White Noise

One element in the waiting room of any psychiatrist, analyst, psychologist, clinical social worker, and the like that I've noticed in my 30+ years making the rounds of various shrinks has remained constant: the white noise machine.

The device never changes its look, purpose, or sound. It's an off-white-to-beige circular plastic item about six inches in diameter and four inches in height, tethered to the wall by the inevitable extension cord, generating the same reassuring whoosh.

Everything else about the venue differs: from shrink to shrink, whether in shared office space or solo in what is now considered a home office, and used to be called the den, has changed over time. Innumerable faces hold countless certifications, and my sister/fellow-patients wait to enter or exit the closed office. Waiting room magazines bear new titles, cover lines, and dates, and even the type of bulb in the table lamps has gone green.

Still, white noise is white noise is white noise, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein badly. No one has come along with explosive technology to change anything about the machine, and it serves its purpose just fine.

Alice likes that in an a machine, that consistency. You never need to reboot white noise, just unplug it and move it to the next electrical outlet for your convenience.

Then again, if Alice could reboot her head, to make the synapses and neurotransmitters move in the alignment they may have had when Alice was a baby, before all The Troubles with Alice started, when she was a child, she would try to advance her techno knowledge to do so.

Technology and Alice faded out as partners circa 2001. Prior to that, Alice, oddly enough, was on the cutting edge -- online since 1993 successfully (vs. the 1985 inability to be pure techno junkie with the 300 baud modem); owner of PCs for 25 years, learned of untold number of operating systems.

Now? Alice wants everything simplified, as she would do so in her head. Alas, what is intuitive to Alice vs. the population at large spans a large gap.

In the meantime, Alice has made the leap into 21st century webgrrl. How?

Alice joins Facebook

Never say never, apparently. After about two years of rejecting invitations, Alice has given in. Web 2.0, here she comes. Or some variation and with major hesitation, Alice has decided to approximate a social networker.

She wonders if anyone else thinks Facebook is junior-high-school note-passing on steroids. Or high school folks simultaneously ducked out for a smoke of whatever substance pleases.

With enough "friends," Alice has discovered, on Facebook you're never alone. Hearing from someone you know, however vaguely, seems akin to to the result of tossing spaghetti on the wall and hoping some of it sticks. In real life, Alice believes if you have five true friends, you are blessed.

On Facebook however, it's all about quantity. "What's on your mind?" my opening page asks. Usually I don't think the answer suitable for public consumption. If you really want to Go Ask Alice, ask her here.

Among my questions: does Facebook actually bring together people who want to be rediscovered in one's life, or does it bring up parts of the past we'd really rather not acknowledge on a Wall.

Most of my Facebook "friends" are people I know personally, in real life. The rest are my blogging friends, whom I have known in cyberspace for many years.

Alice is very much a result of her breeding: she was raised as an anachronism, as it turns out. She wants a separate personal and professional life, boundaries of the 20th century that seem to be indistinct in the 21st century. And, like The Velveteen Rabbit, Alice wants to know what's real.

On Facebook, Alice finds communication somewhat detached. It has been prettied up with more applications than Alice will ever understand, and lots of icons that make much better sense in real life, i.e., getting someone a drink, rather than giving them the Facebook equivalent.

If someone handed you a photo of a glass of wine, there isn't anything to swallow, except metaphorically, and Alice isn't so sure Facebook addicts retain the ability to distinguish metaphor -- a polite and perhaps inexact term for our "secondary, simulated reality" -- for "first-degree reality."

She finds one determination best made in the pages analyzing Don Delillo's White Noise. It has been explained as follows:

"In 1983, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations. In it, he maintains that the postmodern world privileges simulacra over reality; we believe our secondary, simulated reality is more real than first-degree reality.

"His classic example is that Disneyland, a fantasy world, seems more real to us than the real world. DeLillo utilizes this idea throughout White Noise, focusing on a nation reared on the simulated reality of the media which even had a former actor (Ronald Reagan) as President at the time."

