The Halloween Suburban Myth

I am exhausted. I am covered in goop, my back aches, my hair is a matted mess, my hands are cramped to uselessness and I look like hell.

No, I am not the mother of a newborn. I just got finished carving our Halloween pumpkin.

Two hours into my intricately detailed haunted house carving I came to my senses – the pain in my left hand is what did it – and wondered what the hell I was thinking. But by then it was too late. I couldn’t put half a haunted house out for the kiddies to enjoy; I would get hate mail for the rest of the year. So I plundered on, and in the meantime simultaneously and unwittingly completed my “disheveled housewife” costume.

Turns out it was nearly all in vain because we had only four trick-or-treaters. Back in New York you didn’t get many kids, because the front doors to all the apartment buildings are locked and impenetrable (one hopes). So in an effort to keep out the riff-raff, we also alienated ourselves from a truly enjoyable tradition. Instead of trick-or-treating, Halloween lovers got half naked, sprayed themselves with glitter, threw on an elaborate showgirls-like sequined and feathered headpiece, and paraded through Chelsea in 30 degree weather. And those were just the men. I found this terribly amusing and most certainly entertaining, but it just wasn’t the same as my childhood Halloweens. Now that I am back in suburbia I was truly looking forward to a real Halloween. I envisioned myself the Cool Lady on the block, the one who gives out handfuls of “fun size” candy bars, rather than this new, micro-sized candy “bite” they’ve come up with recently.

(A quick aside, a soliloquy, if you will, on this new Micro size – which, if the old Halloween candy bar was called “fun” size, must be the “Delirious With Ecstasy” size. The Micro Size is simply un-American. Americans enjoy Super Size everything. It doesn’t matter if we can consume the serving within our lifetimes or not – we want it BIG. We want everything BIG and for the most part the entire consumer economy supports us in this, as evidenced by French fry portions that can no longer fit through those little windows at the drive-thru. SO WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE CANDY PEOPLE? Why is chocolate the only thing getting smaller? I have to stop now, or I’ll be too emotional to continue this column.)

Anyway, in my fantasy, the kids would pass each other on the street and throw meaningful advice at one another, as we used to do when we were kids, along the lines of, “Don’t go to that house – they’re giving out toothpaste,” or “That lady is giving out REAL size Hershey’s!” And in these conversations my house would feature prominently, reverently, as they whispered to each other, “She gives out whole handfuls of the really good stuff and there weren’t ANY dum-dums in her bowl at all!” And then all the children in the neighborhood, after they had completed their rounds, would vote me Best Lady on the Block and carry me down the street on their shoulders and vow never to egg my house again.

Well, okay, perhaps that was a tad unrealistic but the point is I was very much looking forward to being generous on Halloween. But we only got four kids. Four. Kids. I can only assume that the trend that had begun when I left suburbia seven years ago has increased in momentum to the point that by next year, trick-or-treating will just be a suburban myth.

When I have children, I will gather them ‘round on Halloween night and tell them fantastic tales of when I was a child, and my parents would dress me up, and take me door to door around the neighborhood, and perfect strangers would each give me a piece of candy, and at the end of the night I would have a pillowcase full of candy that was all mine! And they will roll their eyes at me, and think, “Mom’s been into the wine again,” and ask if they can go IM on their blackberries now.

I understand that we must protect our children, but it really pisses me off that a few crazies out there have ruined this tradition for everyone. It is truly a shame that one day soon children will no longer know the joy of roaming the streets after dark, dressed as their favorite hero or as something to make the girls scream, committing silly little acts of vandalism all in good fun, and eating so much chocolate they puke in your flower bed.

Those were the days.

I'm Not Crazy, I'm Multi-tasking

There are those who believe that women are scatter-brained flibberty-gibbets incapable of focusing on any one task from start to finish. There are others, such as myself, who would like to point out that the ability to do more than one task simultaneously is called, in the workplace, “multi-tasking” and is considered to be a highly desirable asset. But unfortunately those who do not share this talent have a difficult time understanding its benefits.

I can cook dinner, talk on the phone, do the laundry and empty the dishwasher all at the same time. And very rarely will I accidentally dump the salad into the dryer instead of the salad bowl. True, there are these occasional slip-ups when we multi-task, but for every mistake I make, I have accomplished ten other tasks successfully.

Many years ago, when we dwelled in caves and did not shave our armpits, men were expected to do only one thing: kill elk (or buffalo, or mammoths, depending on the century and continent). Meanwhile, the women squatted in the cave and kept the newly-discovered campfires burning, picked berries, made clothes, bore and raised children, healed the sick, and, if they had time, ran out during lunch to the hairdresser’s to get that expertly matted, just-got-hit-by-lightning look that was so popular back then. Our genetics have changed little since those times (although luckily hairstyles have improved dramatically).

