Through a Looking Glass

Alice doesn't blog here anymore

2011-09-18T21:18:00.000-04:00

Alas, it seems that Alice is on permanent hiatus. She hasn't blogged in so long, she's not sure she remembers how, or whether she has anything to say that she hasn't said since 2004. Still, she is available. If you'd like to Go Ask Alice, email her at alice.uptown @ gmail.com.

P.S. She misses the days before Facebook, before blogs carried more ads than Alice has shoes, back in the day when blogs flourished and bloggers were a cult unto themselves, a group of people who knew how to express themselves without taking a Learning Annex-type class for an education they continue to lack. Those days are gone, and for that, Alice is sad.

Still, the blog will remain in cyberspace for now. Given Google's propensity for swallowing information, Alice suspects that should she remove the blog, someone would find it somewhere regardless.

Alice is sitting at her computer, waving good-bye to any notion of privacy or civil rights as she once knew them. She is not a happy camper. All her blogging friends have ceased writing, and while she wishes everyone well, she wishes her former peeps would express themselves in more than 10 words of a status update on Facebook, the final nail in the American productivity coffin.

Also, if you tweet her, Alice will neither notice nor care. She has no plans to reduce her life to 140 characters, nor does she need to hear about yours so concisely. Email is quite enough, thank you. Texting is a horror. Alice would prefer to pick up the damn phone, if only her landline company were capable of repairing the line so that the hard-wired phone didn't drop calls.

Communication used to be so much simpler, more direct, and took place in full sentences. Alice hopes she will make it through with fragments.

You sell them, I'll smoke 'em

2011-06-06T16:21:00.000-04:00

Doesn't matter if I want 'em or not. It's called solidarity, and smokers seem uniformly despised, albeit their tax dollars are still welcome. Oh, and by the way? It's harder to kick a nicotine habit than heroin. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Mayor Mike really went bonkers this time: Now he's Captain in Chief of his very own Police State, one of his making. As of last week, smoking -- not clearly defined as "no cigarettes, no pipes, no cigars, no drug paraphenalia" specifically, has been banned in New York City's parks, on our beaches, our boardwalks, and probably a thousand other places that my tax dollars support. So, along with knowing that the police here can essentially search you at any time you are on public property, i.e., bring a large tote bag on the subway, and you have lost the right to keep the contents private, remember that you've also lost a few Constitutional rights along the way.

For the civic-minded nicotine addict, it's the sidewalk, the middle of the road (so long as it hasn't been claimed for plaza space), or the parking lot as a choice of smoking venue -- 'cause if it's not the parking lot -- of which we have fewer and fewer now that real estate is so valuable you can build a glass box and convince people to spend $1 million-plus essentially to live in a glass house -- it's that or the middle of the road.

As for the parking lot, I don't own a car. Never have, and doubt I will. My carbon footprint is a size 6. So chances of my screwing up the environment with car emissions is very slim. Can you say the same? (Try to tell me that car emissions are good for you, and I will laugh you into the East River.)

So I'm basically headed to the parking lot to stay, because it's that or the middle of the road. And which would you prefer? Fatal car accidents -- for when woman meets speeding car, she loses -- or a slight willingness to concede some air space for those of us not using up any of our other pollution credits. Fortune 500 companies have been trading their pollution credits since the mid-1990s, so I see no reason not to apply that logic on a personal level.

You don't want me smoking in your office, well, I can live with that. You don't want me smoking in your home, well, if you can offer a nearby indoor venue, I can live with that. But the idea that you can't light up in Central Park is beyond me. This is, after all, the park where, in the 1970s, people smoked a lot more than cigarettes.

These days, it's hide and seek with a cigarette. I think people would prefer I brought a loaded gun to any nonsmoking venue than that I dare light a cigarette. This is, after all, still New York. You want clean air, move to Vermont.

Oh, and as for smokers creating high medical expenses? We all know we're dying one day or another -- unlike the anti/non-smokers, who seem to think this is a world without end. Ultimately we cost the country less in health costs than you might think, for the simple fact that a) we die sooner and b)what we have already kicked into Social Security will leave more for you. I'd like a little bit of gratitude for what I'm doing on that front.

You might also want to check the stats for how much money smokers cost in medical vs., say, obese people. One in five smokes, but one in three is obese, at least across middle America. And it is no fun sitting next to a person overflowing her seat in economy class on a plane.

What's next, a ban on sugar?

The young and restless

2011-05-21T15:48:00.001-04:00

I've just spent a week watching my brother with his 4-year-old daughter, my niece. My mom was along for the whole ride -- and I felt like I were 4 again, being cajoled into being in a good mood or else I would be punished. Or is that how you discipline 4-year-olds?

What is the message we're really giving? That it's not okay to be in a bad mood? That's the part that resonates with me. Oh, the threats of childhood: my mom's "parenting techniques," in current vernacular -- she went in for bribes, whether in cash, opera glasses (how someone got me to believe they were better than sucking my thumb is beyond the adult me), or simple threats, i.e., I'm going to crack your skulls together. Or, my favorite: "I'm going to break every bone in your body,"

"How many bones would that be?" I used to ask. 206, I knew. 211 until the last few bones knit together, at what point I don't remember. How did I know? My mom's favorite suggestion if we asked her a question and she didn't know, "look it up." A little knowledge was a lot of protection, and it was fun to use her mandate against her.

Sometimes being a smart-ass kid pays off. Sometimes it didn't. Must say, though, every chance I got to come back with a clever remark, one that made the grown-ups laugh, I took it. If my parents, my-mom-the-disciplinarian in particular, broke out laughing, chances are I was way ahead of the game.

That is, to my eyes, a lot of what child-raising and disciplining is all about: while parents rule the young and restless, once the restless acquire a good vocabulary and sense of what brings ironic laughter to the parent, it's a whole new ball game.

Between my niece's mother sharing my sense of irony and humor and what she'll pick up from my side of the family, I suspect my niece will be firing back some really funny remarks, sooner rather than later. She's a bright kid, reciting "Madeline" from memory. She already knows about the Eiffel Tower.

So my Auntie Mame-ism, begun at my niece's last birthday, when I picked the book to read her to sleep and try to interest her in Paris -- is already working: five months later, she's drawing pictures of the Eiffel Tower. Show me another child from Tiny Town, Sleepy Southern State who is learning about Paris as fast as she's learning about Wonderland from all her trips here.

I'll bet she makes it to Paris before her mother, my ex-sister-in-law (what is a better description of my niece's mother?) leaves the U.S. Or is that just my projecting the happier part, the not-at-home portion, of my childhood onto her? I can't tell.

A long time ago, we used to be friends...

2011-04-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

...but I haven't thought of you lately at all.
If ever again, a greeting I send to you,
Short and sweet to the soul is all I intend.

Yes, but during my Veronica Mars marathon, the Dandy Wharhols tune reverberated, until I did think of you, and you, and others lost along the way, whether through my choice or theirs.

First, Jennifer, who is seated beside me toasting at the bar in Lake Placid. She, almost 2, and I, almost 3, settled in our mothers' favorite banquette, Shirley Temples in hand. We had our summers together until I was 18 or so.

I have found Jennifer again (through Facebook, which knows us all); now she lives in India at an ashram and does yoga almost full-time. We were the only children in her uncle's hotel in Lake Placid -- two toddlers well acquainted with the cocktail hour.

I have reminisced about our adolescence in fiction: smoking our parents' cigarettes, drinking wine the bus boys brought in to the kitchen when we were on glass-washer duty, getting stoned with one of the waitresses and gobbling entire boxes of Freihoffer's chocolate chip cookies.

All Jennifer has said is, "I don't think of the past very often, but those days -- they were golden." So they were, days crafted by a generation that believed in leisure and escaping heat: my family stayed at our uncle's hotel every year for the month of August.

We swam, water-skied, pretended we were bicycling on the white fiberglass paddle boats; We played tennis, backgammon, all manner of card and board games; we ice skated at the 1932 Olympic rink; bowled in Saranac, the next town over; stole chocolate chips from the pastry chef's kitchen and gobbled them up on the 18th green of the golf course next door where we practiced gymnastics.

When it rained, we went next door to the big hotel's game room, playing pinball at ten cents a throw, back when the scores were analog and digital was a gleam in no one's eye. We also excelled at shoplifting from big hotel's gift shop.

We dressed formally for dinner -- preening in our fancy outfits when our moms let us wear mascara, non-waterproof variety, that made black tears pour down our cheeks when we laughed so hard we couldn't but cry. We had manners, drilled into us as toddlers, corrected when we were teenagers who couldn't be bothered. Yes, those days, that way of life -- it was golden, and I miss it.

Then there's Jamie's mom -- my friend from college who decided, belatedly, that she didn't like the way I behaved in front of her kids one day, after 8 or 9 years of being perfectly content with my role as Aunt to her kids, Aunt verging on Auntie Mame, the one who always played with the kids and brought them presents galore.

I spent hours on the phone with her when her husband was on a nuclear submarine in waters unknown, before email and other electronic means of communication. At the time, I believe I was the only adult voice she heard during the day above the clamor of her three children.

Her conservative husband, when I did see him, humored me: he didn't know anyone else who would so appreciate the irony of a coffee cup that read "U.S. Navy Earth Friendly." He called her diploma "your father's receipt." I refer to it as my mother's picking up a four-year bar tab, but the sentiment is the same.

I missed the memo the year she was evaluating and dropping friends with abandon -- in retrospect, it seems clear: I was far from the only one dismissed, and, presumably, I was among the last. Still, I spent hours worrying about her and her family when communication lurched to a sudden halt, only to discover she was angry at me -- but phrased it passive-aggressively: the children, she said, couldn't understand my sleeping late, for example.

I wondered why she couldn't explain to her kids that my way was different from hers, for whatever reason -- she was fond of reminding me that we shared an education, but evidently hers didn't lend itself to bringing up her children the way our generation was brought up: the adults were always right. She could have used one of those T-shirts: "Why? Because I'm your mother. That's why."

Who else, cared for one day and always in memory, regardless of how our connections were severed: the college BFF, for whom that second F had a timer on it; the stockbroker who was once my financial planning study buddy, and who wanted to continue our business relationship minus the friends part.

She, like Jamie's mom, was a Republican, and that ultimately would have broken that camel's back. But there were years that I was at her house so frequently that her 6-year-old son asked her if she and I were getting married -- little boy gender-bender circa 1995: I loved him for that alone.

I miss her about as often as I miss my manic-depressive friend who took it upon herself to call my shrink and tell him things I had told her -- hello? If you benefit from my illegally obtained largess, shouldn't you just say thank you and keep your mouth shut?

When you reach a certain age, you have enough detachment to think of friends in a former life as just that: people in a life you no longer live, or even remember all that well.

Still, it saddens me to hear the lyrics: "...we used to be friends."

Oh, to sleep-- perchance to dream, please?

2011-04-18T15:54:00.000-04:00

For just about half my life, my synapses have been ordered to sleep by my pharma-copia of drugs. They have taken their marching orders grandly, but recently, it seems some synaptic connection has frayed.

Meaning, I'm NOT sleeping through the night. No, it's more akin to sleeping like a baby: I wake up every hour and a half for no discernible reason. Seven nights running on interrupted sleep, and my days become as hideous as my nights have been.

It's as if I've been in a clinic for the sleep-deprived. Oh, wait: my health insurance would never pay for something that useful. My sleep clinic is my very own bedroom, without the hospital equipment to monitor my REM cycles. Obviously, affording personal medical staff is out of the question and out of my insurance company's interest.

Odd, that -- one would think that it would be beneficial to stop a sleep problem before it started affecting the rest of your life -- but the insurance fools seem to think that it has to start affecting the rest of your life and your day-to-day capabilities, and then insurance will step in.

Reminds me of the time I needed a PET scan to prove I had cancer, but insurance wasn't convinced of the fact that the only way to prove or disprove those overactive dancing cells is with, ta-da, a PET scan.

This week, it's time to schedule another scan, so I can be the radioactive lady on the sidewalk, not caring if pregnant women or young children are in my way -- we live in Wonderland: do you think anything here is solidly clean and PC?

Where's the off-ramp for the info superhighway?

2011-03-29T13:54:00.002-04:00

At this point, I would settle for a rest stop -- a la Bob's Big Boy on the New Jersey Turnpike. Don't care how long I would have to wait in line for the ladies' room, or to purchase an overpriced cup of coffee that resembles dishwater.

So long as no phones were beeping, ringing or otherwise making sound effects and the place sounded neither like a day-care center or a bar, I'm good. I also prefer no screaming children.

Discipline, parents: use it or lose it. Once it's lost and you've set bad precedent for kids' behavior, you don't have your children anymore; they have you, by the short-hairs. Once upon a time, "children should be seen and not heard" was not considered a form of tap-dancing on your child's developmental self-expression.

Also, note to parents and anyone else who avails themselves of the rest stop. Have you counted the 16-wheeler rigs in the parking lot? Added up how much they pollute the atmosphere, vs. how much I have done in my 5-minute cigarette break? Think about it. Do the math: that is, if lack of nicotine hasn't destroyed your logical and cognitive abilities.

Two weeks back from Mexico, and I would like nothing better than to return to the land where my biggest decisions were a) is it time to swim now? and b)what should we have for dinner. A blessed two weeks sans phone calls, cell rings, and, what could have been sans Internet.

The only reason I used any part of my 30 minutes a day allotment for computer access was to empty out my e-mail box, so I wouldn't come home to 500+ messages that didn't need to be delivered, seeing how quickly the delete key jumped on them. And to show off my knowledge of how to create an @ symbol on a Spanish keyboard. Alt 6-4 -- that's my contribution to the global village.

As for you, the lady with the stroller behind me waiting for the rest-stop ladies' room: no one wants to hear about your errant son or your mother-in-law's latest insult, or the status of your physical/emotional personal life. If you can't use your inside voice well enough, then don't use any voice at all.

Otherwise, your conversations are fair game to all within hearing range. If you won't turn yourself down, vocally, anyone who wants to is free to join your part of the call. Thus is my belated conclusion after overhearing one "my Pap smear was clean" too many on the cross-town bus.

I have also listened too many times to various imbeciles who can't wait to exit the plane before announcing to his/her spouse, "honey, the plane landed." Planes take off; they fly; they touch down. This used to be considered common knowledge. (Granted, the airlines used to be a lot more reliable than thy are now.) Plus, I doubt you'd be able to place a call to say, "honey, the plane crashed."

If the plane has gone down, chances are good so will you. And the cell reception won't be at its strongest in the middle of, say, the Atlantic, or flying over/into the Rocky Mountains.

Just a thought on my part, one I have returned to face in the so-called real world, that vacuous space of TMI. Another note to business execs: if your quarterly numbers are going to suck, do you really want the whole world to know? Should we passers-by be told what company you work for, is it public, and do these numbers mean your stock price will tank?

This is potentially useful info. Perhaps it's also known as insider trading, but that's a slippery slope. If Exec A phones Exec B so that you can overhear him at the departure gate, that little piece of knowledge has lost all its pretenses to confidentiality.

Cell phones and privacy don't mix: hello GPS? Whether you like it or not, it's easier to reach out and track someone than to call someone, or touch someone. Cell tower connections are only one of several devices known to keep track of one's whereabouts.

In the old days, it was ankle monitors for house-arrest prisoners. These days, you don't need to be fingerprinted to have your whereabouts available to any government body that has authorized itself to subpoena your cell number or your bank statements.

That large withdrawal in Brazil will set off bells at your bank. Or, should you require Facebook while abroad, it will ask you a series of questions to ascertain that you have indeed left your laptop at home.

Until last year, my bank never needed to know in advance that I might be taking out money in a foreign country: now, without giving advance warning, I get one swipe and stash of cash from my bank card, and then, if they don't know I'm in, say, even Mexico or Canada, my bank card is dead.

Whatever happened to the notion that ATMs were supposed to make it easier to access money in different countries? My bank, in particular, likes to slap me with currency-exchange fees, not to mention a $3 or higher levy if I use a machine other than one with their logo branded on it, or the fact I never see the currency exchange measurement in use.

Moral of these anecdotes: Bite your tongue. Spare me your life story. Consider that while, artificial intelligence has come a long way, it is still, in the end, artificial.

Meaning, some computer algorithm, minus human input, decided to make you validate your travels to MasterCard and American Express -- what happened to serendipity?

Spontaneous travel works only for those with enough cash not to need to register with the plastic-card people. At this point, it may not work at all should you desire an airplane ticket. No, those people want your name, gender, birthday, and, insult of insult, they want you to type your passport number into their computer.

Really? Big institutions lose track of their data all the time. There is nothing so charming as knowing some Large Company/Organization Inc. has lost your social security number and, oh, we're so sorry to inconvenience you, but you'll have to keep track of any credit fuck-ups we've helped create, much less identity theft.

Why is it that the people responsible for holding on to personal information can't manage to keep track of it, then turn around and ask us to clean up after them?

That is clear evidence of the death of privacy in this century. That's where I try to draw the line, with a heavy ironic note that my scribbles in cyberspace could be considered a breach of privacy for everyone I have written about.

Here, on my blog, I control what you see and how the people in my life are described -- most have pseudonyms, and I am a character in some of these entries. And you know me as Alice, she who lives in Wonderland, aka New York City.

It's my choice to add to information overload; yours is whether to consider whether it is of sufficient interest for you to hang out here, perhaps comment in a way that will move me to write another post, or at least let me know these words are not written all in vain.

Consider what content farms pay for writing -- $25 for 500 words? You've got to be kidding. I may write here for free, but it's on my terms. 500 words on the topic of someone else's choice? Not at those prices. I'm not sure that the minimum wage even matches how little writers are paid.

Or how little they are appreciated: my friends who write books are hustling all over the country to promote them, not necessarily on the publisher's dime; another has learned she's good at Skype book clubs, complete with her own glass of wine.

Anyone who wants someone to read their latest article puts a link to the story on Facebook, hoping some of her 200+ friends will be moved to read it, "share" it, and make it go as viral as a written article can in the video age.

Given the global economy concept and Google's omnipresent search engine waiting its turn in the background, your article could go anywhere -- and probably a machine has translated it into other languages, regardless of nuances lost.

Since the info superhighway grows exponentially, it is almost impossible to find a place on the planet without it. What I need is a driver to find a way for me not to have TMI meltdown.

Difficult, however, for once the Internet has been unleashed, it is hard to stuff it back into a jar.

Losing my calls

2011-02-27T19:10:00.002-05:00

Another gray day at home -- feel like I haven't seen the sun in years. keep staying home and nesting, if that's what you want to call it. that would, however, imply that I'm doing all manner of things at home. I'm not. I'm watching taped TV and Netflicks. I'm not reading. I'm not keeping up with my online scrabble games. What am I doing?

Making a transition between what once was and what will eventually be. Stuck in limbo, somewhere. Can barely remember what once was -- did the year of lymphoma take that from me? I assume that if I had really liked what once was that I would remember, I would want to do it again. But if that means financial planning, forget it.

For a time, it was a lovely gig. Then the economy tanked, and I felt like nothing I could do in the way of financial planning would be of any value to anyone, so I retreated from it. And took a long breath -- happy not to need to keep up on every tax law change, the health insurance bill from hell that has fucked me six ways from Sunday, and god knows how it's affected anyone else.

My phone just announced a text message, but I'm at the machine, looking at the time more often than I'd like, simply because it is there. Does it mean anything? Not so much -- only that I need to keep track because I have shrink appointment. and it's going to be by phone.

The sidewalks and corners are treacherous, and I'm not going anywhere outdoors that I don't have to, at least not today.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to do an open house at Spanish school, then go to a party in the Village. One of The Three Sisters called yesterday -- it's going to be a fondue party for reasons I have yet to discover. Apparently it relates to the Chinese new year, though I don't possibly see how. Still, it's The Three Sisters, my oldest friends, and, assuming strangers don't come streaming in the way they did at Xmas, it will be a good place for me to go, to see people who just accept me as I am, whether it's as cancer vic or trust fund kid or brilliant writer who just won't or can't get around to putting words on paper.

Paper? So 20th century. What I can't stand is how my computer has turned into a communications toy, so much that I rarely use it for the real, basic stuff -- the reason I went cyber in the first place: I wrote papers, short stories, essays, a novel...and kept track of all my financial data -- basic spreadsheet 101. And those functions still exist; I do remember the keyboard shortcuts for WordStar, before there were mice, before there was DOS, much less Windows.

There's so much other crap on the machine now that I've succumbed to computer as toy, seduced by the lure of FB, an invention that will end whatever productivity exists in this country.

Yes, folks, I am alive and typing -- but what my mind is trying to say, I don't have a clue.

I may try an exercise, looking at photos of Haiti and seeing what evocative descriptions I can glean from them, what memories they bring up -- and just write it all down, no rereading, but social commentary is okay, since it's all that I didn't know as I sat on the beach at Kyona, all those years.

That whole period of my life -- from Lake Placid to Haiti: that world is gone, gone, gone. And, having failed to plan for middle age, I come to it baffled. I come to it searching for a world that has different values than the one I see around me.

Jobwise, it doesn't seem to matter if you are intelligent. To me, it matters more if you can use the technology and not have it use you in offices or at home or any place on this earth. I suspect one may have to do more than fog a mirror, but it's been 20 years since I've had an office, so I don't know what constitutes good behavior at work. Twenty years ago, I could get jobs based on my brain, without having to pass a piss test.

Then, the piss test bothered me from a privacy angle. Now, there's no privacy left, so as long as I stay away from weed, which has turned into a huge no-no, I could pass the test -- assuming I resisted the temptation to throw the container directly into the face of the person who had requested it.

While I'm on this rant, I've had it with technology: with me, it's strictly need-to-know. These days, I learn as little as possible. Why bother? Nothing sticks except what changes and hence becomes obsolete knowledge as soon as I've memorized any of it.

Plus, I'm still battling my not-so-new "smartphone." It outsmarts me, and there is not much more to be said about it, except that while it may retrieve info accurately, it's not so hot as its alleged primary use: as a telephone. So I may speak to people when I'm not home, however well we got along before we had this whiz-bang opportunity.

I'm losing all my calls these days -- Verizon has yet to fix either phone line, after many conversations and three or four visits from their tech support people, who seem unable to manage to troubleshoot calls dropping out or getting static-y from landlines. Not sure if Verizon is getting metaphorical or just completely inept.

Honestly, technology consists of boys and their toys. Otherwise, we'd have robo-chef by now, not to mention silent vacuums and dishwashers -- all the things you need to run a household of any size. Clearly cleanliness is not high on the tech-lovers list.

If I were Queen, I would make sure that all the phone lines worked and the cable company could manage more than a day without the need to reboot. And I'd have a driver -- granted, it might be weird to have a driver take me to Costco, but I'd be safe.

Right now I can't do large stores -- the Petco store where we bought cat food for The Consultant's cats struck me as a shop for children's clothes when we first walked in. How to outfit your schnauzer. I'm assuming the margins are bigger on animal clothes than they are on animal food. I don't understand why she just doesn't get stuff delivered: she says, well, my ex was supposed to place an order this week, then makes an excuse for why the ex hasn't done her quasi-wifely duties.

Haven't figured that relationship out -- I know The Consultant is actively hunting on line, and I'm on hiatus from trying to date new people. After The Artist and I went our separate ways, I ran out of emotional space. I wanted simplicity, and I got it. I'm know I'm not in the best mood to be bright and shiny and sexy the way I have to feel if I'm going out on a date.

Bigger question is, what do I want in the way of a relationship, and what kind of mixed signals am I getting from The Consultant, who has made it very clear, and I've agreed, that we're good in bed together and fine for dinner, but no angels are getting their wings.

Except perhaps last weekend, when I took her out for dinner and she deliberately picked a "romantic restaurant," and the whole time we were out, she held my hand, or my arm. This is moving into the PDA world, and I hadn't thought we were there. Still not sure: are we there yet? or are we going anywhere?

Groupon, groupoff: so much for that eyelash perm

2011-02-21T12:12:00.002-05:00

In this day and age, well past the dawning of Web 2.0 and nearly, I suspect, near its sunset, many, many entities want to sign me up to spend more money. Their premise? Since we have such a large buying group, it's a bargain.

Oh, really?

Explain to me, please, why on earth I would purchase a Japanese eyelash perm, at any price, for any reason. I understand the Japanese are known for straight hair. I get it: I sent hair straightener for black woman to Dona, the year she lived in Japan. Not a lot of African-American or Caribbean-American women in Tokyo circa 1985, before the multi-culti globalization of our little world.

If Japanese women were curling their eyelashes, they probably did it the old-fashioned way: with the type of metal eyelash crimper last seen by me circa 1970, when my bunk counselor -- at an all-girls' camp -- persisted in doing full makeup every morning.

In retrospect, who was the counselor primping for? Not the other female counselors, not circa 1970, when bras were flung with abandon, underarm hair and unshaven legs were a political statement, and the word "femme" had yet to come into popular usage. (Even now, it's only used in certain circles, and I'm not quite sure I understand the complete definition, or if it varies, city by city, urban by rural.) I'll never know, except to chalk it up to pre-feminist cultural conditioning.

But I digress: before chemo, I might not have realized that the everything-must-go sale my hair follicles staged was complete, and I would not have grasped the full extent of the loss-of-hair. It never would have occurred to me that my eye lashes were lacking.

(Yea, you -- tell me my hair will grow back and I will ask you if you've ever seen your pubic hair on a wad of toilet paper.) It does grow -- but not back -- it grows in textures and levels of curliness not found on any head of mine I ever brushed. My eyelashes hold mascara now just as well as years ago.

When my hair, now 3 inches in length, started its regrowth, it was not the hair I had cut off in the ponytail to donate to other women with cancer. That hair was thick, and long. I don't recognize myself as the woman in the mirror with short, curly, hair. She looks too old to be me.

That may be the woman I have become, but I've yet to adapt to her, the one with a scar down her chest where the surgeon opened her sternum, and the one whose other incision, now healing, came from inserting and removing the quarter-size port under her skin, at a level just above where my cleavage, such as it remains, happens to be. That, and having been a Superfund site for several months. Do the poisons ever leave?

Here is where I step sharply on "groupoff." I missed the day when my email bargain-getter sent trampoline lessons on sale. Groupon? Middle-aged women in circus school? In Brooklyn, on a street name I recognize from my childhood in the 'burbs, but not directly over the East River? Not part of any group that I can imagine, not without an ambulance and an orthopedist nearby.

If you're of an age to try the tramp or flying on wires, perhaps you have not reached the age where you understand the repercussions of signing a waiver of responsibility. Or, no one has texted the legality (or lack) of the form to you. Or you are one of the various lemmings comprising the group for which these "bargains" are targeted.

In high school, I loved the tramp (not the dirty little man outside the gym). But not now, in what I assume to be the midpoint of my life. No sane person wants me, veering on osteoporosis, to hop up on that tramp to jump and fly. My bones might not make it through intact, for one reason; another, bigger question: could I ever feel as free jumping now as I did at 14, when fear was not a part of my physical makeup? I'm guessing, not so much.

"Freedom's just another word for, nothing left to lose," or so sang Janis Joplin, at the ripe old age of 25 or so. Apparently it look me longer to lose my water-wings and training wheels. Twice as long, to be precise.

Having stepped over the medical threshold into the land of illness, of temporary disability, some of my fears have grown, but others? Not so much. Sure, there's the State Department. I hear it has issued a warning on travel to Mexico.

I'm sure there was one on Haiti, at least part of the time I was there. It didn't occur to me to be afraid. And Mexico? Border drug trafficking is not happening 1000 miles from the California state line. Where I stay in Baja, the only drugs on special are Viagra, anti-depressants, and Retin A. Each is freely available in pharmacies. I'm not even fearful of germs -- 20 years of visiting Haiti, and I know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. (Cf. Superfund site).