In 2009, we in Wonderland live with the white noise of our nanny-state governments. Which makes more pollution, bus exhaust or five minutes of second-hand tobacco smoke? Alice knows which way her vote is going, and it's not going in favor of Rudy and Mike, those key window dressers of her day.

Times Square didn't used to be Disneyland; it was a real, honest in the grittiest sense, place where Broadway and 42nd St. connected. Cars and pedestrians only, thankyouverymuch. Until now, when Mike has seen fit to shut the intersection to cars and spread out lawn chairs instead. Surely there are better places for lawn chairs -- Central Park comes to mind.

Lawn chairs aren't called "street chairs" for a reason. Note to Mayor Mike's office: move the damn chairs into a park. Don't leave them clogging the intersection. It's not as if there will be less traffic; it's just that the drivers are going to hit the road rage dial faster and faster as the traffic piles up.

And those horns blaring? A driver with road rage is not going to go forth under the white noise radar. No, horns blast white noise back to the shrink's office, where they work.

A few more words on White Noise:

"DeLillo says the idea for White Noise came to him while he watched television news, and realized that toxic spills were becoming such a daily occurrence that no one the news cared about them -- only those affected by the spills cared.

"We can see this idea play out in the airborne toxic event in White Noise, when people are upset that the media pays their crisis little attention, but it emerges in subtler ways when DeLillo examines the consumerist, technological atmospheres of death we create for ourselves -- from our living rooms to our cars to our supermarkets.

"DeLillo also takes a look at several more typically postmodern ideas -- ambiguity of identity, waste, racial heterogeneity, the family -- and gives them his astute, humorous spin. Though most readers find his view of American society harsh and pessimistic, others see the ending of White Noise -- with its bonding through consumerism in the face of death -- as subversively "uplifting."

Facebook is all about bonding, however ingenuously. We write on Walls; therefore we exist. We have some semblance of a connection with humanity. Yet Alice still hears streams of shrink-office white noise boxes, even as the air conditioner at home imitates the sound.

There is a gap, between what we write and what is real, or, more precisely, what we want to reveal and what seeing us in person would reveal. Into that gap floods white noise in all its manifestations, keeping us with one foot in Disneyland, and only one grasping the floor that is genuine and tangible and no imitation of anything but itself.

D * I * V * O * R * C * E -- again

It is once again that time: Two and a half years into wedded, well, marriage, and bliss is not on the brother's list. Divorce is. Lawyer and joint custody are on mine. Finally, I have a niece, and I want to be damn sure that she knows me, knows her NYC clan. I am assured things are being taken care of. God, I hope so.

After announcing he and Kay's mother were divorcing, no messing around with trial separation or anything to that effect, the brother says, "I never should have married her."

"You say that every time," I replied, this being divorce #4. #1 through #3 didn't make much of a difference in my life. After the first or second, I stopped trying to get to know the wives. There would always be a woman; the hope was, the brother wouldn't try marriage again.

This time it matters: the brother has a daughter, my niece. My only niece/grandchild, and I want to make damn sure I will get to be part of her life. In truth, I want her the hell out of Tiny Town, Sleepy Southern State, and north of the Mason-Dixon line, where at least she will learn who won the Civil War.

(Our mother, raised in North Carolina in the late '40s/early '50s, was taught it was The War of Northern Aggression, and her teachers were hazy on how it played out.)

Perhaps I should have spotted a clue at Christmas, when the brother made reference at a party to his "current wife." Here today, usually gone tomorrow... but not this time, not with my niece in the picture.

I'm hoping my niece's mother -- until the papers are signed technically she remains my sister-in-law -- and my brother will remain on good terms and I will have the luxury of being the aunt/grandma to K. She is my link to the next generation, the only genetic one I will ever have.

I imagine all the things I want to show my niece, what I can do in my capacity as New York aunt that her Southern mother, half my age, may never have the ability to do and that might not occur to my brother. I want K. to feel special around me, around our mother, around everyone in her orbit.

It terrifies me that there could be any other options.

Ode via an offspring

It is true that the portrait I paint of my mom in this blog only goes as far as I see her. Here, I offer another view, the woman my mom's colleagues see every day when she goes off to work, in her capacity as a professional volunteer -- going on 30+ years in that capacity, about 30 years more than I could do what she does.

