Suzy Says

I’m off to my brother’s and sister’s for Thanksgiving in the country. I’m picking up Mom on the way, and I can’t even remember the last time we were all together for Thanksgiving.

The last time I was at my brother’s and sister’s for Thanksgiving was two years ago, when we found Dad lying in the mud on the dirt road between their houses after he had had a stroke. I rarely, if ever, pass by that spot without thinking of that night, and being up there for Thanksgiving for the first time since that fateful one is going to be hard. It won’t be the same day, obviously, but it will be the same holiday. We will all be thinking about it. but no-one will speak of it, unless Megan and I have some time alone, because Jonathan can’t or won’t talk about Dad.

Maybe it’s the way men cope with these things, but I want to tell him that you cannot skip or shorten the mourning process. You have to go through it and work through your feelings. There’s no easy way. Not talking about Dad or your feelings and memories about him will not make them go away. And it’s not morbid to speak of these things, as my brother believes. Rather, the opposite: it’s morbid and unhealthy not to.

Since my sis and I are on T-Day cooking duty, and I’m not bringing my iBook with me, there will be no Suzy updates until Sunday at the earliest. However, John is staying at home with our cats, so he might be inspired while I’m away.

Wishing you all a very happy Thanksgiving with your friends and loved ones. Have fun and stay safe!

I took a break from the drudgery of work today and slipped out to Stacey’s bookstore, where I picked up the following:

• Stephen King’s From a Buick 8.
  
• Eyewitness Guide to Chicago (so I can learn something about it before I go there in January).
  
• Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Spyhole Secrets.
  
• Lemony Snicket’s Carnivorous Carnival, the latest installment in the terrible (mis)adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, to which I am hopelessly addicted.
  
• So I bought the Unauthorized Biography of Lemony Snicket to tide me over until the Slippery Slope, the next book in the series, is published. Since “Carnival” came out less than a month ago, I fear the waiting time for the next one more than its terrifying contents. Yes, my impatience is legendary.
  

So there I was with my bag of goodies, on my way back to dreary work, when I noticed a demonstration outside the very ugly E*Trade building. I went over to see what it was all about, and learned something more horrifying than anything that ever entered the imaginations of Mssrs. King and Snicket. Worst of all, this was real.

E*Trade is partially financed by the monsters and criminals at Huntingdon Life Sciences, a laboratory which cruelly abuses animals on a daily basis. 500 of them die every single day at Huntingdon’s facilities, located in England and in New Jersey. They have been repeatedly caught violating the Good Laboratory Practice laws, but refuse to stop the needless pain and horrendous suffering, even after being exposed by TV reporters beating beagle puppies and dissecting a live monkey.

So if you invest with E*Trade, you are supporting this. Many brokerage firms, including international giants Charles Schwab and Paragon, refuse to trade in Huntingdon’s stock because they are so appalled by their business practices. I took a handful of fliers and gave them to everyone I work with, since many of them invest with E*Trade. I posted the flyer in our lunch room and mailed one to my vegetarian niece in England. I faxed the CEO at E*Trade:

Please take a few minutes to do the same. For more information, please visit the official Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty site.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

I have nothing better to do while I’m waiting for my roots to complete the enhancing process (my hair color is brought to you by the folks at Wella (an American Classic, just like me), than tell you what I did on Saturday.

It was a piquant mixture of duty and pleasure. Started the day off by going up to my Mom ‘s place in Petaluma, about 35 miles away. We brought the Beaujolais Nouveau for Thanksgiving dinner; the heavy object I’m giving my bro for Christmas (so I don’t have to mail it at vast expense and annoyance); and two pies. We traded all these for what was behind Door Number Two: an antique clock in desperate need of repair. I spent most of last week locating someone in England to repair, appraise and ship the 250+ year old grandfather clock I inherited, so now all I have to do is find someone in San Francisco to do the same for this one, which should be quite easy in comparison. Maybe I am developing a new talent.

I have discovered the key to dealing with my mother: bring John with me. She is much less likely to put me down or insult me or yell at me or complain or similar if he is there. So I brought him and voil&agrave! No yelling. However, we did have to move around most of her furniture so we ended up sweaty and dusty. But she was very grateful and couldn’t have done it herself, so she was Nice Mom, which was great.

