She's Writing a Novel

Lately Philadelphia has been having a rash of what the local media refers to as "flash mobs." This is a cute social media term that conjures images of young professionals randomly rendezvousing in public arenas to launch coordinated amuse-bouche theater, typically clever but at the very least harmless.

Is that what we've been experiencing in Philly this summer and recent summers past?

Nyet!

What we've been enduring are large roving bands of teens, and in some cases pre-teens as young as 11, that swarm otherwise safe and civilized streets and at some point set upon a hapless stranger who they beat into a pulp and rob of any personal belongings before fleeing in laughter and mockery.

The mayor of our fine city, after receiving word of the sixth or so such incident in as many weeks, assured us that he would have a response to this troubling trend. Just as soon as he returned from the vacation he was about to leave for.

Local authorities have a tendency to adhere to the "enlightened parent" school of discipline when it comes to unruly minors. They want their kids to know that they are VERY SERIOUS about punishing them, IF they do it again (and get caught)...maybe. Yes, if it happens again then the next time after that there will be serious consequences later. Possibly.

Because the real problem is that we don't have pools or libraries. If we had more pools open in the city, then instead of punching a 70-year-old in the side of the head these teens would be cordially splashing their peers in a respectful manner and obeying safety instructions from the lifeguard. If we had more libraries open in the city, then instead of breaking the leg of a twenty-something girl these teens would be discovering the beauty of Shakespeare or Dickens (or Walker or Angelou), maintaining respectful whispers and handling borrowed books with attention and care.

The desperate excuse is that if there were other places for teenagers to be, then they would be there. The pathetic hope is that then their destruction would be only self-inflicted or at least outside the notice of the tax-paying population and potential tourists. The city leaders want to believe that this is a problem that can be corrected with a little love; we need counseling and mentors! Why, with a little sunshine and some watering...

Local politicians and their bleeding heart voting base would have you believe that there are no bad seeds, only misunderstood apples.

Bullshit.

I believe in lost causes. And I also believe that if you aren't one, the cynical disdain of people who think that's all you are is the only motivation you should need to demonstrate otherwise.

After almost seven years in a corporate job, I've learned that modern-day office buildings are just glorified petri dishes. I know a lot of people feel that these are prisons or tombs or whatever metaphor reflects their existential paradigm. But my job has treated me pretty well, all things considered, and while there is plenty I could criticize there is little I feel obliged to complain about.

Except the rampant disease,

Growing up, I was one of those kids with perfect attendance at school. Almost never missed a day, can count on one hand the number of times I had to go see the nurse. Even in high school, when I was catching the bus in the dark at 6:30 and not getting home from my after school job until 9:30, it didn't seem to matter if I was run down and stuffed into school buses and classrooms with other germ-ridden kids. I was always, always healthy. Even when I lived in a college dorm for several years, I only got sick twice. I was proud of my immune system.

Then I graduated and got a "real" job in a downtown office highrise. A life of cubicles, windowless offices, and highly suspect recirculated air. That first year on the job was the first year of my life where I got sick during the summer. I didn't even know such a thing was possible. I remember it vividly because I made my new boyfriend sick too, and we spent the 4th of July curled up in bed shivering and listening to the fireworks.

I got sick several more times that summer. And every year after that, I continued to come down with a flu or cold several times during each season. I learned to know when it was coming; so-and-so would be out sick -- they sat three cubicles down. I could safely assume that within three days, after each of the co-workers between us had had their turn, I would be the one out sick.

It didn't matter that I ran 4 miles a day on my lunch breaks; it didn't matter that I ate fruit and vegetables and yogurt instead of lunch truck cheese steaks; it didn't matter that I drank 8 glasses of water a day and never touched an ounce of soda. It didn't matter that I got plenty of sleep and plenty of, um, affection. I was a poster child for "healthy living" and here I was, eating up my sick time like someone who had spent the first two decades of her life on antibiotics.

I'm sick again this week. My head aches, my throat hurts, and my body is on strike with the prevailing, pervasive ick, the ick that puts the "ick" in sick, that grossness that saturates your limbs and makes you feel tired and weak. Yeah, probably some kind of flu, In August!

If our ventilation system had a motto (and why wouldn't it, I have a fever, right now the cat has spectacles), that motto would be something like: Making the well sick, sooner; making the sick sicker, faster.

Hah hah. Maybe the current administration can borrow that one.

During this afternoon's monsoon, I decided to duck into the cafe next door and grab a salad instead of going to the gym and getting thoroughly drenched. Well, it's not so much a cafe as a regional chain restaurant that specializes in pseudo-fast food. When I've got a craving for an $8 salad consisting of over-saturated wilted romaine with too many ribs, this is my go-to place.

