"Bush Addresses 8.2 Million Unemployed: 'Get a Job'"

Saw this headline in my news aggregator and assumed it was true, until I noticed the Onion logo. It's not exactly outside the realm of possibility...

Flattering but disconcerting moment of the day

Jen Muehlbauer lives (thanks, Jimmy...I think...)

Alternet.org, which is generally very enlightened and yummy, has posted a truly irritating article basically saying that since creative people have to use their crippled left brains to do icky-poo math once a year, those boring math people should have to spend tax time writing or dancing -- you know, doing creative stuff that they must be bad at if they know how to fill out a form.

How nice to perpetuate the stereotypes that you can only be creative if you're flaky, and you can only be smart if you're a boring clod. How extra-nice for a female writer to be the one perpetuating it ("Math is hard!") Girlfriend, take the money you got for this inane article and go down to H&R Block, where you can pay someone to do your taxes for you, and quit yer bitchin'.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on...

Beth was buried yesterday. I did not attend, for a variety of reasons including the main one: there'll be a local service later this week that I'm going to instead. I did wake up at 7am, after four hours of sleep, and noted that the funeral was starting, on the east coast.

Ugh.

One of the ways I've been coping for the past week (and by "coping," I may just mean "shoving this aside until later, when I'll have a right and proper crying/wailing freakout") has been vigorously exploring LA in the carpe-diem vein. (As Michelle points out, though busting out the high school Latin may be a questionable tactic, at least I'm not saying "tempus fugit.") Yesterday, I finally got around to visiting LA's oldest blues bar, in my quest to find a club as good as Wally's (about halfway down the page). The quest is over.

When you get to Babe's and Ricky's Inn), 80-something Mama Laura takes your money. If you're early like we were, a charming waitress comes and chats with you when taking your drink orders. ("First time here?" "I had a Heineken once, it knocked me down...") The bar itself is decked out in an authentic retro fashion, not the calculated retro of a new place trying hard to be hip. Red walls, blue lame curtains on stage, framed black and white prints of musicians, vinyl booths, and a Central Ave street sign memorializing the old Central Avenue Jazz heyday of Los Angeles. (If you're finding this intriguing, take a break and read about the club's history.)

Monday is the weekly open-mic jam, and the musicians (the house jam band filled in when necessary to create a full combo) ranged from serviceable to amazing. You couldn't help but notice that at times there'd be a jam session that included white, black, Asian, and Hispanic musicians. Since the surrounding neighborhood is overwhelmingly African-American, you know what that means: we weren't the only ones who traveled to get to this place. It seemed like a lot of the patrons were regulars, including an old woman in a camisole, skirt, and cowboy hat who stood and yelled, "Are we having a good time?" until she got a loud enough response to satisfy her.

By 9:30, it was packed and loud. On a Monday.

Around 11pm, during the last song led by an excellent rock-blues guitarist, men started emerging from the kitchen with food and setting it on a table. This was the fried chicken buffet that led us to this place on a Monday. We'd imagined it would be earlier, but I can also understand why it's not -- to prevent poor students from coming, eating, and leaving. It did give us the Stomach Growlin', Where's-My-Dinner Blues to wait that long, but that's okay. Everybody got a drumstick of yummy, non-greasy fried chicken, greens, potato salad, and one slice of sausage. Mmm. I almost paid the cover charge again to get seconds.

Right after dinner, as though to reward the people who stayed when the food was gone, another set of musicians took the stage. Then, a loud, old-skool bluesy singing voice sounded from the other side of the club, near the door. It was the type of voice that belongs on scratchy LPs -- or in this bar, but in the 40s. And it was coming from the eccentric old woman in the cowboy hat. She worked the room with a fistful of dollar bills, picking up new ones as she sang and shook her senior-citizen booty for the appreciative crowd. No microphone. I thought, "Who is this?" It's LA. No small chance that this was a retired big name slumming it for the night.

