ready for kindergarten

Mr. Ben and I turned five on friday. It’s a little hard to believe, but, since we could use the situation to justify spending outsized amounts of money on a meal in a fancy Manhattan restaurant, we decided to take it on faith.

The restaurant we picked, after much deliberation, was Annisa. It’s feminist! (True!) The incredible three page wine list includes wine only from vineyards owned and operated by women; the owner of the restaurant is a woman, and so is the star chef. Mr. Ben and I got to sit side by side and order an appetizer to share and a glass of wine each in addition to our entrees and generally we felt like Hiltons. It was awfully nice.

Then we had to go ruin the mood by taking in a showing of the new What If the Confederacy had Won the Civil War? movie C.S.A. at the IFC. Theoretically a Q&A followed the main event but the charismatic young director made it through only two questions before the theater had to usher in the next batch of ticketholders. The IFC must have made a fortune that evening. Three showings to packed houses at $10.75 a pop — they probably took in as much as the movie was made for.

The movie itself was interesting and I encourage you to see it, if it ever comes to a theater near you, which it won’t, or a cable channel, which is more likely, or a college classroom, which is more likely still. It sparks good discussion, for one thing. I didn’t agree with all of the decisions the director made about the way history would have unfolded. For one thing, he seemed determined to hit all the same 20th century high notes: WWII (although he never mentioned WWI,) the Bomb, the Great Depression, the Moon Landing. Many of the same people, in his revision, ran for president. A lot of it’s illogical and/or feels shoehorned in.

But while it may have been less creative to show a 20th century eerily parallel to the one we lived through, it does force the viewer to confront the similarities. A lot of what he does well is highlight those same uncomfortable modern issues Spike Lee did in Bamboozled, another ambitious, flawed film. Except that one I saw on a really bad date.

Happy Presidents Day, everyone. (Where does the apostrope belong there? President’s or Presidents’?) Ugh. Who cares. Can you believe February’s almost over? Soon, friends, it’ll be spring.

Dear Mr. Cohen …

So we all know this is unethical. But HOW unethical is it, on a scale of 1 to Jack Abramoff? Is it worth the minor purgatorial singe you might suffer in the next world, or would it forever compromise your academic integrity?

Signed,
Needy Grad with Bucketloads of Useless College Research Papers, Most of Them About Gender

anyone want some old bras?

I confronted a demon today. A big, bosomy, beige demon with a Brooklyn accent. My excessively sweet and accomodating friend Claire and I were wandering around Soho / the Lower East Side when I realized I was in the neighborhood of my demon and I should just face the damn thing and be done with it. I didn’t know its address, of course, but after a while, we found it: right on Orchard Street, where it’s supposed to be.

The store has a serious reputation for women with serious endowments, and my friends, I am endowed like Harvard University. Like Harvard and Yale PUT TOGETHER and there’s nothing I can do about it, except find undergarments that fit right. I have a drawer full of old standards that don’t quite do it, so I figured it was about time to square my shoulders, narrow my eyes, and get fitted by the experts.

Naturally, as soon as the expert approached me, eying the figure I keep well-hidden under my coat, I shrieked, “I know what size I am!” They keep tranquilizers on hand for just such occasions. The expert, an ageless Jewish lady watching soaps on a small TV, cooed to me, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. No one grows in this store.” I’ve been waiting for those words my whole life.

From a wall of floor-to-ceiling boxes she selected one marked with the measurements and the brand I gave her (Wacoal, baby, for which tip I must credit La Bitch) and displayed its contents. “This one’s the best,” she said. “This one?” I asked, holding up another. “No,” she said firmly. “This one.”

I am a sucker for experts. Dutifully, I took the bra she recommended and followed her down the narrow middle aisle past a heavy Hasidic man and a dark-skinned woman in a turban. She stopped at no place in particular and pulled a curtain to separate us from the store. Once she’d coaxed me out of my shirt, she nodded and smiled. “Mamaleh,” she said, “you’re wearing the wrong size.”

“No!” I cried. It was my worst fear come true. But she hasn’t been a bra saleslady for 21 years for nothing. She spun my new measurements to mean that I was thinner than I thought, and what could be wrong with that? Besides, the proof would be in the pudding. She brought me a different bra, which I slipped on, and — well, wow. I looked smaller, smoother. My back felt different. She pronounced me perfect, then insisted we go out and show Claire.

Claire, who is a trooper, nodded excitedly at my chest and tried to say supportive but not creepy things about what was displayed there. The saleslady beamed. The bras were on sale for half off, and the decision was made. The key takeaway? I’m thinner that I thought.

refeducation

The first three days of this week:

Day 1) Job interview. Sit across from very nice young woman, roughly my age, who looks me over and seems to approve. We bond about the importance of your office being “a good fit.” (Perhaps she too was “let go” right before the pre-Christmas office party while carrying a huge black garbage bag in each hand.) We chat some more, and we are nicely situated on the same wavelength.

