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.

Kingston: Lousy with Prejudice

TO THE EDITOR:

I own my own home on Andrew Street, a nice slice of Kingston just behind the high school, with Kingston Hospital on one end of the street and Benedictine on the other. I've owned my home for four years but only recently been able to upgrade the house from its 1932-vintage heating, elecricals, plumbing and windows.

This week my contractor and his men are doing windows and preparing for an outside paint job. 

We're used to people coming up and asking us about the work, so I wasn't surprised when an elderly gentleman stopped in front of the house and said that he was the "inspector".

He went on to say that my windows were "in wrong", my porch stairs "didn't seem right", and he had the gravest doubts about the house in general. He was going to have to ask for a Stop Work order, he said. And, of course, I would need a Permit.

I'm from Manhattan, where people generally respond to this overture by saying, "Get the **** outta my house" or "How much?". Because, let's face it, it sounds like this guy (with no ID or license, just that vague "Inspector" title) is about to tell me that he can make my troubles go away with only a $500 check, and make it out to cash, please.

Also, my contractor had already checked with the City to see if he needed any kind of a permit, long before we had started work.

I called the Kingston Fire Department on the idea that they could identify this man and answer some questions. The polite lady there told me that if he said he was an inspector, he was an inspector. (The man had not yet offered his name, along with not offering ID or any kind of license).

I asked if I needed a permit to paint the exterior of my house. She said she didn't think so, but it was up to the Inspector. I asked her if I needed a permit to put in new windows, or new porch steps.

She said she really didn't know and I would have to ask the Inspector.

I asked her if there were any laws, rules, or ordinances which dictated the actions taken by the Inspector--rather, the actions he had threatened to take. Surely this couldn't just be up to one individual?

She repeated that she had no idea and I would have to ask the Inspector.

I said, "Well, what if he's drunk?" which seemed to displease her very much and that's how we ended the conversation.

Do I need to mention that my contractor is dark-skinned and speaks Spanish? He's an American citizen--there was an article about him in the Freeman when he passed his citizenship test. He owns his house and his business and, like both my grandfathers and a lot of other people, he came to America with a little money and a lot of brains and made a nice business for himself.

He works harder than anyone else I've ever had at this house and he pays plenty of taxes. He doesn't take anything from the government except education for his children, who deserve a lot better than what Kingston can give them. Kingston being the place that allows tattoo parlors to move in, cosily, right across the street from the High School. 

As far as the "inspector" or anyone else is concerned, my contractor could be named Leonard Bernstein or Paddy O'Gill and be as blond as JFK or as black as President Obama, and speak any language he wants to speak. He shouldn't get any different treatment.

Why, then, was the "inspector" calling on his cell phone and saying that I had "a bunch of immigrants" working at my house? Why was he asking me where my contractor was from? ("Mary's Avenue," I responded, which made the inspector look slightly confused.)

Why, for that matter, do teams of men delivering materials to my house try to speak to a white male visitor in my yard, instead of any of the Hispanic men or me, even after I identify myself as the homeowner? Why do so many of my white acquaintances giggle nervously when they see I'm employing a Hispanic crew?  Why do they say I should have called O'Brian or Connelly or Fouchard or Klein? 

I try to have respect for Kingston. I'm not flipping my house--I mean to live here for a good long while. In the course of these renovations, I've given plenty of business to local merchants and work to local professionals.

Maybe some people would say that I don't understand the way the city government works, because I'm not "from around here".

But even if the prejudice is only personal, not institutional, the sloppy way in which the Building Safety unit is run, and the Old Boy's network by which it seems everything in Kingston is run, leads to an amplification of prejudice.  

My contractor tells me that this "inspector" is well-known for giving Hispanic people a hard time. Nobody stops him, of course.

The "inspector" himself told me that he was looking at my house because "the neighbors" had told him "something's going on." What, several Hispanic men working hard on repairing a house? Scandalous. No good can come of that.

Can some or any of your readers, or yourself, explain to me why this arrant bigotry is not a scandal, and is perfectly acceptable to my fellow Kingstonians?

Sincerely,

Annie Newman

I sent this letter to the City Editor of the KIngston Freeman tonight after the events described. I don't think they're going to print it, so I wanted to record it here, at least.

Love in the Basement

One character to whom we wish to introduce you is our house. Known to us as The Old Newman Place, it is a 1932 four-square bungalow, apparently built from a Sears kit by a crew of loafers who were sitting around the corner tavern waiting for the New Deal to kick in, when the person who owned this 1/3 acre told them it was free beer for them as would lend a hand, and he didn't mean the needled stuff, neither.

(If this passage made sense to you, you were probably wondering what good it did anyone to sit around a tavern before Repeal, anyway. You're such a smarty!)

Anyway, the boys pitched right in, and we think many a fine craftsman learned a profession on this job. As in, the electricians learned plumbing, the plumbers learned floor-installation, and the flooring men learned wallpaper hanging. We should point out that no one learned any of this well.

Time went on and we have owned this house since since 2005. We actually got a mortgage in 2005, although we were broke, in school, and subsisted on a small and undependable hand-out from our brother. This, in its essence, is the germ of today's Financial Crisis. 

Anyway, we live here with our Beautiful Daughter, our Cat and our Young Roommate. We refer to her as a Roommate although she does not contribute to the upkeep of this house in any way. She pays for her own food (a slight cost), beverages (not at all slight) and cell phone bill (roughly equal to the gross national product of Peru).

Every third week she unloads the dishwasher and puts everything back in the wrong place, an action which must be greeted with fawning approval or else we will lose the right to ask her to do it again. (Not that she will, but we like being able to ask.)

Our Roommate keeps company with a nice young man who looks forward to working in his father's construction company. This ambition has the dual benefits of preventing him from taking any further education (he doesn't know when he'll be called to a full-time job) and keeping him under his parents' thumb, unable to do anything of which they disapprove. They are the sort of people who disapprove as a way of life, although they call it Religion.

Our Roommate has been working part-time at Walmart for two years and is already up to 25 cents more than the minimum wage. She works 45 hours per week, which is called part-time with overtime. In this way, she is protected from having to take time off to go to the doctor, as she has no benefits whatsoever.

In this happy situation, it is obvious that the two needed to become engaged, and so they did, on a $300 ring and a sixpack of Mike's Hard lemonade. And they have been miserable ever since.

Since they live in our basement, we have ear-witnessed every moment of the romance: the recriminations, the second thoughts, the throwing of the ring in the ring-giver's face, the piling out of the basement and into the cars and the speeding off madly in every direction, the reconciliatory pizza, the creaking bedsprings, the having the ring re-sized because it cracked when it hit the basement's concrete wall.

Does Love always go this way? Or is it Love in a Basement which makes it go wrong?

We are actually happy to be living on the celibate (and airy) second floor of the Old Newman Place.