Diary Pages -- May 2003

Ahhh, the familiar terror of the blank page.

Welcome, torture.

Still thinking about the e-rants of Miss White Disgusted--who made it quite clear that she's had it up to HERE with the snide remarks, evil looks and general disapproval from black women about her relationship with a black man--and Mr. Black Royalty, who had a thing or two to say in reply to Miss White Disgusted. Both of them angry, both fed up, about the other's clueless attitude. Or something like that.

Very interesting reading indeed.

I can't decide what fascinated me more, Miss Disgusted's insulting ignorance about black female anger or Mr. Royal's sardonic reply--which, for all its loyalty and impassioned righteousness, rang slightly false somehow.

I mean, he made his point, Mr. Royalty did, about the strict upbringing of young black women and how this made the sexual "availability" of willing young white women an appealing option for young black males on the make. ("You're no goddess, baby--you're just easy!")

I have to admit I liked what he Mr. R had to say about the resilient strength of African-American women through the generations, the way generations of us have taught white women how to cook, how to dress; how we've raised white women's babies even as our own were ripped from our arms forever.

And let's give Mr. Black Royalty points for his willingness to acknowledge black male fear of black women, and the worry that she will leave him behind as a higher wage earner--better educated, better motivated to succeed, more socially sophisticated--enters her life (or as she becomes all of those things).

Yeah, I liked all of that. Until I slowed down to

First Sunday In May

Beautiful, sunny and everything's popping green (at last). I should be outside today.

Can't. Too much pain. Will have to take it easy today, maybe finish the Paul Krugman book. But there's a cooling breeze coming off the lake--damn, wish we had a patio.

Bolero is playing in the black and white background of Secret Agent/AKA Danger Man. A petrified middle-aged businessman type is about to get offed by the doughy, steely-eyed blond guy holding the pistol. Always loved the theme of this show--not the Johnny Rivers vocal, which is swingin' finger-poppin' fun alright, but the spritely, organ- and trumpet-driven incidental music or whatever it's called that always opens the episode. You see the "Series Devised and Edited by Ralph Smart" and other credits over the action as it plays. Remember?

Max was so pissed off last night she pissed me off. Can't get that out-of-left-field phone call out of my mind. I guess Mom is right that it's likely a control issue. Max has been the family free spirit for such a long time, it's hard to watch her slowly becoming a cranky old lady with ever diminishing capacities. She hates the new apartment--totally understandable where the kitchen and bath are concerned--and she's lost her pretty view of the boats on the lake. But mostly she hates her increasing vulnerability, the way she's become so dependent on the rest of us for almost all the things she used to be able to do herself.

I understand that, I do. I watch Maxine's decline and am swept with sadness at the change in her, and worry what's coming for my mother, my Aunt Mary, my Uncle Bob and Aunt Vera. And Michael.

And me.

When we were living in California, some--Jesus!--25 years ago, Max and I would often get in the car and just go. Sometimes shopping, sometimes sight-seeing, sometimes just for the ride up the Pacific Coast Highway and the breathtaking views of sparkling water and distant mountains. We'd roll the windows down, turn the radio up and laugh like maniacs at jokes nobody but us would get. We'd find the best restaurants and sweet shops, if we were lucky a combination of the two, and bring home mouthwateringly fresh peach pies, strawberry pies, lemon lush pies and (this absolutely floored me; still does) the most delicious french vanilla ice cream--a local drug store brand, as good or better than Haagen Daz, Baskin Robbins or Breyer's. Don't smirk. If you'd been there you'd know what I mean.

I miss El Pollo Loco, Marie Callendar's, Jongewaard, and Jim's Hamburgers--far and away the best greasy spoon burgers I've ever had. Mostly though I miss going to all those places with Max. She was then the age I am now, and I was a little girl with big, grown-up hips thinking lipstick, summer dresses and high heels made me her equal. We were such great friends. We're still friends. But everything's so different now.

Everything is so dfferent now.

WTF??

Two blogs--or was it three?--posted in January, one in February (something about Rita Hayworth? Where was I going with that?), and nothing at all last month. Nothing really this month either, as this is the last day of April '09.

