It’s so hot we opened Jack’s windows tonight before he went to sleep. “Can you close them a little?” he asked.
“Why? It’s really hot.”
“Those guys next door are going to have sex again. I had to listen to them last night. It sounds like they’re in pain.”
“That’s not pain.”
“Yeah, well, one of them has a really high voice.”
“Ew. If it gets too loud you can sleep in the living room.”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t last very long."
Waiting for Chinese delivery on a night when all of San Francisco lies sprawled on its collective kitchen floor fanning itself and croaking, “Cannot cook, cannot cook. Too hot. Cannot cook,” I drink my beer and feel grateful for this lovely, unusually hot summer night. And also that I do not have to cook.
Earlier today I sat in a sweatbox at Jackson’s school witnessing the Power Point research paper presentations of 19 eighth-grade English students. The highlight for me was the one whose premise held that the Italian Mafia may have been involved in JFK’s assassination and that therefore we need to “get a hold of our country,” and limit immigration. The other highlight was the statement that, unlike earlier times when immigration to this country was as easy as “hopping on a boat,” the government now makes the process unnecessarily cumbersome, except for “refugees, who have it easy.” This to me did not seem like a good example of the Critical Thinking about which the school congratulates itself at every opportunity.
Of course, I was extremely proud of Jackson, because his presentation was in every way perfect, ie: not patently moronic, and not mumbled into his sleeve like the frantic garbled excuses of a drunk Congressman just caught with a transvestite hooker. This good result did not come about by accident, however. This result required propping my eyes open with the DVD cases of Battlestar Galactica that we did NOT get to watch at 10:45 last night while he practiced enunciating and I harangued him about indefinite nouns.
So tonight, despite a tres importante exam tomorrow we said Frak ‘em all, and with great guilty pleasure, watched Episode 2, Season 2 of BG. Starbuck is so totally butch.
John says Hillary is like the Black Knight in Monty Python. “It’s just a flesh wound,” she insists after losing North Carolina.
She’s going to appear at the convention with no arms or legs shouting, “I’ll bite your legs off!”
You have to look at the Monty Python clip to know just how apt this is, and funny. Funnily pathetic.
(I stole this thought but I’m hoping for mercy from the shopkeeper. Maybe he’ll just take me in the back and… um, give me a lecture.)
Talking points:
1. Tell friends' parents or any other responsible adults that neither your mother nor her boyfriend had any idea that this movie glorified drug use, defiled the sacred place of sex in a loving relationship, promoted homophobia, denigrated women, and was not nearly as good as the first Harold and Kumar movie.
2. If you use drugs you will end up like Neil Patrick Harris. Or George Bush. You will not end up like Harold and Kumar, happily skipping through the streets of Amsterdam or having whimsical fun in a costume shop with your implausibly pretty girlfriends. Instead, if you take drugs, you will trip and knock out your teeth on the Dutch cobblestones because you are so high. Not only that but you will not be able to properly count out your Euros to pay for the whimsically large breast chest plate your implausibly pretty girlfriend thinks is really really funny. Anyway she doesn’t actually think you’re funny because you’re squeezing the fake breasts. She’s just really really high.
3. Plus you can’t get a job in Amsterdam. How do expect to pay for all that whimsy?
4. Don't keep asking for the AMC Snack-Time Value-Pak. What kind of parent lets her child drink a 36-ounce Coke?
To the Editor:
I'm not sure I like this new index thing. I mean, just read the damn paper.
Jackson Okuhn
San Francisco, CA April 29, 2008
I think it is so cool that I am so totally far ahead of everyone in the very first marathon I ever ran. By my calculations I am going to totally win this thing. Yeah sure, I heard they canceled the race because the course isn’t exactly the usual 26 miles, and the organizers were going to let runners start whenever they wanted. And because no one else showed up. Whatever. I am so winning and I can’t wait to collect my medal. I am going to give it to Bill because without his encouragement, without his running alongside me with Gatorade and Powerbars, I would not be where I am now, winning the marathon that’s going to send me, Hillary Clinton, to the Big Race in November.