My responsibilities around the house are to: clean the house, do the laundry, cook, wash the dishes, pay the bills, walk the dog, check the mail, make the coffee, and shop for food. My boyfriend’s tasks are to: take out the garbage, if he remembers, which is about 30% of the time. I do honestly believe he means to be more helpful, but men have this uncanny ability to tune out chores that need doing. A man and woman can be standing together staring at the exact same kitchen and where she sees coffee grounds, cracker crumbs, soap scum, fingerprints, and rotten food, he sees, well, a kitchen. And so, when she begins her ritualistic high-pitched wail consisting of variations on the general idea that their house is so dirty pigs would be offended by it, he will respond with a resigned look that says, “Great. There goes poker night.” He will then proceed to help her clean in an overly-solicitous manner that states he is humoring her because she is clearly unstable – not because he agrees the place needs to be cleaned.

And he really doesn’t think it does. We must remember that this is the same guy who, when you first met him, did not clean the dishes in his apartment until there was nothing left to eat out of, including the bathtub. Same person also considered underwear clean if you turned it inside out, and saw no reason to wash the sheets ever, since you always bathed yourself immediately after sleeping on them anyway. There was stuff growing in his sink evolved enough to go two rounds on Jeopardy.

To their credit, due to an uncanny ability to block out everything around them including babies crying and the neighbor’s house on fire, men can concentrate so intently on whatever single task is at hand that they do a much better job on it than a woman would. Granted, it takes them seven times longer, but when it’s done, it is really done. I may be able to clean the whole house in two hours while my boyfriend has only gotten halfway through cleaning the guest bathroom’s toilet, but when he is finished with that toilet, by God, you could eat off it, if that’s your kind of thing.

The downside of this intense focus is when it misses the target. For example, you may say, “Honey, while I am chopping the broccoli, cooking the chicken, heating the bread and fixing tomorrow’s breakfast could you please stir the rice?” He will then get up from the couch with every intention of doing the chore you have asked him to do. However, in between the couch and the kitchen and directly in his path is the television, on which there is a shiny black helicopter dodging machine-gun fire in a most seductive manner. An hour later when you glance up, sweaty and breathless from your ten simultaneous chores, he will still be standing there, staring wide-eyed at the television like one of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead. “Honey?” you’ll say, your voice catching on a sob, “the rice?” (which, of course, burned a long time ago). And he’ll visibly shake himself, remove his gaze from the source of his intense concentration and look at you as if he has no idea how you got into his house.

I suppose men have just as much room to gripe about this genetic dichotomy as we do, and hopefully when the frustration reaches its apex we can all take a moment to reflect on how well we balance each other out. But not if the #$%&* trash hasn’t been taken out in two weeks because frankly with that smell I can’t concentrate on anything.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

It’s absolutely beautiful outside. The temperature has dropped, the sun is shining, there isn’t a cloud in the sky and there’s a lovely fall-is-coming breeze wafting through the room.

I’m so depressed.

For many this merely signals the coming of fall, but for me it heralds the approach of Football Season. Which means that for the next several months, the closest thing I will get to affection from my live-in boyfriend is a look of vague recognition on the rare occasions we see each other around the house.

Women, sing with me of conversations tuned out, houses littered with beer bottles, and our inability to concentrate on anything on Sundays because the air is so often pierced with random gunshot-like explosions of alternating fury and joy aimed at the television.

Sometime around Labor Day my otherwise mild-mannered boyfriend turns into a one-track-minded frenetic football freak. His hair stands on end, his eyes bug out, and you never know when he’ll burst into angry discourse. Something he reads in a magazine, sees on television, hears about in an IM conversation will trigger a sudden torrent of furious obscenities as if somebody has just offended his mother in the most vulgar manner possible. “WHAT!? OH COME ON! THIS IS BULLSHIT!” he’ll scream to one of a various number of screens, interrupting an otherwise peaceful night, sending the dog and myself into terrorized heart convulsions.

And it’s not just limited to Sundays and Monday nights, however much they try to convince us of this. “Just two days a week,” they’ll say in a firm yet whiney voice, implying that we are being so unbelievably and unreasonably demanding of their time we may as well suggest a straight-jacket-for-two. But we know that is a load of crap. Yes, the games may be limited to those two days, but the dissertations on what happened, what is going to happen, and what should happen or should have happened takes place around the clock.

