filibuster on the Alito nomination:

Tim Johnson, D-SD: “I am troubled by Judge Alito’s apparent views on matters such as executive power, his past opposition to the principle of one person, one vote, and his narrow interpretation of certain civil rights laws. Even so, I cannot accept an argument that his views are so radical that the Senate is justified in denying his confirmation.” (Okay, so he’s an extremist, but not enough of an extremist?)

Mary Landrieu, D-LA: “It is imperative that we remain focused on creating the tools New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast will need to rebuild … We simply cannot afford to bring the Senate to a halt at a time when we need its action the most.” (Right…let’s not keep an eye on the big picture or focus on the future or anything; instead, let’s doom entire generations to a radical right-wing Supreme Court, because that will clearly help the people affected by Hurricane Katrina.)

Joe Biden, D-DE: “I see no reasonable prospect that a filibuster would work.” (Now there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for you…it won’t work, so I’ll help make absolutely certain that it won’t work. Good reasoning there, Senator.)

Honestly, if the Dems bend backwards any farther to appease the Bushies, they’re going to turn themselves inside out. I guess that would result in their becoming Repugs, which they basically have anyway. I can’t believe I gave the DNC money last year. That won’t be happening again, I tell you what. Not until and unless they suddenly grow a collective spine.

I’m thinking it’s time for a new bumper sticker: “I’m anti-Alito, and I vote.” I just wish I lived in a state where I could vote one of these feeble excuses for Democrats out of office. That would at least go some tiny way toward assuaging the growing sense of political powerlessness that I feel. Not that I’ve ever felt politically powerful, of course, but there was a time, not that long ago, where I could still feel that a majority of Dems stood for the same things I did, or gave lip service to standing for those things. More and more, though, they stand for not ruffling feathers, not making themselves fodder for the wingnut talk-show hosts, and most of all, not risking anything that will engender accusations that they’re liberals. It’s a game that they can’t win, but they’re pretty much all desperate to play it anyway.

More than ever, I miss Paul Wellstone.

The City

January 29, 06 //
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So my brush with the Joys of Business Travel got even better when, at about 8:30 the night before my 6:30 a.m. flight, I got a call from the senior management type whom I was traveling with, telling me that our flight had been canceled and he was trying to get us on another flight that would leave around the same time but would involve connecting in Chicago. It turned out that it was some weird code-share thing that required us to get our tickets from US Air but check in at United. US Air’s Website doesn’t mention the ticketing part, though—they just tell you to check in at United, which is what I did. It’s a long story, but due to the kindness of various airport personnel (a rarity, I know, but Missourians are the friendliest people in the world, I swear. Seriously, even the postal workers. Even the motor vehicles workers. It’s downright weird, in a good way), I didn’t miss the plane, though I came very close. Usually, when I travel on my own, I’m ridiculously punctual, but I couldn’t sleep the night before my trip, and I just wasn’t moving very efficiently on Wednesday morning. I was having horrible visions of missing the plane and losing my job, because I had the presentations that we needed for the meeting, and the guy I was traveling with is a managing partner, and…it just wouldn’t have been good. But all was fine in the end, despite having to walk 90 miles across O’Hare carrying my laptop and all the presentations and my suitcase. Fine for me, at least; the stupid airline managed to lose the managing partner’s bag en route to Philadelphia, and of course we weren’t staying in Philadelphia; in the end, we were only there for about three hours. The partner also told me that he had gotten an automated recording about the flight being canceled, with no other information—not even an 800 number for rebooking. And US Air wonders why it’s in bankruptcy…

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that in spite of the unexpectedness of the trip, and in spite of the way it disrupted my whole schedule (meaning this coming week is going to be busier than it would have been if I hadn’t lost two days last week), it was still a very good trip, partly because both clients were good, smart people who know what they want and know what they’re doing, but mainly because I got to spend time in New York, aka home. I’ve gone on about this many times before, of course, but I’m still always a little bit surprised at the effect that just being in the city—even at Penn Station waiting for a cab on a raw, windy night after a long day of meetings and lugging all my junk with me—has on me, instantaneously. It’s home, and as much as I feel settled here in many ways, and as much as I appreciate the low cost of living and easy pace of life here on the Plains, I miss feeling truly at home on a regular basis. I love New York in the winter, too, especially when it’s only mildly wintery, as it was this last week. Just being out and walking in the middle of everyone and everything…it just feels right, just makes sense somehow.

