ever-fixed mark

One

On Friday, Aitch and I were roughhousing on the couch, and he wrapped his hands around my throat. I told him nicely but firmly that we NEVER put hands around someone else’s neck, because it could hurt them.

“No, Mommy, it’s okay,” he said. “Look, I’ll show you!”

He ran to the kitchen and brought back a section of The New York Times. “See?” he said, pointing to this photo. So I had to explain to him in a roundabout way that the man pictured was not a nice man, and he was not caressing the pretty lady so much as testing her neck to determine the strength of the blade required to bisect it.

I knew I would have to talk to him about sex and violence in the media, but I was thinking more along the lines of vixens depicted in comic books, not historical figures depicted in the Times.

Two

Another section of the paper contained an article about the selection of a new school board member in Bethlehem, PA, a town not far from where I grew up. A Hispanic gentleman stood for election, but a white candidate was selected, and citizens were debating whether or not the outcome was motivated by racism. One woman said this:

‘We certainly need diversity,’ said Johanna Bees, a Republican committeewoman who spoke outside the city library. ‘But the school board had to consider qualifications first.’ Ms. Bees paused and then added: “One of my gripes is that all these people should learn English. When they’re walking down the street and they’re jabbering in Spanish, that really annoys me.’

You have to love that quote. We need diversity…but maybe not SO diverse that they actually walk around, you know, speaking other languages.

Memo to Pennsylvania: It is possible, even preferable, for people to be bilingual. Just because you hear someone “jabbering in Spanish,” that does NOT mean he is not fluent in English. If you ever traveled or even moved to another country (not that you would; Pennsylvanians are some of the most home-bound people in the nation), you would certainly speak your native language when you got the chance. And don’t tell me that your parents/grandparents/great-grandparents who were immigrants spoke only English. They certainly spoke their native tongue to their peers, even if they did insist on English with their children. That, by the way, is a tragedy, not a virtue. If your family had encouraged their kids to speak German as well as English, Mrs. Bees (and I’m betting it’s German), then maybe you wouldn’t get the willies whenever you hear another language spoken on the streets.

When I was seven or eight, my aunt and uncle bought a two-story yellow brick Prairie-style house. Stylistically it looks something like this estate, which is located on the same street; the architect or builder must have been the same, but I have been unable to track down who it was.

Their house was much, much smaller than the one depicted, but I was convinced it was a bona-fide mansion. Compared to the single-story tract houses in our development, it was, but in actuality it was just a regular four-bedroom house. There was something about the proportions that gave it a grandeur beyond its size. Even as a kid, I sensed there was something preferable about a house that was designed by an architect and built by a craftsman, as opposed to one designed by committee and built with a cookie-cutter. When I was a child, though, the exterior didn’t make as much of an impression upon me as the interior. My aunt and uncle had pretty flashy taste in interior decoration.

I recall a crystal chandelier in the entry, something I had never encountered outside of a book or movie. The wide center hallway was carpeted in dark red and trimmed in dark wood. On holidays, when we visited, my aunt and uncle would greet us from the top of the stairs, he in a smoking jacket, she in hostess pajamas. (They were not wealthy socialites, just working people with a sense of theater.)

The living room featured flocked wallpaper (of course!) and red velvet Louis the Fauxteenth settees. (Those things were SO uncomfortable; the only possible way of “setting” on them was bolt upright.) Perched on the end table was one of these telephones, a reproduction, like the furniture. A fake silver Christmas tree, left up year-round some years, finished off the look. I think my aunt and uncle pretty much invented “ghetto fabulous.”

On the second floor there were laundry chutes, which I thought incredibly cool. My cousins’ bathroom had double sinks (also unknown in the hinterlands) and was tiled a Pepto Bismol pink. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my aunt and uncle had a round bed. (Apparently you can’t buy sheets for them any more; you have to use king-size flat sheets, or have them custom-made.)

