What is “fire drill”?

October 15, 2009 //
0

(Another boring technical note: I’m in the middle of switching hosting companies, after repeated site outages this week while I was sending the URL for my portfolio to half a dozen prospective employers. I actually posted this last night, too late for it to be included in my database backup, so I had to reconstruct it through the magic of phpMyAdmin. But I really did write it last night.)

That’s the “Jeopardy” answer to the following question: what two words strike fear into my heart when I’m trying to stick to an exercise program?

I work on the top floor of a building that is trying hard to be a real office building, but still has a ways to go. A lot of it is unoccupied but is under construction as it gradually gets prepared for use by the business school of a local university. (Last year, the construction work meant that the mice and rats that were living in the unoccupied parts were displaced and wound up on the two floors that my company occupies.) And the fire alarm system is constantly under construction too, apparently; for a while, we had false alarms at least twice a week. That means we tend to ignore the alarms, which isn’t the best idea in the world, obviously. But over the summer there were two that weren’t immediately identified as false alarms, so we all trooped dutifully down the stairs. That’s 17 flights of stairs, for the record. Long flights of stairs, too.

There are a few activities that are especially bad for my knee problem (patellar subluxation—I remembered to look it up)—basically anything that involves putting downward pressure on the knee with my full body weight. Cycling is terrible, although I biked for years—not any great distance, but regularly, and my knees got used to it. Running isn’t great, even if I’m ignoring that fact now. And walking down stairs is pretty much the worst. I always have a little bit of discomfort walking down stairs, especially if there are a lot of them, or they’re steep, or I try to go fast. (I get vertigo when I go down stairs too, so it’s altogether not my favorite thing.)

So the first time we had one of these fire drills (shortly after I was moved from the 16th floor to the 17th, not that one flight makes that much difference), I didn’t think too much of it, but the next day, I couldn’t really bend my knees, and walking became painful; even going down the few steps we have in our split-level house was a challenge. It was about three days before I felt normal again. The next time, which was about three weeks later, the aftermath wasn’t quite so bad, but it lasted just as long. And today, when my co-worker came over to tell me that we needed to go downstairs (I had my noise-canceling headphones on and was completely unaware of the alarms…which is a little, um, alarming), my first thought wasn’t “Wow, I wonder if there’s a real fire this time,” but “Oh no, not today—I’m planning to do Day 2 tonight.” But the alarms kept going, and I didn’t have any choice but to trot down the stairs in my high-heeled boots.

At one point I noticed that my knees weren’t bothering me at all, and I wondered if exercise was helping. Then I looked at the number on the next landing. Oh. We were only on the 14th floor. By the time we got to the 3rd floor, my knees would have been screaming if they had vocal cords. And after we’d gotten back upstairs (the alarm was triggered accidentally by some idiot who tripped an alarm panel on one of the unoccupied floors by leaning on it) and the day went on, I could feel the weakness and cramping start to set in, just a little bit.

But when I got home, I did my workout anyway. I don’t know if that was smart; maybe it will make things worse, though I’m not sure why it would. (And I raised the incline on the treadmill a little in the probably misguided hope that the climbing motion would somehow balance out the strain of the downstairs motion.) In any case, it was fine, I’m happy to say—just slightly easier than Monday’s was, which is as it should be. Whether I’ll be able to do it again (or to walk, for that matter) on Friday is another matter. But I’ll worry about that on Friday.

Week 2, Day 1

October 12, 2009 //
2

I had a million reasons not to exercise tonight…or at least a few: I spent about an hour and a half raking leaves yesterday (Bill did the lion’s share of the work, but I did quite a bit too), and my entire rib cage is stiff as a result; the stand for my new TV arrived today, and I wanted to set both up (Bill ended up doing that for me); I’m in the middle of redoing my online portfolio so that I can apply for jobs, and I really want to get that finished; I got way too little sleep last night, even by Sunday night standards (I always stay up too late on Sunday night), and by the end of the workday, I was really dragging; and it’s our sixth anniversary today, and though we had our celebratory dinner (all-you-can-eat sushi at our favorite place) on Saturday night, we still have some champagne (okay, prosecco) to drink.