I quit my job. After over a year of standing on the corner hoping to get hit by a bus, or better yet, mugged by one of the neighborhood crackheads (more sympathy and a better story to tell) just so I wouldn’t have to trudge up to my office and spend 8 or more hours doing a job I found increasingly depressing and at which I was dismally bad, I finally quit. Everyone is relieved.
I am relieved because I no longer have to convince a funder that the test scores of disadvantaged youths will be improved by seeing a performance art piece featuring a parrot singing the Star Spangled Banner. Which is not to say that disadvantaged youth, or anyone else will not benefit from the parrot/Star Spangled Banner show. It may offer valuable insights into patriotism and art and learned behaviors. However, children still need to be taught in a classroom with heat, by a teacher with actual knowledge of math concepts. I am so relieved to be done with trying to bullshit everyone into thinking that a trained-animal theater group can accomplish everything this pathetic government cannot or will not even attempt to accomplish.
Clients are relieved because they no longer have a fiction writer looking at their budgets and saying to herself, “Budgets, schmudgets. Budgets are like boring passages describing a grape arbor, or a chapter devoted to a character’s Freudian dream. Let's get to the point: if we had any money we wouldn't be asking for any, so please give us some. Now what's an asset again?"
Funders are relieved because they no longer have to answer emails asking what is the maximum font size again. Nor will I have terrible dreams about Tom Ridge conducting some children’s theater company’s NEA site visit, or Ben Bernancke auditing their project budget:
My co-workers are relieved because I am not sitting next to them muttering swear words and threatening to put my fist through the Flintstone era computer that crashes every time I type the letter t.
Instead I have decided to work part time in PR and use 2008 to finish my book. And maybe write a blog post now and again. Aren't you just so relieved?
City Car Share drivers. They only drive 4 times a year, to go to Costco. Most have forgotten how to drive entirely. Plus their uber-green sensibilities prevent them from acknowledging that the gas pedal is there for a reason.
U-Haul drivers. By definition they do not drive a truck for a living; if they did they wouldn't have to rent this filthy rattling piece of junk. Just because someone thinks they are capable of backing a 30-foot truck into the compact parking spot next to the Ferrari you bought on your 50th birthday, and just because they are moving from Lincoln Nebraska to escape a terrible marriage to a guy not nearly as sensitive as you, plus they have a really cute Golden Lab sitting in the passenger seat, does not mean you should trust them the way you trust the guys driving liquid gas over the Sierras in the snow.
Anyone with a "My other car is a bicycle" sticker. He will either: 1) drive like a bicyclist (ie: flipping other drivers off, veering onto the sidewalk to avoid traffic, mowing down pedestrians in the crosswalk because when he wants to cross the street on a red light, smoking a big fat one while giggling at his imaginary handlebar streamers) 2) drive like a bicycle lover (ie: refusing to pass a bicyclist on the left, instead holding up 7 miles of traffic so he cannot be court-martialed at the next Bicycle Coalition meeting for failing to Share the Road).
Men driving mini-vans. They are so humiliated and emasculated they
will do anything to prove they still have a weenie and can still stick
it to you. This includes making screeching left hand turns from the
right lane, pulling up behind you and refusing to move so you can't
parallel park, passing you on the right and then slowing to 55 because
you're driving a real car. Watch out for Toyota Sienas and Honda
Odysseys but avoid the Dodge Caravan like the plague.
Valencia Street in San Francisco. The city has been “repairing” this street for 5 years. The repairs entail: 1) flaying open block-long swathes of road so that 4-inch high water department pipes stick up out of the ground to decimate your tires 2) many weeks later laying down steel plates that complete the decimation of your tires 3) removing the steel plate to reveal the totally unchanged lunar landscape of the road 4) repeat Steps 1 2 and 3 until the year 2100.
