Suzy Says

Back in civilization (for now). No dogs, no Mom. Just cats and the city (new HBO series?). Mom is amusing herself by baffling the doctors with her will to live, so unless you hear otherwise, it is, as Talking Heads put it, same as it ever was.

Pretty much the first thing I did, after going through a week’s worth of mail, doing laundry, and other assorted domestic tasks that had accumulated during my absence, was go to the gym. Of course, it magically banished my stress, and my trainer got a good laugh out of my concussion Christmas.

While I was away, San Francisco got itself the first female fire chief in its history. Though I’m not a fan of the new mayor (and even less of the old one) and voted hopefully for his opponent, the great Matt Gonzalez, I think this is a great choice. Now all we need is a woman President. Hillary, are you listening?

We could use some good news in the fire department, since the Governator’s planning to cut the funding for fire departments all over California. Yes, in the wake of the worst fire in California’s history. Don’t tell me there’s no other way to balance the budget.

Fun fire trivia: my brother, who is a volunteer firefighter, told me that San Francisco is the only city in America to use wooden ladders. Everyone else uses metal ones, so San Francisco’s have to be specially made. Couture ladders! He says it’s because of all the overhead tram and streetcar wires. Not a good combo with metal. Oh, his town voted to tax themselves on a per house, per year basis to help fund their fire department.

So my trainer told me that she made the mistake of asking her boyfriend – they recently moved in together – how many women he had slept with. She was horrified by the total, which included 13 girls before he graduated from high school. I don’t think I know anybody who got that much action in high school, and I found that the most remarkable part of the revelation, though clearly she didn’t.

I said that it was a long time ago, before he knew her, and that all the people he had met and things he had done made him the person he is today, the person she loves, which made her feel a little better. But inside I was thinking, “Thirteen?!”

It made me realize that there is no good answer to that question. If the number is low, the guy is a loser, and if it’s too high, he’s a dog and possibly a walking lab experiment.

It also made me realize yet another fundamental difference between men and women. We always want to know about their romantic and sexual pasts, and not just for our health. We have a Pandora style curiosity that we just can’t help, sometimes with similar consequences, though on a lesser scale, witness my trainer. She would have been much better off not knowing, but had to ask. I have done the same thing with comparable results, but I’m sorry to say would probably ask that question again, even though you’d think I’d know better by now.

If you do ask, rest assured that the guy will not ask you the same question. As much as we want to know, they don’t want to know. They don’t want to think about you with any other guy, even if it was years ago and way before you met them. In the back of their minds, I think they all want really experienced virgins. And if they did ask you, you couldn’t tell them anyway. I personally have no idea what the number is, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep with 13 guys in high school. An informal survey of my friends reveals that men do know what the number is, and women don’t. Some of the guys said that they had actually made a list at one time or another, which I immediately found icky, though I’m not sure exactly why.

I guess the lesson here (if there is one) is: don’t ask, don’t tell. If you can help it.

I got the classic wolf whistle today. So retro and delightful!

Ex-boyfriends. I think there should be a planet they get sent to so you never have to see them again. Though if you do have to run into them, it should be exactly the way it happened to my good friend M last weekend.

Many years ago, when we were young and foolish, M was madly in love with a guy who looked quite a lot like Bono. Many girls found D irresistible in spite of (or possibly because of, in the case of those chics who love the bad boys) his treating them like crap and generally being an arrogant, cheating asshole from hell.

Now M is not, and never has been, a girl to take crap from anyone, ever, male or female, so her taking of D’s crap, especially for an extended period of time, was both mystifying and horrifying to her many friends. We all begged her to see reason, but to no avail. Eventually, though, he went back to his ex-girlfriend and that broke the spell. I’m sorry to say it took M years to get over this guy, but we’ve all done the same thing at one time or another. I personally wasted a year of my life on a psycho alcoholic freak who stalked me after we broke up (He went back to his ex-girlfriend, too, come to think of it. And in both cases, the exes were plain, dull girls. Maybe some guys just can’t take the smart beauties.).

