Dazed and confused...

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.

Sealed for whose protection?

Forget going green. I grew up in the day of "Give a hoot. Don't pollute." I remember the first Earth Day ever. That was in the late 1960s, at a time when the most challenging package to open was a cardboard milk carton. In the 1960s, the golden word was "plastics."

These days, the packaging industry, in particular the clam-shell and shrink-wrap divisions, is alive and well, and trying to make it impossible for you to open, in no particular order: a CD (why does it come with theft-proof tape when I bought it online, and the retailer doesn't have any brick and mortar stores); ditto the calculator or camera trapped in a clam shell, which has also never seen the light of an actual store; or the vitamins with an outer clear plastic seal, an inner foil liner, and of course, a "childproof" cap.

And our pharmaceuticals: the "childproof" prescription bottles for which you need the child, especially when you would need to put on your reading glasses to see what the opening instructions were; a "squeeze to open" Aleve bottle, when one of the medications main uses is to help those with arthritic hands, and hands with problems -- arthritis, tendinitis, loose tendons, and the like -- can barely button a blouse, much less tangle with the great God plastic.

Following those challenges comes the squeeze bottle, whether it contains moisturizer, shampoo, chocolate syrup, or mayonnaise. Without the ability to press one's fingers comfortably to one's palms, you will need to reorder these supplies more frequently than someone who can squeeze every last drop out of the squirt-top (not removable, of course).

And finally, the toothpaste tube: you know that toothpaste manufacturers adore the fact that no one can completely empty the tube, unlike in days past when the tubes were metal and you could attach a toothpaste key to make sure you'd finished off the tube. This practically defines planned obsolescence.

What I want to know, in the age of An Inconvenient Truth, is whether it takes more energy and a larger "carbon footprint" to manufacture all these items from plastic, or whether it took less energy and we were less wasteful in the days of glass and metal, without shrink-wrapped plastic covering our every purchase.

'Cause my cohorts and I aren't getting any younger or gaining more manual dexterity, and right now, at the supposed height of our buying power, we are not the happiest of consumers.

Incommunicado

In case you were wondering, that's my state of being. I haven't felt like talking to anyone of late. I suspect it's called depression. No, I know it is. The symptoms are all too familiar: not eating, barely washing my hair much less getting dressed, leaving the house only under duress, sleeping oddly, crying out of the blue -- I've been here before, and will probably return to this state again, no matter what psychoactive cocktail the shrink can devise.

Problem with the cocktails is, it's all a matter of guesswork. I am a perpetual guinea pig. If one drug doesn't work, we try another. And another. Then another. But we don't make changes very quickly: first, we'll try one for three weeks, and not until it's had a chance to take effect (or not) will we move on to the next.

At the moment, the drug added to my previous cocktail helps me feel, if not better, than simply less. Less is better than sad. Less means there is a stronger film between me and the world, so I don't take in anymore than I can process. This does not leave me with much to say; hence, my lack of posting. Less circumvents my cognitive abilities.

Less doesn't seem like a great loss, not now, in the middle of the holiday trifecta. Train of thought? Derailed quite a ways back, stranded without a cell phone. In my mind, the pony express is more than a fast enough way for my synapses to travel.

This week was the saga of the tea-soaked keyboard: when typing while hands are splinted, it is probably wise not to leave a large mug of tea nearby. Once sweet tea hits the keyboard, the keyboard is doomed. Since this is only the second keyboard I've assassinated in 21 years, I don't think my record is that bad. Many have killed far more electronics than I.

I killed my first modem, but that was 300 baud, very much pre-cell phone, pre-Web, pre-ubiquitous email, and the software that accompanied it suitable only for the technologically inclined, which I was and am not. No one has mentioned baud rates since the early 1990s.

The first keyboard I killed was in an office: that time, I spilled coffee, with cream and sugar. I called the tech support department, and was amazed at how grateful they were that I inquired about a new keyboard. What difference did it make to me? It wasn't my keyboard; it belonged to the company.

The fact that the tech people had to cannibalize another machine, instead of having a spare keyboard or two on hand, astounded me. It should also give you a good idea of why I don't work in publishing any longer. If I had asked for pen and paper, I the office supplies department probably would have had to run across the street to the five and dime to procure them for me.

Sugar in hot liquid remains the keyboard's nemesis; it makes the keys stick in one position, refusing to rise to type another letter. While waiting for a new keyboard (and the folks at Dell, who keep track of your purchasing history, try to sell you on a whole new machine when all you want is a $50 means of communicating with the machine you have), I pulled out a former keyboard, only to discover that the letter "d" likes to go on strike.

It annoys the hell out of me when my electronics have a mind of their own, one that is not in accord with mine. I don't like it when they pull tricks out of the ether that I have no way of comprehending. It makes me feel stupid. Woman vs. machine: why can't the woman win more often? Just curious.

