excellent walker

Too Sad

2008-11-03T16:47:00.003-05:00

Several election-related deaths today are making me sad.

Terence Tolbert, the Obama campaign's director in Nevada died yesterday of a heart attack. He was on leave from his position as a New York City Department of Education official, and was only 44.

Christine Durbin, the 40-year-old daughter of the senior senator from Illinois Dick Durbin, died today from congenital heart disease. Senator Durbin, who is up for re-election tomorrow (which he will win easily) has been a major supporter and mentor of Obama since he entered Illinois politics.

Finally, word that Madelyn "Toot" Dunham, Barack Obama's grandmother, who had an enormous role in raising him, died this morning in Hawaii. This was obviously coming soon, but how I wish she could have held on just another couple of days. I'm sure she did, too.

Call Now

2008-11-03T09:34:00.003-05:00

I just got my first Obama-related robo-call of the election, from Jon Carson, the Obama campaign's national field director. He was urging me to spend the next 24 hours helping with the get-out-the-vote effort (print shorthand is GOTV, which always makes me think it's a Republican television station we're talking about).

Look, I know none of the stars could campaign in NYC these last few months. There's nothing to be gained from our little city everyone takes for granted, other than big bucks and comedy show audiences. But they couldn't have gotten Barack himself on a robo-call asking me to help out the day before the election?

(Voting starts in about 20 hours. I CANNOT WAIT.)

Barack Obama Hates Me

2008-10-15T13:52:00.003-04:00

From this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine article "Working for the Working Class Vote"

“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?

OK, so I like a latte occasionally, and you pretty much have to sip it, because Starbucks coffee is always really hot. I read the New York Times (self-evident by the fact that I just quoted from it). I don't own a car, but my husband has a fondness for vintage Volvos, so if I did, it might be one of those. I don't own a gun. I wouldn't describe myself as effete exactly, since that adjective is generally applied to girly men; maybe I skate by on that one. Politically correct? I'm sure when I don't laugh at the sexist jokes my boss tells during staff meetings there are one or two people who think so. Arrogant? Yes, about certain things. Liberal? Definitely.

Does that mean I shouldn't vote Obama now?

Things Are Not Looking Good for Our Dow

2008-10-06T14:36:00.003-04:00

As of this writing, the Dow is down 694 points, or 6.72%. Don't they halt trading at some point if it goes down far enough? Yes.

In a nutshell, it's too late in the day for them to halt trading, unless it drops another 3,306 points, which does not seem plausible. However, before 2:30, it only -- only -- needs to drop 1350 to trigger a half-hour pause.

If Obama Loses

2008-09-23T09:45:00.003-04:00

With six weeks before the election, and the silliness of the post-convention weeks behind us, it seems a good bet that Obama is going to win this thing. The country's focus is now on the tanking economy, and that's usually good news for the Democrats, particularly when it's increasingly clear that the Republican candidate has no idea what to do about it.

(Of course, now that Bush appears to be going after Osama bin Laden in a big way, there is the possibility of an October Surprise that tips the election towards McCain, though I don't know why it would. It'd be great to eliminate bin Laden, but seriously, seven years after 9/11 and we're supposed to be impressed by this?)

If Obama wins, though, it's not going to be the unqualifiedly good thing his supporters are hoping for. Treasury Secretary Paulson is about to bail out Wall Street using close to a trillion dollars of tax payer money, and it's unclear to everyone whether it will even solve anything. Whoever is president in January 2009 is going to have to deal with the mess for a long time, and it seems fairly certain that very few of the big-ticket items on Obama's to-do list -- health care, energy research, tax cuts -- are going to be easily achievable.

If McCain ekes out a win, though, because of his "experience", because of Palin, because of the Bradley effect, he will be the one who is stuck holding the Bush bag, and there will be little danger of the Democrats getting the lasting blame for it. Of course, that's what we all thought about that other close-to-a-trillion-dollar expenditure Bush foisted on us -- the Iraq War -- but somehow, Bush got a second term, and McCain is still competitive.