This one's for her, from the people she sees every day, in their words, to describe her as volunteer of the year:

"I've had the honor for the past 15 years to come before you and tell you about a rare individual whom we feel deserves this award in Mrs. Wilson's name. Often as not that individual is someone who has volunteered for dozens of years, a demure person who does not seek the limelight, someone who is an unsung hero, a shy person, someone who can quietly appears at a bedside, who is never ruffled, a kind soul who proffers her calm presence to our patients and enjoys the quiet of of a garden and the repose of a nap.

"This, however, is not our Frances.

"Frances has six opinions for every half of one you've got. She has no interest in computers. She likes anemones. She hates a mess; she likes white; she doesn't suffer fools. When you think of Frances, you should imagine someone with the metabolism of a hummingbird. She's first on line at any event serving excellent food and never gains an ounce.

"She has volunteered for the VOICES program, the flower program, the front desk for admitting, the volunteer department, the patients' library, the Ambassador's program, for the surgical liaison program. She travels by plane, plane, boat, camel, and probably by turtle while in the Galapagos.

"I think of her arrival at HSS [the hospital where she volunteers] each day as something akin to a flight pattern: ETA is about 8:30 am with a stop at the front desk to see how Lillian is doing and answer at least a dozen phone calls and as many people at the front desk.

"She zips up to the Family Atrium, demands that someone from Susan Flic's office turn on the computer; that accomplished, she makes and serves coffee, attends to questions by a dozen or so family members in the atrium; she then proceeds to floors 8, 7, and 6 to gather vases for the flower program, drops by the volunteer department to tell Shahan and me what to do about our health, husbands and homes; she receives the flowers from Lexington Gourmet, advises the Flower committee on their health, husbands, and homes, and delivers flowers to patients on 8, 7 and 6. Then she prepares the library cart for delivery on floors on 8,7, and 6 to deliver magazines and books and flatly refuses requests from a few patients for pulp fiction.

"By now, it's about 9:15 am and almost time for the Flower committee to have lunch. Lois Fankhauser, who, by the way, is chairwoman of the Flower committee, fondly calls Frances 'the little general.'

"This [award] has been a very difficult secret to keep from Frances, because you are the volunteer department.

Now, I heard from a friend of yours that after working a 'ge-billion' [10,000 hours plus] hours at a Westchester psychiatric facility, they gave you an alarm clock. I don't know why anyone would give you a clock, because it's quite clear to me that you don't need a wakeup call. You are the most wide awake woman I have ever known. So we're not going to give you a clock, or a T-shirt, or a mug; we're just going to tell you that we adore you."

So here's to my mom, a woman of many talents, most of which I rarely acknowledge or which drive me insane more often than not.

Happy Mother's Day, Frances.

lots of love,

Alice

Are you ready for the country?

Alice is. Five weeks in Wonderland and environs, and she is ready to go again, this time to the bucolic environs of Zurich, where her best friend from grad school 25 years ago has settled, one in a number of Americans who left just as the country started going to hell under a shrub and who has since developed a life that differs from the one she left behind.

Despite her self-proclaimed news blackout, when Alice is at home, she cannot help being part of her cityscape, cannot avoid the work she likes to leave behind. This is why holidays are so appealing for Alice: out of the country is the only way she can unplug herself entirely from the so-called real world, the one where all the numbers count, where she is the dernier cri on matters financial.

BFGS claims it is 1953 in her Swiss exurb, and, given that she is walking her daughter back to school after a 2 hour lunch break, it is obvious that even the 20th century of working moms has yet to claim a perch here. Then there is the husband, and the division of labor that doesn't quite break down the way the BFGS would have imagined, all those years ago.

Yet BFGS, she of the full Ph.D., is getting her research done, her book written, and holding up the homestead, getting more done before noon than Alice in the proverbial day. Alice could not do full time domesticity; she is admittedly too self absorbed, or absorbed within her limits.

