Sweet December

I'm finishing out 2007 at home in New York, at my parents' house (get ready for grandmother stories next week), back home in New York, and then in Hawaii and Oahu. In that time I will also finish my grad school applications, take the GRE, and watch hours and hours of Hunter on DVD. (Man, the guest stars from season one - Frances McDormand, Drian Dennehy, Ed O'Neil, and Dennis Franz, for example - rock my world.)

Not only am I fortunate enough to have a semi-easy end to my year, but I am lucky to see December 1st at all. As I have complained many times, drivers in the city seem to believe that red lights do not require them to stop their vehicles. They just cruise right through, even after pedestrians get the cheerful "walk" light and venture into the crosswalk. As I mentioned on Ev's post about hitting a deer (excerpt: "As I was standing on the brake, fishtailing towards a ditch, watching the deer's head and neck fly over the roof of my truck while the front half and the back half of the torso broke apart at the ribs, and I was thinking, 'Huh! I never would have expected it to do that!'"), I was nearly run down by a shiny new BMW that neglected to follow traffic laws. I was eating a Trader Joe's 100 Calorie pack of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and I hurled one at the car as he narrowly missed my toes. I smashed against the front passenger side window with a satisfying, if small, noise and shattered into a million pieces. (That's when I realized I should carry little paintballs in my pocket with me from now on...) The other guy crossing the street while I was agreed with me that drivers are fucking maniacs.

Another disturbance in the balance of the world happened when I read that The Red Balloon is being re-released. I cannot explain why that fucking movie vexes me so much, but it was always 34 minutes of hell when they forced us to watch it in grammar school. Every damn year. For reasons that are beyond me, my beloved Entertainment Weekly gave it a grade of A. Tarnation!

Last Chance Before December

When I was a wee lass growing up on the "wrong" side of the Edens Expressway in Wilmette, IL, my dad had a t-shirt that puzzled me. It had a picture of a cartoon women who (according to my partly unreliable memory) was scantily clad and had big titties sitting on a bale of hay with a piece of hay in her teeth. Above her, it read, "Last chance before the freeway." My dad also had a t-shirt with McDonald's golden arch logo that parodied the fast food purveyor. It read, "Marijuana: Over 5 Billion Stoned."

Of course, these memories have nothing to do with NaBloPoMo, a scheme to encourage people to blog at least once every day in November, but as today is Nov. 30 and thus the last day of NaBloPoMo, it's people's last chance to create posts and backdate them if they didn't make the daily postings. In my case, pretty much post at least once every day, every month anyway. However, as I decided to enjoy myself in London over Thanksgiving weekend and not pay the outrageous internet connection fee at my hotel, November happens to be the one month I didn't post every day. Some may say I lose, but I say I win. Dude, I got to go to London!!!

I tried to offer a prize for those who successfully completed NaBloPoMo, but the organizer never responded to either of my emails. I guess it's OK for others to offer their blog merchandise, but not offensive little old me. However, if you are a CUSS reader who successfully completed NaBloPoMo, email me (my email is on the right side of the blog), and you can have any short sleeve t-shirt or mug from the CUSS store. If more than one person is a NaBloPoMo champ, I'll do some sort of random drawing at the end of next week. Just because the official NaBloPoMo people rejected me doesn't mean I shouldn't try and make good on my offer. Holiday spirit and all that shit.

Back to growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, this last day of November brings the news that former member of the House of Representatives Henry Hyde from Illinois died. Rep. Hyde did everything he could to ensure that low income women had few options for terminating pregnancies by blocking federal Medicaid funds from paying for the procedure. On the other hand, at least he was slightly less hypocritical than his anti-family, pro-forced-childbirth colleagues, as Hyde supported the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant. This important money helped low income parents pay for safe places for their kids to stay while they worked or went to school. I won't call it even, but at least he tried to help families even as he coerced them into living by his religious beliefs.

Hunter-thon

I promised myself that I would celebrate finishing Off the Beaten (Subway) Track by watching seasons one and two of Hunter on DVD. Hunter was my favorite show (tied with The Golden Girls) when I was in junior high. Every Saturday night, I babysat and watched Hunter with my friend Jeremy Weiner* over the phone. (Meaning: we both sat in our respective domiciles and watched TV while we were on the phone, discussing the action.)

So four weeks after I was supposed to engage in my TV fueled bacchanal, I finally stopped all my various little other projects and sat down for fun. Man, this show is fucking priceless. The quips, the action, the extraordinarily dated plots - all
joyous fun. Not to mention Det. Didi McCall's super hot '80s high waist pants and blouse sets are better actors than the people. Delightful fun.

Now I realized that both my posts today are about my TV watching habits in the 1980s. Yep, it's definitely time to do more consulting jobs.

Update:

Sample dialogue from the third episode:

Bad guy: You guys were suspended.

Hunter: I know. But we love this city and hate injustice.

****

McCall: I just hate throwing garbage out and watching it blow right back in the wind.

Prosecute the Prosecutors

Back in the dark days of the late '80s, when greed was good and Bush continued Reagan's work of systemically dismantling governmental mechanisms put in place to ensure at least a small measure of fairness and equity for all living in the US,* L.A. Law ruled the airways. I was in junior high, struggling with the bullshit of adolescence and developing a moral radar for political and religious hypocrisy. L.A. Law highlighted all these issues. I was hooked.