After doing all this, we headed home, fed the cats, and then went out to the nearby Metro, a charming Art Deco theater serving the neighborhood since 1924, to see The Ring. We were both annoyed by the ads that preceded the movie – for cars, etc., not just for popcorn or even telling us to hush up and behave; when did this horrifying trend start? – and by the fact that the art of the trailer seems to be lost. They are now like Cliffs Notes for movies – you already know everything that happens in the movie, so why bother to go? The single exception was the trailer for Dreamcatcher, which was what it should be: just enough to get you interested.

But The Ring was worth the wait, and about a thousand times better than I expected. The premise is essentially that if you watch a certain videotape, you will die within a week. Sounds lame, but it was fantastic. Stylish, spooky, suspenseful, unpredictable, and I don’t know what was better: the beautiful photography, the excEt writing (no dead space here), or the story. Even the fact that the lead actress bore an unsettling resemblance to the toxic Jeri Ryan (currently destroying Boston Public) could ruin the movie. Also, this girl could actually act, unlike the talent-free Ryan, who runs the gamut of emotion from A to A (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker) and whose idea of acting is to stare vapidly into the camera. But I digress. In short, it’s a small jewel, a minor masterpiece. Go see it. And I’ll try not to think about how I, too, have seen the fatal tape.

Jed the Wonder Dog’s recent accident seems to have made me more aware of news with canine content. Either that, or the entire world shares my concern, which is the way it should be, of course.

I love it when scientists spend a boatload of time and money to come to a conclusion that anyone with any sense could have told them was the case. The latest example is the one that shows that dogs and human have a special bond and ability to communicate with each other that is greater even than our close relative, the chimpanzee. Anyone who has seen my brother and Jed together, or has had a dog of their own, knows that. Ginger, the dog we had when I was a girl, saved my brother more than once in true Lassie style, including the time when Jonathan fell deep inside a snow bank and Ginger went and got Dad immediately, barking and fussing until Dad rescued Ginger’s charge. No-one trained him to be that way, he just was. There was a real bond between that boy and his dog. And it only took 15,000 years or so to get that way.

The London Times is my start page. All the news from everywhere at a glance, unlike our local paper, in which anything outside California simply doesn’t exist. There is, of course, coverage of the ongoing soap opera provided by the Windsor family, including Princess Anne’s day in court after her dog bit a couple of kids. I think that Anne should get credit for going to court at all, since she could have easily weaseled her way out of it, and being fined like anyone else. I also think it’s great that she is taking her dog to obedience boot camp instead of killing it.

I recently came across this fascinating article in the Times, (inspired by the Anne d&eacuteb?cle), and learned a few things about dogs that I hadn’t known before, including the derivation of the word “feisty” (it’s not what you think). The scientists (and you) should definitely check it out.

Love/hate for Friday, November 22, 2002
Long Movies

Note: we’re planning to skip Love/hate next Friday, in honor of Thanksgiving and overall laziness. But tune in the following week for your regularly scheduled programming. Oh, and if you have some hot topics to suggest, email me at suzy @ suzysays.net and I’ll see if I can make your wish come true. Since it’s close the holidays and all.

End of Note.

You had to see this one coming, after my rant earlier this week about Lord of the Rings. The truth is, despite my advanced age, my attention span never grew up, remaining at approximately three year old levels since I was, well, three years old. I honestly think that this is why I can happily watch six episodes of Sex & the City, equalling approximately three hours of viewing time, whereas I have to be cajoled and bribed into watching a movie that is more than two hours long.

It’s just like how I hoard six weeks’ worth of The New Yorker before every trip involving a plane. My post-valium and vodka ritual is to read the New Yorker with all available attention during take-off, not taking my eyes from the page until we are level enough to get more alcohol. I can read dozens, or possibly hundreds of articles, with greater ease and enjoyment on a plane than a very long novel, even though you’d only need one very long novel. Having said that, though, on my last trip to London (11 fun-filled hours each way), I brought the entire third season of Sex & the City, two 400+ page novels, and 8 New Yorkers, just in case.

