Is This Thing On? by annie newman

You Funny Little Good-for-Nothing Meme

(This title is from a Maurice Chevalier song which we wish we could reproduce on this blog. Suffice it to say that Mimi is a girl and Chevalier is asking if he's her guy. It all ends in a lot of suggestive French snorting of the sort that La Skolnique and ourself refer to as "hon, hon!"

As to why we are answering this meme, it's because we never have done one before, and we filed our income taxes a full 20 hours before the deadline, and we are very proud of ourself.)

1. We've come to realize that our last kiss ...was shared with someone we have completely forgotten

2. We are listening to ...the knockabout comedy of Odillio and his work crew painting our house

3. We talk ...to the trees, but they never listen to us.

4. We love ... iTouch apps. To a really frightening degree.

5. Our best friend ...is La Skolnique. Although it's okay if we are not hers.

6. Our first real kiss ...was extraordinarily hot. 

7. Love is ...on the whole, a positive thing.

8. Marriage is .... a socio-economic construct for which there is (just briefly, right now) no real reason.

9. Somewhere, someone is thinking..."will this pain ever end?"

10. We'll always...eat m&ms.

11. The last time we really cried was because....We were feeling emotional.

12. My cell phone ...plan has really good coverage.

13. When we wake up in the morning ...we'd really rather not.

14. Before we go to bed... We kick the cat out of our room.

15. Right now we are thinking about... errands. 

16. Babies are... so fragile

17. We get on Myspace... never.

18. Today we...feel about as lonely as usual.

19. Tomorrow we will be... Just about as lonely. But we will not be with in-laws, which reminds us that there are worse things than loneliness.

20. We really want to be... financially solvent, and of some help to people.

21. We are allergic to...penicillin

22. We are annoyed by... humorless people

23. One food we refuse to eat is...snail caviar

24. The most recent thing we've learned is... even when it hurts like a sonofabitch, it's not personal.

25. The number one thing on our bucket list is... stay the hell away from the bucket

26. Something we've always wanted to learn to do is... speak Spanish

27. We have a high tolerance for... children

28. We have a low tolerance for... narrow mindedness

29. My wish... for my daughter to be safe and happy after her father and I are gone.

30. Person in front of whom we wouldn't mind behaving like an idiot if we saw them in real life...George Clooney.

All Aboard!

We've said it before and we'll say it again: travel is no pleasure. 

Why, then, is so much of our life spent on the road?

It is an odd conjunction of circumstances, none of which you will find interesting.

 For one thing, our contractor Odillio has been bring the Old Newman Place up to code for so long that they've actualy changed the code twice since we started. Ha, ha! 

No, seriously, we knew when we bought the place that it was only "turn-key" in the sense that you could put a key in the lock (if you wished) and turn it, but the door would probably fall away from you and the wall fall over you, like the old Buster Keaton gag. And the rest of the neighborhood would laugh their tails off but you yourself would not be so happy.

For the past four years we only took care of emergencies. Then our lamented Mom left us a certain amount of money and we started re-doing the house.

At certain points it has become necessary for us to leave the house. Sometimes this is because we are beginning to exhale, as well as inhale, plaster dust.

Sometimes it is because, as much as we love Odillio and his crew, we feel that if we hear one more Spanish pop-gospel tune in the middle of the night (9 AM), we might run amok with a staple gun in our mouth, and it won't end prettily.

We also want to travel now because we have rarely travelled in the past.

When we were a child, our parents loved traveling and, even more inexplicably, they loved traveling en famille. This, although we were the child most likely to need a potty break halfway through a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel, and our brother became hysterical with fury if his London Broil touched his peas.

As we grew older, we hated travel more and more. This was because we were constantly being sent places. Camp in Canada. College in Central New York. Our Brother's College in Illinois, to disengage him from the hands of a gold-digger.

When we found ourself ensconced in a damp bedroom off the Gloucester Road because someone felt we should study abroad, we re-enacted that scene from "Gone with the Wind", except this time God was witnessing the fact that we would never travel against our own wishes, ever again.