My friends confuse the border with Cabos, 1000 miles down the peninsula. In timeshare-ville, guards blend in with the scenery, but I know they are there, just as I knew the staff paced the grounds in the Haitian beach where I went from girl child to grown woman.

Americans, except in war zones and potential political hotbeds (find me a dictator the U.S. didn't fly out of his country in the past 25 years, and I'll show you a dead man), didn't used to need private security protection. Now that we've globalized, U.S. citizens are easy targets.

Especially targeted are those those who give rise to the ugly American stereotype, one I've discovered is not without those secured to it, the ones who don't give a damn that, hey, no one speaks English here and speaking louder is not going to change that.

Volume is not the key to language comprehension, much to the chagrin of many. (Take that, groupon, and go global.) Hand signals are much more effective. In moments of desperation, you will get your point across -- perhaps not in a grammatical sentence, but in the way you most need at that very second.

Or so I continue to trust, as my attempts to learn Spanish (where is that group discount when you need it?) regress, and fluent French dating back 30+ years spews forth in in its place.

Why such an emphasis on group discounts in the cyber age? Because no one would ever leave the keyboard, the cell phone, the "smart" phone, or the PDA? Makes me think the Internet is not where we find each other; it's where our connections fray, and, if you're not careful, lose all meaning.

Groupon? Is this for 21st century groupies? If you're offering discounts, perhaps you or your oh-so-clever computer, could devise a few not designed to add to a woman's insecurities. Don't try to make me think my eyelashes are doomed, the way the teeth-whitening crowd has tried to convince me to add that task to daily maintenance. It's not working.

If that's groupon, stop the world -- I want to groupoff.

No longer a port in any storm

2011-01-27T13:21:00.000-05:00

My porting days are over. Translation: I no longer have a chemo-needle-friendly "device" implanted in my chest. It's a far cry from where I was a year ago, at this time -- between rounds 1 and 2 of chemo, with 5 more to go

I've gone, done my time, and walked by the "infusion room" aka chemo lounge at my doctors' office, and finally, had a sigh of relief. No port, no entry. Here's to hoping no one ever wants to appoint me as a Superfund site again. Or make me a one-woman radioactive blip on the sidewalk. The only exception to the latter is, there will be more PET scans, more signs that I am, I hope, home free.

Home, of course, will never be the same again. This season I am snow-bound, but it's better than being the girl in a bubble. Hello, normal white cell count. Hello, immune system. So long, fare well bottles of Purell. Return to regularly scheduled interaction with the public. That is, once I find my snow boots.

I'm all set for sledding, apparel-wise: boots, snow pants, ski mittens, down coat with hood, extra cashmere cap for warmth, all requisite long underwear and thick socks. Only thing I'm missing is the sled, and the assurance of normal bone density. What would it say about me if I took a hill too fast, clipped into a tree, and broke my hip? Age-appropriate? Ha!

For public consumption and to speak the vernacular, I am a survivor. Not at all sure the word is appropriate to describe the experience, but that is what our language, in the world of cancer patients, has labeled appropriate. I have, for the record, survived worse: 40 years of depression vs. less than a year with a cancer diagnosis. By comparison, cancer was a walk in the park. Without snow gear. I'd hardly call it a trek, considering how I've felt in other circumstances.

With lymphoma, the odds were in my favor: 90% "cure" rate is what I'm told. "Cure," not "remission." After two solid years off chemo, "cured" is what they will call me. But what term will I use?

They say you can't go home again, and while that sentence applies to me literally -- my aunt and uncle's hotel in Lake Placid burned to the ground, and Haiti had, well prior to the earthquake, become a politically untenable place to go -- Wonderland, my hometown, looks different as well.

Tourists may like Toys R Us in Time Square, part of the Disneyfication a la Guiliani and Bloomberg; those of us with memories oddly enough prefer the old days, when that was a seedy part of town. We miss the fake ID joints, the peep shows, the 24/7 porn palaces and all the people who frequented them.

What price safety? Total loss of character and place? I'm sure the hookers made a better living than the minimum-wage folk now operating every chain restaurant in the land that's open to reassure tourists that Wonderland is "safe."

Sure, I no longer have to defend my city's crime rate -- in the old days, Detroit's and D.C.'s murder rates made ours look like amateur night -- but I have less of my city to defend. So much has succumbed to another strip of the global village with all of its big-box, made-in-China-but-sold-only-for-export chain stores bleeding our local shops dry that we're losing our personality.

I love New York? We used to lure visitors with a huge advertising campaign. Now busloads enter voluntarily. I would enjoy those who commute much more if they had to pay a percentage of the NY City tax dollars from which they benefit. New York is a city of first-responders, but no one counts how much it costs us and how our neighbors beyond the borough lines have benefited since we stopped collecting income tax from them.

We should have a cover charge for entry, even if it is "congestion pricing" for cars in midtown. We should have neighborhood stickers for cars, so the locals have their place in the street and let the out-of-towners resort to a garage. That is, we should also have temporary windshield-visible signs for residents to lend to those who park here explicitly to see us. That is, for those of us -- most of us, I suspect -- for whom owning a car would be more challenging that learning to speak a new language.

I fall into that category: never have I legally owned a car. As a teen and college kid, I had one that belonged to my parents, but never did I need learn any maintenance skills beyond filling the tank with gas and checking the oil under the hood.

These days I delegate even that little knowledge to those who drive me the most frequently: bus and subway drivers, plus taxi cabs and other car services. For me, maintaining a car simply means I have discount coupons on my refrigerator for whenever I need a ride to the airport.

If you need outdoor camping or related skills, don't call me. If you need urban camping tips, from conserving water to overriding electronic stove ignitions, call me. Inside I have battery-powered lamps, radio and fan; for the great outdoors? Snow boots. If you need a port for an indoor storm, I'll see what I can do. Outdoors? Baby, you're on your own.

Good-bye to all of that

2010-12-31T12:11:00.000-05:00

It has been one hell of a year. This time last year, I was in the limbo between surgery and chemotherapy, with a pit-stop, day-surgery gig to put in the port, a device implanted under my skin so that the chemo nurses didn't have to ruin all my veins in their search for one that could receive the toxins.

This past winter, I could have collected money from the Feds for being a Superfund site, what with all the poisons streaming through my veins. Sounds like the Vietnam of my childhood, where they had to destroy the village in order to save it.

Logic like that leaves me convinced that whatever I was taught in philosophy class has no bearing in real life. The only thing logical about my illness is that it is recognized as a disability, not just in my mind but in the insurance company's.

I've been radiation central: three PET scans in 12 months. Every time I left the radiology office, I was warned to stay away from small children and pregnant women. Right -- on the sidewalks of New York? I want to get where I'm going, and I don't much care who is in the way.

But where have I been going? Not very far, at least not locally. And since I don't have the energy or capacity to travel far -- not when I don't have enough strength to go back to work and be able to focus with any level of acuity -- I can't take a vacation anywhere that the medical facilities are lacking -- bye, bye "developing" countries. We used to call them Third World, and that seems more accurate, however politically incorrect the term.

Politically correct and I have completely severed any connection. Cancer is good that way: you focus on what's real, and fuck the rest of it. Problem is, when you are no longer "in treatment," i.e., heading off for chemo and blood tests nearly every day of the week for months, you're not "cured."

Perhaps technically: the overactive cells appear to have been banished from my body, but what remains is the rest of me, the part that has to process all the events and is not ready-for-prime-time, not yet. They say a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but once it's gone, who cares?

For me, it's more like a waste is a terrible thing to mind, at least at this point in my life, now that I've had the birthday -- the big 50 -- that ensconces me in a middle-age demographic. The world looks different now: what it is I want to do in it escapes me. What have I not done that I regret not doing? Not much. I'm in search of a new goal, and don't know quite how to find one.

Love, always, love is something no one can get enough of, myself included. But the process of finding it again -- do I have the energy for that? My mind barely registers what day it is, forget about higher pursuits. I just want to have fun, and turn off the panic meter, which is on high alert. Could be seasonal, but maybe there's more to it.

How to have fun despite panic mode? I've got my ways -- unfortunately I can't indulge in them all day, every day. Reality intervenes, stabbing me internally in the solar plexus more often than I'd like.

Then there is the part of me that thinks, stop being so self-involved. Find a hobby, damnit. Or a job, if 20 years of working on my own doesn't preclude my fitting into some corporate scenario I never imagined I would like, primarily for its stability. Or, wait -- stability and job got a divorce while I wasn't looking.

Sometimes I feel like the 20th century was my time, and I can't keep up with everything -- technology, disease, and so forth -- that keeps coming my way. Adjustment disorder, my old shrink used to say on the insurance papers. That's what I had, years ago. Think I have it again now.

Bumping into middle age, adjustment disorder seems to have crept into my blood, leaving with me with a need for reading glasses, an inability to remember more than one current event at a time, no patience for anyone or anything, and a body fighting gravity with all its might. Aging, they say, is not for sissies.

Then again, no one's ever called me a sissy.

Thanksgiving chez Alice, 2010

2010-11-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

This would have to be the strangest turkey ever to drift onto a Thanksgiving table, but there you have it: chez moi, 2010, we did not have birds of any stripe. The sole reason these creatures made their way to my table was, I believe, that my mom got annoyed that she'd been invited for dinner at the BF's a few weeks ago, with lobster as the advertised meal, but it didn't work out that way.

BF ordered had ordered filet mignon (after several discussions more lengthy than you can imagine or want to about lobsters and how long they would stay lively in the refrigerator), so steak it was. Since BF is, for all intents and purposes, a vegetarian, I got to cook dinner. Not exactly my idea of a dinner invitation: "I'd love to have you come for dinner and, oh, I bought the meat as you told me to, so won't you come to my house to cook it?"

Hence lobster chez moi. If I had to order the critters, I was going to cook them in my own kitchen, not hustle up to BF's apartment and do the work there. So, we were four: me, mom, BF and BF's husband. Would not have been my first choice of dining companions, not with my mom there and white wine to follow her Dewar's. Three sheets to the wind, my mom loses her vocal censor.

Fortunately, she didn't have her eye trained on me, but BF got a full complement of mom's thoughts on BF's hair and why it looked terrible and how she should cut it....I quite agreed with mom, but kept my mouth shut. It did, after all, take BF nearly 30 years to tell me she didn't like how my hairdresser cut my hair, and I don't know why she didn't speak up sooner.

Wouldn't have made much difference, since it's my head and my hair (at this point in time, I have to be proud to be able to say that, even if the post-chemo hair texture is fine but curly, and I don't recognize myself in the mirror.

Funny part was, BF's husband agreed with the mom. Several times over. However, in the ten years they have been married, I've never seen the husband disagree with the BF, about anything: in their house, she rules. Or, rather, I can talk to him about why they should fly business class, and he will agree, but won't actually buy the damn tickets himself. BF buys air tickets, coach, even though her body won't make it through a five-hour flight.

But this is friendship, or at least how I maintain this one, though BF long ago stole a piece of my heart, which you might think would make me more hesitant. Yet without her I would be more lost than I already am. And these days, I am a wandering soul.

Do blogs have birthdays? anniversaries?

2010-11-29T14:54:00.000-05:00

If so, mine is past due. October marked the end of blogging year number 6 -- a year in which most of what I've had to say had a lot more to do with blood chemistry than I ever hoped to need to know.

Hard to "share" the experience I've had except to describe it as a hand grenade thrown into my life, a chance for me to have a legit do-over. Problem is, what I'm ready to do-over is my life as an editor, and those days are gone. Judging from what I've seen around the Web, no one wants to pay writers what they are worth either.

By way of contrast -- in the 1920s, Fitzgerald earned $1 a word for magazine pieces. Today, those who seek literate web content want it for about 2 cents a word, if that. Over 80 years, the once livable writers' wage has sunk so far below the ocean, it got swallowed in the Bermuda triangle.

Makes me sad, that writing has come to this pass. Makes me angry that people won't pay for grammarians/copy editors to read for continuity and proper grammar -- because the world, as I see it, is growing less literate by the second.

The U.S. already sucks in math and science on a high school level. Now English is headed down the same path. If we don't get educators who can teach, whatever subject and whatever level, I shudder to think of where we're going -- time's not on our side.

Gilda's Club: for support, abandon all privacy

2010-09-22T19:59:00.005-04:00

So, I go looking for support, finally, from people in situations like mine. But first, an interview with a social worker. This one lied about going to my college. So much for trust from the outset. I mean, if you're going to lie to make a client/patient feel like you have something in common, don't pick something that can be easily fact-checked.

The interview goes on, with a woman I've never met trying to get my entire mental health history along with the cancer story. Confidentiality? They asked me to sign a release form so that anyone of the social workers in the house can chat about me and and anything I've said about anything. I'm thinking, no fucking way. Gilda's not even bound by HIPPA.

HIPPA, the law that's supposed to be about patient privacy. The long and short of that is, if I don't explicitly give a medical professional permission to discuss anything about me with anyone else, what I do discuss is supposed to be confidential. That is, in as much as anyone has any privacy in this century. HIPPA is a piss-poor offering, but it's something.

Purpose of interview? To find where I fit into there support group scheme. Who are the people in my situation? I fit into the "post-treatment" category, meaning I'm done with chemo. The fact that I'm still or again on a medical mystery tour doesn't fit into the Gilda's Club calculus.

And, while I'm signing away rights, will I agree to let the Gilda's folks talk to my shrink? Excuse me? How exactly is this offering me support? More like offering to put my history as the Prozac poster adult on the AP wire, for those who know what it is. Or on an unsecured Web site, for those on the other side of the digital divide.

Turns out that the "wellness" group for which Gilda's clan thinks I'm suited consists of people just diagnosed, people in treatment (i.e., undergoing chemo or radiation or what have you), plus those, like me, who have gotten great grades for going through chemo and having a clear PET scan.

Even if it has been followed by July 4 in the ER, and the first week of September bouncing from ologist to ologist: onco to cardio to radio and back to onco. And more: my white cells are tanking and I need injections to boost them. When that doesn't work, I get a bone marrow biopsy.

A week later, I'm still in pain, and no clear answers are forthcoming.

"Wellness" is one of those words that makes me cringe. Websters defines it as the quality or state of being in good health especially as an actively sought goal." Need I say that no one crosses Gilda's threshold without some interest in better health. Or at least an interest in not feeling alone with cancer.

Problem is, I don't think yoga classes are going to do it. Nor arts & crafts. Nor lectures about my "disease." Or afternoon tea once a month.

I went to Gilda's in the hope that I would find people who could help me feel less frightened that I've been tagged a member of the medical mystery tour. Instead, I found my friend M. Wyrebek's poem title more than apt: Be Properly Scared. May not have been what Gilda's crew was aiming for, but they more than hit that target.

Lever-less at the polls

2010-09-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

So, New York decided to comply with some half-assed Federal mandate that allegedly helps people vote.

Wrong.

Until our most recent primary, every time I went to the polls, I went behind the curtain, pushed down a lever for each candidate I chose, and before exiting, I pulled back the large red lever that controlled the whole setup, and I heard a satisfying clunk when I was done.

Now, it's back to the future: we have paper ballots that are supposed to be marked by a filled-in circle, like the SATs, circa 1970s. Then, we are supposed to feed the ballot into a scanner, and the scanner monitor allegedly says "thank you for voting," or something to that effect when your ballot registers.

Mine did not register. No entity, human or computer, thanked me for voting. The polling people claim the scanner recognized my ballot when the next ballot went through. Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you.

The paper ballot in itself is off-putting. For one thing, if you have reached the age of my-arm-is-too-short-to-read this, you won't be happy with the print size. For another, voting in the gym has never struck me as a very adult location for the so-called democratic process, but now, it feels even more juvenile.

Feels less and less like my vote matters as I stand there, waiting on line in the gym. It feels more like college class registration, back in the day when we needed to collect punch cards to fill out our schedules.

Makes me think less of cap-D Democracy and more of small-s student council. And electioneering was bad enough in high school. Who knew that would be the highlight of the process?

Aftershocks

2010-08-26T14:48:00.005-04:00

It's been one hell of a bumpy night -- almost twelve months since I went to Dr. Training Bra, aka Baby Doc, aka the doc-in-a-box to ask for a Nicotrol prescription. First time I ever met a so-called doctor (I think her M.D. came from the kind of school that used to advertise on matchbook covers.) who didn't jump all over the chance to stop a patient from smoking.

I thought I had a smoker's cough. Not so much. More like cancer. Lymphoma: two surgeries, one splitting my breastbone in two, followed by six rounds of "aggressive" chemotherapy, and now, well, now this -- this limbo, this sense that I am not who I was but I don't know who I will become.

It's a scary place to be. People congratulate me on having gone through chemo with flying colors, and physically, maybe I did. Mentally? Did I have any time or energy to think about what I was doing? Oh, all that is hitting me as I write. Months of mental processes ignored, shelved to make room for what was medically necessary.

Post-traumatic stress disorder: another item on the you've-got-cancer list that I did not find out about until I reached that stage, which is now. NOW. It's like a bad record playing over and over in my head. I went through something huge and awful, and while I'm technically on the other side of it, now is when it feels horrible in a way I couldn't have exposed myself while I was spending seven hours a week tied to an IV drip.

That tether was, in fact, my lifeline. Now I'm free of it, yet I don't quite feel that way. One major casualty of my dance with cancer was my relationship with the Artist, for which I am very sorry. My emotional plate far too full for so long that only my longstanding -- 20+ years -- friends have been able to make it through, to varying degrees, with me.

I get nervous and scared and shaky in an instant. The only comparable emotion in my repertoire is grief. The solution on which I am living is, take extra Xanax. Make phone calls, even in tears. I'm going to need help finding my feet, much less getting back on them.

When you are grieving, you alternate between different states of being, subject to change without notice. Some days are fine; some days, you are bereft. You don't know what to make of anything when you are in the throes of grief, and that is as close as I can get to describing how I feel.

Which end is up?

Whatever happens, that's the plan

2010-07-30T17:38:00.004-04:00

The Artist and I, apparently, are having creative differences, as some on the Left Coast say. You could also say, we are unable to accommodate each other's needs. But in truth? I am not sure how it happened, how it went from feeling like "us" to sensing she was already gone, long before I realized.

It makes me sad: I had such hopes -- initially we seemed to share the same sensibilities, to laugh at the same jokes, shake our heads in joint irony; I thought, perhaps, we even comforted each other, as well as the fun stuff. Fun is another element that had left the building. I wanted something I could not get, something I can't quite, or don't want, to articulate here.

But apparently, whatever happens, that's the plan. That's the tune everyone around me is singing. Or at least for the moment. These days, I suppose it's as workable a motto as any. Erases the sting of "Be properly scared," something that has echoed in my head.

I am at a point where, whatever happens, that's the plan seems quite apt, considering my shortage of definite plans for my future -- what will I do for a career, given my lack of interest in running a financial planning business, and my technological incompetence leaving me unable even to try to get a job in my previous field, editing.

Then there's the fact that the magazine industry when I left it was alive and practically well. Now the print world as I knew it is gone. The magazine industry's on life support, and we're all to blame for that. I do wonder: who the hell decided that we were better off reading brief articles on a Web page, and let print go to die.

I realize the irony: I'm writing on the very instrument that has helped push my old industry into the ground, making use of exactly what I complain about: the Internet. I just think the pace of technochange is way, way, too fast, and that something has gotten lost in the mad dash to computerization.

That would be, among other things, our attention spans, our ability to talk with one another in person and think real social life did not involve sitting at a screen typing in lieu of talking, leaving the vocal intonations completely devoid of a job for which they are better suited than a machine: conveying emotion, whether cheery or dour, sarcastic or earnest.

Here I return to Luddite-ville, apparently alone.

Only last week did I find out the Artist had been trying to figure me out from reading my blog entries -- and noting that my travelogues seemed too self-focused, and why didn't I talk about the settings: for example, what was new and different and interesting about each culture?

I tried to explain how much of my view was, alas, that of a tourist more than the traveler I would like to think I am. No, I don't write about seeing homeless people in one part Buenos Aires juxtaposed against another neighborhood that could be Paris. I think and observe more than I write. (As for Buenos Aires, I could not tell whether I was watching the ghost of New York past or future: a city falling on hard times, again.)

For another, this blog is the world through my eyes -- and if you happen to share an interest in how I view the world, that's why you're reading it. If I weren't sufficiently entertaining in some manner, well, how would I have met and become real-life friends with other bloggers to whom I was introduced through their writing?

Back to the plan: whoever made it has a very slanted sense of humor. Black comes to mind, but that is how I get by, how I see things. When I went through chemo, people kept telling me how wonderful it was that I kept my sense of humor. What else was I going to do with it? Tuck it away in a safe deposit box to make sure I knew where it went? Cry?

You don't make it through a year of doctors and tests and chemo without laughing at some of it. Or at least I don't, didn't, couldn't. It is, after all, how I get by.

And, you have to admit, it is peculiar that two different straight women in the chemo lounge admired my boobs. I should thank them here -- for reminding me that all was not lost, that my body could be a toxic waste swamp, and still, I have great tits.

That, apparently, remains the plan.

Playing above the grass

2010-07-12T12:17:00.006-04:00

From an article in The New York Times, this resonates with me: "Thomas R. Cole, author of a cultural history of aging, said he hailed anyone who, borrowing a phrase from his mother, age 85, 'is playing above the grass.' ”

What better way to put it? The ultimate division in life stages in five words. Far less of a cliche than keeping your head above water. Biggest problem is for those of us who never thought we would, regardless of circumstances, live to see past our 30th, 35th, or 36 birthdays. It's 15 years on now, and I hadn't anticipated this longevity.

Neither had several of my friends (a commonality I never expected to be growing each time I mention it). Thing is, we all forgot to plan. Live past 35? Really? From the age of 17, I somehow conjectured that twice that age would be about as good as it would get.

It seems I gravely miscalculated. Post-chemo, the miscalculation is all the more vivid. What has proved to be dead-on, though, is that about the time I was turning 35, the world I had known was becoming more and more lost and the world as it has come to be has taken over. Hey, I was an English major.

Apart from being the first family on the block to have a microwave; play Pong with the TV set sporting a green-on-black display; own a VCR old enough to record the original not-ready-for-prime-time SNL gang; and possess a home fax machine -- the better to see each week's football spreads, technology and I have not been fast friends.

Sure, the first computer moved in in 1985 -- and I've been editing on computer almost since my work life began -- but, honestly, I preferred it back in the day when I didn't feel electronics had showed my brain the door. I like to be smarter than the machines with which I'm involved.

The longer I play above the grass, the less likely it seems I have any interest in keeping up with the latest widgetry. The user-friendly concept and I seem to have had a falling out. I want my computer to be like a car: when I was 16, I could drive one just fine, and for the most part, nothing has changed on the dashboard to change that.

That's more than 30 years in real time. Thirty years in computer land is another story. While I can still operate the original computer, which had the best word processing software I've ever encountered, all the latest twists and wrinkles leave me cold.

It's a brave new world out there, and somehow, I forgot to prepare for it.

Nearly bald soprano passes her PET scan

2010-06-11T20:59:00.004-04:00

Atop my head is peach fuzz, getting longer by the day. Chemo is gone from my body and my datebook, as are almost daily visits to the doctor for blood counts. Best of all, the PET scan did not light up anywhere.

So, I'm officially on the road to recovery. It's a slow one, involving a great deal of sleep. Fortunately, sleep is my forte. You might even call it a vocation. Closer still, my true calling in life is as a sleeper. Twelve hours a day? No problem.

Oh, you wanted me awake and coherent? At what hour? Whatever the hour, you can never be sure of how cogent I'll be. I have been known to converse with people -- real, live ones standing next to my bed -- without regaining consciousness. Unconscious telephone calls? Been there, done that.

What are my plans, now that I've been blessed by the medical academy? My plan is not to plan, not now. I have just come through months when planning anything wasn't possible, and, given the strength of chemo fatigue, I don't think this state of affairs will change for a while.

It is interesting, to be in my fiftieth year and once again, have no clue what I am going to do with my life. Ideas float around, one or two in particular, but the execution of them in real life, well, that may take some doing.

I've got the time now, to think -- or not, depending on the day. And blogging? Not so much. Too much focus required, at least at the moment. Yet it's comforting to know, when I'm ready, my blog will be waiting.

Round six report

2010-05-05T22:50:00.005-04:00

I have officially completed chemo -- now, all I can do is wait. The last round ended about 9 days ago, followed by a week of stab-and-jab. For months now, I've gone every day to have my blood checked for white and red blood cell counts, and then I receive shots accordingly.

The hair atop my head has started to grow, fuzz by fuzz. My eyebrows, on the other hand, are slowly drifting away from my face. As for the rest of my body, it will still be some time before I need any sort of depilation.

Limbo is where I live now. Yes, there will be scans and bloodwork, but timing? Not a clue. When will I have energy again? Could be months from now, until I move into what I can only speculate will be the new normal. Once cancer throws a hand grenade into your life, it's hard to know where the road, to mix a metaphor, will take you.

I had fallen into a rhythm with chemo -- finally figured out how I would probably feel on any given day based on what had happened previously. Now, I have to relearn how to have days to myself -- it is two weeks until my next doctor's appointment, not two days. I am intermittently exhausted, but I have time now -- maybe too much time.

Apart from slicing my palm open when I cut an avocado and, a week later, slamming my index finger in my front door, I'm doing okay. But still, it's different: what would normally require basic first aid now requires a trip to the oncologist's to make sure the wounds are minor. My white blood counts remain at the point where something minor could turn into a nasty infection.

So I'm out of the bubble, but far from ready for prime time.

Tie a colored ribbon...cut off your circulation

2010-04-03T14:24:00.017-04:00

In case you were wondering what to get me while I'm sick, here's a list of links to things I do not want: No T-shirts, no mugs, no hats, no pins, no rubber bracelets. I don't need words on my chest to tell the world that cancer sucks. This is not exactly breaking news, folks.

Pick a ribbon, any ribbon, and choke on it. When my friend Dona was dying, the last thing she wanted to see was any item marketed in the pink ribbon factory. What she wanted to do was strangle the next person who showed up with one of those in-solidarity ribbons.

Meanwhile, the Web sites below have conflicting colors: is lymphoma lime green or is it red? Remember when red was AIDS awareness? Apart from Tony Orlando's song, that was the first ribbon, the one that wasn't commercialized -- and now, it isn't even listed as a disease.

http://www.choosehope.com/category/by-cancer-color-cancer-type

http://www.personalizedcause.com/shop/index.html

http://www.trinitylondon.com/awareness-ribbon-meanings.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awareness_ribbons

If there's an illness, or some other life-event trauma, the ribbon people have you covered. My personal favorite is the lace ribbon for osteoporosis. If only it came in a thinner size than the others, to show not only the lack of bone density but the decrease in diameter of the bones, it would be just perfect.

What I'm really waiting for is the walk for osteoporosis. That's about the only disease for which walking is recommended to keep bones in strong working order.

Walk for breast cancer, lymphoma, AIDS: how does that help any cancer research? Just send in the damn check and stay home. Do something fun while you can -- before you go Googling the Internet to see which ribbon has your name on it.

The marketing people have gone overboard on this theme. They started out on Prednisone, one of the components of my chemo, and moved up to the big stuff, the steroids that may not have made it to the house that [Babe] Ruth built -- Yankee Stadium, 1923 -- but are probably common in the bloodstream of ball players who compete in its replacement, opened last year.

Tomorrow is opening day for major league baseball. I don't know how I came upon this bit of useless information, but all it means to me is there's another place I can't go, in my immunocompromised state.

No stadiums for me, no matter who build them or who decided that naming the Met's new stadium "Citifield" was a good idea. Last week I read that the Feds not only own more than 25% of the bank stock, but it will be sold this at an what would be an $8 billion profit today.

