Keeping up with Sarah

The Most Unpractical Brilliant Gifts Part II

The other most brilliant gift I was given was a tiny working piano for Moishe. Two of my friends, who are single without children, sent it to me for a shower gift with a note "He MUST have music!' I thought, oh God, what is he going to do with this? He'll break it and then hurt himself on it. It's so precious, it's not some stinking little toy piano, it's a real piano. Or sort of real. Chromatically tuned, the chime-like notes are produced by little hammers striking precision-ground, German steel music rods (versus the conventional taut wires used in full-sized models), as it says on Schoenhut's website. The keys on this little piano are the same width as the keys on a regular piano, teaching Moishe to use his hands appropriately for the big one. And he does. At six months of age he plays notes, he bangs away on it, and when he gets seated in front of it he gets really, really excited. It's so incredible to see him love this instrument and to love playing it. This is an instrument, it is precious, and it's not made of all plastic. It's a beautiful wood laquered red piano; it's his first precious possession. And it's precious because it is both beautiful and allows him to be creative before he can talk or hold a crayon in his hand.

Here is a little video of him playing.

Most Vapid Blog Ever?

Is there such a thing? Could this be it? http://lg.blogs.com/lipstick_lover/

I had such high hopes for a blog called Lipstick Lover. It could be a torch for very femme lesbians. It could be about someones need to wear lipstick during sex. But it appears to be about lipstick. What lipstick to wear with white. Pretty lipstick containers. Wow.

The Most Unpractical Brilliant Gifts

I can think of two gifts that I've been given that struck me at the time as being completely unpractical, unnecessary, a huge waste of the givers' money and clearly not my style. The first was a present from my mother. It was an ice cream maker. I don't like ice cream. I don't like cold food. And it sat in my cabinet for a while after I received it until I was given a pineapple I didn't want either. The pineapple sat upon the cabinet, unwanted and ripening while the ice cream maker sat within, unwanted though made of undegradable plastic. Eventually I took the very ripe pineapple and put it through first the food processor and then the ice cream maker to make the best pineapple sorbet I'd ever had. It was a "you put your chocolate in my peanut butter" kind of moment for us because my husband doesn't like fruit, but he sure does like ice cream. We'd found a nice combination of the two and I began to turn all sorts of overripe fruit into sorbet. I now keep the tub in the freezer so that I can poof make instant sorbet when the mood hits. That's a fabulous gift that I once thought was completely useless.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about the other.

A few days in paradise

We're spending a few days at the ocean, far far away from the cold. It's lovely - so lovely. Weather in paradise is perfect.

Why ruin it by confining it to words?

The dog gets chased by ravioli at the corner of Homer and SpongeBob

Last week my dear friend's mother passed away suddenly. Moishe and I headed to her house, by train, car and kindness, to help her out. She lives in an area beyond suburbia, a rural area intersected by interstates, blobs of old strip housing developments and ugly box retail. It's urban enough to need sidewalks, and rural enough to have a pig as a next door neighbor. Among our tasks, we took her mother's dog to visit a grieving friend, a little old Italian lady, who loved that dog and her owner. She was known for overstuffing the dog with ravioli, so that when the dog got tired of eating them, she chased her around with the pan, crying "Mange!" Simonetta happened to live in one of these strip housing developments, with identical houses on grids, so that we drove around in circles in the dark, not able to read the street signs, looking for her particular intersection. We could best identify her by the Christmas decorations. Homer Simpson and SpongeBob Squarepants faced off across the intersection.

Be Media Critical! A Great Expose of Photo Retouching

In Cuba, where there is zero marketing, except the government sponsored "Viva Che!" and "Viva La Revolucion" grafitti, I noticed that women of all shapes and sizes felt comfortable wearing spandex and heels. Clearly their self images were better than mine. I noticed that for myself I stopped obsessing over my appearance - details like eyebrow hairs and blemishes became a lot less important - and mirrors were more scarce.

In the US, where marketing is king, and apparently in Sweden as well, as we all know, women just don't have that kind of self-esteem. Here's a great Swedish campaign to force advertisers to show the truth of their women, instead of the physically impossible. They're lucky enough to have a Trades Ethnical Counsil against Sexism in Advertising. Be Media Critical!

My Heart's Desire...Shiny, Pretty

A Spam Vampire of my very own.
"Q: What is SpamVampire?
A: SpamVampire is a spam abatement tool. It is an image rotator on steroids, basically downloading images from spamvertised websites repeatedly, running up the hosting costs of the spammer who owns the spamvertised domain."

And a metal Happy Holidays light show in my front yard. Download the video here.

Find Maureen Dowd a Matchmaker

So yesterday I see a friend who has a new boyfriend who has a very unhappy jealous female best friend who told him that he "has an obligation to date someone who's smart, not just pretty." Since I'm the 1/2 glass full girl, I took that to me that the best friend thought my friend was exactly that - smart and pretty, which she is. No, that's not what she meant, and then the next day she saw Dowd's article and passed it on to him as an example of why he had this obligation.

This best friend is miserable: a relatively ordinary single in her 30s, with particularly high standards of what she wants in a mate. And along comes Maureen Dowd, a stunning woman, as can be seen in her photo, making a complaint of her singleness that acts as an excuse for this best friend's uncharitable and miserable nature.

