Magpie Musing

The Only Crowns I Have Were Put In By My Dentist

2013-05-10T16:58:00.000-04:00

You know that I'm the kind of cranky feminist who gets all in a twist about things like the tarting up of Merida and why do Monster High dolls exist and no, little girls shouldn't dress like sluts, and nor should they be wearing lip gloss.

On the other hand, the totally stylin', fancy-sneakered, well-coifed, thirty-something guy who sashayed down Broadway this morning with this tote bag slung over his shoulder absolutely made my day.

But, I want to unpack this. I'd be appalled if someone handed my nine year old an "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" bag or sweatshirt. No, you're not a secret princess. You're a sturdy, feisty, smart kid and it's not about your appearance, or your tiara, or your royal lineage, it's about what you can (and will) do.

So, why is it okay for a grown-up gay man* to walk around like a princess? Because he's not a kid? Because he's earned it? Because he's got a deep vein of irony? Huh?

And what does "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" mean, anyway? Don't give me crap about how it supports self-esteem, like the Toronto school board preaches, because hello? We're not royalty. We don't wear crowns. What do we do? We model good behavior: we read books, and cook dinner, and go to work, and practice things that are hard. We exercise and we challenge assumptions and we think about issues. We read the newspaper at the breakfast table and talk about things going on in the world. We discuss things like "is there a god?" and soda with artificial sweeteners and "where did the world come from?" and the girls who like fashion.

If my kid ever wants to fly that "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" flag, we're going to talk about that non-existent tiara and about that lack of royal blood and about avoiding crowns later by brushing your teeth now.

* I have no way of knowing if he was actually gay. But you don't spend 25 years working in the arts in NYC and not develop very good gaydar. Trust me.

Unexpected Inutility

2013-05-06T10:44:00.000-04:00

While I'm all for energy efficient light bulbs, I've never been fond of those spiral compact fluorescents. The shape is often wrong for a fixture, and the color temperature is too cold and blue, and you really don't want to have to look at them. But the LED bulbs that are starting to be available are much better: the shape and size is pretty close to an old-style incandescent bulb, the color is warmer, they go on instantly, and they're dimmable. [They are, however, exceedingly spendy up front.]

I flipped on my office desk task light this morning, and poof! The incandescent bulb expired. When he got in, the building manager scrounged me up an 8 watt LED bulb made by Philips. Lovely!

But...it didn't work. You see, the light fixture is a wall mounted, adjustable, spring arm fancy-pants thing by Tolomeo.

And as soon as I put the bulb in, it gently sank down and rested its little head on my telephone.

The problem is that the old incandescent bulb (A) weighs about an ounce, and the new bulb (B) weighs 4.4 ounces - way too heavy for that particular fixture. Happily we had some old style bulbs, but what are we going to do when we can't get them anymore? In all the hullabaloo about the phase out of incandescent bulbs, it never occurred to me that we might need to get new light fixtures.

On Pigs and Birds

2013-05-03T16:28:00.000-04:00

I stayed out late the other night, because when you get invited to a prosciutto tasting, you go. At least I do. I took my walker with me, because he’s always the perfect date, and we drank prosciutto-flavored cocktails (too sweet), and tasted four different aged prosciuttos* (from 18 months to 46 months), and ate lovely nibbles (foie gras! porchetta!), and finished with prosciutto-flavored panna cotta (delicious). All in all, it was splendid – a beautiful night, a lovely restaurant, and a whole mess of delectable pig. My only disappointment was that the very heavy goody bag** did not include a whole ham, because really? That would have totally made my day.

Anyway, staying out late meant that I didn’t take my usual train home, so instead of just the usual dour commuters rushing home to dinner, it was salted with a hodge-podge of eccentrics. I took a seat next to an older woman with a prodigiously wrinkled face, loud clothes and severe glasses. I decided I liked her when she chided the young woman across from us to “move your bags so someone can sit down”. But then I had this peculiar set of odd exchanges with her, the kind that left me scratching my head, who are you anyway? It started with the New York Times Magazine [I was reading the very interesting Peggy Orenstein piece on breast cancer]. “What magazine is that?” I told her, and showed her the front cover. “Would you like it when I’m done?” “No”, she said, “I had it over the weekend.” But you didn’t recognize it? Later I pulled a lip balm out of my bag, a generic one, filched from my dentist who uses them like calling cards, branded with his name and phone number. “Do you like white lipstick?” she asked me. “Well, no, but it’s not lipstick”, I said, wondering if she’d never seen chapstick before. “It doesn’t have any color.” Then I opened up my iPad, to read the New Yorker. “Is that like a computer?” she asked. I paused to pick my words with care, bemused by her use of “like”. “Yes, it does many of the things a full computer could do.” “Oh,” said she, “I don’t have a computer”.