That's TARP for you -- your tax dollars at work. Wonder if the U.S. government had a stake in how the Mets play?

I don't know what color ribbon goes with bank-in-distress, but if it's green, I'll bet there are a number of bank execs around whose neck that ribbon would fit perfectly. Perhaps former bank execs -- someone must have gotten fired when the bank tanked, even if for window dressing.

Still, if you're looking for a few necks around which to tie ribbons, the bodies are probably available by name in The Wall Street Journal. Or, wait: do those ribbons come in necktie form?

Which is worse in our society? A broken banking system or no cure for cancer? Judging from how readily the U.S. bailed out the banks vs. how difficult it is to get funding from the N.I.H., it doesn't look like public health has a fighting chance.

My obsessions are my own

2010-03-28T12:01:00.004-04:00

We watched Julie and Julia last night. I loved Meryl Streep doing Julia and how she projected Julia's larger-than-life personality and dedication to her art, along with some sleek parodic moments.

As far as Julie, I didn't care for the character. She seemed scheming: not to write a blog about what she was thinking, but to write with the original premise that she could hitch her star to someone who might take her places.

So, you can cook. According to my undomesticated mother, anyone who can read can cook. That's why recipes call for measurement. That's also why we stay out of the kitchen.

When Julie got to the point that she didn't want to disappoint her fans, I thought it was a bit precious. I didn't get into the blogosphere for fans; I didn't even know who would stumble upon my little world, decide s/he liked it, and wanted to sit for a while.

May I remind all of us, when we started in this world, when we had "fans," we learned that others admired our writing style, could made us laugh or think. We, or at least I, didn't set out to purchase any product some blogger gushed about. Or admire their ability to commit to a cookbook for an entire year.

How did I decide to blog? On the heels of some friends who blogged in 2004, I got inspired. I have written professionally; these days, I don't do marketing, which does bring the chance for fame and fortune into the realm of negligible. However, I have a voice, and blogging give me the chance to play with it.

The closest this blog gets to domesticity is in describing my own incompetence, and what new areas I have glossed over since Y2K. Take most 21st century technology. Please. Or give me a lucid explanation of why it is that when telephones had cords, we didn't have dropped calls every three minutes as we do on this decade's model, the cell phone.

Why detach the cord when it served such a perfect purpose? So the next generation won't know how to conduct a conversation? Or are they so busy texting that by the time they reach legal drinking age, their hands will be too crippled to hold a glass?

I'd started reading blogs written by some of my ancient private email list friends, women I'd known virtually for at least 10 years at the time -- 2004 -- and my focus was and is, my blog and welcome to it. Sure, I comment on social affairs and bad politics and the long saga of life in Wonderland, and why I would choose to live nowhere else.

I don't fancy myself an arts critic, unless it is to mock stumbling over the "art" a a contemporary gallery, a place where I think the "artist's" highest achievement was to convince someone else to buy the product, even when it looked like a mound of dirt, or tree outlines moving to John Cage-like music on a CD player.

Sure it's creative, but then again, so is my next-door neighbor's fingerpaint ouevre. And Abby just turned 5 last month. I've seen paintings my mom had framed, my own elementary school artwork. At age 7, I had a good grasp of perspective.

I may have hit my zenith in watercolor at age 8, but I'm not trying it to peddle it at the school of art and commerce. Commerce is where those who lack in artistic talent lose their critical aesthetic abilities to become seduced be an artist's story. I do have to admire an "artist" who separates fools from their money. That, to me, is the true story of contemporary art.

Tell me the story, and I'll keep my money to myself. I will try hard not to laugh at what I will never consider art, just spin.

But I digress: I did not come to blogging as a means to make my fortune. Looks like Julie did. I did sign up for BlogHer this year, simply because it is in Wonderland, convenient by taxi, and I should have an immune system, I hope, by them. I'll never be Dooce; I'll never be FinSlippy. If I have a blogging idol, it's MetroDad. He's a great writer and he makes me laugh.

Plus, Peanut's Halloween costume for last year alone should get him a lifetime of paid blogging. You haven't lived until you've seen MD's underage Chinese gymnast outfit on his daughter. And he doesn't take commercial endorsements.

The girl in a bubble: white blood cells needed

2010-03-25T20:02:00.003-04:00

Today my white blood count reached a new nadir: I have 400, practically few enough that someone could count them, and someone else could start singing 400 white blood cells in her bod, 400 white blood cells; take any down and pass them around, 399 white blood cells in her bod....

A normal reading is 4,800 to 10,000. So I don't exactly have any to spare. This week? Like the others, but more so. Every day, visit the doctor. Get blood pressure taken, temperature taken, finger pricked to put blood on a slide; get weighed; see blood test results before doctor hits the exam room and know: today, another 480cc shot of drug to hasten white blood cell formation.

Why so important? Chemo nukes out all the cells, the good and the bad. Then you have a hiatus, 2 weeks when the blood is supposed to regenerate. Thing is, every cycle of chemo makes it more difficult for the bone marrow to make the cells. But if I don't have a high enough count a week from now, then I can't get the chemo to nuke the cells that may exist.

Makes that much sense to me, too.

Then there are the red blood cells -- too few and you have no energy, not to mention having no immune system since the white cells are so few and far between. And let us not forget the platelet count. Normal? 130-400 of whatever unit is being counted. Me? Down to 55. You could definitely sing the bottles of beer song to that.

Platelets at this stage equal very limited blood clotting ability. A paper cut could send me to the hospital. This thought is not cheering. Neither is the idea that I have to be incredibly careful not to walk into anything, because I'd have a bruise for months.

People tell me, at least you still have your sense of humor. What else am I going to have? Shall we all start to sing the platelet count song? I don't have much in the way of intellectual thought processes to get in the way of a good old-fashioned sing-along.

Lymphoma? Not pretty. Can't dress it up and take it anywhere, not without sterile precautions. Time for another round of Purell, what I'm wearing instead of perfume this winter. I used to wear Joy. Even if I couldn't feel it, I could smell it. Now, it doesn't make a difference, except in the irony department -- but you knew I was good for that.

Good tech, bad tech: just fix it.

2010-03-20T18:53:00.006-04:00

I am tired of the latest, brightest shiny toy to come out of any so-called technology box. What I want is for the folks who thought they were so clever to invent things, to come through on FIXING what is already invented, not going on to muck up something new.

For example, take the cordless phone: great idea, bad ergonomics, and unreliable reception. Is it that challenging to take the old-time technology that made our corded phones connect so reliably and apply it to more recent "innovations"?

And television: it used to be so easy. Press one button for on/power; change the channel or the volume with two simple arrow points. HD TV? Hell to define it. No better definition, because the cable signal now pixilates at random. Make the signal too complicated, and the TV can't manage to make it smooth and constant, as the signal did so smoothly back in the day.

Hell to make the TV clicker work to get you to one of more than 1000 channels you may wish to cut back to a manageagble, say, 100? Can the video recording box manage to fast-forward or reverse as easily as a VCR? Not in my house.

Then, the cell phone -- may it rot in hell. How important are you? Do you need to broadcast your lovers' quarrels, your medical test results, any call other than say, can't make it on time, got an emergency going on. Are the recipients of these calls so stupid that they can't assume, as in other times, that you've been delayed?

More people than not show up less than on-time. Planes never do on-time, unless they are fudging the schedule. If you're not a cop or a fireman or, dare I say a doctor, on duty, on call, do you really need to chat on the sidewalk?

In the car -- no one ever promised driving excitement. Vehicles are simply transit. Perhaps distracting yourself with the radio is enough. Be daring -- have a cup of coffee. Try not to spill it. Don't give me your traffic updates. I promise: they're boring. Moreover, maybe you should keep your eyes on the road, cut down on accidents.

And ergonomics? Kids are going to text themselves into early arthritis, strange tendon problems, shoulder strain, back troubles -- then they will have to learn to talk. Wonder if they'll be able to catch up with their less technology dependent peers: the people you see having conversations, ordinary verbal exchanges, with one another. They are few and far between these days, at least in public.

If the techno-folks wanted to be useful, they might look into improving voice recognition software. At this rate, no one will be able to type -- or given how language has deteriorated, maybe everyone will get by with grunting. Once for yes; twice for no.

Apart from texting, which is for people who are too lazy or incapable of using a telephone for its original purpose, which was not to be Western Union on a regular basis, there is a problem with cell phones that makes me laugh.

It is this: an entire generation of people are growing up without having an unimpeded conversation, without interruption, either by another call or, to go back to the original technology complaint: IF YOU CAN'T GET A CALL TO GO THROUGH WITHOUT DROPPING OUT, what exactly was the point of losing the cord in the first place?

Then, the speaker phone: nice concept, lousy execution. Yes, you avoid ergonomic incidents, but the echos and sputters over the line make the conversation more challenging. And privacy? Long since gone by the wayside, not that most people seem to care, or even make a distinction between personal and business. Scary.

Granted, someone's good techno idea made blogging possible. A place for people like me to rant where we want, in case someone's listening, or, to be precise, reading.

Yet I can't help coming back to my first point: why can't technology be perfected before the next ingenious idea comes along? Short attention spans? Another failure of our time? If someone would take back fiber optics in favor of copper wires, we might be able to find out. And while the sole techno-perfecto in the land is at it, can't the digital camera shutter press in a timely fashion?

Why go forward when we haven't succeeded at backward? Alice wants to know.

Letter and a rant: antisocial media

2010-03-07T18:31:00.008-05:00

Dear RC,

My apologies for sending this through FB, but you came up on the side of the page that makes "suggestions." FB today burped up that you have "only 16 friends." I have, by its count, more than 100 -- you can guess which one I think is more realistic.

This whole social media thing is really ludicrous. I miss the old days -- hell, like, last week -- when people, myself included, weren't "sharing"/ broadcasting our 15-word thoughts (or, fewer and not thoughts but "is waiting on line at the store") to the world. I know this is somehow R.'s bread and butter, but no matter what she explains, I don't get it.

Call me old fashioned, but call me -- on the phone - do not text me, IM me or whatever passes for digital communication. I'm sucked in and simultaneously sickened.

Started reading a book on the train yesterday and realized how much I miss just plain reading your basic book. Hard copy, suited to recovering from coffee spills, page-turning books.

I don't care what the digital natives (read the term today and liked it) are trying to say: you can't mourn in cyberspace. Not unless you're working on complete detachment. Is this the wave of the next generation? Do they think they can talk to a shrink by typing? And get any kind of results?

No, when it comes to full-on emotion, I'm not posting it to FB. This whole FB thing makes blogging look positively antiquated, in that when I write in my blog, I'm trying to make a real point. What I say on FB is stuff left over floating when my brain has gone on hiatus.

I may be wintering on FB, due to my housebound status, but if I could go outside and not be afraid a germ might march through my defenseless white blood cell count, I'd be there. With bells on. In person.

Today I had my one outing between chemo cycles: I felt well enough to go talk to people at a safe distance at a Haitian art sale. Fortunately it wasn't crowded, or highly peopled, as The Artist and I say. We prefer lightly peopled or none at all. Odd that we live in New York, but there you have it. We like our conveniences more.

One of my current ones is that the chemo lounge is five minutes by cab from my house. Couldn't find that in a small town. My friend outside of Buffalo has to drive an hour to take her mother to chemo. (Lymphoma is the disease her mom and I share.)

Would I talk about chemo time on FB? Not in this lifetime. I doubt more than six of my so-called friends would even care. FB has its place, especially when communicating with folks a generation younger than I, but it's not anything resembling a face-to-face interaction. Not even resembling an email.

Fifteen words or fewer: I am cranky as I write this. Social media? It seems more antisocial to me.

All cooped up with snow place to go

2010-02-26T21:01:00.007-05:00

Has it snowed more this winter than last? I have no way to judge. Since my surgery, December 2, I haven't been out much at all. Since chemo began, I've been afraid of public petrie dishes. Most of the time, I don't notice -- but today, while it snowed and I couldn't go out, I felt like a little kid sick on a snow day -- a do-nothing day that I couldn't fully enjoy.

Instead, my mom was here: we toiled together in the kitchen, making comfort food from scratch. My comfort food -- not something she has ever eaten. I called it mac & cheese day, but neither of us had ever made a white sauce. It takes a village when we attempt domestic competence.

We made two phone calls to consult with my friend who gave me the recipe, my friend who is upstate taking care of her mom, who has also lymphoma. It is, apparently, the disease of the season. Her mom and mine are drinking buddies: she and I think it's cute, we who stay away from the bottle, for reasons too complex to detail here.

This winter, I am ill. Last winter, I met The Artist, with whom I am in love. Our anniversary -- that is, in real life, not via email or telephone, is January 29, a Thursday. I had picked the restaurant, my favorite French bistro not 100 steps from my home. It is where I had auditioned, so to speak, many a real life rendez-vous. La Boite closed suddenly in May last year. All I could think was, I hope I never have to go on another first date.

The Artist is sweet and witty and compassionate, and I am grateful beyond measure that she is in my life. This is a hard patch we are going through: no matter how "garden variety" my cancer may be considered, she is stuck going to work, and tending to me while I am home.

I am tired, and sometimes achy, but the largest part of my physical pain has been healing from the five-inch incision in my chest. Chemo has not, thus far, proved the tribulation that made me so nervous.

A winter snow- and germ-bound in my apartment, however, is making me twitchy. I cannot remember the last period of time I was Wonderland-bound for so many months. Last year, January was Alabama, for my niece's birthday; February, my belated JYA in Buenos Aires; and March, my two weeks down in Mexico.

This year, I travel by taxi to the oncologist, five minutes from my house. Last year the heat was turned low, but this year, it is not. This year, my house is awash in Purell, Kleenex, pain pills, and tranquilizers. The freezer is stocked with food other people have cooked. The Artist makes our dinners, each with a reduction sauce she improvises and that impresses me. My mom's friends, most of whom live outside of Wonderland, send flowers, chocolates, books, skin cream.

Most of my social life, except for The Artist, TBF, and one of The Three Sisters, is conducted via electronic means. Certainly it is the season for Facebook. Alas, it is not the season for great writing, given the limits of my concentration if not any other impediments. It is mostly a time for arts and crafts, and I feel kinship with my 5-year-old neighbor, who received finger paints for her birthday.

I have paint (by numbers), coloring books, crayons, glitter crayons, markers, glitter, modeling and baking clay, and a needlepoint kit. I have also designed my own tiara, courtesy of The Artist's dabbling in the children's crafts department at a local store. She herself paints for real, and creates beautiful photographs. What I hope I do with words, she succeeds with art.

One of the Three Sisters has been down this road before: I am her fourth patient in the chemo wars. She keeps me hydrated and laughing and is great, loving company. We have known each other for 25 years, and we are family. We are better than family: we don't have the built-in stress of childhood competition and don't share buttons installed by the same mother.

Most winters I spend time in bathing suits. Now, I wonder how the sun will affect my scars, and whether my sun days are over. I dress oddly, as if in the throws of menopause: hot, cold, hot, cold: my internal thermostat is askew.

I used to wear flannel nightgowns; now my nighttime attire is improvised layered pajamas. Cotton elasticized-waist pants; a long-sleeved, tunic-length cotton T-shirt; a button-down, flannel shirt worn open to be taken on and off as needed; athletic socks; and a cotton cap, to cover my head. The cap is striped; the shirt is plaid, but mismatched clothing seems symbolic.

As a teenager, per my journals, I hoped my life would look seamless, that it would not be all manner of patchwork. Patchwork, however, is the story of how it goes, never more so than now.

Hairless at home

2010-02-09T13:39:00.006-05:00

No one signs up for chemotherapy with any kind of informed consent. Why? Info is given on a need-t0-know basis, while my 5 minutes on Google gave me the questions I needed to ask.

Sure, they tell you about losing your hair -- right on schedule, it came out in tufts. There was enough hair in my wastebasket to build a bird's nest. No one says, this process will take a week or more. You will shed. You will think you are molting. You will be surprised at what hairs remain and which ones detach with ease.

Then, you go to Wigville for the actual wig fitting. Explanations for taping wig to head prove more complicated than my brain can process. On my head, wig feels like an imposter's hair. Name for wig? Cousin It. No gender required. Cousin It's relative is "ittle," a band of hair that requires a cap over it so as not to expose the skull.

I'm told I have a lovely scalp. I'm told Cousin It looks real. Personally, I can't imagine that anyone could have any other response. Just as with new babies, all of them are cute, even the ugly ones. When you are hairless, compliments take on a different slant.

Nausea is commonly mentioned as a side effect, although the question is posed, "are you nauseous?" and proper English calls for, "are you nauseated?" P.S.: One day after chemo does not a clean couple of weeks create. You may not be nauseated the day of or during -- but there's a two-week interval to follow, when any day could be the bad day.

It is, basically, a crap shoot, how each person will react to toxic chemicals "infused" into her body. Your mileage, it seems, may vary. That covers a lot of reactions, but still, what you think when you start and what you conclude after four hours attached to a needle attached to tubing that glides the toxins into your body is unpredictable. Every day is a surprise: some are just days of slow movement; others are filled with queasy hours.

Things I researched; things no one would have otherwise mentioned: peripheral neuropathy, possible mouth sores and strange chemical tastes in mouth. Will chemo slow down the healing of the surgical scars? What foods may I and may I not consume? Do I need someone else to discern the temperature of my bathwater? How germ free do I need to make my house? Should I just shower in Purell and call it a day?

Do I need distilled water for ice cubes? How do I know good white cells from bad ones? In high school, we had to dissect a frog, twice. Why couldn't someone have taught me, say, some human anatomy? Something to do with how our bodies work? Surely we could have passed on the damn frog.

This is not the brave new world I envisioned. It is, however, very much in line with the title of poet M. Wyrebek's book: Be Properly Scared. I read the poems when they were published: the story of M's life from age 16 and her diagnosis onward. She was someone I admired -- talented, pretty, smart, funny -- and her life cut short as the bad cells multiplied and won the battle.

I guess I am lucky: the odds are in my favor. What the exact numbers are, I don't know. Another factoid hidden from the hairless. Chemo is not an adventure for those who need situations clearly delineated. Clues don't get spelled out; clues bite you on the ass, and assume you'll recognize them as answers.

But watch me when I do engage in commerce with clerks who are idiots: I have no time for them, not that I ever did have much patience. What I have now is an answer for, could you wait a few minutes? Not today, not this week. The toxins running through my veins have me in their grip. I am in thrall to what will one day be considered as suitable to cure cancer as mercury once was to cure syphilis.

I pull off my cotton cap, show my scalp, and say, "No. Don't have the time. And unless you have cancer, you won't, don't, can't understand me, so lay off the platitudes." It may seem cruel, but if there is one time in my life when it truly is all about me, this is it. Everyone I know who has been on this cruel dance floor has traced the same choreography.

Lymphoma focuses what is left of the mind in a position sharper than its ever been before. The rest of the brain cells are off on a sojourn somewhere I can't find them. I have to cling to the ones that remain.

Minus my thymus; au revoir Haiti

2010-01-20T16:22:00.013-05:00

To recap: the thymus gland lies beneath the breastbone in the middle of one's chest. It is considered a lymph gland, not an endocrine one. Meaning, that, for a child and a teenager, this is the go-to spot for generating immune cells.

For the average adult, this gland is vestigial, about as useful as an appendix or tonsils. For me, however, the smoker's lung scan I had in Jan. 2007 -- which insurance/"medical benefits" didn't pay for -- gave a point of comparison with the CAT scan I had in September. Net result? Gland had doubled in size.

Getting to the CAT scan was easy: I went to Dr. Training Bra, aka Baby Doc, my 12-year-old insurance doctor ("in network") for a smoker's cough late last August. She took a chest X-ray and sent me for the CAT scan. And that was as far as she went.

Baby Doc, as you may have recently heard, since the Haiti I know and love was turned on its side last week, was a not-very-bright dictator who ruled that country during many of my years there. Like Training Bra, he was totally incompetent.

But Haiti was relatively calm, and open for business. Given the political structure, as long as you knew who to pay off, you were good to go. Since Baby Doc's forced (U.S. aided) departure in 1986, no one has known who is in charge for more than half a minute or so.

I'm afraid all the well-meaning aid in the world can't fix Haiti's problems. Rebuild? That would assume infrastructure that never existed in the first place.

Forget democracy: start with potable water, food, and shelter. I don't care who is running the show; I just care that the show runner is consistent. Although I'm hoping for a step up from Training Bra, whose consistent mien was inattentive, bordering on awful, and who demonstrated a less than active interest in me, the patient.

Kyona Beach, Haiti: the last place I saw my father alive, some 19 years and 14 days ago. Four days from now will mark 19 full years since my father died.

CAT scan results, September 8: lungs are clear, but thymus growth indicates I may have lymphoma. The word is on the table then, although no one allowed me to ask questions about it -- or, at least, no one would listen and answer me. What I picked up on is, the radiologists' report says, send her for a PET scan.

Thus Catch 22 begins: Insurance won't pay for PET scan unless I have a cancer diagnosis; PET scan is the test that shows the abnormal cell activity indicating cancer is present. Logic here? Not so much. And Training Bra did not, as I explicitly asked her to to, advocate for me to get the insurance company on board with the test.

So I exit the mismanaged nightmare system to return to The Good Doctor, the internist who won't take my insurance but who actually gives a shit about me and my health. TGD sends me to a pulmonologist.

Lung man compares the CAT scan film/disk with the previous smoker's scan. While he does think the gland has to be removed, lymphoma doesn't make it onto his list of concerns.

A few weeks later, I meet the surgeon. He's got the social skills of an 8th grade boy. I'm hoping that his handiwork is on a much higher level. His office, at least, gets the PET scan approved while I am waiting to schedule thymus removal surgery. Like the docs before him, he thinks this thymus thing will be nothing.

I wait seven weeks for the PET scan. December 2, Surgeon removes thymus -- not laparoscopically as advertised, but through a five-inch incision in the middle of my chest. It will be six to eight weeks before the bone knits back together. Meanwhile, I also have small slashes across the edge of one breast: the failed attempt at laparoscopy.

Surgeon thinks thymus will be nothing all the way until the pathology report comes back from the lab December 11. When I go for the post-op checkup, finally someone voices what amplifies the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling I've been experiencing for two-plus months.

Yes, it's lymphoma, Surgeon says, not in the least bit concerned as to what that will mean to me. Oh, and here's an oncologist in the next office. My work is done. Surgeon appears to have no emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. He doesn't even say, I'm sorry.

Nor does he concede in the office that he thought the growth was benign, which is what he told my mom and one of The Three Sisters after finishing my surgery. Post-op, Surgeon doesn't seem the least bit empathic or sympathetic or to have any emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. As my mom would say, "fuck him. Or rather, don't."

Surgeon has no answer for why the water in one of New York's better hospitals is not potable. Nor has he an answer for why the hospital was unable to supply one of my medications and I needed to bring it from home.

Nor does he check to see that the resident who let me go knew how to write a prescription: she wrote for ZERO pills. Were I not astute at proofreading, that would have been an ugly drugstore showdown.

Possibly the worse part of the do-it-yourself hospital experience was that if I hadn't learned to disconnect the monitor that measured the oxygen in my blood, I would have gotten even less sleep than I did. (The monitor, it seems, was not hooked up to the nursing station.)

In Haiti, I grew up brushing my teeth with an inch of bottled water in a glass. In what used to be called the Third World, that is par for the course. To find out that the hospital in upper Manhattan required the same course of action was a surprise. To me, if you can't drink the water, you damn well better have palm trees and a beach.

I return to TGD, diagnosis in hand. Within an hour she has found an oncologist who is well respected as a hematologist and he can see me the next day at 9:20 am. Not my time of day, she knows, but at this point, who cares.

Enter Dr. W., the recommended oncologist I like, in as much as I'm going to like one. I can't bear to go for another opinion; I have had doctors and tests filling my weeks since September.

So: I have non-Hodgkin's large diffuse B cell lymphoma. As cancers go, it is common as dirt, and it is one of the "good" cancers. Sure, like second place in the beauty contest in the yellow Community Chest cards.

What's good is, I'm at stage 2: very curable, with standard chemo protocol. I don't need the specialization of the cancer factory at Sloan Kettering. I can stay with Dr. W. and have my treatments in his office. I don't have to go to a hospital just to get the poisons that will save me "infused" into my body. Infused. One hell of a word choice, one of many in the new lexicon.

I feel like a Vietnamese town during the war: we must destroy the village in order to save it. Didn't make sense when I was 10; doesn't make any more sense now. But there's the metaphor and that is how it applies.

Thus far, I've had round one of chemo. So far, no major nausea or other side effects. However, the toxins have just started to work. I'm told by day 10 or 12, my hair will start to go. That hair I spent two years tending like the back 40.

Sure, it grows back: but still, the idea of lifting my hand to my head and hair just flying through my fingers is an experience I dread. And yes, I bought a wig -- from the store that refers to these items as "she" and "her."

Not having received the memo telling me that English has gendered nouns, I want to say, "IT. IT. IT. It is an object." But wigville is another stop I never anticipated. I am learning a new language every day, one that I hope you, any and all, will never need to learn.

It may help you to know that my mother, after hearing my diagnosis, brought over a box of chicken soup mix for me. She and kitchens are not on good terms, and the last time, probably the only time, she made chicken soup from scratch was the night my father had a fatal heart attack in 1991. Culinary expertise and my mom don't go hand in hand. For us, soup is black comedy, not cure-all.

Discussions in the chemo lounge are fragmented, scary: some tell their entire stories, from diagnosis into X number of rounds of treatment. Exact diagnoses are volunteered; it is rude to ask. Some in the room have no hair. Some may have wigs, though I am not yet expert at distinguishing them.

I know one thing: if you lose (not that misplaced is exactly the proper term here) your hair and get a wig, it must have bangs, because you no longer have a nature hairline. I have not had bangs since I was 6. Right now, I'm just hoping I won't look like a Hasidic woman who has shaved her hair for her husband.

My mom offered to shave her head in solidarity with me, and then to wear a wig. If she cannot go though treatments in my stead, she wants me to know how much she would if she could. I tear up every time I consider the offer, but I have pointed out, Mom, we're not those kind of Jews.

People say, at least you have your sense of humor. I wonder: without it, how would I survive? My illness is drenched in irony, and that is the costume in which I suspect I will navigate the next several months. It is the only one I know. Here's hoping it helps.

Hair story, part 2

2009-12-16T13:23:00.005-05:00

Turns out I need the ponytail after all. My medical odyssey has just begun. I've fired the doc-in-a-box employed by mismanged nightmare, and found some M.D.s who are knowledgeable and care about patients. The prognosis is good, but I am tired. Right now, I'm going to take a nap, and this blog is going on hiatus. Wish me well.

Hair today, donate tomorrow

2009-11-23T17:06:00.007-05:00

After 22 months, and countless brushing, combing, shampooing, conditioning of the hair flowing down my back, I am set to donate a 9-inch ponytail. It's made of my hair, for women who have cancer, and will be sent to Pantene for a program that makes wigs for cancer patients.

The ponytail, as requested, is properly tied, and resting in a Ziplock bag, waiting for me to mail it off. Given that my medical merry-go-round won't stop until after I have surgery next week, I'm waiting for the pathology report before mailing it off.

This way, I won't need it. Call me superstitious, but that's my nature: hedge your bets when you can, especially if irony is an overriding element in the entire event. Donating my hair is as close as I've come to volunteering a little part of me for someone else. Have I ever given blood?

Let's see: until I was 40+, I weighed under 100 pounds, and the minimum weight is 115. By the time I got to that weight, the chemicals in my blood alone would render it useless to anyone who wasn't prone to depression, migraines, anxiety, high cholesterol, and osteopenia. So there's not much call for that.