If that doesn’t tell you how much I fear boredom, nothing does. It rates as #2 on my fear list, right after Death, which is permanently #1 (and not in a Lynda Barry way). And boredom seems to be the inevitable consequence of movies more than two hours long. All I really require of movies, besides a humane running time, is that they distract me from the horror of life (I really, really don’t need to be more depressed, thanks anyway), preferably be amusing and/or thought-provoking, be well-written, be set somewhere nice to look at and be populated by people who are nice to look at. Life and ordinary fucking people, to quote Harry Dean Stanton in the perfection of Repo Man (a perfect 92 minutes long), are ugly enough. Oh, yeah, and I am always and completely bored by the crazy (you would be, too, if you had my under-medicated mother) and the noble terminally ill, particularly children. And since I already made everyone hate me, I might as well just admit right here that I don’t know what I hated more: the actual movie the English Patient (die, already!) or the way everyone pronounces it, with the emphasis on English, like there were patients of French, Russian, and other nationalities in the movie.

However, since it’s me, there are always exceptions, and they are embarrassing in their girlie-ness. I’m sorry to say that I love the following three very long movies (in alphabetical order; and, as it happens, in declining running time order):

1. Cleopatra, starring the breath-taking Elizabeth Taylor. 246 minutes (It’s like parents telling you their kids’ ages in months, telling you the running time in minutes. They know it would be far too appalling in hours)!

2. Gone with the Wind, starring the breath-taking Vivien Leigh. 233 minutes!

3. Titanic, starring the equally breath-taking Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio. A mere 194 minutes.

Note the similarities:

Gorgeous cast; gorgeous settings; [melo]dramatic; romantic; and the history is just background. All fluff, amusement and all about the pretty. The way it should be.

I gave in to my inner francophile in honor of Beaujolais Nouveau Day, and had all-French shopping experiences on the way home today.

First, I stopped off to get a carton of cigarettes for John, because they were on sale at $32 a carton (excluding tax, of course). I realize that this probably doesn’t add to my wifely cred, because I should be nagging him about quitting instead of buying it for him, but there you are. That’s the kind of girl I am.

Next stop was William Cross Wine Merchant’s on Polk Street, where there were only two kinds of Beaujolais Nouveau to taste this year: Domaine Piron (which I had bought last year), and Georges du Boeuf, which I had rejected last year in favor of Domaine Dupeuble. So I ended up with mostly Piron and one bottle of the du Boeuf, though I think the finish is a little acidic. It is, however, very fruity and lighter than the Piron, so we’ll have a contrast for Thanksgiving dinner. Having BN for Thanksgiving dinner is our family tradition, and a rather pleasant one. Unaccustomed wine drinking in the afternoon, and on an empty stomach, too! I’ll probably end up with a hangover in the line of duty. It’s just the sort of thing that would happen.

Last stop, the gorgeous French lingerie store, which is conveniently located between my house and the wine merchant’s, and which was also having a 50% off sale day, so I was unable to resist adding to my collection of fripperies. Not that I tried very hard. I have to say, no-one makes lingerie like the French, which may be one of the reasons it’s called by a French name. Victoria’s Secret is utter crap in comparison, in style and workmanship and endurance. Though filmy, the real French stuff is beautifully made and lasts for years, and are beautiful with it.

Here are 10 Facts you need to know about Beaujolais Nouveau. Sant&eacute!

John finally persuaded me to watch Lord of the Rings on Saturday. I had read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was about 12, and never read it again, though I am an inveterate re-reader. I re-read all of Jane Austen’s novels around once a year, and I can’t remember a Christmas when I didn’t read The Box of Delights (the best children’s book ever) or have it read to me by my father.

So I should have realized that the books weren’t really for me, given that I never wanted to read them again. I have always found adults who create incredibly detailed alternate universes, down to geography, history, and mythology quite unsettling, as are the afficiandos of those books. It’s as if they are too busy living in the fantasy world to live their real life, which is all too short though obviously less controllable than the alternate universe. In the fantasy universe, they probably are remotely attractive and have actual sex lives and so on, unlike the real world. I’m sorry, but the gorgeous rarely invent fantasy worlds, especially incredibly detailed ones, because they don’t have to. Look at the attendees of any Star Trek convention on the planet, and you’ll see what I mean.

And I know women have been bemoaning this since time immemorial, but John totally lied to me about how long it is. It’s like 3 & 1/2 hours long. Had I known this important fact, I would have remained in blissful ignorance, but by the time we switched to the second disc (always a bad sign), we’d already invested more than 2 hours in it. Movies should be less than two hours, just like songs should rarely venture past the 4 minute mark, or I’ll get bored. And boredom is my greatest fear after Death itself.