Single Issue

2008-09-10T09:29:00.003-04:00

I'm not a single issue voter, and I don't know anyone who is. Except, by proxy, my friend's 70-year-old neighbor who told her that, though she'd been planning to vote for Obama, with the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, she's going to vote for McCain. Despite against everything they stand for. She's old, she doesn't think there's enough time left for her to see another woman in the White House. She's been fighting for abortion rights all her life. She's not going to need one anymore; let the young women take over.

If I were a single issue voter, I might, for instance, object to the fact that Obama voted to authorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with its provisions for warrantless wire taps. In fact, I do object to it, but not enough to keep me from voting for him. I have to hope that as a former constitutional law professor -- one of his former jobs you didn't hear mocked at the RNC, I guess because it's kind of hard to make fun of someone for being an expert in the document that guides, or at least is suppose to guide, the way our country is run -- that he understands that FISA can never be allowed to become part of the landscape.

The only issue that comes close to singularity for me is homeland security. By which I don't mean building more walls to keep out undocumented Mexicans, though I accept the fact that terrorists could be intermingled with those future landscapers and restaurant workers. (Remember, however, the 9/11 hijackers came in not over the fence, but through the front door, step right this way, sirs, and please do attend all the highly unusual, but apparently not at all suspicious flying lessons you like.)

Homeland security means one thing to me: preventing another attack on my and other big cities. America may be voting small-town values this election, but oddly enough, 70% of us live in urban areas. A New York Times op-ed yesterday talked about the high likelihood of a nuclear attack on Manhattan in the next ten years, and how each of the candidates are likely to prevent it. The author was not particularly sanguine about either Obama or McCain, but did say that of the two, Obama understands the threat better.

That's what I want. Someone who understands first, then acts. Not someone who, like John McCain, believes the 9/11 terrorists had ties to Iraq, then gets us into a long war with massive casualties and distracts us from the real tasks at hand: finding Osama bin Laden, dismantling his organization, and preventing a new al Qaeda from forming.

I only had 500 characters

2008-09-08T11:42:00.001-04:00

So this is what I sent to ABC News, trying not to sound like the crazy person this race is turning me into (and the liberal nutbag they will assume I am given my zip code, which I had to provide before they'd let me submit):

Dear Mr. Gibson:

Now that you've been granted the first interview with Sarah Palin, I want to encourage you to be a tough advocate for the public. You may have heard speculation that you were chosen because you are perceived by some to be a "softball" interviewer. If yours turns out to be the only interview with the Governor, it would be a tragedy if this were the case. Please press for substantive answers on broad range of issues. The American people will respect and thank you for it.

Let's Get Something Straight About Hillary

2008-09-06T10:59:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of people Out There who think Sarah Palin wouldn't be the problem she is if Obama had choosen Hillary as his running mate. True, she wouldn't be. Palin wouldn't be the Republican VP candidate if Clinton were on the Democratic ticket. We'd be looking at Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, or maybe even Joe Lieberman, God help us.

A subset of these people are still fuming that Clinton wasn't even vetted for the VP slot, which they see as an insult to her and proof that Obama is a sexist asshole.

Here's the thing. Hillary Clinton did not want to be the VP candidate. No way, no how, as she herself might say. She wanted to be the presidential candidate, and if she can't be that this time around, she'll hope that Obama loses this year and wait until 2012. Proof of that came in a New York Times article yesterday in which "advisers to Mrs. Clinton" tepidly noted "that she stood ready to help the Obama-Biden ticket, but they urged the campaign not to overestimate the impact Mrs. Clinton could have, noting that she had other commitments this fall, like campaigning and raising money for Senate candidates."

That being the case, why put herself -- and more importantly, her husband -- through the rigorous VP vetting process?

Don't forget, when you run for president, the only official (and it's not even really official, just customary) vetting you get is in the release of your financial and medical records. Clinton waited until fairly late in the primary game to release hers, possibly because she didn't know how well it would resonate with voters that she and Bill had earned $100million since he left the White House. She needn't have worried. People don't hate you for being rich; they think they might be rich some day, too.