But the hair: it took on a life of its own as I tended it these past few months. It required lots and lots of maintenance, something I will not miss. Shorter hair is easier -- into the shower and out again, without a lengthy battle with knots and tangles.

This would be my pink ribbon, the real badge I've been wearing to honor my friend Dona. I think she would prefer it to my buying a pink bra for breast cancer month. Dona died at the end of October, 2007, and by January 2008, I had set out on my hair project.

Alice will be uploading photos to Facebook, that spot in the world where most of her friends live now -- before, during and after shots, carefully taken by one of The Three Sisters. That is, after her surgery.

Surgery is set for next week, and two of the three sisters have appointed themselves my health care advocate and brains. They have been to the surgeon with me, asked all the pertinent questions (they know this drill all too well), and will babysit my mom when I am on the table.

At this point, I don't want to know anymore about this surgery except that it will be over a week from now, and I will be in some drugged-up state at this time 7 days from now, and the drugs probably won't include nicotine.

That one, I will miss a lot. It's been my friend for a long time. Back when Dona was alive, we went to dinner in D.C., and I was amazed to find smoking sections in the restaurants, when Mayor Mike had scuttled that possibility in Wonderland. And she didn't care -- her cancer was her own, and that was plenty to contend with.

As for weed, Dona was all for it. Medicinal or not, that was, in part, how she got by. The rest of how she got by, mostly I don't know. What I do know is, I grew my hair in her memory, and soon, it will belong to someone else, someone I don't know.

I think of my donation as a gift more valuable than money -- I don't miss long hair; the ponytail is probably not an appropriate middle-age 'do, not that I have much to do with styling and shaping and applying product to keep hair from moving.

I am happy to retire the big hair clip, the only one that held all my hair in a bun all summer into fall. I am hoping someone will benefit from this tiny part of me, and that wherever Dona is, she will know I was thinking of her.

For Dona Marie Thomas Canales-Higgins

2009-10-31T18:48:00.003-04:00

In memoriam: Dona Marie T. C-H March 2, 1991-October 31,2007

Ten things I know about Dona, who fought and bitched and sued and was ready to strangle the next pink-ribbon wearing woman. Ribbons don't cure cancer, and if you have it, do you really want a month of reminders commercialized everywhere? Dona didn't.

She had a neat one-page summary of all her chemo treatments, with a photograph of herself and all her relevant insurance info and contact names. Somewhere in my files, I have a copy.

In the end, none of it mattered: as of two years ago today, she is no longer with us. But this is what I know, or snippets from her lifespan.

1)she had blue contact lenses, to confuse people who wondered, how can a black woman have blue eyes?

2)she drove a Yugo, in the 1980s, and when she parked it, she put the club on her steering wheel.

3)she could have danced professionally

4)she taught me to dress better -- not to be so boring in the wardrobe department

5)she and I liked to make our college friends think we were lovers, just for the hell of it.

6)she liked her boyfriends to be other than traditionally handsome.

7)she loved her two children, Marcus and Thomas, more than anyone in the world. Thomas remembers her laughter; Marcus, her cough.

8)she and I spent hours at her uncle's house, watching the projection screen TV and frolicking around the pool

9)she bought me my first home pregnancy test, so I didn't have to

10)she was my dear friend, and I miss her.

Dream a little dream of me...

2009-10-24T15:50:00.006-04:00

Over at Dementia Nights, one of my high school friends has been chronicling the experience of his father's Alzheimer's disease. Today, he is transporting his father to a nursing home. It is the hardest thing Alan, an only child, has ever had to face: being the father to his father.

I am dreading the day that I will live that experience first-hand: that day when I will be that parent to my own mother. Regardless of my having a sibling, chances are good I will be called upon the mother to my mother, and that my brother won't.

In our society, when baby boomers have aging parents who need care, unless one is an only son, it is still the daughters who do the heavy lifting. Or perhaps it is the child deemed "the responsible one" vs. "the fuck up" at an early age. We do live up to and down to parental expectations, alas.

My brother may have the best intentions in the world, but when it comes down to who's in charge of mom, that is going to be me. With bells on. Already have power of attorney. Ditto her health care proxy.

Given that both of my mom's parents went gaga, I have to think the genetic odds are unfortunately good that my mom will end up the same way. The Alzheimer's diagnosis wasn't on the radar when Grandpa Abe lost his marbles. Thirty years ago, he was just plain senile.

I have a vague inkling of what Alan is going through -- but from the distance of packing up and transporting my maternal grandmother. I don't think she ever knew what hit her during the senility send-off we gave her.

(Cue up the Mamas and the Papas, "dream a little dream of me," which went through my head while packing up my grandmother's things in 1989 and which seems to be my brain's link to that situation. Don't ask for a logical explanation for that.)

The day we parked my grandmother at what is generically the Jewish Home for the Aged, we discovered Little Haiti, the part of Miami where Granny Lee lived out her last days -- years of them. We know Haiti, the island, intimately.

We also figured that Little Haiti was not exactly in an upscale part of town. Then again, in the seven or more years Granny Lee lived at the Jewish Home, it's hard to say if she ever left the premises for more than some minor grocery shopping -- or dinner, with my brother and me.

She was happy to go to Denny's -- probably would have gone to Taco Bell, if that had been our decision. Over dinner, she informed us that there was too much sex on TV and in the magazines. That was, we think, the only time she ever uttered the word "sex," although she had, when I was a child, made reference to Grandpa Abe "getting amorous."

Grandpa Abe went gaga first. The last time we had dinner as a family, he didn't recognize my mom, his only child. He said, "I used to take my daughter fishing." I doubt he was talking to the waiter. My mom ran into the bathroom and I followed her: did that mark the beginning of my care-taking career?

Or had I always been the care-taker-in-training? I don't know, and it is way too late in the day to figure out how I got that gig. I just know I have my hat and my checklist when, 20 years from now, my mom's inability to provide nouns in her speech will render her incomprehensible. I am not looking forward to it.

Has it been five years? Compare...

2009-10-14T13:53:00.011-04:00

October 14, 2004

My blog and welcome to it

Why through a looking glass? Most people see the place I call home, the place I was born, the city where my great, great, great grandmother is buried, as one unlike any other. Many can't understand why I stay. I can't see that there is anywhere else to go.

Perhaps we do look at life differently here, or I do, which explains the looking glass: life mirrored, slightly askew. It's not how you might assume from TV, whether "reality based," i.e., news, or fictitious.

Today? It's the second anniversary of my having quit smoking, and of one of my closest college friends, then age 41, e-mailing to announce she had stage 4 breast cancer. It's the day after my mom's birthday; a week after my own.

Twenty-two years since I have moved to this block, twenty-two years with the same phone number, in the so-called real world, where my mind is prone to wander, and my synapses misfire with some consistency.

It is a strange world, when life's most intimate details are proclaimed in cyberspace -- but since I gave up cigarettes (without becoming an irritating "reformed smoker"), I need a hobby. More precisely, a place to talk to myself, and, I hope, to you, whomever you may be.

It is a challenge, to understand why smoking indoors has been outlawed here, when the average person who stands on the street will breathe in more carbon monoxide in 20 minutes than I would exhale in 200.

I get it -- that I am smaller than the average car, much less bus or truck, so it's easier to try to make me conform to a new social norm than to force the average driver to make an effort. (Car does beat pedestrian; bus beats car, and so on in the run-me-over sweepstakes.)

One caveat: despite or because of all the techno-changes since my brain was young enough to absorb them without forgetting what to eat for dinner, I remain technologically challenged. It wasn't my intention, but there's just TMI out there.

I realize I'm adding more, but no one ever said irony wasn't my strong suit -- it's one I wear well, one that escapes many people in many places, but its absence would be stranger here, particularly at this time in our political landscape, to put it politely.

October 14, 2009

Today? Life is different: I'm smoking again, despite or to spite local ordinances; my friend with breast cancer died on Halloween two years ago; and now the count is up to 27 years on the same block in Wonderland, with my synapses misfiring completely inconsistently.

The world has mostly gotten stranger. For example, we've endured The Big Awful, when the economy cratered, and we all said, "disposable income? It was nice knowing you." Welcome to Brave New World. And, "good-bye, privacy. Hello, Facebook."

On the other hand, five years ago, when I traveled, I pretended to be Canadian, and now I don't have to explain that I didn't vote for the idiot who has belatedly returned to his ranch with My Little Pony.

Back then I wasn't preparing to do battle with Cambridge health plans, my so-called insurance. Now, not only do I need surgery to remove a gland most associated with pubescent growth, I also need a D&C for post-menopausal bleeding (TMI? You bet. But I am still talking to myself here, and so it goes.)

It seems it is better to go under general anesthesia once than twice, and it only gets more complicated from there. One doctor -- the gland guy -- has privileges at hospital A; my other doctor, one of 25 years standing, has privileges at hospital B, 90 blocks south and right around the corner from my apartment.

Chances of their meeting in pre-op? Zero.

Chances of my finding two surgeons from two different hospital departments at the same institution who both take my crappy insurance AND want to tag-team each other in the OR? I don't think MasterCard makes a commercial for this one.

I may have stumbled upon an occasion for which even the most comprehensive electronic Hallmark equivalent doesn't make a greeting card. If anyone did, it would say,

"Sorry you need two surgeries to make sure you don't have cancer."

Inside it would read,

"But congratulations on growing your hair for the past 22 months so now it's long enough to donate to those who do."

Irony: it's not just a concept -- it's a way of life.

Precertify this!

2009-09-26T12:38:00.008-04:00

To: my so-called health plan

From: Alice

It has come to my attention that the word "insurance" does not appear anywhere near the word "health" anywhere in the opening pages of your 200-page book, the one you would prefer I not request as hard copy. "Curing the sick" is not even on your priority list.

Well, I read the damn thing, and the sum total is, if I am told I need a test more serious than blood, piss, a pap smear or a chest X-ray, my "health care provider" can neatly ignore what the radiologists, who specialize in reading films, have to say.

The buck did not stop at the doc-in-a-box office: she sent it flying off to the hands of the money-grubbers, those anonymous people whom I cannot telephone to argue for myself. My health is in their hands, whomever they may be, the "precertifiers."

If any of them has an M.D., I'm betting s/he works for the "insurance" company because no one would have him/her as a clinician or researcher. The guy who graduated last in his med school class, the one who is called M.D. nonetheless? That would be, should Cambridge (my nom de blog for the "health plan") actually employ someone with any medical training, the one who turns down my test.

This would be the idiot at the other end of the 800 line, paid to refuse to agree with the medical opinions offered by my first-line "health care providers." This leaves me either with large uncovered medical bills from the better doctors in this town, or it leave me being screwed, and possibly ill.

Notice the term "health care provider." Sounds like anyone from the clerk at the big-box drugstore chain to a kind stranger offering a Kleenex. Does not have that authoritative ring that an M.D. once implied. Apparently the health care (insurance?) provider has the last call.

Primary care means, I have discovered, if you can't diagnose based on years of experience, you will cover your ass by calling for expensive scary tests, then refuse to follow the advice of the radiologist, and blame it on my insurance. If you are a doctor employed by one of the mismanaged nightmare plans, you are not going to be my advocate.

An M.D. with experience and balls, however metaphorical, might fight for me to have what is deemed the next logical step in the flow chart per her outsourcing. But that's not how my health care plan works, and I'm betting yours is no better than mine.

Cambridge has decided it's not in the patient's (that would be me) best interest to follow through, on the grounds the next test is too expensive to bless. I wonder how the company will feel if, ultimately, I do get the damn test and it shows me lighting up like a Christmas tree. Will Cambridge then decide I don't need an oncologist?

That would be me, the patient, self-payer of $10,000 a year and rising for my health care. New discovery in the road to middle age: a "health care provider" is fine for, say, the chicken pox or the flu. If, however, you go in with a smoker's cough, you will find the PCP has never met a smoker in her practice.

Never heard of Nicotrol, the nicotine inhaler used to get smokers to stop and too scared to write the script on her own. Ever hear of a doctor NOT jump all over the smoker to help her stop? That's my "primary care provider." I should see a pulmonologist to confirm the need for medicinal nicotine.

Never mind that I control my own nicotine intake, and it's certainly got a lot more nasty chemicals in it than the prescription kind. Or that my lungs came out clear on the CAT scan. Where did the PCP get her M.D.? I'm afraid to ask. Her decision-making abilities, not to put too kind a description on them, suck.

When I asked her to act as my advocate, the go-between between Cambridge, which doesn't want to cover me when I may be sick, and her own medical opinion, she responded with a vote of no-confidence on pushing for what I need. I'm not sure she has her own opinions; her voice is never long on confidence.

Apparently it is my job to remind the doc that if she wants me to have a test, she may need to push for it with the precertification department. Not going to happen. Yea, that guy who was last in his class certainly knows more than someone who has seen the actual patient. Ha.

I doubt this doc-in-a-box would even prescribe an antibiotic for what could just as easily be bronchitis. And I don't need any degrees to know what bronchitis feels like.

But we are way beyond the chest X-ray. Went for the (preapproved) CAT scan, and independent radiologists offered up the PET scan as the next step in the testing process. Then Cambridge steps in, and says, not enough evidence.

Hmmm: I've seen the radiologist's report, and it is pretty damn clear what is supposed to follow.

Not from Cambridge, it's not. Who the hell makes the medical call of "sorry, too expensive. Wait until you feel like you're dying, and then we'll, say, send you to hospice"?

Who need a hospital when you can go straight from your own bed to the one that says, here's the last place you'll be on this earth? No, let's keep the costs down, and hope that one day, one of your Cambridge employees, needs this test. Then she will know how it feels, to be on the other end of test? You want a $5,200 test? Oh, no -- no precertification forthcoming. Not in the cards.

When the "health care" provider starts the bidding at four no-trump, the game is over before it begins. Cambridge has all the cards, and it specializes, it seems, in dealing its customers/consumers/suckers the hand without even one heart in it.

Our system is broken, clearly, but I don't have much faith in so-called reform, despite being a yellow-dog Democrat. Even with "insurance," we already have rationed health care, and I can't imagine the next round will cover my health needs any better than the crappy system in which I am enmeshed.

One of my closest friend's mother was diagnosed with lymphoma last week. This week, she's already gone for round one of chemo. She is 80, and recently she said, "old age is not for the faint-hearted." Her daughter, a veteran of the cancer wars, is a great advocate for her.

For the rest of us, however, her mom would say, 'It's a great life if you don't weaken."

The ex-wives club

2009-09-04T12:43:00.006-04:00

Since the papers have been signed, I count four ex-sisters-in-law, only one of whom I care about. Ex #4, A., is the mother of my niece. Despite the not-so-surprising end of the marriage, I want to stay on good terms with her. I need the connection.

A. has physical custody of my one and only niece, Kay, who is my link to the next generation. How to make nice with A. without disturbing my brother? Friends say, send Kay postcards (not that a 2 1/2 year old can read), presents, and so forth -- just to keep my name in the air in her mother's household.

When Kay gets a little bit older, I'll start sending family photos, with lengthy captions explaining who's who. I'll write her stories about my dad, the grandfather she will never have met. I'll write stories about my brother, about my mom. I will be the witness, Kay's link to a family she otherwise may know only when we die and she inherits.

In the meanwhile, I have befriended A. on facebook. We have the occasional chat -- about her school, work, and my niece. FB is good for keeping in touch from a comfortable distance. When I'm typing instead of talking, I am more deliberate in what I say.

In some ways, that cuts down on the misinterpretation factor, but at the same time, so much is left out: the body language, the facial expressions, any visual clues. This is always the problem with e-communications; here, it's exacerbated by the speed with which a typed chat occurs.

I keep clear of any mention of my brother. Today, however, I'm wondering how to interpret A.'s status. A. "is happy that things are looking up. for a change:)." Dare I ask why? I think not. I'm curious, but at some point I have to be an observer.

Occasionally I wonder: what would happen if all the ex-wives got together? Each one took my brother's last name. It might be confusing: "Mrs. Uptown, this is Mrs. Uptown, this is Mrs. Uptown, this is Mrs. Uptown."

Did they revert to their previous surnames? From Social Security to the DMV, Department of State (ex # 1 was the sole passport holder), the IRS, and whatever other government institutions in the need-to-know loop, that's a lot of bureaucracy to contend with. Each one said, "I do," then after fewer than three years (each) said, "I don't."

Hard to know why any of my brother's marriages ended: we are not a family to ask for details best left unspoken. All I know is, each time he says, "I should never have married her." That's four "hers" now, and we hope he won't take the plunge again.

Honestly? I want to take all of his divorce papers and hide them in New York, so the next time he has the urge to merge, he has to get on a plane to fetch the papers. At least it would buy some time. He may be over the marriage thing, finally, though his track record suggests otherwise.

After wife #2 didn't pan out, I stopped getting invested in my brother's partners. I assumed he would always have one, but that she was subject to change. No point in my even knowing the maiden names of the women in the ex-wives club. I do have some recollections, however, not just of their names:

Ex #1 was Smith (sic) ; ex #2, not a clue; ex #3 was Cluck or Gluck or something to that effect, courtesy of her first husband; ex # 4, Kent. Looks like surnames of one syllable have been popular. And what would Emily Post say? Not sure she covers that territory.

A quarter of a century ago, Miss Manners did: "the truly correct style is to combine Mrs. with your maiden and [married] last name...but few people use it nowadays." By that rule, ex # 1 would be Mrs. Smith Uptown. However ex # 1, like her successors, was not the type to have heard of Emily Post or Miss Manners.

Ex #1 was, to put it mildly, a bitch on wheels. (Another epithet comes to mind, one rhyming with "bunt.") Of the group, she was the most educated -- and the one who lied on her financial aid application for law school, saying she was single to get a scholarship.

If she hadn't known so many family secrets, I would have made sure she got had gotten hit by payback. But I couldn't. What I know is, payback's a bitch unto itself. Perhaps karma will take, or have taken, care of her. My brother left her on Christmas day, the best present he ever gave me.

She made out like the proverbial bandit: after she and brother were through, my brother, who should have had a prenup, had no nup left to pre. Her list of parting gifts was extraordinary: a house, a car, law school tuition, a set of sterling silver my brother had inherited, and a lot more that I can't remember, seeing that the marriage ended in 1991.

Her father was an Episcopal priest. At the wedding, someone dug up a rabbi to hold up our family's end of the heritage. I was pressed into service as a bridesmaid. (I wanted to set fire to the acetate dress, but refrained.)

My father, who was the best man, forgot his cuff links and had to sew buttons onto his shirt. We were late to the ceremony, and you don't need Freud to figure out why.

That was brother's only church (did I ever say we were religious Jews?) wedding; the rest were City Hall specials that sounded about as exciting as renewing a driver's license.

Wife #2? That was more of a drive-by than an actual marriage. They pledged their troth (tell me, what is troth?) after eight weeks together, and divorced two years later. She was the daughter of Jehovah's Witnesses and had even been christened or baptized or what have you herself.

When I heard about her religious background, I hoped no offspring were forthcoming -- because I didn't want to have nieces or nephews raised as little door-knockers offering up copies of the Watchtower.

#2 took Oprah as gospel, which I didn't realize when started pondering aloud about the power of the media and how warped it could get. Whoops. Put my brother between a rock and a hard place. I remember telling him I would get on the next plane out of town if it would keep the peace.

Prior to marriage #3, my brother's mother-in-law to be took me aside and asked about my brother's "intentions." Excuse me? Intentions? Of a 35-year-old man with two ex-es already to the good?

Wife #3 came with two children, though motherhood was not her forte. The elder daughter turned into a teenage terrorist who proved incorrigible, not that her mother helped. Elder daughter got locked up in juvie jail, and upon her release, had to have "piss tests" whenever the authorities wanted. This put a crimp in wife #3's style, or so she bitched to me.

If we had national health insurance, I suspect wife #3 would not have gained her position. Sure, my brother liked to get married, but this time, it seems, his employee benefits were a major attraction.

The third segued into the fourth, who was half my brother's age. Now he says he married her to give his child a father. Okay. Wife #4 hadn't had a legal father of her own, that I knew of. And that marriage did produce my one-and-only niece, whom I adore. Still, was the paperwork necessary? Couldn't he just have put his name on the birth certificate?

For various reasons, including the fact that gay marriage isn't legally recognized by the IRS, I have never been formally married. What amazes me is, my brother and I grew up in the same household, saw the movie of our parents' lives unfold together.

Perhaps one of us saw the director's cut and the other saw the dailies. In any case, marriage never struck me as a good deal, though it struck my brother as the best thing since, yea, sliced bread. Our adult lives have unfolded in such different directions that I don't even feel I can ask, why marry? Or maybe I don't want to know the answer.

What I do know is, I have a niece, and I want her to know me as more than Aunt Alice swooping in from out of town for a few days a year. I don't know how I'll achieve that, but I'm hoping my current strategy will be the right one.

Out of work in America?

2009-08-07T12:08:00.004-04:00

Statistics aren't what they seem: for example, Alice has no employer save herself. For a long time, she had a tidy little business as a financial planner. The hours were minimal; neither early rising nor heavy lifting were involved; smoking in the office was a matter of desire, not law; all her colleagues were virtual. It was a good life.

Then came The Big Awful, with the economy blown to smithereens, and financial planning clients in increasingly short supply, and Alice's interest in the subject, at least as a career, waning considerably. Once again comes the question: what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

See, Alice and some of her friends, those who play psychopharm roulette along with her, never expected to age beyond, say, 30 or 35. However we have, which leaves us with far more time in our lives than we had anticipated. What to do, what to do? The answers are not coming fast and furious.

Alice would like to be an unemployment statistic, but she has failed to consider one critical connection: first, Alice would have to be working, doing the 9 to 5 and receiving a weekly paycheck. You can't collect unemployment without having put in 20 weeks working for someone else.

Last time Alice was eligible for unemployment was 1990, after her last staff magazine gig collapsed. Since then, as a so-called sole proprietor, she hasn't paid a dime into NYS's unemployment coffers. Hence, she is not eligible to receive, though she is working just as little as those who are collecting.

In truth, Alice's vocational calling is sleep, a minimum of 10 hours a night, every night. Without slumber, she is not-ready-for-prime-time functioning. It's been close to 20 years since Alice commuted to an office, and all she really knows about workplaces is that overhead fluorescent lighting, sealed windows, and recirculating air would be major contributors to an increase in migraine headaches.

Thus, Alice would prefer the office come to her, not that she go to an office any more substantial than the one that doubles as her dining room. Comfort first is her rallying cry. Alas, to answer FB's eternal what's-on-your-mind question, by saying will work for food, health benefits, and a really nifty retirement plan does not, in this po-mo world, constitute an active job search.

Is it time for another career? Alice exited magazine editing shortly before the demise of the printed page; she is looking to exit careers that require her to dress in heels, a good dress, a blazer and pearls in order to have her body language say, trust me. I am a good planner; it's just that our Brave New World requires too many economic projections that may well not hold.

So, now what? Alice's skill sets are mostly 20th century. She is a creative thinker whose techno-knowledge acquisition seems to be on overload. It is all she can do to burp out 10 words in a single sentence to communicate on FB, where Alice has been summering. (She is betting FB will kill whatever remaining productivity U.S. workers have pretended to retain.)

What Alice would like to do, thankyouverymuch, is retire. More specifically, she would be just as happy not to work another day in her life if not for the financial fallout. Give her a free day, and she will fill it, or not, depending on her mood.

Particularly difficult is the segue between vacation proper and back-to-some-facsimile-of-work.

A week away with a friend's family on the north shore of Massachusetts makes Alice realize how much better off we were without cell phones, computers, PDAs and the like. We could actually get away, and, unless we are filled with an unhealthy sense of self-importance -- narcissism run wild -- we need some time untethered.

Ma Bell used to say "reach out and touch someone." She meant, pick up the telephone. Alice is all in favor of the telephone (never text Alice; while she can receive messages, she can't send them and doesn't want to learn how. Texting strikes Alice as the best way to ruin her thumb joints, already fussy, forever. Not going to happen.)

She also likes to receive letters via snail mail -- just something personal from time to time. A postcard or two would be nice. Even a personal email -- coming back from vacation, Alice was greeted with 250+ emails, most of which are deletable without thinking.

Yesterday's cyber headlines are like yesterday's newspapers of old: we used to say that yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping. Difference is, now the fish wrapping is words on a screen.

And stopping the email flood would mean trying to remember what is important to bring back into the inbox. This in itself would be more work than Alice deems necessary. She gets emails she never meant to sign up for, and can't figure out how to disengage.

If you want to go ask Alice, please keep the correspondence lively. If you have a job for Alice, please send particulars. Meanwhile, in Alice's mind, she is on vacation until after Labor Day. Not only does she want no heavy lifting in a job, she doesn't want her synapses to struggle either.

Superman is dead, said his fiancee

2009-07-16T22:24:00.008-04:00

It's been just over 50 years, and the crew obsessed with George Reeves still hasn't gotten that memo. From time to time, the memo comes to the forefront of my mind, although my curiosity is from a different angle than the fanatics.

They are certain that Lenore, who was Superman's fiancee and my father's sole first cousin, killed him. I've always been more curious about the use of the term "fiancee."

When the Web was new, one fanatic kindly snail-mailed me a copy of all the newspaper and video clippings she had collected about that one day in June 1959. Had she known my angle, I doubt she would have been quite so forthcoming, since she seemed in basic agreement with the keeper of the Superman flame, the chief fanatic who believes Lenore is good for his murder.

Lenore is my family's blackest sheep, the one who didn't attend her father's funeral. (There were many whispers the day we buried my great-uncle.) Why do I care? I have a tiny family, and I look for whatever stories I can find.

If anyone knows what happened, it would have been Lenore. Twenty years ago, several tabloid TV shows filmed her slurring most of her words, but crystal clear in one sentence: Superman is dead, dead, dead.

Lenore had a long and checkered history, a woman whose means were as mysterious as Truman Capote's Holly Golightly. She was known as a member of Cafe Society and for being the only woman ever thrown out of the Stork Club. Earlier in her life, she was known as "the Jewish Brenda Frasier." Frasier was famed as a debutante, at a time when debutantes made the news.

Jews, however, don't come out (as debs), and whether Lenore would have had the wherewithal for such formalities is another question no one in my family has answered. Still, in the 1990s, I knew people who knew of cousin Lenore from fame acquired 50 years earlier. They say she was beautiful.

(I've seen the photographs from Life and other magazines. Yes, she was. Should I want a family photo of my cousin, I would have to buy it from an archive. We don't have any.)

The one woman in my family known to have graduated from sarcasm to fisticuffs, Lenore does hold the record as most alcoholic member of my family, although the contest is still open, unless all of my generation has thrown the towel back on the bar.

Since my father's demise, I am the only one who knows where her body is buried. Her grave has no marker, and probably never will. While our family history is littered with bits and pieces of info about her, she rarely comes into comes into conversational play. Cousin Lenore? Maybe 30 seconds of air time every few years. No one else wonders about her.

My aunt once said her cousin, Lenore, was spoiled. I think my aunt was jealous that while she was turning in algebra homework, her one and only cousin was photographed at "Life goes to a party," in a 1940s issue of the magazine I happen to own.

For Superman's fiancee's full story, you would have to search New York Post archives from the late 1930s onward, or hope that Walter Winchell's radio broadcasts had been saved and transcribed. The NYPD probably has her in their arrest archives. Drunk and disorderly? My vote is yes.

Other newspapers probably covered other stories: when Lenore was 17, she was named co-respondent in a divorce case, at a time when such a thing mattered. Ask a Vanderbilt about the black sheep in their family: she married him.

In later years, every public hospital in Manhattan had her as a patient. Wikepedia claims she died of alcoholic dementia. I don't know where that factoid came from, just that it's not quite accurate. But finally tabloid TV producers are too young to consider retelling this particular celluloid hero story again. They don't remember George Reeve's Superman, even in reruns.