So it would have been awfully easy to talk myself out of exercising tonight. But I didn’t. I got home and fed the cats and then got on the treadmill, and I got through day 1 of week 2. It was a little harder than I expected—maybe it’s because I was tired and still stiff from raking, or maybe it was that I did increase my speed a little bit, but the 90-second jogging intervals seemed a lot longer than the 60-second ones. By about the halfway point, though, I started to feel really good, so maybe day 2 will be easier. I’m vaguely nervous about whether I’ll be ready to move on to week 3 next week, and whether I’ll ever make it all the way through, but I’m trying to focus on just the next workout. And I’m looking forward to it.

And I promise to blog about other stuff shortly, or at least I promise not to turn this into strictly a fitness journal. I don’t really expect anyone to read these posts, and I hope the subject lines will serve as a sort of warning that there are boring workout notes ahead. But posting about each workout is part of keeping myself accountable; it’s harder to back out of something when you’ve made a fuss about it publicly. I have enough self-doubt to suspect that I may still find a way to back out, but every little bit of accountability helps, I think.

Week 1, Day 3, or I Exercised on a Saturday

October 10, 2009 //
2

(Before I get to the exercise stuff, I would like to mention that I am watching the playoffs, and I’m deeply disgusted that the Cardinals—one of only two National League teams that I like/root for/care about—are about to get swept. By the friggin’ Dodgers. Feh. I guess my visions of a thrilling Yankees-Cardinals World Series aren’t going to be realized.)

Last night was a typical Friday night for me, after a bad workday to end a bad work week: I got home, vegetated in front of the TV for a while (the Yankees were on, after all), and suddenly it was 8:30 and I hadn’t eaten dinner or even moved much from the couch. On the rare Friday nights when I have been able to get myself to exercise, I’ve done so almost immediately after getting home; that’s the only way it works. Instead, last night I ended up eating dinner around 9:30, “napping” from 11:00 till 1:30, staying up till 4:00, and waking up way too early, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. This was not the greatest setup for getting Day 3 in today, but I managed to talk myself into it, and I’m (of course) really glad that I did. It was a slightly odd workout: the jogging intervals seemed to come up a lot faster, because the walking intervals seemed shorter than on previous days, but on the other hand, the jogging was easier, and I really felt like I could have sped up. (I didn’t, but I might try increasing the speed just fractionally when I get into week 2.)

I continue to feel great after the workout, too. It’s a little surprising that I feel so good right now, because after I worked out, I shampooed the carpet, which always wipes me out. (And puts the exercise I’m doing now in a little bit of perspective—pushing that heavy carpet shampooer around is way harder than doing a little bit of jogging on the treadmill.) But I do feel great. My knees—excuse me while I knock on every piece of wood I can find—haven’t hurt at all, and though I’ve had a little bit of foot/ankle pain while jogging (I have super weak ankles; if anyone knows good ankle-strengthening exercises, please share them), it doesn’t stick around after I’m done. So, so far so good. And happily, I think I’m ready to move on to the 90-second jogging intervals that week 2 will bring.

I was thinking about my lack of a major goal for doing this, and it occurred to me for the first time that the program results in being able to run 5 kilometers, regardless of whether or not you enter a 5K race. Seems to me that that’s a pretty great goal in itself, really. I don’t know that I’ll get there, and I’m sure I won’t get there in the 9 weeks that the program allows for; I didn’t get there the first time I tried the program. But I’d like to at least aim for it now.

Week 1, Day 2, plus some music stuff

October 8, 2009 //
7

Music stuff first:

So it’s a little less than three months from (!) the end of the ’00s, a time when all good obsessive list-makers start thinking about their best of the decade. I’ve already had a few people share their top 15 lists with me, and though I’m not sure why they did top 15s rather than top 10s (maybe 10 is too few for a whole decade?), I’m going to go with that number too. I already know what my favorite of the decade is (and my list will be my favorites, which may or may not be the ones I think are objectively the best), and I’m pretty sure I know what will be in my #2 and 3 slots, but after that, things get really, really tricky. So I’m going to try out a bunch of versions of the list here—that’s the main reason I was contemplating reviving the blog before the C25K thing actually pushed me to do so—before committing to anything like a final one.