The first holiday of the trifecta is down: Thanksgiving at my house, where my mother came to help and managed to take over the entire cooking process, not to mention critique my ability to arrange fruit in a bowl. I also was not the hostess she thought I should be. My conclusion? Next year I won't invite such a critical guest.

My brother's wife -- dare I saw sister-in-law? -- is counting down the weeks until she is officially a mother and I, an aunt. Pregnancy in the eighth month is apparently dull as dishwater, and it is all she can do not to jump up and down and shake my niece-to-be out of the womb.

I am trying to work up the energy for Christmas, preparations for which are helped greatly by the vast arena of on-line shopping venues and my part-time assistant, who has been with me for the past six weeks.

Essentially, I am renting her hands, to write since I can't hold a pen, enter data for which I have no patience, wrap and ship presents, shred papers, write checks, send out correspondence, balance checkbooks, file paperwork, and, when I am tired of all that, follow my instructions to bake brownies.

This week we're making a double batch, with chocolate chips.

The month that was

Alice is finally getting to flex her fingers, thumbs included, at least part-time. The rest of the time her thumbs remain immobilized, which seems to have immobilized her brain as well. All that aside, Alice has been traveling and birthday-ing, and occasionally attempting to work.

So, late September: Florida. Alice goes to see where her brother and his fiancee have ensconced themselves. She is delighted that fiancee, although half her brother's age, seems to have more intelligence, a better sense of humor and appreciation for irony, and preference for financial independence far more than did wives 1, 2, or 3. Fiancee's favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. Previous wives have favored The National Enquirer or TV Guide for reading material.

Alice, brother and fiancee almost fall off the couch watching the local news. It is South Florida, and the weatherman looks like Lurch from The Addams Family. His forecast has been the same since June: hot, humid, chance of showers or thunderstorms. No hurricanes in the vicinity. By the third night, we are mocking him ceaselessly. We equally enjoy the sportscaster, who regales us with tales of high school football.

There is nothing so delightful as high comedy masquerading as news; it distracts us from "national news," which makes all of us want to hurl sharp objects at the TV. Finally, a potential wife who shares Alice's political leanings. Recent previous wives have not even been registered voters.

Fiancee and brother both work in the service industry, she in retail and he in restaurants. Their customers all seem to share a brain. Apparently gray matter is in short supply in Collier County.

They seem good for each other, based on Alice's quick assessment. And on Alice's refrigerator in Wonderland are now posted sonograms of her niece-to-come. She is going to be an aunt. Another generation waits in the wings (well, in the fiancee's womb, to be precise). This is an experience Alice never anticipated.

Alice returns to Wonderland, where The Croquet Player has snagged a room at a posh hotel for his semi-annual visit. Despite previous protests to the contrary, Alice decides to see The Croquet Player again. In this, our 26th year, the sex has been better than Alice remembers since the first five years or so. TCP was Alice's first love, and he will always have a place in her heart.

The purpose of Wonderland's hotels, in Alice's life, is to offer her a place to get away from real life and think of nothing but great sex. It is the perfect set-up for Alice and TCP: secret assignations in lieu of domestic disharmony. The hotel looks out over Central Park and the Hudson River. Alice knows she will never live there, but it's a damn fun place to visit.

A few days go by. Two days before Alice's birthday, her brother calls to invite her to his wedding. It is to be held in the town in Alabama where the fiancee comes from, an $860 round-trip ticket from New York, and it is scheduled for the day after Alice is to return from London. There is no way Alice can return from London at 8 pm Monday night and get on a 6 am flight to Alabama (via Atlanta; no one flies to Alabama directly) the following morning.

This is the first wedding Alice has been invited to since the disastrous wedding #1, when Alice was forced to be a bridesmaid, and her hideous dress lasted longer than the marriage. With wives #2 and #3, her brother called to announce the nuptials a few days after they had taken place in various Southern City Halls.

Alice, sadly, regrets. Later, a friend suggests that missing the wedding might have been a good thing, since her brother's latest in-laws might not be folks with whom Alice could sustain a conversation. Given that Alice is just a year younger than fiancee/wife's mother, and the mother's life is so far removed from Alice's experiences, she has to agree.

Then it is Alice's birthday. She used to adore her birthday, spoiled by a father who made sure a birthday was a BIG DEAL. Now she receives the occasional card, and is treated to dinner by several friends on successive nights. Alice still likes the celebration, the day that is All About Alice, but she remembers her childhood, misses the days of opening presents, albeit she realizes the gifts of time and friendships are far greater than a new toy in a box.

For Alice's birthday, she and a friend have a once-in-a-lifetime experience: they go to hear Barbara Streisand live, at Madison Square Garden. Her voice is phenomenal. She sings the theme from The Way We Were, and Alice is moved to tears: the first time she saw the movie, she was en route to England for the first time, with her entire family. She was 13.