Anyway, when M ran into her ex, she was wearing a pink satin minidress and signing copies of her book. So she was looking fabulous and being successful and fêted. What could be better? His career isn’t going very well, he’s aging horribly and no longer looks like Bono at all, and grudgingly has a baby. Of the baby, he quickly informed M that the mother was not his wife, and added that only 30% of children really know who their fathers are (where did he come up with that little gem of information?). Lovely. He could barely hold up his end of the conversation, and M asked me if he had always been that stupid. I said, “Honey, we were all telling you that for years!” Then she asked me if he had always been so short. I think she’s over him.

My sister’s little house in the pygmy woods (the soil is too acidic for the redwoods to reach their usual majestic heights, so it’s known as pygmy forest, though pygmy is relative) is far too pygmy itself to accommodate the entire clan. It?s overpopulated as it is, with Megan and her husband; Mom’s hospital bed in the living room, and my other sister Beth sleeping on the couch.

So I’ve been sleeping in a tent in Megan’s garden, like Claudia Salinger in Party of Five, only outside. Sleeping in the tent has made me understand more about silence and darkness. It’s not just the absence of noise and light, but the presence of the silence and the darkness. The silence is so intense you can feel it – it almost presses against the city dweller’s ears, as strong a contrast to the usual city noises as a sudden power outage.

But after a while, you realize that the silence itself is made of many components. The wind in the trees, which almost sounds like the ocean. Distant crickets. Grass rustling. An animal walking through the woods: a cat? A raccoon? A skunk? Maybe even a deer? The mylar ribbons on the flower beds (supposed to deter marauding birds) softly rattling as they turn in the wind. You know how they say, you could hear a pin drop? You can hear a pine needle fall, and you do.

The darkness is as shocking to a city girl’s eyes as the silence is to her ears. There’s no ambient light from a nearby city or town, and no streetlights. So if I’m going to be out at night, I need a flashlight to light the way immediately ahead of me. I am returned to my childhood, when it seemed that any sort of monster or imaginary creature could be hiding in the woods, ready to leap out at me. The shadows in the flashlight’s beam, even my own, grow and move alarmingly and in a very monster-like manner.

But if I look up and away from what’s right in front of me, I see something beautiful: countless silvery stars against the blackness of the sky. Light in darkness. Hope.

The following are things I wish I never had to hear again. I realize that if the wish were actually fulfilled, it would be in a horrible Monkey’s Paw/Twilight Zone manner, so that the protagonists involved would be dead or I would never have met them or something. However, it doesn’t stop me from daydreaming of the absence of the following, in the same way a girl daydreams of winning the lottery (knowing it will never happen, but what if it did?!):

1. Snoring: Really, is there anything more annoying than being yanked out of the depths of hard-won sleep by snoring? Especially if you’re having a really good dream for a change; say, one featuring Johnny Depp or living in Italy or unaccountable and defiantly un-worked for wealth. To add insult to injury, the cause of your sudden sleeplessness is sleeping! And probably having a completely excEt dream. The final garnish on this cocktail of inconvenience is the utter inability to persuade the snorer to turn over, either by physical or verbal means. Note to self: Must work harder on upper body strength.
   
2. The Troll Downstairs: Has earned this unloving soubriquet by means of unrelenting obnoxiousness and habit of leaping out of his front door whenever he hears (see Superpowers below) someone coming or going; hoping, undoubtedly, to somehow glean the remnants of an actual life from theirs.

   The Troll noises that I never, ever, want to hear again:

   – Snoring: (And it’s not just Me. The guy who looked after our cats while we were in Canada remarked on it with the amazement usually reserved for phenomena of nature, such as waterfalls or the Grand Canyon).

   – His Radio and TV: He plays the classical music radio station every weekend, commercials and all, at a sound level usually experienced at heavy metal concerts instead of one’s Pacific Heights living room. He has done this for years, which begs the question: why doesn’t he just buy some CD’s and be done with it? CD’s rarely, if ever, have commercials for cars, laxatives, or anything else, for that matter, though what with the lack of a life and all, he may be unaware of this fact. The radio is replaced by TV after dinner, and I could tell you everything he watches, unfortunately.

   The garnish on this cocktail of horror: The Troll has a form of deafness previously unknown to medical science. While he can apparently only hear his radio and TV if they are played at a sound level approximating a jet taking off, he has preternaturally sensitive powers of hearing us. He complains bitterly at every condo meeting about us walking around (shoeless, too), the cats walking around (equally shoeless, and with sound-muffling paw fuzz, too), and once actually complained about the fan in our bedroom by saying, “I thought my refrigerator had turned on.” Bonus: He claims not to hear loud parties in the neighborhood that are shaking the windows and causing small objects to fall off shelves in manner of earthquake until the police are called. Sometimes he flees his cave until the cops have done their duty.