That is to say that she and the Artist are again traveling together, and Alice awaits each email with a smile on her face. A brief reversion to courtship may be just what she and the Artist need, just to confirm that next time Alice leaves Wonderland, she will very much want the Artist to accompany her.

The road not taken

When Robert Frost was writing, his choice, it appears, was between two routes, and he chose the one less traveled by. I live on one of those roads less traveled by, and yes, it has made all the difference. However, my choices, here in the 21st century, are far more vast and confusing.

Over the weekend, the Artist and I got lost in upstate New York so many times, all we could do was laugh. How else react when you call a hotel to ask directions, and they aren't sure of which little county routes are required to arrive there?

But I had thought, somehow, that she and I shared the road less traveled, until Sunday night when it became clear that, like route 9 upstate, there were several roads with similar names -- 9G, 9W, 9A and other permutations -- and underneath us, we did not have our feet on the same asphalt. We are, apparently, on different sides of the river.

For me it was if the roads had all upended, leaving me to fall out of the car, holding on -- to what, I don't know -- for sheer life. Had I misread the situation so completely? Failed to hear any of the warning signs? For she and I, it turns out, are not on the same road. For that I am sad and sorry. If hope is the thing with feathers, it may be a while before I can reconstruct mine.

Joni Mitchell echoes in my head: "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling. Looking for something, what can it be?....I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun; I want to be the one that you want to see...." But I am not, apparently.

And, irony of ironies, we were making love in my bedroom just as the building manager whose bedroom wall adjoined mine, was busy dying. I know I am not supposed to think that way. But Monday I was shattered by Sunday night's phone call, and Tuesday morning, by a slip of paper shoved under my door.

You never know, do you, when is the last time you will see a person, or the last time you will make love with someone? When the two events hit so close together, it is a wonder anyone can stay on any road, more or less traveled, at all.

Bob Dylan had it right: "I would not feel so alone.....everybody must get stoned." A leaf from the new book at Alice's bedside table, and perhaps her new motto for this next season of brave new world. It may be the only way she can stay on this road, or any road, just to make it through another day, until she is healed.

No news is good news, except my own

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Made the mistake of listening to a single minute of Wonderland news -- on our 24/7 local "news" channel -- and found that our once-upon-a-Democratic mayor has decided to embrace the Republican clan, where he initially sought refuge just to gain a spot on the ticket. Turncoat opportunism rules. Guess who's not getting my vote, again?

In the realm of the news all I wanted to know was, when is the rain going to stop? While I have no control over what goes on in the world, and hence, at this juncture, don't want to know, the weather does seem like a benign event, at least in Wonderland, to discover.

This is my home. I know what constitutes a local natural disaster and what does not even fly under our radar. Other parts of the country, not so much.

For example, in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, the weather is not so benign: Brother and family almost got flooded out from torrential rains last week. A solid 12 inches of water and then some hit the ground and the clay-ish soil couldn't absorb it. Tornado warnings. Tornado what?

They almost lost a car; they couldn't leave their home. Two adults plus my two-year-old niece bouncing around what Brother calls a tin can of less than 600-square feet. My apartment is bigger than that, and there are days when I bounce alone.

Those days are fewer, recently: the Artist and I are spending most of our weekends together, and speaking for at least 2 hours a night on the telephone. When we are not together, I miss her presence, sometimes acutely.

Dare I say, I'm having a fine romance? Our plan for next week is to spend a long weekend upstate, touring mansions turned into museums from residences. Olana. The Vanderbilt mansion. Samuel Morse's Forest Grove. All of these beautiful places that I never explored when I attended college less than 20 miles from any of them.

We have dinner reservations at the Culinary Institute, an institution I've known by reputation for 31 years, but have yet to visit, despite solidly rave reviews from those who have crossed the Hudson River to try it.

Four years in my collegiate bubble, and no one ever knew what constituted the news if it didn't apply to us within our gated community. Who knew how nostalgic I would become for the days when not only was no news good news, but there was never news, at least none from the so-called "real world." If we wanted drama, we supplied our own. In abundance.

With the Artist, I have my own drama, however tampered by age and chemical intervention, a strong sense of those nervous hours as I take baby steps in the relationship world. The Artist has observed that with every new relationship, we are all in high school again. I'm starting to feel that I've at least graduated from grammar school, but I'm still a freshman.

