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Thank You For Being a Friend

Would you lose too much respect for me if I admitted that I squandered my allotted 25 minutes of blogging time by watching The Golden Girls on YouTube (here)?

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By Meredith – June 9, 2010

Hummus Among Us

According to an article in yesterday’s NYTimes, Sabra is planning to spread across America with its line of refrigerated hummus and dips (here). Sabra, which is owned in part by PepsiCo, is one of the healthier offerings that the company plans to push to atone for more poisonous fare like Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos. But will Americans actually eat hummus, knowingly, and on their own volition?

According to Sabra, an advertising campaign to promote the hummus with the theme “Adventure awaits” (here) has so far been well-received. The campaign is specifically targeting “adventurous eaters… who don’t know what hummus is or what it tastes like.” Now, I know I live in a tahini-fortified liberal bubble — where hummus is ho-hum and the adventurous eaters partake of durian fruit, bone marrow, and Rocky Mountain Oysters (aka tendergroin) — but… question? What exactly are the adventurous eaters who don’t know what hummus is eating now?

Bob Jones sits at the table for lunch and peels back the top slice of bread on his sandwich to reveal not bologna, not pastrami, but tan-colored mush. “Honey? What kind of sandwich is this?” he calls to his wife. Mrs. Jones bustles out of the kitchen. “It’s hummus,” she explains, her face radiating with excitement. “It’s an adventure! I’m feeling… epicurious.”

Hey, I think it’s great. Certainly hummus is healthier than most of the processed crap that one can buy in a supermarket, and perhaps if the standard American culinary repertoire extends into the Middle East we’ll start to develop a cultural consciousness about this crucial area of the world, but I wonder, what exactly will these newfound epicureans be dipping into their tubs of hummus? Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos?

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By Meredith – June 8, 2010

Gloss Loss

Every Monday, the New York Times runs a feature called the Metropolitan Diary (here), essentially a column for New York City residents and visitors to share conversations and anecdotes gleaned from their ever-interesting lives in the city. Each submission begins “Dear Diary”; uses the superfluous, overwritten prose of educated people who want to prove themselves as such; and usually involves an old person doing something snappy, a child doing something precocious, a working-class person doing something poignant, a tourist doing something embarrassing, or a fabulous person doing something fabulous.

I like the idea of the Metropolitan Diary. Our newspapers should not just be a forum for intelligent, erudite journalists and columnists who have something important to say. No, everyone should be able to report on the prosaicism of everyday life. I mean, really, that one of the guiding principles of my website.

Today, the leading diary entry concerns a woman who dropped her Chanel lip gloss in the subway tracks (here). And I really can’t decide if this was written in earnest or if its a sly parody on the moronically-pompous nature of many of the Metropolitan Diary submissions.

DEAR DIARY:

On a Friday night in early April, as I was going home, I dropped my favorite Chanel lip gloss down on the subway tracks at Spring Street. I asked the token booth man for help, thinking that with the clumsiness of some New Yorkers, the booths must have retrieval tools (like for golf balls in the lake), but no, they actually do not.

Although I’ve never owned a Chanel lip gloss (retail starting at $27), I can totally relate, because once I got a Lancome “Le Rouge Absolu” lipstick as a free gift along with my Lancome fragrance purchase. Oh, I adored this lipstick, not only for the Rose Petale shade that turned my normally pallid lips into plump, pouty pink, but for its replenishing Blistex-like smoothness. Then, one day, I accidentally put the cap on the tube before lowering the stick, smashing it to a pulp. The kicker: Rose Petale has been discontinued. If only life had a Undo button! Or retrieval tools, like in golf!

He called someone for help, possibly an associate or police officer. He told me to wait. Someone would come. So wait I did. And wait. Train after train passed by, and each time I saw my beloved lipstick still lying on the dirt all alone. But still no one came.

So get up get, get, get down. 911 is a joke in yo town.

I felt oddly hopeful throughout, though, as if the knight in shining armor wasn’t going to stand me up. It would be an utterly charming story; everyone on the platform would cheer, confirming faith in our civil servants. Alas, in real life, no one ever came.

I would cheer for a wedding ring, although there are no innocent reasons why someone would have removed their wedding ring on a subway platform. I would probably cheer for a wallet. Maybe a phone, if the owner didn’t look priggish.

Should I have jumped to retrieve it myself? Should I have known better than to wait? Or to have waited so long? Well, it is only lipstick, and it can be replaced. Broken bones, not so easily.