   – Bodily functions: The worst is the unnatural sigh of pleasure while peeing. Hearing both the sigh and the peeing is so beyond disgusting that I won’t even attempt to describe it, fearing the inevitable loss of both my sanity and recent meal. I’m sure just the fact is more than enough for you and me both. I will just say that it’s undoubtedly the most enjoyment he ever gets.

   This is followed closely by the loud and phlegmy coughing that is a feature of every day life in the Troll household, and just another of the hideous side effects of his inveterate smoking of deeply stinky cigars.

   But it’s not just the unloved and unlovable who are the targets of my ire. Ain’t no-one exempt:
   

3. The Cats: I really, really hate the way they demand to be fed. At the top of their voices. Non-stop. Milling around in a manner calculated to get in my way and possibly cause bodily injury if I fall over one or more of them. And even when I am clearly in the feeding process – opening the containers, scooping out the food – they are still milling around and shouting at the top of their voices. Garnish: Cleo keeps giving me shit while I am actually putting the food in her bowl. And she won’t get her head out of the way so I can get the food into the bowl per her incessant demands, so some goes on the floor. Every day. Every single goddamn day.

   Bonus: We have Mom’s neurotic and unrewarding cat staying with us indefinitely. She has been vacationing at our little resort by the Bay for more than 6 weeks now, yet the hissing and fighting have yet to subside. This morning, the kitchen was flooded by an impromptu chase through the kitchen, knocking over the water bowl and accompanied by hissing and yelling. Topper: Cats tried to claim they hadn’t been fed, when I knew for a fact that they had been fed a couple of hours earlier. Not that they shut up or anything.

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?

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?

You know your mailman reads your postcards, don’t you? Yet I was surprised to actually catch one in the act yesterday on my way home. This federal employee was not in my own neighborhood, but a neighboring neighborhood, and was leaning casually against the postcard owner’s door, reading it while having a relaxing cigarette. Somehow, it seemed just a little beyond the casual glance while putting the postcard in the destination mailbox, which would be acceptable even to Miss Manners, I think.

It’s like how people seem to feel it’s perfectly acceptable to look at whatever is on your computer screen when they come over to talk to you, either in your office or in your home. Now, if I’m doing anything even remotely personal, such as email, or writing this blog – things I would never do on my employer’s time, just like a mailman would never take a smoke break and read other people’s mail on his employer’s time – I minimize that window and try to look productive (it helps to always have actual work going at the same time so the switch is fast & easy, the way I like nearly everything). Though my observation is that most people don’t, and that they don’t seem to mind other people checking out what’s on their computer screen.

So the question is: where and what are the personal boundaries?

I recently took one of those tests that are supposed to explain the complicated many-splendored thing that is one’s personality. The test decided that I am, or should be, a millionaire.

I heartily concur with this diagnosis, though it has no basis in reality. We consistently fail to win the lottery and live in one of the most expensive states in the Union, a place where you can make $100,000 a year and still be barely scraping by, with the result that we are not in fact millionaires, even if our neighbors are.

I have mentioned before that I got in trouble at my very first Career Day ay school for writing down “idle rich” as my career of choice, the powers that be immediately assuming that this was the worst kind of mockery, when in fact, it was the simple truth. Isn’t it touching to think that my 12 year old self not only considered that goal a possibility, but also didn’t realize that such notions should not be brought to the attention of those in authority? I wonder if that’s where I really started disliking school.

Years later, I still have to stand by that original goal. I have no particular talents, or at least none that are particularly well remunerated or useful. The ones I do have are chiefly and surprisingly domestic for a post-modern girl. It used to bother me, since all of my friends had goals and dreams, most of which they have achieved, but not anymore.

If I had to come up with actual jobs I could do, I could only come up with two. One in the realm of possibility:

Personal shopper. One of my few talents is finding the perfect present and card for anyone, for any occasion. Imagine how cool it would be to be paid to go shopping all day. Making money by spending someone else’s!