She got off the train, into the night, leaving me perplexed – there was something completely other worldly about her and her non-sequiturs. Dry, birdlike, curious, engaged but distant. Memorable.

* I should probably point out that it was actually Prosciutto di Parma, the authentic stuff from Italy, and that I didn't get paid to write about it. Also, that 46 month old prosciutto was swoon-worthy. And who knew it ever got to be that old?

** Actually there wasn't any pork in the bag.

Wordless Wednesday: Cage in Sun

2013-05-01T17:21:00.002-04:00

An Explanation Of My Absence

2013-04-26T10:26:00.002-04:00

Busy busy busy.

Reading a 962 page library book.

Busy busy busy.

Running for the library board.

Busy busy busy.

Discovering rot underneath the failed stucco while the house is being worked on.

Busy busy busy.

(Unbloggable.)

Busy busy busy.

Having a much-needed and totally fun party to show off the WiiU and drink wine with friends on a Saturday night. (Thanks, Nintendo!)

Busy busy busy.

Guns, Furious

2013-04-18T13:20:00.000-04:00

Gabby Giffords is furious, and so am I.

Liz Gumbinner, a/k/a Mom-101, is furious too, and has a list of things you can do.

Me, I used the list of twitter handles that the Huffington Post helpfully published, and sent a tweet to every single senator on that list - even though none of them represent me. Pissing in the wind, I'm sure, but at least I felt like I'd done something.

Remember Network? Even if you never saw the movie, you've probably heard the quote:

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

So, whatcha gonna do?

Good Wives

2013-04-12T08:04:00.000-04:00

If you want to get my dander up, all you have to do is buy a package of puff paste and stick it in my freezer.

I mean, not that I have anything against puff paste - other than I think it's often used as a misguided replacement for pie crust and is better suited to palmiers and vol-au-vents - but um, Good Wives? What the hell is a good wife?

Good: a general term of approval or commendation, meaning "as it should be" or "better than average"

Wife: 1) a woman, 2) a married woman; specif., a woman in her relationship to her husband

I am certainly a better than average woman, but if the puff paste in my freezer is called Good Wives, is that not attempting to replace me? Is that not suggesting that I am not a better than average woman?

Not content with spewing venom at my good husband, I looked up the brand on the intertubes:

In 1979, the two wives who started making these hors d’oeuvres in their homes thought the name "Good Wives" would be appropriate and fun. "Good Wife" was a term applied to a married Puritan woman, implying industry and integrity.

Okay. Puritans. Gauntlet thrown.

Goodwife: a wife or a mistress of a household" or "a title equivalent to Mrs., applied to a woman ranking below a lady

Not content with a mere definition, I moved on to what turned out to be a great book, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives (Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650 - 1750). Why yes, a scholarly tome about Puritans, but accessible and fascinating. From the preface: "To write about good wives is to write about ideals; to write about goodwives is to write about ordinary women living in a particular place and time."

You know what? Those women had it hard. Housekeeping was arduous, childbearing was dangerous, church going was de rigueur. "A married woman in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian. On the war-torn frontier, she might also become a heroine". She was powerful, she was burdened. If her ordinary honorific was Goodwife, so be it, and the more power to her.

So I've simmered down, and I'm no longer offended by the poor innocent puff paste. But it took a couple of hundred pages for me to get there.

NOTE: All definitions in italics are from the Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, ©1970

Chicken Legs and Iron Pestles

2013-04-08T19:28:00.000-04:00

I can't put a finger on why I love this image so. Is it the chicken feet? The magical triangles emanating from her fingertips? The bird on her head (which I like to think is a magpie)? Was I Lithuanian in another life?

It's a Lithuanian man-eating wood nymph, says Rima, but I can't help but think of Baba Yaga - she who flies around in a mortar and pestle and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs. I always loved that story - but Baba Yaga isn't Lithuanian. Granted, in the case of Baba Yaga, it's her house that has the chicken legs, not the lady herself.

Come to think of it, the moving castle in my favorite Miyazaki movie also moves on chicken legs. So maybe it's just that I have a great affection for chicken legs, chicken feet? I know I always want to take a picture when I spot a tray of them in the Asian grocery store.