Hell yes, you should have jumped down to retrieve it yourself. That’s Chanel lip gloss, lady. God forbid you leave it there for the homeless or the civil servants to scavenge.

I got on the subway and headed home.

The next Tuesday night, purely on a whim, I went to the booth to check, and, my lip gloss was sitting right there, on the ledge in front of the token booth man! He didn’t even ask any questions, he just saw my incredulous smile, and graciously passed the lip gloss to me through the window.

Jennifer Freed

Sniffle. Cue Adagio for Strings. Oh, gosh, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but I can’t help it. I love happy endings.

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By Meredith – June 7, 2010

Citizen Kane

The Internet is full of lists: Of news article links, of trivia, of quotes, of reviews, of friends, of events, of random personal facts, of favorite things, of best things, Craigslist, Angie’s List, and of lists. In fact, aside from advertisements and porn, the Internet is chiefly comprised of lists. People love reading lists because they do not require any taxing brain cycles beyond what it takes to skim enumerated items organized under a unifying principle, such as: These are the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time! Lists are also easier to form opinions about, because it’s easier to get mad at numbers rather than words.

Some of these lists say that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time (according to the AFI), the second-greatest aside from the Godfather (according to Entertainment Weekly), the fourth-greatest (according to Mr.Showbiz), the 33rd greatest (according to the aggregated ratings of IMDb user), or the 10th most overrated movie of all time (according to some guy.) I’ve been seeing Citizen Kane on lists for years, and yet… yet… I had never actually seen the movie. I’ve always sort of felt like an infidel for missing this cultural touchstone — sort of how I feel about having never finished reading Moby Dick, not being able to sit through a Red Sox game without a magazine, and never having eaten a Whopper.

So the Brattle Theatre has been screening Orson Welles movies all weekend, and I felt compelled to finally see Citizen Kane. Since the movie is so old and presumably has been seen by everyone, the mysterious meaning of the Kane’s dying word “Rosebud” is freely discussed without anyone feeling the need to precede with a “Spoiler Alert!” So I knew that Rosebud was the name of Kane’s sled, an awareness that did, in fact, spoil the enjoyment of the movie but enhanced my understanding of what Rosebud really meant: the fleeting security and innocence of childhood, which can never be relived, and is only corrupted further with the passage of time.

Best movie of all time? Eh, I’m no more informed to analyze Citizen Kane‘s rightful place in the cinematic canon than I am to equipped to make a list of the 10 greatest physicist of all time — or, um, any 10 physicists. But on my own personal ranking greatest movies based on my enjoyment and any sort of life lessons, Citizen Kane would rank somewhere below The Wizard of Oz, Boogie Nights, and Platoon, but above Drugstore Cowboy, Reservoir Dogs, and the Usual Suspects. Maybe someday, I’ll make a list.

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By Meredith – June 6, 2010

Today’s Distractions

I sat down with my laptop this morning with every intention of hammering out a substantive, aesthetic post to atone for the recent dearth of such missives flowing from my work-addled brain.

Instead, I have spent the past hour: Looking at a friend’s vacation pictures, perusing various online yoga schedules, reading a hilarious review of Sex and the City 2, scrutinizing weather maps, browsing Craigslist classifieds for violins, browsing Craigslist classifieds for Dead Milkmen tickets, reading the Wikipedia article for the Dead Milkmen, reading the Wikipedia article for the Philadelphia dialect, reading the Wikipedia article about earwax, googling how to control the ant population in my garden without resorting to chemicals, reading the nutritional benefits of green beans, reading how New Hampshire’s state spelling bee champ stumbled on the word “barbizon” (obviously she doesn’t read mindless teen magazines where she’d see exploitative advertisements for Barbizon Modeling and Acting schools — it pays to be well-rounded, kids), stifling giggles over the Laughter Yoga Club, scanning Alltop, and then reading an article on how to stay focused and avoid distraction as a blogger — oh. the. irony.

To untether myself from this unstoppable surfboard careening through waves of web, I would love to go outside and massacre my garden ants with boiling water (and then blog about it) but thunderstorms are passing through the area, plus it’s only 7:15am. I think I’ll go tear out the toxins with some Kundalini Yoga.