The first part of the movie was definitely the most fun for me. I lovedlovedloved Bilbo’s house (and I seem to recall that my 12 year old self liked The Hobbit the best of the books, too) – it is gorgeous – and the fireworks were fantastic. But the second half, with those stupid Elves and all those boring battles, just bored the daylights out of me. I hate battle scenes and sex scenes in movies. I just want to them to be over with so I know who wins and the story can move on. Also the slime monsters looked like something out of the first season of Buffy. And there was no-one worth looking at in the cast, with its breathtakingly effete male stars (that Frodo! He’s the Castro poster child. And those pink cheeks!) and overrated and dull girls (the ubiquitous Liv Tyler and equally u. Cate Blanchett: the ubiquitous twins from each side of the Pond).

I will utter the final heresy before changing my name and going to live in obscurity forever (I am completely resigned to being burned in effigy in the alternate universe of the fantasy geeks), having bitterly offended the planet by disliking this movie so much. I didn’t care at all when Gandalf died.

How’s that for unrepentant?

My brother’s best friend, Jed the Wonder Dog, is OK but had a ball-chasing accident. Chasing the ball is Jed’s main interest in life, other than going everywhere her Food Guy goes. Ball throwing for Jed is much like sex for high school guys: there’s no such thing as bad. As long as you’re getting any, you’re happy. In my family, we refer to a condition known as Jed Arm, which is the result of throwing the ball for Jed for too long (too long for you, that is. It’s never long enough for Jed).

The other day, she was chasing the ball with such intensity that she failed to notice the pointy edge of a park bench until it was too late. She gouged a hole in her chest and was immediately taken to the vet. The vet said that Jed would have to be knocked out to repair the damage, because it required inside stitches as well as outside ones, like when she was spayed. The vet said that while Jed was asleep, she’d clean Jed’s teeth, too, which needed it after 8 years of continuous kibble service.

So yesterday, Jonathan brought Jed back to the vet and held her while she was knocked out and then waited to bring his repaired dog home. Her chest is shaved where the hole was, and it’s bruised pretty badly, but Jed and her Food Guy are resting easy today.

Love/hate for Friday, November 15, 2002
Snow

I think snow is like a beauty treatment for the landscape, covering everything with a layer of sparkling white and cloaking the flaws. And since I love the pretty, I also love snow, especially this time of year.

Getting older does seem to make a girl nostalgic. As the holidays approach, my thoughts turn back to my childhood. We lived in upstate New York, on 5 acres of land not far from Cornell, where my father was then working. The land we lived on included a pine forest, so we cut our own Christmas tree each year. In my memory, there was always snow at Christmas, and after we cut the tree, we’d pull it home across the snow, the sharp scent of pine sap mingling with the crisp snow.

We’d often go to my mother’s parents for Christmas. My grandparents lived in a big Victorian house with a double parlor divided by pocket doors. They would keep the doors closed until Christmas morning, when they would be thrown open to reveal the tree (and presents!) in all its glory. From the front door, which was only used by company, you could look down the street to the town square, where the village Christmas tree was all lit up. It was magic.

So even though I have lived in California for many years, and would never even consider living anywhere else, I miss snow at the holidays. It just doesn’t seem like Christmas without snow. But one of the great things about living in San Francisco is that all you have to do is drive for a couple of hours and voil&agrave! Snow! But you don’t have to deal with it day after day, all winter. Just when you feel like it. Why does anyone live anywhere else?

Still have the headache. I’m going to have to try some of your very helpful suggestions (hee!) and/or stop by one of those scary herb stores in Chinatown for wing of bat or eye of newt. Maybe Shakespeare was onto something.

I had a call yesterday from my friend Paul. I haven’t seen him since we had dinner back in May. His life has been the usual: full of adventure, mostly good (including a new grandchild on the way), and it was great to catch up. He’s wintering in Florida this year, she said grandly, and invited us to come and stay with him. I just might take him up on it, ending my lifetime streak of never going to Florida. But I’m not going to Disney World, or Disney Land, or any other Disney-related place, whether I go to Florida or not.

