Waging A Living

Ben and I watched this episode of P.O.V. the other night called Waging A Living which was a pretty excruciating documentary tracking the lives of several people trying to get by on just slightly more than minimum wage. I strongly recommend checking the listings for a rerun, or trying to rent it, and then maybe sending a copy to our president who doesn’t seem to think we need to raise the minimum wage. The thing that really struck me was that these people all work so hard, and that they actually like their jobs – they want to work – but the system is set up so that the so-called cost of living pay increases – sometimes a QUARTER A YEAR – TWENTY-FIVE CENTS, people, don’t even come remotely close to the actual cost of living increases. And for those receiving any kind of government aid – food stamps, section 8 housing – same thing – they maybe get a raise at work, then the government takes away some of their benefits – which seems like it makes sense until you realize that what they take away is not at all equivalent to what they’ve gained in pay. I lost it when this one sweet guy, a recovering addict and alcoholic and former homeless person, handed single dollars to some homeless guys on the street, even though he lived in an SRO and was scraping up his pennies to go visit his kids he hadn’t seen in nine years.

And you know, I’ve never been rolling in the dough, not for more than five minutes at a time, anyway, I’ve struggled quite a bit, especially in New York, I can certainly relate to low wages, never being able to catch up, but the truth is, I am so fucking lucky, and I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t just a little luck we all need because a hell of a lot of hard work isn’t adding up to much for a lot of folks.

Morning Glory

I am still here, dear twelve readers, I have just been massively busy with work work. Which is unfortunate as there have been any number of things I've wanted to blog about but had no time.
So here is the shortest of them. Among the flowers I grew from seed this year was a morning glory, which promptly climbed a little trellis thingie by our back door and then some, and just the other day got it's first bloom. It has been very exciting to watch this vine grow practically in front of my eyes, so the bloom was the frosting on the cake.
And I learned why they're called "morning" glories.

A Whole New Weird World

I just got an airport card for my laptop. As we speak I am in a coffeehouse. This means many things, but one of the things it means is that I will be able to look at movies and such on the internet without waiting six hours for them to download. I feel like I’m in the future, and it’s weird. And great.

I Guess I Should Weigh In On The Tom Cruise Thing Now

Only because this turn of events is so very surprising. It seems to have been true so far that Hollywood is all about money, and even if Tom’s movies are maybe doing a little worse than before, I’d like to have just the difference in my pocket, and he’s still a huge star and Paramount is openly stating that they’re letting him go because of his public weirdness. Is it the end of an era? Just recently, you might recall, Lindsay Lohan was also called out by her employers for her bad behavior... and on top of all this, now they have to pay taxes on their goody bags! All I’m saying is, I dunno what’s gonna happen if movie stars start to get treated, you know, like everyone else. But I’m pretty sure it involves things imploding.

Little Movie

Someone, I can’t completely remember (was it you, Rebecca?) recommended I rent Little Manhattan but it was a while ago and I forgot who or why. Last night Ben and I watched it and he started out grumbling something about why are we watching a kids movie. No less than a minute into the movie, Ben and I are cracking up pretty hard. I’m not sure this is a kids movie or a grownup movie, but it is a feel good movie, and it’s a lovely movie about a boy’s first love in my old hood of the Upper West Side of NY. Okay, well, not exactly my old hood – not the grungy version where I grew up, but the shinier version you’ll see when you visit now. In any case, I loved two things about this movie – the story aspect of it was very true-to-life I thought – the boy’s not as well-off as the girl he likes, who lives in an incredible apartment on the park. He lives with his separated parents in a crowded two-bedroom – which I’ve heard, with real estate the way it is in NY now, not uncommon at all. At one point in the movie, when we’re still waiting for him to kiss the girl, Ben cried out, “Oh, I SO know what that’s like!!! It would take me weeks just to work up to holding a girl’s hand!” But what made it especially great was that it was a NY movie very clearly, um, not shot in Toronto. Shot in NY, quite beautifully, and from what I could tell, accurately – what I mean is, I have a huge beef when I see movies that’ll have let’s say someone running around a corner on Broadway and 73rd, and then the camera cuts to him coming around the corner on what’s obviously Fifth Avenue and 17th or something. Creative license, whatever, it makes me nutty. Anyway, I barely remember even hearing of this movie when it came out, which is too bad. Check it out if you’re in the mood for a sweet surprise.

