Gay or Un-Gay?

In our polarized, my way or the highway world, there's an astonishing new app for mothers who wake up each morning wondering, "Is my son gay?"  If successful, this annoying bit of Androidian asininity may spawn a whole series of apps for inept mothers. From  "Should I be an Avon Lady?" to "How can I tell if my husband stays up all night watching porn?
         "Is my son gay?" offers a series of questions right out of a dog-eared Freudian primer that are intended to help a hapless maternal parental unit determine -- once and for all -- whether to buy Hugh Jackman's version of Oklahoma or anything Metallica. Boxers or briefs? Mixed greens with arugula and endive or a wedge of iceberg? New Balance or Ferragamo?  
          Here are the Kafkaesque questions perfectly timed for the coming Apocalypse, aka, the 2012 election. I have not made any of these up. In fact, you can read the article for yourself HERE, but don't come whining to me afterward.

1. Does he like to dress up nicely? Does he pay close attention to his outfits and brand names?
2. Does he like football? 
3. Before he was born did you wish he would be a girl? 
4. Has he ever gotten into or participated in a fight? 
5. Does he read sports magazines?
6. Does he have a best friend
7. Does he like team sports?
8. Is he prudish/modest?
9. Does he like diva singers?
10. Does he spend a long time in the bathroom
11. Does he have a tongue, nose or ear piercing
12. Does he spend time getting ready before being seen in public?
13. Have you asked yourself questions about your son's sexual orientation?
14. Are you divorced?
15. Does he like musical comedies?
16. Has he introduced you to a girlfriend ever?
17. Is the father (you) very strict or authoritarian with his son?
18. In your family is the father absent?
19. Was he shy as a child?
20. Is he close to his father? 

Navel Gazing

Someone wrote in her blog about pissing away our allotted time, as if it were something borrowed like a mortgage. She went on to postulate that from where she sat, at the age of 62, her rent will soon be coming due. 

          The idea of borrowed time caused me a moment of contemplation, which is a lifetime for me, since nano seconds are usually the extent of my short attention span. Just exactly who has lent me this time? Does he look like Morgan Freeman? And to whom will I be making my payment? One of those people in a toll booth?

          Then, like dominoes falling, my thoughts continued to cascade, causing me to wonder, when someone dies young, does their allotted time get banked for someone else, since they only used part of it?  Perhaps we are all on a list, based on how much time we have left in our lives. When our time's up, do we go to the top of the list and hope someone dies really young so we can have their remaining time and have a chance to become the oldest person in the world? Or do we have to earn the spare time somehow with multiple good deeds or years of honest effort? And could we pass on the offer and just die when it's our time? 

          On the other hand, those leftover years might be divided equally among family members without anybody realizing it, except when they all get into their nineties. I can also see unused minutes going into a huge pot to be divvied up once a year in some kind of a worldwide lottery. They could call it the Time's Up lottery. And it would work something like the Mega Millions or the Power Ball. But I don't know where you'd get a ticket or who'd run the thing. I do know that your money would be no good. Tickets would only be purchased by investing some of your time. Perhaps that happens anyway. 

          The movie, which will no doubt be made, would star Tom Hanks as the accountant in charge of the leftover lifetimes. Who else? He keeps track of how much extra time there is at any given time. 

          He would report to a board of directors led by Tom Selleck, Tom Cruise, Tommy Lee Jones, and Tom Sizemore, because I just thought that guys named Tom would make it easy for people to remember who was in the movie. They meet once year in Las Vegas to decide who gets more time to live. Their decisions would be based first on the luck of the draw. Since they're in Las Vegas, each member of the board picks a card. The Tom with the highest card wins the right to decide how many people get some leftover time. He also gets to decide what his decision will be based on. Say Tommy Lee Jones picks the winning card this year. He could decide that 100,000 lucky people can divide up all the leftover time among themselves for that year. But those 100,000 people can only have years of extra time added to their lives if they wear a Size 11 shoe. Or XL latex gloves. Or they use a c-pap machine. Think of the requirements. It's a bureaucrat's dream. 