The next morning, Alice leaves for London, to join her mother. Mom is turning 70, and for her birthday, she wanted Alice to spend a week with her in London, a town Alice has known well over the past 30+ years. While Alice is chief entertainment source and itinerary director, it is Alice's mother who insists on waking Alice at 9 am every morning.

Alice's mother is already babbling and expecting Alice to respond, in full sentences. Alice can scarcely manage 9 am, and she does not speak in full sentences until she is well into her second cup of coffee. Therefore, Alice is perceived as a bitch in the morning. She wonders why her mother can't remember that this is the Alice she has raised, that Alice's morning behavior was implanted in her brain and hence, is unlikely to change, no matter the location.

It is then that Alice discovers her mother believes Alice and her brother, as infants, always slept through the night. Alice suspects the truth is closer to the fact that her parents have always been sound sleepers, a tendency Alice has inherited and embellished.

The day after Alice arrives in London, it is 10/11. She and her mother are dressing for dinner, with CNN on the television, when the broadcast is interrupted by breaking news.

At the moment, 3:08 EDT and 8:08 GMT, the live, breaking news was that an airplane had crashed into an apartment building down the block from her mother's apartment. 9/11 happened five miles away from Alice and her mother's respective abodes; 10/11 occurs in the building that holds part of the hospital where Alice's mother volunteers.

Three days a week, Alice's mother has lunch in the building's cafeteria. Nearly every day of the week, Alice's mother walks by the building. The debris, Alice realizes after returning to Wonderland, could have very easily fallen on Alice's mother. However, her family has a history of barely missing violent events: the last time we were in Haiti, for example, our plane took off at 8 pm, and a coup was attempted 30 minutes later.

In London, on the hotel room TV, videos of the tiny plane flying into the apartment building were surreal. When Alice returned to Wonderland, reality entered the picture, and she was far more shaken up than she had been the week before, when the pilot and his flight instructor, filled with hubris, had veered off course and smack into the vicinity of Alice's mother's apartment.

As for the reporting, what didn't get mentioned in the newspapers was that
the one woman who got burned in the building is the same woman upon whom a street lamp fell one year when a helium balloon went out of control at the Thanksgiving day parade. Note to Alice: do not ever cross the street in her vicinity.

After reading all the news reports, Alice has concluded that hubris was the direct cause of the plane's accident. Many years ago, Alice herself flew small planes, leaving from an airport in the suburban county where her parents lived. She had been told where LaGuardia's airspace was, and decided at the time, that it made no sense to fly where the big boys controlled the turf.

The plane lost radio contact 13 blocks from where it crashed. If anyone sounded the Mayday signal, no one was listening. What puzzles Alice still is that the hardest part of piloting an airplane is take-off and landing. Once you are aloft, unless the rudder pedals break, it is so easy to fly in a straight line that even Alice, whose lack of car-driving skills are legendary, could pilot the plane without going off course.

Back in London, Alice and her mother enjoyed delightfully warm (for Alice) unbearably hot (for Alice's mother) weather. They (Alice's mother) breakfasted. They lunched. They had tea at their favorite hotels. They went to theater. They dined in familiar restaurants. They saw the Churchill War Rooms (a first for Alice), and they tramped through well-known territory: the V&A's costume collection, Kensington Palace, Knightsbridge, Bond Street, Green Park and Piccadilly.

In short, everything they did in London they could have done with equal ease in Wonderland, their hometown. But Alice knows that regardless of what her hometown offers, she would never spend a week there acting as a tourist. Life would intervene: the telephone, the e-mail, her attempts at life maintenance and work.

Thus, despite the early awakenings, Alice's mother's solo cocktail hours, and Alice's having to have countless conversations she could have lived without, Alice did leave Wonderland, and the change of venue was appreciated. The trip, which Alice was dreading, went much better than expected. According to friends Alice and her mother have in common, Alice's mother had a great trip. Alice wouldn't go that far, but it was mom's 70th, and if that was her mom's perception, Alice did her job well.

Back in Wonderland, it has been a few days, and Alice is enjoying her solitude. She has been recuperating from her vacation, from her birthday, from The Croquet Player, from her trip to visit her brother and fiancee, and appreciating some time alone, when the only person to whom she must answer is herself. At the moment, herself is calling time-out on use of hands, so Alice will end this lengthy post here.

Instability

Like my nervous system, with its perpetual synaptic lapses, my thumb joints have been determined to be unstable. They had a few years, a hiatus, when both were operating on as close to full power as they had in 15 years. I could cook; carry groceries, mail and packages; wear clothes that buttoned and shoes that laced, and even change a light bulb or two. I could even hold your hand, or any part of my anatomy or yours I desired, depending on the occasion.

