It Always Feels Good...

when my creative work is recognized in some way. Thank you to the literary magazines that have recently published some of my writing. I thoroughly appreciate it.

"The Tea Kettle" -short story, appears in amphibi.us

http://amphibi.us/all/the-tea-kettle/

"Magical Douche" -poem, appears in Mad Swirl

http://madswirlspoetryforum.blogspot.com/2010_10_24_archive.html

"Tha Ballad of Done Me Wrong and Maybegirl" -short story, appears in Jersey Devil Press

http://www.jerseydevilpress.com/?page_id=19

Feel free to take a look and have a read!

McDonald's

Literary magazine, Instigatorzine, has featured my poem "McDonald's" and I in their June 2010 issue. Below you will find my poem and the accompanying interview that was done for the magazine by Jenna Kildosher.

"McDonald’s"

Whenever I get McDonald’s
my father has to stand over my shoulder
and make his usual comments.

“Looka whadda she’s eat,”
he’ll say to no one but me—
because I’m the only asshole there.

“No eata dis merda.
Dis food itsa everyting shit,” he’ll say.

I’ll ask if he wants a French fry and he’ll say no.
I’ll ask him again and he won’t answer.
I don’t ask him a third time because
he is already eating my French fries.

Then he tears a ketchup packet open
with his teeth and squeezes
a Heinz pool out onto a napkin.
In go the French fries,
three, four, five at a time.

He is eating
all my shit.


—Sandra Bazzarelli


Sandra Bazzarelli is a singer/songwriter and writing instructor from Bergen County, New Jersey. She earned her BA in Literature and Writing from Columbia University, and her MA in English Education from NYU. She likes to write about her parents because English is their second language so, really, she can get away with saying pretty much anything she wants about them. She highly recommends being a first generation American for this reason.


Featured Writer: Sandra Bazzarelli
Instigatorzine, June 2010


What type of literature do you mainly write? Would you say poetry is your main genre of writing? If not what type of writer would you consider yourself? I think I do my best writing when I’m working with a fixed number of lines. This is probably why I gravitate toward poetry and songs. Shorter is better for me. I wrote a novel once. And it’s been constipating my hard drive for over 12 years. Frankly, I cannot begin to describe its awfulness to you. That would take too many lines. And collectively they would be, well, awful.

Some may find poetry to be intimidating because of ambiguity, or they just, “don't get it”. What would you say to someone who doesn't read poetry because they may not fully understand it? I would probably say, “If you are not a poetry reader, then write poetry.” You will have a cleaner lens as a reader once you’ve been a writer. Not all poetry has to be woefully Hallmarkian. It’s a voluminous genre. Walt Whitman and Shel Silverstein are both poets, after all.

I found “McDonald's” a poem that would be easily accessible, because of its directness and humorous demeanor, to people who may misunderstand poetry, would you agree? You’re right about its accessibility. It is definitely not an old school jazz musician of a poem. It doesn’t turn its back on its audience. It faces you because it hopes you’ll recognize something about yourself when you look at it. It’s likely funny because it’s relatable without being jokey. I personally find humor to be remarkably highbrow. I find poems about slitting your wrists on the bathroom floor to be so predictable and such a snore.

In your biography, you state you are a first generation American, we see this take part in your poem “McDonald's”. How does this take influence in your other works? My family pops up in a lot of my writing, for better or worse. Mine is an American experience underscored by the fact that my parents are immigrants and their English is broken. My mother’s English is much better than my father’s, yes, but there has always been poetry in the way each of them speaks English. They’ve either had to use simple, choppy sentences, or they’ve had to simile and metaphor the shit out of what they didn’t have the precise words for. My mother, for example, would never say, “He has a pronounced chin.” Instead she’d say, “His chin. It’s like you can grab his ankles, turn him upside down, and dig in the dirt with it.”

Reading this poem we get an understanding of a part of the parent-child relationship, a parent's criticism and their self-contradiction. Was this something you wanted to depict? I think I just wanted to sum up my father. Criticism + self-contradiction + food = my father.

What did you want to portray in “McDonald's”? I suppose I just wanted to portray how the everyday exchanges people have are really just comical, but profoundly telling, living poems. What you don’t know is that my father is a chef. So, in my family, we absolutely know the difference between good food and junk food. But McDonald’s, as you know, works in mysterious ways. Come to think of it, maybe I just wanted to portray the voodoo charms of McDonald’s French fries. And now I’m hungry.

Tiger! Tiger!

Tiger! Tiger! you're a shite,

Crashing in the dead of night,
What immoral hand on thigh

Could lift short skirts up on the sly?

In what distant, driven swing

Did you think to risk everything?

In what ho dare you, bare, enter?

When alone most sure to sext her.

And what waitress, what porn star?

Cheating standards not on par

With your wife at home, yes, waiting

While you're making your rounds dating

What the endorsements? What the game?

In what pair of pants was your brain?

What the golf club? What Ambien grasp

Rushed Elin outside to shatter glass?

When the Gatorade pulls their dollars,

And no longer puts your face on bottles,

Will you smile your handiwork to see?

Or weep at the sneakered feet of Nike?

Tiger! Tiger! you're a shite,

You fired the bullet that you must bite

What impossibly bad behavior?

Returneth to your cave, you player.

(Inspired by William Blake's classic poem: "The Tyger")

Lost in the Lights

The MTV show Jersey Shore does not represent me as an Italian-American from New Jersey. Still, I have lived long enough on this earth, and among enough ethnic groups to know that, whether or not we'd like to admit it, stereotypes, both negative and positive, survive because they are born of some truth. Where there is smoke, there is fire, so to speak. However, like many Italian-Americans, I watched the first episode of Jersey Shore the same way I watch horror films...through my fingers...as I begged the people on screen not to do what they were about to do. "No, please," I called out to drunk and pathetic Snooki. "Don't get in the hot tub in your bra and leopard print thong!" But, sadly, even with my plea, she did. And sadly, even with my shame, there are, indeed, Italian-Americans who absolutely live by guido/guidette lifestyle rules. In this case, where there is a tan, there is a tanning bed.

Yet, rest assured, not all Italian-Americans are cut from the same leopard print cloth. The same way the African-American community can proudly claim Barack Obama as its own, it must also claim Flavor Flav. The same way the Latino-American community can proudly claim Sonia Sotomayor, it must also begrudgingly claim that rapping, Reggaeton, iO Digital Cable pitchman (Do I haf to trenslet?). So what is it then that creates such gaps in achievement and, subsequently, pride, within a specific racial or ethnic group? Is it education that separates us where race, cultural heritage, and geography do not? Is it a question of where we sit atop the socioeconomic ladder? Or, quite simply, is it travel and a steady exposure to people from other backgrounds that keeps us, regardless of our youth or age, open-minded and ethnically balanced? What makes one Italian-American woman "Dr. Melfi", for example, and the other "Carmela Soprano"?

I venture to guess that, ultimately, it is deep-seeded, hole-in-the-soul insecurity that causes certain personality types to latch on to the lowest, most obvious "standards" within their respective ethnic groups. Unfortunately, this Italian-American "Guinea" standard stands out precisely because it is represented by insecure posers who, in an effort to mask their fear of social isolation, fist-pump the hardest, yell the loudest, and dress the most ostentatiously. People who don't feel the need to belong, don't worry about earning titles like, "King of the Guidos"- which, to me, isn't a title anyone should aspire to have. In fact, it's not unlike being named the "Lord of the Flies". Lord, oh Lord, you are still only a fly. But people with low self-esteem all too often harbor an inexplicable attraction to all things outrageously over-the-top. Easily intimidated people, it seems, tend to gravitate toward personas that seem the most intimidating. This, of course, is a very broken road toward feeling both protected and welcome, but it is a road lit with flashing club lights and is, therefore, irresistible. But don't be fooled. Lights, after all, don't always illuminate. Sometimes lights afford you the option of hiding in plain sight. Ask any baseball outfielder who plays night games. You can lose things in the lights. Most notably, yourself.

Still, vainglorious behavior will always attract attention. A lot of attention. Heavily accented guidos and guidettes are entertaining and amusing, and, as a result, quite profitable. Is it any wonder that Hollywood keeps coming back to the lowest common denominator in terms of Italian-American storylines? This is what makes everybody the most money. The Mafia posturing. The hair gel. The way they tawk. The caked-on make-up. The sausage and pepahs. The nails. The Italian flags. The multitude of juiced-up Vinnies willing to wear tight, white T-shirts, drive Mustangs...and slap their Teresas around when they get too accusatory.