Then she drops the bomb: salary $20K/year. I fantasize about all the things I’d like to do with $20K/year and I realize the most important thing I’d like to do with it is PUT IT IN THE BANK while I live on the other $10K/year that I earn. Sheesh!

With as much dignity as I can muster, I get to my feet and say, “If you wanted to insult me, why didn’t you just draw a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler?”

Day 2) Job interview. Sit across from a very nice young woman, roughly my age, who approves eagerly of everything. We bond over movies, particularly Junebug. Again, we seem to be sharing space on the same wavelength.

Then a mouse runs across the floor in front of us. “Oh, a mouse,” I say. “Oh, yeah!” she says, looking embarrassed. “He sort of lives here. I don’t mind him so much.” We debate climbing onto chairs to shriek and hop from one foot to the other and decide we don’t have the energy.

Day 3) Reemployment Orientation. Sit in a crowded room the color of mucus. I am the only white girl present, and one of only 3 girls total, but everyone is too depressed by unemployment and the mucus-colored room to stare. The Labor employee who leads our session is being punished by the fashion gods for unknown reasons.

One by one, the Labor employee calls us to his desk and gives us a packet of paper, repeating the instructions to everyone and then telling us to sit back down and fill out a form. Then he takes us on a tour of a computer lab and brings us back to the mucus-colored room, where he shows us what he calls “a movie” and which is actually an elementary power point presentation projected onto a mucus-colored wall and accompanied by a recording that reads aloud every word we see.

Then, one by one, the Labor employee calls us back to his desk, takes our completed form and hands us a slip of paper. We take this slip of paper back to the computer lab, hand it to another employee and sign his register, and we are free to go. The process takes just over two hours.

Nobody makes a single Holocaust joke. I feel betrayed.

the last thing i’ll say about it

Here’s the cartoon controversy from a cartoonist’s point of view.

I don’t know why this brouhaha has gotten under my skin the way it has. I haven’t really been able to think deeply on any other topic for days. (While, it should be said, the major news outlets seemed to be simply hoping the story would go away, a strategy destined to last only until the story became really ugly and unavoidable.) Comments here, I’ve noticed, have been few, meaning that maybe I’m alone in my fixation.

But, man! So many absorbing questions. If momentum carries all this saber-rattling much farther, aren’t you scared it’s going to be the new bomb under the carriage? Or do you assume it’ll flame out? How much freedom of the press is too much freedom of the press? Is it too much to expect, in a globalized but not equalized world, that everyone can fully appreciate each others’ values (religious conviction in one case, secular liberty in the other)? What role does the UN play? Where should America be in this equation? It’s been pretty silent so far, aside from a stultifying and mealy-mouthed state department press release.

Surely, surely you have an opinion.

going for Brokeback

This short film/trailer “Brokeback to the Future,” is definitely worth a viewing. Critics are calling it “Three times as funny as that cartoon of Muhammed with the turban bomb!” And that’s really saying something.

a very tired controversy, including SPOILERS

Ever since the the Oscar nominations have come out, the media has been turning itself blue hollering, “Culture wars! Culture wars!” Turns out Brokeback Mountain offends some of the Concerned Women of America because — well, actually, I’m stumped as to why. Damned if Elizabeth Vargas, who has informed me of the issue TWICE now, mysteriously during “World News Tonight,” has deigned to explain.

The thing is (SPOILERS!) I’m scratching my head over what even the most repressed and repressive would find objectionable in this film. The two men have a love affair, sure, but they both hate themselves for it and torture each other with their inabilities to commit to a taboo lifestyle. Instead they bow to social pressure and marry women, who they, of course, then inevitably make miserable.

They don’t identify as “queer,” they don’t agitate for rights or acceptance — in fact they’re completely apolitical. I’d think they’d be the right’s posterboys for good gays. Well, okay, maybe that’s stretching it, but if the right were willing to tolerate homosexuality in America, don’t you think this is how they’d want it to look? Cloaked in quiet suffering & self-denial?

On the other hand, I did come across this article from OUDaily.com that I hope Ang Lee and Annie Proulx have also found, because it seems to indicate that they did their job perfectly.

Oh also: I can’t post a frikking thing about Palestinians without thereafter feeling guilty about it. So let me add, to assuage my lefty conscience: I think it’s criminally stupid that French and German papers are now reprinting the offensive cartoons, to the continued horror of the Muslim world. Thanks, guys. Well done. Way to show how advanced and mature you are as a civilization, shaking salt onto an open wound. Even Voltaire, seeing this, would ram his forehead through the nearest wall.