What is going on? I so want to write... but when I sit down to try to do so all that comes is nothing. Nothing, nothing and more nothing. It's hideous. And the reading is not going all that well either come to that, even though I'm steadily buying books and borrowing books and people are giving me books. I just can't seem to concentrate, to focus. It's almost impossible to relax and just give myself over to the whatever--the page, the pen. Maybe I need to get out more.

Do you think I need to get out more? What do you think?

PS: Carrie Prejean is a fucking idiot. Nice teeth, though.

Yesterday Was Awful

Put the blame on Mame, boys
Put the blame on Mame
Mame did a dance called the hitchy-coo
That’s the thing that slew MacGrew…

Don’t know what made me think of slinky Rita Hey-Hey-Hey playfully pulling off one long black satin glove, raven waves falling seductively over one eye…

Auburn waves. Not raven. The Lady From Shanghai notwithstanding, the lovely Rita was most famously a redhead and Gilda, her most memorable film, was a noirish black and white.

Yesterday was awful, one of those working days that makes me wish I’d tried harder to stick it out with the money-grubbing private sector. I arrived roughly an hour early as is my custom and decided to use part of the time to shop for a few groceries. Some thirty minutes later it turned out I’d bought rather more than a “few” items and was relieved to make it back to the front door of the library with several heavy shopping bags of milk, juice, meat, etc. Even bought a pint of my beloved Haagen Daz—on sale, of course. By then there were some twenty minutes to go before time to open for the day. I wasn’t worried, initially. I could see all the lights up, including in the auditorium and staff room spaces… someone had to be there…back there… somewhere…

Not.

No Friendly Custodian Guy, no Briskly Efficient Branch Manager, and—it goes without saying—no Clerks, senior or junior. Nobody. ‘Cepting the painters, who as a rule seldom look up from their mixing and pouring or break from their gossiping, assuming they even heard my increasingly insistent tapping and pounding.

The time ticked away, the unseasonably warm temps began to melt my Haagen Daz, and the patrons began to gather in earnest, most of them youngish men impatient to get on the Internet access pcs and get those job searches, tax preps and circuit breaker requests going. Most of them seemed resigned to yet another late opening day; one or two of them seemed dryly amused. “That’s our people, ya know? We jus’ be like that sometimes.”

I was not amused, dryly or otherwise. I was steaming. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to help it. It was damn near noon; in another minute or two, once again, I was going to be late swiping into that damned time clock, once again through no fault of my own. This was a replay of Saturday, my previous working day, when the only other staffer on the schedule—the only one—finally pulled up to the curb several minutes late. And once again I’d placed an SOS call to the Branch Manager, who was not scheduled to work that day but was now forced to alter her plans due to the irresponsibility of one of her coworkers.

This time around I called the (Interim) District Chief as well, and told him directly how—“tired” was the word I chose—how tired I had become of these irresponsible no-shows, particularly on a day when everyone, the Branch Manager, myself, and four full time clerks, was scheduled to work. One or two of them might be sick or have suddenly to deal with some unavoidable emergency, possibly even three of them, but all five? Five full-timers, each with keys to the door, and none of them are here? The weather is mild and sunny, traffic is running normally, there is no snow—so what could be the justification for this?

Okay, said the (Interim) District Chief, sounding pretty tired his own self, I’ll talk to them.

I’m sure he will. He’ll talk to them, maybe lecture and gently scold them all, the way presumably the previous District Chief did. The Branch Manager will react with her typical stoicism. And the clerks will grumble amongst themselves and sulk their resentment; one or two feeling perhaps a twinge of guilt… and nothing will change. Absolutely nothing.

Why is this? Why are unreliability and a poor work ethic so tolerated by the City? I don’t know for sure and have no data to back me up on this, but my assumption is that it’s a form of self-protection. To keep wrongful dismissal lawsuits to a manageable minimum the strategy seems to be to keep giving problem employees lots and lots and lots of rope with which to eventually hang themselves. I mean, I guess it’s a strategy; presumably by the time serious action is taken against a troublemaker—and by “troublemaker” I do not mean your noble, conscientious whistleblower type—all the protests in the world of discriminatory mistreatment won’t be able to hide the evidential mountain of chronic misconduct.