I do not doubt that UNICO (an Italian-American service organization) is sincerely outraged at MTV for putting Jersey Shore on the air. After all, it is difficult to claim that MTV is not, in fact, complicit in perpetuating a negative stereotype of Italian-Americans when you really start to pay attention. Stop and take a closer look when you channel surf; you will almost never find a positive image of Italian-Americans to rival the negative ones that are out there. Then again, whose fault is that? Maybe UNICO is just embarrassed, as I am, that we have these attention seeking buffoons among us who seem to have a stronghold on our collective identity.

MTV is a business, first and foremost. Like Bravo, home of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, it doesn't care. It is making money off of eight (residually) Italian-American kids from the East Coast who were willing to, first, exploit their culture in their everyday lives, and then willingly exploit themselves as they exploited their culture on television...in a contrived, fish bowl experience. The exploiters have, thus, become the exploited. Unfortunately, judging by the ubiquity and popularity of their image, they continue to succeed at marginalizing Italian-Americans as a people. If we don't change, how can we expect society, as a whole, to change its attitude toward us? We can protest all we want, but a select few among us can't hear this truth no matter how loudly it blares.

The house music is pumping and thumping much too loudly.

You Down with OPM?

They have been referred to as "helicopter" parents...because they hover. A recent Time magazine article chronicles the evolution of this overparenting phenomenon. Hands-off parenting steadily groped toward hands-on parenting in the 1990's, and now parents apparently seem to have completely forgotten that their kids have hands of their own. Many modern day parents are like anxiety-heightened personal assistants with really unhealthy attachment issues. They are parents to the extreme. Today, parents who leave their kids alone to fail, fall, and falter are considered bad parents, renegades who are often bullied by what I like to call the OPM (Over-your-shoulder Parent Mafia). The OPM's fear is often irrational, but their criticism of other parents who do not agree with their safety/educational tenets is loud and proud. OPM sounds like "opium", I know. That's because I wonder if some of these parents are high when I observe what they are doing to these overscheduled, overinstructed, emotionally and materially overindulged kids of theirs.

Sylvester Stallone was recently reprimanded by countless media outlets and called "The Worst" (on that mess known as The Insider) because he had two of his daughters (ages 11 and 13) sitting in the passenger's seat of his sports car as he drove down a residential street in Miami. Poor judgement? Yes. The worst? No. Not unless he forced them to watch Rocky V when they got home. Some even went so far as to suggest the girls should still be riding in car seats. Honestly, I believe in car seats. I sincerely do. They save lives and that's a fact. But these car seats nowadays are an unbelievable sight. A feat of mind-bending engineering, really. When I strap my six-year-old niece into hers I feel like I'm prepping her for root canal surgery on the moon, not a five minute drive around the block at 15 MPH. Yes, it's better to be safe than sorry. I get it. I agree. Still, the idea of her being strapped into one when she's an adolescent or a teenager makes me wonder what will be next. Perhaps we should slow down the earth's rotation because, you know, it is spinning pretty quickly. And, you know, spinning is dangerous. Why do you think those tires on those chains at playgrounds have been extricated? Kids die when they spin.

My father always let us ride in the front seat of his car. In fact, as kids we used to beat the holy shit out of each other just to get to the car door first so that we could ride shotgun. And, no, we did not wear seatbelts. A seatbelt would have just gotten in the way. How would we have been able to slide over and steer the car while our father picked his teeth with a toothpick, or counted out his change as we approached a tollbooth? The kicker is this: My father thinks he was a very good father. Why? Because he never killed us. He means intentionally. Growing up, had we gotten hit by a bus because he let us cross highways, I suspect he would not have taken any sort of blame for our deaths. It would have been an accident, after all. An accident caused by our own inability to not get hit by a bus. No, when he says he's a good father because he never killed us, he means killed us because we were getting on his nerves by being too loud while he tried to watch the soccer game, or taking too long to fetch him a pair of clean socks. When a story came on TV not too long ago about some sonuvabitch father who set his triplet baby girls on fire, my father pointed to the TV and said, "You see? I told you I'm a good father." Because he never roasted us on a spit over an open flame, he thinks he deserves a prize. Perhaps, a new pair of socks.

And yet, for all the lack of caution, for all the lack of interest and concern, we're pretty much fine. We have our problems, of course, but guess what? I have yet to experience a broken bone. For all my careening downhill in a shopping cart sans helmet, swimming in the ocean without swimmies when I couldn't swim, and doing my "gymnastics" routine on an open staircase with wads of Bubbliscious gum in my mouth, I survived. My siblings and I are social, educated, moral, and respectable people...and our parents never went to one PTA meeting. I never even showed them my homework. I'd occasionally turn to them when my pencil needed sharpening, but that's just because that wood whittling with a butcher knife was tricky business. My pencil tip may have looked like it had been gnawed on by wild animals, but in my hand, it did its job. And I did mine. With my own hand.

Eviction Noticed

About two months ago, in the middle of the night, I was startled out of my sleep by a very peculiar happening. Seconds after I "awoke" from my "sleep", my personal perspective was completely inverted. I wasn't where I thought I was anymore. Instead, I was floating above my bed, looking down on myself from somewhere over my body. What I saw scared me so thoroughly, I'm getting the chills again just thinking about it. What I saw was, well, me. I was lying on my back, but slumped to my left. My mouth was agape, and my eyes were open. I wasn't blinking. The moment I caught a glimpse of myself, I gasped. Was I dead?

Suddenly, with that same gasp of breath, I returned to my physical form. I sat straight up in my bed, my left arm tingling with pins and needles. The sound of my heart racing and skipping more aggressively than it usually does was both frightening and comforting. I was alive. Sandra Spirit had apparently taken up residence in Sandra Body once again. I could see my wall now, not myself. I was looking through my eyes, watching the dark. What, I asked myself, had happened to me in those few seconds just prior?

Naturally, I solved my fear by doing what any reasonable person in this situation would do: I covered my head with my comforter and buried myself between my pillows. Had I wormed myself any further into my mattress, it would have folded itself up and around me and made me into Sandra Taco. Surely this would keep me safe from whatever it was that had lifted me out of my body and into mid-air. I mean, if I had died for a few seconds, surely barricading myself with down bedding would protect me. My heart, if it had stopped briefly, couldn't possibly stop again in one night, could it? No. Not if neither one of my feet was hanging off my bed.

I wondered if this had been my Intro to Death 101. A little taste. An appetizer. One crabmeat stuffed mushroom before the prime rib is served. But if that is, in fact, what dying is, I don't want it. I'll pass, thank you. Even though I felt zero pain, just a jolt followed by confusion followed by fear, I'd rather stay alive. I always hear people announce, "When I go, I hope I go in my sleep, in my own bed...quietly and in peace." Yet, if life has taught us anything, it's that hope isn't always the most realistic route toward peace. Perhaps this is a life lesson that the concept of death and dying should appropriate. There is no real peace in the transition. I think we can assume that, regardless of how you die, whether you experience pain in the process or not, dying is always going to be a shock to your system. Let's assume it's the most difficult move you will ever make. Let's think of it as being evicted from your body. Even if you've been given notice, you don't want to leave. Once you're out, you're wondering where you're going to go next. You want to break back in and live where you've been living.

I think that's what I did on that one suspicious night about two months ago. I think I broke back into my body before it had been completely boarded up. Clearly, death didn't last very long in my case, but it did leave quite an impression on me. I wonder how long it's going to be before some kind of governing celestial force realizes I managed to slip back into my body soon after I was kicked out of it. The irony, of course, is this: I don't even like my body. But, really, it's better than no body at all; that's what I've come away with. So, I guess I'll keep it with me. I do wonder about being pulled back out of it, but I try not to worry about it. All I know is, should I be snagged for trespassing any time soon, I intend to put up one hell of a fight. My soul is a squatter, so to speak. But she won't go quietly.

A Chicken Lives in New Jersey

My grandfather, who lives in suburban New Jersey like the rest of us, recently had a chicken. Her name was Clementina and she was akin to a pet cat. Self-sufficient and a bit of a snoot, she roamed his yard and went about the neighborhood with her head held high as though she had every right to be strutting along the asphalt. I'm going to assume that she died of natural causes, but one never really knows.

As kids, we, too, had a chicken. My father had bought her for us where they slaughter chickens at some place in Jersey City. This is just one of the many inappropriate places my father would take us as children. Horrified, my older sister and I would watch as they’d slice the chickens' heads off with a blade that was built into the counter. Some kids get to go to the zoo; we got to go watch chickens go bye-bye.

However, on one occasion, instead of with the usual, freshly killed chicken, we actually returned home with a live one. Hoping she would provide eggs daily, we kept her in the garage…in a Foodtown shopping carriage my father had stolen and transformed into a coop. My sister named her Chicky. Her full name was Chicky Feathers Joey Bazzarelli because my father let us each pick a name. My little brother contributed the Joey part, and I nearly blew a gasket.