So, as usual, it was great to catch up with him. And it got me thinking (so look out). I seem to have quite a lot of male friends. Only one is an ex-boyfriend*, and all the others have absolutely no taint of sex at all. There’s Paul. There’s Richard, who has been my friend since high school. There’s Adrian, an all-around great guy. There’s Randy, who used to be my boss (!), and who now lives near Chicago. He will be the first call I make after room service when I go to our conference in Chicago in mid-January (brrr). There’s Gary, who used to be a client, which makes it possibly even weirder that we remained friends after our professional relationship ended than staying friends with your former boss. There’s Raven, who used to be my sister’s boyfriend long ago. There’s Charles, who is also my jeweler. There’s Lance and Sal and Wade, who are admittedly gay, but boys and friends, nonetheless. And that doesn’t include miscellaneous friends of Dad’s, who have become my friends, too, over the years; or the friends I have through John and my brother, but who are also mine; or the husbands/boyfriends of girlfriends who have won me over in their own right (like Candi’s Brian); or the guys whose blogs I love to read and whose minds and wit I admire.

I wonder why I seem to have so many more male friends than female ones. I generally have a higher opinion of women than men, right or wrong, and feel there is a real strength in the bond between women. But if you look at the facts, I have more male friends, though I wouldn’t confide in the male friends in the same way I would the female ones. Maybe a girl just needs both. After all, when I can’t decide between two things, I just take them both. The “all of the above” category on tests was invented just for me, you know.

*Other than him, I wish there was some planet they could be sent to, so you never have to run into them or hear about them ever again. Especially if they’re hugely successful and much happier without you, when they should be in a hell of terrible, searing regret from losing you, even if you are no longer the slightest bit interested in them.

Apart from work and family, the eternal but metaphorical headaches that they are, I have had a real headache since Thursday. This is a very long time to have a headache, and it’s beginning to interfere with what passes for the workings of my mind.

At first, I thought it was just the stormy weather, including unaccustomed thunderstorm. Then I thought it was spending weekend hours, the most precious kind, with my mother. But both of these have passed and I still have the headache. I have tried every remedy known to Suzy from both sides of the Atlantic, and to no avail. I am beginning to wonder if a girl can get a permanent headache. And not only that, why do people say, “It’s all in your head” like that’s better than something attributable to the physical? I mean, if it’s in your head, how can you ignore it? It’s right there, all the time. And as easy to overlook as an elephant in a studio apartment.

So it’s all in my head. But how can I get it out of there?

Will I ever learn?

It’s pouring with rain this morning (the storm door being open and all), so I decided to take the bus to work instead of walking. So I waited half an hour and the bus didn’t show up. I went back home and called a cab, which is what I should have done in the first place, but am soaked – including hair and new boots – and sweaty and enraged, and it’s barely 6 am. I’m really feeling the hate right about now.

Love/hate for Friday, November 8, 2002
TV Details

Though I do tend to focus on the petty things in life (the nice way of putting this is “detail oriented”) and always notice how things look (the truthful way of putting this is “shallow”), for some reason, I never really notice what the TV picture looks like. As long as I can see it, it’s fine with me. Maybe it’s because I grew up watching a tiny black and white TV set, usually quite snowy no matter what the outside weather, because we lived in the country, and TV was as carefully rationed as prescription drugs, so my expectations are low. Or maybe I just don’t care.

John, on the hand, feels the need to adjust the tracking, the brightness, the sharpness, the orangeness, and every other possible-ness, whether he is actually watching the TV show or not. If I am indulging my fondness for WB programming meant for people half my age, he cannot resist fixing the picture, even while critiquing the appearance of the characters and the story line, all while preparing to flee its mundaneness the second the adjustments are complete. There is no reason for him to care about it, but he just can’t leave it alone.

And if it’s a show we are watching together (you will be amazed to hear that despite the fact that we have no fewer than 4 VCR’s and tape something every day of the week, we only watch about an hour of TV a day), you can just picture the fussing over the picture. Yet the fussing always has to take place while something is happening on the show, rather than, say, during the credits.

I guess I’m just a TV slacker. The same thing that makes me just watch whatever picture the cable guy gave us that day makes me idly watch parts of movies which we already have on DVD, something which baffles John no end. He can’t understand why I don’t just get the DVD and watch it from start to finish, as nature intended. I can’t understand why he can’t understand that I am perfectly happy watching some of it now, and – gasp! – not even finishing it. Opposites really do attract.

San Francisco is noted for many things, but dullness isn’t one of them. Except in one particular: San Francisco must be one of the most boring places on earth to be a weatherman (or I suppose I should say, weather person, or possibly meteorologist). The temperature range is rarely more than 40&deg (40 being the coldest and 80 the hottest). The default weather is between 65&deg and 70&deg and sunny, with optional fog, mostly in the summer. The weather is pretty much uneventful, except for the occasional earthquake, though that isn’t really weather.

