suburban kamikaze

This week in Hint Dropping

Has anyone else noticed how long it has been since the "Date Night" section of this blog has been updated?

Anyone who may also have noticed that The New York Times gave the Goodman's production of Sweet Bird of Youth a pretty good review? Or that Amanda Fucking Palmer is coming to the Metro? Or who maybe just wants to get lucky with a woman who is a fountain of good conversation and puts out ... a lot of conversation?

Anyone whose bosses have been keeping him at work way too late and who repeatedly fail to provide a replacement boyfriend for the nights they keep him out debriefing sources in parking garages?

Hmm? So it's just me?

Never bring an olive to a food fight. Unless it's a really good olive.

People are always asking me, "Suburban, is it true that you once threw a box of strawberry-flavored Cheerios at your son in the grocery store?"

That's not true: nobody has ever actually asked me that.

So I have no reason to confirm or deny any rumors surrounding the alleged incident. Except to say, hypothethically, there would have to have been a great deal of provocation behind such an act and 2. it's not possible to actually injure someone with a box of strawberry-flavored Cheerios.

I would rather live on lint than do the grocery shopping, but there's no getting around the fact that you can't serve lint without a pretty good bottle of wine and a pretty good bottle of wine calls for a decent selection of olives and before you know it, you're out of cheese. It's a slippery slope to the Cheerios aisle.

It's not just that the Midwestern grocery store experience is hellish in itself - crappy selection, a generous interpretation of "fresh" and cashiers who believe every transaction is a conversation starter - it's that the members of my family have managed to destroy any enthusiasm I ever had for the process of feeding them. I can hardly believe I am the same person who once bought cookbooks with titles like 100 Foods Your Kids Will Love.

Now I just try to get to the cash register without killing myself, or starting a food fight on aisle 3.  

Their taste in food is terrible and expensive. They never stop complaining about their meal choices and they have zero appreciation for the effort. Or recipes from the New York Times dining section. In short, they do not deserve to be fed. 

And yet, there I am week after week, trying to get to the end of a horror-novel of a grocery list and get out before anyone can try to start a conversation or force feed me a sample of ham. 

My cart is piled with Teen Cuisine: Pop-Tarts, Cheerios, Goldfish crackers, salsa in the jar and low-quality sandwich bread - what they refer to as "real bread." Only the Greek olives stand between me and complete surrender. 

There is no point in making any more of a stand than that in a world in which it is actually possible to subscribe to Pop-Tarts.

 

Related recipes: Nothing. It's what's for dinner

Top Ten dinner ideas your teen will love. Not.

Midweek dinner prospects keep suburban family on edge

Oh, Bank of America, I feel like I could tell you anything.

Dear Bank of America,

I am in receipt of your 29-point notice outlining all of the many ways in which you intend to share information about my purchases, creditworthiness, financial transactions and other information both within your company and without, with business affiliates, non-affiliates and the marketers of other products and services, unless I call your toll-free number and opt out, in which case you will limit your sharing with non-affiliates somewhat - unless they are other financial companies with whom you wish to conduct joint marketing.

But really, why be coy? Who knows me better than the people legally required to describe the scenarios under which they intend to share my personal information?

I am returning your notice along with a copy of the journal I kept during my senior year in high school, the results of my most recent pap smear, everything is fine, thank you, a couple of rejection notices from The New Yorker - I know, I was aiming high - some art photos I posed for a few years back and the receipt for a speeding ticket I got on Lake Shore Drive.

There's really no reason why you shouldn't have the whole picture.  They were very tastefully done, I am told.

Also, nobody drives 40 miles an hour on Lake Shore Drive.

I'm counting on you, your affiliates, non-affiliates and the other finanacial companies with whom you conduct joint marketing not to judge too much. We all make mistakes. How was I supposed to know the punch at the toga party was spiked with grain alcohol? How were you supposed to know that a little bit of creative thinking in the mortgage market could bring down the whole economy?