“Chickens are girls,” I said, losing my patience.

Of course, my father told me to leave my brother alone, unless I wanted a schiaffo across my face. So, yes, the name stayed, but I was very annoyed about it. I still think it's totally stupid. I don’t think I need to tell you that, as a child, I had high blood pressure. Anyway, Chicky never laid eggs. No, she gave us something better, something no other pet could: chicken drama.

One afternoon, while we played outside with the garage door open, someone’s unleashed dog made a beeline for Chicky. It knocked over the Foodtown shopping carriage and, Chicky, understandably, went from frazzled to certifiably nuts, flapping and running across the washer and dryer, sort of flying around the garage, fumbling across my father’s tool-strewn workbench to get away from the dog.

Being that we were kids, home alone, and, well, chicken shit, we scrambled inside to call the police.

“There's a dog,” I said. “Loose in our garage,” I said. “It's going to eat our chicken!”
“Is it your dog?” the cop asked.
“No,” I said. “We don’t know whose dog it is.”
“Whose dog is it?” the cop asked.

My blood pressure rising, I didn’t answer for fear that I’d curse and earn myself multiple schiaffi in the process.

“Well, the dog’s probably just hungry,” the cop finally said. “Leave it alone. Let it eat your chicken. It'll run off after that.”
“But the chicken's ALIVE!” I yelled.

Eventually the police showed up, caught the dog, and made us call our father who got in trouble for not having a permit for Chicky. He couldn't have cared less. I remember him telling the police something about a dog’s not being on a leash being “more danger” than a chicken in someone's garage. Not that any of the hunting dogs my father owned over the years even knew what a leash looked like.

Needless to say, Chicky survived the dog chase, and we continued to keep her. Albeit, illegally.

“No worry,” my father said. “They no do nothing.”

Unfortunately, Chicky didn’t last too much longer. Chicky got cancer. Her right eyeball protruded at least an inch due to the tumor growing behind it. When she’d let you, you could feel the clusters of tumors under her wings. She also couldn't poop anymore because there was a tumor growing on her rectum. My father had to use pliers to pull out the feces she struggled to release. It was heartbreaking, watching her suffer like that. She really did suffer.

Then, not long after the first tumor appeared, Chicky died. We came home from school and she was gone. I asked my mother if my father had put her out of her misery. He hadn’t.

Recently, over one of our Saturday family lunches that starts at 2 PM and doesn’t exactly end, I brought up the subject of Chicky.

“Really, Dad?” my sister asked. “You didn't kill her?"
“No,” he insisted. “Justa she's die. By sheself. I find dead.”

It was quiet for a beat.

“You know,” I said. “The one time you should have killed a chicken, you didn’t.”

Ode to Panettone

Raisin bread,
seasonal,
or, rather, brioche
Light and fluffy
with a bitter brown crust.
Inside, diced orange peel,
scattered and candied-
or should I say, petrified?
Why do paesani
like you so much?
You give me agita,
literally.
Whether I eat you here-
or in Italy.

Alone All By Myself

I hate going on dates. I hate hate hate going on dates. I'd rather sweeten my tea with pulverized glass than go on one more awful date. The idea of even attempting to have one more one-sided "conversation" with one more one-word-answer manbot is so excruciating to me that I suddenly understand the logic behind that show Snapped on Oxygen. Here's an example of a somewhat recent exchange I had during one of my more painful dates:

ME: So, then you like what you do?
HIM: Yeah.
(Silence.)
ME: Great. So, what inspired you to go into that industry in the first place?
(More Silence.)
ME: Did someone encourage you to go into that field?
HIM: Dad.
ME: Your dad?
HIM: Yeah.
ME: Great. That's great. So, do you and your dad work together?
HIM: Yeah.
ME: Really? Oh, that's nice.
HIM: Yeah.
ME: Do you like working with him?
(Again, Silence.)
HIM: Sometimes.
ME: Sometimes? Why's that?
HIM: (shrug)

Anyway, the date wound down with this:

ME: Yeah, I don't think this is going to work out.
HIM: No?
ME: No. I actually feel like I'm alone on this date. And, to be quite honest with you, ______, I don't really need to date you to be alone. I can be alone all by myself.
HIM: Okay.
ME: Yeah, I actually prefer being alone all by myself.
HIM: (shrug)

I am 33 and single, and, frankly, the only times I wish I had a man in my life are a) when I'm having car trouble b) when I have a lot of parcels and/or bags to carry while I'm shopping and c) when I see men walking around with their kids hoisted up on their shoulders. Were it not for these three disparate moments in time, I'd be fine. I'd scarcely consider pairing up. The problem is a) lately my car has been having quite a bit of trouble b) I always seem to have a shitload to carry, and, c) to make matters worse, I work with kids, so I see lots of men carrying their kids up on their goddamn shoulders.

I don't like to gripe about men because it's basically been done a gazillion times over by many other women who do it so much better than I ever could but, seriously, what the hell?

If the men I date aren't legally mute, they're talking non-stop...about sex. In odious detail. They don't even know my last name, but they want to know what color my underwear is. So, when they ask, I tell them.

"It's black," I say.
"Ooooo, black, sexy," the horny bastards reply.
"Yeah, and guess what?" I say. "You're never going to see it."

Not unless I also tell them the style, the designer, and the size of my underwear so they can then go and peruse the lingerie section of Bloomingdales on their own...the pervs that they are.

Now, I cannot speak for all women on this subject, but I can speak for myself. The sex talk does not work. The no talk does not work. Why can't the interest a man expresses in a woman be, I don't know, sweet? A respectful, yet charmingly playful, effort toward genuinely getting to know the woman because he genuinely likes the woman. You don't want to hold her hand unless it's immediately going to lead to nakedness? Somehow that just doesn't seem right to me. If it really is only about sex across the board then, really, I'm in trouble. One guy proudly told me that he doesn't know if he loves a woman until he has sex with her. In my mind, love should develop first. Sex should be an expression of that love.

But, apparently, I'm alone on that one.

Single Turkeys (Put A Wing On It)

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

Put your wings up...

Listen to us
you're not gonna stuff
any of that mush
in our guts

We've had enough
of the buttery brush
Your drumsticks were our
legs and butts

Pay us attention
Did we mention,
beef and pork are very
deliiiicious?

We buzzards are tough
Yes, ugly and such,
but come and touch us and you'll suff-er

Try and catch us cuz we're gonna put a wing on it
Barely fly, but we're gonna put a wing on it
Baked and sliced, bitches, we can put a wing on it

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble

Your oven is hot
and you think you've got
a holiday meal to hit the spot

But we think not
We're hiding your pots
and pans out in the garage

Pay us attention
Did we mention,
fish and duck are very
deliiiicious?

Want to carve and cut
us birds into what
you'll just serve tomorrow for lunch

Try and catch us cuz we're gonna put a wing on it
Barely fly, but we're gonna put a wing on it
Baked and sliced, bitches, we can put a wing on it

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble...

So
many pilgrims served
It's worse than what you've heard;
it's so absurd
Thanksgiving and Christmas,
both traditions
to uplift us,
not kill us,
slit our throats...
Drown us with gravy boats
See this is what we know
Atop a stove, a Macy's float,
cartoonish oaf
about to roast

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

All my single turkeys
(All my single turkeys)

Put your wings up...

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble

gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gob, gob, gob
gobble...

Have a Heart

You know when you're walking along somewhere and you happen to notice a fellow human being who is in distress, but you keep walking along, pretending not to notice so that you can get away with doing nothing to help? Yeah, me neither. I personally always try to do something to help. Even if I don't necessarily think I'd be much of a help, I still offer my assistance. And I've always been this way. The steady threat of ABC's "What Would You Do?" hidden cameras has not suddenly made me a decent person. I, like most of you, tend to do the right thing. However, if you are one of those people who pretends to not notice that your help is needed, and just go along on your merry little way without stopping to offer someone a hand when a hand would obviously be appreciated, I'd like to think that you, at the very least, would be both artful and considerate enough to never ever mention to the very person you failed to help, how you saw him or her in distress, but did nothing about it. I mean, surely there cannot exist the type of person who would offhandedly remark, "I saw you. I saw you slip and fall on the ice. I saw you struggling and everything to pull yourself up...but I didn't help you."

Surely not. Not unless you are one of the women I happen to work with.

You see, a colleague of mine actually said that very thing to me the other day. My hard fall onto the ice was, at least, two weeks in the past and no one was talking about it anymore. And yet, there she was, admitting to me that she had seen me struggling and didn't help me...because she didn't want to bother me. Did you catch that? She didn't want to bother me. She hadn't even offered an empty, "Are you okay?" I was so stunned that I could do nothing but listen as she rambled on. Was she kidding me? Who would be dense enough to admit this sort of thing? Then I sarcastically told her that it was probably a good thing that she didn't help me because she probably would have also slipped on the ice and then fallen on top of me, making it much worse. But as I tiptoed away from this morally questionable space cadet, I couldn't help but remember all the times I helped other people out, strangers included, and how good it made me feel to do something.