But in submitting to a VP vetting process, you open yourself to whatever the presidential candidate's team wants to ask you, and if they don't like your answer, it's over. Financial questions, sure (and do we know everything there is to know about Bill Clinton's business dealings with Ron Burkle and the Dubai Investment Group?), but also questions about what we euphemistically call a person's "personal life," in this case code only for "has Bill Clinton been screwing around outside his marriage in the last eight years and if so, with whom?"

Maybe the answer to that question is no. Maybe Clinton could answer no and the presidential candidate would believe her. But if it's not no, if there's any hint of it not being no, and you're not a lock for the VP slot, and you don't want the VP slot to begin with because you want to be president (for which, by the way, I don't blame her), why would Hillary Clinton put herself through that? Put off the Bill Clinton stuff another four years, by which time things might be different for him.

So stop being all up-in-arms self righteous about why Obama didn't pick Clinton. He may not have wanted to, but for her, the feeling was entirely mutual.

Just a Couple of Northeastern Elites

2008-09-04T10:18:00.002-04:00

Overheard on my walk to work this morning, one truck driver on the sidewalk to another:

"She was not nice. It was just really mean spirited."

Now, I don't know that they were talking about the Sarah Palin speech last night, but I like to think they were. In any event, I'm fired up. I gave more money to the campaign this morning -- the Obama campaign, that is. I'm also contemplating a career change -- to community organizer.

Why It's Going to Be Obama

2008-01-04T11:25:00.000-05:00

Despite the fact that only 227,000 people voted in the Iowa Democratic Caucuses last night -- oh, sure, record turnout, whatever, I can't get behind .07% of the population having any influence on who I get to vote for -- everyone is reading the tea leaves this morning. So I'll do it, too: Obama is going to win.

Not just the Democratic nomination, but the whole thing.

Here's why. People always say they want change, but they're deluded. Real change is scary, unpredictable, sometimes painful, and, this is the important part, almost impossible to achieve in our current political system. That's actually why it's set up the way it is; we're not supposed to be able to change things too quickly. (It's also why the Bush Administration has been aggressively asserting its right to broader Executive powers; if they played by the rules, they couldn't do stuff like warrantless phone taps.)

We all know, deep down, that whomever we elect is going to be playing by the same rules as always -- hopefully not by the expanded Bush rules, though I wouldn't put it past Giuliani -- and our best hope for significant change in the war in Iraq, or national health care, or global warming, is to let the system grind its way through a new set of priorities. Maybe in four years, or eight, things will be a little better and the United States can collectively look itself in the mirror again without hating itself.

But Obama. Now there's some real change, no matter how he governs. The combination of his youth, race, and relative inexperience in the entrenched Washington culture are, by definition, change. Yes, electing the first woman president would also be a big change, but it feels like that is canceled out by the fact that Hillary is a Clinton. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton -- she'd do a decent job, but I think we're all tired of that crowd by now.

If we elect our first Black president, that's something to be proud of. It will no doubt help our image internationally, but within the United States, whether he makes civil rights a priority or not, a President Obama will change the way we view each other, and ourselves. We need that.

Iowa is practically an all-White state. I'm not as big on hope as some people, but the fact that so many of them chose a Black man as their first choice, is pretty damn heartening.

The Price of Feminism

2007-12-06T09:56:00.001-05:00

I am getting married in February, but not changing my name. I wouldn't have thought that was a controversial decision in this day and age, but a couple of relatives have been surprised.

But that's nothing compared to my surprise when my fiance told me that, when he called Verizon to have them put my name on the account (in case, you know, someone calls information trying to find me), they told him that they are charging us $2.50 a month for this "service". If we had the same last name, no charge.

Are you kidding me?

I'm sure they have some super-acceptable rationale for this numskullery, having to do with the extra millisecond or two it might take their computer to parse the two names when someone calls just looking for one of us.

But really, isn't it time for the Verizon to accept that more and more households have different names these days and their system needs to keep up? My mother can manage this, but the phone company can't? Oh wait, they're a monopoly.* They don't need to do anything.