Sincerely,

SK

Photo:  Greek history class, Senior Year

Let them eat reduced-calorie cake in our new environmentally friendly, easy-to-carry packaging!

You really can not match the forces of American consumer marketing for inspiration.

As The New York Times reports, producers of that most American of products known as "food" are pulling out all the stops to avoid having to increase prices in the expectation that the price of energy and other raw materials might surge later this year.

And by "all the stops" we mean reducing the actual amount of food in their products in a way that makes it seem like they haven't. Only a socialist would point out that this is really the same thing as raising prices. 

The point is, we should be celebrating the kind of free-market ingenuity that brings us the New! Nabisco "Fresh Stacks" cracker products by Kraft, in which 15 percent fewer crackers is marketed as offering "added freshness."  Or the infinite variety of other ways in which manufacturers have conspired to sell us less food without making us feel bad about it.  I't s not "less" - it's healthier, it's better for the environment and it's easier to carry.  How cool is that?

Some people might call this "deceptive" or "misleading," but those are the people who are ruining this country with their crazy, communist ideas about fleecing consumers. Besides what is stopping you from doing the kind of careful item by item forensic inquiry that would reveal exactly what you are paying for?  Especially now that you are unemployed?   

After all if costs don't rise as much as expected, we have this assurance from Heinz chief executive William R. Johnson: "We can always course-correct."

The nice thing about course-correcting is the way in which it does not actually commit you to do anything specifically.  

Besides if there is anything more American than added air in the potato chip bag or a jar of peanut butter in which some of the peanut butter has been replaced by an indentation at the bottom of the jar, I don't know what it is.

I swear those crazy guys in research and development will soon have us eating nothing but air! It will be billed as "100 percent fewer calories." 

Photo: Groceries, now with 20 percent more fleece!

In which we resolve greater effort toward laying bare some of the more insidious, unspoken, ridiculous assumptions behind our standard pieties and official narratives.

"And by humor, I don't mean the automatic-pilot snideness, or contentless cattiness, or jealous innuendo, or ironic jibberish that sometimes passes for humor in certain parts of the Internet and Internet-influenced culture. I am referring to Fey's complex, spirited, intelligent kind of funniness, which has the effect of laying bare some of the more insidious, unspoken, ridiculous assumptions behind our standard pieties and official narratives."

-- Katie Roiphe, suggesting in Slate that women on the Internet are not funny, which is not at all like what Christopher Hitchens did when he argued in Vanity Fair that women are not funny, which made him seem like kind of an asshole.

Portrait of the agent as a young man

I won't pretend I am the world's greatest multitasker. I have a friend who can reach orgasm and send text messages at the same time.  But she has a really expensive phone.

Among ordinary people, however, I submit to you in all humility, the fact that I manage to write a single coherent sentence during the summer months is worthy of some sort of prize.

Deadlines and teenagers may come and go in the summer months, but they coincide with a frequency that is both freakish and cruel.

Yesterday, between telephone interviews and attempts to settle a vacation itinerary that would have consisted of a departure date and a return date if the 15-year-old's schedule had not blown it into 15 parts, the same 15-year-old attempts to engage me in the following series of conversations:

"I need new shorts. You never let me buy enough clothes when you take me shopping."

"We have to go to Sports Authority today. I am out of tennis balls."

"How much money are you going to give me for vacation?"

"When am I going to get a new phone?"

Also, "Are you ready to go to Sports Authority now?"

And yet I manage to finish an entire interview and two sets of flight reservations. Someday I will write a best-selling advice book. (For now, I leave you with this: The key is setting the bar very, very low.)

Plus, there is always tomorrow. Which, as it happens, is today. I am halfway through negotiating a car rental and Chapter 15 of my unfinished novel, The Unfinished Novel, when the 15-year-old settles himself into my office for what seems like the fifteenth time. Note for future advice book:  A home office should not include any furniture conducive to lounging. 

He stretches out on the couch with his iPod and taps through some sort of racing ap.