I walk slowly through the relationship field, wanting so much but feeling ignorant of so many of the techniques my peers absorbed through much earlier practice in the field of feelings.

Granted, one pass through Youth was probably enough, particularly as I've seen Youth in Buenos Aires, being 30 years Youth's senior. Flatmate Youth has become known conversationally and in my travelogues as Nattering Twit.

Nattering Twit earned the title after I spent too much time listening to her self-absorped patter exherting confidence that she is oh-so-preciously brilliant. "Verbally intelligent," she informed me.

One might have preferred to observe, rather than be actively informed about her brains. The concept of filtering speech was nonexistent. Twit abhored American English, she informed me. My speech put her knickers into the proverbial twist.

Oddly enough, her family itself had emmigrated to Europe: she was half Malaysian and half Indian, but for her, only the King's English would do. She thought ill of the U.S.; I did not point out that in general, I never think of Holland, her birthplace, one way or the other.

Despite my embarrassment at most American culture exports, I don't think the Twit realized that the U.S., under Department of Defense initiative, spawned the Internet, the cybertether to Twit's mothership.

Sans Internet, I would have genuinely considered her a solo traveler, having a true cultural immersion. However, hours of instant "chat" to her homeland, did not, to me, constitute bringing one's inner resources to the forefront.

Twit did amuse me: she has planned her life to the nth degree, inscribing pages of the future that include the conviction that she will marry Boyfriend, have 3 children and teach English literature in some country to be designated.

Life, I did not say, has a habit of biting you in the ass when you least expect it. That kind of experiential knowledge would not penetrate the Twit's cranium. While, given that her dad died of chicken pox complications when she was about five, I would think she would know that, her mother has shielded her from a great deal.

Until Twit, who has called her own hours since the age of 14, left her European home for her Argentinian sojourn, her mother brought her tea in bed every day (which explains why she thought it appropriate to bring me, the middle-aged, coffee in my own room).

She is taking what the Europeans call a "gap" year. It is a notion that, unfortunately, has no traction here in the U.S. We could all have used a year to play abroad, to de-Americanize ourselves and get a sense, however vague, of how the rest of the world lives.

It would have given people like me reason to get a job, any job, to have an actual savings goal. It would have, perhaps, urged my parents to make me find a job, with world travel the incentive. (The self-funded look down upon the parentally funded gappers.)

At Spanish school, Teacher and I pulled age rank in the classroom on the temperature front. We of menopausal years believe our need for air conditioning trumped any complaints of cold or chills. We told the 22-year-old Swedish girl, whose perfect English stemmed in part from The Gilmore Girls, one of our less embarrassing exports, to bring a sweater.

Teacher and I lived on the same page, far from the Youth chapter. She understood my English more easily than that which emanated from Youth. The Brits mocked my American accent. But I was more readily understood than the English, Irish, Scots and Aussies. Go figure.

During our smoking breaks outside -- 95 degree heat without air conditioning -- I made periodic announcements to Youth at large that there was no point in rushing through university, not with the world as we now know it. Why rush to enter a work force that cannot absorb a good portion of the already accredited?

No matter their nationality, I counseled Youth that if they could pull together enough money, from under-the-table gigs or parental cash infusions or what have you, to continue to support themselves in South America, why go home?

Home is where the news hits, no matter how hard one tries to hide. Fortunately, Alice has a lovely distraction from the world: the Artist has come into her life, and for that, Alice is grateful beyond measure, and hopeful, for the first time in blog history, that perhaps she has found a potential long-time companion.

Alt 6 4

That's the magic combination, south of the border or on any keyboard without an "at" sign, to address an email. At the public Internet lounge, I am quite in demand for this minor triumph over technology.

It's been quite some time, again, since I have written here. No sooner did I unpack from Argentina then I went off to spend my annual two weeks in Mexico, at the end of the world in Cabos San Lucas.