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By Meredith – June 5, 2010

Third Gear, Second Gear, First Gear

Maybe it’s the change in weather, maybe it’s the change in age, but lately, I’ve been feeling sorta poetic. Tonight I boiled savoy cabbage for dinner, and I wanted to, like, write couplets — either about the various shades of green that the leaves turned, or about the banality of boiled cabbage, or both, if I can muster the talent:

An emerald head in the bubbling pot
Promises satiety, or maybe not.

WHEW. That felt good.That was the first bit of poetry that I’ve written since last October. What happened in October? Why, I bought a car. And as sexy as the Jetta TDI is, it has simply siphoned my creative juices like so much ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel.

Not that I was ever a prolific or serious poet, but once upon a time I did feel moved to construct verse out of the random words and phrases that nagged my brain. So what gives with the poetry drought, brain?

Well, my commute used to involve roughly 4 miles walking (round-trip) during which my brain bantered with itself about infinite truths and eternal recurrences, plus eight subway stops during which my eyes meditated upon seemingly nothing but plutocrats and derelicts. For Boston is a town of nothing but.

All of which was highly conducive to poetry. Look at William Wordsworth — “I wandered lonely as a cloud” — a notorious walker who frequently embarked on 15-mile sojourns during which he would not only “mine poetic materials,” but also engage in “purposiveness without purpose,” (here) an active mindset that is perhaps congenial to the creative process, depending on if you don’t think Kant is full of philosophical bullshit.

And the subway… well, who hasn’t been inspired to compose verse, treatises, and/or a letter to the editor while being ferried cargo upon public transportation? As Paul Simon once murmured, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.” And the prophets are saying… Wreckonize!

The car commute just doesn’t inspire comparable poetry. For one thing, commandeering a two-ton steel vehicle occupies the same sectors of the brain that mediate creative thought…. or any thought. For another thing, driving on traffic-plagued roadways during rush hour does not inspire the same sort of acquiescence towards humanity as walking on a tree-lined path. A transcription of my mental activity during my commute would run something like this:

Third gear, fourth gear. Fucking Volvo. Fucking Jeep. Get off my ass, Saab. Stale green light. Yellow light. Third gear, second gear, first gear. Red light. Reggae channel. 80s channel. College channel — alright, Guided By Voices. First gear, second gear, third gear. FUCKING Jeep. Left lane. Fourth gear, fifth gear, sixth gear. Red light. Fifth gear, fourth gear, first gear. Sigh.

Not exactly prime poetry fodder, although maybe I could write an elegy for the abnormally giant leaf that I ran over and thought, for an instant, was an animal? A limerick about the cursed rush-hour traffic on the off-ramp of Route 2? Or a haiku for the Audi driver who nearly crashed his car indulging in hyperactive right-lane passing in gridlock traffic?

(It’s easier to write poetry about boiled cabbage than it is to write about driving…)

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By Meredith – June 3, 2010

Bird on a Sill

Taking out the trash tonight was unusually eventful, for a chore.

First, as I dragged the recycling receptacle down the driveway, a neighbor woman approached me holding a clipboard. She lives three doors down with her extended family, a townie stalwart who has been around since blue-collar Catholics dominated the neighborhood of densely-packed two-family homes. I frequently see her walking her small terrier, a Toto lookalike that barks at me as if I were Miss Gulch herself.

She approached me warily, which was strange because we’ve had several conversations — based solely on her dog’s inordinate aggression towards me, but friendly enough words that she shouldn’t be holding the clipboard at neck level, as if fearful I will gash her throat. “We’re having a block party on June 19,” she said.

“Oh,” I said with an injection of mild delight. I thought she was going to ask me if we wanted to attend, and perhaps commit me to chips and dip, but instead she asked, “Would you mind signing this petition saying that you won’t protest the block party?”

I signed, of course, as she made small talk about how she’s gotten “everyone’s” signature except for the elderly shut-ins next door because they don’t answer the door for anyone but their son. I handed back the clipboard and continued dragging bins out the curb, nearly gagging on the unmistakable stench of week-old oyster shells from the trash. The last block party I went to was in Cambridge; the town gave our street $200 to fund the refreshments, which included a keg of PBR, grain alcohol jello shots, and (after 9pm) a very busy bong. I had no such expectations of this block, where white wine would symbolically mingle with Bud Lite.

After I took out the trash, I wandered into the garden, where the lettuce is filling in the rows nicely — almost too nicely. I pruned about 20 leaves of lettuce — the first harvest of the year, that always-exciting moment when all of the blood, sweat, and tears of cultivation pays off in the form of, well, lettuce.