Every piece of technology in that house signaled a tendency toward enthusiastic early adoption that quickly obsolesced into retro kitsch. Exhibit A: the DeLorean. Exhibit B: WebTV. But the best gadget in the house was the intercom. The main unit was built into the kitchen wall, so it must have dated back to the ’20s or ’30s. Several paddle-like toggle switches allowed you to connect to different rooms in the house. I’m not sure why the builders thought they needed an intercom, because it was a fairly compact house, but it certainly fit in with my image of the place as a palace.

Since we’ve renovated the attic, I’ve been thinking about that intercom and kicking myself for not installing one during the renovation. It is difficult to make one’s voice carry from the first floor to the third, and not always prudent to yell upstairs past sleeping babies or run up and down stairs leaving children unattended. And when I am in the midst of developing film in the basement, no one can hear me scream. Consequently, Husband and I have been getting into the habit of calling one another, cell-to-home-phone and home-to-cell, to alert each other that dinner is ready or the dog has been fed. It seems ridiculous to dial eleven numbers just to talk to someone in my own house.

So yesterday when I was shopping for the most basic kitchen phone I could find to replace our broken one, I bought a set of three intercoms. I expected them to work as well as most Radio Shack brand products I’ve tried (i.e., not at all), but they actually do the job. They look like little answering machines (remember those? I’ll bet my aunt and uncle still have one) and lack the cool factor of a built-in unit, but they’ll do. Sample conversation:

Me (third floor): Can you make me a tuna sandwich, too?

Husband (first floor): You can smell that?

Me (third floor): Of course.

Husband (first floor): You’re weird.

When I first started blogging, I read Dooce’s advice to avoid blogging about work, and I thought, “You know, those sound like words to live by, especially for a woman who has confidentiality agreements with her consulting partners and her clients.” And for the past three years I have eschewed (eschewn?) the subject. I always regretted it a bit, though, because I’ve always liked my job and I’ve certainly had a lot I could say about it. I’m an English major working in disciplines (medicine and computers) in which I’ve had no formal training, in a field (clinical research) that I didn’t even know existed until I entered it on the wrong side of thirty. I have “mommy job” flexibility in my hours, without the low “mommy pay.” And, unlike most people I know, I’ve been really happy with my work.

Until recently.

I have had a very successful year, but a number of factors have combined to prompt me to envision a future where I might not be so successful. There is the economy; my growing reluctance to “sell” myself via a string of tiresome speaking engagements; and increased competition in my field, in some cases from people who were paying ME for advice just a few years ago. I have come to the conclusion that it would be best for my career if I went off and, you know, actually WORKED somewhere, instead of just sitting at home getting paid for giving people advice that they mostly don’t follow anyway, and then ending up as one of those superannuated consultants who haunts industry meetings, running on about her pet management theory.

It’s been hard to leave, though. Leaving a job can be like leaving a relationship. Some boyfriends are total losers, clearly toxic, and all your friends will cheer you when you make the move. Other boyfriends are nice enough, just not terribly exciting, and you may feel bad about leaving until you start to see how much more fun some of the other options look. But other boyfriends will sing your praises in public and fly you all over the world and buy you diamonds and furs and sometimes, not often, but sometimes throw a little verbal abuse your way in private so you don’t get any ideas about leaving them. And while some of your friends will tell you that you don’t need that crap and should walk away, others will tsk tsk and say, “Every relationship has problems. The grass is not always greener…” and you will start to have second thoughts about the feasibility of finding someone else who can support you in the manner to which you have become accustomed.

So that’s where I’ve been the last few months, evaluating my need to leave against my need to pay my share of the mortgage on the house AND have enough left over to pay someone else to make the beds in said house. I have been paralyzed with fear over this decision, and I believe Husband’s phone log during those months would reveal calls to McLean to ask if they offered such a thing as in-patient career counseling? And would I have to commit myself, or could he sign the papers? It has not been pretty.

But after a lot of soul-searching I let it slip to a few key people that I was looking for a job, and one thing led to another very quickly (elapsed time from announcement to offer: twenty minutes), and on Friday I finally burst through my inertia to sign the papers and break the news to my current employer. And suddenly a few things that I thought I would miss about my old life (”I won’t be going to Europe any more…I’ll have to get up and take the train a few days a week”) seemed like raging positives (”I won’t have to spend Sunday nights in the airport any more! It might be good for me to get out of the house and talk to other people a few days a week!”)