Whole New Levels of Smooth

Ben and I just gobbled up season 2 of Project Runway, or P.R., as we’ve come to name it around here, and I have do say, I don’t know what the big fuss about Santino’s attitude was – yeah, he kind of had one, but he was so funny I really didn’t care, and it never seemed to me like he was some sort of evil character. His songs (Lighten Up, It’s Just Faaa-shuun!) and his impressions of Tim at the Red Lobster with Andrae are, well, classic television, I feel. I loved season 1 too, but this season I just want to be new best friends with Santino, Daniel Vosovic, Nick Verreos, whose devilish smile and giggle just kill me, and my new group of best friends wouldn’t be complete without Tim Gunn. Tim Gunn, who at first has this sort of cool demeanor, a very New Englandy proper way of talking, is actually a total sweetie with a great sense of humor.

I don’t know how it would be done, but I think someone should think up an equivalent show like this for artists. Talented artists come on and have to do artistic challenges, but something that sort of makes sense like it does on P.R.

Anyway, Sunday night since we had no more DVDs and our best tv option was some teen awards, we decided to watch some videos Ben downloaded called Yacht Rock. I’m not sure any explanation I could offer would do it any justice, and might actually detract from the element of the inevitable what-the-hell-is-this surprise. I will offer the advance warning that it’s not for everyone – but I think this sort of homemade entertainment, as evidenced by the popularity of YouTube, is the wave of the future, and much more fun than anything tidy that’s on actual tv these days. Except P.R.

How Do People Function Without Lists?

I have always kept a list. I do not know how to get by without a list. Yet there is always a point at which it becomes necessary to admit that certain things on the list will not get done. Nevertheless, if I do not have a list, I do not know what to do. Example: Dad gave us some Japanese prints to try to sell for him and I haven’t put it on my list, so I keep forgetting to call around. I haven’t completely forgotten that this is something I want to do, because the prints are on the desk in the hall. But were they out of sight, I’d forget it altogether. I can’t even give you any other examples of things I might be forgetting because they are out of sight. In any case, I think the reason I really like lists, besides my forgetfulness, is that there is a decided feeling of accomplishment when I cross something off the list. Yesterday I went downtown to do some things on my list, and I got them all done easily, but when I got home I was unable to find the list they’d been on, and was extremely disappointed looking at the only remaining list with plenty of uncrossed-out things on it. Here’s something that’s been on the list for quite a while: renew passport. I should probably cross it off, and do what I always do which is to leave it until we have plans to leave the country. I’m just going to hope the need to leave the country won’t be urgent.

Note: Writers Do Not Necessarily Look Like Their Book Covers

I don’t know about you, but I have a habit of picturing people I haven’t met, whether I know them by phone or just by email.

Even with the clue of their speaking voice, I am almost always wrong. For example, before I met my agent in person, I imagined, from her chipper speaking voice, that she was a tall, preppy blonde. In fact, she is a petite, wholesomely sexy brunette and not at all preppy.