Not tonight, though. This is just my official statement that I’m contemplating the contemplation of my list. Because so far, I’m seriously stuck on what #4 is going to be, and I can’t go any further with the list until I figure that out. Will it be “The Hardest Part” by Allison Moorer, which was my slam-dunk #1 for the first few years of the decade but which I don’t listen to much anymore, so that putting it at #4 seems more like a concession to its previous supremacy than to its actual current place in my heart? Is it Patty Griffin’s “Impossible Dream,” a record that I don’t love start to finish but which contains three of my favorite songs of the decade, including one (“Useless Desires”) that I count among my favorite songs of all time? Is it “Okemah and the Melody of Riot,” because I think there should be a Jay Farrar-related record in my list and I can’t include “The Slaughter Rule” because it’s a soundtrack, even though it might be my favorite Farrar record of the decade? Is it a Sam Phillips record, and if so, which one? Or wait—honestly, if I’m going by the records that have given me the most pleasure during this decade, it really has to be “Couples in Trouble,” even though I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for Robbie Fulks in recent times. Okay, so that’s #4 nailed down; but you can see why I need to work this list out in blog form before I can even think about talking about it anywhere else.

So, the list so far, then:

1.The Clientele, “Strange Geometry” (2005). I’d be lying if I said any record released this decade had given me more pleasure than this one.
2. Dolly Varden, “The Dumbest Magnets” (2000). But if any record had given me more pleasure than #1, it would be this one. I have to admit, though, that I feel ever so slightly weird about putting it ahead of the artist represented in #3, because he’s pretty much been my artist of the decade, one of the few artists who…okay, I can’t think of any way to phrase this that won’t make certain people tease me, so let’s just move on to #3:
3. Scott Miller, “Thus Always to Tyrants” (2001). And if I decide not to be a stickler for precision, this spot will actually be occupied by an imaginary double record that includes “Thus Always” and “Are You With Me?”, but for now, I’ll stick to records that actually exist.
4. Robbie Fulks, “Couples in Trouble” (2001). This is one spot where the distinction between “best” and “favorite” needs to be reiterated, because I definitely don’t think this is Robbie’s best record. It’s not even his best record of the decade—”Georgia Hard” is, objectively, a much better record. But fuck objectivity; this is my list. And I love this record. Not every single second of it (hi there, “Brenda’s New Stepfather”), but most of it, and more of it, I think, than a lot of other Robbie fans do.

Gah. Stupid sieve-like brain. I wrote all of that, and then I watched some TV and took a shower, and as I was getting out of the shower I thought, “Oh, wait. The Delgados.” And now everything other than the Clientele record is up in the air, because I can’t even decide whether “Universal Audio” (and it will be that record, not “Hate” or “The Great Eastern”) is going to bump Dolly Varden and Scott Miller, or just Scott Miller, or neither. I’m thinking it’s going to be at #3, but it might sneak up to #2, I don’t know. How am I supposed to decide? It’s like asking me which of my cats I love more.

Okay, that’s the list thus far. I’m thinking Patty Griffin is going to be at #5, but I’ve made enough decisions for one night. And now, on to the boring C25K stuff:

Day 2 is done and dusted. Yay.

Probably because this is all still new (and because I was having a crappy day at work…a crappy week at work), I looked forward to it all day. I’d been a little apprehensive that it was going to be harder than day 1, but it wasn’t; if anything, it was a little easier. I mean, it wasn’t easy, but there were intervals where I wanted to jog faster and/or longer and felt capable of doing so. I didn’t, because the program stresses that the big mistake beginning joggers/runners make is to go too fast too quickly, and I want to be careful of my tendency with any exercise program to push too hard at first and then burn out really fast. (Not to mention that I want to be nice to my knees). But I feel good for having done it, and I feel optimistic about being able to move on to week 2 next week.

But first, on to day 3! I’m not sure if I’ll do that tomorrow night or wait till Sunday (Saturday would be best, but I know myself well enough to know that exercise + Saturday = not going to happen), but I’d like to press on and do it tomorrow night. I just need to make sure to get going shortly after I get home; otherwise, the urge for a Friday night nap will win out over good intentions.