Personally? I suspect Lenore would have been too drunk to aim a gun. This theory has not been well received, but no matter how many books people write, or movies made (see Hollywoodland), no one will ever know what transpired that night

Then again, the L.A. coroner was on the job investigating the entire scene, and I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume the coroner in 1959 was on the take in old-time Hollywood, or that his notes were burned long ago, if indeed he wrote anything down.

Today something triggered my curiosity about this family mystery, though I can't say what. I remain fascinated by how far this woman strayed from ordinary family life at a time when TV dictated that Leave it to Beaver, the Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best were paragons of normalcy.

And I wonder: did anyone ever live the way those long-ago black-and-white characters portrayed middle-class life? I am guessing, not a chance.

White Noise

2009-06-26T00:52:00.015-04:00

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

2009-06-05T20:29:00.005-04:00

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

2009-05-11T23:41:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-05-08T07:18:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-20T18:13:00.005-04:00

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

2009-04-11T14:27:00.007-04:00

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

2009-03-13T17:21:00.007-04:00

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

2009-02-21T19:02:00.008-05:00

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

2009-02-15T16:36:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-07T19:33:00.005-05:00

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

Alice va a Buenos Aires para aprender español

2009-01-29T16:54:00.005-05:00

So far, that's about all of Alice's Spanish, but she's off to another hemisphere to wait out the freezes of February, keep her mind occupied and her skin warm, and reactivate her hiatus from responsibility.

January has been another month of travel and health crises: last month Brother had spinal cord surgery; this month, The Best Friend, aka Clover's Companion. Brother recovered quickly enough to return to Sleepy Southern State, where Alice went to celebrate her niece's second birthday.

However, back in Wonderland, Alice returned to find TBF still in serious condition, two weeks after her six hours under the knife. Alice trusts the visiting nurse, but the friend chosen to babysit TBF? Not so much.

Said babysitter's technological incompetence exceeds Alice's: yesterday Alice gave a magic show, what with turning on the cell phone and pushing the button to allow the thermometer to operate. Alice and TBF go back a long way, close to three decades on. If Alice were running the show, TBF would have a practical nurse from the time TBF's husband-the-doctor -- an actual practicing M.D.-- leaves the house until he returns.

When it comes to health care, Alice wants the pros. The cost is pretty much irrelevant. TBF is receiving all her nutrition from a feeding tube in her stomach. Fuck the friend/babysitter: TBF needs someone with real training. TBF is also attached to an antibiotic infusion, whose computer speeds the meds into her veins every four hours.

In another time, no M.D. would have dared consider her a home-care possibility. These days, it's let's cut, sew, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. If you can fog a mirror, apparently, you no longer qualify for a hospital bed, even if you have a staph infection that needs 24/7 antibiotics and you can't even swallow.

This is scary stuff: if Alice had her way, the amateur would have long since been dismissed, but she has no standing here, just her hopes and her prayers that husband-the-doctor (heretofore known as HTmD) takes damn good care of TBF, who is Alice's nearest and dearest.

Alice is equally powerless at home or 4000 miles away, and since TBF's babysitter is acting as guard dog, and HTmD is short on details, she has opted to leave town.

She is running for her life and praying for the life of TBF.

We need(ed) a little Christmas...

2008-12-26T22:29:00.004-05:00

and we had one, the first one I've had in Wonderland since the great drunken expletive-on-tablecloth debacle several years back.

I missed Maine, but at The Girls' party Xmas eve, when I saw the box of ornaments, I froze for an instant. I thought, oh my God, we're going to have to put up all of them, for that is how we do things in Familyland North, one tradition I'm not enamored of.

But no. The Girls didn't care if the tree got decorated, or if they did it the next day. Their party was at their late mother Cicely's house, and, even though she is in a box on a bookshelf, it was a happy time. We reminisced; we looked at 20 year old pictures of ourselves; we danced. A good time was had by all.

This was the first time in 20+ years that my mom, my brother, and I celebrated together. The last time I can remember, my dad was still alive. Seems like many lifetimes ago.

It didn't start out auspiciously: Brother was in town to have spinal surgery, and he is staying with The Mother until his doctor gives him a thumbs-up to go home. While Brother may live happily in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, he was not about to let any M.D. there get close to him with a scalpel.

Thankyou, no, it was time for The Mother to pull strings and get him in to the best doctor in the country, one who operates at the hospital where she volunteers. In my family, when it comes to the Big Stuff, we don't fuck around.

Admittedly the month has had its strains: The longest year of my life was the December I spent in New York, Brother says. Well, a month of immediate family togetherness, after 30+ years of our not sharing much, has had Alice bolting for her Xanax, and both Brother and The Mother drinking a tad more than their share.

But Christmas -- come hell or high water, I decided we were going to have a genuinely festive day. We did. I made some rules about presents: we were to spend $50, max, even if we wrapped up toothpaste and shampoo to stick under the tree. So long as we had gifts to unwrap, it didn't much matter what they were.

So we got creative: we swiped things from one another's closets. The Mother got her monkey sandals back from Brother; he got a pair of clean socks she had just washed, along with some unmentionables.

Brother and I did the Costco run and wrapped up 36 roles of toilet paper for The Mother. The tag read, to F-----. from: Mr. Whipple's friends. (That would, apparently, be the late Mr. Whipple, as those Charmin commercials were from another century, and he is long since gone. Who knew?)

Brother gave me a photo of Kay, my niece, that looked as if she were the picture that had come with the frame. Kay is Goldilocks come to life. If times weren't so tight, Kay and her mom, my sister-in-law, would have been to Wonderland for the holidays. Alas, not this season.

The Mother gave me a sweater I loved, but had forgotten I'd given to her. She re-gifted me a decorative collection of boxes of tea, and the chocolate-peppermint candy Brother had given her and she hadn't liked.

My bonus gift? A vial of pills marked, "Alice. MEDS from Mom."

Then dinner. My menu, executed mostly by The Brother. He is, after all, the one in the restaurant business. He cooks without thinking, never consults a book. Filet mignon, roast potatoes, timed just right. My applies-heat-to-food contribution? The asparagus with hollandaise, a sauce I make from scratch, just the way my father taught me. No restaurant can make it better.

For dessert, a chocolate souffle. Again, my specialty, but one I asked Brother to prepare, as I'd missed a blue pill and temporarily gone haywire. After dinner? Irish coffee. (This was the one night I encouraged The Mother to drink. Dewars, of course, then red wine, then the Jamisons. Will she remember the evening? Do I care?)

So: we did little to enhance the economy, but we entertained ourselves big time. Maybe that's what the holiday should be about.

Alice's Argeninian adventures

2008-12-15T08:37:00.005-05:00

A day in BA:

Alice el turista in full force remains an observer of the strange, the silly, and the bizarre. For example, on her city tour, she is astounded that one of the main stops is the soccer stadium.

She had no idea soccer was an Argentine religion, could not imagine a city tour of, say, Wonderland, that put Yankee Stadium so high on the priority list. Alice roots for no team, not in any sport.

Everywhere the tourists come in couples: Alice meets the 50 somethings from Chicago, who think the digital camera in the running for the sliced-bread contest. So easy, they say. So cheap, for thousands of exposures.

So little thought, Alice suggests. So little artistry. Alice prefers to compose one spectacular shot rather than run through a dozen at a clip, attempting to capture the image at random.

The 20 somethings from Seattle are lovers of technology and sport. Alice considers them The Youth, and gets Youth to change her camera batteries, for she is certain Youth has a better handle on all things technological than does Alice. Youth, after all, was born after Alice got her first computer.

Chicago and Seattle don't have as many questions as Alice does: she wants a constant narrative: where are they? what's the historical significance around here? what do the Portenos, as the people of BA are known, think of the multimillion-dollar flower statue whose center follows the sun?

But Alice's Spanish is limited, in part due to a mental block about the language, which she first heard one summer in Cambridge, spoken incessantly by teenage offspring of the Nicaraguan elite, who had been sent to Harvard to learn English. Ha.

They went for a two-month party, highlighted by the celebration the day Somoza was overthrown. None even tried to hablas ingleses.

Then, too, Wonderland is awash in bilingual signs and companies with phone machines that, Alice gathers, ask you to press 2 if you want to conduct your business in Spanish.

Alice thinks it all very fine and well to have a bilingual city, but she draws the line at her local drugstore clerk who does not know the English word for "film."

Yet in Buenos Aires, Alice wishes she did not choke on the language, confusing it with every other romance language she has known. She could use a few sentences to question the tour guide.

On to the Plaza de Mayo, site of Evita's famed plea, and the Casa Rosada, Argentina's answer to the White House. BA is a cross between Washington, D.C., with all its government buildings freshly scoured with her tax dollars, and Wonderland, where government is an afterthought.

The original house of government, the Cabildo, dates from 1765, and is open only as a museum. Outside, it wears graffiti tags and shady teenagers hanging out. A father and daughter who appear homeless sit on the building steps to eat their shared lunch.

This in itself reminds Alice that while she is a tourist, BA is a real city, just like Wonderland, with a huge range of comfort levels.

Caminito is a postcard, an open-air museum with street-dancing tango performers, a locale originally settled by Italian immigrants and now home to tourists from all nations. It is not, as Alice was told, just one street.

It is a warren of pedestrian walks, with colorful buildings that blur in Alice's mind, as well as confuse Alice's sense of direction. There, she nearly misses the bus, for the tour guide fails to live up to her job description. Every other guide Alice meets is perfect.

She is most fond of George, her go-to guy, the man who tells her that if she has the slightest need or curiosity, all she has to do is call. Alice would like a go-to guy in Wonderland, to steer her past all the messy bits, the times when Alice would prefer not to lead the way, not to navigate the crowds herself.

Had his timing been better, he would have given Alice a tour of Recoleta cemetery, where Alice ventures on her own and pays her respects to Eva Peron, one of the many famous and honored at the exclusive plot of mausoleums, where to this day, funerals are held. It is odd, the juxtaposition of the tourist and the mourner.

At the gaucho ranch

The next day, another double-take. Alice has gone to the estanzia with a group of Belgians and a mother and daughter from Columbia. They share the day with a huge group of men celebrating 50 years of their company's manufacturing success.

What does the company make? Toilets. Alice has never given any thought to where the porcelain gods originate, much less where its creators celebrate.

The Columbian daughter has taken this trip to Argentina in lieu of a 15th birthday celebration, akin to Alice's Sweet Sixteen. Are Sweet 16s still part of the teenage lexicon for girls of a certain class? Alice has no idea.

She thinks the trip a much better idea. Two weeks of seeing the world vs. four hours of a party: would Alice have made that decision? Who can remember 16?

At the gaucho-style barbecue, Alice et. al. receive a standard meal for a cowboy: four courses of meat, with an occasional shredded carrot for variety. Had Alice known what a huge repast was planned, she would have paced herself better.

Then there is the floor show, where songs of every nation come alive. There is nothing quite like hearing Hava Nagila on a tourist-ed up horse ranch outside of BA. For a moment, Alice thinks she is at a Bar Mitzvah.

Solo explorations

Alice finds life to be one image contrasted against another, with disconnects abounding, and entertainment found in the oddest of places. At the tango show, Alice discovers the ladies' room has no tampon dispenser, but condoms, or preservativo, have a shiny white dispenser.

The tango dancers are lithe and flexible; the women ballerina-thin and just as agile. Alice takes a tango lesson, and feels exceedingly clumsy. The dancers tell a story that Alice cannot translate, but embraces just the same.

In Palermo, the next evening at a restaurant, Alice spots the preservativo dispenser again. This time, it is paired with a toothbrush dispenser. Obviously, these items are what every Porteno needs in a hurry.

Portenos, like Parisians, are also fond are what are marketed as American brands. Many years ago in France, Alice grew accustomed to seeing sweatshirts from non-existent U.S. universities.

On Avenida Alvear, BA's most elegant shopping street, akin to Wonderland's Madison Avenue, Alice comes across a clothing store called "SoHo New York Est. 1958." She is certain that the brand's creator has no idea that what has become SoHo, was, in the 1950s, a manufacturing district, chic in no one's eyes.

What sums up Alice's experiences best is the BA duty-free shop: She cannot figure out how one fits a 42-inch flat-screen LCD TV under the seat, but it is for sale nonetheless.

Then she comes upon shots of Chivas, dispensed for the tasting, with no one minding the open bottle. Try that in the U.S. Since the whiskey is there, Alice has to have a couple of shots. What better way to fly?

Alice becomes a "godthing"

2008-12-14T15:43:00.010-05:00

Iguassu Falls (on the Argentine/Brazilian border) is the world's widest waterfall -- more than 270 km or 1/4 mile across, in contrast to Niagara, which has the most volume, and Victoria (Zimbabwe), which stakes its reputation on some other superlative.

It is amazing. Water, water everywhere, tumbling down steep rock cliffs.

Alice goes first to Brazil, a four-hour sojourn for which she has spent at least twice that time in New York getting her spite visa (the U.S. has a cover charge, so Brazil thinks it only fair to have one in return), where the falls are distant and panoramic. Then onto Argentina, where Ricardo, the tour guide, keeps a special eye on Alice, the only solo woman traveler.

A couple from San Francisco, Shelly and Jack, adopt Alice for the day. They are accustomed to adopting friends, usually only children who have become only adults, something Alice frequently feels despite the brother in Alabama. Originally from the East Coast, we share a sensibility.

Their adoptees are not their godchildren; they are their godthings, a title Alice wears for the day with love and pride.

Ricardo calls Alice's attention to several different views, calls to Alice and Alice alone. By the time he points out the bathroom, Shelly says, "oh, do I get to go too? Or is the bathroom just for Alice?" She and her husband are I are laughing hysterically.

He and I have bonded over scarring from the same prep school circuit; she and I have the crazy moms and non-linear career connections.

In the boat that took us into the falls, we shared a waterproof bag for all our belongings. We scrunched together in the same seat to be blasted with water, soaking us head to toe as the boat operator scudded us through the rapids, and the distant mist became a close-up, cold, soaking shower.

It is at that moment that I realize one of the best things about being a solo traveler is the people I meet and the serendipitous nature of my journey. Laurie Colwin's story "The Lone Pilgrim" comes to mind: "Single, you carry only the uncluttered luggage of your own personality, selected and packed by only one pair of hands."

I am a diversion; I am entertainment; a conversation with me is not tantamount to what I imagine the intimacy of marriage, not that I am sold on that institution.

(Shelly and Jack have it right: I could be married, too, if I had my own bedroom, my own space. All their friends, who once thought them insane, are now envious.)

Another joy for this trip is that other people have made all the decisions; for once, I does not have to be in charge. I can become a child again, having all the fun and lack of responsibility the title brings with it.

The Argentinians want to take care of me; the female tour guides want to hug me, cheek to cheek, as does the woman who later washes and braids my hair in Buenos Aires. It is a huge luxury not to have to braid my own hair.

The male guides watch my every move; George in Buenos Aires narrates the history of his city, wants to assure my comfort, explains such peculiarities as double-daylight savings time, brought to the country by its president, who may not have all her marbles.

George knows everyone at the airports, which pays off big time when I check in. I go straight to the front of every line, thankyouverymuch. It is bliss.

I share odd cultural references with the San Franciscans. For instance, the coffee stirrers in Argentina resemble the ones McDonald's retired when too many people were using the tiny spades to shovel coke up their noses. This too bonds me to my family for the day, the people with whom I later pad around the Sheraton pool, blissfully cool in the hot Iguassu sun.

The San Franciscans came from Puenta Arenas, Chile, nearly the most southernmost town in the hemisphere. They have traveled extensively, as have I. On my trip to Africa three years ago, I noticed that you did not get to safari in Botswana without having seen all of the Western world and a good portion of the rest; the same is true in Iguassu.

Later, I will develop a fierce sunburn, due to my confusion between when to apply apres sun spray and when to apply sun protection spray. Whoops. In the airplane returning to Buenos Aires, the flight attendant offers me a barf bag full of ice to cool my inflamed skin. Finally, a use for that item eternally riding in the seat back.

This is inadvertently my second stay in Buenos Aires. The first was prompted by a missed airplane connection. It astounded me that American Airlines came through with a night at the Intercontinental hotel, plus dinner and breakfast.

It is a fancy joint, and after my massage, I learn that the AA crew stays in the same hotel -- a far cry from the kinds of hotels I had imagined the crew frequented. Note to self: flight attendants have a much nicer gig than it may first appear. If this is any example, they stay at ritzier hotels than I do.

Airline finance mystery solved, for a week the brave new world does not obtain, and no news is both good news and all the news I will allow.

Abroad, riding the unemployment wave

2008-12-12T07:31:00.004-05:00

Even in Argentina, the news is unavoidable: U.S. jobless rates reach a 26-year high. That about sums up Alice´s time in the marketplace. This leave her back where she started, only a tiny bit wiser and a whole lot older.

When did Alice attempt to enter the workplace initially? That would be 1982, the year to which the current lack of jobs is being compared. But how did it happen that Alice has consistently ridden the recession wave? First, she tries for gainful employment at a time no one is hiring.

Later, she becomes a recessionary trend-spotter, as noted by her 1990 exile from corporate America. That time, she worked for a company that the magazine where she toiled on the same day that it won a National Magazine Award for general excellence, an experience recently likened to working for a TV show that is cancelled the day it wins an Emmy.

She hit the 1990 unemployment line ahead of the benefits extension afforded colleagues who quickly landed subsequent jobs at trendy mags that folded just a few months later. So, Alice has had her recessionary bout with government subsidy of artistic pursuits without incurring Jesse Helm´s ire, or so she chose to look at being on the dole then.

Now, she´s been self-employed for long enough that the only unemployment money she will get is from the first national bank of Mom, a long-standing institution that has only made a couple of bad loans in its day, none of them to Alice. Her credit is good there.

The terms of doing business at the bank of Mom would be unacceptable to most people: while repayment plans are at the customer´s request, in the interim the customer and her daily life are subject to far greater scrutiny than they would be at, say, the late Wachovia or the deathbed-rattling Citibank.

How did Alice come to Argentina? Frequent flyer miles, the last remaining currency. And why? Because if she is going to lose money, she might as well have a good time in the process. A couple of thousand bucks are nothing compared with the beating her portfolio has taken in the past six months -- and this time, she will have a great suntan, leather goods, and some excellent adventures to show for it.

Once upon a time, the U.S. was the land of opportunity, or so it was perceived. Now, immigration seems to work on the pay to play principle, which is not exactly what I consider welcoming. It appears to me that if you want to get foreigners to spend their dinero in the U.S., you would want to make it cheap and easy for them to visit. No, first we make everyone pay a toll.

Welcome to America. Whatever you want, we make you pay tax on it, and, unlike other countries, we offer no rebate upon your exit. Whatever you´ve got, we´ll take it. Pity we couldn´t convince enough people to buy what we were selling, so our deficit is so high, if the U.S. tried to write a check, it would bounce sky-high. Knowing us, we wouldn´t apologize.

On election day, I was a patriot. Today, not so much.

Today I want to be an Argentine.

Citi was a group...

2008-11-24T19:00:00.006-05:00

...now it's two suits holding hands on a high floor of the Citicorp building, wishing the windows would open so they could jump.

As I may have observed before: the only reason they aren't on a street corner selling apples is because the corner vegetable vendor slot is occupied by someone for whom English is a second language. Yes, we've managed to outsource apple selling.

Every day I turn around and the economy hemorrhages more red ink. Planning for the future has become an utter crapshoot: sure I'll plan if you want to pay me, but honestly? You would be better off going to the movies and getting some entertainment value for your dollar, not to mention a couple of hours of distraction.

More and more, the concept of financial planning is looking a lot like writing fiction. Since no one knows what's going to happen, I can make up any scenario I want. I'm writing if you're buying. Actually, I'm writing no matter what. I can, after all, still construct a sentence.

Thanksgiving is fast upon us, and all the food has been ordered, set for delivery tomorrow. It's the one day of the year my mother cooks, and should I try to deviate from her menu even by one ingredient, I will hear about it. It's easier just to buy the food, point her toward the kitchen, and follow instructions to the letter.

For someone who otherwise can scarcely apply heat to food, my mother is far more opinionated on how things should be prepared than anyone might logically expect. For her, there's the right way, or the doorway, even in matters about which she is completely uninformed.

How do you raise a mother? You just let her do what she wants, and duck if you don't want the fallout to hit you.

I'm too old or too tired to argue -- not just on the family front, but on the we-can-change-the-world front. There was a brief, shining post-electoral moment when I felt an almost orgasmic rush of hope suring through my body.

It has since retreated, to somewhere in the far back of a closet, behind the lightbulbs and the printer paper, between the assorted extra computer cables and a year-long supply of laundry detergent.

I wish I could say I felt more optimistic. At the moment, though, I'm feeling a lot of empathy for those two suits on the high floor of the glassed-in office building. I'm just grateful I'm not up there with them, tempted to imagine myself as Superman. Right now, Underdog is more my style.

A guide to living in reduced circumstances

2008-11-11T19:43:00.009-05:00

Alice is sad to report, it has come to this. She would much rather produce a guide to living under better circumstances; however, in this climate (read, economy tanked), it seems inappropriate.

Until the recent, shall we say, unpleasantness?, Alice made a living, as they say, from offering financial advice, a field whose existence appears rather tenuous. Thus Alice will offer a few words on the way she lives now.

It may be ordinary for some folks, but for Alice, it is not business as usual, not S.O.P. by a long shot. Alice is a baby boomer, part of a generation that has been known to act as if instant gratification takes too much time.

Food: Alice has rediscovered her kitchen. She markets -- in ordinary grocery stores, where she watches for good prices. She is applying heat to food on a regular basis. A prescription for burn cream has been filled, and Alice slathers it on with abandon.

Clothing: Fortunately, Alice was never much of a clothes horse. Now, she is not even a clothes pony. More like a clothes shih tzu, if that. So much for predictions of pricey underwear. It's strictly Hanes -- her way or the highway. As for outer layers, good-bye catalogs; hello, thrift shops.

It's time for pre-owned clothes. Pre-owned shoes. Maybe freebies from craigslist, or bargains at a church rummage sale. (Do they still have rummage sales? Does Alice know how to rummage?) The lipstick factor is prominent in Alice's toiletry plans.

Might even be time to relearn to sew, although that could cost Alice a finger or two, which would push health care out of reach.

Shelter: At least the mortgage is paid off. There will be no improvements to shelter short of hanging already in-house paintings and reorganizing the bookshelves and closets.

Heat may be curtailed, although Alice will be damned if she's going broke in the dark. Perhaps she will rearrange the living room furniture. Or would that be the deck chairs on the ship that may remain nameless?

Travel: all air travel has been postponed indefinitely, with the exception of tickets procured with frequent flyer miles to places where Alice may stay with friends. Inter-Wonderland transit has gone public.

It's subways, buses, and trains. Au revoir les taxis, those little yellow vehicles that have sped Alice from one part of town to another on a regular basis in the past.

Entertainment: Welcome to free movies on demand. Let's watch all DVDs purchased but still sealed against thievery. Read all books acquired with spines still uncracked. Can Alice interest you in a game of Monopoly? (Read about its ironic history here.) Anyone want to ante up for a game of nickel-dime-quarter poker?

Who cares if you lose? It's only money, right? Isn't it? asks the financial planner. What she really wants to know is, how far can we go before we hit bottom? Are we there yet? Please? Even the Wizard off Wall Street, major shareholder in Capitalist, inc., seems a few steps off. (Damn it, Alice should have remembered white men can't dance.)

Is there a 12-step program for the global economy?

Contemplating what to defrost for dinner, Alice is profoundly depressed. Previously she had never considered the freezer section a home for much more than ice trays, nukable proteins, extra smoked salmon, bagels, butter, and coffee.

Now she has said adieu to her menu drawer and has wrapped various meats, first in plastic wrap, followed by aluminum foil, labeling the packets with indelible marker by contents and date received. In the 'burbs, growing up, Alice remembers seeing her father do this with entire filet mignons he had cut into portion size.

It feels different now, and part of Alice is relieved her beloved Daddy isn't around for this 21st century meltdown. On the other hand, he taught her that life was a banquet. It's just that Alice hadn't planned on getting the check.

Here's to hoping the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming train.

Rearrange the world...

2008-11-05T21:22:00.001-05:00

it's dying, to get better....

We might just make it after all!

Eastern Standard Time: a brave new world

2008-11-03T23:44:00.004-05:00

The sun set at 4;49 this afternoon, one day into spring forward, fall back, the changing of the clocks that I forget, season after season. This autumn, however, is different. Oh, we have fallen back -- in so many ways I don't care to enumerate them.

All I can do is hope that tomorrow, this country springs forward. Please, let the map turn blue. Let's have a president before midnight, the one, for once, whom I want.

It seems that recently, I can remember 40 years ago and my third-grade class better than I can what I told my best friend on the phone yesterday. As daylight shrinks, so, it seems, does my capacity to hold on to anything more than, say, the fact I am growing my hair to donate it in memory of Dona, my dear friend who died of cancer last Halloween.

Then, there are my menopausal marches, those hours in the park that I am free from computers, telephones, any form of electronic connection to the world. Mile after mile, all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, check my pedometer for speed and my heart rate monitor to see if I'm in the right zone.

Sometimes I think I hit my zone in the last century. So much about me remains twentieth century, and damn proud of it. For example, I am not a willing member of the DIY economy. Specialization of labor had its good points, and with the computerization of the world, we appear to have lost it.

I particularly liked the part where human beings answered telephones and it wasn't considered outre to wish to receive physical bills in the mail. Then of course, there is the lost travel agent. I preferred it when I was not in charge of booking tickets, screening hotels from Web site descriptions, and guessing which company had the best tour guides. I liked a little knowledge from those who possessed it and were happy to share it for a fee.

But that was then and this is now: let's just hope that our brave new world brings us something genuinely for the better. If not, I fear we are, how to say it delicately? no, no way -- just about doomed.

Plan B for the middle class?

2008-10-30T18:33:00.004-04:00

It's official: New York State has declared me a card-carrying, check-rebate-worthy member of the middle class, handing out what is called a "2008 Middle Class STAR rebate check." My rebate is based on various factors, and it is billed as a rebate "in addition to the amount of relief [ital mine] I receive under NYS's existing School Tax Relief Program (STAR).

I have mixed emotions regarding the "relief" I receive. On the one hand, I do not, nor do any of my friends, colleagues, or relatives, have any children in the New York City Public School System. On the other hand, our schools suck; they need all the funding they can get. These kids will need to work; someone has to pay into Social Security.

It is Halloween Eve, a night during which I do think of children. I think of why I will not be one of those apartment dwellers who opens her door to the building's trick-or-treaters. The last time I did, the children ran in a pack, grabbing for candy as if they hadn't seen food since their last Federally subsidized school lunch.

They barely said "trick or treat"; none stayed long enough for me to admire their costumes; and none said thank you. No one in this building, this bastion of the middle class, has a school lunch subsidized by anyone other than a parent. A parent who, as far as I can see, appears not to have taught his/her kids any manners.

(This may not be the first Halloween I have ranted about the neighbors' children.) But if these children are our future, my late poet-friend's book title remains apropos: Be Properly Scared.

I do remember watching my cousins' children in Maine, seeing the inability of a sixth grade teacher to catch a major grammar error in the first sentence of one child's essay. In Massachusetts, my assigned role is to distinguish between less and fewer, to tackle proper use of prepositions and verb tenses, as well as assert the importance of asking "may I," not "can I."

Granted, I am one of the few remaining grammar Nazis, but I maintain that it is much easier to communicate when everyone can speak the same language, and can create subjects that match their predicates. I am not sure about the future, in the land of what can kindly be called the short-attention-span.