My advice to my friend was to find her a matchmaker. A good old fashioned matchmaker who will work to understand her character and capacity and introduce her to suitable men. I've come to believe that matchmaking isn't a bad idea. Here in the west we have this incorrigible view that romantic love is the be all and end all, and for those of us for whom it works out, it's great. But clearly, it requires a healthy dose of optimism, good luck and congeniality. We met truly happy couples in Pakistan who were the results of matchmaking, "arranged marriages" being reduced by the more secular population, to being set up by parents and then meeting and screening the prospective spouses, including chaperoned dating. It's not that much different that what happened in the U.S. 50 years ago. Our hippie parents have screwed us: their belief in free love has turned into a curse that puts the double demons of independence and romance squarely upon the shoulders of people who really want to be part of the institution of marriage. Were they just capable of setting their children up, perhaps this "best friend" would already have a suitable partner and be happy. Aren't there any real matchmakers out there?

Not All Men are Like This

Maureen Dowd's new op ed piece that's an essay adapted from her new book, 'Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," "What's a Modern Girl to Do?" laments the loss of feminism as women have juggled the opposing forces of independence and relationships. She puts it well, if loquaciously, that women that don't play the sexy kitten game just aren't that sexy to men. Well, duh. But that's to average men in an average world. And average women are also just that, average. There is however the flip side of that coin, and that is women dating men who have less power, prestige and money because they're good guys. Until women are ready to lower their standards to include younger, less powerful men, instead of looking at men as trophies of success and power, they will be forever limiting their pool to only those at or above them in economics and rank. Men have a bigger pool because they include those below them, and of course they like the young hotties, because they ARE young hotties!

But not all men are like that. My husband, as an example, loves my slighty powerful job, and thoroughly enjoys being "arm candy" at my business events. He'll announce that he's only there because of me, and that he's my arm candy. Granted he's an entrepreneur with a successful business who is very well known in his community, so he's got lots of opportunity to be the head honcho. But perhaps this is all okay because he's a confident guy and because his wife isn't a direct threat in his own industry. But I'm not alone in this. My next door neighbor, an English teacher married to a retired Foreign Service officer, just told me a similar story. They are approaching 70, and her husband loves going to events where she is the center of attention and he's the accessory. This very successful foreign service offer of some repute, published in the papers, etc., is very comfortable when his wife is the star and encourages and promotes her.

So these men are unusual, I don't disagree. The average man is, after all, just average. Ms. Dowd and other professional women need to question whether they've raised the bar too high in their idea of a good mate. I've got lots of still single girlfriends who dumped suitors over the years for not being successful enough, however they couched it. And I've been criticized in my own dating for picking men that weren't of my own economic peer group. You can have a great relationship with someone who's success is askew to your own, but you probably can't have a great relationship with someone you compete with.

By the way, this gives me a great segue into why I think matchmaking is a needed and necessary phenomenon. But that will have to wait for another day.

Life in the Capital of the Wealthiest Nation in the World

While the smart people are concerned about the lives disrupted and lost by hurricanes and earthquakes across the globe, people in Washington, DC are perpetually concerned about their own skins. It's a top down phenomenon here in the District, neither a state, nor just a city of one, where we're a little petri dish of testing for all trendy things that come through Congress. Consider Bill Frist our personal Mengele, testing his monstrous cruelties on those who have no say to stop him, because District residents don't have representation in Congress, nor does our vote count towards the President. Lab rats that we are, Trent Lott opposes gun control and goes for overthrowing DC's gun control laws. W supports this crazy No Child Left Behind, and the district schools are held to the fire, made an example of because Congress can. So the wealthy send their children to private schools gives the parents pop quizzes prior to entry as well as pay exorbident fees. The apocrophal question at Sibley, the Quaker school attended by Chelsea Clinton, is, "If your child were a vegetable what kind would he be?" The middle class moves to the suburbs, increasing pollution and sprawl and diverting still more tax dollars from the communal effort of public education.

While Karl Rove fights for his position as chief puppetteer, though really no one's contesting THAT, they're just questioning how much puppetteering is legal, Cheney's holed up some place in a bomb proof shelter because after all, when the world ends, we'll need SOMEONE to run it. And it turns out that safe rooms, or bomb shelters, with multiple steel doors and multiple dead bolts are NOT uncommon in the basements of typical NW Washington houses. The official spending all of his time hiding because something might be Code Yellow isn't too different from what appears to be at least 50 years of terror in Washington of the same thing. It's trickle down terror in Washington every day.

After the city imposed emergency evacuation signs that genially point out the quickest routes out of the city's political boundaries, now the wealthy have taken up the call to prepare for emergencies with meetings about stocking up, making lists, etc. What are they worried about? The common disaster of earthquake or hurricane? Oh no! We're worried about anthrax and avian flu. These aren't the concerns of a community joined together by common interests, it's a community splintered by personal greed and selfishness, with gigantic blind spots to our real needs: stronger public schools, services for the poor, safer streets. Avian flu isn't going to get you before that carjacker will!

While all this works it way through many levels of Washington society, my neighbors banded together to raise $20,000 to pay the rent for a year of two families from New Orleans who were left homeless. They also put together enough clothing, furniture and supplies to get them started, including using connections to find them quite decent jobs. There are a pile of decent folks out there, just don't get too close because you never know who will sneeze on you.