Which makes sense, I suppose.

But what happens to office morale in the meantime? While all that rope is slowly spooling out, what becomes of the dependable worker bees, increasingly disillusioned and wearied to the point of cynical detachment by the excesses of the slacker drones around them?

So tired all of a sudden; all of a sudden I'm fighting to keep my eyes open. I really should grab my coat and go for a walk. But it’s so gray outside, so dreary-looking, and in any case this is not a neighborhood in which under the best of circumstances I feel all that comfortable walking around.

Maybe I’ll just crawl back into bed and sleep for awhile. And dream of employers who don’t reward inconsideration and indifference.

Ghosts

Barack H. Obama is now President of the United States of America. How cool is that?

It's a good thing, but that's not enough. I want to feel the elation I saw on all those shining young faces. Instead I just feel... subdued. Not so cool.

I wish I was twenty years younger. I wish I was a teenager and Joey was alive and we were both young again and connected to this moment in exactly the way so many younger people are today and seem to have been throughout Obama's campaign. I want to feel as good, as invigorated, as I'm sure they do. Through most of Obama's run, instead of Yes We Can! what I felt was, Well... Maybe. We'll See. I was not a true believer. He seemed to me so young to be reaching for what he was reaching for. I wasn't convinced he was ready yet I knew I wouldn't want to see him lose. At some points I was actually annoyed--couldn't he wait another few years? What was his hurry?

And now I am happy that he is President and I have high hopes for him--who does not? who could not with all that is at stake? I think he will be a great president. Because we need him to be.

But Uncle Larry has died, just Saturday. And his passing, a sadness in and of itself, is another reminder of all those missing places at the family table, all the people I've loved, and admired, who didn't make it to see this moment of history. Mark told me that well over a year ago Larry had predicted Obama's win--and not a pathetic, controversial, squeaker of a win, either, but a decisive sweep. That was a remarkably confident forecast given that more than a year ago no such thing seemed so certain. Who knew? Who was Barack Obama?

Who indeed? Who was George W. Bush except the privileged wastrel son of an accomplished father and a powerful political family? What did he know about running a country, about global statecraft, about leadership?

Not so much, turns out. And many, many of us are the poorer for it.

I wish--I know I said this already--I wish my brother Joe was here. I'd like so much to be talking to him today and have him talking to me, telling me what this day meant to him. If he were alive so many things would be different. We'd have all been at his and Maria's house having brunch, the televisions would be going, broadcasting the Inaugural, and everyone would be wandering all over the place, hugging, eating, and driving Colin and Allegra to distraction with endless grown-up questions about what they thought of all this, what they'd remember best. Family and friends. There would be good food and the dogs would be frantic with happiness, making affectionate nuisances of themselves. We would banter and console, argue and laugh. Conversations would spill out onto the porches. We would remember. We would eat some more. I would eat a lot.

I'm going for a walk. It's cold. But I need some fresh air and solitude. This room is crowded with ghosts.

The New Damned Toy

Oh, woe.

I've finally bought myself a brand spanking new MP3 player (you there in the back, stop snickering!) and I've had the thing for only slightly more than 48 hours and already I'm having problems with it. Problems I created for myself--inadvertently, but still--problems that even the young, friendly and presumably techno-savvy Radio Shack Guy who sold it to me Wednesday afternoon wasn't 100% sure how to help me solve, though he made a suggestion that sounds like it might work (Please, God, if you're there, make it work, especially since the Sansa support@ people have not yet responded to my electronic SOS). I feel so dumb about this, and so ancient, like this boneheaded mistake I made was the kind of thing I'd be tsk-tsk-tsk at my mother for doing--except that it's me this time. I'm my mother. I'm my grandmother for Chrissakes, that's how idiotically inept was this botch-up with my MP3 player.

What happened was this: I eagerly took the thing, a Sansa Fuze 8GB flash drive thing, out of the box and my heart sank at the sight of the included mini installation disc because it's for Rhapsody music service and I hate Rhapsody and don't care who knows it. Apparently Rhapsody and Sansa are good buddies and Sansa promises cool fun features on my new MP3 player if I install Rhapsody on my computer and use that to download my music.