Life is not a video game, contrary to what computers and game boys may try to teach. For one thing, you can't always shoot the bad guy; sometimes, it's simply not an option, and besides, the bad guy is difficult to identify. For another, practice will not get you to Carnegie Hall. Practice will screw up the joints in your fingers to the point that when you are old enough to buy a drink, you will lack the ability to hold the glass.

Where I'm coming from today is my gut feeling that Plan A for the middle class, that economic merry-go-round we all thought would never stop, has thrown all its riders to the ground. It's not working. We need to go to Plan B -- but first, we need to figure out what it is.

No matte what happens next Tuesday (and I've been ready to cast my vote for at least a month), I don't think Plan B will materialize at any time soon. Government simply isn't cut out to work that way.

As my friend winding up 30 years at the FBI says, "we bring you yesterday's technology tomorrow." I assume that means that government does do Windows, but it probably doesn't do VISTA, much less anything to do with a Mac.

Obviously, at this moment, I don't think the proverbial glass is half full. I'm not sure I think it is even half empty. It seems more likely that as we wait for Plan B (the one in which politicians and finance people admit the economy has tanked, not that the economic outlook has been reduced, or diminished, or whatever euphemism they choose), that the glass is cracked.

All I can do is hope someone has some Crazy-Glue in his or her back pocket. Cause that's what we need to hold a Plan B together. Otherwise, well, let's not go to otherwise just now. Tomorrow is, after all, another day.

Drowning in four-color slick paper stock

2008-10-26T06:53:00.003-04:00

I have surveyed the landscape that is my apartment and discovered an appalling number of magazines received and unread. I do like the printed word, holding the magazine in my hands and flipping through the pages.

I particularly appreciate the mobility of the hard copy, how easy it is to read in transit, for example, or in bed, where it is possible to read while prone, something you can't do with cyber text.

However, the magazines seem to have reached critical mass, bringing up the question, are you going to read these periodicals, or shall they be relegated to the recycling pile? How many weeks of The New Yorker is one reasonably expected to keep?

The New Yorker offers hours of entertainment and some additions to my knowledge base, as I suspect it is currently called; most of my other magazines are less intellectual and contain more in-the-moment content.

Do I really need to read "The cabbie in the coal mine"? How will this information enrich me? Or will it piss me off, so that I simply turn the page? Yes, the economic sky is falling, and it's not chicken little's hallucination.

Simplicity has taken on a new place in my life and in that of my friends. "Need" has become a working part of our vocabularies. "Want" has been relegated to what-were-we-thinking?

I have to laugh at the travel magazines: Endless Vacations? Forbes' Life Fall Travel? Gourmet? Then there are the "trade magazines," for which I pay someone $300 a year to summarize the articles and rate them, so I don't have to slag through half a dozen of them myself. Sure, I mean to read and file the articles, but then again, I mean to grow four inches taller, and neither is a likely scenario.

Plus, seeing that we are nearing the Christmas season, I am full up on catalogs, both from places I know and places that apparently rented my name for purposes of commerce. N0 one I know needs a fruit basket this year, much less outdoor apparel despite its money-back guarantee.

I have to worship at the alter of Lands' End and L.L. Bean, whose customer service is legendary. They will accept merchandise returns at any time, for any reason. My wardrobe may be boring, but at least it's replaceable without much cost beside postage.

Recently I received a magazine about offerings for rabbits; I called customer service and told them that the off-White Rabbit, aka Bunny Boo-Bearsky, had gone to his reward in the sky two years ago, and that I didn't need to be reminded of the days when my closet contained 10 pounds of Timothy hay and 5 pounds of rabbit breakfast pellets.

Nothing gets you off a list faster than when you say, the creature or person for whom these products was intended is dead. My mother, over the years, has become a whiz at responding to people who call asking for Mr. Uptown. She simply says, he can't come to the phone. Ever. He's dead. That will teach people to cold call, or at least rethink that particular vocational opportunity.

What falls into the "want" category is now scrutinized for weeks on end before a decision is made. Consumer purchases are debated, where once they were a matter of course. Currently up on the block is a 32 inch LCD TV. Do I join the flat-screeners with the high-res pictures or do I hold on the what I've got until it totally dies?

I have been offered birthday and Christmas money to subsidize the purchase, so it's looking tempting, and since New York City is carting away electronic refuse through mid-2010, it does seem timely. Yet in this economy, purchasing anything beyond the most basic needs seems like a display of financial security I don't honestly feel. Thus, the dilemma.

I am sure I am far from the only one facing these questions; all I can really say is, my mortgage is paid off, and I still do have money in the bank (and in the stock market, but that account is hemorrhaging fast) .

So, drowning in magazines is not the worst thing that could befall me. Not having any marketable skills, simply on the basis of having worked for myself for 20+ years and having no idea how to transfer my skills, much less my attitude, to any corporate culture, is my one major drawback.

Then again, I can always occupy my time with all those magazines to read.

a la recherche du temps perdu

2008-10-20T01:03:00.012-04:00

In lieu of Proust's madeleine, what would probably trigger my generation's collective consciousness would be a bong hit, a line snorted, or some recreational pharmaceuticals consumed. At that point, we would all realize who we were, if we couldn't see who we've become.

It has been reunion season chez Alice, and in the past month, she has attended two 30th high school reunions. One was at the prep school from which she actually graduated; the other, from the public school system Alice fled in 1975, but where Alice spent most of her childhood. In other words, Alice went back to see her kindergarten, elementary school, and junior high school class. These were the people who knew Alice before we had permanent teeth, much less tits.

Herewith the report on public school reunion, an opportunity sought out through the Web, not from any list of invitees for whom the organizers had addresses.

You might call this, About Last Night. I got on the train to the once-upon-a-small-town White Plains. The cab driver who took me to the hotel was Haitian, and together we mourned what has become of his country, the one he has fled and to which I can never return. I also didn't recognize the town through which he drove me. It is calling itself a city, which I find to be at misnomer at best.

Driving through urban renewal land with a Haitian driver lent is an odd perspective from which to begin the evening -- to remember who I was for many years as a facet that none of my public school friends would have recognized.

It was weird to me that no one said, you look great or you look pretty -- which is S.O.P. for all the prep school and college reunions I've attended. Plus, there was a cash bar. Usually I don't drink, but I was also really surprised that no one offered to buy me anything, although my one friend from my street, did toss $40 my way when I said I needed cash. I was grateful, but once again, it appeared I'd landed firmly in DIY land, a surprising place considering how many married and traditional women were present.

Since I have put reunions together, I was really surprised that there were no hors d'oeuvres; dinner was buffet-style, and for drinks, it was strictly a cash-only enterprise from a less than complete bar. All this, for $100 a head.

Alice has planned reunions before, and at that price, even accounting for the venue rental, Alice knows you can get a lot more for your money -- and if your ticket prices breaks $100, an extra $20 for adult comforts isn't going to make or break the attendance records.

Then, too, the organizers knew I was coming, and that I hadn't graduated from the school, but the only name tags created were copies of people's senior year yearbook photos along with their names. My name tag was hand-printed, which didn't exactly feel welcoming. Granted I may be more than a little sensitive about some of this, but this was my take on the evening. Truly the best time I had was late in the evening, when the DJ was playing music I loved to dance too, and I just hurled myself on the dance floor, partner be damned. There, at least, I felt like myself.

One of the women at the reunion, Trisha C, whom I remember vaguely, recognized me as "you were the smart one." I must have recoiled slightly, because she added, "I meant that as a compliment."

Maybe now, but back in 7th grade or 8th grade, I remember becoming acutely aware that my spoken grammar was impeccable and that in junior high school, that was simply another mark of how different I was, and I had enough of those marks against me as it was. There I was, the last of the late bloomers, being more intelligent than most of the people in my class, not knowing what that meant, and not having the social skills so many of my classmates seemed to have -- not to mention not having a clue about, say, boys.

I did confess my 6th grade and my 9th grade crushes to the boys who had grown into men. And I grant you I was looking for what can only be called the fuckability factor -- a resounding zero, unless someone expresses subsequent interest in Alice, which she is not anticipating.

No one seemed to see the humor in my observation that I knew these people before I had my period and now I'm going through menopause. Or something else I've commented on before: I went to kindergarten with many of these people, so we all knew each other before we had permanent teeth, much less boobs and hips. (I never could wear those junior-high-school-hip-huggers that went with the huckapoo shirts, since I lacked the body curves. I do remember those shirts, though: 100% genuine polyester, guaranteed to go up in flames if the wind were blowing in the wrong direction when you lit a cigarette.)

I'm glad I went to the reunion, but I can't say I'll be back again. I thought there might be some variety in the stories I would hear, but the $100 ticket price pretty much guaranteed that the stories would be homogeneous, surprisingly so. Everyone, male and female, was married, with 2 or 3 children, most of them living in the 'burbs, or "locally," as one woman I went to elementary school with put it. Professionally there were, I was not surprised to find, a lot of lawyers. Most of the practicing ones were men.

There were a fair number of women who hadn't been in the workforce since shortly after they either conceived or delivered their first child. It felt to me like they had all drunk the same Kool-aid, and turned into their parents without a question. Probably not surprisingly, the women all looked great and the men weren't aging well -- a lot of rotund bellies coupled with major baldness or very short gray hair. I looked at the boys I had had crushes on in elementary school and junior high school and wondered, what was I thinking? (Not that I would have known how to handle a relationship then if someone waved it under my nose.)

Meanwhile, I'm single, never married (in my 20s most of my relationships were with women, so marriage wasn't really part of the picture), and have no progeny. Plus, I live in the big city, know nothing about cars, and was genuinely perplexed when some of the conversations turned to cheerleaders and football -- that seemed like something out of the 1950s. The one thing I do have in common with most of the people with whom I spoke is we all have aging parents. I, however, had to tell so many people my dad had died that I had to retire to the ladies' room for a brief cry. You can only clutch the windshield sticker that summarizes your life in 30 years and 30 words or less for so long before the glass breaks.

A good portion of my elementary school was present, and a fair number from junior high. Since I was only at WPHS for one year, and that was the year that pushed me over the edge to get the hell out of suburbia, I don't remember too many people I met that year.

I don't know why I thought I would feel more connected to the people I had known as a child, but the reunion didn't bring that out for me. What it did bring out was I suppose I've always been a nonconformist, but never felt it so acutely as I did last night. Some people have kids; I travel.

Where there were supposed to be a few years after college that we were equal with our parents, and neither of us had to take care of the other, I missed that experience. I went straight from graduation to feeling like Queen Victoria, not amused that my dad and brother were getting high together. Nancy Reagan might have been shouting just-say-no into a windstorm, for all it affected my family.

My family dynamics are not quite out of a Tennessee Williams play, but on the other hand, June Cleaver or Donna Reed would have been a far cry from any scenario I saw as a child.

I do think it important to revisit my past, if only to satisfy my historical curiosity, my wanting to know for posterity what has transpired.

I've been emailing an old friend I tracked down, who decided to sit out the reunion at home in her sweats eating chocolate. We've gotten below the windshield sticker arena, and, as I wrote to her, "as for your feeling you went through a phase of "mediocre mom and student," I'd say you came out pretty well. I have a friend who, at the the age of 40, had already raised 2 teenagers (with the help of her ex-husband and then current one) and published 5 books of fiction; her take on how she had achieved all that was that she had done it all badly.

"So it's a matter of perspective. No one's perfect, and I would bet that over the long haul, your kids are probably proud of you. From what I saw at the reunion, very few women had switched gears since the first "I do," and it takes guts to go against that tide.

At any rate, I'm very much enjoying our correspondence, and I hope to hear from you soon. I'm glad you come into the city, because after last night, I don't want to get on a commuter train again for many moons. I hope this missive makes sense to you -- I feel like you didn't drink the Kool-aid and hence might have a clue about my life, and perhaps an interest in it, for I would really like to see you, now that we are past the windshield-sticker level."

As for my prep school reunion, the day after, I was completely depressed. Like the public school gathering, this was filled with those who drank the Kool-aid. Once again, I was the only person who had failed to get the marriage-will-make-you-happy memo, and, apart from one friend, I was carried the childless banner solo. She was gracious; when asked whether she had children, she didn't say, "I had cancer, not children." In her shoes I'm not sure I would have been so polite.

Here is what perplexes me: we were raised in the 1970s, with The Rocky Horror Show our backdrop. It was, in essence, the anthem for nonconformity. I took it to heart and I have never felt like a solo operation at a college reunion, but the lack of diversity at either my prep school or public school reunions makes me think, the only reason people attend these gatherings is to show how much they have taken the current social zeitgeist to heart, fallen down a rabbit hole I have scrupulously avoided.

No wonder I have become Alice; I cannot think of anyone else in history, real or imaginary, with whom I share so many traits.

Questions, comments? Post here or go ask alice, at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com.

Incidentally, Alice will swear that the logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. She echoes the door mouse's plea, "feed your head." And she blesses the Western pharmaceuticals that have made it possible to Alice to remain here, to share a thought or observation or two, no matter how infrequently.

Dazed and confused...

2008-10-17T18:38:00.005-04:00

as the song of 30+ years ago says. No, I don't know what to do. Not a clue. I attribute this state of being in part to stepping up my migraine preventive drugs to new heights of spaciness and also to the current state of the economy. Finally, my lack of time, energy, finances, and interest in business school have paid off. I don't know any more than those Wall Street M.B.A.s, but it didn't cost me a dime not to know it.

Ever so proud of the money I saved, I do does wonder how I will make my so-called living as the months unwind and the market tanks quicker than a crack addict's high evaporates. The pace is stunning. Fortunately financial planning is holistic (dreadful but applicable description). It's not just about investments. If it were just about managing money, Alice would be screwed. Talk about your ballroom days being over.... This brings Alice to her next theme.

Chaos: It's not just a theory, it's a way of life. Apparently it's the way that Alice has signed on for, whether she realized it or not at the time. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? Alice wouldn't bet on it. Her theory on the lack of suicides in the financial district is that most of the newer office buildings have windows that don't open.

You would have to be very determined to that break glass in an emergency, and Alice doesn't think the I-bankers have the upper body strength. She could, of course, be mistaken. She is certain, however, that street vendors whose native language is not English have already cornered the market on vegetable and fruit sales. Depression-era apple selling set up shop years ago. For immigrants, it beats dish washing, and it's an all-cash business.

All-cash businesses are, well, priceless. And everyone needs to eat. The folks in Alice's upscale apartment building are all planning to apply heat to food on a more consistent basis. Say good-bye to last-minute restaurant dinners; say hello to home cooking. Alice's freezer is well stocked with bargains on meat, fish, and poultry. A year ago, she wouldn't have known a good price if it bit her on the ass.

These days she takes great comfort in her menopausal marches around the reservoir. Finally, Alice and nature are on more than speaking terms. Turns out she loves walking and even running under the trees -- far from the sound of the phone ringing or the computer chirping. She doesn't understand the multitasking walkers who have a dog leash in one hand and a cell phone in the other, or the mommies jogging behind a stroller outfitted with two children.

Domestic incompetence is looking increasingly less attractive. Still, Alice can't open the cap on a bottle of soda, much less change a light bulb or do laundry without turning everything pink. You can bring Alice into the kitchen, but you'd better bring the burn cream along, too. Given how flaky her thumb tendons are, Alice wouldn't mind a sous chef, but she suspects that position has been lost to what is most assuredly a recession.

On the money management front, Alice as family CFO has been bailing out of financials for the past year, a move not taken with any prescience about the fall of Lehman Bros. et. al, but one that looks pretty damn good no matter what its impetus. Still, it looks like that retirement Alice was dreaming of will be postponed for the indefinite future.

She is, however, keeping her carbon footprint small by not attending any financial planning conferences this year. A week in Whistler with the socially responsible folks, and Alice would have gone postal. (They seem to respect trees more than intellectual property, and Alice has a big problem with that.) A trip to Hershey to discuss baby boomers retiring, and Alice would have been puking chocolate for days.

We baby boomers are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. All those great plans we had, the country houses and the sojourns to foreign countries, well, not going to happen -- not unless great Aunt Matilda conveniently leaves a seven-figure cash inheritance ASAP. In real life, half the boomers Alice knows are scraping together college tuition money or shoring up their own finances, and another, larger-than-expected portion are supporting one or more parents.

Remember Goldie Hawn as Private Benjamin? She signed up for the Army with the private rooms and maid service. Looks like we're all joining her in the barracks, at an age when the kindergarten virtue of sharing has long since paled.

Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

So you wanna be VP...

2008-09-01T21:32:00.007-04:00

Lipstick or not, you'll have to be fixed and carefully outfitted before you visit England.

For the geographically clueless (whoops, was that you?), it's part of a famous island off the coast of continental Europe, adjacent to your Irish refueling stop.

Consult a map for more precise whereabouts. Beware the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991.

Under that law and its 1997 amendment, it is:

"illegal to own any Specially Controlled Dogs [pit bull terriers and cross breeds thereof included] without specific exemption from a court.

"The dogs have to be muzzled and kept on a leash in public; they must be registered and insured, neutered, tattooed, and receive microchip implants. The Act also bans the breeding, sale and, exchange of these dogs, even if they are on the Index of Exempted Dogs."

Need more travel tips? Go ask Alice at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com.

Viewer discretion is advised

2008-07-21T11:00:00.003-04:00

Why this disclaimer doesn't run prior to every newscast, atop every newspaper, as a pop-up ad before every Website hit, I don't know. Seems to me there is a lot in this world the viewer would be advised to think twice before taking it in.

Life is beyond see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, touch-no-evil, taste-no-evil, feel-no-evil: evil has, in various guises, become unavoidable. Here in Wonderland, we're into our sixth day of a so-called heat advisory. (Touch- and feel-no-evil the primary principles involved, with see-no and hear-no a close second if the TV set is nearby.)

Translation: 90+ degrees before noon, humidity to make a person wilt. Con Ed wants us to conserve energy. Forget kilowatts: the energy I'm conserving is my own. I'm following what the signs in on the lawns at Central Park suggest: passive activities encouraged.

For our continued enjoyment of the park, the sign-makers suggest we not wear it out. They are trying to keep the grass from getting flattened from too much use, an odd idea for a park, you might think. Still, it is Wonderland, and the park rules reflect our lives, the truth of living among so many people in such a densely populated area.

The private sector has pumped a ton of money into our park in the past ten years; we finally have lawns where once there was just mud; and no one wants us -- the public -- to trash the efforts of those with another kind of green.

When I set out on my menopausal marches, otherwise known as my hour-long, 3.75-mile speed walks on the bridle path around around the reservoir, I do stick to the trails. The bridle path has become a misnomer: Central Park is now bereft of horses. Dressed for walking, I wear more metal than the average equine. A friend has me wired for everything but sound.

I strap on a heart monitor, wetting the two leads before hooking them to the actual metering device; I turn on the pedometer strapped to my sneaker (running shoe, to be precise); and I press "start" on the watch that keeps track of it all: heart rate, distance, speed, time elapsed, calories burned.

The sheer computing power of the device attached to my wrist exceeds that of my Kaypro II X, the computer I owned in 1985, a "portable" machine lovingly known as Darth Vader's lunch box, all 26 pounds of it.

Funny thing is, apart from the Internet, I'm not sure I can do much more with the computer I own generations (and several operating systems) later. I did not sign up for technological advances at the speed of light, and at this point, my brain remains one formed by the last century. The computer has vast capabilities of which I remain unaware. I work on a need-to-know basis.

This century requires more viewer discretion than the last: the economy is crashing and burning, and my former industry, editing magazines and newspapers, has gone to the dogs. Copy editing is being outsourced to India. Want to buy a house, cheap?

Friends tell me paralegal tasks are performed at cut-rate prices next to the copy editing; we know any kind of computer "technical assistance" has long ago left these shores. What remains for us, as even our intellectual capital is offered offshore to the lowest bidder?

Clearly I have chosen the wrong vocations: I should have learned electrical, or plumbing, or how to run a boiler, fix the air conditioning, tile a bathroom, any form of construction -- tasks that cannot be shipped offshore, many of which are unionized.

One of these days our local news will come from China, where it is clearly cheaper to produce. The fact that none of the reporters will know uptown from downtown will no longer be relevant. More evil here I wish not to see.

Rumor (or the government) has it that we are exporting far more than we are importing, due to the weak dollar. What I want to know is, what do we have left to export? I didn't know we had any manufacturing plants remaining, especially after my tour of Lowell, MA last week.

Lowell, once the site of America's first textile mills -- many of which were water-powered, in those pre-oil-dependent days -- have long since been shuttered. Downtown is the nation's first urban national park. The area feels like an actual city, except that the streets are empty, as if someone built a city but forgot to drop in the people.

Our political landscape makes me wince: why is anyone surprised that Obama turned out to be, horror of horrors, a real politician? I'm a yellow-dog Democrat; of course he has my vote. But I don't expect him to change the world. Camelot, after all, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The late M. Wyrebeck wrote: "Be properly scared." I am.

The seven "dirty" words

2008-06-23T10:10:00.006-04:00

George Carlin died last night. I will motherfucking miss him.

shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits

Amen.

Ask Alice? She doesn't know...

2008-05-29T11:32:00.004-04:00

It has been a couple of weeks, and Alice is increasingly befuddled by the world. She was, after all, brought up not to discuss politics, religion or sex. Her mother has never revealed her personal voting record to anyone. Secret ballot and Alice's mother are one and the same.

In Haiti, under Baby Doc, Alice's father said: "You don't discuss politics in a dictatorship." While Alice was young, she got the message.

So Alice as political creature has come late to the dance.

Sure, she knew Nixon was a Bad Guy from the ever-so-seditious My Weekly Reader that informed her that Nixon was a Quaker, and Quakers did not believe in wars. This led to great confusion in Alice's pre-pubescent mind when Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia, cognitive dissonance that enrolled her as a Democrat long before she could reach the levers in the voting booth.

And given the civil liberties lost to us courtesy of the current administration, as Alice has mourned previously in The Party's Over and Follow the Money, among other rants, Alice has become convinced that you don't have to be paranoid to think Big Brother is watching you.

Last night, Alice was part of the audience for the filming of a Very Well-Known Feminist's talk on fascism in 10 easy steps, the how-to explained in VWKF's most recent book. She left with an acute case of paranoia, and a reminder that free speech is very expensive, a fact not lost on her friend The Misanthrope, who has had part of his blogging experience bite him on the ass.

Alice's take on VWKF is in part personal: they met at a writers' colony many years ago, and she critiqued the manuscript of VWKF's second book; VWKF said Kaddish at Alice's father's grave; Alice danced at VWKF's wedding, and their connection, ironically, was lost after VWKF became part of the asylum-running crowd of married couples, while Alice remained a solo act.

Alice concluded years ago VWKF's most important contribution to the social fabric is how well she popularizes and makes palatable ideas and ideals that most Americans would fail to comprehend in more intellectual terms. She is also not surprised that part of the VWKF's impetus for her latest book was a woman who is the daughter of Holocaust survivers who kept saying as we lost one right to privacy, one civil liberty, after another, "they did this in Germany." Alice had made a similar link years ago.

Remembering a family friend who fled Germany in 1937 and, who, when asked in the 1980s what she did for fun, said sadly "I had all my fun before Hitler," Alice wondered whether the same would be true for her and the Bush administration, or whether Alice was exaggerating. As time has gone by, Alice has come to think she was spot-on. And now she is terrified and not at all convinced that the next election will solve anything.

At the same time, she wonders why her tax dollars are going to monitor citizens' once-Constitutional, political expression at the expense of, say, universal health care or ending hunger and homelessness, in our so-called "first world" country.

If someone on the Fed's dime is reading Alice's blog, he/she might have noticed that Alice doesn't attract much attention, no matter how many times she thinks the so-called War on Terror is as ludicrous as was Nixon's War on Drugs with Elvis Presley its model citizen.

Alice is convinced that the road to ending terrorism has nothing to do with T.S.A. screenings and banning shampoo bottles larger than three ounces on airplanes. All of the hyped security she encounters seems like a full employment act for those who can participate early and often in charades. None of it is real; it is all window dressing.

As the Mexicans have pointed out, while the Feds want to build a wall to keep them out of the U.S. and are funding this absurdity under the guise of border security, no terrorists have entered through the Mexican border, only the Canadian one.

And while Alice is not thrilled about illegal immigration, she can't take seriously the argument that immigrants are depriving Americans of jobs. No, in real life Alice knows these immigrants take the jobs native-born Americans, regardless of aptitude or intelligence levels, will not dream of signing onto.

So Alice doesn't know what the hell is going on, who to believe and who to ignore. Her critical faculties are suffering from synaptic lapses of a monumental proportion, and all that it adds up to is, Alice is tired. She is suffering from TMI overload, and cannot cope with "the news" in any form. Immediate rest is her self-issued prescription.

If you don't hear from Alice for a while, this is why. She welcomes you to Go Ask Alice at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com, where she can be found, but she cannot promise more than intermittent blogging until she catches up with herself in the world.

For Cicely, The Girls, and T.

2008-05-12T19:33:00.004-04:00

Above, Alice, at left; two of the Three Sisters, center; Cicely, at right; after the 1995 D.C. Rally for Women's Lives, or, as Alice's T-shirt reads: The Power to Stop Violence Against Women Begins with Me.

The third sister is taking the photograph. The Three Sisters, also known as The Girls, and their mother, Cicely, have been a huge part of Alice's life since about 1985.

Prior to meeting The Girls -- each a year apart in age -- Alice was a checkbook activist. With The Three Sisters and their mom, Alice spent many years putting her body where once she had only put her checkbook: into the streets of D.C., Wonderland, and Albany. She lobbied politicians by telephone, long before email, much less email petitions and progressive political Web sites, became commonplace.

A few days before Alice's father died, she, Cicely, and The Girls protested against Bush the first and his incipient Gulf War in the streets near the United Nations. There were cops everywhere: on foot, on horseback, in the sky, atop buildings, and, Alice believes, practically falling from the trees growing from the sidewalks.

Granted, Alice was younger and angrier, and less cynical. She used to think she could make a difference; now, not so much. But to her dying day, Cicely believed. And she acted. And she made Alice think and debate and act in ways that have made her a better person.

Cicely and The Girls got Alice off her ass and moving. Everything Alice knows about taking it to the streets -- protesting injustice, war, and Republican foreign policy -- she learned from them.

The Internet may have galvanized grass-roots organizing in its current incarnation, but, to Alice, nothing says I-mean-business like showing up in person. You vote with your feet.

Four weeks ago, Cicely left this mortal coil, after years of raging against going gentle into that good night. The Girls and T., Cicely's quasi-officially adopted daughter, held her as she drew her last breath.

Last night, The Girls and T. held a celebration of Cicely -- a far cry from any memorial service Alice had ever attended. It was standing room only, 100+ people in attendance, some of whom The Girls had tracked down after 30+ years. They put together a photo montage of Cicely's life, synced to protest folk music, and found more than a dozen people to speak of Cicely's accomplishments.

Alice wept through the photo montage, seeing herself on screen through the years, as part of the extended family. The Christmases, the protests, the parties -- it all felt as if it had happened yesterday, along with Friday night bridge and early 1990s Monday night TV. A reception followed the program, with enough food and booze to make Cicely proud. The Girls threw one hell of a party, the kind of send-off most people only dream of.

And Alice is grateful, to have been a part of it all, to know as family people whose mission it is to make the world a better place. They certainly have made it one for her.

Why technology and I want a divorce

2008-05-09T11:14:00.003-04:00

Irony about posting on a blog aside, this story may be apocryphal, but I'm right there with its spirit:

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, 'If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.'

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics :

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash.......twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single 'This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation' warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask 'Are you sure?' before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the 'Start' button to turn the engine off.