I invite friends, and together we dwell in Mexican version of the U.S. that is the land of the time share. This season, the other dwellers are few and we seem to have one of the lagoon-like pools to ourselves. Business is bad, down in Mexico, but for those who have escaped here, the population density feels just wonderful.

From the front page of Yahoo (Alice's sole source for news of the outside world), it appears drug trafficking has run amok in a part of Mexico far, far from Alice. No, we have plenty of security here, on foot and by camera. I send emails reminding everyone I am 1,000 miles from the border.

The main drug activity in Cabos is the purchase of medications that can only be obtained by prescription in the U.S. The pharmacies downtown do a very active trade in pills ranging from Viagra to Premarin, with all stops on the antibiotic train and several on the pain-killing one also accounted for. Antidepressants also populate the menu, for reasons Alice is looking into.

With mismanaged nightmare (that would be the pricey health insurance Alice is grateful to have) she has never needed to price-shop, say, Prozac. With insurance, Alice's drug regimen comes in at a semi-reasonable price. Without it, apparently her meds start at about $60 to $90 a month each, and some cost considerably more.

Let us all give thanks to New York State for the blessing of what is called, in insurance lingo, community rating. If you can afford insurance, full coverage is one price for all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, or whether you, statistically, are more or less likely to need care. New York may be expensive, but at least we're not exclusionary.

Only four other states have the same idea, which means Alice will remain in Wonderland throughout her days. She is tethered not only by emotional geography but by practical considerations: no state outside of the Northeast would have the least interest in making sure Alice's health care needs were even remotely provided before, and Alice can't see getting healthier as something that comes up in the aging department.

But I digress: in the land of Alt 6 4, I check in with the world once every couple of days. It is enough. These days I quite agree with William Wordsworth, whose poetry I do not completely comprehend, but whose 1806 title "The World Is Too Much With Us" contains sentiments with which I am in full agreement.

And that was long before the term telecommunications fell into the vernacular. Right now I check in with my world mostly to hear from the Artist, who makes me laugh and feel good about myself and feel like there is someone in the world who actually gets me, whom I get. We shall see as time proceeds how well these feelings hold, but for now, they are blissful.

As for Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Back in the real world, sort of

Home again, home again, earlier than planned. Call me Spanish school dropout. (No graduation day for me.) Just say it in English, because my vocab in espanol is rather limited. So is my knowledge of verbs.

In Argentina, I lived in the present tense. I had no past and no future. It is an interesting way to perceive and the world.

Actually, it is quite apropos, given our brave new world and goings-on in Wonderland and places beyond. The past is history and the future a huge question mark. Will Alice need to find another gig to keep her in the style to which she is accustomed? Or are those days gone, regardless of what gig she comes up with?

Teaching English as a second language seems a possibility. It is a gig with instant credibility, something Alice believes has been lost in her current so-called profession. She thinks Madoff made everyone in her line of work appear as credible as car salesmen are usually wont to be. This does not inspire trust, a necessary element in Alice's work.

In Wonderland Alice is grateful for her health and mobility: TBF (aka Clover's Companion) had a second back surgery in Alice's absence. She will spend months recuperating. Alice would still feel better if TBF would hire a pro for her caretaking, but it's not her choice.

Husband-the-doctor (HTmD), to Alice, appears on the verge of a breakdown. Alice kindly brought him Cuban cigars that she had rolled in a T-shirt in her suitcase. She tells him to take care of himself, but he seems to fall short in that arena.

Today he shopped and brought home the wrong toilet paper, to TBF's dismay. Alice held her tongue. To her, as we know, toilet paper is not created equal. HTmD is a boy; he doesn't make the distinctions Alice and TBF make. He is also bewildered by all things domestic, and Alice wonders how he survived his lengthy bachelorhood.

HTmD is running himself ragged while TBF is incapacitated, calling herself a cripple with a scoliosis-like brace to wear as part of the recovery plan. He is stunningly clueless about their everyday life -- all things remotely domestic.

Alice has never lived in the world of couples, where one brings in the money and the other manages it, much less one in which food supply falls to the female and the male seems unable to manage for himself. Perhaps it is simply all the stress: Alice will buy that. Under stress, brushing teeth can be problematic.