I had missed the lunch rush, and there was no one in line ahead of me. That was a good omen; maybe I'd be able to get back to my desk and start hacking at that hydra of an email thread from morning. The emptiness of the establishment belied its efficiency; it was a scene I had come to expect here just as much as soggy lettuce in a plastic bowl. I would order and pay for my salad, take a number, and stand to the side near the open food prep area. Then I would continue to stand there, waiting in plain sight, watching as the 3 or 4 employees whose job it was to assemble the pseudo-fast food did things other than assemble my food.

They chatted, maybe threw up some jokes judging by the bursts of laughter. They'd make a pretense of sweeping part of the floor, or wipe some corner of the counter aimlessly over and over while exchanging a story with a coworker. They'd take a 3 second task of emptying a tin of tomatoes and turn it into a 3 minute orchestration. When they weren't blatantly blowing off the fact that they were employees of the establishment on the clock, they were making routine manual labor seem as onerous as brain surgery.

Eventually, a manager from the depths of the back would emerge and spot my lone ticket hanging in the window. Suddenly, reluctantly, one employee would step forward to pull together my caesar salad in the space of two minutes. A miraculous feat based on their demonstrated capability in the previous moments.

I have worked in comparable places myself, so I have more than the usual amount of patience when it comes to service and retail; I have been the person that other people were waiting on to get what they needed and get out the door. And when I was that person, I hustled. I showed my employer, and their customers, that I took my job seriously. And I was not making even $7 an hour. I busted my ass, because that's what it means to work, regardless of the task at hand.

I appreciate that many good, hard-working people are having trouble finding jobs. But there are a lot of lazy fucks with jobs that clearly wish to be relieved of them. And what do people think they can lay claim to in terms of employment when they can't even respond to the requirements of the relatively menial? There seems to be a mentality that you are entitled to a CEO's compensation for showing up and putting on an apron, and if you actually want me to do something? That'll be extra.

I know a lot of people are hiring. I know a lot of those people are sorting though hundreds of resumes for the "good" jobs they need to fill, and they're lucky if they can find 3 candidates who followed the application instructions. That's not 3 candidates who are actually qualified, mind you. Those are just the ones who read the directions.

Woe is us that there are no jobs in the US? No, woe is us that there are no people who still believe that to have a job, any job, is to have a responsibility and a duty to perform that job to the best of their ability. Woe is us that there are no people who are willing to assemble lettuce with such damn conviction that they set themselves on a path to being a hiring manager in a few years. Woe is us that people who aren't willing to assemble lettuce and can't fill out a form correctly believe they should be paid 60k a year and are set on collecting unemployment for 99 weeks unless that happens.

The good news for the US economy is that the jobs, in fact, are there. The bad news is that there is no one willing or able to take them.

Now I almost feel bad for ranting about the comparatively sedate mob scenes in Philly. London clearly has us beat when it comes to the nihilistic rioting of youths! But perhaps this is all just a conspiracy hatched by the baseball bat manufacturing cabal?

Not unlike current events stateside, the politically correct establishment across the pond is quick to dismiss any too harsh indictment of the unruly mob and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of "society" for the creation of a "disenfranchised class." We might pause and consider our seminal achievement as a society where our "disenfranchised" enjoy free or subsidized housing, food, education, and health care, with apparently enough left over to keep up with the latest technology and street fashion. In fact, one might say that it's precisely this careful tending of the disenfranchised that has made the social democracies of the West, which increasingly includes the US, a shining beacon for the fast-breeding and underfed. You can coexist with rats on a ship, but enough of them and the boat will sink. And certainly, going out of your way to ensure that the rats are sustained and preserved is nothing but an invitation for disease and eventual demise.

Or to put it another way:

If you teach a man to fish, he'll leave you alone and decide he can do better for himself on the open ocean. If you give a man a fish, he'll come back the next day asking for a bigger one. And if you fail to deliver, he'll break all your fishing rods and set your house on fire.

The weather changed suddenly in Philadelphia this week. If I didn't know better, I would say that autumn has its eye on us already. August has been unseasonably cool, and the recent spate of rain was preceded by the sort of arm-ache I only suffer before serious cold fronts and hurricanes. While I've always had the bone density of an old woman who is one martini away from a broken hip, an injury from 2003 has left me permanently in tune with nature's capriciousness. And so I say to you, as a young woman with old-lady bones and a better-than-an-almanac antenna in my left shoulder, that it's going to be an early winter.

When I was very young, I didn't understand how people could claim to predict the weather based on their aches and pains. This was, I now appreciate, because I was very young and I didn't have any aches or pains. Maybe a decade or two of being knocked around but good has a way of putting you in touch with the universe. The science is apparently still on the fence about all this; some non-committal mumblings about barometric pressure is about all I've been able to find on the subject. It's the sort of thing that gets chalked up to being "all in their heads" by doctors.