There are several ways we women can deal with this. The first and most obvious is to spend every Sunday shopping, but by mid-October the creditors beating down the door are more intrusive than the football-related emotive eruptions spewing Exorcist-like from the person hazily resembling, but no longer recognizable as, our significant others. The second is to give in to the pleads of “Come on, honey, just try to understand the game. If you did, you might just enjoy it!” Another condescending implication of which I am fond – that my inability to enjoy a bunch of men slamming into each other for three and a half hour stretches indicates some flaw in my character.

Every year I try anew to “understand,” by joining the boyfriend on the couch and, with a heavy sigh, listen to him explain, again, about 10 yards and fourth downs until my ears may not be bleeding, but I wish they were, because then at least something interesting would be happening.

It’s no use. I will never find this game stimulating. But I haven’t given up hope that I can still somehow insinuate myself into his fall schedule without having to memorize the definition of a pass reception. After all, there’s always half time, and I have one more trick up my sleeve involving a Cheerleader costume and a bathtub full of beer. One way or another, I am determined to win his attention back from this bunch of IQ-challenged muscle men intent on destroying each other over a piece of pigskin in the shape of a giant suppository. Or at least remind him that I still live here. I mean, come ON! THIS IS BULLSHIT!

Heart of New York

I have wanted to write about my experience in New York City on September 11, 2001 for a long time. I haven’t done so, because I feel there is no way I can do justice to the intense emotion of that time. And while the day was the most terrifying I have ever known, and ever hope to know, the fact is that I was never in any danger, nor were any of my family or friends. Although while it was happening I did not know that.

Because I find it impossible to describe the horror of September 11^th, I would like to honor the third anniversary by recounting the small levels of heroism I observed during that unprecedented time. I was always proud to live in New York and regard myself as a New Yorker despite never having met the prerequisite of a ten-year residency. I was never more proud of or impressed by my fellow New Yorkers than I was on September 11^th.

New Yorkers have a reputation for being harsh, demanding, and cold, but you know from television accounts how the city pulled together. You know that there were lines out the door at the blood banks and they had to turn most of us away. You know that nobody took advantage of the fact that the city’s bravest and finest police and firemen were focused downtown, leaving only a skeleton crew – and an exhausted and grieving one at that – to oversee the rest of the city. You know that only a very few misguided souls tried to take out their anger and grief on innocent Muslims. You already know that my humble tales are just a few of hundreds of thousands.

You probably heard that New York City, the most aggressive and pushy society in the

United States if not the world, was completely silent for weeks following September 11^th. A city normally filled with the constant background noise of honking and yelling remained respectfully hushed. Suddenly the ambulance sirens that used to be a part of that white noise stood out shrilly in the silence.

But you may not know that local news channels would regularly announce the needs of various shelters and relief organizations for things such as heavy wool socks for the firemen slogging their way through water and muck to find their fallen brothers. An hour later a new message would run across the television screen: “Over 100 boxes of socks have been received in response to our request. Please do not bring any more.” Over and over, for days, this would happen. New Yorkers remained plastered to the local news just as you were, and the moment they learned of a need, they could not move quickly enough to fill it.

What you probably never heard about was the group of dust-covered, exhausted firemen who sank to the grungy floor of a Penn Station platform to await their train home after spending hours, perhaps days, at Ground Zero. Perhaps you, too, would have burst into tears as, gradually, up and down the long platform on both sides, fellow travelers rose to their feet, turned towards the group of weary firemen, and broke into applause and cheers. I wish you, too, had seen the looks of surprise, and then gratitude, spread across those soot-streaked faces.

And you definitely don’t know about the lovely Muslim man who ran the deli on the corner of my block, on 90^th Street and 1^st Avenue. I went to the deli the afternoon of September 11^th to stock up on food, batteries, water – all the things it seemed necessary to buy, but which could never alleviate the feeling of raw vulnerability. A man was struggling with the ATM in the deli. Since most New Yorkers had gone directly to their ATMs to withdraw as much cash as possible for whatever emergencies might lie ahead, the city had been drained of cash in a matter of hours. “The ATM is out of money,” explained the gentleman behind the counter. “But if there is anything you need, please, take it.”

The written word – mine or anybody else’s – cannot do justice to what happened on September 11^th. But I hope it can at least touch upon the unprecedented heroism of this country and that day, and remind us of how a vast city dropped all pride and prejudice and offered services, unity, comfort and trust in a time of unthinkable and unprecedented horror that changed forever that remarkable city and our entire world. Here’s to you, New York.