Doctor-husband cannot ascertain by himself where to put the tuna fish cans. He cannot apply heat to food (nor can TBF). That in itself is not a problem, but his failure to find nutrition that is not on the Chinese food or pizza menu puzzles Alice. Shouldn't an M.D. know what they call a balanced meal? Perhaps order one to be delivered? Cash is not the problem, but common sense is in short supply, or perhaps stress has taken its place.

This is why Alice ran away, and why Alice, once she excavates her dining room table, will be just as happy to get on the plane to Mexico next week. She cannot, it seems, bear witness to that which drives her insane. Apparently Alice is a control freak: who knew? Or is Alice the last to get that memo?

In BA Alice had fleeting maternal tendencies: one day she almost decided to wake up the Twit for school, and another night, while they smoked on the balcony, Alice wanted to lecture her about protein and safe sex. (The women of Buenos Aires have emergency kits for sale in their ladies' rooms: two pesos for a toothbrush, one for a condom. That will see them through the night.) However, Alice refrained.

Twit is massively devoted to Boyfriend, with whom she "chats" for hours via instant messaging, although that doesn't stop her from going out and finding a boy to fuck. One morning she came home and announced that she had gotten laid. Alice hoped that having sex would have calmed her down a bit, but no such luck.

When Alice was 19, she probably acted very much like Twit, except that she kept a bit more of her personal life to herself, and she didn't feel the need to tell anyone how intelligent she was. She was probably more about the hair, makeup, and clothes than she remembers. In retrospect, she was definitely more about the conquests than the intimacy.

Thirty years later, Alice has a different take on the world. She is again dating: tonight is her second date with the Artist, a woman Alice met on line and with whom she giggles madly on the telephone. They courted via email during Alice's hiatus. The Artist's Valentine's Day/Friday the 13th email cheered Alice immensely.

So, brave new world aside, Alice is up for more adventures. Keep your fingers (or other parts of your anatomy, as you choose) crossed for her. She wants something to work out with the Artist. Alice, perhaps, has found something to hope for, something/someone to add to her life.

I am the spin cycle

From Alice´s travelogue --

Yesterday I decamped to a hotel, with air conditioning, a bed that doesn´t feel like a massage table, my own bathroom, speedy computers with keyboards that still show the letters, a full breakfast (landlady was a tad short on food), and the amenities to which I am, apparently, quite accustomed.

But what did I do after I arrived? Laundry. (Don´t laugh.. Yet.) At home I have raised domestic incompetence to a high art. When last I washed my comforter in the laundry room at home, I flooded the whole place from washing machine to dryer to door. (The machine was as tall as I was, and so I couldn´t see how much soap I was supposed to put in. I guessed wrong....)

So, for the first time in countless years, I did the wash. By hand. (Which you may not find nearly as entertaining as I did, but so it goes.)

First, I worked out an entire system for the process. The clothes got scrubbed (piece by piece) in the bathroom sink, then rinsed in, yes, the bidet, and finally rolled into a towel that I stepped on to squeeze the water out. Then I hung everything all over the room and draped some underwear on a chair. And, in keeping with my mom´s idea of the purpose of a hair dryer, this morning I used the one in the bathroom to dry my socks.

(Okay -- laugh now)

I have one of the most beautiful views in BA. I overlook the cemetery where Eva Peron is buried. It is full of architecturally fascinating mausoleums and it is a huge tourist attraction. A woman sells maps for 6 pesos ( less than $2) at the entrance, and you can take a guided tour if you like of where BA´s most illustrious have come to rest. This is high-end real estate, and if you have to ask the price of admission, well, you won´t be worthy of a place there.

Requescant in pace are the words carved above the entrance. Given the amount of traffic in the cemetery, it must be a challenge.

I just realized that while I don´t usually visit cemeteries, all over London, famous people are buried under the floors of the churches that are tourist sites. One year, I tried to avoid stepping on them, but most of the time I´ve been there, it hasn´t bothered me in the least.

None of this is meant to be morbid. I´m just free associating.