Perhaps, had she done something to help, she might have felt the way my sisters and I felt on a super sunny spring afternoon at the local Dairy Queen, back when I was eighteen years old. This specific DQ is no longer standing because word eventually got out that the teenage boys who were working there were, um, how do I say this? Squirting themselves into the soft serve vat of cream? Oh my God, I'm gagging. Anyway, who knows if it's even true, but that was the rumor.

Anyway, this rumor was a good two years away as we sat in my sister's Volvo eating our ice cream. Then, as if on cue, we all looked up from our treats at the same time to notice a thin, disheveled-looking elderly man. This probably wouldn't have kept our gaze had he not also appeared to be both alone and mentally retarded. Eating his vanilla cone in front of the DQ, he wore a pained expression on his face. He seemed confused, lost, scared even. As he licked his ice cream, he squinted and pressed one hand to his forehead with such pressure that it looked like he was pushing his loose forehead skin into his eyebrows in the hopes of pushing them all the way down and off his face. "What's wrong with that guy?" my little sister, who was nine at the time, asked from the backseat. But, before I even had a micro chance to try to answer her question, I heard it. The sniffling.

My older sister, who was twenty-two at the time, had already begun to bawl. The napkin that had been wrapped around her cone to absorb any dripping ice cream was now suddenly working overtime as it wiped away her tears. The thing is, my sister, a.k.a. Tenderheart, always cries when she catches even the most fleeting glimpse of mentally retarded, or physically disabled people. And she always utters the same 9 words once the floodgates open. "WHY do I always have to SEE these things?" she laments. And our response to my sister's wounded soul is always the same: we laugh. At her. Not at who she is crying for, just at her. And through our laughter we always ask, "But why are you crying?" As she fights to catch her breath, she usually replies, "It's so saaaaaaaaaaaad." And then she adds, "I don't know WHY I always have to SEE these things. WHY do I always have to SEE these things?"

But I will be honest with you, okay? The sight of this particular man in front of DQ, on this particular day, in this particular moment, tugged pretty aggressively at my own heart strings. Seeing this elderly, mentally retarded, and, likely, lost man was like stumbling upon the tearjerker trifecta. Within seconds of my older sister's initial sobs, my little sister and I joined in with our own. Oh how we blubbered. It was worse than when we watched The Champ.

"You should go see if he needs help," I finally sniffed to my older sister as I wiped my nose. But by now she was wailing. She couldn't do it and, well, my other sister was technically still a child. And apparently children aren't supposed to talk to strangers or something, so I couldn't really instruct her to do anything about it. Plus, she, too, was still a weepy mess. So, with no other choice than to forge forth on my own, I pulled myself together and got out of the car to see if I could do something for this man who appeared to be in need of some assistance.

Hunching my shoulders slightly and bowing my head a bit, I approached him. I don't remember him as being shorter than I was, but for some reason, I always hunch my shoulders slightly and bow my head a bit when I say, "Excuse me..." to anyone. Maybe a body language expert or psychologist could help me out with this one but, I'm guessing that this is my way of presenting myself as somewhat submissive. A non-threat. Like, "Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. Look at my lousy posture. I'm probably brittle and weak. If you had to, you'd be able to run away from me easily." Anyway, I asked him if he needed help and he said that he did. I couldn't completely understand what he was saying, but somehow I caught that he had gotten on the wrong bus and needed to get home because his wife would be worried. I hadn't been talking to him for more than a minute when my sisters suddenly crept onto the scene like the Munchkins coming out, coming out, from wherever they were...which, in this case, was the tear-soaked interior of my sister's Volvo.

Now, this was before the days of everyone having a cell phone, so we asked the teenage DQ dummies who had been watching this scene unfold from behind their sliding glass windows, if this gentleman could use their phone to call his wife. Before they could say yes, the man we were trying to help added this heartbreaking detail about his wife: She wouldn't hear the phone. She was deaf. To my right, once again, I could hear the sniffling begin, but then it abruptly stopped. My sister had a plan.

We made the DQ dummies call the guy a cab. When the man started crying that he couldn't pay for a cab because he had no money, my sister announced that we would pay his cab fare. When the cabby arrived, we handed him fifty dollars and told him to give the gentleman any money that was left over after he dropped him off. We also told him to make sure he got into his apartment safely. The cabby couldn't have been any nicer, or more pleasantly surprised by how much kindness we were showing this stranger.

Then, as the cabby drove off with our new friend in the backseat, the three of us smiled broadly at each other. We didn't say it, but we were all quite proud of ourselves. We almost joined hands and did a Ring-Around-the-Rosey dance right there in the parking lot to celebrate our inspiring wonderfulness. And then some smartypants asshole guy who had been watching, but doing nothing but eating his ice cream on the sidelines the whole time called out, "That cabdriver ain't gonna give him that money." Whatever. We ignored the smartypants asshole...because we knew the cabby would follow our instructions. We just knew. And then it happened. A burst bubble. My older sister realized that we hadn't given the cabby a tip. She started to panic. I could see it in her eyes. This good deed was now completely undone. "Why didn't you remind me about the tip?" she snipped. "We didn't thank the cabdriver!"

No matter. She would figure it out. The next day my older sister brought a generous tip to the cab company to thank the cabby for doing his part. When she walked in, all the drivers already knew the story. They were impressed and moved by what we had done and talked about how our particular cabby was just the guy for such occasions. As it turned out, he was the male equivalent to my older sister. He would have done the same thing we had done. You, likely, would have done the same thing we had done. Had you known you had fifty dollars on you when you encountered a lost, elderly, mentally retarded man with no money and a deaf wife at home, you would have used that money to get him home, too.

Unless, of course, you're the type of person who wouldn't want to bother him.

Breaking the Routine

Last week I happened to catch a rerun of Jimmy Kimmel Live. The episode had originally aired in November and featured Reese Witherspoon, Scott Weiland, and the Pumphrey brothers. If you are like me, you haven't the slightest idea as to who the Pumphrey brothers are. The truth is, not only did I not know who they were, I had zero interest in finding out. And so, after the Witherspoon interview, in anticipation of Weiland's gangly, teetering, guyliner smeared performance, I turned the volume way down and diverted my attention toward writing out a very short list of my new year's resolutions...in pencil.

Then, just as Kimmel's two relatively unknown guests were walking out to their seats to chat, I glanced at the T.V. Now, much as I hate to admit this, it was what these two casually attired guys looked like that made me immediately dig the remote out of the couch and adjust the volume. Could it really be? Actual men? You see, the Pumphrey brothers, stars of a new reality show called Human Wrecking Balls on G4, are both impossibly tall, and brawny in a way that suggests strength, not preening. Both in their thirties, peroxide blonde Craig and brunette Paul are apparently, and each in their own right, highly regarded and accomplished martial artists who hold world records in God-knows-how-many feats of strength. Thus, after a brief, genial conversation, Kimmel challenged the brothers to demolish a vending machine with their bare hands. And so, in less than 2 minutes, that's precisely what they did. Have you managed to guess the premise of their show yet?

Human Wrecking Balls, on every Wednesday night at 10 PM, is a show about the science of breaking stuff with human force alone. The tagline is: Man vs. Man-Made. After I watched the brothers annihilate the vending machine on JKL, I nearly cried for all the lost treats that were so mercilessly strewn about the studio stage. I felt sorry for the vending machine, and yet, I could not help but be impressed by how precise and methodical the destruction had been. Effortless, even. Without a hint of chemical support, or pent-up aggression. This was not two jackasses trying to hurt themselves for cheap laughs. Too bad I'll never see the show, I thought to myself, knowing that I don't have TiVo and, therefore, due to my Wednesday-night-at-10 PM addiction to Bravo's Top Chef, would be unable to see the show for myself. And then, this past Sunday afternoon, while I was channel surfing, wouldn't you know it, I stumbled upon a Human Wrecking Balls marathon.

The show features the aforementioned Pumphrey brothers, an engineer/science guy, and a pretty, albeit, pretty pointless nurse on the sidelines who basically cleans out wounds and snoozingly tells the guys things like, "It's a good thing this or that didn't happen because I wouldn't have been able to do anything for you and the hospital is really far away." Great. What the hell are you doing there then? Couldn't someone like, oh I don't know, the Food Network's Paula Deen stretch Band-Aids across their scrapes and scratches? I'd rather see her and her motherly Southern comfort in the nurse role. An expressive, "Aww baby, what'd you do now? Come 'ere and let me fix that up for you," would make much more sense in this context. Never mind the fact that the brothers are from Indiana, not Georgia.