The skills that remain semi-intact are typing, telephoning, and channel-changing. Others I have misplaced are the ability to pour a pitcher of water, cut food with a knife or properly use a fork, wrestle lobster out of its shell, pick up a suitcase, hold onto a hand bar on a bus or subway, navigate car doors (forget driving), pick up a pen, shuffle papers, or use the computer mouse.

Say good-bye to 21st- century living. On a good day, I can punch the start button on the microwave. Sometimes I can wash my hair. Being left-handed (and left-thumb dominant), I have been challenged by the electric toothbrush, its control and my coordination.

So, off to a new orthopedist: he wanted to know what had befallen his colleagues in the hand trade. A misdiagnosis, a badly run office, a doctor who stopped taking my insurance: with that I stopped. Newsflash and note to self: never tell doctors -- except perhaps shrinks -- how his/her predecessors have failed you. They will mark you down as a difficult patient, never mind that you have been dealing with your body and its foibles low these 45 years, and the doctor has met you perhaps for five minutes.

There is no scheduled date for the reuse of my hands. I did not need the orthopedist to say "I don't know"; I could have told him that. All I wanted were new custom-made splints to immobilize my thumbs -- black is the latest color plastic to come down the designer splint turnpike. Its ever so chic and, more to the point, doesn't show the that dirt my several previous incarnations of the white knuckle-halfway-to-elbow or the beige pin-pricked (for air circulation) wrist-length plastic of earlier entries in the immobilization sweepstakes.

I realize this plaint of unusability has nothing on the situation in which my eldest cousin and her family found themselves a year ago. Apparently the proper term for the destination for those who made it out of New Orleans just ahead of Katrina -- for government purposes is an "evacuation center." Refugee camp is more like it. I doubt they ate Army surplus MREs; the military can't fill the beds it has available, so MRE shipments are not what the government would have had at the ready.

My cousin and her family had barely deposited her daughter at her dorm at Tulane when word of the storm's impending arrival made the news (at least locally; I don't know when Bush's official messenger sent him the word), and the entire family evacuated. Fortunately, they are a family of campers, accustomed to going without electricity and making do with the most rudimentary of lavatory facilities. Otherwise, it would have been rougher going in Jackson, Mississippi than it was.

It was a 21st-century involuntary migration: when the electric power went out, the family could have had a full tank of gas, and they could charge their cell phones in the car's cigarette outlet (and to think, no one wants me to smoke), get some semblance of news from the car radio, and press the four-way red blinker button to indicate a crisis.

My cousin's 13-year-old had, at that point in her life, experienced not one but two parents surviving cancer, on top of the Katrina evacuation, and I give her prize for surviving more instability than any other relative at that age. When I saw her last week, the Mississippi story bored her; to me, it would have been a life-changing event. In an instant, powerlessness and instability can overwhelm.

Had I been there, a medication crisis might have been imminent. Today, if I were not already prone to depression, my inability to do for myself would certainly have helped shove me over the edge.

Then, too, there is this past month's familial instability: some of you may remember I thought last October I should have gotten my brother a box of condoms for Christmas. Who knew how prescient that was?

For he has interjected into our tiny family the 21-year-old mother-to-be of his child (I thought, but did not ask, are you sure it's yours?), whose pregnancy (and his impending fatherhood) crushes any thought of stability, in my eyes, in his life. Couldn't he at least have waited until, say, Thanksgiving, to announce this girlfriend was pregnant? Given me a week or two to adjust to his most recent divorce status? Given him, maybe, a week on his own?

I have spoken to the girlfriend. In the Southern state in which they resided, Medicaid was taking on her prenatal care. In the state to which they moved less than a week after announcing the pregnancy, matters are not so clear cut. All I can think is, if we had national health insurance, my mother and I would not be singing my brother's wedding bell blues nearly so frequently. (The third time was not a charm.)

The girlfriend's mother is one year older than me. She works at the equivalent of an International House of Pancakes, in what capacity I did not ask. My mother once made pancakes, in the days when Aunt Jemima wasn't considered politically incorrect. Her mother married at 16, had a child at 17. At 17, I was a virgin. My mother married at 22. Given this disparity in generational ages, my mother is old enough to be this forthcoming infant's great-grandmother. As it stands, she can't muster the excitement for the assigned role of grandmother (my own chronological generational peg).

As for me, I am wondering: do I set up a college fund for this child, after she -- it's a girl -- is born and in possession of a Social Security number? Neither of her parents finished college. I am grateful that the mother to be (status as brother's wife or ultimately sister-in-law to be determined) speaks grammatical English, something wife #3 could not manage. Yet I can't help wondering: what are the chances brother and mother-of-his-child will be together in five years? What will it be like, to be Aunt Alice?

I may well be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. However, when my mind veers ahead of itself, it doesn't twist in any prettier a direction than my unstable thumb joints. It hurts.