*Yes, Ma Bell was broken up 25 years ago, but if you can only get local phone service from one company, that's pretty much a monopoly. And don't talk to me about cable phone.

The Price of Oil: What Are We Talking About Exactly?

2007-11-12T09:59:00.002-05:00

The rising price of oil is on a lot of people's minds these days. It hasn't quite hit $100/barrel yet, but it's getting close ($94 as of this writing). I was reading Elizabeth Kolbert's article about extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands in the New Yorker this morning, and it occurred to me, as I read that 4500 pounds of tar have to be dug and separated into their constituent parts to get enough of the bitumen that can be refined into one barrel of oil, that I had no idea how much oil was in a barrel.

I'd always pictured it like the one here -- it's the size we think of when we think of a generic barrel -- but that couldn't possibly hold enough oil to justify the expense of digging up the 4500 hundred pounds of tar, could it? An official barrel of oil must be much more massive.

Turns out, that barrel in my mind is an official barrel of oil, the one that costs nearly $100 now. It holds 42 gallons of oil, about half of which is destined to become gasoline. The rest is made into things like jet fuel, fuel oil, asphalt and lubricants. So, one barrel of oil yields about 21 gallons of gasoline, or about two-thirds of an SUV's gas tank.

The reason it's at all profitable to convert those 4500 pounds of sludge into a barrel of oil is that, all told, it costs about $30 per barrel to do so. It was only a few years ago that oil was at $38, making tar-sand extraction unattractive. The process isn't nearly as efficient as conventional oil extraction, though, so the environmental impacts are much worse.

Can I Have My Money Back?

2007-11-06T09:19:00.000-05:00

There's a story in the New York Times today about the abysmal conditions at the barracks Iraqi Police Academy, built by an American contractor. The company, Parsons, did such a shoddy job that the building is "largely unusable".

That's an understatement. How would you like to live in a building where the bathrooms have human waste dripping from the ceilings? Is it any wonder the Iraqi Police Force isn't yet up to the job of policing Baghdad? We -- the American taxpayers -- paid them $72 million for this.

There is, of course, as there always is, a Congressional investigation underway. But there's no word yet as to when the company plans to issue its refund checks -- 55 cents for each of 131 million income tax filings last year. OK, that might not sound like much; but considering that the entire Iraqi reconstruction effort to date has cost $45 billion, and is, according to the Times article, and any sort of common sense, "widely considered a failure," a refund on the whole thing would be $343 each.

Alright, $343 isn't going to get me very far, either. But on principle, Parsons, Blackwater, Halliburton, and the rest of youz on this list of war profiteers, please make the check out to Cash.

Happy Goddamn Halloween

2007-11-01T10:39:00.000-04:00

OK, sure, every other woman on the street last night was a slutty barmaid, or a slutty referee/umpire, slutty pirate, baseball player or cat. I even saw a slutty Sherlock Holmes. We get it; Halloween is firmly established as a safe time for otherwise only mildly slutty woman to become full-fledged slutty fantasies for men whose most creative costume attempt is carrying a football while wearing a football jersey and sneakers. If I were 15 years younger, I might think it was fun to do, instead of just funny to ridicule as the sluts pass.

But when the slut parade interferes with my ability to get home quickly, that's when it's gone too far. The cab we were in after the theater last night was held up for several light cycles and meter clicks too many on 42nd Street. The cause of this late-night traffic jam? A Halloween party at Cipriani, to celebrate the launch of Roberto Cavelli's new vodka line (doesn't he know that designer vodkas are so 2004? but get this, it's filtered through crushed Italian marble), at which there was a line of black SUVs standing in what would otherwise be a no-standing zone/bus stop, funneling the traffic into one lane instead of two, their drivers napping while the D-list celebrities they were waiting for slutted it up inside. People like Petra Nemcova and Katrina Bowden. Who? Right; exactly.

At least Petra's costume is a little beautiful. What's Katrina supposed to be? A slutty Donald Trump? Ew.