          Speaking of dreams, it's about time I woke up out of this one. The ninth season of MI5 is waiting for me. 

          

          

          

         

How Did Anybody Hook Up Before Facebook?

Tonight I'm having dinner with two guys I hooked up with via computer dating in 1965. Yep. You read that right. As computers go, that's the Jurassic Era. Mark Zuckerberg's PARENTS were barely out of diapers. 
          Operation Match was started by two Harvard lads who may be dead now for all I know. [Ooops, not dead yet! I found them. See link below.] Their minions went around the country, hitting the college campuses and downtown bars frequented by the young and nubile, handing out questionnaires to anyone with $3.00. The good news was that chances of meeting an unemployed cab driver were slim and none at that stage. 
          We filled out the questionnaires for ourselves, then did it all over again for the fabulous attributes we wanted in our ideal dates. Afterward, an anonymous mainframe sorted it all out, then mailed out a printout of the people we matched up with. Or "with whom we were matched," if you want to nitpick. 
          In case you think I'm just making all this stuff up, you can read a recent article about the guys who started Operation Match HERE. Here's ANOTHER. One of the founders is now a judge in D.C. Depending on how good I look, I'll post some pictures from tonight later. Meanwhile, here's how we matched up back in the day. Who needs Facebook? 

          
          

Kweku Adoboli's Ass is Grass

Quick! Do you have any idea who Kweku Adoboli is? Probably not off the top of your head. He isn't in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and he doesn't work for AOL or AIG or AARP. If you're the average working Joe or Jane in the United States, chances are good he has never ever been a blip on your radar. And, given the demographics of my readers, this may well be the first and last time you ever read his name. 
          Go on, guess who he is. Yes, he's African. Brilliant deduction by the way, given his distinctive moniker. But no, he's not the dictator of a yet to be named country. Or a guerilla chieftain responsible for millions murdered in the genocides of Darfur, Somalia or Rwanda. Nor is he a Nobel Laureate for medicine or physics or a delegate to the UN. Although his father once was. 
          Let's face it, unless you are the former CEO of UBS and you just submitted your resignation because of Mr. Adoboli, you probably haven't got a clue. But Kweku Adoboli may be the reason you're also out of a job in the not too distant future. His fraudulent manipulation of ETF's as a senior trader on the Delta One desk of UBS may be the reason you can't afford to send your kids to the colleges of their choice. He may be the reason you have to keep your car for an extra five years, the reason you no longer vacation out of the country, and the main reason your re-financed house loses even more of its value. In a round about way, a few years from now, he may even be the reason your marriage comes crashing down. 
          Kweku Adoboli might be the straw that broke the camel's bank in Europe this week. He may be the reason the world stands on the precipice of recession again. Depending on your investments, he may be why your retirement is now on hold. Or he may just be a scapegoat. No one expects you to connect the dots. I'm sure they hope you won't. After all, he was only playing with company money and there's still some left. Besides, no clients were harmed in the perpetration of this fraud. If you believe UBS.   
          In the 24/7 365 day world of global trading, the London-based Kweku [Kwek to his friends?], a 31-year-old native of Ghana, went rogue, as they say, costing UBS -- the huge Swiss bank with the increasingly ironic advertising slogan, "We Will Not Rest" -- a whopping 2.3 billion dollars in losses. The fact that he was able to hide his fiduciary chicanery [i.e., unauthorized trades and losses] from as far back as 2008 through this year, does not bode well for the world in general, and the survival of his bank in particular. I hate to say it, but I'm rooting for Kweku to take UBS down with him. The CEO already stepped down. And a couple of Kweku's co-workers have quietly exited. I so hope that the rest of the bank isn't too far behind. A girl can dream, can't she?
          My favorite quote about this debacle is from a WSJ article -- "The losses raised questions among industry executives about supervision at the bank, as well as the ability of regulators to police such activity." 
          I think those questions have been asked and answered. And not for the first time.

Every Day Is An Adventure

Here's why I like to get out of the house from time to time. Besides taking out the garbage. 