Therefore, on Thursday we are taking a train to Washington, DC.

Former President with an unnamed friend.

Schleppin' 'Cross the Wilderness

"Wait. Is there gonna be a test on this?"

We don't like to make comments about our friend JC, who is a very smart man and much larger than ourself. But the man complains a lot. He truly does.

Last night, f'r'instance, he was Twittering from his seder. which already is going to get on God's nerves. But it might have been okay if his tweets has consisted of comments like : "This haroseth is incredibly yummy" or "Memo to self-do not actually eat bitter herbs".

Instead, we heard nothing but complaints.

"Let my people go...out for a sandwich!"

"My stomach is rumbling so loud it drowned out two choruses of 'Dayanu'!"

"I swear to God that hard-boiled egg is a gonner if I don't get some brisket within the next five minutes!"

The fact is...and anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments can bear me out on this...the Exodus was not a journey for sissies.

First of all, we (not just ourself this time, we mean all the Jewish people) had to leave the house without packing. Our own mother, never a vain woman, couldn't leave the house without fifteen minutes of makeup and hairdressing, and, as to some of our more princessy friends, we think they would rather be caught by Pharoah's henchmen than be seen in their gear from spinning class. So already the complaints would start.

Our bff La Skolnique ("Chava the Peacemaker") would have to run back twice to see she had turned off the stove (had the camel pee on the fire) underneath the tzimmes. Which no one would eat anyway, because it looked like mortar and reminded them too much of work.

JC (or, as he would have been known in Biblical times, "Joshua the Fresser") would have demanded to be carried aloft by his handmaidens, claiming some old stonelaying injury; his comments ("So who told you to bring the half-baked bread? Half-baked gefilte fish would have been okay but why the bread? Did anyone remember the half-fermented wine?") would make his wife and child beg for Egyptian citizenship.

You see how tiresome this would get? And he wouldn't be the only one. 

Our brother, Pesche With the Open Mouth, would be lecturing his adorable two sons (Sholem the Pure and Mordecai the Yeller) about the true meaning of the holiday, whilst his wife, Judith the Balabusta, would illustrate with healer-approved tub toys.

"Did anyone bring noseplugs? I've got a deviated septum!"

Over at our part of the caravan, we ("Hannah the Unpaid") would be trying to comfort our Beautiful Daughter ("Tauba the Annoying"...once you start these things it's really difficult to stop)...while we searched high and low for her father, "Baruch the Messy", who, we hoped, brought her prescription manna.

Our only point here is that Passover could be a lot worse, so everyone pipe down and pass the affikomen. And if you don't know what that is, you weren't on the Exodus anyway. You get to tell the jokes on Sunday.

Like Mike

This is Michael Ruhlman, a writer.

He is, for we love to put first things first, a truly nice-looking guy.

Second, he is a good writer. He mostly writes about food but has also written about Boys, Houses, and small sailing craft.

He is one of these people who can look at a very small thing and then talk (or write) about it for hours.

A stoner. No, wait, we didn't mean that. A WRITER.

We would like to write as well as Mr. Ruhlman. So we are going to follow Ruhlman's rule, which decrees that the best way to become a good writer is to write every day.

We're going to write it here and we're going to write it short and illustrate it profusely, so it ought to be easy to read and very quick. We know you're a busy person.

Check back often. And, this for the foodies in the (incredibly small) audience, we are not going to follow Ruhlman's other rule, which, if codified, would go something like: "You are a fake foodie if you do not create your own veal stock. Veal stock is food magic and anyone with a functioning neurological system, like you don't even need a brain, can put it together from roasted veal bones and h2o. If you do not make your own veal stock, you are nothing but a stooge."

Yes. Well. We buy ours from Eli Zabar.

How Real Life Differs from the Comics

"Rose is Rose". Used without permission on account of we only have 1.5 readers right now, and what could it hurt?

We have read the comics throughout life and with great joy, but Rose is Rose, pictured above, is our current favorite. 