Week 1, Day 1

October 7, 2009 //
4

Extremely boring technical note: I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time tonight upgrading my WordPress installation, which was approximately 9,079 generations out of date. The last time I upgraded, it was absurdly simple, but this time, it resulted in disaster, partly because I deleted some of the files before I’d backed them up (an accident caused by my FTP client hiding the “transfers” window, so that I didn’t realize the files weren’t finished downloading), and partly because when I got to the final step, I got a blank page when I clicked on the link to upgrade my database, which (it took me several panic->restore from backup->tear hair out attempts to determine) was caused by Firefox or one of my Firefox plugins not playing nicely with WordPress. It’s now after midnight, and I’ll be getting up in not that many hours, but I wanted to at least start this post.

Because I started something else tonight: the Couch to 5K Program (C25K). I’ve been leading up to it for a few weeks by doing a less organized version of it: I would walk for 25 minutes or so, and at two or three points during the walk when I felt able, I would start running for 1-2 minutes. But now I feel like I’m ready for something a little more structured.

I am starting the program with a ton of disclaimers:

  • I’m not designed to be a runner; I’m top-heavy, old, and mildly asthmatic, and I have bad knees*. And to borrow my friend Marie’s great line, I have always had a strict no-running policy.
  • I’m starting the program without actually intending to run a 5K. My short-term goal, insofar as I have one, is to be able run a mile without switching to walking. As a bigger goal, I’d like to become someone who runs as her main form of exercise, but that seems like a long shot, honestly.
  • I started this program once before, and got pretty far with it. In fact, I ran a mile without switching to walking…once, I think, or maybe twice. And then something distracted me, I quickly fell out of the habit, and here we are. That was a bunch of years ago—can’t remember how many, but at least 5—and in the interim, I have tried and failed to get any exercise habit to stick. I am not, and have really never been, a yo-yo dieter, but I’m a yo-yo exerciser. I don’t love to exercise, but there are forms of exercise that I enjoy…and yet ten months is the longest I’ve stuck to any of them at a stretch before getting distracted and quitting exercise entirely for an equally long stretch.
  • For now, I’m running on a treadmill rather than outdoors, despite the beautiful fall weather and the availability of trails, roads, and a track that I think is open to the public nearby. This is partly out of self-consciousness, because I’m embarrassed for people to see me only able to run for 60 seconds at a time; partly out of lack of desire to leave my house once I’ve returned from work, because even if I’m not exactly snuggling with the cats while I’m on the treadmill, at least I’m not actually out of the house; and partly because I’ve been getting through my workouts by watching episodes of the addictive Brit soap opera “Mistresses” on my iPhone while on the treadmill. (I’m already into season 2, which was the final season, so I’m going to have to find something equally addictive and absorbing to carry me through the remaining weeks of the program.) But anyway, I’m treadmill-running, which isn’t even exactly the same as real running. It will have to do for now, though.

But still, I want to do this. I acknowledge that I may quit. I may quit after the first week; hell, I may quit during the first week. I may run the world’s slowest mile if and when I do run one continuously. (When I was younger, I could walk a mile faster than I could run one, and yes, I realize that makes no sense.) I may have to repeat weeks 1 and 2 twelve times each. But I still want to do it.

Why? Yeah, I’m not sure what the answer to that is. It might be that I’ve always admired and envied runners, who seem to get so much more, mentally as well as physically, from their workouts than those of us who do stuff like step aerobics and kickboxing (two forms of exercise that I actually enjoy but don’t have any sort of transcendent relationship with). It’s partly that I’m sick of being fat and out of shape, although I’m being quite sincere when I say that this isn’t about my weight.** But mostly, I think I want to prove to myself that I can do it.

So can I? Well, obviously the jury is still very much out on that. But after being sure that I wasn’t even ready for week 1, day 1 (which is 5 minutes of walking to warm up, then intervals of 60 seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking for 20 minutes), and doing a pre-week 1, day 1 trial on Sunday night (15 minutes of intervals instead of 20), I surprised myself a little bit tonight by doing the whole warmup + 20 minutes and throwing in an extra 5 minutes of walking at the end. And I felt genuinely great afterwards, just as I had on Sunday night, which was the first time that I got any inkling of that “runner’s high” thing that people talk about. (I used to get a similar rush of endorphins back when I was a devoted lap swimmer, but it’s been a long time since I felt that good after exercising.)