          I was working with my video editor editing, when we stopped a moment to take a break. At that point, someone nearby asked if we liked the taste of coconut. If I had been at home alone, this probably wouldn't have happened. Yes, I said, I do like coconut. [Not as much as chocolate, but that wasn't the question.] My editor said he liked coconut, too. 

          As evidence of my newfound proclivity for all things coconutty, I should mention a recent vending machine purchase of a Mounds bar in lieu of a Snickers or Twix as proof that my enjoyment of coconut has been on the rise. I even found myself counting out my nickels and dimes, singing "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. Almond Joy's got nuts. Mounds don't." So imagine my surprise when she produced not a coconut candy bar, a coconut macaroon, a piece of coconut cake, or even a coconut shrimp appetizer, but a can of LaCroix infused with natural coconut flavor. I certainly wasn't expecting a beverage. 

          And she offered one to each of us. 

          I'll put it in the refrigerator so it'll be cold by lunchtime, I said. Try putting some coconut flavored rum in it, she suggested, slyly. Suddenly, I flashed back to my experience with coquitos, the tasty Puerto Rican Christmas beverage that starts with egg yolks, coconut milk, and coconut cream, and gets its high octane from rum. I remember wondering why this flavored egg nog was being served in such a tiny glass. Too late, of course. 

          So the coconut rum sounded tasty, but, despite my coquito experience, I don't drink sufficient amounts of rum [or alcohol in general] to justify the expense. Spending money on an entire bottle of coconut flavored rum just for the thrill of adding a single cap to a glass of LaCroix didn't seem worth the cost. Unless someone else was buying. I can improvise with rum and coconut extracts. And not add any calories. A win-win. 

          I can't wait to let you know how the experiment went.   

The End of Office Politics

For someone who says she doesn't drink coffee, except as an ingredient in those milkshakes they call frappaccinos, I have a hard time explaining why the baristas all know me by name at my local Starbuck's.
          Recently, one of them actually had my de-caf tall mocha hazelnut frap with whip started the moment I walked in the door. Also as a cone-wasser of their small, but potent lemon squares, I will often purchase a couple of these confections [$.50 off the second one btw] as a treat, if I happen to be in the store just before closing. Something to tide me over on the five-minute drive home. This often prompts the appearance of an extra one or two in the bag, another perk of becoming one of the regulars -- free leftovers. 
          It all started when Starbuck's got wifi. I now had an excuse to work outside of the house in an environment that offered more than trips to the fridge in my underwear. Then my town library got wifi and I suddenly had another option. But only after I got up the courage to return a book I'd borrowed in 1997, a tome I discovered during my once a decade routine of dusting the shelves. Unable to compute the amount I surely owed, I prepared myself to pay whatever it took to get in their good graces again. After telling them my very sketchy tale of woe, I was shocked to discover that they had no record of the book. Or me, for that matter. The card I handed them wasn't in the system either. So I got a new card, and they accepted the library book as a donation. All because of wifi. I'm a wifi regular at their "cafe" now, a vending machine room at best, but paradise as libraries go. 
          I've had the same experience with FedEx Office the company that ate Kinko's. The night crew knows me so well they'll ask where I've been, if I haven't stopped by at least a couple of times a week. I'll often go there to work after 9:00 PM because they're open 24 hours, seven days a week -- except on Labor Day, it turns out. And I'm almost always the only customer in there, a benefit of living in the suburbs, assuming you like having the place to yourself and aren't there to meet the love of your life. The printers and copiers are mine all mine. Not one minute of waiting. And if they run out of the snacks I like -- cheese Pringles -- somebody will check in the back to see if they've got more. Try asking any of the "co-workers" to do that during the day. 
         I have also added Subway, Panera, and McDonald's to my worldwide offices. One of the sandwich makers at Subway gave me a free cookie a few weeks ago, just because I asked. Fast food joints are just another office for a freelancer. Free from politics and people sucking up for promotions. A place to write copy, update websites, even skype. All for the cost of an Egg McMuffin or a 6-inch sweet onion teriyaki chicken sandwich. P.S., a Starbuck's barista just gave me a receipt left by a customer. It lets me go online, take a survey and get a code for a free beverage next time I'm there. I can do that. 
         Got any other "office locations" I should look into?
         