Now that I am on myspace and conversing online with authors whose voices I haven’t heard, I find myself imagining these people as well, but in a whole new way. I think of them as their book covers. I realize I may be alone in this, and also, I myself would probably prefer not to be imagined as the cover of my current book. I was never and am not now a softly-focused happy young girl. There’s no logical explanation for this mental phenomenon, I’m just saying it’s what I do. I get an email that says, Hey Betsy, blah blah blah, I picture the writer wherever they live, a book cover walking around their house, composing email, doing readings, teaching classes, speaking Chinese. I do it a little bit with their photos as well, which is perhaps slightly more accurate, but for example, I imagine Etgar Keret is perpetually carrying his baby over his shoulder. So you can imagine my surprise when last night I received my copy of Roy Kesey’s Nothing in the World, which features a lovely painting of a pear on the cover, and turned the book over to discover a small photo in the bottom left corner, which I take it is some sort of representation of the actual Roy Kesey, but which I find to be rather disconcerting. To me, Roy Kesey is now and will always be a lovely green pear.

Susan Powter is In My Dreams

I’m almost sure few of you will remember Susan Powter’s infomercials of a dozen or more years ago, but I found them hard to forget, in spite of the fact that I was never quite sure what she was pitching. For the rest of you, picture this: You can’t sleep. You get up to turn on the TV. You have to get up to turn on the TV because it’s so old there’s no remote. Your choices, at this hour, are limited. You land on an extremely fit woman with a spiky white blond haircut, pacing back and forth across a stage saying “I know three things! You gotta eat, you gotta move, and you gotta breathe!” It may be an exercise video, but it seems more like some weird exercise/self-help hybrid. The voice is an important part of it – her diction is extremely crisp, and her voice is husky, inasmuch as it’s possible to affect a husky voice when you probably don’t actually have one. You have the sense that many hours were spent developing the “look” and the “sound,” and choosing just exactly the right midriff-exposing top, and frankly, if I had her body I might expose my midriff on late night TV as well. Okay, no I wouldn’t. But anyway, so this woman repeats this mantra many times and you begin to consider that possibly a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes would be a better choice, but you cannot look away, and you can’t even use the lack of remote as an excuse. Susan is your new best friend. You find her riveting. You have no desire to be her, you are not even going to be hypnotized into buying whatever she’s selling (a video if you recall correctly), but there’s something mesmerizing about her... you wonder if she’d maybe be your exotic new best friend.

Then she went away.

The other day she came back on one of the morning shows. She’s got the same eat/breathe/ move shtick, more or less, she’s updated her look a bit, added some pinkish blond dreadlocks and a bunch of tattoos, but the midriff is still on view, except now she’s almost fifty. She’s got a few years on you, but her midriff would whup your midriff’s ass in a fight real fast. That night you dream that she’s your personal trainer. You are grateful. She would for sure frighten you into shape at the very least. You wake up and Susan is gone, but not really.

I remember now what it was about those infomercials that struck me all those years ago. I was just beginning to get my shit into a together-type styling, with the support of many friends and a good therapist, and I remember thinking, god, this is probably what people do who don’t have what I have. And while a part of me wants to say, hey, whatever works, another part of me was grateful that I got my help from actual people in the world, and that I didn’t have to work through my issues via infomercial.

One Ocean View Is Sort of A Hugely Misleading Bummer

I suppose I should be thankful that there’s pretty much no chance that anyone of sound mind is watching it. But for the one or two of you who even peeked at it, let me say this: if you happen to be watching, as I was, for the sole reason that this show takes place on (my beloved) Fire Island, I can assure you, you can stop right now. There is virtually no footage on this show that will give you any sense of what this unique place is like, and what there is, is a bunch of self-absorbed, genuinely unlikable (okay, the guys more than the girls) singles in a group house, which is only one small aspect of life on Fire Island, which has a variety of communities, families more than anything else, although it’s known for its gay communities, The Pines and Cherry Grove. This show takes place pretty close to where Nina’s family’s house is, and occasionally shows familiar places for about three seconds, and the rest of it is annoying single people arguing about who sent who a text message and why. From what I could tell (until I became severely distraught) that text message was seriously the focus of last night’s episode. To reiterate – if you ever want to go to F.I., you should go in spite of this show. It’s a lovely place populated with much nicer people than this.