The Take-Apart Man

As my loyal fans (both of you – hi, Mom) know, I have suffered through a number of adjustments in moving to

Huntsville from New York City. But this time I’ll give you a break from my tales of woe to share with you some of my enjoyable lifestyle modifications.

Take, for instance, the dishwasher. In New York, dishwashers were owned only by the very, very wealthy; people so wealthy they never actually saw their own kitchens, the kitchen being a room designated for the hired help. The rest of us not only had no hope of a dishwasher, we didn’t really have a kitchen. My “kitchen” consisted of a refrigerator, a miniature oven and a sink shoved into the corner of my living room. I stored off-season clothes in the oven, since closet space was just an urban myth.

And I am positively in love with my washing machine. A machine located in my own home that will wash my clothes any time I tell it to. I no longer have to worry about a bum wandering in off the street and stealing my still-damp underwear from the dryer. The first time I used my new washing machine I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out where the quarters go.

In addition to all the machinery that has contributed to my new and approved lifestyle, there’s the SPACE! Closets! A bathroom that does not require climbing over the tub in order to get to the toilet! A whole room, attached to the house, devoted just to your car. A car – a machine that waits patiently for me, wherever I last left it, to take me anywhere I want to go! A life-sized couch in the living room! Furniture at all! I admit I went a bit nuts with the furniture-buying when I first moved here. The luxury of not having to worry about what will fit, or how to get it in the house, was intoxicating.

When I first moved to New York City I purchased the first real piece of furniture I had ever owned: a brand-new sofa. But when they attempted to deliver my sofa they could not fit it through the narrow stairwell. Which was just as well, since it turned out even if it had, it still wouldn’t have fit through my apartment door.

This is when the deliveryman introduced me to the Take-Apart Man, a whole profession that I never knew existed. The take-apart men subsist off those who live in walk-up brownstones with staircases about a foot and a half wide, capable of accommodating only the starving models attracted in droves to New York City - or a person of my size, if one does not mind turning sideways and scuttling up the stairwell crab-like. The Take-Apart Man will come to your apartment building and, for a mere $300, take apart the brand new sofa you just purchased, carry it up piece meal to your apartment, and reassemble it. Although I suffered several minor heart attacks watching him tackle my sofa in the lobby with various sharp implements, I had to admit having the sofa actually inside my apartment was a lot more convenient.

That sofa deteriorated significantly over the next several years but I never replaced it, because I could not bear to go through that ordeal again. Spending an additional $300 to get a brand-new stranded sofa into the apartment seemed, at the time, fair enough. Spending $300 to disassemble a dilapidated piece of crap in order to get it out of the apartment was too unfair to contemplate. I toyed with the idea of simply taking an ax to it myself but somehow I sensed that would probably lead to a disaster involving sirens. And so that sofa remained until I moved out of the apartment and grudgingly re-admitted the Take-Apart Man for the final time.

In Huntsville I have a house, and in this house there are double doors leading into every room except the bathroom, which, although it’s the size of my old

New York apartment, doesn’t really need a sofa anyway. I went out and found the two biggest sofas I could to go in my new big living room, and added an entire TV wall unit for good measure.

I do not miss the Take-Apart Man, but I send him my fondest regards. I have a new best friend now: the Lawn Guy.

Acronymish

Since moving to Huntsville I have the odd sensation of living in a foreign country where my knowledge of the language spoken is limited to a few phrases recalled from a high school foreign language course. Because, like many of you, I now work with the government. Which means I have been introduced to the government’s very own variation of the English language based almost entirely on endless strings of acronyms.

Like a tourist, I consult on a regular basis the Acronym-to-English guide (AEG) the government has thoughtfully provided. Using acronyms is supposed to streamline our communication. But more often than not you don’t know what the acronym stands for, which means you have to ask. And finding out what it stands for doesn’t necessarily clear things up.

But my natural inclination to blame the government for my difficulty assimilating to Acronymish isn’t entirely fair. This language conversion isn’t limited to the government; they’ve simply perfected the art form. Financial institutions, technology, healthcare – they all rely on acronym shortcuts designed solely to confuse the masses (CTM). The reason it takes the masses so long to realize they’ve been violated is because companies shield their illegal activities with a barrage of acronyms. By the time we’ve looked up WPTSAYM - JSH in the AEG to discover it means “We plan to steal all your money - just sign here,” it’s too late. And it’s not like they weren’t honest and upfront about it. If they had warned us in French, we’d still be held responsible for the consequences, right?