"This is bullshit," he says. "I'm winning the entire race and he just pulls in front of me." He continues to talk to his iPod, but cannot break my concentration because I am a professional. Also, I learned to write in a newsroom.  

When he burps, however, I turn and give him a long silent stare of disapproval. My meaning is unmistakable.

"You look like you want to take me somewhere," he says.

"Oh that's good," I say. "I'm going to write that down."

His thoughts turn to self-enrichment as quickly as you can say "15 percent commission."

"If you make any money off that you have to pay me," he says.

 
 Photo: Boy, in search of an angle.  

More ranting from the work at home archives: A Stapler of One's Own

Illinois cities to taxpayers: We'd love to make government records public but then we'd have to let your houses burn down

Look, citizens, it's not that the people in charge of running local government in Illinois are uncommitted to the idea of transparency.

Really, they'd love to be able to show you exactly what they've been doing with all of your tax money - it's just that it would cost too much money.  Money that could be better spent on -- well, you'll just have to trust them there, won't you?

Because right now, government in Illinois operates under a public records law so weak that residents of the Wheaton-Warrenville school district were forced to litigate all the way to the state supreme court to be able to see the contract of the guy hired to run their school system.  Who, coincidentally, turned out to be one of the highest paid school superintendents in the state.  Not that it's any of your business.

In Cicero, town officials refused to disclose how much they were paying the members of various town boards and commissions, some of whom were relatives of the town president. Why do you really need to know?  

In the face of such contempt for the practice of open government, some people in Illinois, including the General Assembly, decided it was time to pull back the curtain just a little bit. A revamped Freedom of Information law was passed and awaits the governor's signature.  

Sure it sounds like a good idea. Until your house is on fire. 

Because if these new provisions become law, cities may be "forced to lay off firefighters and police officers so that they can afford more Freedom of Information Act lawyers..."   

Because you can't have a commitment to open government without employing a team of government lawyers to try to thwart it. 

This warning comes to us from the folks at the Illinois Municipal League, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of keeping citizens in the dark. For their own good. With whose money do they lobby? I can't tell you because their budget, some of which comes from fees paid by member cities, is not public.  Which is not to say it is not publicly funded.  But that is not the point.

The point is,  open records are dangerous, and possibly flammable. 

It's really not such a mystery, Betty

"Mean Betty truly wants to know: Why can't they be more CLEVER and DISCREET about their infidelities? Is that really too much to ask? Whether it's that pathetic anti-prostitution crusader Eliot Spitzer being caught with a hooker, or this latest yokel Governor Sanford with his caliente mistress down Argentina way - one really does have to wonder how they managed to land themselves in office in the first place." - BettyConfidential.com

I hate to be mean, Betty, but the answer to your question is pretty obvious.

They land in office because we pay more attention to Jon & Kate, Angelina & Brad, Britney Spears or just about any bit of B-list celebrity gossip than we do to the people who run our country, our states, our cities or even our schools.

They don't have to be clever or discreet because most of the time they don't get caught. They know we're not paying attention. And let's face it, we're only paying attention now because the guy got caught with his pants down. The stuff that he did with his clothes on does not have the same hold on our 10-second attention span, though I can pretty much guarantee, Betty, that more people got screwed.

There is a price to be paid for our national obsession with celebrity gossip, scandalous sex and 5-minute makeovers.  Because while it might be fun to engage in a little drive-by badmouthing, it surely does not encourage any sort of thoughtful debate of the stuff that matters. Meanwhile, the journalists who actually do the work of trying to hold some of these dumbshits accountable are being told their services are no longer required. You want to know why Betty? Because it's so much easier to just click on some gossipy website and read the recycled version, extra snark please - and hold the attribution.  It's not your fault, Betty. You never claimed to be The New York Times.  And god knows how depressing that can be.

It's just that I worry that the public officials who decide everything from what our fourth-graders will be required to learn to how much it will cost us in taxes to pay for the legal bills they run up  fighting our efforts to see how they are spending our money, won't take us seriously anymore.