That’s when the bizarre thing happened. As I headed to the back door, clutching my 20 leaves of lettuce, I happened upon a bird on the window sill of the back porch, lying on its belly, slightly askew. The bird convulsed, a slow shudder that seemed to convey suffering. I was barely one foot away from it, yet the bird barely reacted to my presence. Somehow, this dying bird found its way to the interior window sill of our partially-enclosed back porch to endure its final moments.

Empathy exploded within me. Yesterday’s walk through a veritable bird menagerie awakened a protective respect for birds, and now here is one, enduring death throes right outside my door. It reminded me of the squirrel incident a few years back, when we tried to help a lame squirrel by moving it off the pavement and into the grass where — oh fuck — it promptly died.

But when a creature is helpless, mortally wounded, and in pain, is the most merciful action to hasten its death? Mr. P wasn’t home, and neither was my downstairs neighbor. I was thinking that since she has 3 cats, we could make use of a feline executioner (“Yum. Birdz. Me wantz it.”)

I couldn’t deal with looking at the bird any longer, so I went upstairs, took care of some correspondence, had roughly half of the lettuce along with my dinner, and pounced on Mr. P the minute he came home. “Did you see the bird?”

He went down to the porch to take a look, and came back shrugging.

“It’s not there,” he told me.

“What? What do you mean? That bird was dying. It was, like, convulsing.”

“It’s not there,” he said again. “Sometimes they just need to take a rest.”

“On the window sill of our back porch?” I asked. I was perplexed that the peremptorily-mourned bird evidently lived, but hey. Good for it. I hope the bird is snuggling up with its loved ones in its nest. I hope the bird greets tomorrow’s dawn with song. Hope may be a delusive emotion, but at least it’s congenial.

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By Meredith – June 1, 2010

On My Left

I woke up this Memorial Day morning in Pennsylvania, nursing a slight bloat from having spent the previous day eating things that I don’t normally eat (cake, hot dog buns, my aunt’s beloved 7-layer taco dip) and drinking things that I don’t normally drink (3 bottles of Yuengling with periodic slugs of Pinot Gris). Such is the unfettered festivity of family picnics: cavorting among my kinsmen, my tribe members, evokes an almost primitive craving for hot dogs and potato salad.

It is almost 7:30am and Mr. P intently continues to sleep, so I slip out of bed and lace up my sneakers for a quick fitness walk before our long drive back to Boston. The morning is insistently sunny with mounting mugginess. The bike path that runs behind my mother’s home already sports a fair amount of bicycle traffic; groups of mostly men in colorful jerseys speed past me in varying degrees of velocity, some ringing their bells, many calling out the customary alert: “ON YOUR LEFT!”

I walk with a spirited gait under a tree canopy that is delightfully infested with birds. Dozens of robust trills, squally chants, and flirty phrasings blend together into a melodious cacophony of birdsong, lead by the lusty lark with its beguiling refrain and complex riffing. The lark is singing, “Ladies, ladies! Calling all lady birds! Mate with me and you won’t regret it!”

So intent I am at parsing the voices of this avian symphony that I am genuinely startled when “ON YOUR LEFT!” is bellowed directly in my ear, nearly causing me to jump, of course, to the left. Two cyclists blow past me at a relatively sluggish pace. One is wearing a garish American flag jersey with “USA” emblazoned across his shoulder blades, a tube of fat bulging above his cycling shorts and rippling the red and white stripes of his jersey like a plume of slushie. He is an unknowingly comical but astute manifestation of our national character, the paradoxical slothful slob and willing warrior. We pay penance for our pleasure. Sometimes, we don’t pay enough.

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By Meredith – May 31, 2010

Birthday? Again?

I spent most of the day in a computer lab of an elementary school in gritty-urban East Boston, observing students as they used a beta version of our next software release. To actually see kids using the program with such enthusiasm and diligence evokes a profoundly noble feeling; for once in my career, I’m part of the solution, not the problem. I hope that developing software teaching people how to read will compensate for the seven years that I spent developing software helping large organizational entities do strategic long-term capital planning across their vast real estate portfolios.

Despite my attempts to not be a distraction, it’s impossible to nonchalantly observe kindergartners in a computer lab. Before each class, the lab supervisor introduced me and my colleague to the students. “This is Miss Meredith,” she said. “Can everyone say good morning to Miss Meredith?”