Mostly I loved Susan Dey's character. She was a prosecutor who worked to protect women and communities from evil criminals who preyed on them. Although she didn't make nearly as much money as the vile divorce attorney Arnie, she was doing good for the world. I decided that this was exactly the job for me.

More than a decade later, I dropped out of law school on my third day. While I still wanted to help people, particularly those living in low income communities, I learned that there were many ways to do this that did not involve the torture of law school's Socratic method. It also came to my attention that the mentality of many district attorneys was far less noble than L.A. Law led me to believe. Time after time, evidence would appear that indicated that a defendant was innocent. The Cult of the Prosecutor, however, refused to acknowledge that they might have the wrong person. Instead of trying to serve justice, they stubbornly insisted on continuing cases. Even after DNA evidence exonerated those wrongfully convicted, the Cult insisted that the person did the crime.** Nope, I wasn't cut out for the District Attorney's office.

All this ran through my mind this morning as I read a story in today's New York Times about a woman released from prison after serving 13 years of a sentence for killing her teenage daughter. DNA evidence revealed that her boyfriend's blood was mixed in with the victim's body. Of course, the DA's office doesn't apologize for her conviction, partly derived from her boyfriend's testimony against her, which they secured by granting him immunity from the crime. No, instead, the DA is planning to retry her on a charge of second-degree manslaughter. Even better, even if she is convicted of the lesser charge, she won't return to prison because she already served the maximum sentence that charge carries. No, there's absolutely nothing wasteful about a second trial. Really, a second trial would not just be about vindictiveness. It's about justice. For who, I don't know. It sure is way too late for the poor kid, who was neglected at times by her mother, abused by her stepfather, and then killed by someone who is immune to prosecution for her murder.

*The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sigh.
**This is why shows like Law & Order are my favorite forms of escapist entertainment. The cops and ADAs always drop charges against people who are innocent so that they may find the real perpetrators and justice can be served. If only real life were like TV in these cases...

Trucks and SUVs and Mini Vans - Oh My!

For those of you who drive on a daily basis, you are very brave. Between the trucks, the SUVs, and the mini vans that I can't see around to the speeding maniacs (which admittedly includes me as I zip down the road at a brisk 80 mph in a 55 mph zone), driving practically gives me a heart attack every few miles. For the rest of the day, I'm very glad that I'll be running my errands on the subway. Even though non-discounted rides are $2 a pop, that sure beats $3.47 per gallon in gas. (OK, it sort of doesn't, but a monthly public transit pass with unlimited rides for $72 definitely kicks the ass of a month's worth of gas.)

Driving Me Crazy

My drive up to Alex's house yesterday was mostly uneventful. The worst part was driving in the area near the city. It's a little absurd when I am driving 70 in a 45 mile zone and people give me dirty looks as they pass me in the left lane.

Alex and I made excellent progress on organizing an official call for submission for Congratulations, You're a Woman Now!. Her husband (aka Big Giraffe) will put up a website for submissions in the next few weeks. I'm pretty gosh darn tootin' excited.

I'm also exhausted. I don't know how people spend a full day with kids and don't fall asleep by 4 pm or need to be institutionalized. Just pretending to be a squirrel for five minutes this morning left me out of breath and in need of a nap. All you parents out there - and teachers - are amazing.

You're a Woman Now, so Demand to Read about It

Since Husband is in San Francisco for work (poor dude got back from London on Sunday night and took off for the West Coast bright and early on Monday morning), he doesn't need the car to drive to his office in Connecticut. I decided that I will take advantage of the availability of our automobile (which I always think of as his since his work pays for it and I never drive it for a variety of reasons, the primary one being that I hate driving and fear the maniacal NYC traffic) and motor up to see Alex. We plan to work out more details for my idea to put together an anthology of first/early period stories, tentatively titled Congratulations, You're a Woman Now!.

Not long after I first conceived of the need for an anthology of this nature, I emailed my friend who also served as my agent for Off the Beaten (Subway) Track and told him about it. Oddly, he was not nearly as enthused about the idea as I was:

I've read a few proposals for this very idea for an anthology and think it is a tough one. The problem is 1) to put an anthology together for sale you need some pretty big names, or at least recognizable. 2) the subject matter for most people is a bit squeamish, even for girls. I had two female interns read the proposals and both did not like... I could be wrong, so if you're passionate about it, sell me on it.

My initial reaction to his response was not constructive ("Well, those female interns are obviously cunt-face bitches who read shit like Devil Wears Prada while staggering around in their pointy-toes stilettoes getting snatch waxes, so they wouldn't know a good idea if it hit them in their Sephora-made-up faces."), but then I buckled down and realized that what my friend was saying is that I need to show that girls aren't squeamish about their first periods because the topic is fucking funny in retrospect. I think the outpouring of interest that is still emerging on my original blog post is a good indication that people do want a book like this.

Anyway, the goal is to come up with a framework for proposal submissions, a plan for compensation, and a website that organizes the whole thing. In the meantime, the more I hear from people who are interested in reading a book of funny essays about the early days of getting a period, the better. (For an example of the types of writing that would be in the book, see 1980 was an interesting year by Jessica.) The first battle in the war for this book is to demonstrate that it is a commercially viable product.