We in the west have grown accustomed to the ramifications of free speech. We weren’t born with a thick skin; we’ve developed one over hundreds of years, and not without a rather a lot of bloodshed along the way. It’s naive to expect that the Arab Muslim world, largely without a free press or a tradition of satire, would be able to react the same way we do. And anyway, even in the west protests pop up all the time over free speech issues. France doesn’t allow large religious accessories in public schools, that’s how much they value total free expression.

So tend to your own backyards, Western world, and stop making things worse.

a political entry (for a change)

– Cloture vote on Alito today, leading in to the almost inevitable full Senate vote on him tomorrow. Our country is going Scalito’s way, folks, and I don’t see what we can do about it, except moan really loudly about John Kerry’s mis-timed and mis-orchestrated yodel for a filibuster from the mountaintops of Switzerland.

Kerry lacks instincts. That’s really what it is, and instincts are half the game. Al Gore was the same way. Hilary’s not, but she’s got the opposite problem: too many instincts, not enough actual values. Oy.

– The Danes, of all people, have seriously pissed off the Muslim world with a controversial cartoon. Really! You know what country has the largest population of Palestinians outside of the Occupied Territories? What country held an anti-Israel demonstration every week or so while I lived there? What country prides itself on tolerance, freedom of expression, and being totally sympathetic to all Arabs everywhere (at least those outside Scandinavia)? Zambia. Wait, no: Denmark!

So I never thought I’d see the day when masked Fatah gunmen burned a Danish flag. See for yourself – isn’t it dizzying? I wonder how they’re reacting over there.

If the Palestinians are looking for a way to save money now that they’ve elected a terrorist government that the Western world is squeaming about supporting financially, maybe cutting down on the budget for flags & flag-burning supplies is a way to go. Also bullets. I’ve heard those are actually pretty expensive, especially when you’re shooting into the air to express both joy and rage.

Just a thought.

larry summers is me?

I’ve avoided taking the IATs in the past because, like most well-meaning people, I can realize that I am a product of a biased society with biases of my own without wanting to be straight-out told that I am that way. So I started slow, with the Judaism test and the Gender-Science test.

The odds that I’m secretly self-hating seemed slim to me. Turns out I was right: I love my people — to such a degree in fact that I was really frazzled associating the bad words like “destroy” with them. In the end, the test told me I have a strong preference toward my own kind. Interesting.

The Gender-Science test however threw me for a loop. It tests how strongly you believe, as the president of Harvard does (or did, before the public exorcism,) that science is manly and liberal arts are girly. I myself am a liberal artsy girl who never excelled at math and only sporadically enjoyed science. BUT I grew up among the most high-achieving math and sciency girls you’ll ever meet. Numbers came naturally to them. One’s in an MD-PHD program, one’s in med school, one majored in applied math although she went on to law school, one’s doing public health in Ethiopia. At college, several of my female friends were also comp sci or math majors, and they’re all either in grad school currently or planning to be.

Likewise! I know plenty of male film & english majors. In fact I’m shacked up with one.

So what does it mean for the world if even I, with this background, can be confronted with a whopping STRONG ASSOCIATION with [men and science] and [women and liberal arts]? I despair.

Interestingly, I had a really hard time associating “Latin” with women or with liberal arts. I kept getting that one wrong. Latin is apparently, in my head, a male language. I blame President Bartlet.

the right tone?

The 30th anniversary of Roe happens to coincide with the first vote, today, on Alito in the Judiciary Committee. Dana Milbank in the Post has a very affecting article on the huge march that took place in DC to mark, well, both occasions really.

In these situations, it is common for those of us who value our right to live unhindered by the moral surveillance of the christian right to look to the north for salvation. But there’s no comfort there today.

More than one person has pointed out that Roe is in no immediate danger, despite the marchers’ euphoric insistence otherwise: even with Alito replacing Sandra Day (who I blame for all of this, ironically) 5 votes remain on the court to preserve the right to an abortion. And even if it were overturned, somehow, I, nestled safe in commie Brooklyn, would hardly feel the effects. Except. I am one of those lefties that struggles with America without getting all bleak and bitter about it. Even having grown up in DC, where Diogenes would have been even more hard-pressed to find an idealist, I retained some pride in a country whose system has the right intentions.

I don’t wave flags and I don’t burn them either, is what I’m trying to say. But on the day that this country capitulates to the Christian right, regresses 30 years into the past, takes my personal liberty off the table to replace it with a big steaming pile of self-righteous bombast, on that day I would. Burn a flag, and be done with it.