Your readers are outraged that Jon & Kate got a lot of free stuff. But what would happen, I wonder, if you told them that in Wheaton, Ill., a school district so hard up for cash that it considered cutting fourth-grade orchestra, workbooks and intramural sports programs, spent $62,000 fighting to keep its $380,000 a year contract with its school superintendent secret? They fought the case for four years, Betty, all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court - before being told that, uh, that's public money you're spending, morons; you can't keep it a secret from the public.

Can you imagine how pissed off your readers would be to learn that?

Still, government goes on in secret all over the place. The Wheaton Warrenville school board struggles to "maintain financial stability" in the face of "significant financial challenges" that may or may not include paying its lawyers to keep things secret.  What else don't we know? Raise your hand if you know how much you are paying your own schools superintendent.  Anyone? Who will bother to find out when the newspapers are gone and we are left with nothing but gossip for our news?

Want to know who's really getting fucked, Betty?  We all are. And we probably deserve it.

Photo: Jon and Kate Somebody doing something. Who Cares?

Get out your notebook, there's more

I am tired of your chickenshit games, Paris Hilton!

I don't want my children to grow up in a world where celebrity baby watch replaces watchdog journalism. They need real newspapers.  

It's everything you want them to understand, right there, on the doorstep day after day: geography, civics, science, culture, right from wrong, honest to god heroes and the power of standing up for what you believe in.  And occasionally, stuff that the people who make the laws, spend your taxes and run your schools don't want you to know.

Turn off the television. Unplug their video games. They need to know what you know.  

We are putting a red flag in the flowerpot today.  We might just leave it there.

R.I.P.  Mark Felt.

How to make a sand castle

In the days before political correctness got its manicured hands around the throat of the newsroom, there was no mercy shown to the rookies.

I was working at a medium-sized southern newspaper with a good ol’ boy culture and a cabal of top editors with thick drawls and a practice of referring to women as "skirts" or worse.

It was a macho, adrenalin-charged kind of place that ran on two parts testosterone to one part caffeine.

I was the rookie.  As green as you would ever find in a newspaper of that size.

So I was relegated to covering all of the stories that no one really cared about: chili cook-offs, sand castle competitions, fundraisers - the sort of light, bright, feel-good stories in which nobody ever gets hurt or threatens to pull their advertising from the paper.

My hard-bitten co-workers did nothing to encourage me.

That was also part of the culture.

When you made a mistake, said something stupid or attracted any kind of attention, the newsroom was a cruel place to be.

When a county lawyer started sending me flowers my colleagues opened the cards before I got to my desk and read them out loud. I was mocked for the way I dressed (too well), for the stories I wrote (too small) and for the fact that I’d taped my press badge into my reporter’s notebook (as if I’d need credentials to get into a chili festival).

Once, I arrived at the office to find that my desk had been pushed to within a few inches of the front door and hung with a sign: "Cub Reporter and Social Climber: Deposit press releases here."

Mostly, I loved it. I learned almost everything I know about reporting in that newsroom: how to stand up to powerful people, how to get someone to talk to you after they’ve hung up on you twice, how to sniff out the real story beneath the self-congratulating bullshit served up in news conferences and press releases.

Also, how to get sand just the right consistency for building. That was considered fluff in those days. What mattered was holding the people who ran the schools and the cities and the courts and the police departments accountable. But first you had to do your time in the fluff.

These days it seems as if it is the newspaper business that is built upon sand. Newsrooms and news pages are shrinking under wave after wave of budget cuts. Serious journalism is pushed aside to make room for features about how to wash your hair.  Or worse. The people that make these decisions like to say they are making them for you.

You want bigger pictures, fewer words, more stories about celebrities, they say. I have never believed this about you. 

But this isn't really a debate anymore. Count the number of reporters covering the state legislature or the school board or the city where you live and you will see what I'm talking about.  They are disappearing. 