In general, this seems to be the very scientific conclusion doctors come to when they think that you should not be feeling any pain. "I'm experiencing pain," you say to your doctor. "Well, I don't know why that is," he replies. "I cannot find any good explanation for it. Ergo, you are not experiencing any pain."

When I was 15 I had my impacted wisdom teeth (all four!) taken out, and while the drugs are fun when that shit wears off you have at least a week of the opposite of fun. On my follow-up visit to the oral surgeon the craters in my gums had to be flushed out with saline solution. At first, a sweet and hapless nurse was tasked with this; bless her heart, she came at me with that saline-filled syringe and thought she was going to stick it into the raw gum in the back of my mouth. She made a noble effort, but after a certain point I put a stop to it. "You're HURTING me," I told her. "As in, really hurting me. Is it supposed to hurt this much?" Flustered, she ran to get the doctor.

He came in, a mouth-breathing giant of a man, and more or less lectured the nurse that she was being a timid idiot about the whole procedure. And then he took the syringe and jammed, and I mean JAMMED, that needle into the tender recesses where my wisdom teeth had been. I writhed and shrieked, and the nurse gasped with horror. Holding the syringe firmly in place and pumping my mouth full of saline as I gargled and seized, he explained to the nurse: "That's not pain she's feeling. That's just pressure."

I had been raised to subject myself to the authority of doctors, even when they manhandled you. After all, it's for your own good in the end. But this...this? Was just rude.

From my reclined position in the dentist chair, I raised my right leg and delivered a swift but hard kick, landing my foot directly in his groin. He gasped and jumped back. Swallowing the saline, I told the nurse: "That's not pain he's experiencing. That's just pressure."

And with the help of his throbbing balls, we reached an understanding about the amount of pressure that was acceptable in terms of pressing a thick syringe into my throbbing gums.

Today while I was procuring some truly vile vended coffee from the company kitchen, I overheard a female colleague complaining about her husband's habit of leaving the dishes in the sink. I thought, I can relate! Russian lover loves to pile dishes in the kitchen sink!
But then she continued: I mean, the dishwasher is right there.

Oh.

I don't have much sympathy toward these suburbanite housewives complaining about men not putting dishes in dishwashers or socks into clothes washers. I imagine I have about as much sympathy for their complaints as would a third-world tribal village woman have for my complaints about having to wash dishes by hand (in a sink with hot running water in my home) or having to carry my dirty laundry three blocks (to wash and dry it all in industrial machines for a nominal fee.)

I try to avoid complaining about the mildly inconvenient unless it's for dramatic or comedic effect. And I consider not having every single last modern appliance in your home to be, at best, mildly inconvenient. Good lord, I've put dinner from scratch on the table for the past couple of years without the aid of an oven (and would you believe it, making something besides tuna casserole is really not that difficult) while some of these women are practically overcome with the effort of having to peel the plastic off their TV dinners every night. Oy. Is lazy the word I"m looking for here? I think it might be. I think the number on the tag of their jeans might agree with me on that.

Tonight I have less than nothing to complain about, because the Russian lover has washed all the dishes and he's bought me a new oven. And baking equals not babysitting a stove which equals the ability to do something else which equals a cleaner bathroom! It's like being handed a gift card from the universe for 15 extra minutes in the day.

As we approach the height of tourist season (or are we already dropping off from it?), my workday commute starts to feel like a salmon spawning. I must fight against the perpetual tide of humanity that has come to peruse some of the best relics of our national history; they have come to mill about and gawk en masse, while I must reach my desk before 9:15.

There is a part of me that has always been a little bit uneasy about working in a historic district of national import after 9-11. If you wanted to commit a destructive symbolic act, why, here is the Liberty Bell on one corner of the street and Independence Hall right across the way!

And, if you were from a people group with a particular grievance...say, that people group that presently commits approximately all global acts of terror, then we have just sprinkled the sugar on your cake so you can eat it too. Because last year the city opened a museum of American Jewish history only a block away! I always accepted the fact that I work in a neighborhood which is a geographic bulls-eye for terrorism, but I really didn't expect anyone to make that bulls-eye flashing and neon.

One of the things we do have going for us it that, for all our historic significance, Philadelphia is still a second-rate city that no one in America really cares about and that no one abroad can really find on a map. We are not New York, DC, or even LA or Chicago. We're the suburbs of New York and DC that terrorists would merely fly over on their way to some place where their efforts could have more universally appreciated impact. What's a broken bell? What's an empty 200 year old building?

I don't think anyone except Americans could really understand, which might be why so many foreigners come halfway across the world just to stand between me and my cubicle. Because they know that it matters, even when they can't feel why it matters; they know that they are standing among shadows that shaped our world. Independence Hall is no Colosseum, but its reverberations through history might be as great.