So it makes sense that the meteorologists get all excited when the winter rains start up (it almost never rains any other time of the year), as they did last night. It’s front page news in what passes for the local paper. But what drives me crazy is how on every single local TV station every single weatherperson says, “The storm door is open”. Not, “It’s really coming down out there” or “Expect storms over the next 48 hours” or anything like that. No, it’s always the damned storm door. I have come to the conclusion that it’s some kind of secret weather porn catchphrase that gives every meteorologist, regardless of gender, some kind of cheap weather thrill just to say it, or even think it. They probably look forward to it all year long. So have it, weather people, and I’ll just avoid the local news until the sun comes back, as I know it will, and enjoy wearing my cute new boots in the rain.

And then again, sometimes it’s not.

All the critics have been drooling over Punch Drunk Love, the latest movie from the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson. I love Boogie Nights, a completely perfect movie of its kind, and expected to like the new one, too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone to see it in the theater, since there are so many annoyances inherent in movie-going (you have to go when they feel like showing the movie; you have to pay; you can’t pause it; there are other people there; you have to more or less sit up the whole time). But it turned out to be the first movie we actually walked out on in some time (the debate continues as to whether we actually left Leaving Las Vegas or just wanted to).

All the things that worked in Boogie Nights didn’t in this effort. The harsh SoCal light just made everything and everyone look horrible – and yes, I realize I’m shallow, but everyone looked absolutely terrible in this movie. If I were Emily Watson, I’d be first in line when the botox clinic opened. The story, such as it was, meandered aimlessly, things and devices that should have been funny weren’t even remotely, and it tried so hard to be hip and arty that I just felt embarrassed for everyone involved. Finally, the scene where Sandler and Watson start having sex made us flee before it quelled every urge we’d ever have for the rest of our lives. John restored himself with a cigarette while I restored myself at Mac.

I am one of the world’s slowest learners, but I have finally learned this: if the critics like it, I’ll probably hate it. And vice versa. And no matter what they say, I should just see it for myself and make up my own mind, even if I have to wait for it to be on HBO.

Sometimes, it’s nice to be proved wrong.

Can you believe I said that? She who is always right?

After work on Friday, I went to MOMA, with the intention of seeing the exhibit of Lewis Carroll’s* photographs. On arriving at the museum, I discovered not only that my membership had lapsed (a problem which has been rectified), but that there is a wonderful artist I had never heard of before and whose works I had never seen, a problem also rectified on the same day.

Before I reveal the artist’s identity, I have a confession to make, which is: I have never been to Germany or Austria, and that those Germanic parts of the world don’t appeal to me in the slightest. A friend kindly pointed out to me recently, and with some truth, that this means that I am seeing these places only through the prism of others’ experiences, which is probably true, but still doesn’t have me reaching for the phone and calling Lufthansa.

Having said all that, I will now say this: Gerhard Richter, the subject of the MOMA exhibit, 40 Years of Painting, has a versatility and range I have never before witnessed in any artist ever. Most artists stay within a certain scale, big or small, and paint similar subjects (portraits; landscapes), and develop a style over the years that is uniquely his/her own. But Richter is equally successful at large and small scale, abstract paintings and paintings that look like artistically blurred photos. It amazed me to think that all of these paintings- rooms of them – were painted by the same man, and painted well.

To give you some idea, here are three examples:

One

Two

Three

And they were all painted in oil, on canvas. Amazing.

*Am I the only one not convinced that he was a raging pervert? That seemed to be the gist of most of the remarks I overheard while looking at the photos.

I ask you: is this the diet of an adult? Even a faux one like me? Here’s what I ate yesterday:

1 cup of perfect black coffee

1 nicely ripe organic Bartlett pear

[serious degeneration about to occur]

1 exquisite old fashioned doughnut from the best place in San Francisco (Bob’s)

“Buttered” popcorn in amounts difficult to quantify

About half a gallon of Sprite, for some reason

1/2 bag of chewy SweeTarts (not a good idea, in case you’re wondering. Stick with the classics in this case)

2 pieces of pizza

1 piece of Entenmann’s pumpkin pie, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet

What was I thinking?