Anyway, where the stuntmen programming of late seems to revel in recklessness, this show focuses, instead, on the science of breaking things. Getting hurt is not their intention, even if it is their reality. They ask questions of the engineer/science guy or expert on site if what they are doing does not work. In other words, there is method here, not madness. There is an effort being made to educate the audience about what they are seeing. And I, a person who is not generally interested in examples of brute force or physical science, was awed by the art of it all. When Paul Pumphrey is commenting on his brother's performance of a specific task, for example, he'll often refer to how Craig looked while he was doing something. "It looked pretty," he might say. Or, "It looked cool." And it does. Especially when the slow-mo happens. You can appreciate the art when you can see the minutia of the execution. The height the jumps reach, the full extension of arms and legs, the glass crashing outward, seeming to splash...it isn't just breaking shit; it's physics by way of martial arts, and years and years of training. There is a sort of beauty here.

So then what is in the destruction? More art, or just a mess? I would argue that, in the destruction, you will find the science. There is a sort of wisdom here. Hence, the show's production team smartly uses these opportunities to flash digital science lessons and fun facts up on the screen to explain what is happening to the objects and why. There are blueprint sketches that simplify the scientific explanations for viewers. And in the brothers themselves? What do we find there? Well, there you will find the heart of the show. When the camera catches genuine looks and queries of concern exchanged between the brothers Pumphrey, you realize, as a viewer, that, yes, there is real risk involved, and, yes, they are real brothers.

The genuine affection and friendly rivalry they seem to enjoy supports the format, which is as follows: Craig comes up with a scripted "hair-brained" idea and tells Paul, "Hey, it'd be awesome if you did it." Paul is unwilling and tries to deflect the challenge onto his brother. How to solve this? Well, prior to any joint BIG challenge (i.e. destroying a Cessna airplane, office space, sailboat, car, manufactured home, and so on) the brothers compete in a mini challenge to determine who will have to do the extra tricky part per Craig's suggestion. For example, who will not have to run through a glass wall in an office? Whoever will most thoroughly destroy a Xerox machine with his bare hands in the allotted time, of course.

The engineer/science guy on hand is a little bland, but he knows his stuff. Unfortunately, he is also on hand to discourage results and lower expectations. He is, for lack of a better term, the resident naysayer. "You've got your work cut out for you with this one," he'll drone. His lines are stagey and manipulative at times, but they may just be intended to voice the thoughts of doubters who are sitting at home...or so I'm guessing. Who knows. Maybe the guy's just a downer.

The brothers themselves, however, are very likable, even when they are delivering corny lines. Craig, the younger, but bigger brother, can roll up a frying pan in his bare hands with about as much effort as it would take the average person to roll up a single sheet of oak tag. He seems to be the more natural athlete, and yet, Paul, who can hurl a round tabletop out a window like it's a Frisbee, seems to be the more disciplined and committed of the two. In other words, they are super strong, and don't seem to get drained of their strength.

Unfortunately, when I mention the strength of these two brothers to a strong man I know, he immediately dismisses them and brings up the steroid angle. And why wouldn't he, after all? I'm convinced that strength is to men what beauty is to women. Tell a strong man another man is stronger and he'll muscle through with a steroid accusation; tell a beautiful woman that another woman is more beautiful and listen while she brings up the likelihood of plastic surgery. Anyway, the steroid possibility hadn't crossed my mind before the strong guy I know mentioned it. Is it possible? Sure. Baseball and Andy (holy roller, my ass) Pettitte taught us that. But I kind of doubt it. Or, rather, I'd like to doubt it, because I like the show. And I think you'll like it, too. Who knows, this Wednesday night I may just break my routine and watch Human Wrecking Balls instead of Top Chef. See? I, too, can break something.

'Twas Two Nights Before Christmas Eve

'Twas two nights before Christmas Eve, and all through my veins
anxiety was coursing like a train on cocaine
I, in high-heeled boots, had gone shopping for gifts,
slipping through the icy parking lot 10,000 plows missed

Bundled in my black coat, the one with the hood,
I'd just exited Bloomingdales, feeling cold, but pretty good
For I had accomplished a task most could not:
I had finished my Christmas shopping, all in one shot

When, what to my narrowing eyes should appear?
Why, an SUV tailing cautious steps at my rear
His headlights were blazing, as he loomed close and large
Surely he'd follow me till he'd find where I'd parked

Thinking his spying me rendered other drivers thwarted,
this guy didn't realize the journey he'd started
See, I'd driven my mother's car (mine died last week, damnit!),
and yet I traipsed searching for my car out of habit

Around and around I walked, packaged arms breaking, achingly
The SUV stalker wondering, "Where the hell is she taking me?"
I slipped and I sniffed until I spotted, as horns blew,
my mother's car and wondered, "She came shopping here, too?"

When finally my senses returned to my thoughts
I scurried, best I could, to recover time lost
With the key in the keyhole to open the trunk,
I wobbled on the ice like a Christmas punch drunk

Surprise, surprise, FROZEN! The lock I'd dared turn
So I went 'round the backseat with a look of concern
Worrying that not all the parcels would fit,
squishing and pushing until all of them did

Now, trying to compose myself and shake off the worst
I started the car and put it in reverse
But, no, no, not so fast, all the windows were frosted
Now, cursing and frazzled, I totally lost it

Defrost time, I had none, the mood nearly manic
For the SUV waiting had caused major traffic
There, inside my mother's car, I cowered, just listening
to the cacophony of beeping, headlights on me, blistering

I dashed out the vehicle and into the backseat
that immediately spit every package back at me
Desperate, I grabbed the inspirational pillow,
that sat on display, cozy in the back window

"Behind every great woman is herself," it reads
Thus, I used its embroidered face to wipe the windows clean
Then, finally, having packed up the car once again,
I got in the driver's seat, and out the space I went

Saying to myself, jingley, as I slid out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all...WATCH THE ICE!"

In Want of a Need for Christmas

Forgive me if I fail to allow the holiday spirit to tip-toe in here with its red-stockinged feet and the promise of merrymaking, but I'm just not in the mood. I could lie and say that, in fact, it's just this year that I feel kind of bothered by the whole holiday thing but, gingerbread man-oh-man, it's every year for me. I hate Christmas. I'm sorry, but I do. And I think I always have.

Right after Halloween, I just tuck my chin into my chest, avoid eye contact at all costs, and barrel through the turkey targeted season until it's officially over. Once the red paper cups come out at Starbucks, I know that I need to keep my sunglasses on even after the sun goes down. Why? Well, isn't it obvious? To further protect my eyes from the impending glare of all those little lights that will soon be strung up on houses that, who are we kidding, are already the most unsightly ones on the block. Why would you want to draw more attention to your home's shortcomings? When neighbors go caroling door to door, voicing neither an energy concern, nor a safety concern about many of these electrically molested houses that appear to be one short away from a fireball existence, I wonder about the human camaraderie of it all. I don't care if your house explodes. May your days be merry and BRIGHT!

As if going blind weren't enough, I also, miraculously, go blank once Christmas approaches. I never need anything once people start asking me about potential presents that could be bought for me. All year long I say to myself, I could really use a..., I wish someone would get me a ..., You know what I need? A ... Then, "Hey, Sandra, what can I get you for Christmas?" Um, nothing. Let's not exchange this year. Of course, no matter how many times I instruct people not to get me anything, there are always boxes under the tree with my name on them. And damnit if I don't have to then make a mad dash to the mall. For the record, you always spend more money when you do all your Christmas shopping in two hours.

Because it has become somewhat of a Christmas tradition of mine to forget that I need anything worth asking for, not many of the gifts bought for me over the years have been especially thoughtful. Some of them have been nice gestures that do not go to waste, but some of them couldn't have been more off-base or generic. And yet, they are always fun to receive and then survey on the whole. In fact, on Christmas mornings of late, I have adopted a new tradition for myself that I highly recommend. You see, after I tear through my presents, one after another, I like to lay all my newly acquired booty on my bed and look at it, like I'm trying to piece the puzzle of perception together. There are scarves, gloves, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Staples, & Starbucks gift cards. There are big black purses, and big black pairs of sunglasses. So, this is who people think I am, I say to myself, the chilly woman behind her dark sunglasses, with her designer bag slung over her shoulder as she carries a latte in one hand and a book and a pen in the other. My God, I say to myself, people think I'm a pretentious asshole, don't they?