And the other in the realm of impossibility:

King’s mistress. Not, I hasten to add, the Queen, who is required to produce a string of heirs and attend boring ceremonial functions. Nope. I’d rather be the amusing and charming power behind the throne. Along the lines of Madame de Maintenon, mistress of Louis XIV (the Sun King, who built Versailles), or Madame de Pompadour, ditto but for Louis XV, both of whom had a salon of writers, poets, and artists and were patrons of the arts, style setters, and had lots of impressive jewelry (which was theirs, and not the Nation’s, unlike the Queen’s. Isn’t the Queen job looking less desirable by the second?). Again, spending someone else’s money, but this time you get to keep the stuff. Of course, if you’re unlucky in your choice of King or political climate, you could lose your head (like Madame du Barry), or be replaced by the next cute thing, though that is a problem not restricted to royalty.

Maybe the best job is no job. Happpy Labor Day!

Love/hate for Friday, August 30, 2002
Shaving

Shaving – I’m all for it. When I shave my legs (and I’m sorry to say that when a girl has been married as long as I have, it’s no longer the daily ritual that it was when I was single, the idea being, I suppose, that one’s husband is more forgiving of imperfections than potential suitors may potentially be), they feel like dolphins, and I love that. I’m also a big believer in pit shaving, for both aesthetic and olfactory reasons. Crunchy granola girls and Europeans be damned. Fuzzy arm pits would ruin the look of the most exquisite strapless gown or lacy bra. And anyway, I generally prefer artifice to nature.

Perhaps familiarity also breeds contempt for men, too, as far as grooming goes, because I’ll tell you, I’m lucky if John shaves twice a week. Even though he mostly feels that the entire world should be arranged to suit my convenience. Even though he knows I love it when he has just shaved and his face is all smooth, instead of doing a convincing cactus imitation which in turn wreaks havoc with my delicate porcelain complexion.

So shaving your face must be wore than shaving your legs and pits, since all men seem to hate it. But as usual, we women have more to do and bitch about it less. The ones who have the most work are definitely transvestites. They have all the boy shaving, and all the girl shaving, plus make-up, wigs, and other et ceteras to deal with. It must take them ages to get ready, especially since they are really guys. In my experience, girls always have to wait on the guys to get ready. But that’s another story.

Love/hate for Friday, August 23, 2002
Clothing variety

This may be one of the classic male/female situations that lead to clich&eacutes: women feel that one can never have too many clothes, and men feel the opposite. Women can stand in front of a closet stuffed with clothes and say with all seriousness, “I have nothing to wear!”, a remark greeted by her husband/boyfriend with utter disbelief. I mean, look at all those clothes in there!, he thinks (though if he is wise, he keeps this observation to himself). But what he doesn’t understand is that once you have eliminated:

– things that are too big (but which you might have altered, so you’re keeping them)

– things that are too small (but which you might lose enough weight to fit into, so you’re keeping them)

– things that need repairs which you haven’t gotten around to doing yet, but you will, so you’re keeping them

– things that are too heavy or too light for the weather du jour

– things that are too formal or not formal enough for the occasion du jour

– things that no longer make you feel good when you wear them (i.e., have lost their fun factor)

there really is nothing left in the closet to wear.

The same thing applies to shoes. At a working lunch, one of my colleagues said that when she and her husband were in Italy on vacation, she had bought 5 or 6 pairs of shoes. Her husband gazed at the new shoes with bemusement and said, “But honey, you already have a pair of black shoes.” All the women in the group laughed at the utter absurdity of his remark. All the men looked at each other in bemusement. Men think one pair of black shoes, a pair of sneakers, and possibly a pair of brown shoes is all you need. They don’t realize that women need shoes with heels of varying heights, some suede, some leather, pumps, mules, boots…the possibilities are endless, and if you don’t have the right shoes, it ruins your whole outfit.

You can tell that guys wrote Star Trek and other shows set in the future, because the first thing they do is get rid of fashion completely and make everyone wear stretchy uniforms. If the future is like that, or the most recent remakes of The Time Machine, where everyone lives in sconces and has the most deplorable rags to wear (and no jewelry), or Planet of the Apes, then no thanks. I would have a hard time living in such aesthetically unpleasing times. On the other hand, no-one has ever predicted the future with any real accuracy, so I can take comfort in that.