It took some doing, but I always was the queen of the Net search, and I found out who she was. It's Mickey Champion (MP3 available on that page), who was on the blues scene for decades but never became a household name like many of the people she performed with (Billie Holiday, Ike and Tina Turner...) In fact, her first CD came out just a few years ago, recorded in my new favorite blues bar.

Truly, this sprawling third-world suburb I live in can be a great city, if you choose wisely.

Well, I'm doing better. I've stopped wandering around my apartment in a daze (it's a one-bedroom, that got old fast). I'm no longer severely nauseous. I went to the beach and had a good chat (justifying the existence of cell phones) with the old campmate I met at Beth's last party. I still haven't talked to many of my friends, aside from the bury-the-lead catharsis below, which I'm now a little embarrassed about, but have decided to let stand.

I'm getting my ever-inappropriate sense of humor back. Last night, after a few beers I'm happy I didn't cry into, I was doing impressions from the "Kenny Dies" episode of South Park -- "Kenny was my friend. Why can't God take someone else's friend?" -- then telling people, no, they didn't have to feel bad because they laughed.

It's still surreal-ing me out, and I'm not convinced it's sunk in. I had a moment last night when I realized that soon, I'll catch up in age to my older friend who always did everything first. I'll be 30, and she'll be 30, too. And someday I'll be 50, and she'll still be 30.

I had another moment this morning when I went out onto the patio to water my plants. Beth gave me those plants when she moved late last year. Fucking houseplants outlived her. I was reminded of when Rick realized he'd outlived the World Trade Center.

Next person who dies better be freakin' elderly, you hear me?

When I was 12 and at nerd camp ("this one time...at nerd camp...") I met this crazy girl named Beth. It's all a blur now. Her favorite color was purple. She lived fifteen minutes from my house, in another town. She had a dalmation named Sherlock that her family eventually had to give away. She had a big, cool scar that you could see when we were in bathing suits to use the pool. (It was from open-heart surgery, and she couldn't always walk as fast as I could, but she seemed fine.) One of our projects that summer was to build a scale house for worms -- the lamp would be a toothpaste cap mounted on a marble. She liked fish, and gave herself the extra middle name of "Fishtank." We wrote a script about the camp snack-plums going evil and attacking everyone, named it "Attack of the Killer Plumatoes," and then performed it.

Really, not a lot of people could have gotten me up in front of a group back then. Or even now. But Beth didn't give a crap, up there in some jerry-rigged costume I don't remember (I think a cape was involved?) singing, "Attaaaaaaack...of the killler Plumatooooooes...." to beat the band.

That was Beth's last year of camp, but we kept in touch. Ooh, imagine scared me at a party with high school girls a whole two years older than I was. We listened to the Beatles and, in a rare display of girliness, did our nails, though we'd do things like every nail a different color, just to keep our mothers on their toes. We went to movies, got ice cream, all the normal stuff. I had my friends and she had hers, and the twain rarely met, but somehow it all worked out. I'd call her with stories of the latest screwed up thing to happen at my high school, and she's say "Wow!" and compare it to Orwell. We had matching pins that read, "Why be normal?" She introduced me to Douglas Adams (not literally. The books.)

She went off to MIT when I was a junior in high school. I'd occasionally get a postcard with a picture of MIT or of Boston, and some tale of college life ("We were playing croquet in the park across the street, and then the cops came!") By then, we listened to less Beatles and more Nine Inch Nails. There was still no particular reason to be normal, and better yet, it sounded like at college, that was okay.

Somehow, I thought I'd see her more when I went to college in Connecticut. Yes and no. She came to visit me a couple of times, once for each summer I spent at Wesleyan. One of those times, we went to Mass. I'd never been to church before, but she took it well when I declared the only difference between Judaism and Catholicism to be "stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down" versus "stand up, sit down, kneel." I took her to all my local dives: greasy spoon O'Rourkes, Klekolo World Coffee, the Athenian Diner -- at that last one, Beth, Rick and I gathered our classic diner story of:

Beth: Excuse me, there's a hair in my water glass.
Waitress: [picks up glass, looks, puts it back down] No there isn't. [Walks away.]