And they do. But not my mother. No. I can tell by my mother's ghastly gifts to me every year that she has no idea who I am. Last year I got something so spectacularly awful, I am having trouble typing this right now because, as I am recalling it, I am teetering off my chair in a fit a giggles. Yes, last year my mother gave me a reversible electric blanket/poncho. You could either wear it so that the beige plastic slicker side was showing, or, if you sought further humiliation, you could turn it inside out and reveal its forest green Scotch Tape-print wool to the world. Why the woman on the package was smiling as she modeled this botched abortion, I have no idea. It just doesn't make any sense. Am I supposed to wear it out in the cold rain? An ELECTRIC blanket/poncho with a WOOL underside is water-friendly? Since when? Needless to say, right after I opened this present, I slid it right back over to my mother who is so used to my giving back her gifts, I can't believe she still has the nerve to be offended by my lack of gratitude. And yet, every Christmas morning, that's precisely what she is, offended by my lack of gratitude.

It seems that, despite my greatest efforts, I just can't pretend to appreciate something when I don't appreciate it. I want to, but I can't. If you must know, the notion itself makes me bristle. Therefore, Christmas doesn't suit me or my needs. It's either beyond me, or beneath me...the pretentious asshole that I am.

The President-Eject & The President-Elect

There are two kinds of ignorance. Neither of them bliss. There is the forgivable kind, the kind of ignorance that is smart enough to recognize itself, and ambitious enough to seek the remedy of counsel and education. And then there is that other kind of ignorance. This is the kind of ignorance that is so convinced of its inherent wisdom, it borders on religion because, in spite of any tangible proof, it remains devoted to itself. Sometimes this ignorance looks a lot like stubbornness and arrogance. This is the ignorance that fails to notice the fact that even the stupid people in the room think it's hopelessly stupid.

Granted, we are all ignorant to a certain degree. As it has been said, none of us will ever know all of the things we will never know. And yet, after eight years of cringing while I watched presidential press conferences and interviews through my fingers, I know that the person in charge come January 2009 will be (sigh of relief) intelligent. I don't know what Barack Obama's term as president will bring, but I am hopeful, and I am listening, and what I am hearing sounds like English...and a plan.

Now, just to be clear, I have never thought President George W. Bush to be an evil man. I still don't. When people compare him to Hitler I am as equally put off by their ignorance as I have been by his. However, what I do think is that our current president, #43, has never been the right person for the office he was sworn into because, frankly, he does not have the God-given mental capacity to best fulfill his duties. He does not even have the capacity to want to learn how.

For some reason, President Bush just doesn't get it. Nothing seems like that much of a big deal to him. He is the Whatever president. In fact, I suspect that's what the W. really stands for. After all, according to most accounts, G.W.B. wanted to be the commissioner of baseball. That was his dream. He didn't want to be president. Those who have really been running his administration wanted the poor sucker to be "president". And we know who those oily folks are, don't we? And we know why, don't we? Even his parents were stunned by the turn of events. They thought it'd be their prized Jeb who'd follow in George H.W.'s footsteps, not slaphappy, good time W. who, with his propensity of mooning people and flipping them the bird, nursed a keg of beer until he was forty.

The thing is, despite his tragic presidency, I predict that, someday, George W. Bush will be the commissioner of baseball. And I think he'll be very good at it. It suits him. For that job, yes, he has what it takes. For the job of president of the United States of America? Well, this time we finally (and thankfully) chose the best candidate. No, not the black man with a dream...the smart American with a brain.

Where Credit Is and Isn't Due

I remember when there was a time when you could only drive a Mercedes if you had money. Luxury cars were precisely that, a luxury. These days, it seems, any self-delusional image climber with 15 cents and a dual airbag inflated ego can drive a Mercedes. We are a "look-at-me" society, more concerned with the facade than the foundation. We are adept at "frontin'', if you will. We are brokety broke and yet, we charge and lease away the days like there will be no tomorrow, or, at least, not one we will ever accept any fiscal responsibility for.

Bailout? Takeover? Buyout? Merger?

I've seen people on TV talking about how they should teach money management classes in high school to better prepare students for their financial futures. Good idea. Still, the basics are what seemed to trip us up. We learned how to add and subtract in the first grade, didn't we? They called the class Math, if I recall. I believe the standard questions were along the lines of: If the apple costs 80 cents and you have 50 cents, can you afford the apple? No, right? Right. So, you can't have the apple, right? Right. Because you don't have enough money, right? Right.

And yet, the basic rules and lessons have grown loopholes. Question: What if you put the 80 cent apple on your credit card? Well, then, you still can't afford it, right? Right. And yet, you can have it, right? Right. You can eat it, right? Right. And right now, right? You can eat it right now, right? Right. Enjoy it in the moment and worry about it later...when later, that 80 cent apple winds up costing you $17.00 because of the interest rates, and the fact that you can barely cover your minimum payment due each month. Rotten to the core. Yummy. Why stop with one apple? Get two. Three. A bushel! Get a bushel of apples.

The profound greed that percolated on Wall Street, allowing mortgage and investment firms and credit companies to take advantage of the clueless many who managed to fool themselves into believing they weren't being fooled is sickening. And yet, as they sold and resold mortgages and charged astronomical fees wherever they could, licking their chops all the while, Main Street marched along to a beat it could not keep up with. Wall Street is guilty, yes, but so is Main Street. Imagists who, knowing they didn't really have the money to buy a house, still went after those too-good-to-be-true NINJA (no income, no job, or assets) mortgage loans just so they could own a house and, dare I suggest, show off to their equally fiscally doomed neighbors. What happened to having money and living well below your means? My mother always taught us this: If you can't afford something, you don't need it. She also said, like twenty years ago, that credit cards would destroy this country. To this day, my mother, a very successful businesswoman, doesn't have one credit card. She needed me to get her a cell phone because she couldn't get one with, you know, money.

This financial meltdown, I'm sorry to say, is a bright orange semaphore desperately directing us toward the real evil-doers...ourselves. We are to blame for our own mess. Look what we done did.

Car leases are what really amuse me. What the fark do you need to trade your car in for every three years? Oh, I know, because you're too high class and important to drive the same car for more than three years. Or, at least, that's what you'd have others believe about you. Allow me to tell you about my car. My car has been my car since 1995, when my parents finally bought it for me after I had spent three years driving a ten year old Pontiac with one windshield wiper, a dragging muffler, and a hole in the radiator. I managed to hold the windshield wiper's rubber inlay in place with a yellow scrunchie, and, frankly, I just got used to the noise, smoke, and smell my vehicle produced on a daily basis until it exploded on Route 4 one afternoon. Anyway, this December, I will have had my car for thirteen years. And, I will continue to drive it until it falls apart all around and under me and I have to Flintstone footwork it to get it to move. When that day comes (I figure I have another year or two, at least) I will buy myself a car with the cash I have saved. Leasing means losing, so no leasing for me, thank you. Then, I will drive that new energy-efficient car for, God willing, another 12 to 15 years. In case you are wondering, both my degrees are in Literature.

Personally, I know what I have and don't have. And I know what I can and cannot afford. I make many a sacrifice in my everyday life (most notably with regard to my living situation) just to make sure I'm not putting myself at a terrible disadvantage. In a hole. While I may not independently be rolling in the dough, I am not in debt like many of my peers. And I have been told that I am in possession of enviable credit. Am I fly? Do I sparkle when I walk? Am I money? No. Not at all. Most people would not look at me and think, wow. I mean, why would they? Haven't we already established just how lousy most people in this country are with the whole credit thing?

Word Up

Everlast, not to be confused with the boxing gear, nor with the alternative rock group Everclear, is one guy, the former lead guy from the all-white 90's hip hop group House of Pain ("Jump Around") who has since resurfaced a few times and gone on to enjoy a respectable level of solo success. He is, perhaps, best known as a solo artist for his socially conscious "hick hop" track, "What It's Like", that married old school beats with an acoustic guitar. At the time (1998, I think it was) this was hardly chartered territory. Still, Everlast, with a surprisingly melodic, yet husky singing voice, triumphantly jumped back onto the music scene having found his creative niche. With an altered perspective on life and death, which came courtesy of his having survived a heart attack at the age 28, Everlast was a new man who had something to say, but nothing to prove.

A flawed, but earnest and interesting salt-of-the-earth kind of artist, Everlast seems most at home when he is documenting the grimy underside of the celebrated facade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. His penchant for telling the stories of the often dismissed folk who suffer through their lives with soiled souls, broken hearts, and dirty veins, earns him points in the "keepin' it real" books of many a music critic and fan alike. I almost don't even mind the fact that he sings about being "uncurable" in a straight-faced, non-ironic way on one track off his latest CD release, Love, War and the Ghost of Whitey Ford.