Hmm.

In my kitchen, I have my mother's mortar & pestle. Where she got it, I don't know - maybe family, maybe a flea market. But it's cast iron, with shapely mortar well suited to the hand, and a barbell-shaped double-ended pestle. Grinding spices in it sets up an industrial musical hum, and I think of Baba Yaga beating her pestle against her mortar - "fly faster!" she says, "we've children to eat!"

Rima's wood nymph, Howl's moving castle, my little mortar & pestle - disparate notions, yet so oddly interconnected. My mind is a weird place.

Dawn to Dusk

2013-04-05T17:21:00.002-04:00

An imaginary friend. Cancer. Death.

Sweet & caring, Dawn was. I never met her. I knew her via Twitter, Facebook, blogging, email - all those ephemeral vehicles, except that they aren't, they're real, my imaginary friend was real. And now she's gone, too young, too soon. I'm sorry I never met her.

These moments, such deaths, they demand something - or they feel like they demand something from me, anyway. Why? What?

Christine - dear Flutter - stepped up and created a donation site to help Dawn's husband Mike and their boys. I sent a little something.
Dawn's obituary asked for contributions to the Melanoma Research Foundation. I sent something there too.
Coincidentally, on Tuesday, the day Dawn died, I learned about an American Cancer Society project called the Cancer Prevention Study-3, so I signed up to participate. You can, too, if you are between the ages of 30 and 65 and have never had cancer.
And last but not least, I found a new dermatologist. Like Dawn said, "Check your skin people. Check your skin."

Say it with me now: Fuck Cancer.

Wordless Wednesday: Yearning for Spring

2013-04-03T13:16:00.000-04:00

The Things We Have Around Us

2013-04-02T14:38:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes - a fascinating, hard to describe book. It starts in the late 1900s, and meanders from Paris to Vienna to Japan, and ends in the present day. Along the way, it follows a collection of netsuke and tells tales of the family that owns them, and how they've passed from generation to generation, and the attendant political and social history.

The author, who is the current day family member with whom the netsuke presently reside, is also a potter, a creator, a maker of objects.

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? (p. 17)

Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters. (p. 348)

I sit here writing at the desk that was my mother's, and before that, in my father's family. It's an Eastlake cylinder front desk, with burled insets, and a glass-fronted bookcase on top, and a cornice atop that which is missing its finials - and it dates to around the time in which The Hare with Amber Eyes begins. How do I tell its story? What are the important parts? When was it built? Who was the first owner? Who else has sat in front of it, tucked notes in its cubbyholes, fiddled with its hardware?

Tucked in one of its little drawers is a scrap of paper ripped out of a shelter magazine. Once upon a time, before Antiques Roadshow, you could send in a picture of your antique what-have-you and get an expert opinion on its provenance. Someone, not my mother, because it isn't this desk, had asked about a similar desk; my mother, pre-Evernote, clipped the column as an aide-mémoire, and tucked it in its twin.

I don't know who bought this desk, but it's likely - given its age - that it was my great-grandfather. At the time that my grandfather was born, in 1900, the family was living in a white, shingled farmhouse. My grandfather went to college, got married, moved to a small house in the same town, and later - after his father died in 1933 - moved back into that family house with his wife and older children. At some point, the Eastlake desk was moved into storage in the garage attic. Before my great-grandfather died? After? Later, after my parents were married, and after they'd become homeowners in the early 1960s, my mother - in need of things with which to furnish their house - discovered the desk and convinced my father and his brothers to lower it down from the attic by block and tackle. She refinished it, and it stood in the dining room of their first house, and in the front living room of the house they moved to in 1972.

In 2012, the desk arrived in my living room. Gently, and with the great understanding that we were making an irreversible alteration, my husband drilled several small holes in the back - allowing me to snake a power cord and ethernet cable through onto the desk surface. Built around 1870, it suits my 1920 house and 2013 connectivity, still relevant these many years later.

I tell its story, because it will go on.

As I was reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, I found myself thinking that it was a peculiarly idiosyncratic book, one that wasn't right for everyone - though two different people had recommended it to me, both rather out of the blue. Oddly, though, since I've finished it, I've urged it on a surprising number of people: friends, co-workers, imaginary friends, and family. Maybe it's because it has something for everyone: a little art history, Jews in Vienna in WWII, lovely writing, expats in Tokyo, supple charm, aristocratic bankers in Paris, a family tree. I hope you'll read it too.