I will never understand line dynamics. Not the math kind, or the geometry kind, or the late unlamented dance craze now moldering wherever dance crazes du jour go before being recycled into yet another one, but why lines of people are the way they are.

When we were in line to get tickets for “Road to Perdition” on Saturday, there were only 4 or 5 people ahead of us in line, but it took nearly 15 minutes for us to get to the window, where we paid with exact change and were out of there in seconds. Why does it take other people 10 times as long to buy a movie ticket?

I have observed the same thing in post offices, grocery stores, and airports. In the post office, you wait in line while time seems to stop, as the people ahead of you mail large, untidily wrapped packages of what appear to be body parts to countries with unpronounceable names, and without the correct paperwork or actual money.

The use of actual money is so unusual in this country that I wonder if they aren’t going to do away with it altogether and just implant chips in our hands to access our bank accounts and credit cards. A couple of weeks ago, I let a guy go ahead of me in the express line at the grocery store, because he only had one item. He thanked me and said, “And I’m even going to pay cash.” I joked, “Isn’t that positively un-American?” His response: “I’m Canadian, so I think it’s OK.”

Honestly, though, non-Canadians seem to think nothing of writing checks for $5 or using their ATM card for amounts almost as small. And in the express line, too. If you know you’re going grocery shopping – and how many of us do so on an impulse? – get the money first. Or get it at the ATM with which nearly every store is equipped. Your fellow Americans will thank you. Or at least not openly glare at you while cursing you and generations of your family.

As for airports, even if I’m going to Europe for three weeks, I never have more than carry-on. Bring outfits you like, about 5, and mix and match, doing laundry where necessary. Wear the one good outfit, fit for going out to dinner or to the theater. Bonus: airline staff, on the ground and on the plane, tend to be nicer to you if you’re dressed well, even if you’re flying cattle class. By limiting your baggage to carry-on, it’s a faster check-in. I also always book my seat ahead, which not only makes sure I get what I want (my main goal in life), but also makes check-in faster. But even assuming you haven’t done these things, why does it seem to take so long for people to check in? I’m not talking post-9/11 security measures, I’m talking standing at the counter for 15 or 20 minutes before finally finishing the checking in process. What could possibly take so long? Enquiring minds want to know. Well, not really. I just don’t want you ahead of me in line.

I think it’s a fairly well-known fact that mechanics of the male persuasion tend to pad their bills, overcharge, and/or flat out lie to their female clients. In the short time that I have owned a car, the only honest mechanic I have met is my brother.

Starting from my first personal encounter with a mechanic named Snake when my car broke down on one of the major artery roads through the city and had to be towed on a Sunday afternoon to Snake’s lair in the Haight on down, it hasn’t been good. It might be because I am a very silly girl who doesn’t know the first thing about cars, other than how to put in gas and change the oil (and I have been known to forget to screw the gas cap back on, too. Good thing it’s permanently affixed to the car with a sort of wire thing, so it doesn’t get lost completely). It might be because my car is a 1966 Mustang convertible, which can have strange effects on people, ranging from envy to the person who keyed the hood after it had a brand-new paint job to the uncontrollable urge to pass me when I’m driving it just to say they can. Or it might be a combination of such a fine ride being wasted on one so very ignorant. But for whatever reason, this has been my personal experience, and one I have heard from many other women, including smart, non-Mustang owning ones.

I was discussing this phenomenon with a screenwriter (for Paramount) at a party recently, and his theory is that men, including but not limited to mechanics, are actually afraid of women. In the wild, the frightened animal puffs himself up and tries to appear bigger than he really is to intimidate whatever is frightening him. The screenwriter thinks the mechanic’s bill padding is the same thing, translated into an urban (or suburban) setting. I think he gets points for creativity and charm on this one, but that’s it.

Any thoughts?

96 years ago, the buildings I live and work in hadn’t been built yet. On this day in 1906, the city was awakened at 5:12 a.m. by an earthquake that measured 8.25 on the modern Richter scale (compared to 6.70 for the 1989 quake). Three thousand people were killed, 225,000 were injured, and most of the city burned. Though the quake itself lasted only a minute, it is still considered one of the worst natural disasters of our time.