Clearly, when it comes to expressing what they mean to say, writers, well, songwriters, specifically, have their favorite, tried-and-true words and topics from which they choose. They effortlessly reach into their rusty toolboxes and don't, generally, make any apologies for what they pull out. They gravitate toward certain themes and communicate their thoughts and feelings in ways that tend to be comparable to the ways they conduct their lives, the ways they notice others conducting their lives, the ways they wish they could conduct their lives or, on a far less integrity-driven note, the ways in which they merely want to be perceived by their audiences. On occasion, they create something we'd call art. Sonically speaking, I think Everlast's latest solo effort, Love, War & the Ghost of Whitey Ford is a brand new & interesting stretch of lonely road, and yet, the lyrical content suggests the same old scenery. Empathetic as ever, Everlast does not have a heart problem. Not at all, actually. No, what Everlast has is an art problem.

When crisp, dramatic horns introduce the opening track, "Kill the Emperor", it is difficult not to let your goose bumps dictate your opinion of the song overall. First, you envision the royal court. Then Washington, D.C. presents itself. The pomp and circumstance that could only highlight the disconnect between the rich and the poor, the enfranchised and the disenfranchised in our modern American times is evoked instantly. And then the emperor's assassin enters, trying to flex his political muscle via a stale decree that is intended to kill, but doesn't. Save for the "fifty states of denial" line, nothing that follows the horns is especially groundbreaking or even remotely poetic. Plus, the figurative notion of "killing the emperor" is as old and dusty as monarchies themselves. Tired. Snooze. Wake me when it's over.

And yet, stripped of its narration, the music of L,W&tGoWF is remarkably alive and impressive. It really is. Needless to say, the SOUND here is king, as it stimulates in an unpredictable, mixed bag fashion that, at its best, inspires smiles and bursts of movement. It successfully rocks and hops and picks and strums and, kudos to production all around, seamlessly. However, where the music seems studied and precise, the off-the-top-of-the-head lyric writing seems to have finally run its course. This is where Everlast (i.e. Whitey Ford) may need to invest in a notebook and start physically writing words and concepts down on the page. Writers write differently when they put pen to paper. If a songwriter is going to be bold enough to experiment with instrumentation and "beats", s/he needs to do the same on the lyrical/subject matter front and open up to the possibility of telling different stories. Or, at the very least, the same stories, just framed with more of a creative edge and enthusiasm.

Now, I know there have been reviews out there praising the lyrical content of L,W&tGoWF, but, alas, upon further inspection you'll notice that those reviews, themselves, are poorly written. Just an observation, of course. Anyway, I don't think anyone will revoke Everlast's Biggie Smalls/Jay-Z writing-without-writing-anything-down lyricist's pass for daring to challenge himself for the sake of his craft. Pen and paper are not just for autograph signing, after all. Perhaps they might afford Whitey the opportunity to withdraw from a WORD BANK that does not only include the following words:

junkie/hell/whore/girl/broken/tired/pain/devil/city/jones/heaven/

heart/angel/drinking/pills/knees/God/dirty/scars/die/love/live/

poor/bones/rich/high/low/lies/gun/kill.

I mean, it can't hurt to try. After all, a singular, personal truth can be communicated through an assortment of different channels and still be true in the end.

Don't get me wrong; I think this is a very good CD, but there are moments on L,W&tGoWF that suggest that it could have been a great one. A really great one. A classic, even. The track "Die in Yer Arms", for example, sparkles from every direction and in every light. With a wink and a nod to an 80's dance floor, this track proves to be a perfect, little, "vicious sway" of a song because it is fun, light, infectious, and witty. A grape metaphor done justice: juicy, but tightly wrapped. The verses are not long, self-indulgent attempts at trying to communicate something meaningful without quite getting there. The message arrives immediately and, dare I say, artistically.

Another highlight is the track "Friend". I don't care how many scars, or broken hearts, or I-fuck-up-a-lot-but-love-me-anyway-girl references are made on this song; I love it in spite of itself. In spite of myself. The words (including the non-word "uncurable") and the overall confession of sorts are not what make this song fresh; it's the angle and the sincerity here that make this song worth my looking like a complete junkie for when I sing my scarred and broken heart out when I play the hell out of it while driving my tired bones into the dirty city.

Loosen Up On Buttons

I bought a great fitted sweater the other day. Correction: I bought what I thought was a great fitted sweater the other day, until I wore it out in the world and made the mistake of shrugging my shoulders in it. You see, the stretch knit of which I speak, happens to be adorned with two large buttons that, when I'm at rest, sit flat and parallel to one another on my mid-section, just below my chest. However, when I lift my shoulders ever so slightly, voilà, the buttons shift upward in a flash and, suddenly, my breasts look like they have been bedazzled with shiny, black, industrial strength nipples.

I have never understood designers' fascination with buttons as fashion. I had a pair of cherry red corduroy pants as a kid that had three buttons (flower petals) on each back pocket. The designer might have thought these buttons served a great aesthetic purpose, but, honestly, the only purpose served was that of making my butt cheeks into musical instruments, as they tap tap tapped out a tune every time I sat down in my chair. Then, whenever I moved, it was like the remix. I cannot forget feeling those buttons pressing into my flesh during a mandatory assembly where I had to suffer through sitting "Indian-style" on the gymnasium floor until my rear end became a button punching bag, and my feet (for their having been sat upon for two hours) lost all sensation. At the end of that assembly, as I pulled myself along the waxed wood floors of the gymnasium with arm strength alone, I looked like a seal...in cherry red corduroy pants.

Buttons have a really undeserved sweet reputation in our culture. They seem quaint. With their perfect little holes, they look like little round faces. Of course, no one ever says that about bowling balls, and they, too, have those holey faces. Cute as a button? Yes. Cute as a bowling ball? Not so much. Buttons seem delicate. Button noses, not baton noses, are heralded as the beauty ideal. Just ask the plastic surgeons. Button your lip sounds so much daintier and so much more polite than shut your hole, or quit flapping your gums, or put a sock in it.

I can understand buttons as fasteners; that I get and mostly appreciate. It's the decorative buttons that cause me to pause and shake my head while shopping. Using buttons in place of eyes on children's clothing is just weird to me. I saw a yellow sweatshirt in the kids' department at Macy's not too long ago that proudly boasted an alligator with blue button eyes on its front. It was the ugliest thing. I felt so sorry for any child whose mother might buy it, thinking it was adorable because it happened to be in the children's department at Macy's. Why can't manufacturers just stitch on the damn eyes the same way they stitch on the rest of the damn alligator? That way when children's alligator sweatshirts lose buttons, their mothers won't have to send their children to school wearing crippled alligators across their chests. Quick, sew a toothpick onto that sucker! Your blind bastard of an alligator needs a walking stick. Using buttons as wheels on knitted trucks is equally strange to me. How is this clever? Don't kids have it tough enough nowadays? Must we also force them to wear lousy arts and crafts projects?

Listen to me closely, okay? Buttons are not as benign as they seem to be. Chip one or break one in half. Go on. I dare you. Why so reluctant? Aha! You, it seems, know what I know. Yes, you know that if you do chip a button or break one in half, you will suddenly have a rather ninja-like weapon in your possession. I don't care what you say. No broken plastic anything is as sharp and as deadly as the itsy bitsy cutesy wootsy broken button from hell. Just ask that other cute button you know and love...your belly button. Clearly the victim of button on button crime, mine still winces when I put on a pair of tight-ish pants. "No, Sandra, please," my belly button's muffled cries seem to say. "Elastic waistband! Elastic waistband!"

Anyway, this is where I press the POWER button OFF and leave you with my musings. My scissors, after all, have a date with the threads that bind my shiny, black button nipples to my otherwise great fitted sweater.

If He Had a Hammer

Would you like to be reminded of your elementary school days? Then, please, by all means, make it a point to visit any neighborhood drugstore (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid), or Staples between the dates of September 5th and September 12th of any given year. However, if you are an adult child of immigrants, you want to take this trip down memory lane around the Fort Lee, NJ area. You see, this is the best area around back to school time because this is the new immigration hub, where many new immigrants and their families seem to put down roots for a few years. This is where they choose to sorta kinda assimilate because of the area's close proximity to the city, and the school systems that are nowhere near those of the city in terms of shear administrative incompetence.

Anyway, the truth is, there is nothing that brings an adult child of immigrants back to his/her childhood like listening to a brand new crop of parents with accents. As they argue with their children in the crowded aisles over all the frivolous and flighty requests the teachers have put on their school supplies lists, you'll feel like a kid again. WHAT YOU'LL NEED FOR CLASS is emblazoned on many a ditto being clasped in the hands of none too thrilled mothers. "I tink," growls one heavily accented Russian mother in Staples, as she runs down the list with her bubblegum nail, "vat yous need for cless is a meeeellionaire moder to pay for all this tings."