Pill Pushers

2013-04-01T16:57:00.001-04:00

Like lots of people, I spend a good deal of time scratching my head about health care costs. I'm particularly sensitive on a personal level, because the health insurance that I have has a very high deductible - $10,000 a year for me and my daughter. We get a handful of things "for nothing", that is, outside of the deductible - like well visits, flu shots and mammograms - but we pay the "contracted" rate for everything else. That's things like sonograms, sick visits, lab work, prescriptions, casts, colonoscopies and all those other things one might need.

I recently had to refill two prescriptions for maintenance medications. I usually just get them at CVS, but I thought I'd check out the mail order website offered by the insurance company. Back in the day when I had an insurance plan with co-pays, you could get mail order drugs for less. One co-pay would get you 30 days at a retail drugstore, but two co-pays (double, that is) would get you 90 days worth of meds by mail order. Since there was a decent savings, it was worth the hassle of doing it by mail order.

Alas - it's not like that anymore, at least not through my insurance. While the pricing on the brand name versions of the two drugs was more or less comparable between retail and mail order, with mail order coming in slightly lower on the price per pill, I was a bit dumbfounded to find that the generic versions of the mail order drugs weren't less, they were actually A LOT more.

	Source	Quantity	Patient’s Cost	Cost Per Day
DRUG A	Mail-order pharmacy	90	$58.94	$0.65
Generic	Retail	31	$9.22	$0.30

DRUG A	Mail-order pharmacy	90	$400.49	$4.45
Brand Name	Retail	31	$151.31	$4.88

DRUG B	Mail-order pharmacy	90	$101.85	$1.13
Generic	Retail	31	$2.52	$0.08

DRUG B	Mail-order pharmacy	90	$474.12	$5.27
Brand Name	Retail	31	$178.90	$5.77

In fact, it's so much more that I can't see how anyone would actually want to buy their (generic) drugs that way. Besides, even though CVS isn't exactly a local company, buying my drugs at the CVS that's down the road apiece keeps some of my money local, in the form of employee salaries and rent paid.

What is going on here?

The Egg

2013-03-31T10:30:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, you just find yourself poking around the free! out of copyright! books on the Project Gutenberg website. Right? Okay, maybe that's just me.

But look, here's an egg.

You know, for Easter. It's not dyed, and it's not hiding under a hydrangea, but it's an Easter egg none-the-less.

Go forth, nibble the heads off of bunnies and make egg salad with the dozens of eggs you undoubtably dyed.

Happy spring!

This egg is from A Moral Alphabet, by Hilaire Belloc, illustrated by Basil Blackwood.

[Found] Poetry Friday: Brain Flame

2013-03-29T14:17:00.002-04:00

BRAIN FLAME

Quite, in a virulent wafer but vacantly happens, the compensator –

Poised the beeps of minutes
not of he run
squat after I
to let infrequently on past that vast extravagance.

Achieving this can make your brain flame in different ways.

The moment was even and was not longer,

And it frowned dry.

There screwed the ended ocean in the plainness.

Why yes, I did just clean out the folder of "comments awaiting moderation", all of which were spam.

Wordless Wednesday: Altered

2013-03-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

Ingredients

2013-03-25T22:14:00.000-04:00

A friend, an earthy-crunchy friend (and I use that with great affection, being of the generally earthy-crunchy persuasion myself) recently wrote a post railing about the ingredients in a box of cereal, and the attendant false advertising that promotes cereal as healthy.

As it happens, her post appeared in my Reader^[1] on a day when I'd eaten shredded wheat for breakfast. I love shredded wheat. The big biscuits, not that spoon-sized stuff. I love splitting the shards off of the big biscuits - which I usually eat one & a half of, because they come three to an inside sleeve, so one sleeve is two breakfasts if you're a little OCD. They have wonderful mouthfeel, it's fun to splinter them apart, and inexplicably, they always remind me of my grandfather, Owl.

I digress. The reason I mention the shredded wheat is because I'd been struck by the verbiage on the back of the box:

An ingredient list that is so good we have NOTHING TO HIDE.

Indeed, the only thing on the Post shredded wheat ingredient list is whole grain wheat.

But by declaiming so boldly that this box of cereal has nothing to hide, do they not tar every other box of cereal in their line up? Take Waffle Crisps: the first ingredient is sugar^[2]. Or Fruity Pebbles: the second ingredient is sugar, and they're laced with artificial colors^[3]. These cereals do indeed have things to hide, like sugar and hydrogenated oils and artificial colors and artificial flavors and purportedly "natural" flavors that were probably fabricated in a plant hard along the New Jersey Turnpike.