As if Microsoft isn't bad enough...

2008-04-26T16:57:00.006-04:00

Alice just bought a new computer, the last Windows XP machine to come off the assembly line. She is suffering technological difficulties, and sick to death of how wonderful the PC was supposed to make her life. Right now, she would rather have a hard copy of a newspaper, and not need to know more than the TV evening news has to tell her.

Although she has managed to keep most of the learning curve to a minimum, there are still a few hurdles to go before the machine is working perfectly. The computer guy (does not deserve the name "technician," though his invoice reflects it) managed to transfer data as Alice asked.

He could not, however, trouble shoot such common questions as, why won't the screen saver kick in when it's supposed to? Why won't the antivirus software run on schedule? Somehow, Alice expected a wee bit more knowledge from someone who bills himself as a computer tech guy.

However, given her last run-in with HP, she should know better. It doesn't matter what the native language is, ignorance is apparently in great demand for all tech support gigs. Where does Alice sign up? She wears her ignorance proudly: the exact label reads, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

The do-it-yourself age is highly overrated, Alice once again observes. If she had wanted to be a travel agent, she would have signed up for that gig. If she had wanted to develop pictures, she would have had herself a darkroom. Getting the photos from digital camera to computer is just one more technological nightmare, so far as she is concerned.

And one more tangle with Microsoft's monopoly makes Alice certain that she would like nothing better than to get a cease and desist order on the entire company. Let us have a few years to catch up before you try to sell us anything new. The economy sucks, and we're just not interested.

On another note, here is some news from last week's Tactical Traveler:

Better Get That Icky Stuff Off Your Laptop's Hard Drive

"A federal appeals court in San Francisco has ruled that Customs agents at the airport don't need any evidence of wrongdoing to search the contents of a passenger's laptop, thumb drives and other storage devices. The theory supported unanimously by the court's three judges this week: A laptop is luggage and Customs agents don't need evidence of wrongdoing to search luggage because it is the equivalent of a border search. (The Supreme Court previously ruled that luggage searches at the airport are the equivalent of border searches.)

"All of this would be a fascinating legal argument in and of itself, but keep this in mind: The case began in 2005 when a Customs agent stopped a traveler on his return from the Philippines and asked him to turn on his computer. The agent then found images he believed to be child pornography. The flyer was arrested for transporting child pornography and traveling to the Philippines to have sex with a minor."

The world never ceases to amaze Alice, or perhaps dumbfound is the more appropriate response.

My six-word memoir

2008-04-22T11:59:00.004-04:00

Tagged by The Misanthrope I give you:

Nostalgic for what might have been.

"Helicopter" parent age

2008-04-13T22:54:00.007-04:00

"Helicopter parents," I recently discovered, are those who hover over their offspring long after parents like mine -- those who gave you my generation, the baby boomers, decided to honor the generation gap and leave their offspring, i.e., me, to fend for themselves.

These are scary individuals. Roughly my age and younger, they have what strikes me as an overly extensive interest in their children's care and feeding above the age of majority. I'm sure every one of them wrote the essays for his kid's college applications. (I'm not sure mine even saw what I wrote.)

I would bet they worked on their kids' high-school geometry homework. Personally, I handed in mine in 1975. I suspect if I had asked for parental help, I would have been told, we haven't had to prove two triangles congruent since the early 1950s.

We love you, but you're on your own. Had I needed a tutor, one would have been found. But my parents had long since graduated from high school, thankyouverymuch.

I met several helicopters last weekend, while visiting my alma mater during parents' weekend. This year, like last, I volunteered as a sales girl for the annual Haiti Project art auction and craft sale. A Haitian village needs my support far more than my well-endowed college does.

Last year, since I stayed just one night, I didn't meet any of the parents at the college-owned inn where I sojourned. (The auction is held on parents' weekend because, of course, they have the money.) The college inn is the only ho/mo tel accommodation in walking distance of campus.

This year, I stayed two nights, and the parents I encountered in the inn's TV room made me feel I had stepped back into la vida loca all over again. In this world, parents seems to think having junior graduate from a brand-name college will set him/her up for life.

I didn't have the heart to tell them, 25+ years post-graduation, that a diploma from my college and a MetroCard will get me on the subway, and I don't expect it will take me any farther than the Staten Island Ferry.

Sure, I went to college in the 1970s. So did these parents. Did they forget that all we did was get stoned? My idea of schoolwork in college was to expend the least amount of time needed to get a decent grade.

Brand-name diploma was, for some, a $40,000 bar bill; for others, their parents' receipts; for me, a windshield sticker in the academic domain; for a few, recognition of honest academic achievement.

The last was not mine, nor did I claim it to be. The helicopter parents in the TV room would have had a collective stroke if I had described my college experience, or what I remember of it, to them.

Needless to say the idea that junior might be in it for the four years of freedom, sex, and crystallizing an adult self might does not seem to have permeated their collective consciousness.

These parents are going to get boomerang kids: they've raised their kids to live in a style to which they have all become accustomed, and it's not a style your average 25 year old earns enough to maintain. I would bet these kids are going to look for their parents' blessing in a mate. My generation, not so much.

I don't know anyone who returned to live with their parents or blended families for the prepared dinners, laundry service, and free cable. I could not have born the angst of retreating to that nest, but given the economy and the amenities, I'll bet it's looking a lot more attractive these days.

During my four years in an academic cocoon, I spent 40 hours a week in the college pub, and fewer than 10 in a classroom. I spent close to 60 hours a week in my dorm room, whether sleeping, studying or doing something more entertaining. Toss in hours spent primping, gossiping, flirting, and in hysterics, and you've just about captured my college years.

My memories of those long-ago years reflect the time spent in each area. I wasn't out to save the world, master six disciplines and come out ready to fall into coffee-achiever parents' concept of what a life should be.

My parents, I belatedly realize, let me make my own discoveries, my own mistakes. They would comfort me if I cried, but they did not assume, not being overly invested hoverers, that they were at fault. In the long run, I think that served me best.

Friends who are parents remind me we are living in different times, even those who have come late to the parental party. Nothing is as safe as it once was, and, given that my home was Wonderland in the days of "Ford to New York: Drop Dead," the safely gap has grown into a chasm.

It is one I am grateful to be of an age that I didn't fall in.

The printer ate my telephone cord...

2008-04-02T20:29:00.003-04:00

...and other tales of urban life.

The weirdness began before Mexico. The No Exit personae were just one stop in the strange confluence of events that has been my life of late. (Hell is other people.)

It may have started the day the telephone cord inadvertently fell into the ink-jet printer, swallowed whole permanently. Bye-bye phone cord. Bye-bye printer. Hello Staples? What do you have in the way of new all-in-one-machines?

Print color documents, fax, scan, copy, enlarge, reduce, read memory cards, tap-dance, what have you. All the machine fails to do is Windows.

It does VISTA. I do not. Note to self: get XP drivers. Download from Web site?

When I packed for Mexico, I could not find my suntan lotion. I had the car service driver stop at the local 24-hour chain drug store at 5 am so I could pick some up en route to the airport. You don't want to know who else shops at that hour. I didn't.

What else? In my absence during the No Exit experience, I have a house guest arrive. My best friend from grad school is in town from Switzerland, where she has emigrated with her second husband.

America is on sale, and she has the empty suitcases to prove it. She is awake when my housekeeper, who is from Poland, enters. While I am sleeping, they discuss their respective situations as immigrants.

It is not, I admit, a coincidence that occurred to me, that they share emigree status.

Later in the day, after my guest leaves, the infant downstairs starts crying. I put on the Rolling Stones to muffle the noise. I dance to Satisfaction. CC, my best friend, is chez moi, her dog in tow. Shamrock barks to show her annoyance at the baby. The Visiting Dog Service of New York has arrived.

My one-bedroom apartment has no place for a baby except a walk-in closet. The couple downstairs, whose layout is identical to mine, failed to receive the memo informing them that the time to move out is between the conception and the delivery.

They complained once of noise from my apartment. I suggested the doorman read them the riot act, and they take it up with their landlord. They aren't supposed to be able to rent in this building anyway.

The Visiting Dog Service will return as needed. CC will teach Shamrock to stop barking when downstairs teaches their child to stop crying. Or when they move the the kid into their bedroom. It (gender undetermined) lives in the dining area, where I have my office. The wailing makes it hard to concentrate.

I am unreasonable, but not completely so: dining areas are for meals and entertainment, not for infants' slumber. Bedrooms have windows and closets, neither of which is included in the layout for this apartment's dining area.

By Wonderland city code definition, a "room" has windows; an "area" that contains them is rare. The floor plans don't call the dining area a slumber nook.

Just as I never enjoyed my upstairs neighbors' domestic disputes, I do not enjoy the downstairs child. Had I wanted to marry or reproduce, I would have. Neither experience is one I need to have vicariously. Years ago, had there been one more thud from upstairs, I was ready to call 911, fearing spousal abuse.

I set up the new all-in-one and realize the sole purpose of the fax machine. It's is for CC to send prescriptions to her pharmacy in Paris and me to do the same with mine a block from here. Without our meds, we wouldn't need it.

Then came the bizarre phone message: in my line of work, I have had clients ask me to be their executor, or a trustee in their wills. Depending on the circumstances, I may agree. Today, a stranger from upstate left a message: would I consider being a trustee if he and his wife died? I am not sure what to say when I return the call.

Do I start with, are you out of your mind? Or, are you terminal? I have no idea who this person is, much less whether I will still be working when his need for a trustee arises. Or why he would want to entrust his finances to a stranger. This is not where I would begin the conversation.

Where would I begin? With the digested cord? VISTA? The 5 am lotion stop? No Exit? The emigrees? The Visiting Dog Service? The dining room child? The fax discovery? The trustee request?

This week an expose of my prep school has made the cover story of Wonderland magazine, much to my amusement, following the Spitzer denouement on its cover two weeks ago.

One class ahead of me, like most of my fellow graduates, he was filled with the arrogance and hubris imparted with the diploma. I suspect, too, that he never got laid during his days there. That strikes me as a reasonable explanation for his choice of paid companionship.

Where will it stop? Please: someone, anyone, a clue?

La vida loca

2008-03-26T23:09:00.005-04:00

I have come, again, to Mexico.

This time, I am sharing a hillside villa overlooking the Pacific.

My fellow travelers are a retired professor and his French wife, newlyweds en route to a stint as house guests in the U.S.; a retired artist, who lives downtown in Soho, age 80; a 70-ish Englishwoman with U.S. citizenship who is a legal assistant in the Connecticut countryside; and a whiz-bang management consultant in her 40s who thinks traveling for a four-month stint to work in Atlanta is a good time.

What we have in common is our absent hostess: my travel companion from Africa and Eastern Europe, who was felled by arythemia last week and forced to stay near her doctor in New York. If she were here, the villa might take on another, friendlier tone.

The French woman has taken charge of the kitchen and is starving us to death under the guise of feeding us healthy food: she is the kind of French housewife who can look in a bare cupboard and a refrigerator containing leftovers I would have thrown out, then produce what she calls a meal.

Last night she used carrots, ginger, and potatoes to make a soup, which she deemed "dinner." Personally, I go for more calories and a protein, a starch, a vegetable, perhaps something chocolate for dessert.

Nutritionally, we don't see eye to eye. She was miffed when I made grilled cheese for lunch in lieu of her salade Nicoise, made of leftover mahi-mahi added to tomatoes, peppers, hard boiled egg, and brown rice. That was her idea of a big, "heavy" meal. Another main meal consisted of two mangy pieces of cooked chicken with reheated spaghetti.

Neither combination fits my definition of a snack, let alone a meal, much less something to replicate an American dinner.

The management consultant and the Englishwoman spent an hour yesterday walking the beach, picking up five bags of trash. I suppose it gives them a goal, a plan. Today, they went to a time-share presentation. (Having already bought a time-share in a fit of middle-aged, menopausal impulse, I didn't care to join them on their excursion.)

Besides, the consultant was here last year: she and I inhabit different worlds, and without our hostess, she barely makes an effort to speak to me. Hey, I'm trying, but our first point of departure is that she wears two- to- three-inch heels as a matter of preference, and I am a flat-shoe person. This in itself separates us in a way I hadn't anticipated.

The whiz-bang consultant has glommed onto the Englishwoman and instead of going out to dinner in town at the two restaurants where she had originally invited us to join her, she has lunched at both with the Englishwoman, leaving me here with French soup. I am growing increasingly less enamored of her presence. Passive-aggressive for $100, anyone?

The entire crew think it odd that I don't drink, even with the explanation that I am on a new medication, and I don't care to experiment. (Finally, tremor-stopping pills that work!) They think it odder, and more ominous, that I smoke cigarettes, no matter how few, and that I am happy to do so.

They get up at 6 am, where as I am content to start the day at 9:30 or so. The only reason I don't consider 9:30 the middle of the night is that we are on Pacific time, 3 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight. (In my real world, this 9:30 would be 12:30.)

Am I stranded on a Mexican version of Gilligan's Island? If so, I am either the ingenue or the movie star. I don't have a WASPy husband at hand, but I do have a different life than the rest of this entourage. I make different demands.

I do not care if we waste electricity my friend the villa owner has already paid for, not when our landscape would be pure desert were it not for an overabundance of water desalination plants to keep terra firma green. Why should we try to save water ore electricity when they are used in such grand excess all about the grounds?

Call me semi-retired, and I see what I have in common with the elders of this tribe. Call me a working woman, and I have a few traits in common with the younger members. Still, I am neither one nor the other.

I am sure they find me as peculiar as I find them. Sarcasm is not appreciated here, which limits my conversational forays, even as commentary to the evening news we view on CNN International.

Irony is another area in which I find this crew deficient. Too, I am puzzled why one would want to see what's on HBO each evening. The conversation lags. Time-share life grows in surreality.

Next year, regardless of my friend's health and love for this mountainside villa, I shall decline her invitation. She has hundreds of friends, gathered over the years, and I don't think it occurred to her how this particular mix would play out, what alliances would form, what would leave me by the wayside.

Again, we are part of an English-speaking compound. Without our town trips, we could be in Any Resort, USA, while we struggle to deal with a staff that speaks a language not our own. I did finally get to use more of my limited Spanish vocabulary while I held up the bed linens to demonstrate. Limpea means "to clean." I do not know the words for "change the sheets."

I managed to convey to the maid which beds needed to be changed, not without feeling victorious that the communication succeeded. Si necessito, por favor, and quisiera (I would like) constitute the other relevant phrases I know. My French is coming back to me in leaps and bounds, not that it is any help aqui.

While I am happy to be away from Wonderland for 10 days, I cannot help thinking that the next time I depart, I want to arrive in a location that is what it is, not an American enclave outside of the U.S.

If Alice leaves Wonderland, she wants to be damn sure she has left the building.

The Wonder Years are over

2008-03-16T14:06:00.006-04:00

The day I sought medical help for my blurring eyes, I also saw my new internist. (There is little consistency in that part of my health care that involves insurance: every few years, I have to seek another gatekeeper to the magic kingdom.)

Body examined, hearing test performed, blood taken -- an ordinary annual check-up. This one, however, had a twist. Three pages of results, with everything from cholesterol to thyroid to liver enzymes to reproductive hormones tested, and, with a word, the world changes.

It seems I have reached menopause.

The tale of My Reproductive Years has effectively ended. My eggs have called it a day. I am somehow proud that I escaped those 35 years without an abortion, particularly because those years included some far from my finest.

My Reproductive Years completely coincided with the years abortion was legal: Roe v. Wade came into effect in December 1973, shortly before I got my period. The right to choose, as it's now called, is under grave scrutiny in the current administration, now that I am fertile no longer. It is a curious sociological serendipity.

(Would anyone on eBay care to buy Tampax by the hundred? I am considerably better stocked in the feminine hygiene department than I need to be. I would consider a trade, for a gift certificate for the expensive underwear I never wore when I knew it would be prone to getting stained.

That is one good thing: I don't have to wear cheap underwear purchased at the drugstore anymore. Say good-bye to Hanes; au revoir to Fruit of the Loom. From now on, I can wear more precious, pricey imported underwear: hello, Hanro.

Another good thing: the older I got, the less I bothered with birth control, which turned out to be a safe bet. My affairs with women obviated the need; in my affairs with men, I gambled and won.)

I never felt becoming a mother was part of my destiny. Any maternal urge I may have had has been absorbed in the parenting of my parents: when I was in my 20s, my dad needed parenting. These days, I feel my mother is a 71-year-old child, a naive in the so-called real world.

She doesn't know how, and won't learn, how to deal with a computer. I manage her money, make all her travel reservations, send and receive email on her behalf. She is disinterested in politics and much that is personal. In fact, she has appointed me to the role of grandmother where I am actually Kayanna's aunt.

I never experienced a need for a child of my own. Actually, I couldn't imagine inflicting my gene pool on another human being. A child with tendencies to depression, migraine, and addiction would replicate the child I was, and no one should have to feel that bad for reasons that escape her.

But I digress: at 47, I still consider myself young. Menopause makes me reconsider where exactly my place in the world is. While I am grateful not to be a teenager, or a girl of 30, I choke on the idea I am middle-aged.

The middle-aged are grown-ups: they have careers; they have families; they have responsibilities. I wouldn't call my work a career; my family is more by friends than my blood relatives, and, since I am single, I am relatively free of responsibilities.

When my mother was 47, both of her children had been launched: one had graduated from college; the other, from high school, she had yet to earn a paycheck, and she was married. My father, at 52, owned his own company and supported a family in a style to which we, alas, were accustomed. Clearly the resemblance is lacking.

Yet I have shown much maternal instinct, acted as parent to my parents, who rarely acted as one might expect given the roles each theoretically had.

When I got out of school, my father was reliving his adolescence. While our boat was docked, he would get high with my brother, and each confided in me, with the request that I not tell my mother. When I was in college and had a friend come to stay at my home, my dad supplied her with pot.

The year my favorite grandmother -- my father's mother -- was dying, my father came to my apartment one day after a hospital visit and asked, "Can I have a joint?" I replied, "Sorry. Wrong offspring." The generations were twisted: I was the responsible one and my dad the adolescent. I was in charge of paying my grandmother's nurses, because my father couldn't bring himself to do so.

I was the one preaching "just say no," and I'm a far cry from Nancy Reagan. In college, my Quaalude dealer took personal checks, and so did all the coke dealers. I knew my way around drugs -- for my generation.

Then came visiting my dad in rehab: in 1985, Hallmark made no greeting cards to mark the occasion. I remember the building was stone, and large, and on the Hudson River, where the sunset was beautiful. My father's room resembled a dorm room in size and decoration. What I felt, I don't know.

It was a weird twist on camp visiting days. Emotionally, I disconnected; to this day, I don't think I've processed that episode. The visuals are strong, the context a blank.

So it's not as if I haven't experienced parental-type care-taking. It's just that I've done it with the generation above mine, not the one below it.

Our society makes a huge fuss over girls starting to menstruate: I've never known a mother not to explain the process to her daughter. There's sex education in school. Some cultures celebrate the day a girl "becomes a woman."

What about the day the hormone tests say, we've had enough. Throw out the tampons. Time to research hormone replacement therapy. Have a bone density test. Take calcium and Fosomex to keep yourself from crumbling. Does this change the kind of woman you are? Do you celebrate or mourn?

For my part, I went straight from the doctor's to visit The Boy Next Door, whom I have known since I was 22 and he was 35. We've been having an on-again, off-again affair for 7 years or so, and like me, he's not tied up 9 to 5. These days the affair is on again. In The Boy Next Door's eyes, I will always be 22; in mine, he is 35. We are young and in amazing physical shape.

A former tri-athlete, he's still in incredible shape, while I am just starting a routine that involves weight-bearing exercise. Neither of us had much interest in My Reproductive Years. Still, it feels weird to me that they are gone, and I missed (probably due to my meds) any signs of their passing.

Tremble and blur

2008-03-05T22:09:00.003-05:00

My hands have been stuttering wildly these past few days. Sure, I was used to the occasional med-related hand tremor, but waking up in a full-body tremor that won't go away....not so much. If I had a hard time focusing before, not being able to hold a pen and read my own writing hasn't helped.

The neurologist today said, since my meds haven't changed in at least 6 months, that the tremor was "idiopathic." That's doctor-ese for, "fucked-if-we-know." At least he was impressed by my vast pharmaceutical knowledge. (Hmmm: I take the meds; I'm going to be damn sure someone does her homework about them, since I've had to explain one combination twice in one week.)

My corneas are irritated, so everything I see is through a haze. At first, I was scared I was going blind, for no conceivable reason. Then I went to the opthamologist, got a diagnosis, and eye drops. Why did this happen? Once again, fucked if we know.

Makes me wonder what the hell they do teach in med school. Why is it considered so challenging to be admitted? After four years of school, plus years of residency, you're not going to ever diagnose any ailment I have and be able to determine its origin. I can play doctor without having had to stay awake in a hospital helping sick people for a 36-hour shift. Pass me the prescription pad, please.

You haven't lived until you've tried to put drops in your eyes when your hands won't stay still.

It has been one hell of a week chez Alice.

10 days in customer "care" hell

2008-02-28T21:41:00.001-05:00

Let me be brief here: I called HP tech support, and under their guidance, I blew up my laptop. It was having problems connecting to the Internet, but it was, until this phone call, working. The tech guy said, press f8 and control, or something to that effect, and the laptop was dead. Gotta love that outsourcing.

Six repeat-your-serial-number-and-all-personal-data (short of the results of my last Pap test) later calls and 2 sets of disks later, after about 10 emails and promises made and not kept, and a "case manager" who telephoned me and made the mistake of giving me his name and telephone number, with an extension, but oddly enough, no email address, I got the laptop to work again.

As for HP and its "tech support" system, caveat emptor.

Here and there...

2008-02-18T14:01:00.005-05:00

The day after I returned from Mexico, The Misanthrope from Toner Mishap was in Wonderland, and we had a lovely dinner together -- six hours worth of talking, and plenty more to say. He is the first blogger I've met in real life who wasn't someone I knew prior to my blogging days. I hope he's not the last.

We seemed to share the same outlook on life, politics, sex, relationships, the media, and so on. The story of his day in court hit new highs in accounts of absurdity in government. He served as a juror, and wrote about it afterward. He was the foreperson of the jury, a job I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Although in Law & Order and all the other court TV shows, the foreperson is not addressed by name when issuing the verdict, he was. So the defendant, found guilty of a major felony, knows by name one of the people who judged him a criminal.

It hardly seems fair that The Misanthrope was subsequently called into court for writing in his blog about the way the justice system seems to have derailed. (Translation: expediency is not government's middle name, since it's civil service, you would have to go postal to get fired.) Apparently one of the alternate jurors found his blog and duly reported it to some official who had too much time on his hands.

Seems to me the judge owed him an apology and perhaps protection for having used The Misanthrope's name aloud in the courtroom while the defendant was present. Instead, he got a lecture.

The right to free speech doesn't apply when you're a juror. Thanks a lot, Big Brother. Ironic, isn't it? Reminds me of the husband of a former friend. He served in the Navy and was fighting for a Constitution that didn't apply to him. (Then there was the mug he gave me: "Navy: Earth Friendly." Sure, as friendly as a nuclear submarine could get.)

There's a reason why I blog as alice, uptown, and the players in my blog go by the noms-de-blog nicknames I've given them. That reason is privacy. Inasmuch as it is possible to separate the public from the private (okay, the right to privacy died at the end of the 20th century), I would never name online my lovers, my friends, the people I love and cherish.

Kayanna, my niece, is one exception. Since she just turned one year old, and her parents don't read my blog, and you don't know who alice is (don't try the phone book: alice, uptown has an unlisted number), there's enough distance that I can tell you who she is. Perhaps when she's older, I will give her a nom-de-blog for her privacy.

Migraine days, migraine nights

Over at The Daily Headache the question has been posed: is there a migraine personality per se? Offhand, I would disagree. I’ve known too many people with migraines and incredibly disparate personalities to agree with that. What we do share is a genetic predisposition to migraine, which, like depression, is related to how we process serotonin, a neurotransmitter.

Serotonin processing is also related to depression, another disease I no longer question. I’ve stopped asking “why,” and, when I have a major depressive episode, I just want it to go away, and I don’t care how, just don’t make me talk about it again. I have a chemical imbalance, period.

Joan Didion wrote an essay in The White Album called “In Bed,” about her migraine experiences c. 1968. I read it years ago, and it still resonates for me, particularly the part about major stress not correlating with her headaches. For me, it is relaxing that brings on those particular synaptic lapses.

Migraines are part and parcel of my life: after 30 years, I don’t care “why.” Instead, I look to my meds to see how fast I can staunch the pain. Those Imitrex commercials are full of shit. Give me those old-time opiates any day, thankyouverymuch. Some are available over-the-counter in Mexico.

(Alice knows where to obtain different drugs in many parts of the world. She could give you the Cook's tour of where to find relief from pain, infection, stomach upset, cough, allergies, etc., on five continents.) This would be one reason why people ask alice about all things pharmaceutical.

I was diagnosed with migraine at age 18 or so, and can recite chapter and verse all the so-called medical breakthroughs in the past 30 years. I’ve tried the latest and greatest, and not only are the newer drugs expensive, they don’t work at all for me. When I have a migraine, I want the old-fashioned tried and true, what's proven to work for me, regardless of any potentially addictive effects. It’s far too late in the game for me to care.

Cure my pain, and let’s be done with it. Forget about my personality: my head hurts; I can’t move; I get sensitive to light, sound, and scents; and the little man with the big hammer behind my right eye is having way too much fun. If I can’t kill him, at least I can knock him out long enough to make it through the night.

Things are slow, down in Mexico

2008-02-17T23:34:00.002-05:00

I may well have been in the land of los americanos and felt overwhelmed by a need to be with people who have a different -- to be precise, one more like my own -- sensibility than I found. Yet according to the halting Spanglish conversations I had with the waiters on the beach, los Mexicanos are having a queasy trickle-down feeling about their own economy in 2008.

(Note to self: "trickle-down" added to vocab during Reagan administration. That would be the sum total of progress during those eight years: one sliver of enrichment to my vocabulary, at a cost to others I cannot calculate.)

If you hadn't caught the headlines that the U.S. economy seems to be tanking, any of the Mexican staff at the timeshare could have told you. Business was way, way off. Admittedly, I didn't see much beach or pool traffic, nor were the restaurants in town full.

My initial assessment was I'd caught an early-February lull in the tourist season. Granted, I'd never seen one in the Caribbean, but who knew about Mexico?

Alice considers the weather in Wonderland and on the East Coast: if it's winter, it's cold and dark. The middle of the country, you may have gathered, is not a locale to which she gives much thought. But yes, it's dark and snowy -- and colder than here, now that you mention it.

Since few mid-westerners tend to frequent the Caribbean in Alice's experience (from Haiti to St. Barts, with a dozen islands in between), and she is pretty sure most people dislike the freezing, daylight-deprived days as much as she does, it stands to reason that those who can must have some warm destination in mind. Yes, dear: Mexico for the Midwest; Hawaii for the West Coast.

Not until the owners' party did Alice ever met anyone from North Dakota. (That reminds her: last year in Cabos, she met people from Wyoming, another geographic spot that has been hidden from Alice's horizons.)

Then I pondered: if the Mexican economy depends for its well-being on things buzzing along in the U.S., it stands to reason that our tanking economy would topple down Mexico's, and that more Mexicans would want to emigrate here for jobs that don't exist. Catch-22?

My most fluent Spanish sentence remains: La via del train subterrano es peligroso. Translation? Subway tracks are dangerous. Not that it matters to anyone at the tip of Baja California, Mexico. It's just what I know how to say.

And bodega? I thought that was Spanish for small grocery and cigarette store, as that's its definition in Wonderland. No, it means warehouse. Whoops.