So please, come and bask in the cradle of our culture here in the real West. I'll even forgive you for standing in my way with your cameras and your children and making me 5 minutes late to work. But mess with my block and I promise I will come and get you myself.

So, today I experienced my first earthquake. And of course, of course, it would happen the way I most feared. I am not so much terrified that I will find myself caught up in a natural or "man-caused" disaster. These things happen, and one day they may happen to me. But I just hope that, when and if such a thing should befall me, it will find me in a more or less dignified state.

Which is to say that when the earth started shaking today that of course, of course, I was butt nekkid. I had nothing but a towel, and the kind of towel that's too small to cover much of anything at that.

I was in a state of deep relaxation, lying back in the sauna at the gym. At first I thought it was just another meathead upstairs dropping a too-heavy barbell , or an elliptical gone horribly awry. But when the rumbling continued, and the sauna started swaying, I thought for a brief moment that perhaps it could be an earthquake. Except that earthquakes don't happen in Philadelphia. So my next thought was that someone was blowing something up somewhere nearby, and maybe I should put on my pants and run. But then it stopped, and I put it out of my mind until a minute later when a very nervous woman stuck her head in the door and announced they were evacuating the gym. Because of the earthquake.

Ah, well. At least my pants were at hand, and at least the earthquake was sufficiently subtle that it did not necessitate my fleeing the building mid-shaking in nothing but an inadequate towel.

Far more times than I would generally be willing to admit, I find myself in a public restroom with my pants down and thinking, it would be just too awful if anything epically tragic were to happen just now. Silently, I plead with the universe not to endanger me when I'm on a public toilet, Please. If I have to go half-naked and compromised, then let it be in bed with a beautiful man. Or woman. Or both.

Following fast on the heels of our "earthquake" here in the Northeast, we also experienced a "hurricane." Really, we had some heavy rain showers following a few days after nearly imperceptible ground tremors. We are the people who can shovel out from two feet of snow in a day; it's going to take more to rattle the mid-Atlantic than these non-events Mother Nature has been trial-ballooning.

The worst part of this whole hurricane, for me, was early Saturday when the sky was grey and the wind was picking up, but not a drop had fallen out of the sky. Russian lover and I had a fight in the parking lot of a grocery store; I was backseat driving and nearly caused us an accident. In my defense, people were not messing around about getting the last bag of Chips Ahoy, and they were ready to cut you. Not in my defense, no one needs a backseat driver in a parking lot the week before Christmas or an hour before a supposed hurricane rolls in.

But I was self-righteous about Russian lover's frustration, and I demanded that if he was going to be angry with me then he needed to pull over and let me out. RIGHT NOW. I would walk home. I would not cause us any more "almost" accidents.

Russian lover obliged, to my surprise. I tried to backpedal, briefly, but it was clear that my bluff had been called. I had no choice but to do what I had insisted he let me do; get out of the car and start hauling for home. So I did.

I was about two blocks in of my 20 block trek when it started to drip, and the wind started to pick up. I thought, oh dear. My pride or dry pants? I kept walking and it started to rain, not just drip. I called the Russian lover. Satisfied I had been dispelled of my childish protest, he agreed to meet me at the front of the store. I ended the call, and the skies opened. Within two seconds it was apparent that running for cover would serve no purpose, because I was already soaked through.

I trudged to the awning in front of the store, and waited for the Russian lover to bring the car. The pathetic sight of me was the end of our fight. A few minutes later, the rain slowed to a half-hearted drizzle that didn't require so much as an umbrella. I can only conclude that Mother Nature took his side on this one.

Wednesday gets a bad rap, but it's clearly Tuesday that is the worst day of the week for us nine to fivers. Saturday and Sunday are given awesomes. Monday? Well, it can be hard coming back to earth, but more often than not you're rested and refreshed and two days of consecutive drinking have helped you forget about everything that happened the week before to make you hate your job. Friday is almost Saturday. Thursday is the shining beacon of hope, the harbinger of the end. Wednesday, hump day, is the encouraging mid-way point of your work week journey.

But Tuesday? Tuesday is the hopeless void. Tuesday is the continuation of the ugly email chain from Monday; it's the day things gone horribly wrong last week come to the light; it's the day when you look at your calendar and see a waterless desert between you and the the next day you don't have to wake up to an alarm. All of your gathered enthusiasm was spent on Monday, but here you are again, having to do it all again.

If Tuesday were a woman, she'd be a nagging, unsatisfied bitch that you could never put both arms around. If Tuesday were a drink, it'd be a cheap lukewarm whiskey watered down to nothing. If Tuesday were a car, it'd be the rusty car you drove at 16 that almost got you there before it sputtered and died, and did twelve miles to the gallon.

But, this Tuesday is almost over. I've got a cold beer in one hand, a battery operated device in another, and Wednesday in my sights.