(Serves you right, For Better or For Worse. We didn't want to go back thirty years in time. We don't like having to wait another ten years until April is born.)

But Rose is Rose is letting us down.

Rose, a stay-at-home wife and mother, likes staying at home. She cares for her husband and her little son and a lot of animals in the neighborhood.

She does things like setting out feed for birds.

Rose isn't Disney, so it's not like the birds fly to her outstretched hand and perch on her ring finger and whatever. But they are cute birds and they appreciate the gesture and sometimes even sing her a little song.

We, on the other hand, set up a bird feeder station and got what appears to be the outtakes from "the Birds" but in a version directed by Quentin Tarantino.

We get nothing but black birds. Small, ugly black birds with sneering bird nostrils in their beaks.  

And they came in droves. Dozens. Blackbird-pie amounts.

And they pooped while they ate.

And then they fought. This is the evening plan of the average bird at Annie's Last Chance Saloon:

1)Arrive

2)Poop

3)Poop again

4)Grab sneering beakful of suet-based bird chow

5) Kick crap out of fellow bird.

Meanwhile our cat Fuzzy is making book on the outcome.

If this keeps up, we're going back to Brenda Starr.

Good--Now You Know How We Felt

"Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have their (pride), and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.

However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one." 

--from "When All You Have Left is Your Pride" by Benedict Carey in today's Times

We have never yet figured out why it's so hard for us to hold a job.

True, a lifelong lack of self-esteem has sent us to ever-sillier and less-consequential jobs, and we tend to question authority in completely inappropriate ways. That's a bad combination. We're not proud of it and we don't think it means that we're smart. We think it might mean that we have a hard time distinguishing appropriate behavior and regular social cues. 

True also that many people find us entitled and arrogant. Hmm. We think some of these people came to work needing to find something like that.

We're trying to tell you that we don't think we're too good for work, and we're not ashamed of hard work, and, even as we wrote that sentence above about "silly" work, we're not really putting anything down. We spent one very pleasant summer handling phone orders for the 'wichcraft chain of sandwich shops, and, in addition to bringing us about as close to Tom Collicchio as we ever hope to be, it was a lot of fun and we got to eat a great sandwich every day. 

It wasn't silly at all, except some fashionistas' need to know that there is not one single tiny atom of fat in their fat-free lattes is a little silly. Each to his or her own.

However, as more and more people lose their jobs and try to arrange their lives around a routine that either isn't working (like pretending they're still employed) or won't be working for quite a long time (like looking for a new job), we find that we have a lot of sympathy for these newly-unemployed. It is very difficult to give yourself permission to be unemployed, but you're going to have to do it.

If you don't, even if you do get a new job as soon as you can, you're going to have bad memories about this time in your life. You might hang on too closely to your next job, or you might take the first thing that comes up, or the thing that seems steadiest, instead of the job that's right.

Attitude is crucial. (So is cutting down on your extraneous expenses and concentrating on the things that count, but you'll find other blogs to tell you how to do that). If you look on your time of unemployment as a period of failure, you'll always feel (at least a little) like a failure.

Try to remember that you are still yourself, and that you existed before this job and you are still existing after it.

Our parents lived and worked in a world where you only got fired for embezzlement or trying to kill the boss. (In some advertising agencies, you could only get fired for doing both at the same time). Whenever we got fired--we've already admitted it was more than the average working jane--they felt it as a judgement on themselves.

Our own generation has moved jobs and 401k's frequently enough, has changed careers one time or more and have come to believe that work serves life (instead of the other way around, which came to its reducto ad absurdum in the crash of '87.) Still, we went though enough business-card mixers in which your next paycheck, promotion or sex act could depend crucially on your job title. A lot of us still think we are our job and nothing more.

The big challenge of this new economy, outside of keeping food on the table and the kids in school, is going to be keeping our sense of self, our identity as individuals, even though it is unsubstantiated by paycheck or perks.

It's going to be difficult, but we've found, from long experience, that it is possible.