This time around, I met people from our New York office for the first time, and on hearing that I’m a native New Yorker, all of them said the same thing: “We do have a New York office, you know—why don’t you move out here?” And for the first time, I felt that doing so is really what I’m striving for; it didn’t seem quite as far-fetched or improbable as it has in the past. (I’d be the only one doing what I do in the NYC office, which might be kind of isolating, but then again, they have a real need for someone in my role in that office, especially with big, New York-based clients like the one we were meeting with—a lot of the things we discussed with them could be accomplished much more efficiently if there were a user experience person physically present. This new resolve on my part doesn’t change the basic facts of the situation, like having two big dogs who wouldn’t be happy in an apartment, but for the first time, I started to feel like maybe obstacles like that weren’t as insurmountable as I’ve convinced myself they are. (There’s doggie day care, for example, and barker-breakers to make them better neighbors. And so on.)

Plus the doorman in my family’s apartment building, who’s known me for most of my life (literally—we moved to that apartment in 1971, so he’s known me longer than just about anyone that I’m not related to), started talking to me about how he’s seeing my dad show signs of aging, and it’s not like that’s news to me, but it’s a reminder of one of the best reasons to move back home. I know it’s not going to happen tomorrow, might not even happen this year. But I’m going to get there. I feel more certain of that now.

And this time, once I get back there, I’m not leaving again. It’s one of the great ironies of my life—one that I can find amusing if I look at it objectively, even if it also drives me a little bit crazy—that after all the years I spent in Minneapolis trying to persuade my first husband to move to NYC, I left and went back to the Midwest only a little more than a year after finally making it back. (That he’s still there, and loving the city, just adds to the irony.) But maybe you can go home again after all. We’ll find out, I guess.

The joys of business travel

January 24, 06 //
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In the ongoing saga entitled All I Ever Do These Days Is Work:

What’s more fun than finding out less than a week in advance that you have to fly to Philadelphia for a 2.5-hour business meeting, even though you’re swamped with work and can’t really afford to spend a day out of the office? Finding out that it’s actually a three-day business trip involving two accounts that you won’t be working on, of course. And even better is finding yourself with a fever (from a flu that won’t quite give up on me) the night before your 6:30 a.m. flight to Philly.

Maybe I wouldn’t be feeling quite so awful if I hadn’t set my alarm for 3 a.m. this morning to watch the Australian Open quarterfinal match between Justine Henin-Hardenne and Lindsay Davenport. Yes, I really did that. What can I say? I’m a fan, and ESPN2 hasn’t shown any of Justine’s matches during normal hours. I figured she needed me to cheer her on in order to beat Davenport. I’m paying for the lack of sleep today, boy howdy. But it was worth it, because it was an exciting, come-from-behind victory for my favorite female tennis player over my least favorite tennis player.

(And I can’t resist a nasty comment about Davenport’s outfit. At first, I thought it was just a shapeless one-piece dress that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a nightgown, but then I got a better look. It was actually a long-sleeved (very practical for the Australian summer) mint green zip-up cardigan with a matching mint green skirt. With random black stripes as accents. And the clincher: a vaguely triangular translucent mesh cutout panel on the back of the cardigan…presumably needed for ventilation to counter the long sleeves. And her hair! It was all bunched up in weird clumps that were caught in barrettes. Yikes! Fashion note: The lighter your complexion is, the worse you’re going to look in mint green.)

It’s not all bleak, though. One of my projects got scaled back and postponed slightly, so I won’t have to fill the hours during which I’m not in meetings with work; I can actually relax and sleep in a little bit. And the good news is that the second part of my itinerary will take me to New York, so I’ll get a very quick, unexpected visit with my dad. It will be very different from my last, relatively leisurely trip home (which I haven’t written about yet, but I might still; it was a pretty cool trip), but hey, a trip to New York is a trip to New York.

So why am I dreading the whole thing so much? Oh yeah, I forgot: I’m allergic to meetings. It’s a good thing I love my job. That’s what I keep repeating to myself, over and over.

2005, finally

January 22, 06 //
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So, about that best-of listâ?¦

(I realize that I’m the only one who will care if I never do a best-of-2005 list, but I don’t think I’ll be able to focus properly on 2006 posts until I get this one taken care of.)

2005 was the first year that I can remember when I truly couldn’t do a numbered top-howevermany list. There were just too many good records that bunched up in the 6-20 (or 50, more like) spots, and putting them in order was too much of a chore. I already posted a (very) partial list, but it’s actually changed since then, because the Clientele record so thoroughly dominated my December (and January, so far) that it moved up a few spots.