I'm not talking about the pack of people who show up with television cameras when something sensational is happening. I'm talking about the people whose job it is - or was - to read all the boring reports, sit through the boring meetings and keep asking questions until all the motives are clear and all the dollar signs have been accounted for. This is the work of newspaper reporters and no amount of googling, blogging or pretty people talking on the television can replace it.

Further reading about what you won't be reading:  

Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein, but the price is right.

Newspaper industry cutting its losses: "Let Them Read People Magazine"

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be press secretaries

Former Bush loyalist Scott McClellan's change of heart is no mystery in Texas Republican circles, where they are unafraid to put the blame squarely where it belongs, as long as you are not talking about blame for missteps in Iraq or the Texas public school system.

It's his mother's fault.

Sure, they all liked him well enough when he was dissembling for the president, but now that he is pimping a tell-all book, they are shaking their heads over Scotty's flawed upbringing at the hands of his mother, the "left-leaning" daughter of a tort law expert and, gasp! a former Democrat, turned Republican, turned Independent.

"I wonder if it's just the basic bias showing that Scott grew up with and may not even know he has," says Bill Crocker, an Austin lawyer and longtime Republican activist, whose own mother presumably maintained a blamelessly consistent party affiliation throughout his formative years.

Look Crocker, you may be a certifiable Republican Mother's Boy, but please, is there no statute of limitations on mommy-blame? Some of us vote Republican, some of us vote Democratic and some of us are too busy cleaning up the milk you spilled to get involved in your petty political squabbles.

Now, go to your room.

A Stapler of One's Own

There is a good reason for not writing on a weblog every day, no matter what the conventional wisdom holds:

As a write-at-home mommy, there are days when I would sit at the keyboard and be compelled to pound out rants like "where the fuck is my stapler?!??"  with the kind of excessive punctuation that immediately signals weak writing.

After a few pithy sentences like that, I would be distracted by the need to find the missing stapler even if it means I have to toss the entire goddamn house. This will assume an importance all out of proportion to genuine necessity. (Paper clip?)

As a work-at-home mommy, I have produced journalism under conditions that Bob Woodward could not begin to imagine.

This does not always produce the finest journalism or the most competent parenting, but I like to think that if there were a Pulitzer category for Newsgathering With Toddlers, or the Best Telephone Interview Conducted While Diapering, I might have garnered at least an honorable mention.

My point is, I have learned to work through the inevitable distractions and interruptions. I learned a few tricks. I learned that I could live with the trade-offs between bad parenting and good journalism. (It is better to let your toddler eat an entire box of M&Ms than to fuck up an interview with the source who is never, ever going to speak to you again after you ask about the disciplinary proceedings.)

There was also bad housekeeping: M&Ms last longer if you spread them around the room.

Then, faster than you could say "Thank God It's Monday" came the school years, and up to five whole hours a day of working in relative peace.

This worked so well for a while that I was inspired to try writing fiction too. (I can do it all!)

And then They Grew Again.

They learned to use computers and office supplies.  They figured out where I keep my box of Ridiculously Overpriced Pens That No One May Touch But Me. They learned how to change the screensaver on my laptop to monkey butts and Hannah Montana montages. They change the settings on things I have no idea how to change back.  Why is my cursor shaped like a leprechaun? Why is the telephone ringing the Happy Birthday song? Their little handprints are everywhere.  But the stapler is nowhere to be found. 

Where the fuck is my stapler???

I need to staple a batch of short stories for a writing critique. I can't very well tape the pages together can I?  Because there is no tape. The entire roll (along with most of an ink cartridge) has been used to create a Hannah Montana/High School Musical photo wall. Plus, for reasons no one will ever be able to explain, the dispenser has been disassembled and the little plastic piece that holds the tape roll is gone.

I have read Virginia Woolf. I know I should just kick them out. Declare the office Off Limits. Period. But then I see them in there printing out maps of the solar system and Facts About Tennessee and covering the desk with their crayons and glue sticks and scraps of construction paper and I fall for their promises.  They will Never, Ever Again open the drawers without permission or take all of the paper out of the printer or touch my pens. They mean it.

Now if I could just find the stapler.