Later, when she griped about one of my classmates hitting on her, I apologized and said at least Rick hadn't hit on her. "No," she said, "He was too busy hitting on you." She was right. Who knew?

One time senior year, I came back from spring break and there was a box sitting on the porch of my house. Beth had sent me the book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" by Richard Feynman with a note explaining that he was a famous physicist and one of her personal heroes, and that when I read the book, I'd understand. I did.

Beth and I had less and less in common superficially, but I could always call her with the most screwed-up possible Wesleyan drama and she'd at least pretend I wasn't off my tree. (Except the one time she uttered the classic lines, "I can relate. Actually, I can't relate at all. That's really weird, Jen.")

She repaid the college dive favor years later when Rick and I went to visit her in Somerville, back when Somerville was still cheap and divey. Rick fell asleep in her living room and we went to Dolly's. She came to visit Boston a few years later, when she was in grad school in Florida, and gave me hell for not being able to stay up all night to go to diners anymore.

"But I'm not a student anymore," I groaned.

"So what!"

But at least I was able to show her some new Boston spots, like Boston Beer Works, serving a Watermelon Ale with a real slice of watermelon in it that she talked about for years as the only beer she liked. She wasn't much for drinking because of her heart condition, and never so much a tried a joint in college because she wanted to keep her science clearance clean, but I did manage to get her drunk once...we flipped through a book of misheard song lyrics, cracking up and warbling, "She's got a chicken to ride! And she don't care!"

I got a lot of phone calls about her thesis in those days. And also about her a-hole ex-boyfriend, followed by another, different, less a-hole-ish but still unsatisfactory boyfriend. I assured her that all she needed to do was get out of Florida. I'd been to visit her in Gainesville by then (what a dump), and understood completely. She teased me for years about how excited I was to eat at a place called "Steak & Shake," and apologized for almost as long for being a bad host, but I had fun in Gainesville nonetheless. I think it was Florida that taught Beth that she wasn't really a Republican -- I'd never known her to vote anything but Independent and Green once she saw what the modern Republican party really stood for. Besides, how many Republicans really join campus groups like Free Tibet and Amnesty International?

After becoming Dr. Beth, she went off to California to do what she'd wanted to do when I met her back at camp: work for NASA. I was in Germany around that time. Our paths crossed on our first visit to America, because she happened to be in New Jersey. Then our paths crossed again on our second visit to America, when we were visiting Rick's parents at his cousin's house near LA. Beth drove out from Pasadena to Corona even though she was still nervous about driving on freeways. Rick's mother was not long for this world at that point, but Beth took it in stride. In some way, I was glad one of my close friends got to see how much Rick's mom -- and by extension, Rick and everyone else -- was suffering at that point. It was, and is, somewhat indescribable. She stayed for dinner and then braved the dark freeway home.

Then I was in LA. You know, astronomers travel a lot -- the good ones, anyway. She was always at a meeting or a conference and I work a lot of weekends, and she also had a new, terrific boyfriend who appeared to be The One. (I told her all she needed to do was get out of Florida...) So I got settled and she got settled and we didn't hang out much for a while. I did go to her place a few times. Once, she'd just returned from some science thing in Berlin and had a souvenier calendar; she asked how to pronounce things like "Gedachtniskirche" and actually seemed interested in the answer, trying out all the consonants a few times herself. I went to her 30th birthday party last summer and consulted with her on how to best put purple streaks in her hair. She had a Halloween party that I showed up to without a costume, because I'm a fuddy duddy like that. She was dressed like a cat and went around actively meowing and purring.

I also went to her housewarming party a few weeks ago and re-met another old friend from camp I hadn't seen since 1988 or so. Beth not only remembered my birthday -- which I almost discourage friends from doing, because I never do much for it -- and asked if she should save a date for me since her calendar was filling up. I said no, since I wasn't going to do anything special. She called me that night and some of our friends from UCLA happened to be over, because our friend Craig who was running the LA marathon that weekend asked if he could have his carbo-loading night at our place that night instead of his studio apartment. I hope Beth believed me that I wasn't having a birthday party without her. I really wasn't.