Anyway. My list, which will be missing records that I’m forgetting about, I’m sure (no notes added, because I’ve written about a lot of these here before, but ask me if you’re curious about any of them):

1. Son Volt, “Okemah and the Melody of Riot”
2. Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard”
3. The Clientele, “Strange Geometry”
4. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods”
5. Steve Dawson, “Sweet Is the Anchor”

and the rest, with the first five representing most of what would be my top 10 if I’d done one, and then the remainder in no order:

the everybodyfields, “Plague of Dreams”
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, “Naturally”
The Morning After Girls, “Evolve”
Bettye Lavette, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise”
Dallas Wayne, “I’m Your Biggest Fan”
—–
Dierks Bentley, “Modern Day Drifter.”
Gary Allan, “Tough All Over.”
John Doyle, “Wayward Son”
Lasarfhiona ni Chonaola, “Flame of Wine.”
Cathie Ryan, “The Farthest Wave.”
British Sea Power, “Open Season”
Dogs, “Turn Against This Land”
Brakes, “Give Blood”
Richmond Fontaine, “The Fitzgerald”
Bettie Serveert, “Attagirl”
The Hacienda Brothers, s/t
Reigning Sound, “Home for Orphans”
Chatham County Line, “Route 23″
Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell, “Begonias”
Sleater-Kinney, “The Woods”

Two promising, if flawed, EPs:
The Love Experts, “Cuba Street.” A St. Louis band with a very distinctive sound. Too distinctive, maybe, because I find that the singer’s voice starts to get on my nerves by the end of the EP. But I’ll still be paying attention to whatever they do next, and I hope I’ll get a chance to see them live sometime.
The Squares, “Very Sharp.” I was very taken with this Columbus band’s debut EP when I first got it, though unfortunately I became less so with repeated listens—the record starts to seem a little too long, which isn’t a good thing for an EP. But I think they have oodles of potential, and you really can’t go wrong with a sound as straightforward and rocking as theirs.

Song of the Year:
If you can’t guess what this is going to be, you have either never read my blog before or you haven’t been paying attention. :-) Yes, my song of the year is “Since K Got Over Me” by the Clientele. Duh. I think I finally figured out why it gets to me the way it does, too: it’s a London song, in the same way that Nick Drake’s “Bryter Layter” is a London album. There are no explicit references to London, but it just seems to permeate the song, and the line “But when the evening paints the streets/When the evening paints the streets/It’s like walking on a trampoline” immediately takes me to a very specific place and time in London and sends joy and heartbreak coursing through my veins all at once.

It beat out my previous lead-pipe-cinch single of the year, Alan Jackson’s “Monday Morning Church” (with magnificent backing vocals by Patty Loveless), which is a perfect country single. I like Alan Jackson better as a singles artist than as an album artist anyway, and between this song and “Drive,” he’s released arguably my two favorite country singles of the decade.

Other runners-up:
Son Volt, “Jet Pilot”
Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard” and “Where There’s a Road”
Malcolm Middleton, “Break My Heart”
Bettye Lavette, “How Am I Different?” (her astonishingly good cover of an already great Aimee Mann song)

In a way, I should have put more effort into my Song of the Year list than my albums list, because so much of my listening now is via the iPod, on song shuffle, so songs are more relevant than albums. But I’m an old person, and I still think in album terms. I’m doing a mix CD for a group I belong to in April, and though it’s going to include some songs from before 2005 (yes, I’m already planning/obsessing about what songs to put on it), I may use it as an opportunity to come up with a Best Songs of 2005 comp too. But I probably won’t, since I’m always too lazy to do those sorts of things. Maybe next yearâ?¦which is to say this year.

The weekend that wasn’t

January 17, 06 //
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I want my three-day weekend back. And specifically, I wish I could undo the last day and a half of it. It was bad enough that I was flu-y all weekend long, which (combined with my staying up until daybreak on Friday night, for reasons known only to God) would have wiped out most of the weekend. But worse, far worse, was the disappearance of our big kitty, Jasper, on Sunday evening.

I hasten to add that he’s back, and okay; if he weren’t, I’d be out looking for him instead of posting this. He was gone for less than 24 hours, as it turned out. But what a hellish 20 hours it was. And he refuses to tell me what happened. All I know is that he failed to return from a perfectly routine last trip outside on Sunday evening. Jasper is the only cat of the three who gets to go outside, and he’s earned that privilege by being totally trustworthy. He’s usually content to just lie on the deck, or to bound across the yard when Bill is out there playing frisbee with the dogs. So we’ve even gotten fairly relaxed about letting him out after dark; I’ve set an arbitrary curfew of 7 p.m. on weeknights (which gives him half an hour to an hour outdoors, depending on when I get home), but on weekends, things are looser. We usually keep track of him when he’s outside, though, so that on the occasions when he walks around to the front of the house, which he’s not allowed to do, we catch him, bring him inside, and scold him—and keep him inside for a while.