Love/hate for Friday, November 1, 2002
Life Soundtrack

You already know that I’m pretty much impossible to please. I love living in a city, but I don’t want it to be too noisy. The country is way too quiet. When I’m up at my brother’s and sister’s, it’s so quiet that it actually presses on your ears, and besides that, you can’t get a cab. So San Francisco is the perfect city for me. It’s really a small town that looks like a city, only much more cosmopolitan. It’s nowhere near as crazy and loud as New York or Rome. It’s just right, and it’s even been easier to get a cab here since the economy tanked (before that, it was one of my few complaints about this beautiful place).

I like my apartment to be an oasis of luxe, calme, et volupt&eacute, to quote Matisse. But when John’s home, the calme part pretty much goes out the window. He seems to need a soundtrack to his every movement, as if he were accompanying his own silent movie. When he sits down, he sighs. He’s always tripping over the cats, or bumping into things or dropping them, which calls for swearing (often creative and amusing) or other miscellaneous noises which are beyond my limited powers of description. He coughs a fair bit, in an extremely uninhibited way, and has a habit of clearing his throat which I truly believe is unconscious.

But the worst. The worst is the snoring (though to be fair, other people can be much louder than he is). If I could change one thing about my beloved husband of almost 12 years, it would be the snoring. I know it should be that he’d quit smoking, but since he does that outside and cleans up immediately afterwards, it doesn’t really affect me on a day-to-day basis, unlike the snoring, which affects me on pretty much a night-to-night basis. (Yes, I realize that this puts me out of the running for the Wife of the Year contest, but I already failed the talent portion anyway.) I am usually able to get him to turn over, which almost always ceases the snoring hostilities, but it still annoys me. I mean, he’s sleeping so much that it’s loud, which in turn is depriving Me of sleep.

And here’s the most enduring mystery about snoring: one’s ears are generally located quite near one’s nose and mouth, whence the snores issue. I mean, the snore is right there next to the snorer’s ears, yet it rarely, if ever, wakes him up. Can anyone explain that one?

Here’s your Halloween frisson of horror: The venerable Samaritaine in Paris has started charging for access to its roof, which has a panoramic view of Paris. I personally prefer the Samaritaine to dealing with the horrors of waiting in line at the Eiffel Tower and the slight yet terrifying sway of the tower, not to mention the overly close proximity to other tourists. Also, La Samaritaine has what the Eiffel Tower never has, and never will: shopping.

It seems ironic that a store named Samaritan (as in Good) is behaving as its antithesis. Unless you spend 30 Euros or more, and then roof access is included.

And now, a Halloween memory.

In the long-ago days of my childhood, back when England still used shillings and sixpences and there were no Euros, the rule in my family was that you couldn’t go trick or treating until you were 5. I don’t know how my parents arrived at this edict; many, if not most, parental edicts have a very arbitrary quality about them.

Anyway, my brother, who is three years younger than I am, was dying to go trick or treating. Just imagine the hell this boy was in: his two older sisters, besides being bossy and worst of all, girls, got to go out and get free candy while he had to stay home. Unbelievable. I think there’s something like that in Dante’s Purgatory somewhere.

The year my brother was four years old, we all went to a Halloween party at the house of our friends, the Cades (digression: Tom Cade, the host of this party, is the founder of The Peregrine Fund). At that time, they lived in a wonderful Victorian mansion perched on top of a hill. The house had its own graveyard, which was not unusual for a house in the country built so long ago, but you can imagine how fascinating that was to those of us who lived in houses with cemetery-free backyards, and also made it the perfect setting for a Halloween party.

The plan was that after the party, the parents would take the kids into the village to go trick or treating. My brother saw his chance and piled into someone else’s car, along with a bunch of other kids. By the time my parents realized what was going on, it was too late (this feeling became increasingly familiar to them as my brother grew up). I will never forget seeing my brother running down the sidewalk of the first house he visited with his bag of candy, calling out joyfully, “It works! It works!” He just couldn’t get over the fact that one day a year, all you had to do was say the magic words and you’d actually get candy.

At least one a day a year should definitely be magic.

…a few days can make. Since I last checked in with you:

• Senator Wellstone, his wife, and daughter were killed in a plane crash along with some of their loyal staff. Just heartbreaking. In death they were not divided.
  
• 118 hostages died tragically and senselessly in Moscow.
  
• The wonderful actor Richard Harris left us, and left the world wondering who can possibly play Albus Dumbledore in the remaining Harry Potter movies series. Harris was so perfect for that part, it could have been written for him.
  