Anyway, we had plans to hang out this weekend. We were going to go have lunch in Pasadena, near where she used to live, and then see an exhibit at the Pacific Asia museum that I'd invited her to -- she dug Asia, and had taken some Japanese in high school.

You know by now this isn't going anywhere good, right?

Beth sent me email to solidify our plans at 1:19pm. At 8:30pm, her boyfriend called to tell me she was dead.

Hug your partner. Count your blessings. And tell your old friends that whether you hang out every other day or once a decade, they're still family.

Heck, tell your new friends, too.

I finished tutoring three of my reading students last week -- the ones from this session who I didn't have to kick out of the program for poor attendance. I'm off from that job this week (and who knows how many more weeks) while I wait for more students. This process is always tied up while the school system putzes around and files No Child Left Behind forms in triplicate, and my company putzes around and fails to answer any of my email.

I put off calling my former students' mom (they're siblings) until today. I put if off partially because I was a little insecure about their post-assessment test results. It's not that anyone's scrores went down or anything, but I wanted to work miracles, dammit. Here's what happened on the two tests: one 7th grader went from 4th and 6th grade level to 5th and 7th, the 8th grader went from 5th (both tests) to 5th (grr) and 7th, and the other 7th grader went from 6th (both tests) to 7th and (wait for it...) 10th.

I was proud of their improvement. But, hardass that I am, I'll admit I was also a little disappointed -- I don't believe these test scores show how well the three were actually doing towards the end. Two of them, in particular, had some test anxiety going on; the same two need glasses and weren't able to get them before our sessions ended. Not ideal testing conditions.

As a new tutor, I also wasn't sure how much of a miracle I was supposed to perform. What's acceptable improvement, to the school board? One grade level up? Two? I mean, I am getting paid for this, even though it's free to the kids and their families...

I'm feeling better now that I've called their mother. While excited about dramatic improvements like 5th->7th and 6th->10th, she seemed much less interested in the scores than with the fact that all three of her school-aged kids are doing better in school, using bigger words around the house, reading the newspaper, and going to the library even when they're not meeting me there. I don't think I've ever been thanked so often in a single phone call.

For my next trick, I'll turn water into Belgian beer...

Best anti-Bush slogan EVER

"Bush hijacked 9/11 and flew it into Iraq."

Every once in a while, I like to jump on a bandwagon...careful, I'll start posting Quizilla results next...

Yesterday's Friday Five asks better questions than usual:

If you...

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
More importantly, what type of beer would I serve? It would have to be a brewpub, of course. Anyway, I imagine I'd want to serve up my favorite pub grub, including a few that most Americans haven't had inflicted on them with beer, such as my Hamburg favorite of mussels in wine sauce. Then again, I'm not sure I'd want to run a brewpub in America, the drinking culture here is too weird.

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Used books. (This seems like a good time to mention that, after recently bitching about the lack of used bookstores in LA, I stumbled onto one. I think I was the only person to come in all day, the proprietor got so excited. He was also listening to the Pixies, which wins the store additional points.)

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Conveniently, I've already written some books. My dream book would be neither a computer guide nor a shoddy, unedited novel but travel essays. This would require more travel, which would be hard to do while running my bookstores and brewpub :)

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?
Conveniently, I already teach...gosh, I'm feeling all life-experienced after these last two questions. Not sure about the acutal structure, but any school I ran would have to be public, and heavily invested in getting the kids who've fallen behind up to speed. Keeping the advanced kids from getting bored would be good, too. Small, carefully chosen classes, and teachers who give a shit, in other words.

A friend in LA, a former Kaplan tutor, once mentioned that maybe the career he does after science will be teaching SAT prep in the 'hood. I kind of like that idea, too.

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
I'd secretly like to learn to play blues guitar. Besides, then I could use my self-assigned blues name, Broke Mama Jen.