At the end of the world

2008-02-07T19:57:00.003-05:00

Baja California has thousands of unspoiled, undeveloped, straight-from-heaven miles of land, acres of untouched beaches and shorelines. Timeshare territory, however, doesn't fit into that category. At the tip of the peninsula, 1000+ miles south of the U.S. border, Alice has stumbled upon – and bought into – a peculiar American enclave.

It's an odd bit of the U.S. imported into Mexico You are a visitor to a country within a country. No getting around it, timeshare owners are turistas. Any place that the tap water has been purified, rendering bottled water unnecessary, is a spot for capital-A Americans.

Cabos San Lucas may call itself “the end of the world,” where desert meets mountain and El Arco marks the end of the landmass, but in Alice’s immediate vicinity, it is hard to tell, difficult to feel the implications of geography and language, nearly impossible to sense she is abroad. She gets the U.S. primary results from CNN.

It is a long way from her telephone-less, kerosene-lit childhood in Haiti, an island with no tourist infrastructure -- where few Americans ventured, where Alice spent 20+ years with no TV and limited electricity.

The "owners' party" feels like a freshman-year college mixer. The opening questions differ slightly. What's your name? your hometown? How many weeks a year do you come here; how many years have you had this unit? What restaurants do you like in town? Done any whale watching?

A mariachi band plays Mexican songs recognizable to the American ear. There are contests for owners to humiliate themselves dancing or imitating a Mexican yell in exchange for a bottle of tequila or a Mexican wool blanket.

No one asks what you plan to major in, and most owners have reached the place in the workforce to which Alice aspires: retired.

Some cultural differences are noticeable: the resort is run Mexican-style, despite the players speaking English. The P.R. person, the sales people, the concierge, the hospitality department, and the front desk are all separate fiefdoms. The idea of an American-style meeting or memo explaining how the departments and the whole enterprise could be coordinated would never be issued.

It is one way to know Alice has left Wonderland. Another is the pelican landing in the swimming pool, something that would never occur in over-chlorinated America. The pelican swam around, took his time before taking flight and seemed no worse for the wear. The third is that the timeshare’s English-speaking doctor makes the equivalent of house calls for $100 U.S. This is startling and useful for Alice’s friend.

For Alice, not so much: the doctor wouldn’t write her a prescription for her U.S. migraine meds, and instead offered something Alice had never heard of, at $4 a pill. Alice sticks to over-the-counter muscle relaxants for which she would need a script at home. She prefers to know precisely what drugs she’s taking.

Alice knows of less touristy locales to explore: San Jose del Cabos, Todos Santos, La Paz. To see those as a traveler, she has belatedly discovered, you need some rudimentary Spanish, a map, perhaps a guidebook and, most definitely, the guts to drive a rental car on bumpy Mexican highways. Perhaps next year, if Alice’s driving skills improve, or if she brings friends better equipped to get behind the wheel.

Mexican roads are better than those in Haiti, home of Alice’s beloved palapas-like chacoons. They are closer to first world streets than those in undeveloped countries. Yet the asphalt is not nearly as smooth as one might expect, given the general emphasis on keeping los turistas americanos from realizing they are not in Kansas.

Last week she and her friend mistakenly took an English-speaking tour of San Jose. The guide glossed over the art galleries, churches, and historic sites they wanted to see, in favor of attempting to make los Americanos do their part to enrich the local economy (and probably his relatives in particular). The guide took them to the Mexican fire opal store, where he hoped his group would drop muchos, muchos pesos.

With Alice, he didn’t stand a chance. She has had guided “tours” of pearl, enamelware, and rug “factories” in places like China, and not only did the fire-opal merchant’s shop tour seem identical to the pearl and other factory “tours” she had experienced, but the sales methods were dead ringers for ones she has previously ignored.

Alice wasn’t buying, not in San Jose del Cabo, not anywhere. Alice has sojourned in and traveled to too many continents to consider herself an ordinary turista. No “bargaining” for her, thankyouverymuch.

Alice practices her minimal Spanish with the housekeeper, and in exchange, teaches her new words in English. It is frustrating: while Alice can converse almost fluently in French, it is a distant enough relation of Spanish that it doesn’t translate. Her Spanish-English dictionary doesn't contain the words she needs.

For the party, Alice dresses the part of an owner, runs through the standard questions, and realizes what she forgot when purchasing her two weeks at the end of the world: that is, she is not an American. Alice lives in Wonderland; she is a native New Yorker. What’s more, she is a yellow-dog Democrat.

Her birthright imprinted on her the sense to consider everything but the coasts is fly-over country, filled with towns she will visit on business or to see friends, but otherwise avoid. The only time Alice has passed through Texas has been to change planes. Given the Texan owners she met, she plans to keep it that way.

Mainstream American culture is too bizarre to contemplate: Alice is single, childless, and lives in a city most owners will never visit. The owners’ party has too damn many gun-toting, anti-abortion, warmongering Republicans present for her comfort. Thankfully, the next day she meets some New Yorkers, upstaters though they may be; some Democrats from California, and liberals from Minnesota.

It occurs to Alice that in her adult life, she has knowingly had only two Republican friends, and she no longer speaks to either of them. After the Shrub slid into office, neither was sufficiently embarrassed to admit what an imbecile occupied the White House. Both former friends have a considerably more mainstream take on what life “should” be than what Alice’s life was or would become. Both are car-dependent suburbanites.

Save for large cities on both coasts plus Chicago, Alice sees the U.S. as a place with favorable currency exchange rates and peculiar customs, all of which involve driving to the mall and countless visits to Wal-Mart. Some involve parties at which Velveeta is the cheese product of choice, and "fine wine" has a screw-off cap, vs. cheap wine from a box.

It is places like Tiny Town, Sleepy Southern state, where the brother and family live. He telephones from the car, the supermarket, or Wal-Mart, never from his home. The South has manners that scare Alice almost to death.

In Wonderland, Alice uses public transportation, and the only call she makes from a supermarket is to ask whether more purchases are requested. Wonderland is blessedly Mart-Mart-less, in Alice's neighborhood where real estate prices make the cost of entry prohibitive to Major Marts, and the zoning laws have been created to keep Mart-Marts, though not 40-story condos, at bay.

It is bad enough that Wonderland has been deluged by local chains, like Duane Reade, a ubiquitous lousy drugstore, and national ones -- high-end cosmetic and mid-range chain clothing and lingerie stores like Origins, Banana Republic, and Victoria’s Secret. The independent bookstores have been eaten by Barnes & Noble; the local leather goods stores pounced on by Coach; the candy stores by Godiva.

There is scarcely a movie theater left that is not a conglomerate-owned multiplex. Individual hardware stores in Alice's neighborhood have been replaced by a monolith known as (Un)Gracious Homes, now competing with Home Depot. Home Depot is situated in the Bloomberg building, which holds the eponymous mayor's business. One of his goals seems to be making Wonderland less so.

Back at the end of the world, Alice tried to make conversation at the owners' party and realizes the fatal flaw in her attempt to amortize trips to warmer climes: in a hotel, guests have varied nationalities, interests, and stories. On timeshare turf, everyone is American, and most, it seems, are conservative.

Too late: Alice should have realized the basic timeshare owner requires no surprises in vacation destinations, whereas Alice is accustomed to and has spent years seeking them. It is only in the communal hot tub that Alice meets Democrats, people with whom Alice shares some basic social values and with whom she can keep up her end of the conversation without apoplexy.

She even gets to play Scrabble and meet people to join on a sunset cruise. The sunsets, too, remind Alice of her younger days in Haiti, albeit without the rum. Tequila is its Mexican equivalent.

A Brit Alice knows refers to Wonderland as "an island off the coast of the U.S." He is correct, and, common language aside, at the timeshare owners' party, Alice was in the country of Americans completely alien to her: Republicans.

Subsequently she has met people who did not come out for the free margaritas and guacamole, those who were on Alice's team on Super Tuesday. She suspects they are a minority.

It is strange to contemplate how many winter weeks Alice has purchased in pseudo-Mexico. All she can tell you is, the welcome mat is open. Any winter you choose, Alice's casa es su casa.

Alice remembers Internet cafes of the past

2008-02-04T20:27:00.005-05:00

It's been 10 years since Alice has bolted into a town to connect with the world at an Internet cafe. Then, she was at a writer's colony in Massachusetts, racing in her rental car over 40 miles of a winding, hilly, two-lane road.

In Mexico this week, Alice saunters into the cafe calmly. She isn't expecting any salacious, lavicious communications these days.

Why the urgency then? She was conducting an affair -- though, since Alice is and was single, did it qualify as such? She had made no promises, taken no vows. The Married Man, on the other hand.... was philandering his hobby? An entertaining diversion from suburban less-than-wedded-bliss, kept intact because he loved his children and hated to cook?

Alice admits to some twinges of guilt, for she did know -- and had gotten along famously -- with TMM's wife years before. If TMM's wife hadn't phoned Alice a lot worse for the wine when her husband was out partying with the boys, there might have been more guilt. At the time, not so much.

Ten years ago, Alice needed those town trips to check email, flirt in cyberspace with the TMM, who had instigated the affair while Alice was staying with his family. Sure, she had hesitated. Stop making passes at me, she said. I'm in your son's bunk bed while your wife is in your bed, passed out from last night's drinking. What are you thinking? (No verbal answer.)

She did not protest too much to find herself having amazing sex with TMM in her favorite Wonderland venue for a clandestine rendez-vous, a hotel. The room overlooked one of the city's only private parks in a lovely residential area three miles south of chez Alice, convenient to Grand Central Station for TMM.

With its dark bar, residential location, and old-fashioned separate taps for hot and cold water, the hotel was a quaint landmark from another era. It's long gone now, purchased and demolished to make way for another overpriced, over-amenitied condo project selling for $2,000 per square foot or so.

Alice broke off the affair -- and has steered clear of married men and women in matters of the heart (or body) ever since. TMM taught her a lesson, one known to most single women of a certain age: TMM was out for himself, and Alice a convenience.

Though all she wanted was sex and some laughter -- if she had wanted to be a wife, she would have sought out that slot, say 20 years ago -- six weeks with TMM re-enforced the fact that Alice lacks the emotional filter required to remain superficial. She starts to take matters seriously -- and serious is where the single and the married part ways.

La vida es bueno en Cabos San Lucas

2008-02-01T20:59:00.000-05:00

Life is good here. It's sunny, laid back, not crowded, and the people are extremely pleasant. I'm not besieged with maternal phone calls.

Bonuses are, I get to ignore the New York State primary election, with Hillary and Obama leaving vote-for-me messages on my answering machine, not to mention the testosterone-fest of Superbowl Sunday.

I'm with a friend for a week, then I'll be here a week by myself. Note to self: learning how to communicate in Spanish was a resonable New Year's Resolution. Alas, I did not achieve it, so I'm glad to be with someone who can utter sentences in Spanish. My default language is French -- and all of that is flooding my brain.

Espanol? Not so much. Not yet. Perhaps next week I'll conjugate verbs, after my friend, who has German, Russian, and some recently reaquired Spanish under her belt, leaves me to my own devices.

We have great plans, places to go, art to see, but most likely, we will stay here by the pool or under the palapas, the Mexican version of Haitian chacoons -- thatched hut roofs made of sisal or banana leaves that shield us from the sun.

It is, I realize, the palapas that attracted me most, attached themselves to my soul when I was here last year, that made me think, this is like the Carribean I knew as a child, the one where my family was intact, where Christmases were merry.

I am older now, and will probably never see another chacoon in my life -- the Haiti I knew has vanished, with all the political upheavals, my father gone (17 years as of last week), all my family's ex-pat friends dead or relocated to safer climes. I have no more ties there, so I am making a Haiti for myself, one for this century.

This one is a land with electricity, telephone, cable TV, hot and cold running water, enough water pressure for a jacuzzi, but still: a beach where, at night, the stars shine through clear skies; I can hear the ocean from my bed; and all we do is eat, drink, play cards and backgammon. We sleep as soundly as children. It is Alice's version of a winter Wonderland.

Y'all come back now, ma'am...

2008-01-18T22:47:00.001-05:00

Five days in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, where brother (the bro), sister-in-law, (A), and niece, Kayanna, reside. 120 hours with my mother, including hours of one-on-one transit and ho-motel time. (119.5 hours too many for my nervous system.)

We went to celebrate Kayanna's first birthday, and to meet the relatives on A's side. (While the bro's previous wives never earned the title of sister-in-law, A is the mother of my niece, so regardless of what happens to his marriage, which I hope is stable and lasting (previous evidence to the contrary) she will always be related to me, always have a special place in my heart for making me Aunt Alice.

Fortunately it was a big party, first birthdays being more of a celebration that the parents survived a year than that the child did, so we didn't chat much with A's relatives, mostly nodded and stayed on the level of introductions. Surprisingly, my mother didn't drink until after Kayanna's Tinkerbelle-themed fete was over.

(We must thing alike, A and I. Knowing nothing about the party's theme, I had brought Kayanna the perfect complement: a DVD of Peter Pan.)

My niece is perfect: her temperament is serene; she has huge blue eyes, fine blonde hair, incredibly soft and unmarred skin, and the smile of an angel. Sure, I am biased, but my next-door neighbor in Wonderland (with no vested interest) says if Kayanna lived in Wonderland, she would make a great baby model, on the cover of American Baby or its current equivalent, as her daughter was.

Tiny Town is not much to write home (or here) about except for a few details. Unless hearing a Japanese chef with a Southern accent counts for racial diversity, Tiny Town is in the clear on that account. I did, however, notice upcoming observances for Martin Luther King Day, so perhaps the town, all 50,000, did get the integration memo.

It is not cosmopolitan by any stretch of the imagination. The inhabitants are, per Southern custom, exceedingly nice and polite. Shockingly polite to those -- and apparently I am one -- whom they perceive as their elders. Several of the guests at the birthday party said, "yes, ma'am" to questions I posed. Ma'am? Moi?

I'm not sure how long my Yankee mouth and I would last there, but, as Scarlett said, "tomorrow will be another day."

And I shall return (sans mother), to dote again.

The Human Condition

2008-01-12T19:04:00.000-05:00

I haven't gone philosophical and read Hannah Arendt's book, just the reviews on Amazon, which tell me that my version is much simpler and easier to apply to every day life.

On an individual level, there are two states of being: better and worse.

If you happen to find yourself in neither category but instead would describe your condition as "okay to good" on one hand or "heinous or despairing" on the other hand, then I'm interested in hearing from anyone who knows what meds will induce the "okay to good" reaction for me and for my friends' lives. Great would be pushing it. Say "fabulous," and I will think you are full of shit.

Despair, I know well, up close and personal. It's when my psychopharm cocktail acts like expired vitamins, for one thing. I suspect it's also the state of many people living under truly hideous conditions, but that definition has outward measures, whereas inner despair flies into situations that would look marvelous to someone who is not "worse."

Heinous describes conditions at Guantanamo Bay or Iraq or any other war-torn, poverty-stricken, fascist-controlled (that includes the U.S., where Big Brother made sure privacy was dead and buried prior to the end of the 20th century) country that springs to mind.

When you're better or worse as a general condition, you're more likely to get to heinous or despairing than to great or fabulous.

Perhaps this doesn't make sense to you. If so, I suspect your are a psychopharmacological virgin, that is to say, one to whom no psychiatric drugs have ever been prescribed. Yes, for some, recreational drugs are the limit. I would have put myself in this category when I was 18 and my Quaalude dealer took checks.

But then the migraines began in earnest and the blackening depression was finally recognized. Voila: Sansert, your link to migraine free days and to LCD, from which it differs by one molecule. In some Swiss lab, LCD was synthesized just prior to Sansert.

The original thought was that LCD would cure migraines. Evidently, not so much -- though the drug's ability as a hallucinogenic trigger is not to be disputed. Then again, Sansert gets high marks as a hallucinogen as well. At 19, no one thought to issue that warning to me.

Eventually, neurologists stopped prescribing Sansert, the one antimigraine drug that worked, due to the severe, extensive and permanent nature of its side effects. It's also not the drug for the serotonin impaired, which covers most of us whose neurotransmitters need to take their orders from the better-living-through-chemistry folks.

For that, welcome to the world of antidepressants. Prior to the Prozac revolution in 1987, the AD drugs all had serious cautionary warnings (one type were the MAOIs: many food did not mix with this drug compound, i.e., aged cheese, beer, bacon and red wine. Ingest any of these or related foods, those magical nutrients would bring on a stroke or death).

The other type were the tricyclic ADs. Gain 7% of your body weight in a month, become incessantly dehydrated and continue to cry daily as before. Not highly recommended, but some folks still take them for nerve pain. Personally, my nervous system's full-body issues didn't respond. My leg, for example, wasn't depressed; it just hurt.

Living with depression is like living behind a mirror: you see all the people in the world, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrifying. However, you don't react at all -- a condition known as "lack of affect," or you react badly.

I'm not going to list the 7 or 10 or how many signs Big Pharma asks one to count to determine whether you are officially "depressed." Let's just leave it as for me, January is a month that consistently falls on the "worse" end of the spectrum, and I find there is no such thing as too much sleep, nor is there much in the way of food that interests me, and my concentration is shot.

I have had a few great afternoons recently: a friend took me through acres of Central Park I'd never seen, and the air smelled of spring, a quality it never possesses four blocks away. Another friend made dinner for me and played backgammon for hours. I am cramming in lessons in Spanish, for the two weeks in February that I will be in Mexico and need to order food, find the bathroom, and ask directions.

Still and all, this month is the anniversary of my father's death, and for that reason alone, despite the joy of my niece's first birthday next week, when Aunt Alice heads to Alabama, I can't imagine a January that will find me in the "better" state of the human condition.

Even the home you hated is gone

2008-01-03T13:19:00.000-05:00

Thomas Wolfe knew what he was talking about. Like it or not -- and I detested it for the 15 years I lived there -- the town where I grew up has no resemblance to the town that currently bears the same name.

The places I lovingly considered home, in Lake Placid and in Haiti, are both gone, one lost to fire, the other to political anarchy. Even Paris, where I lived as a grad student, bit the no-smoking dust, as of yesterday.

The true title of this post should be, what the fuck? However, I'll let The New York Times tell the story, with all italics mine, and bold italics my commentary.
January 3, 2008
White Plains Journal
Urban Success Story, With Hint of Unease for Poorer Residents
By Fernanda Santos
WHITE PLAINS

" The heart of the downtown here spreads out like an oddly shaped T — from west to east for a half-mile along Main Street, and from north to south down a shorter stretch on Mamaroneck Avenue, where new restaurants, pharmacies and wine stores seem to sprout by the day.

"Downtown" White Plains used to consist of 4 blocks of Mamaroneck Ave., with maybe a block on either side of the four avenues that bisected it. Woolworth's, which occupied huge space on that avenue, was where my mother, who worked in a private psych hospital, "took the [looney] 'tunes to town."

There was a deli, several pizzerias, and a Chinese restaurant for your nutritional enjoyment. The Army-Navy store was popular, as was a jeweler specializing in silver, a couple of men's wear shops, Macy's, Sears, two movie theaters, and my favorites, an outpost of Hammacher-Schlemer and several book and record stores.

Our family pharmacy and liquor store were in walking distance of our house, about four miles away from "downtown." We had house accounts there, at our corner deli and the gas station. The only place I saw money exchanged was if my mom went grocery shopping at the supermarket.

My father was a great fan of the house account, and I learned to say "charge it" long before anyone needed a credit card. I suspect he single-handedly kept the before-its-time Gourmet Shop in business.

Even in the 1960s and 1970s, pre-mall days, White Plains was a shopping mecca, with department stores ranging from the now-defunct discount Alexander's to Saks Fifth Avenue, which has since been demolished, to Neiman-Marcus, now linked to an "upscale" mall.

" The steady drone of cars, once an aberration of sorts within the city’s nucleus, is now intrinsic to its fabric. And pedestrians, a rarity after dark just a few years back, stroll around at all times, amid the concrete-and-glass towers that rise like shiny exclamation points into an otherwise barren skyline.

Growing up there, I never saw a building taller than six stories, unless it was federally subsidized housing, and that was plain red brick. There was never a reason to be "downtown" at night. My parents ate out every weekend, and never in White Plains.

In junior high, at night, we hung out in residential parks, sharing bottles of cheap sangria or Boone's Farm strawberry hill country-fresh wine and chain-smoking cigarettes.

" “I like to say that I live in a small city with a big-city vibe,” said Jordan Bachelder, 29, a financial adviser who traded a rental studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan for a one-bedroom condo here in 2004.

I'd say he's delusional. The last time I was in White Plains, in the late 1990s, the vibe was, shop here and get the hell out. This guy is still so far off Broadway that he couldn't sing a show tune to save his life.

"At the time, [early 1990s] the area’s most memorable landmark was the vacant site of a former Macy’s department store, a cavernous hole at the corner of Main and Mamaroneck.

We shopped at Saks, where my mom didn't have to pay for parking, but as teenagers, almost my entire junior high shoplifted at Macy's, where we never went because my mom would rather pay Saks' prices than feed a quarter into the meter elsewhere.

I preferred the higher-end stores, because they had no security in place. Bergdorf Goodman and Brentano's Books were the five-finger discount targets my teenage self focused on.

"Today, downtown is a study in contradictions, a place where brands as popular as Wal-Mart and Target and as exclusive as Trump and Ritz-Carlton occupy prominent spots in a newly developed strip spanning four city blocks.

The Times, late to the story as always, could have made this observation 35 years ago, albeit by citing considerably lesser extremes. Have any of its reporters looked around the neighborhood where they are employed? Or where they live?

You don't have to get on a train, or even take public transit to see that our city, perhaps any true city, is, by definition, a study in contradictions and contrasts.

"It is a place where luxurious condominiums stand near public housing projects that are home to many of the city’s working poor; and where mothers chat in Spanish at a Dunkin’ Donuts, while young professionals tap on laptops in a Starbucks on the opposite side of the street.

Sounds vaguely like the Wonderland I inhabit; the major news here being the rate of demolition for mom-and-pop corner stores to make way for 40-story overpriced condos, whose storefronts boast banks and chain stores as their tenants.

One mile uptown, and the demographics are vastly different, with low income subsidized housing predominating the zip code. On the other hand, you don't have to go more than half a block from my apartment to find numerous people for whom English is not their native language.

Those condos multiplying like rabbits are making us lose what made us special, the individuality our streets showed, which breaks my heart, not to mention adding great inconvenience to my daily life. Our nearest Chinese restaurant, with 25+ years across the street, has been replaced by Godiva chocolates.

The corner restaurant and adjacent butcher, cigarette/newsstand, and dry cleaner, are all on the verge of closing as the next block away from mine is razed for yet another overpriced and underspaced sun-blocking condo.

" “Our dream was to design a city that if you lived here, worked here or visited here, you didn’t have to go anywhere else,” said Mr. Delfino, a Republican who is now in his third term as mayor. “I think we’ve met that objective.”

No, a town of 50,000 can't pull that off, not where I grew up and fled, not at all. 50,000 equals the population of students at the university where I attended grad school.

Don't know what's in the water up there, but I wouldn't mind swilling a few gulps from that delusional bottle.

"But the pace and depth of the transformation, arguably the most remarkable traits of the downtown renaissance, have also been a source of concern to some low-income residents, who fear that they may be pushed out as the area gentrifies.

White Plains has been trying for an urban renaissance since I was in junior high school in 1973. Then, we were taking downtown to see "urban renewal" in progress (much to the embarrassment, I later realized, of my classmates (the "bus children") who lived in the area our middle-class teachers deemed suitable for a "field trip.")

In kindergarten I didn't know that the kids we called "the bus children" were poor; I just knew they lived in another neighborhood that wasn't in walkable distance from our elementary school, a building hastily and hideously erected in 1964 for the housing developments where we baby boomers lived.

The one thing I will credit White Plains for was the racial and socioeconomic integration of its school system, a rarity in Westchester County in 1965 when I entered public school.

" “I love the way downtown looks, but is there a place for working people like me in the new downtown? I don’t know,” said Darryl Jenkins, 53, who has lived at the Winbrook Houses, a downtown public housing development, for more than 30 years. “It seems that all the homes that have been built so far are for rich people.”

Jenkins is correct, and I rather doubt that tolerance was mixed in to any of the new construction projects, much less more than a minimal amount of subsidized housing for a town that may be losing its middle class as quickly as Wonderland is.

"In 2003, downtown White Plains saw the conclusion of its first significant development, a $325 million project called City Center, which replaced the abandoned Macy’s.... The complex includes a Trump Tower, where some condos have sold for more than $1 million; luxury rental units in a doorman high-rise; several chain stores and restaurants and a multiscreen movie theater, the city’s first since the early 1990s."

This is truly the what-the-fuck part of the story, the part that brings it into the 21st century boggle-my-mind section. Trump condos for $1 million plus? I've heard there's a sucker born every minute, and right now, they seem to be clamouring to live in a Disney-fied town.

The place seems more of a horror show than the one I fled close to 30 years ago, before every store was a national chain, before every store fled to the security of a mall for pedestrian traffic.

When I left, the only mall in town was anchored by a supermarket, and its most memorable tenant was McDonald's. There still was a downtown, with individual chain-free stores, there. I never realized how much that characteristic was something to appreciate.

" "White Plains is a whole different city,” said Louis R. Cappelli, who developed the Ritz-Carlton and City Center projects. “It’s a balanced city.”

Obviously this depends on your definition. Last time I looked, Ritz-Carlton's rates (starting at $369 a night in not-so-scenic WP and rising to $5000 a night for some special penthouse suite) rather tilted the balance. Personally, you'd have to pay me $5,000 a night to stay there.

"In all, White Plains officials have approved the construction of 4,400 units of housing downtown, and more than half of them have been built — the first residential projects developed in the area since 1989, Mayor Delfino said. Most of the new construction is geared toward upper-class dwellers, a move the mayor said was necessary to balance the disparity in income among downtown residents.

I don't see them balancing the disparity in income in the part of town where I grew up, the house up the street from a then-working stable where my brother rode and roamed into what was then a completely wooded area.

The woods have long since been superseded by a million-dollar-plus single-family-home development. No, that nabe is secure in its zoning and prosperity, not to mention obscene property tax rates.

"John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, said that a resurgent downtown needed wealthier residents to support its retail base, but that the challenge was to retain an eclectic mix of backgrounds, which is vital to its city character.

Astounding, how retail in White Plains had been limping along with one of the five highest-sale malls in the U.S. before Donald Disney and friends came along to seduce people into mistaking White Plains for a real city. (I've been to that mall. It is walkable, a far cry in space from Minnesota's Mall of America, a spot I ventured to as reluctant anthropologist.)

As for "city character," take away a town's history, however benighted, and whatever character the town may have had is lost to the historical society.

"Rita Z. Malmud, president of the White Plains Common Council, said that the goal of the development was “not to turn downtown into a playground for the rich,” but that the area needed to achieve “the right mix.”

I don't see White Plains as any one's playground, save that of a lunatic. As for the "right mix," I shudder at the implications.

"She added, “What we have to make sure is that downtown remains a welcoming place to people of all races, all income levels and all stripes as we move forward.”

I can't help thinking that before the malling of suburbia, White Plains probably was far more welcoming, even to those like me who despised it, than it is today.

It was what it was -- a big city shopping mecca compared with its minute neighbors, a town with few overt pretensions -- primarily the covert ones belonged to the country-club set.

It was a postwar bedroom community for boomers' parents in what had been, before estate taxes ate up acreage, a country oasis for those who owned the large properties that later became housing developments. It probably always had its share of less affluent workers and families, some of whom minded the local shops or worked for the large landowners.

There are, I'm sure, those who are happy to call it home. I've just never been one of them.