Despite the potential for harm, we go along with all these acronyms because we as a culture have become so lazy we can’t be bothered to verbalize whole words anymore. We use acronyms so seamlessly in our everyday conversations that we’ve forgotten that the acronyms actually stand for anything. If someone asked me to pick up a Digital Versatile Disk on my way home from work, I wouldn’t have a clue where to go for one.

Like cavemen who used one simple stick drawing to mean “I went hunting for seven days and killed this antelope by stabbing him with my spear. And wouldn’t you know it? I got a splinter,” we are regressing to the point where we are able to convey a complex thought process with just a few simple letters. Contrarily, if we take too long to convey our meaning, or share something nobody wants to hear, it’s TMI. Then again, it could just be that you have ADD and any I is TMI.

Computerized communication, more than the government, will be the ultimate force behind converting English into a language made up entirely of acronyms. My young nieces and nephews consider me ridiculously old fashioned because I use complete sentences in IM, while the messages they send me are completely incomprehensible jumbles of symbols, letters, numbers and emoticons. I should probably ask them to decipher the government documents I am struggling with at work; it is in, after all, their language. By the time their generation is running this country, speaking whole words and sentences will be as embarrassing to them as when our grandparents spoke the language of the “old country.”

But like my grandparents who continued throughout their lives to speak a mixture of English and German, no matter how much I try to assimilate to the new culture, I’m sure I will intermittently throw in an old-fashioned fully formed word now and then. I won’t be able to help it. It was the language of my people.

Lessons in Southern Hospitality

Whoever coined the phrase “Southern hospitality” was not kidding around. I was raised by a bunch of easterners whose idea of hospitality was pretty much limited to bagels and nose-hair-curling coffee. Moving to the South has made me painfully aware that the version of hospitality I learned is the equivalent of kindergarten-level here. I am now studying the veritable art form that is Southern Hospitality. Or, in my own words: How to Be Nice to People.

In New York you go out of your way not to acknowledge other people. It is never permissible to make eye contact with anybody, since it could result in a situation involving the police. With eye contact considered rude at best and dangerous at worst, pleasant conversation was out of the question. You went about your business pretending you were the only person on the street, and everybody else did the same. If you didn’t have anything important to say, such as “get out of my way,” you kept your mouth shut.

It did not take long for me to learn the basic, expected gestures of Southern Hospitality. But it’s taking me a good deal longer to actually put them into practice. The finger wave from the steering wheel, for example. Aside from the fact that any distraction from my form of driving could be lethal, it’s just not a gesture that comes naturally to me. In New York our finger gestures had a whole different meaning.

The art of pleasant small talk is another aspect of Southern Hospitality I am trying to master. My Love is from the South and well versed in pointless chit-chat. He can strike up an impressively mundane conversation about the weather or Applebee’s menu or the aesthetics of a license plate tag or any number of pointless, mind-numbing topics of conversation with strangers he may run into at, say, the gas station, with no difficulty. My conversations with complete strangers have always been limited to “How are you?” and “Fine.” Anything more drew wariness and irritation.

It’s not just an inability to perform these little niceties that troubles me; I am equally uncomfortable receiving them. People who wave to me when I am walking to the mailbox make me suspicious. When someone asks me a question in line at the grocery store I become flustered and tongue-tied. I immediately assume they are trying to steal my wallet. Because it can’t be that people are just this nice.

But the hospitality of strangers is nothing compared to the hospitality of people you know, which can border on terrifying. When I visit My Love’s family, I am so unnerved by their hospitality that I develop a stutter. My Love’s mother will, from the moment I walk in the door, try to press all her most precious belongings on me. “Do you see anything you like?” she’ll ask eagerly, while I stumble about her antique-furnished home, looking for the bagels. At first I thought she meant, Did I like her home? I came to realize she meant, did I see anything I’d like to actually appropriate?

My upbringing has taught me that it is rude to make a habit of going shopping in other people’s houses, and yet here it seems it’s rude if you don’t. Southerners are so gracious they would rather politely transfer all their possessions to you, and sit on the floor in an empty house, then worry for the rest of their lives that there may have been something you saw and liked in their home that they didn’t give to you.

I’m trying, really I am. On our last visit I accepted from My Love’s mother four framed prints, a mirror, and a canoe. I continue to develop my polite conversation skills, which still have the awkward quality of a child’s first steps. And, like those early walkers, I often trip over my own feet. It just doesn’t seem natural, all this niceness. It embarrasses me and makes me uncomfortable. So if you are a true master of Southern Hospitality, please put me at ease by ignoring my presence except to cut me off in line or give me the other finger in traffic. Then I’ll truly feel welcome.