Will I make it to Week 1, Day 2 (scheduled for Thursday night)? We’ll see. I hope so, though, and I hope that blogging about it will keep me from quitting as readily as I otherwise might. I’ll try to blog about some other stuff too, to keep this from being, y’know, one of those blogs; I’ve been wanting to revive the blog lately anyway, so that I’ll have a place to write about music again. But I’m going to try using this as a fitness journal too. We’ll see.

*Not as bad as they used to be, it should be noted, but still bad. I have this weird patellar thing that I can never remember the name of, but it sucks. Evidently my quads have gotten stronger over the years, though, because I don’t have nearly as much pain or discomfort as I used to. But I’m probably still not really supposed to run.

**Weight and body image are subjects about which I could write several encyclopedias; I’m certainly not happy with my weight, and you don’t want to know about my body image. But on the other hand, it occurred to me recently that my weight has been stable within about an eight-pound range (except for a stretch the year my mom died when I lost a bunch of weight) throughout my 40s, and though it’s higher than I’d like it to be, at least it’s been heading in the right direction in the latter part of my 40s. I haven’t been making lifestyle changes or anything—that’s far too grandiose a way to put it—but in the past few months I have been thinking more about how I care for my body and what I put in it. I’ve been trying to cut down on processed foods, and I’ve given up aspartame; I’ve cut way down on bread and pasta and cheese. But I still have a raging sweet tooth, so I can’t claim too much virtuousness. Mostly, I’ve been trying to make sure that I eat fresh food, especially vegetables, every single day, and if that hasn’t made much difference in my weight, it has made a big difference in how I feel.

Happy New Year

December 31, 2008 //
0

One in an occasional series of “Do I still have a blog? Yes, I still have a blog” posts.

I am working on my best-of-2008 list, and gathering some random thoughts on this relatively tumultuous year, but in the meantime, I will share this collection of some of my favorite songs of the year. If you listen to any or all of them, let me know what you think. And happy new year!

Priceless advice

July 20, 2008 //
2

So the second phase of the big move is now underway: I’m back in Missouri (where it is a brutal 95 degrees, obviously in my honor—though it’s not much cooler in the NYC area), having returned yesterday to collect the cats and oversee the move. Right at this moment I’m taking a break from packing CDs and other things that I didn’t manage to pack before I started the new job. The packers arrive tomorrow, ostensibly to pack the kitchen, bathroom, our few bits of framed artwork, and our electronics, but I have a feeling they’re going to end up packing more than that. (It turns out that packing services don’t add as much to the cost of a move as I thought they did, which isn’t to say that they don’t add quite a bit–but it’s so worth it, as I discovered the one time I had an employer who paid full relocation expenses.)

And I am a big giant ball of stress. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think; between the heat (we have central air conditioning, of course, an essential in this climate, but it can only do so much) and all the worries and concerns racing through my mind, I just couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour or so at a time. I think that must be the biggest reason that I keep having bouts of uncontrollable crying. This house is just so crowded with…stuff, stuff of all kinds, some of it toss-able, much of it not. I’m afraid that we won’t get all of it packed in time, though rationally, I know that worrying about that is silly. If we don’t get it packed and the movers end up being delayed a day, or we end up having to get them to pack more than we plan to, the world will not end. Worst case, Bill can rent a truck and move the rest of it when he’s ready to join me in NJ. Rationally, I know these things; rationally, I know that worrying about things I can’t control is silly and even unhealthy; rationally, I know that there’s nothing I can do but to keep packing and see how it goes. But “rationally” and I aren’t getting along very well at the moment.

My cell phone has this cute little feature that lets me add a message that displays when I turn the phone on. During the two weeks when I was between jobs and should have been spending every waking moment putting stuff in boxes, the message read, “Shouldn’t you be packing?” For the past month, though, the message has been “Don’t forget to breathe.” It’s good advice; I think I need to tattoo that message to my eyeballs for the next few days.

But it’s not the advice I’m referring to in the subject line. That advice is far better, and it is my heartfelt gift to anyone reading this. The advice is: Never move house. Ever. Find a city and a house you like or even love, and stay there. Or if you really want to move, because you hate your house or your kids are grown or the neighborhood is going downhill or whatever, for heaven’s sake don’t move any farther than a few miles. And for the love of God, don’t do it in July.