No. Noooooooooooooooooooooooo. Not again, not in a million years. I won't bore you with all the headaches I went through with Rhapsody a few years ago when I decided to try it and downloaded it to my XP; suffice to say I learned my lesson and, cool features or no, I won't be using that music program for my player.

Besides, I don't have to. Just plug the included cable into the USB port of my computer, charge the battery and start dragging and dropping my music files into my device. Simple. Except....

It wasn't completely my fault. I mean it was, but honestly, anyone could have made this mistake, I think. See, I'd opened my Windows Media Player to look over my music files, trying to decide which ones I wanted to transfer, when I suddenly remembered I should be charging the battery, the very first thing the little operation manual instructs you to do. So without giving much thought, I plugged it into the port....and continued scanning my audio files....should I include the comedy mixes I created for myself too, or would that take up too much drive space? What about the Spoken Word (American Writers Edition) stuff my mom gave me for Christmas?.....and what about my soundtrack CDs?....how many songs does 8 GBs translate to again? 2000, is it, give or take? At the time I purchased the player that seemed like a lot, like plenty, but now that I look at all these files....maybe I should have gone ahead and popped for that other little thingee, that tiny 8 GB card that goes in the player's slot for even more audio storage (Wonder how long that sale is going to last..?).......

.....When I was snapped out of my reverie by the unexpected sight of my library of music files rapidly "synchronizing" themselves to the player. What the--? Why's it doing that? I didn't tell it do that! Why's it doing that? Hey! (I said to my computer, uselessly) Hey, stop it! Hold it! The battery's just supposed to be charging now, that's all! Drag and drop! I'm supposed to drag and drop the music, like it says in the manual, like the Radio Shack Guy said!! Hey, cut it out!

And I disconnected the cable from the USB port (was going to say I "yanked" it, but that's not strictly true; I didn't want to break anything), looking worriedly from the MP3 player to the computer and back again. I noticed the player's battery was nearly completely charged and I had a bunch of songs already downloaded--there was the album cover art, the name of the artist, and the album and song titles...cool! That was easy! Maybe I don't need to do the tedious dragging and dropping after all. For now I'll just close out Windows Media and plug it back into the pc to finish charging, and then reconnect it to WM and let the two talk to each other for awhile. Simple!

And that's what I did, checking from time to time to monitor the process and keep an eye on the remaining disk space. After, oh, I don't know, approximately 500 songs had sync-ed, I decided to stop the operation for the time being. I plugged the headphone cable into the player, pressed the horribly uncomfortable ear buds into my ears and, after some wincing adjustments settled back to enjoy the songs and get comfortable with the device's functions, adjusting the volume--amazingly good sound--scrolling through the various menus, checking out the FM radio, and so on. Finally I decided to charge the battery some more, turn it off and put it away.

The next day I was out and about running errands in my old neighborhood--no more annoying transportation rerouting since the Obamas have finally moved to D.C., though I notice the barricades and a few strategically placed police cars are still blocking off the house--and I took my new toy with me, of course, vastly enjoying carrying a chunk of my music library around in my pocket as I shopped, posted mail and tried not to fall on my ass on all the slippery new snow and ice. The sound quality of this baby is truly wonderful, and pitched just so, many of the songs weren't playing into my ears so much as reverberating through me. Duffy cooing "Mercy," Al Green wailing "Here I Am (Come And Take Me)," Cat Stevens's lilting, contemplative "Into White," even the Ting Ting's funny, punky "Shut Up And Let Me Go"--it was gorgeous, a religious experience. Sitting on the upper deck of the bus and gazing at the passing neighborhood as the music flowed into and through me I felt fifteen again, when music was as necessary for my well-being as air to breathe.

It was great.

Then I came home, sat down at my pc, and, delighted with my MP3, decided it was time to transfer more music to it.

But first, I would delete the files already sync-ed. I wanted to upload other stuff for sync-ing and after all, I don't really need them on the computer anymore since they've been safely downloaded over to my MP3. Audio files can eat up an awful lot of hard drive.