         

Water World

          Clearly, I live in a town that hires people who don't know shit about how runoff from one person's brodingnagian castle can turn all the homes around them into disaster areas in a storm.
          However, for the low, low price of $8K -- that's $8,000 fahrenheit -- the floodwater from the runoff caused by the construction of the huge houses behind me can be alleviated. Turns out, instead of locating catch basins in the middle of the properties so excess water from the roof could be collected and sent to the street, the catch basins were positioned at the back of the properties, right next to my yard, so the excess water flows downhill -- right toward me.
          The water fills up the catch basins and overflows into my yard and my window wells, then cascades like Niagara Falls into my basement. A landscape architect I called came by to give me the heartstopping estimate. This solution entails the installation of a buried 18-inch pipe leading to a sistern across the back of my yard, which then leads to another pipe and another sistern in the back of my neighbor's yard, and so on and so on, through the backs of all the other yards until our neighborhood pipes reach the pipes of the village street sewers.
           But -- and it's not a good but -- in order to perform this engineering feat, all the houses on the block have to agree to the plan. And they each have to pony up $8,000 like me. Yep. We victims get to correct a problem caused by the village's incompetent engineers and the greedy builders who continue to construct these monster homes.

          My first reaction was that the houses behind us should be paying for this solution. Duh. Naturally, this being the village from hell, the owners of said houses are under absolutely no obligation to make amends for the oceans of rain water which spew off their runway-sized slabs of concrete onto our properties. Nope. No obligation at all. 

Change of Scenery

Returning to Chicago on cheap, but rude, Spirit Airlines in August, I shot Flip cam videos of the unusual clouds gathering outside my window. Too bad you can't hear the deafening roar of the jet engines as we passed by the clumps of fluff. Oh, wait, I can upload a video I shot. Cosmic. Meanwhile, the screen shot from 35,000 feet up replaces the vast and soothing view of the manicured lawns at Cowley Manor, a lovely retreat in the Cotswolds, where my daughter and son-in-law had their wedding reception. No special reason for swapping out, just time for a change.

Welcome to My World

Tonight is date night at Village Hall. It's the Open House to meet and greet members of the Storm Water Commission for an evening of bullhockey, as they unveil the exciting details of their 22-project flood management plan. 
          My street is slated for one of the 22 projects, number six on the countdown, I believe. Basically, we're going to get more sewer grates. The fact that we should have had more sewer grates installed when the curbs were added twenty years ago will be pointed out to the village by me and others in my neighborhood. It's also reason to keep expectations low. 
          I went. I'm back. I asked the following questions: 
ME: It's going to cost around 22 million to execute this village-wide flood management plan. Who is going to pay for the individual improvements to our neighborhoods? 
ANSWER: I don't know.
ME: Will the money be a grant, a bond issue, or do you already have the cash?
ANSWER: I don't know.
ME: You claim that my street hasn't had improvements to its infrastructure for fifty years. What about the improvements you already did to alleviate flooding twenty years ago? The ones you can see in these pictures I have right here. They didn't seem to help. 
ANSWER: What improvements?
ME: How come this map has no indication of all the backyard flooding we complain about on my block? 
ANSWER: What backyard flooding? 
          The grandfatherly person I talked to was a consultant for the company called in to make the flooding assessment for the village and determine which neighborhoods need work. He couldn't have been more uninformed.
          And they didn't even serve refreshments.          