Urban planning geekery ahead...
Los Angeles is supposed to be number 18 on a list of America's 125 best walking cities. Right -- freeways, lack of sidewalks, lousy air quality, insane drivers...tell me again how LA possibly beat Portland, OR in this ranking? Next they'll tell me LA has clean air, good microbreweries, and snow. (Uh, not that I miss the snow...)

Digging further, I notice how some of the criteria may have helped the land of freeways get up there on the list. Specifically: population density, number of exercise sessions per month, body mass index, annual rainfall, annual snowfall, and number of health and fitness clubs. The weather's nice and no one's fat -- we must be walking! Almost as relevant as the criterion "No. of APMA Podiatrists." I know I don't go out for a walk unless there's an APMA podiatrist in the neighborhood, just in case.

"Bush chose Anthony Raimondo, CEO of a manufacturing company in Nebraska, to be the jobs czar, which would have worked out better if Raimondo hadn't just outsourced those 165 jobs to China."

Meanwhile...

"Merely keeping one's head above water, rather than getting ahead, has become the top priority for Americans between the ages of 18 and 34."

My future's so bright, I gotta wear a headlamp.

"Abby someone..."*
You know about the UCLA cadaver-selling problem, right? Ew. Anyway, one of Rick's classmates works in a neurology lab, and she's been informed that they're going to be using sheep brains from now on. Sheep, people...close enough for government work, right?

At least some segments of UCLA have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

But it's such a *productive* waste of time...

I've lost half the day to messing around with news aggregators. Basically, aggregators put almost everything you could possibly want to read online in one place, and lets you know when a page has updated. It's so excellent, if for no other reason than I'll now remember to read things I always forget about, like Dave Barry's column and online comics, while I'm checking news and weblogs. And I won't keep clicking over to blogs that haven't updated. (Speaking of blogs that don't update, this site is now syndicated, if anyone gives a damn: http://www.englishmajor.com/atom.xml).

Check it out for yourself. Andrea recommends Bloglines, and so far, so do I. It's online crack. Have fun, and see you in a few days when you come up for air.

No news is good news?
* The US 24/7 Postal Center in my neighborhood is open 9-6 Monday-Friday, 10-3 Saturday, and closed on Sunday. Much like the Store 24 in Somerville, MA that's open for 18 hours a day.
* Speaking of Boston, I've figured out two things I miss that I didn't expect to: Dunkin Donuts and used bookstores. I'm sure the used bookstores are around here somewhere, I just may have to drive 15 miles to find one. Damn this sprawl.
* Vinergy was on sale at Big Lots for $2 a four-pack, so I decided to try it. It was as bad as I'd predicted back in 2002. Maybe its presence at Big Lots and the state of its website means it's out of business?
* I worked at this event on Friday, but was not in the VIP room, so I didn't have a chance to pee in Arnold's coffee. I saw Wayne Gretzky, though. (How did I know? Nametags.) Apparently he has a restaurant now?

Am I on crack?
I'm thinking of walking the LA Marathon next year.

Worse yet, I'm thinking of attempting to jog part of it, like every third mile. I hate running, by the way.

What put this in my head:
1) I went and watched the LA Marathon yesterday.
2) I walked 20 miles once, but didn't exactly train and didn't exactly make good time (that wasn't the point). But I know I like and am capable of distance walking.
3) This would give me a reason to walk regularly in LA, which I hate doing because of the traffic and the air quality -- but my fat ass and general health would benefit.
4) The LA Marathon allows walkers. Many marathons don't.

Hmm.

Warning: Philosophical Bullshit-O-Meter set to 9

A friend of mine once commented that "getting there is all the fun," and the fact that it's not a unique thought doens't make it any less true.

I'm reading a book called "Tuva or Bust!" about eccentric genius physicist Richard Fenyman's "last journey." He and his partner in crime, author Ralph Leighton, decide one night that they absolutely must see the obscure Central Asian/Russian outpost of Tuva, because the place used to issue cool postage stamps and the capital city has no vowels in it. In the introduction, Leighton writes, "As with life, I think this story will be enjoyed most if the reader does not decide beforehand what it is about."