So I did. I started merrily deleting away, and later in the evening when I decided to play with my new toy again, I began to notice an odd and disquieting occurrence. An awful lot of the songs on my MP3 player were no longer playing. Oh, they were still in there alright, or at least they appeared to be--yeah, there they were. I could scroll around by song title or artist name and see them and the accompanying album/CD cover art, still in there. They just weren't playing anymore, even when I deliberately interrupted other songs to select them.

Hmmmm. That's strange. Why is this happening all of a sudden?

I did a fair amount of head scratching as my anxiety steadily rose. The pocket "quick start" instruction manual didn't address this particular peculiarity and I was adamant I was not going to slide that damned Rhapsody install disc into my computer no matter what. But what was going on??

Then it began to dawn on me. The way I'd downloaded my music to the player--I'd synchronized it. Actually I didn't, Windows Media did, initially, and without my bidding, and then I continued the process once it had started. Anyway I began to realize that the synchronization, the method itself, was the key to the problem. The American Heritage definition of synchronization is "to operate in unison, to cause to occur at the same time as something else." I sync-ed those songs instead of directly dropping them in, and each time I plugged my player into my pc they were communicating with each other about them. When I deleted those music files from my pc, my player felt it had no choice but to dump them as well, though the mystery was that they still appeared at least to be sitting in the player.

Damn. Damn damn damn damn it all to hell. Why me? And now what?

Today I took the player back to the Radio Shack Guy and explained what had happened, sharing my conclusions as to the source of the problem. Ah, he said sympathetically. Wow. Never heard of that happening before. But, yeah, that's probably what it is. You should have dragged-dropped instead of sync-ed, especially if you were going to remove the audio files from your pc. Either that or keep syncing but get a separate hard drive for your music...

Fine, right, right. But in the meantime--? Any thoughts?

His suggestion--and this sounds like a good idea to me; I don't know how many of you other Sansa Fuze owners feel differently--was that I:

1. Plug the player back into the pc without powering up Windows Media (and if it opens up on its own, close it immediately)
2. Double-click on My Computer (what I should have done to begin with) and look to see if the sync-ed music files are there. If they are, try deleting them (again) with the device still plugged in and then see if they are now removed from the player as well. If yes, delete ALL the music you sync-ed to your player, even the ones that have been playing okay until your flash drive is clean.
3. Now unplug your MP3 player from your pc and power up Windows Media. Before you plug your player back in however, go to Preferences and see if you can disable the sync function so it won't create any further headaches for you.
4. Upload all the music you want to transfer again (sigh) and
5. PRAY. PRAY TO JESUS FOR GUIDANCE AND LUCK AND WHATEVER THE HELL ELSE WILL MAKE THIS VEXING PROBLEM GO AWAY PERMANENTLY. (Okay, I added this part.)
6. Repeat step 2, this time dragging and dropping your music files into your MP3 player, checking periodically to make sure the playback is okay.

So that's what I plan to do, as soon as figure out how to fix this other little problem that happened as I was typing this post. I was trying to delete a song while it was playing, something I've done before without incident, and the song didn't delete. I tried again and now the player has frozen, with "Delete Song?" showing on the player's screen. I can't do anything with it now, anything at all. It doesn't respond when I try to shut it off, or charge it, or anything.

And now my cat is looking at me funny.

Route 66 -- A Month of Sundays

I’m watching a grainy broadcast of Route 66, the old sixties tv dramas (with that memorable Nelson Riddle theme), a series about a decade or so ahead of my time, meaning it’s one of those classic tv shows I’d always heard great things about but had never actually seen. It’s an entertaining episode featuring a compelling performance from an actress who has become one of my favorites of the era, Anne Francis (better known as the sexy detective Honey West, another series slightly before my time), who is guest starring here as a young and glamorous Broadway star who has mysteriously fled New York in the midst of the run of a hot new play to return to her Montana hometown, where by chance she meets Our Wayfaring Heroes, Tod (played by Martin Milner, whom I came to know better, more or less, as the older cop on one of my gram’s old favorites, Adam-12) and Buz (George Maharis), both of whom instantly fall for her, especially Buz.

