The minimum donation at the Red Cross site is five bucks. Nice.

Holy shit, New Orleans.

I thought you were out of the woods when the hurricane went north.

Stupid levee.

Dang.

Hello, navel, how are you?

As much as I'd like to get back to school, I'm enjoying my period of temporary underemployment (and thus, very dull blog entries). By the time I'm bored with surfing the web, reading travel books, emailing old friends, going to the gym every day, and cooking from scratch, I ought to be working full-ish time again. Or I'll be in Italy. Either is fine. :)

After all, now I've got time to waste on web quizzes like The Nerd, Geek, or Dork Test.

I'm a nerd, of course. I just said I was eager to get back to school, didn't I? I'm not a student, so I suppose that makes it a little less lame...

Nope, no sudden ticking sounds

At yet another pointless training session for yet another new part-time job this week, another tutor, a mom, described her C-section (you can tell this is going nowhere appetizing). Apparently, in her C-section (any C-section?), the woman's uterus is removed. This particular mom had her husband make a video, so after the birth, she could go back and see what her uterus looked like lying on the table next to her.

I am not making this up, though I hope she was.

In another good argument for birth control, I just saw a commercial for Stayfree Advanced Protection, for the "slight bladder leakage" that occurs in new mothers.

Teach this stuff in sex ed, and the kids'll be more likely to keep their pants on, eh?

I've had a pleasant, semi-eventful week, but said events are likely of interest only to me. I will point out that I've been taking public transit more than driving this week, which has been time-consuming but otherwise 100% awesome.

On top of my usual LA road rage, I've lately had to content with SUVs going 45 mph in a futile attempt to save gas (it's pushing $3 a gallon here, which I still think is too low). Trade it in for a normal car and go the limit, motherfucker!

Either way, I am completely sick of car culture and am willing to trade what little remains of my free time and beauty sleep to ride the bus as much as possible. Unlike most of LA, I like to read, so it'll be easy as long as I stay organized. Wish me luck.

Warning: more sociological mumbo-jumbo

I was a little harsh on the neighborhood yesterday. I have, in the past, been all "Jeez, sure it's the 'hood, but it's not the 'HOOD hood." That's because LA's poor neighborhoods don't look like poor neighborhoods on the east coast. I read an article on the Watts Riots recently where the National Guardsman remarked on now nice Watts looked, with its tidy suburban-type houses. None of LA's struggling neighborhoods look like my birthplace of Paterson, NJ, with cracked-out looking guys just wandering the streets and hanging around in menacing-looking groups (I later learned that they were probably confused that a carful of white people passed right by without trying to score drugs.)

I think this surface-level attractiveness (or at least harmlessness) in LA's not-so-nice neighborhoods is based on LA's culture of isolation. (Which is why it's easy to wind up working in the 'hood kinda by accident..."Gee, this neighborhood is supposed to be pretty rough, but it looks okay to me!") There are no large groups of people hanging out on the street in 99.9% of LA, so why should it be any different south of the 10 freeway? You have to be really, really poor in LA to not have a car, so everyone stays in their bubble -- and driving around at 30-50 mph, it's easy to gloss over things. It's when you're walking around that you might trip over a goddamn couch cushion if you're not careful. It's walking around when you notice the sheer quantity of graffiti, all the people with shopping carts picking through the garbage, etc.

I've had inquiries before about my level of safety in the places I've chosen to work. Don't worry. I've never had a hassle in any of the "bad" neighborhoods of America, including walking through supposedly the worst neighborhoods in Boston in corporate-wear, including a skirt (meanwhile, truck drivers in genteel Cambridge have honked and asked me to "Whip 'Em Out.") Being white in a non-white neighborhood is actually a weird kind of insurance: you won't be mistaken for a rival gang member, and you'll likely be assumed to be an undercover cop or, as stated above, a drug customer. On the Eastside, where I spend the school year, the sub-neighborhood has two schools and you're just assumed to be a teacher, which is not a bad thing either. No one even asks me for money, because panhandlers tend hang out in nice neighborhoods with tourists.

That being said, the worst neighborhood in LA is still, of all places, downtown. Skid Row is like 50 blocks. Even there, the homeless aren't too aggressive and the crowds of male day laborers are polite. But you couldn't pay me enough to work there. One phenomenon I've noticed is that everyone in LA needs to feel like their particular poor neighborhood is superior to another -- and perhaps I'm no exception.

One of the many things that has fascinated/horrified me in the 3+ (!!!) years I've been back in this godforsaken country (it must be godforsaken, since everyone spends so much friggin' time asking God to bless it...)

What was I saying?

Right, American advertising is really messed up. I seem to recall that most marketing in Germany involved humor and/or sex. The results were sometimes dumb or nigh-offensive, but at least advertising is kept in its proper perspective: light, fluffy, not a big deal.

Here, a lot of advertising seems designed to sell the most mundane products with grand concepts such as happiness, love, beauty, health, etc. Now that I've said that, look out for it when you watch TV and you'll see it, too.

Anyway, I originally just wanted to note the ad in the Sunday circular for these jaunty sponges which reads, "Cleaning should be fun!"

It should?

Even the URL for the sponges refers to "solutions," as if washing dishes was an issue requiring major innovation.

They're sponges. They clean your kitchen. They are not fun. The end.

The flip side of this ad, by the way, sells chocolate-covered granola bars (with M&Ms) by telling you they're an excellent source of calcium.

I've bitched/joked a lot about LA job requirements in the past: must be beautiful to wait tables, must be fluently bilingual for menial jobs, must have a teaching credential for menial tutoring jobs, must be able to do graphic design and program flash for editing jobs, must have a car, must be young, must have X-ray vision and Spidey Sense, etc. Here's the most LA one yet, from Craigslist:

A private tutor for an INCREDIBLE female 8th grader who is a very good student that attends a public school on the Westside of town...Please respond with resume, salary requirement, birth day (year NOT necessary), contact information and the best time to reach you.

Birth day...but not year? To quote Cheech Marin, "Hey, are you one of those dudes who do horoscopes, man? Hey, I'm a Cancer with a bad moon rising!"

More about my weekend.

I'll let Rick have first dibs on explaining our weekend, but for now, allow me to share another snapshot from the 'hood:

I'm at the liquor store next door to Subway. It has a wide variety of single-serving alcoholic beverages chilling in the fridge cases, for your brown-bag drinking pleasure. I, however, am buying a Gatorade. The woman in line in front of me is buying a big can of malt liquor and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Please, god, tell me she's only planning on drinking one of them.