As I’ve mentioned, Jasper had a hard life before the Siamese Rescue people found him. You’d think he’d be happy to be a pampered indoor cat after all he’s been through, but nothing makes him happier than lazing outdoors in the sun. He doesn’t hunt; he’ll occasionally eye an insect or small critter moving through the grass, but he’d rather nap than get up and chase anything. And watching him basking on the deck on a sunny day, his face an absolute picture of bliss, has been enough to make me ignore my general objections to letting cats go outside; he’s just so damn happy out there.

I don’t know what happened on Sunday night, what prompted him to go wandering. All I know is that when I woke up from a nap and went to bring him inside, he wasn’t there, and he didn’t respond to my calling him, as he usually does. Lately he’s been a little slower to respond sometimes, but if I call him from the back door, then check to see if he’s in front, he’s usually at the back door on my second trip there. Not Sunday night, though. We called for him, and we both walked all the way around the house looking for him. No sign of him. I decided to give him a little while to come home, but when I checked again half an hour later, he still wasn’t there. It was time to start a full-scale search. We each walked up and down the street and over to adjacent streets, with panic starting to set in. Still no Jasper.

I’ve never experienced this before, and I’m not sure there’s a worse feeling in the world. Okay, there are plenty of worse feelings, I know. But the not knowing was just unbearable. We couldn’t find him anywhere, and yet I knew he couldn’t have gone far. I was sure, sure in my bones, that he was hurt or worse; I knew that if he could have come home, he would have. And as I was sitting at the computer printing out “lost cat” flyers, I had that “I can’t believe this is happening” feeling that makes everything even worse. On Sunday night, I couldn’t quite bring myself to really go to bed, because doing so would have felt like giving up. So I dozed briefly while Bill was still awake, then caught a couple of hours’ restless sleep, still in my clothes, between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning. I tried to convince myself that Jasper was just stuck in someone’s garage, and that he would come home as soon as people started leaving for work on Monday morning…unless they had the day off, as I did. I convinced myself sufficiently that I half-expected to see his sweet face at the door, and I was crushed when he wasn’t there. More uncontrollable weeping and a growing sense of panic took over, though I pulled myself together long enough to distribute flyers at every house on our block and the one to the north.

After I came home to print more flyers, I gave in to my flu symptoms and lay down for a nap before tackling the next block, leaving the blinds open so I could keep an eye out for glimpses of a tail or paw or kitty face appearing on the deck. (The bedroom only has a partial view of the deck; I wasn’t actually expecting individual cat parts to appear.) Maisy, who could tell something was wrong (both she and Liam were noticeably affected by Jasper’s disappearance), curled up on the backs of my legs, and I slept for a good hour and a half. When I woke up, I saw what might just have been a Siamese cat flank at the very edge of my field of vision; I thought it was probably just a rag rug or something (my vision was all screwy because I’d been crying so much), but I immediately got up to check. And there he was. I grabbed him up in my arms and cried into his fur for a good two or three minutes; I had to compose myself before I could call Bill to let him know that the boy was home. I’m still getting weepy just thinking about it.

It took me a little while to notice that he was limping, since I hadn’t actually let him walk when I first saw him—I’d carried him over to his food dish, and thought his refusal to eat was related to his being flipped out. But it turned out that he was in pain, and he wouldn’t let me close enough to his back left paw to see what was wrong. Feeling guilty for traumatizing him even more, I took him to the vet, and she found two big bite wounds on the paw. All Jasper had to say about it was, “You should see the other guy.”

He’s on antibiotics now, and a pain medication injection yesterday seems to have made him feel better; he’s still hopping, but he’s eating again and seems in relatively good spirits. He’s also showing no interest at all in the outdoors, which is fine with me. He won’t be going out after dark anymore, that’s for damn sure. I’d like to keep him inside for good, in fact, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to deny him the chance to lie in the sun once he’s feeling better. But no more evening trips outside. I don’t ever want to go through anything like this again. It’s bad enough when they get sick, and when they grow old and die, but at least then you have some warning of what’s going to happen; this was so unexpected, and so out of character, that it was worse somehow. (Or so it seemed at the time, anyway.) I’m still worn out and flippy from it, hence this long, rambling entry.

And meanwhile, I need a real three-day weekend, one free of viruses and kitty crises. Not sure where or when I’m going to get one of those, alas.