Sometimes It's Just Not Your Day

2007-10-25T09:53:00.000-04:00

I knew I shouldn't get out of bed this morning. I lay there, awake, for at least a half hour, trying to work out how I could avoid it. Why does my job have to be an every day affair?

But I finally did get up, too late to make breakfast at home. I stopped in the bagel store, so far so good. Decided I should have coffee on the way to work, since I hadn't woken up yet. Asked for, as I always do at a deli, hazelnut with milk.

There are people who think flavored coffees are evil. But my thinking is: if I'm not going to have a very-high-quality cup of coffee, in a ceramic mug, sitting down at a table that doesn't have a computer screen on it, I should at least have the softening effects of the toasty hazelnut.

Except that the woman who gave me my coffee gave me regular coffee, which I didn't find out until I opened it several blocks away, too late to do anything about it. This is also the woman who, when I once asked for "not too much cream cheese," gave me the amount you would put on if you were putting on butter at home, i.e., not very much at all. Sure, it's probably better for me that way, but if I'd wanted better for me, I would have gotten up early enough to make my own damn breakfast at home.

Where was I?

Right, so I chucked the coffee, figuring life was too short to drink bad bagel-store coffee and I would get a cup of hazelnut at the deli in my office building. There they make you pour your own coffee, which means you always get what you want, even if what you want is half caffeine/half decaf, with a drop of half-and-half and a swush of skim milk. Not that I would ever want such a thing.

Up at my desk, bagel at my left hand, coffee at my right, I settled in to a day in front of the computer, when, whoops! I knocked over, no, I flung over, the coffee, all over my desk, underneath my monitor and keyboard (fortunately not on the keyboard, or I wouldn't be writing this now), leaving myself with approximately one sip of coffee.

And then, and then, I get a message from the bridal salon I went to last night to try on wedding dresses, telling me I'd left a pair of Spanx in the dressing room. Insult indeed, added to injury.

So I have had a total of three sips of coffee today: two of the bad-woman-bagel-store cup, one of the knocked over hazelnut. Where is my bed?

Gore for Four?

2007-10-11T09:56:00.000-04:00

I'm not the only one who would like to see Al Gore run for president in 2008. A "Draft Gore" group placed a full-page, $65,000 ad in the New York Times, which you can see here.

Now, I don't think Al's going to go for it. But let's fantasize a little and say he did. Say he won. We get four years of good governance, repaired relationships around the world, serious headway in the development of alternative energy, even, let's dream big, an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a major reduction in the deficit.

Then it's 2012 and he's up for re-election. You know what's going to happen then? Karl Rove will slime his slimy self back into the equation and declare that it's unconstitutional that Gore run for another term. After all, the 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected to the presidency twice.

And we all know Al Gore was elected in 2000. (OK, we don't all know that, but it's a very strong possibility.)

Just you wait. The one thing you can never accuse the Republicans of is insufficient chutzpah.

Two Things I Want To Know About Britney Spears

2007-10-03T10:35:00.000-04:00

I'd like to be able to say that I haven't the slightest idea of what's going on with Britney these days, but that would be a lie. I know about the head shaving. I know about the flashing of the unmentionables. I know that she lost custody of her kids to her ex-husband. The "news" about the Britney car wreck is everywhere, and it's hard to look away.

But here's what I don't get. All the media converage has been: Oh, she's so crazy! She's out of control! Just like Lindsay! And Paris! Girls gone wild! Doesn't she care about her children at all???

But there are two things that are never mentioned. The first things is this: At 25, Britney is around the age that, if she were going to have a giant mental disorder, it would appear. Schizophrenia anyone? Manic-depression? She's cut herself off from her family. She's self-medicating. She's acting completely irrational, paranoid, delusional (her performance on the MTV awards was proof of that last). I think she's not "crazy," but actually mentally ill.

Which leads to the second thing I don't hear anyone talking about. Isn't anyone worried that she might kill herself? Especially after her children have been taken from her, possibly her last tenuous tie to real life, if I were her parents or anyone who actually knew her, as opposed to all of us who just read about her in the tabloids every day, I'd be keeping a close eye on her.