After seven years, I’m turning the page.

A few months ago I got a cold that lingered in the form of a horrible dry cough. It was a constant tickle in the back of my throat and a squeezing of my esophagus that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. After two sleepless weeks, I went to the doctor.

“There are a number of viruses that cause this,” she said, “and one bacterium. On the off chance it’s the bacterium, I’ll give you a course of antibiotics. If it’s the bacterium it will clear up right away, and if it’s a virus you’ll have to suffer for a bit, but eventually it will go away.”

I took the first antibiotic pill. Within an hour I started feeling better. Within a day it had cleared up completely.

About a month later, I got the same symptoms, which I found out were also known as “walking pneumonia.” I tried to tough it out for a few weeks but eventually went back to the doctor, explained that the antibiotics had been effective before, and got another course, with the same rapid and efficacious result.

Only a week or so later, though, the tickle came back. I was in Florida for the weekend and decided that this time I wouldn’t wait. I called the practice and got the on-call doctor, whose last name is difficult to pronounce and therefore always refers to himself by his first name. “This is Dr. Steve,” he said (not his real name), and I thought, uh-oh, because it would have been so much easier to explain to the regular doc.

But I tried: walking pneumonia, antibiotics worked like a charm two times, I’m in Florida, could he call me in a prescription? “Well, 98% of the time these things are viral infections,” he said.

“Yes, I know, but the last two times for me it’s been bacterial,” I said.

“So you want to bet against medical science?”

I tried to explain that for me it was more like Pascal’s wager, except that no one has proven the existence of God, whereas plenty of people have proven the existence of bacteria.

“You know, if you’re getting repeated infections, it means your immune system has taken a hit. What are you doing to try to boost it?”

“I’m trying to sleep well and exercise, neither of which is possible when I’m coughing all the time.”

“There’s a homeopathic remedy that works on these viral infections most of the time, as long as you take it within a day of feeling sick. Write this down: [garbled]. It’s better than Airborne or Zicam.”

A homeopathic remedy! Why not leeches or nerve tonic or exorcism? Wait, has my uterus migrated elsewhere in my body, causing these symptoms? Maybe I need to have my humours balanced. What does my horoscope say?

I love that he’s all about “medical science” when it comes to the diagnosis, but not the treatment.

So there I was at a sushi restaurant in Park City on Saturday night when I heard what sounded like my mobile phone’s ring, but I didn’t feel the accompanying vibration. “Is that my phone?” I wondered out loud. The woman at the table next to me said, “No, it’s mine,” and when I looked at her I realized she was an old acquaintance of mine. It was the woman whose annotations had enlivened my reading of the book Mating.

The last time I saw her was in Paris six or seven years ago, and when I was there last month I stayed in a hotel near her old apartment. As I passed that street I thought, “I really should Google her and see what she’s doing,” and then I promptly forgot about it until I saw her in the restaurant. The odds of us meeting at some random spot midway between our respective coasts are probably astronomical, but then again when you travel as much as I do it’s probably stranger that I haven’t met more old friends (and candidates for President) out and about.

Yesterday I took the only direct flight from Boston to Salt Lake City. I was in the second row of coach, so I mingled with the first-class passengers as I was deplaning. As I left through the jetway I bumped into a man who had stopped short. He turned around and gave me a big smile, the kind of smile the CEO of your company wears when he is going through the hallways and knows that people will recognize him and expect him to be gracious in return. It was Mitt Romney.

I knew I should take this historic opportunity to speak to a recent candidate for the presidency of our country, but what could I say? “I would really like to wipe that smirk off your face” might be considered unacceptably confrontational. I thought about it all the way through the terminal as I heard him chatting to some young men about his family (Ann is in Simi Valley, one of the boys is at Tufts, etc.) Then he left the terminal while I went to baggage claim, and the moment was gone.

Then I realized what I should have said, a question that’s been bothering me for some time: Governor Romney, what do you have against the French?