It develops that Arlene—yes, “Arlene,” that’s the very unglamorous name of Francis’s character—has learned she has a degenerative disease (Lupus? Seriously?) and knowing she hasn’t long to live has opted to run away from the bright promise of her life and career and come home to die.

A Month of Sundays was written by the peerless Stirling Silliphant, whose endearingly oddball name is attached as scribe to some of the very best of the classic television shows of the fifties and sixties (M Squad, Perry Mason, Mr. Lucky, Naked City, Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and several fine movies (Charly, The Slender Thread, In the Heat of the Night) as well. His writing is literate and intense, often infused with piercing psychological insight, and this episode is no exception.

Tod: You’re going to Columbia Gardens tonight with Buz, aren’t you.

Arlene: Yes, why?

Tod (heavily): He bought a ring. He’s gonna ask you to marry him—

Arlene (stunned) No--!!

Tod: --and you’re going to accept.

Arlene (agonized): I can’t. You know I can’t, Tod.

Tod: But he doesn’t know you can’t, and that’s why you’re going to!

Arlene: How can I love if I can’t offer a lasting relationship? (Turning away) I don’t even know if I’m gonna see the rain again—I don’t even know if I’m gonna see tomorrow’s sun! How can I hurt Buz by loving him and letting him love me when it can’t go anywhere?

Tod: But it can go somewhere—

Arlene: What, a day? Two days? Maybe a week—?

Tod: A minute if that’s all there is, but a minute that counts!

Arlene: I can’t! I know Buz loves me--I can’t make it worse!

Tod (pleading): Arlene, you’re doing what everybody else does—wasting precious days, just passing the time, going through the motions! Waiting! That’s not really living. Before my father died he taught me something. He knew he was dying. He lived his last days more fully than he lived all the rest of his life. He said ‘Don’t let yourself be hobbled by fatalism and don’t run from death. Recognize it. Accept it for what it is--just as much a miracle as being born, maybe more so. Only when we lose our fear of death can we defeat it. Then we can make every hour of our existence really count.’

Tod (passionately): Arlene, Buz is a guy who’s with things! He feels every minute of every experience in every pore! And if he did know, this is the way he’d want it to be! So take this from him and share it with him and use it!

(She stares at him, wavering, troubled, uncertain, as the scene fades out and a commercial for City Colleges of Chicago begins.)

Strong stuff.

Still, watching this episode--this exchange especially--I'm struck by two things. First, I’m not sure people really talked like this, even in that bygone, presumably better educated, era. I love good television writing and it's fun watching actors eager to strut their actorly stuff sink their perfect teeth into what they know is a well crafted, possibly award-winning, script. Even so, there's dialogue you admire on the page and dialogue you really believe.

More importantly though, I’m a wee bit creeped out--more than a wee bit, actually--by the way Buz’s love, and his plans for them both, is presented by Tod to Arlene as something she’s duty bound to accept regardless of the grim reality of her circumstances (or even because of that) as though his friend’s feelings mattered more than those of a dying woman. Tod’s words seem very heartfelt, but what about Arlene’s words? Would Tod have had more respect for her feelings, would he have taken her objections more seriously, if they were coming from Buz, and it was he confronting the Grim Reaper? I realize this was (and to some extent remains) the culture, rather than a fault of Silliphant's teleplay, the days when, above all, every (normal) girl wanted to be married, supposedly, and most (normal) guys in their swingin' bachelor heart of hearts really didn't, supposedly. You say it was his idea? He went and bought a ring? Well, what on earth is she waiting for? Okay, there was this pesky wrinkle about her not having too much longer to live... but couldn't she, couldn't they, you know, work around that?

Arlene didn't marry Buz, of course; the serie's premise wouldn't have allowed for it. She began to slip away from him while they were foxtrotting on the dance floor, dying as a bewildered Buz watched a priest perform the last rites, asking Arlene if she was sorry for her sins. She said yes, gazed up at the dark night sky, her hand went limp, and Buz burst into wails of grief as a saddened Tod looked on. I felt sad too.

For her.