I´ve read over some of my previous travelogues and noticed some funny redundancies; I have been fixated on the quality of the toilet paper, which, when rereading it, seems like a very odd thing to write about, particularly more than once.

One observation that I can´t understand why it took me so long to achieve; wherever you go, if you want to see obnoixious or culturally ignorant Americans, go to McDonald´s. (A place that seems to be another fixation this trip, and a place I usually ignore at home.)

It is another symbol of how the world perceives Americans, and once again, I don´t think it´s one that reflects well on us. On the other hand, at least no one hates us here, and I don´t have to pretend to be Canadian as I have in the recent past.

It is Sunday, and I´m taking the day off. One of the amenities here is a pool, and I´m planning to use it. What joy.

Any and all news is welcome.

lots of love,

Alice

Dancing in the streets

The news from home is grim on all fronts -- TBF (aka Clover´s Companion) is going back to the hospital for more surgery, and I am thousands of miles away, but in truth, there is nothing I can do for her in Wonderland, other than Be Properly Scared. I am. I am praying to a God about whose existence I am unsure.

Economic news grows more dire each time Alice signs on to Yahoo. Employment prospects look dim at best for the year. Alice has savings, but Alice, as observed last year, is still adjusting to reduced circumstances. (The exchange rate is so favorable in Argentina that it is cheaper for Alice here than in Wonderland.)

Nonetheless, in Buenos Aires, it is Carnaval, and the porteñonos are, as it happens, dancing in the streets. Wearing elaborate sequined costumes with make-up to match, they are celebrating. It is a joyous occasion here, and I am in need of joy. My flatmates I joined one group, made up of people ranging from toddlers to older men and women (not elderly: if you can dance in the street, elderly does not apply) fiercely contorting themselves in rhythm.

Never before have I literally danced in a city street. When Obama was elected, I wanted to dance in the West Village, but a local cop shushed us while we yelled from the concrete stoop, just as the cars were honking madly, before we could our feet could touch the asphalt. Here, we are welcome to dance in the street.

Buenos noches, Buenos Aires!

I am reliving student life, though in fact I never washed clothes by hand, never tried to iron, never washed a dish, and here I am, seriously lacking in domestic competence, and feeling ludicrously proud of my efforts. The apartment is run down, with a computer that runs Windows 98 and a telephone that requires a card for a local call, and my bed is definitely dormitory quality, if that. But what the hell -- my Spanish is improving, poco a poco, and for three weeks, I get to step outside myself.

The other students are young enough to be my children, if I had any, so I am gaining an interesting perspective on Youth.

Youth runs technological circles around me, though I suspect when I was their age and I lived abroad, I was more completely immersed in the culture around me simply because my time abroad predated the computer age. Cyber connections did not exist. We wrote letters, we sent postcards; occasionally my father sent Telexes from his office.

Daddy liked to know how his princess was managing. His princess was having a blast. Our business Telex name was hotdog, a play on my family name. My brother and I still have email addresses containing that name, to honor my father, who loved every new gadget that came along.


No one here can imagine a Telex, or a telegram. To me, the local internet cafe does seem part of the streetscape, but the cabinets where you can telephone the U.S. still seem a luxury, no matter how commonplace Youth might find them. Alice is a baby boomer, late to the global village. Youth is Gen Y or Z and knows of no other town.


Both Alice and flatmate Youth (a 19-year-old Dutch child-woman) think they are getting a great deal. Youth brings Alice coffee in bed. Alice pays for the taxi to school. Alice has been there, done that, and torn the T-shirt to rags on the rush-hour subway front, an overheated crowd new to flatmate Youth.

Other differences? Youth gets cramps; Alice wanted to sell her futures in Tampax on Ebay. Flatmate Youth instant messages; youth texts; youth emails, youth spends an inordinate amount of time facebooking (my verb of the day).

I, on the other hand, still find blogging a 21st century revelation, and if I want to talk to someone, I don´t want to sit at a keyboard and cripple myself. (Youth willl have to invent great voice-activated software. In 10 years, they won´t be able to type.) Call me old-fashioned, but call me. On the telephone.

Muchos gracias and hasta luego.

Alice, far from Wonderland