God help me, I feel sorry for her. Plus, the entertainment shows have just about wrung out all they can out of Anna Nicole. If Britney commits suicide, they'll be feeding off her for the next five years. And I'll probably have to watch it.

How World Peace Is Ruining My Life

2007-09-28T09:28:00.001-04:00

There's a lot I could discuss about the UN General Assembly that was held this past week. The controversial Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia University: Should they have invited him? Having invited him was it appropriate for PresBo to excoriate him in his opening remarks? The anti-George Bush protests: Can activism ever be effective when the movement doesn't have a leader with the oratory skills to whip up a crowd? The stupid-ass global warming meeting W held in DC when all the other world leaders, not to mention President Clinton and his gang of billionaires, were meeting about it in New York: no comment. The Senagalese president: Why didn't he honor his commitment to meet with a group of Senagalese citizens living in Harlem?

But those are questions for another blog. This is about me, and my pain.

What I want to know is not why security has to be such that the stretch of Lexington Avenue from the mid-50s through the mid-40s has to be barricaded and surrounded by police, funneling vehicles through one lane and diverting all east-west traffic to my street -- after all, there are world leaders staying in those hotels, any one of whom could be the target of an assassination attempt (except maybe Norway's Jens Stoltenberg; no one would want to hurt the leader of the most peaceful country in the world, right?), so while it inconvenienced me greatly, I can let it go and think of the greater good it's serving.

No, the worst of it was this: our cable television was out last night, and when I called Time Warner to find out whether it was just us, or the entire neighborhood, I learned that the security equipment in use because of the UN meetings was so substantial that it was interfering with the cable signals in the area. Can you imagine? No television?! Oh, the humanity.

Saving the Environment, Smelling Like Salad

2007-09-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

I don't have much personal vanity, but for my hair. It's of the tousled/wavy/curly/frizzy/ messy variety, depending on the weather, which makes it impossible ever to look sleek and sophisticated unless I pay someone a lot of money to style it for me. I'm constantly looking for the shampoo/conditioner/gel/ spray/lighter-fluid combination that will make it look presentable on a daily basis, but every person who has ever cut my hair has exclaimed, "you have great hair!" as if they really meant it, and while I demurely thank them, inside I'm kvelling.

The perfect set of products may actually be those made by Devachan, a Soho salon that specializes in curly hair. The beauty world is actively hostile to curly hair. Before I started going to Devachan, the "great hair" comment would nearly always be followed by a plea that I should try it straight. At Devachan, they would not only be insulted if you asked to have your hair dried straight, they'd probably kick you out. They're hardcore, but it's nice to look around the salon and only see people with crazy hair like yours for a change.

Devachan is a bit cult-ish, though. God forbid you not want to sit under the low heat lamps for an hour with a quart of gel squished into your hair to achieve maximum Shirley Templedom. Their products, though, actually work better for curly hair than anything else, starting with something they call "No Poo", so called because they don't believe in shampooing curly hair, which they believe strips it of... something... essential... to curliness. I generally tune out the dogma while I'm getting my hair washed beneath the graceful mosquito netting that hangs above their sinks.

But the products are expensive, they come in big plastic bottles (recyclable number 2, yes, but I'm trying to cut down on my plastic consumption), and they're not organic. I don't know if a bunch of chemicals you smoosh on your head for a minute or two every morning have much of an impact on your health, but it stands to reason that less of them can't be bad for you, and might even be good.

There are several natural shampoos, but they're all in plastic bottles, too, and once you start down that path, you're into the "frees": cruelty, parabens, petroleum, FD&C color, SLS/SLES, etc. If you buy a bottle of something that doesn't have this list on the front, maybe you're not really going organic after all, and you could drive yourself crazy trying to work out which of them matters. Plus, they're all expensive anyway.

Oh for the days when I blithely used $1-a-bottle Suave and was done with it.