Hummers. Talk about weenie problem.
It has been suggested in countless blogs and editorial pages across the country that the time has come for women to stop Standing By Their (Philandering) Man when he finds himself in front of a bank of cameras yammering about “healing his family,” after being caught porking interns/hookers/strange men in airports/former aides.
Leah Garchik, in her March 13th San Francisco Chronicle column, went farther, with this advice to Silda Spitzer: “On with your Wonder Bra and stilettos; this is your chance on national TV, which reaches more people than MySpace. Better guys - including hunky pool boys - may be watching.”
I agree. Put on that Herve Leger dress, and stand by your man. Then quietly ask hubby for a moment to address the public. Adjust microphone. With glance at hubby, tell the American people what this has done to you as a wife: “For obvious reasons, I’m personally not that upset.” Point to squirming, hairline-challenged guy with the face of an eel, or cauliflower-nosed, ex-president with escalating water-retention problems, or that insurance salesman over there who keeps shouting ‘I’m not gay.’
With embracing gesture toward press and American public, ask for their understanding: “See what I mean? Now if anyone – and I know Big Guy here is open-minded about these matters – is interested in giving this man a blowjob, sign-up sheets are posted outside the men’s room.” Give hubby friendly goose before leaving stage.
Jackson is in the middle of high school application hell. We claw our way out from beneath piles of application forms, parent essays, student essays, teacher recommendation forms, and test results, to join the convoys of parents and zitty 8th graders in Volvo station wagons on our way to Open Houses/interviews/shadow visits, and I’m thinking, my God, by all rights he should be going to Mission High School, which is right down the block.
I feel guilty, in that useless upper-middle class way. I see kids streaming off the J Church train into Mission High every morning, and I know there are those who are as driven and brilliant and imaginative as Jack, but they don’t stand a chance because there are 42 kids in every class and no one at Mission has a red phone to the Harvard Admissions Office like they do at the fancy private high schools to which Jack is applying.
And then I reflect on my education, which was the result of liberal, egalitarian do-goodism, and which was absolutely and totally useless. A scholarship to the only private lower school in the city was declined, as it might make me think I was better than everyone else. Instead I slogged through elementary school, delivering semi-pornographic notes from my kindergarten teacher to the hot but (in retrospect) short sixth grade teacher. (I don’t know what they were thinking, since the reason I became the messenger was because I already knew how to read.)
Starting in the second semester of junior high, I attended the “alternative” school, as opposed to the regular school where you get the shit beat out of you every day by black girls who hate your weird-looking yellow face, and ignored by white girls who hate your weird-looking yellow face. This alternative school taught me the following important things:
1) How to die, per Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ book, “On Death and Dying.” I’m not sure if learning how to die is a skill a seventh-grader needs to know, but I’m here to tell you I’m as ready for Acceptance as anyone on earth.
2) How to weld. As a modern dancer I found arc welding to be an incredible asset.
3) How it’s okay to have a Black Smoking Room and a White Smoking Room, because black people and white people shouldn’t be forced to get along, especially when they’re trying to smoke.
4) How to ride a unicycle. Enough said.
5) How to play only the second half of the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with an orchestra, who it turned out could play none of Beethoven’s first Piano Concerto.
6) How NOT to dress for a 3-day cross-country ski trip. Salvation Army wool navy pants with 16 buttons are no good at all in freezing rain.
7) How to assemble a “Graduation Package” that was meant to demonstrate mastery of academic and life skills. This is how I became a fiction writer.
What I didn’t learn was where Turkey is, and why they called a perfectly good country Turkey; whether adding two negative numbers makes a positive number; which guys were Allies and which ones were Axis; or what Elizabethan drama had to do with Elizabeth.
Jackson on the other hand, speaks French and Mandarin, although he pronounces Latin words with a French accent. He knows all about the Crusades, which I always thought was an R&B band. And he will never have to Google the French Revolution to see who started it.