High School Evidential

This is proof that I made mistakes in high school. I was going through a pile of 50-year-old student newspapers looking for photos to embarrass classmates coming to our reunion this fall, and ta-da! I embarrassed myself instead. This photo is Exhibit A.  Unless you were in high school with me 50 years ago, I bet -- I hope -- you can't tell which one of these wannabe suburban rock stars is me. [You get nothing for your efforts.] 
          This picture, which also made it into the yearbook, proves that sometimes you do things in high school that are half-baked. Then somebody gets it on film and five decades later, you're toast. 
          For our yearly student produced/written/directed/choreographed show called Lagniappe [which means "a little bit extra"in Creole], two of my pals and I decided we'd be the female version of the Everly Brothers -- the Averly Sisters, get it? [Boy, I crack myself up.] For four nights, we performed the high school white girl version of Little Richard's Tutti Fruitti to a live, paying audience. On purpose. In public. For some reason, our version of the tune became a hit among the pre-teen set. And we were invited to take our performance on tour to the graduation party at one of the local middle schools. 
          Naturally, since the Scarlet Letter was part of the curriculum, we cleverly wore a scarlet letter A on our racy sweatshirts, thinking we were so tantalizingly risque with our [supposedly] oblique reference to, um, pilgrim SEX. How double entendre of us. Until somebody's dad informed us that back in the days before prohibition, a couple of shady ladies known as the Everleigh Sisters actually ran a notorious brothel in Chicago called the Everleigh Club. So without knowing it, we had doubled the value of our double entendre. 
          Somewhere there's a picture of another short-lived high school singing group I was in called The High Five -- because the five of us were all over 5'7".  At that time, "high five," as we know it today, hadn't made its way to the madras and circle pin set. But I like the idea that I may have enjoyed some very early ghetto cred, if only by accident. 
          Play that funky music, white lady.

The Reunion Chronicles -- The Pre-quel

While you may have spent your high school years saving the roaches from your best doobies, someone in MY high school graduating class saved each and every one of the school newspapers from those fun-filled days of yesteryear. From posture pictures through gradumication. 
          How do I know this? Because, for a reason I have yet to fathom, she gave them all to me a few years ago. As Chairperson For Life of all our previous high school reunions, she just handed them to me one night and said, "Here, you take these." I know. My mistake for going to a reunion meeting. 
          I've been to every one of our reunions, 10th, 20th, 25th, and 40th. All except for the one we had for our 50th birthdays, which would have been our 33rd in reunion years. I chose not to go for reasons which I may write an entry about. If enough people beg me. 
          If I didn't live in the same area where I grew up, I wouldn't spend a dime to attend one of these shindigs. But for some reason, getting to a reunion for many of my other classmates is important. One of my high school friends, living in Wyoming, showed up at our 40th, totally bald from chemo, riding in a wheel chair, and hooked up to a bag of medication. She was dying of brain cancer and didn't want to miss a chance to say good bye. We had plenty of laughs, even though the humor was very black. At one point someone announced a future meeting for anyone interested in the next reunion. She asked if they could hold it sooner, since she wasn't going to be around much longer.  
          Perhaps my near perfect reunion attendance record was one reason for the newspaper handoff, since the more reunions you attend, the more crap they ask you to do. More likely, our Chairperson For Life heard that I never throw anything out. Or she thought I would have fun doing something suburban and decoupage-like with them. Perhaps in my spare time, she assumed I could concoct a toilet cover or decorative tabletop out of headlines like "Students begin work on Student Council election," "Parent-teacher dates set" or "Rocket built for contest." I have no clue.
          Except for raising children, working, defrosting Stouffer's lasagne, and separating my garbage, I don't know why I've never set aside some quality time to do a creative project with these ancient relics of my past -- the dinosaur bones of the good old days, when I was 6' tall, weighed 126 pounds, and had nicknames like Stick, Dunker, Long Sam, and The Road Runner. 
          Speaking of which -- the good old days, not my nicknames -- I'm looking at an issue dated November 18, 1960, from the fall of my senior year. On the front page of this edition is a picture of June and Cully, the co-heads of the canned food drive, posing with a bunch of [surprise!] canned food. The first line of this riveting story starts out, "A sock hop will be held in the main gym next Wednesday from 9 p.m. to midnight if students reach the "Grand Can Slam" canned foods drive goal of 51,049 cans." Good times. 
           So no, I didn't throw the newspapers out. But not because I have any sense of duty or responsibility or wish to maintain closet space in my home as a repository for high school days gone by. I just forgot I had them.
          As a result, their discovery came as quite a surprise -- "Oh, shit, I can't believe it!" There they were, crumbling and yellow, as I was going through the last of the many storage boxes, packed up when a pipe burst in my basement two years ago. At that time, the contents of every room had been boxed up by trained professionals [okay, day workers with prison records], who emptied the house [or filled their pockets] and put everything into a storage pod on the driveway. This event was followed immediately by the mold men, who came in and charged thousands of dollars for questionable "reclamation" work, which seemed to consist of a quart of Kilz paint and a couple of cans of fungicide spray.
          Since our latest reunion -- the big 5-0 -- is coming up so fast that the facelift I had planned will have to be put on hold, it occurred to me that I might be able to do something with those newspapers, finally. Something to throw up on a screen during the band's fifteen minute pee-break at our Saturday night "business casual" reunion gala. 
          Keeping things as simple as possible, I'm going to scan four years of student newspapers for anything about anyone in our class and create a slide show that can play during intermission. [For instance, I found a photo of me from junior year on the front page of the paper. I'm described as "dateless for the dance." And I remained dateless. At that point, I was still 0 for high school.]
          Quantity is more important than quality for this reunion slideshow effort. First there's the alcohol factor. Drunken olde classmates will help raise its entertainment quotient. Second, when it comes to pictures, people are like cats and laser lights. "Is that me? Is that me? Oh look, that's me! ME ME ME ME ME." I see it as a no-lose. 
          To accompany this visual spectacle, a few of us are planning to sing some songs from the sixties, with parody lyrics we've written about fellow members of our class. Only five weeks to get it done. It has to be something we can pull off with no rehearsal, since that won't happen. I figure between a former opera singer, a National Geo photographer, a rear admiral, perhaps the former poet laureate of Maryland and me, we can fake it, if nothing else.  
          