Here’s how the Financial District, where I work, looked after the quake.
I would have been a little luckier in where I live: the great mansions on my street, particularly the Haas-Lilienthal House, three blocks away, survived. Legend has it that the H-L house’s inhabitants stood on their balcony and watched the city burn. The house preserves a crack in the wall from that disastrous Spring day almost a century ago.

People who don’t live here often ask how we can, when there have been the two “Big Ones” in the past 100 years, countless little ones, and more to come. I wonder the same thing about people who live in places that are routinely flooded, or destroyed by hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards. I guess the answer is that you live with the natural disaster you can handle.

I don’t worry every day about the big quake that is supposed to send California back into the ocean from whence it came, though I know there’s the possibility. We keep a good supply of bottled water, candles, canned food on hand at home, and have a plan for what to do if it strikes while we’re at work.

So while we know it could happen, it’s at the back of our minds, not the front. For us, it’s worth the small risk to live in such a beautiful, temperate, tolerant place, where 96 years later, it looks like this at the dawn of a new Spring day.

Why doesn’t snoring wake up the person who’s doing the snoring? I mean, it’s right by their ears and you’d think it would be louder there at the epicenter than just in the neighborhood. But it never does as far as I can tell.

And why can I always sleep when the alarm goes off, even if I have been awake for hours at other times during the night? Maybe if I set my alarm for 1 a.m. or something I’ll be able to go back to sleep. I can get to sleep OK, I just can’t stay there.

When Buddy was still alive, he used to sleep on my pillow every night. When I was ready to go to bed, I’d say, “It’s sleep time”, and Buddy would pad majestically into the bedroom and jump up on my pillow. So I’d fall asleep listening to his deep, rumbling purr. If I woke up in the night, I’d just cuddle up to his soft fur and listen to him purring and I’d go right back to sleep.

But Buddy is gone and so is my father. The world has gone crazy, and it’s no wonder I can’t sleep. My world is a mess because of Dad’s sudden death. I hadn’t even begun to cope with that when last Tuesday’s disaster hit, so the entire country and in fact the entire civilized world is now a strange and frightening place. In addition, two of our consultants have quit in the past month and one is on maternity leave, so things are weird and chaotic at work too. No peace to be found anywhere. The really amazing thing is that only last month, in the beginning of August, we were fully staffed at work, the World Trade Center Towers were still standing, and my Dad was going to cricket matches and gardening. All that was swept away forever in the space of a few short weeks.

Here’s my goal for 2002: a completely uneventful year. In particular, I’d like the Reaper to leave me the hell alone for at least one year. He’s been an annoyingly faithful visitor over the past three years, and I think it’s about time he picked on someone else for a change.

Remember that scene in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” where the two title characters are arguing bitterly about which is the “Mary” (i.e. cute) and which is the “Rhoda” (i.e. less cute)? The argument gets so heated that they actually have to pull over, even though up to that point they were speeding along traffic-free freeways (which never happens to me).

Even when “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was in its heyday, I thought Rhoda, with her wisecracks and actual personal style — even when she was supposedly fat — was much more attractive than stick thin, uptight Mary with her matronly clothes and stiff, lacquered hair. The Mary of “Dick Van Dyke” was so much cuter and sexier in her little capri pants. What happened? The MTM Show Mary’s puritanical personality could and did rob even a miniskirt of its sex appeal, whereas you got the impression that Rhoda was much more, shall we say, warm-blooded. Plus she’d make you laugh afterwards, and possibly even during, which I consider to be a bonus.

And I gotta say, Rhoda has the last laugh. I saw a few seconds of a trailer for Mary’s latest TV movie, undoubtedly some form of tear-jerker, and she looked freakish and frightening. I don’t know if she’s the victim of platic surgery gone disastrously wrong, but she looks like a hard-faced creature from another planet. Valerie Harper, on the other hand, has made a couple of guest appearances lately looking fabulous — on “Sex & The City” and “That 70’s Show”. She’s still got wit and style and is undoubtedly still turning heads — and not because she looks like an alien. Maybe one day that scene in “Romy & Michele” will be funny because viewers will wonder why anyone wants to be the Mary.

It was raining this morning, so instead of walking to work as usual, I had to take the bus. I hate public transit. The whole problem with it is…it’s public. And other people are just so loathsome. As Dorothy Parker said, “other people are hell.” Also I always end up with wet feet and a bad mood, even if it is Friday. You will never find me singin’ in the rain.