I work at an engineering firm, and we like to debate the NASA imperative to launch missions "better, faster, cheaper." Is it ever possible to get all three? You can get things that are good and fast, but you'll pay a lot. Fast and cheap, sure; but how good is, say, a McDonald's hamburger compared to a three-course meal at a four-star restaurant? And yes, you can get things that are good and cheap, but they often take a long time to procure or execute.

Which brings me to my evolving hair-care routine. It started with baking soda. Devachan is right that you don't really need to wash your hair. Every few days, my scalp gets a little itchy, though, and a handful of baking soda, turned into a paste in the shower and rubbed through, feels and works great. A big box of baking soda is cheap, plus it's cardboard, which seems a better environmental bet than plastic.

But curly hair can't not be conditioned. I'd read that people follow their baking soda with apple cider vinegar to soft and shiny effect, but I didn't believe it. How could something acidic do anything other than strip your hair? And since the claims made on its behalf seemed too miraculous to be true -- drinking it will cure allergies! acne! arthritis! and that's just the a's -- I couldn't help but be skeptical.

Ha. How wrong was I to have waited so long to try this? A few swishes of some organic acv from a glass bottle (not sure of the environmental impact of glass over plastic, honestly; it uses more oil to transport because it's heavier, blah blah blah), and my hair magically detangled. Once dry, it was softer and maybe even a little shinier than before. And though I used more of it than I probably needed to -- it's harder to control than a goopy conditioner, though I suppose I could put it into a squeeze bottle -- it's far cheaper than anything else I've ever used, except the Suave, and that's more expensive these days anyway. I even swigged a little of it to see if it would cure me anything, but so far I don't think it has.

My new routine doesn't take any longer than regular shampoo and conditioner, it's much cheaper, and it's better for the environment, possibly my own personal health, and dare I say, the loveliness of my hair. Ta dah.

Unfortunately, it makes my hair smell like I've been wearing the salad bowl as a hat.

My fiance said he hoped I wasn't going to start adding olive oil. Oh, but do you know my hair stylist said I should coat my hair in the stuff at least once a week and sleep through the night that way? My cats attack my head when I do it, but it does seem to do something nice to my hair. You don't mind, sweetie, do you? Pass the tongs.

Back to it, again

2007-09-04T09:43:00.000-04:00

According to a study released last week, nearly half of all American workers are dissatisfied with their job.

However, the study went on to find that only 13% of people who reported making "post-Labor Day resolutions" were planning to look for a new job. I guess we're all (I count myself in the nearly half referenced above) discouraged about the prospects of finding something better.

I also count myself in the group of people who make Labor Day resolutions. I doubt I'll ever stop feeling that this time of year is "back to school," and back to school means getting down to business.

To wit: walk to work every day (this is a gimme, because I moved over the weekend to an apartment exactly one mile from my office, and the cross-town bus takes longer than walking); get up earlier for writing and stretching (not at all hard this morning, because the cats are still getting used to their new apartment, and were climbing on my head at 5am); no more deli coffee (oops; drinking a cup now); go to the gym, go to the greenmarket, go to yoga (I'll let you know); less freaking out, more finding ways to soothe myself and transcend stressful situations (ditto).

Sad

2007-08-14T12:40:00.001-04:00

I was at my lawyer's this morning, signing some contracts (don't you love the way I write "at my lawyer's" as if I have a lawyer independent of this one very specific transaction I hired him for? I always love the moment on crime dramas when, as the Lenny Briscoe character is putting the cuffs on, the bad guy says to his secretary or his girlfriend in the cut-off shorts and tank top who made the mistake of opening the door to the cops, "call my lawyer," as if that person is on speed dial. Who are these people who have personal lawyers?) and while I was waiting for him to get off the phone, I read the top page of a contract that happened to be within easy sight.

The contract was unusual looking, in that it looked typed instead of printed, which was explained when I saw the date in the first paragraph -- 1988. Though there was no heading on it that said this, as I read it it became clear that it was a pre-nup, because it outlined what property would remain in individual ownership after the marriage. I can only imagine it was on my lawyer's desk because the signatories were getting a divorce.