“Good morning Miss Meredith,” they would sing in perfect unison, which totally freaked me out.

Although some of the little girls seemed fascinated by my blonde hair — not many blondes in this heavily-Hispanic school — my colleague drew more attention because he’s 6’9″ tall. “Is he the tallest man in the world?” a first grader asked me.

“Almost,” I said. “I think Shaq is taller.”

The major ice-breaker with the younger set is asking them “How old are you?”

“I’m six,” one little girl said.

“How old are you?” a little boy asked me.

“Well, tomorrow is my birthday, and I’ll be 33,” I admitted.

“Tomorrow is your birthday?” They all looked stunned, almost awed. Ah, I can remember when birthdays were the event of the year, aside from maybe Christmas. And now… birthday, bah.

“My birthday was in March,” the little girl said.”And I had a princess party.”

“Oooo that sound fun,” I said. “I hope I get to have a princess party!” But of course, no, I don’t. Give me some good conversation over a couple of glasses of wine, maybe a low-key rendition of “Happy Birthday,” maybe a symbolic slice of cake and I’ll be set for another year.

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By Meredith – May 28, 2010

Dead as a Toenail

An odd thing happened during last weekend’s hiking trip. At the end of the first day, as I pulled off my mud-caked boots and peeled off my sweaty socks, the toenail on my right foot’s big toe kinda sorta fell off.

“Oh, CRAP,” I said, as the nail — painted a dark metallic blue — became partially dislodged from the nail bed. Not wanting to deal with a lost toenail in the midst of a hiking trip, I took a band-aid and essentially taped the errant nail to my toe. Strangely there was no pain, only the mental distress that any yoga-practicing woman who just bought two new pairs of sandals would feel.

Winter’s transgressions are finally catching up with me. My toenail troubles began during last December’s skiing trip to the Alps, when Mr. P’s family was trying to locate a pair of skis and boots for me within the clan’s vast collection of winter sporting gear. The problem is, of course, that I’m a robust American, and they’re all petite French. After conferring among themselves in French, my father-in-law presented me with a white pair of women’s ski boots. They belonged to Aunt Francoise, who is evidently known in the family as having gargantuan feet.

I tried on Francoise’s boots as the Ps watched. “They’re pretty snug,” I told Mr. P.

“You want them to be snug,” he told me. “You don’t want your feet to move around.”

I could wiggle my toes, but nothing else was moving, that was for damn sure. What a relief, that I wouldn’t have to rent boots! The next day, as we were skiing, Mr. P asked me, “How are your feet?”

“Honestly, they are completely frozen,” I admitted. “I can’t feel a thing.” This worried Mr. P, because if my feet had numbed, this may mean that the boots were too small to allow heat to build up around the foot. But because I couldn’t feel anything, I didn’t care… until that evening, when I took off the boot and found my toenail had turned completely black.

Delightfully, my black toenail became the topic of that night’s aperitif. It was then that my mother-in-law actually converted shoe sizes and figured out that “Big Foot” Francoise actually wears a size 7 1/2 shoe. I wear a size 9.

So my toenail turned black and everyone told me that it would eventually fall off. I didn’t believe it, though. I got a pedicure and life continued just fine. No one knew that underneath this coat of dark blue metallic paint was a black toenail. I even forgot.

But now… Just in time for sandal season! After taping the toenail back into place, I could continue to deny that I would lose my toenail until the next day, when the rigors of mountain hiking loosened the band-aid and the toenail ended up under my foot. “Let’s take a break,” I told Mr. P, “because I’m repeatedly stepping on my toenail.”

I could no longer deny it: my toenail was gone. All that remained was a spot of black bruise and the rough beginnings of a new nail protruding from the matrix. I am not vain about my nails, so it was surprising devastating. Everytime I look at it, I become fascinated by how grotesque it is, this little stub of a nail covering one-fourth of the nail bed.

“Toenails are useless, anyway,” Mr. P — who is no stranger to missing toenails — consoled me. He’s obviously not a foot man, but he’s right. Toenails are simply a remnant of our evolutionary past.

“Functionally useless, perhaps, but I want it back!” I wailed. “I can’t paint a nail bed.” Or…can I?

(BTW, after Francoise’s ski boot turned my toenail black, I wound up borrowing an old pair of ski boots from my father-in-law, which fit perfectly. Cringe.)

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By Meredith – May 26, 2010