There's No Bidness Like Show Bidness

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A Moving Story

I've decided my posts are too long. Perhaps that's why I've neglected my blog lately. Long just takes way too long. And the days are getting shorter. That, and I've been spending most of the last week emptying out two packed storage lockers. 
          When it finally became obvious that the value of the objects within said lockers was far less than the cost of keeping them there for another decade, I contacted two sets of people who make a living emptying storage spaces and driving them someplace else. The first set of people are called MOVERS. The second set are called HAULERS. Their names have not so much to do with what they're moving as much as where they are going.
          Movers tend to go to homes. Haulers tend to go to the dump. Like the closet hoarder I tend to be, I decided to hire movers, so I could spend even more quality time with stuff I hadn't used in ten years by now storing it in my garage and basement. 
          Until I discovered that for two guys and a van it would cost me $120 an hour. So, except for one load -- thank you Danny -- I moved it all myself. Over the long weekend I loaded and unloaded my Explorer, trekking back and forth ten times, dismantling shelves, lifting boxes, toting furniture, and generally testing the warrantee on my two new hips. Not to mention the last vestiges of my back. 
          Quelle surprise! I didn't have to break out the Advil once. Considering that it used to take four capsules just to get me to the edge of the bed and putting on socks or shoes with laces was out of the question, this was a miracle. But the whole time I was doing my Jack LaLanne thing, I kept wondering whether I was tempting fate. I mean, did Noah have similar concerns when the boat was loaded with all those animals and he had to find a way to get the last two rhinos on board? Was he concerned that his trusty vessel would capsize? I know. Bad visual. Worse metaphor. But you get my drift. Especially if you have creaky knees, hips, or shoulders. Or replaced any of them. 
          I also didn't want to find myself writhing on YouTube or America's Funniest Videos flat on my back under a giant box that I had tried lifting into my SUV only to have the thing slip out of my hands and, well, you've seen all before so there's no sense trying to explain. [Can you tell I've been reading a lot of Frank McCourt lately?]
          Meanwhile, I have created two staging areas: the porch and the driveway. And two designated storage areas: the garage and the basement. I've reassembled three sets of shelves to accommodate those things which will remain. I've already donated a bunch of clothing, given my daughter's dollhouse to my neighbor's three-year-old, and filled two huge garbage cans with things I can't believe I kept for so long. I'm still undecided about the artificial Christmas tree that has its own lights and the five fake poinsettia plants. But, I'm willing to entertain ideas for creative ways to put them to good use.