Not Said in All of This

2007-08-10T10:40:00.000-04:00

It's raining again this morning, and while the subways are all running normally (except mine -- there was an "earlier incident" at 125th Street that took out the 1/2/3 for a half hour), the MTA is on high alert.

In the first days of the post mortem of the GFof07, there's one thing that keeps coming up that I find really interesting. One of the reasons for the track flooding was that the MTA didn't have enough workers on the tracks to clear debris that was blocking the drains. Newspapers, principally. There's a reason you use newspaper for elementary school papier mache projects. It takes a long time of sogginess before that stuff disintegrates.

So the MTA has to put more track workers out to clear tracks, is the conclusion that seems to have been reached, by the MTA at least. But you know what? How about asking -- or even telling, there's a crazy thought -- passengers not to throw newspapers and other trash on the track? How about sending a bill to the publishers of the Metro and AM New York, the two free newspaper that are pressed into your hand outside of every subway station?

Yes, it feels like we pay a lot to ride a subway that's dirty and hot and breaks down in the rain. But does that give everyone the right to treat it like their personal dumpster? Has the concept of personal responsibility completely evaporated in this city?

The Great Flood of Aught Seven

2007-08-08T14:17:00.000-04:00

It's hard to be an Excellent Walker in August, particularly the hot August we've been having. But I had no choice but to hoof it to work today, since all the subways were shut down after the three-inches-in-an-hour of rain we had this morning. By the time I got to the office, sweaty and on my way to a sunburn, I was in no mood for the cheery greeting I got from the receptionist, who, on a normal day has a problem getting here as early as 10am, so who is she to be all "I'm at work before you" on me?

People are complaining that the MTA should be better prepared for these situations (apparently many of the water pumps date from the 1930s, though I can't find a source for that), and I guess they should be. I think it's unrealistic, though, to expect a fully modernized system when that system is over 100 years old, operates 24/7, and transports millions of people a day. If you've tried to take the subway on the weekend, you know that they are always working on it. There's only so much they can do, though, without shutting the whole thing down. With that kind of daily use, they might as well be bailing water out of a sinking ship with a teaspoon.

What I do think is possible is a better communications system, both in terms of the hardware in the stations and the updates on the website, and getting instructions to the MTA workers who are -- rightly -- interrogated by commuters when something is wrong. All of those things failed this morning, and are still in failure mode at 2:45pm. The best information I got was from the media, who had dispatched reporters to various sites to, you know, report what was happening. Considering how likely it is that we'll have a true emergency in the subway one of these days -- i.e., a terrorist attack -- and that it's been six years since we've put urban terrorism on the top of our "to worry about a lot" list, you'd think we'd have at least made some progress there. You would, however, be wrong.

Four

2007-07-23T10:49:00.001-04:00

That's the number of dorks holding onto my subway pole on the trip to work this morning reading the new Harry Potter.

Full disclosure: one of those dorks was me.

When Your Nose is in the Yogurt, Have You Reached Rock Bottom?

2007-07-18T10:56:00.000-04:00

I told myself that if, when I emerged from the subway at the southeast corner of 35th and Eighth, there wasn't a line at Starbucks, I would treat myself to an over-priced, and overly precisely ordered (non-fat, half-caf, blah blah blah) iced coffee. There was a line, which, according to my prior agreement with myself, meant I should have just walked on by, but a man sitting in the window caught my eye. He wasn't so much sitting as shlumped, face down into the cup of granola and yogurt set in front of him. Was he dead? It was my responsibility to find out.

I paused for a few seconds inside the doorway; he took a breath. Not dead. But at least three-quarters of his nose was in the yogurt. If he hadn't been sitting in a Starbucks with a six dollar cup of yogurt in front of him, I would have said he looked homeless. I got on line, over precisely ordered, keeping half an eye on the man as I waited. No movement. Maybe he'd had a heart attack? A stroke?

As I was about to leave, I shook the man on the shoulder. He startled, lifted his head about an inch, cocked it my way, gave me a look that said, "ehhhh, leave me alone," then turned and dropped back into the yogurt. No one else seemed to notice.