This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give anyone. :-)

Peripatetic again

July 3, 2008 //
2

For months and more, I’ve been wavering about whether or not to just delete the whole blog, to leave it here for posterity (an addition to the world’s growing collection of ghost blogs), or to revive it. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but since I am wandering again and living up to the name of the blog—and since I have a rare ambient wireless connection here at my dad’s apartment (he still has dial-up, so I have to count on grabbing an open signal from the air)—it seems like a good time to post.

Yep, I’ve uprooted myself and my life yet again. In a little more than two weeks, I’ll be a resident of West Orange, NJ, a place I had never even visited before renting a house there. (I was in East Orange back when Upsala College still existed, many years ago, at a record fair or something at WFMU radio, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the Oranges.) The spouse is still back in Missouri, trying to juggle his long workdays with getting work done on the house so that we can sell it. The cats are there too, though mercifully, they’ll join me when I move in to the house; Bill (and the dog) will follow when they can.

And I have to confess that this peripatetic stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be, or seemed to be once. There are so many weird and scary variables that weren’t there the last few times I uprooted: having to sell a house in a tough market (and it wouldn’t be an instant seller even in a good market), having to find a place where we can have cars and pets and space, having to worry about Bill finding a job when he gets here. And not having the cats with me has been truly traumatic; I’ve given serious thought to packing the whole thing in and going back home, resuming my old job and my old life, and I think most of those thoughts have been triggered by my missing the cats. Not all of them, but most. Is it pathetic that I can’t bear to be away from the kitties for more than a few days? I don’t know, but when you consider that their lifespan is only around fifteen years (if they’re lucky, and it makes me nervous even talking about it), three weeks is a long fucking time.

Last time I moved east, with my first husband, we sold our house at a garage sale (really—our next-door neighbors made us an offer while we were chatting during the sale), we had the promise of an apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope, owned by family friends of my ex, and I never had to leave the cats behind. And my ex’s salary in Minneapolis was so negligible that it didn’t matter that he took a job here that paid even less than the one he’d had in Mpls.; we were still able to get by. At my new job, I’m making far more money than I did the last time I moved here, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem like enough.

And then there’s the New Jersey thing. My job is in Newark, and for a variety of reasons, it seems to make the most sense to find a place in suburban Jersey rather than staying in NYC and commuting by train. The office is in a part of Newark that could be called “emerging,” I guess, and it’s not really that bad…but it’s iffy enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk to the train station if I were working late; I’d rather be able to just go to the parking lot and get in my car. (Many of my co-workers commute from Manhattan and Brooklyn, though, so my thinking may be flawed there.) Living in Jersey will also allow us more space and a less frenetic pace, and, if I’m being honest, the easy access to familiar stores like Target that we love to patronize is enticing too. (And there’s a Trader Joe’s within easy driving distance, which I’m excited about. Trader Joe’s has snubbed our part of Missouri, apparently forever.)

So we’ll be Jerseyites, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not the stigma of living in “Joisey,” exactly; just because I grew up making fun of the state doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that it has many lovely towns and places. It’s more that I’m worried that a suburban Jersey life won’t feel like I’m back in New York, back home again; it seems more likely to feel pretty much like our life in Missouri, only a lot more expensive. Is that the life I want? I’m just not sure. Of course, there’s no way I can be sure until I actually start living there, and we’re renting, so we won’t be tied to West Orange for more than a year if we don’t want to be. But it’s yet another thing that’s been keeping me up at night.

Geez, this is the whiniest post ever, isn’t it? On the plus side, I’ve already gotten to see one of my two wonderful nephews,* and the opportunity to see them a lot more often is very welcome. And being able to hop on a train or bus (not as easy from West Orange as from some of the neighboring, pricier towns, but still very doable) to check in on my dad and my brother will be great—I’m really looking forward to not having to get on a plane to see my family. I like my new job, and I get the sense that I’ll continue to like it—and if ever I don’t, I’ll have a lot more job possibilities here than I would have in Missouri. So there’s lots to be optimistic about, and I’m trying to focus on that. Not altogether successfully during these first two weeks, but I’ll keep trying.

But I really think I’m too old for this. I’m not making any more cross-country moves for a while, that’s for damn sure. Or at least I hope I won’t have to.