I can remember getting into an argument with my own mother over the Glue Stick that was on my brother's school supplies list when he was in the second or third grade. "All glue sticks, Jesus Christ. What the hell is the difference?" she'd asked, annoyed, as I dug the old school Elmer's glue out of the red CVS basket she was carrying, and replaced it with the required Glue Stick. "Troppa comodità with you kids; that's the problem in this country." In case you're wondering, that basically translates as, too much comfort. According to my mother, America was and is going down the proverbial tubes because, God forbid kids should do a little extra work and spend a little less money in the process.

Surely, there are more problems than that one in this country, yes. But, my mother is what I call an absolutist. For her, there is one solution to all your problems, and if you really stopped to think for a minute, Jesus Christ, you'd see that there is only one real problem in your imagined collection of problems. What is your problem? Laziness. And what is the solution? Go to work.

When I tell my own students (who, incidentally, pretty much all have parents from foreign lands) stories about how I grew up with immigrants for parents, they immediately relate and, subsequently, relax. They need not worry if they get a different kind of notebook for class, or if their parents fill the forms out incorrectly. I get it. I was there. In many respects, I'm still there. Growing up American is a different experience when your parents no speak the English no so good. It is especially different when the old world culture and traditions are not immediately checked at the gate. For example, most of my students still get hit by their parents when they do something wrong. There are no "time outs" for them...yet. We swap stories about the injustices we've suffered in homes where a smack is not viewed as a criminal offense, and, honestly, we mostly laugh at the ignorance our parents have displayed from time to time in the discipline arena. We all know the hitting thing doesn't dissuade bad behavior. We all know that getting hit sometimes hurts and often humiliates, and that, when we have our own kids, we won't continue the cycle. In some cases, nearly twenty-five years apart, our stories are strikingly similar. Thus, we understand each other, the adult child of immigrants and the children children of immigrants. We can appreciate and laugh at each other's stories because they are the same stories...just with different accents attached.

That said, when I tell my properly American friends a story of being chased around the house by my father with a hammer when I was a kid, they are aghast. They are too horrified to even think of laughing. They shake their heads and give me that look. That look that says, Oh my God! Poor you, Sandra. You sad sad clown. Then, within seconds, I find myself recanting, because they didn't get it. They don't get it. How could they, really? And I don't want them to pity me, or, for that matter, think ill of how I was raised and the people who raised me. They don't see the humor. So, I start again. Only this time I sound like a rattling train of excuses.

Um, well, you know, he didn't actually USE the hammer. And, um, you know, it wasn't a GIANT hammer or anything like that. It wasn't like a SLEDGEHAMMER. You know what? Now that I think about it, it wasn't a hammer at all, actually. It was, you know, one of those hammer thingy things that you, um, use to play a plastic rainbow xylophone. A toy. You know, a mallet. And it wasn't even hard plastic or anything like that. No, it was like, you know, a stuffed animal mallet, so it was soft, you know. It was really really soft. Oh my God. What the hell am I talking about? It wasn't a mallet at all. You know what it was? It was a teddy bear. Yeah. I don't know how I mixed that up. It was a soft, fluffy teddy bear with a red, satin ribbon tied around its neck. And, oh yeah, I remember now. He wasn't chasing me with it because he wanted to hit me with it. He was chasing me with it because it was a gift he had surprised me with. Because he loved me that much. He was always doing stuff like that. Chasing me around with teddy bear presents after I tried to push my brother down the stairs. But, honestly, even if he had been chasing me around with a hammer, which, of course, he wasn't, I would have deserved to have been chased with a hammer because, you know what my problem is? Laziness. And you know what I need to do? I need to go to work.

Don't Count Your Chicks Before They Hatch

Females are not interchangeable. Any man who has encountered more than one woman in his lifetime should probably be able to figure this out. I didn’t think I’d have to say this in the year 2008 but, newsflash, female candidates are not interchangeable either. What, because Hillary Clinton had a very good shot at being elected the first female president of the United States, and female voters supported her campaign, those same female voters will lemmingly follow the next female candidate that is nudged into the spotlight, despite the fact that she is not qualified for the job she is up for? How presumptuous. What a blatant display of shameless pandering. Tsk tsk tsk.

I don't know about you but, I was more than a little offended when Senator John McCain unleashed a female running mate upon us, all the while thinking this would be all it would take to sway the onetime Hillary Clinton supporters in his direction. The political strategists, consultants, pundits, vice presidential search committee members all seem to think that we, women, are all the damn same and, therefore, will all vote the way we are guided (shepherded, really) to vote. They think that, just because a woman is on the ballot, other women will mindlessly vote for her even if she is, clearly, out of her bird. No, I say. This woman here is not that easily swayed. Don’t bother trying to “target” me with your research, polls, and statistics because, guess what? I move.

It seems that, over these past couple of days, this whole Republican vice presidential nomination of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska has gotten me thinking about the woman I am. This, of course, sent my mind wandering back to my girlhood. You see, as a kid, I used to be forced to go to my parents' restaurant to help out by answering the phones, working the register, making cappuccinos, and filling soda glasses with that soda gun that is, like most things, fun to toy with until you realize it isn't a toy, but actually, a tool for working. That said, there I was, essentially hidden behind the bar (no liquor license in those days) to do my various jobs that earned me, I swear to God, $9 total a night, for what worked out to be seven hours of labor. Still, I didn't mind being stationed back there, despite the insulting pay. I didn’t feel comfortable working the floor because that always required a surplus of BS-ing with customers, so, being behind that fort of a bar suited me just fine. I really couldn’t stand the BS. I mean, who were these people? And why did I have to tell them how I was doing in school?

Anyway, during my time served in the restaurant, my mother had this awful tendency of pawning young customers off on me, not caring if I actually wanted to chat with them, which, of course, I didn’t. I'd hear her as she talked to some random family, addressing the daughter with something like, "Oh, you're 12? My daughter is 12." Then I'd see her point in my direction with the smile she only wore when she looked at me in the presence of paying customers. "That's Sandra. You're both 12. Why don't you go talk to her?" My mother did this a lot. I’d cringe, yes, but ultimately, I would talk to them and make them laugh. I was absolutely polite. Some might even say dutiful; this was a business, after all.

So, often I'd be left to entertain a bunch of young, stranger girls who, because they were of, or about my age, were supposed to be just like me, at least, according to the adults in the vicinity. My mother thought that's all it took, our being 12-year-old girls, to make us instant friends. What she didn't seem to understand was that, unlike me, most 12-year-old girls were already little hoochie mamas with older boyfriends they let touch them "down there". Needless to say, I did not relate to, nor respect these sweet-looking girls who snuck cigarettes and convinced their parents they had a stomach flu when they were really hung over. At 12 years of age I didn't even drink root beer, never mind, beer beer (still don’t), and frankly, undressing my anatomically incorrect Ken doll embarrassed me so much, I just kept him in the same outfit for years. To me, it didn't matter if he and Barbie were at the beach, he was going to stay dressed as an astronaut.

That said, if you must know, while I am perfectly capable of exchanging pleasantries and being hospitable and charming for the sake of making those around me feel more comfortable, I've never fully understood the charade of it all. The phoniness, the Hi, how are you? It's so good to see you! lines of fiction always made me want vomit in my mouth a little when I didn’t care about the people I was forced to talk to. At the very least, I should have tacked my own list of Martin Lutheresque grievances on the door. The truth is, I do not genuinely want to speak to most people. The good thing is this: somewhere between the ages of 22 and 28, I completely stopped caring about whether or not it showed that I didn't like certain people. In other words, as an adult woman, if I don't like you, it will show. And if I do not want to engage in conversation with you, I won't, regardless of whether or not you expect me to. Regardless of whether or not it is good for business.

You see, while my family may still very much be in the restaurant business, I am not. I am my own person, after all. Therefore, you won't get my friendship just by ordering a pizza. Nor will you be entitled to my time and conversation just by being around my age. You have to earn all aspects of the woman I’ve grown up to be. Hence, if you think you’ll get my vote just by virtue of having been born a woman, think again. My vote has to be earned. Governor Palin and I are not the same, after all. She happily deals in BS, while I, happily, escaped it because I, unlike Governor Palin, am not a politician.

Oh, and, unlike Governor Palin, I won’t potentially be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States of America any time soon. Thus, because of this, taking the time to learn about what this candidate stands for and what her policies are, as opposed to what kind of a woman she is and how she wears a ponytail, is crucial. It seems to me that when you dismiss individual female voters and clump them together as “the woman vote”, you’ll find, instead, an army, not a sorority, of informed voters who will likely be waving the Obama/Biden winning ticket. In other words, don't count your chicks before they hatch. Not that they were ever yours to begin with.