• I missed the fabulous Candi’s birthday (though I did send her a card and a presentette before I left town last week).
  
• Stupid, stupid daylight savings time started up again. Or ended. Or whatever. It’s all retarded.
  
• The San Francisco Giants lost the World Series to goddamn Anaheim. A place that has Disney in it. A place that is located in Southern California (and everyone knows civilization stops at Santa Barbara). I would rather have lost to a different state, even one of the square ones.
  
• I actually had to wear a coat this morning, because it’s 57&deg and as everyone knows, that equals freezing on the Suzy scale.
  
• I got home late last night, and have failed to unpack or wash my hair or anything, so I’m kind of fran?aise at the moment, with my hair all smelling like cigarette smoke (but at least not Gitanes or Gauloises).
  

But on the bright side:

• It’s sunny.
  
• I’m back home in the most beautiful city in the entire USA in my opinion.
  
• I’m still alive.
  
• No crises occurred while I was away, or at least none that have been drawn to my attention, so that means they didn’t happen as far as I’m concerned.
  
• The boys I work with (I’m the only female analyst in our office) left a bunch of daisies in my office with a pencilled note saying they missed me. Awww. And amazing because they are still riding the bummer about the Giants and it’s so bad that not even Krispy Kremes can cheer them up. They’ll just have to wait for Time, the great healer, to work its magic, even though Time is an unbelievable slacker.

Love/hate for Friday, October 25, 2002
Junk Food

Once again, I’m interrupting your main feature with a newsreelette. Unlike when you’re actually at the movies, though, you can skip to the main feature if you want. Oh, the dizzying freedom!

I’ll be away from home all weekend, back on Monday night. So I won’t be updating until Tuesday at the earliest, and maybe not even then, because all I will have to report will almost certainly be deeply dull. I don’t want to say where I’m going, in case one of you lives there and then I’d have to break my self-imposed rule (the most important kind) of the weekend, which is: see no-one except the Room Service waiter/waitress, and do nothing but try to recuperate from the Baudelaire-orphan-like life I’ve had recently.

And now, the main feature. At least you were spared animated dancing candy and soda and nannyreels telling you to hush up and behave.

Much as I hate to admit it, I think we do eventually return to the way we were raised. No matter how hard you may rebel against it, it seems that breeding tells. In some ways, at least.

When I was a child, we lived in the country in upstate New York. We had five acres to play on, and these five acres included a forest of pine trees and a creek. In the summer, we went to Maine, where we had a cottage on a pond and access to beaches and sailboats. So we played outside all year round and rarely, if ever, watched television. In Maine, we didn’t have a TV or a phone in the cottage, just the radio, and we never felt deprived.

Besides all this healthy playing outside, we also ate pretty healthy. Dad made dinner every night, and he was a great cook. In Maine, lobster, fish, and other seafood was cheaper than beef, so we ate seafood most of the summer. We had whole wheat bread. Edible oil products were unknown in our kitchen. We actually had to eat Brussels sprouts (to which I still refer as “poison balls”) and spinach. We never had soda and rarely had junk food in the house, though there were of course the occasional bags of potato chips and so on, but these were unusual and therefore really treats.

So when I was at my friends’ houses, and they got to eat Kraft dinner and Wonder bread and things like that, I was filled with envy and wished that I, too, could eat such delights. But alas, my parents persisted in their healthy regime, and I secretly vowed to eat nothing but crap when I grew up.

I never really grew up, and I’m still eating healthy. I have taken it a few steps further over the past few years, buying organic wherever possible, and we haven’t eaten cows or pigs in over a decade. Now you couldn’t pay me to eat the junk food I envied as a kid, so I am forced to conclude that my parents triumphed over their willful daughter in the end. In this one area, anyway.

Not that I never eat junk food. John always has a huge stash of it, and I have been known to partake of it (earlier this week, I ate an entire bag of Cracker Jack without his knowledge, and he came home looking forward to it to find that it had vanished. He took it well, but has bought half a dozen bags since then just in case), but I don’t buy it. I wouldn’t even think about it if it weren’t for John’s taste for junk food and how he has to have a wide variety of it on hand at all times, since you never know what you’ll have a craving for.

P.S. Has anyone else noticed that the so-called “prizes” now in Cracker Jack are complete crap and not even worthy of the name? You used to get little compasses that really worked, or yoyos, or secret decoder rings, or toy cars with wheels that moved, and now you just get stupid stickers.