*My nephews, who are now 21 and 17, respectively, are a genuine source of joy in my life. They’ve both turned out to be such amazingly good kids, smart and kind and fun to be with. Not that I would have expected them to turn out any other way, but y’know, they’re kids, and they grew up in a well-heeled New York suburb, and they could just as easily have been brats or snobs or otherwise unpleasant, despite having good parents who raised them well. I know this because a lot of my college friends grew up in the same suburb, and some of them were kind of wrecks. But my nephews, bless them, turned out to be good people, and they make me proud.

Our “alternative” media at work

January 7, 2008 //
0

Salon’s campaign coverage has been very disappointing lately; there’s been a strong undercurrent of Hillary-worship, a tendency to ignore everyone but Obama and Clinton (just like the mainstream media), and in the last week, a remarkably lame bit of bandwagon-shifting from “We <heart> Hillary” to “We loved Obama all along.” But this little snippet might just be the thing that makes me decide not to renew my subscription. Not just because I’m an Edwards supporter, but because I don’t need to pay money to read this kind of trivia-obsessed non-journalism. I have the entire rest of the fucking media for that.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/01/07/john_edwards/index.html

(Note the obligatory, oh-so-original comment about Edwards’s hair.) And seriously, did anyone fall for Hillary’s carefully constructed attempt to make herself look more human? The choked-back sob, the little catch in her voice—it was a fine performance, but nothing more. Not to mention that she’s said far, far worse about her opponents.

Addendum: I never write letters to the editor, but this piece made me so mad that I actually posted a comment—but it’s not the one signed by someone with my name and initial; I used an alias, as I always do nowadays whenever I post in public places.

No fair!

November 13, 2007 //
5

I need to vent for a moment. To wit:

I was sitting here minding my own business and looking for some information on the Website of one of the several professional organizations in my world, and I noticed that they were plugging their new social networking site, which is sort of like an industry-specific version of LinkedIn. So I went to investigate it, and browsing around, I noticed that they had a job forum. I’m not job-hunting, particularly, but I always like to keep my eyes open for new possibilities, so I looked at it. And lo and behold, there was a job that sounded perfect for me.

It’s a long story, but there are a bunch of subspecialties in my field, and my particular subspecialty is a little more obscure and less “hot” at the moment than the others, so jobs that are truly just right for me are kind of few and far between. This one, though, could have been invented for me: it requires someone with a content/writing/editorial background, and a library science degree is preferred.

And it’s at Zappos. Zappos, the online shoe store that is my favorite place to shop, from which I’ve bought countless pairs of shoes. The perfect job at the perfect place, in other words.

Before a) jumping up and down with excitement and b) zooming my résumé to them right away, I looked for a location in the job description. I had this vague recollection that Zappos was someplace in the Southeast—not my ideal, but not out of the question, either, depending on where in the Southeast we’re talking about. This could be good.

But no. My recollection was faulty. They’re in Las Vegas. I loathe Las Vegas.* Of all the places in the country that one might consider moving to, on a scale of 1 to 10, Las Vegas falls somewhere in the region of Miami. Or Camden, NJ. Or to put it in early Talking Heads terms, I wouldn’t move there if you paid me; I wouldn’t live there, no siree.

Not even to work for Zappos, alas. Why couldn’t they be somewhere else? It would be too much to ask for them to be someplace I actively want to move, of course, but couldn’t they at least be in Des Moines or Raleigh or someplace I could even remotely conceive of considering moving to? It’s no fair, I tells ya. No fair at all.

*I didn’t actually know that I hated Las Vegas until recently. I mean, I knew that the weather wouldn’t appeal to me, and neither would the city’s status as one of the fastest-growing in the country, especially because the growth seems to be mainly concentrated in new, faceless suburbs. But I didn’t have anything against Las Vegas, particularly. Kitsch doesn’t appeal to me (<–understatement) and I’m not much on gambling—no moral objections or anything, I just get bored as soon as I lose more than $5.00—but I was still fairly curious about the place, and believed that like any good American, I should see it at least once. Then I went to a convention there this past spring, and slightly to my surprise, I absolutely hated the place. Hated it. Everything about it. It’s depressing, it’s skeevy, it’s unpleasant. I hope never to go back.

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