185 pages and most of the book later, they're still not in Tuva, though their attempts to wangle favors from the Soviets to get there have been entertaining. I don't know if they're going to get to Tuva and it's amusingly-spelled capital Kyzyl, and it matters less and less. I guess that was the point: a journey can be a journey, not a destination. Rick and I go off on similar Missions from God about various locations, though ours generally only last a night. Last night, we broke out the world atlas and spent some happy time deciding we need to go to Botswana. Then we looked online for pictures of Botswana, which led us to pictures of Chile, South Africa, Alaska...good times were had, and that mediates the depressing thought that we may not ever get to any of these places.

This all works well with my philosophy that, to a certain extent, success in life can be measured by how you answer the question, "Did I have a good day today?" You just have to find enough joy in your day to balance whatever shit you had to do (and there's always something) that made you miserable. Are you able to have a good day today? If so, you're doing fine. If not, find a way to have a good day before you go to bed.

Pardon me for channeling Robert Fulghum there. No analogies about kindergarten are forthcoming, I promise.

From my Realbeer.com email newsletter: "Utah House members unanimously passed legislation that lowers the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) level for a second drunken driving stop to 0.05% for those with children in the car."

Here's my Indefensible Proposition a la Esquire magazine. (No, I am not going to defend drunk driving.) Why are children's lives seemingly worth more than those of adults? Is it because they're younger and have more life ahead of them? In this case, is it because a child can't choose *not* to get in the car with a drunk driver? That makes sense, but this law doesn't: who's to say a drunk driver without a little'un in the car won't hit and kill someone else's kid? And I'm still not sure that's worse than killing someone's mother, brother, friend, or adult son or daughter.

Maybe I'm surly because hundreds of people kill their partners every year, but it takes the death of a fetus to make a wife-killing case into big news.

Am I going to hell now?

I swear to something-or-other I'm not Christian-bashing, but...
The window into Middle America continues on my increasingly humorous Let's Clean mailing list. Today: "Happy Wednesday! Are you planning on going to church tonight? Well, lets get your house ready!"

I'm honestly confused, on several levels. Is it common to go to church on Wednesday? Or is today a holiday of some sort? Why would you have to "get your house ready" to go somewhere else and worship?

I'm used to a certain (and not small) segment of America assuming everyone is Christian, so I'm not even adddressing that here. But if anyone has answers to my other questions, feel free to enlighten me. Pun intended.

My primary ballot today said "NON-PARTISAN" in big letters. I don't consider myself a Democrat anymore, really.

I voted for Nader in 2000. I did this in Massachusetts, where it doesn't matter, but I still don't blame him or his supporters in any state for Bush's nauseating win.

I voted Green in my last Massachusetts goober-natorial election. In that same election, I did a write-in protest vote against John Kerry.

Attentive readers will know I'm not a big Kerry fan. I did not vote for him today.

Am I going to vote for him in November now that he's got the nomination sewed up?

Hell yeah.



John Kerry: So much better than Bush, it's not even funny.

This is not my beautiful house...
In a sad little attempt to keep my apartment a little cleaner, I signed up for a mailing list that offered to email me a cleaning reminder every day. The first one was useful: today, clean your desk. Yeah, that's cool. Frequent small reminders like that should help keep things under control.

The next day: "Choose one of your vehicles and clean it."

Choose one? Clearly I'm not the target audience here.

It's becoming even clearer that my lifestyle isn't really the same as most of the subscribers. "Straighten dresser(s)." (I don't have a dresser). "Bathroom: Pick up dirty clothes." (Who leaves their dirty clothes in the bathroom more than occasionally, by accident?) "Clean high chair." (Right. I guess kids leave their dirty clothes in the bathroom.) "Wash, dry, fold, and put away at least 2 loads [of laundry] per day!" (If I did that, I'd wash all my clothes within the week. Twice.)

These people also consider taking out the garbage to be a daily chore. Daily? How much freakin' garbage does the average American family generate daily, anyway? Don't answer that.