Eat real food, people. Pick your cereals with care, and step away from the Fruity Pebbles.

1. Dear Google, I hate you.

2. Waffle Crisps: Sugar, Wheat Flour, Corn Flour, Whole Grain Oat Flour, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Caramel Color, Soy Lecithin, Natural And Artificial Flavor, Turmeric (Color). Bht Added To Packaging Material To Preserve Product Freshness

3. Fruity Pebbles: Rice, Sugar, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Coconut And Palm Kernel Oils), Salt, Contains Less Than 0.5% Of Natural And Artificial Flavor, Red 40, Yellow 6, Turmeric Oleoresin (Color), Blue 1, Yellow 5, Blue 2, Bha (To Help Protect Flavor).

Sentimental, Protective?

2013-03-21T20:53:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I think I’m lacking some parental-sentimental gene, or maybe it’s a parental-protective gene. I didn’t weep when my kid went off to kindergarten (though I did take a picture). I don’t get verklempt at the school plays. I might kvell sometimes, but I’m just as likely to mock.

The other night, there was an orientation for parents of kids going to middle school next year. (I know, how did that happen? She can’t be that old.) So I went – isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? The email announcing the orientation session read, in part, as follows:

It's an exciting and sometimes stressful time as your child(ren) prepare to enter middle school next year. If you are interested, the following are upcoming information sessions pertaining to this transition.

What I realized partly through this waste of a Tuesday evening was that the Administration and/or the PTA think that the transition to middle school is stressful for PARENTS. This was all about using cute fifth graders in a scripted Q&A to assuage parents who are all freaked out about locker combinations, and walking down hallways alone, and OMFG guidance.

In the middle school my kid will attend, there are three guidance counselors and a psychologist and a part-time social worker – for about 700 kids. That seems excessive to me, excessive to the point of coddling all the precious snowflakes.

Did you have a guidance counselor in middle school? I’m fairly sure I didn’t, and if there was one in the school, it was to address the bad kids. We did have guidance counselors in high school, but there their sole purpose seemed to be to help navigate the college application process. (My guidance counselor suggested I should apply to a school that I didn’t even deign to consider a “safety” school – I always thought she was aiming kids low so that her stats would look better.)

I'm thinking that perhaps I'll skip the second orientation meeting, dubbed "Middle School 101" which includes such scintillating topics as "friendship/social development" and "how to prepare your child for middle school". Do I really need to waste another evening getting answers to questions I don't have? Does that make me a bad mother?

Really, all I'm worried about is how we're going to get her out of the house by 7:30 in the morning, given that most days she's asleep until 8.

Ides of March

2013-03-15T10:31:00.000-04:00

You know that certain kind of spam you get when a friend gets hacked? It appears to be from them, it’s to you and a few other people you don’t know, it includes a link full of consonants that screams “don’t click me” (if you have good spam ESP) and it’s invariably from someone using either AOL or Yahoo.

I got one of those this morning. I opened up the email on my phone and did a double take. Email from a man who’s been dead a year. Subject: Hot Copy. But the truly eerie thing about it? One of the other “recipients” was my mother, who’s been dead for four years.

Are Eddie and Moky somewhere together, writing hot copy about Joyce and Eliot? I like to think so, though I know better.

Pies for Pi Day

2013-03-14T11:44:00.000-04:00

In Massachusetts all the way
From Boston down to Buzzards Bay
They feed you till you want to die
On rhubarb pie and pumpkin pie,
And horrible huckleberry pie,
And when you summon strength to cry,
"What is there else that I can try?"
They stare at you in mild surprise
And serve you other kinds of pies.*

May your Pi Day be full of pie.

* Excerpt from On Food, from New Cautionary Tales, Hilaire Belloc, 1931

Wordless Wednesday: Ghost

2013-03-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

Wordless Wednesday: Curtains

2013-03-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Fast Fashion / Slow Clothes

2013-02-26T21:16:00.001-05:00

There's a part of me that loves the idea of shopping at thrift shops. No, wait. I actually do like shopping in thrift shops, at garage sales, at the consignment store, and hell, at the swap meet at the local dump. Your discard, my cheap treasure. But while I will look in those places for Christmas presents, clothes for my daughter, or wool sweaters to felt into projects, I don't have the patience to rummage through racks of clothes looking for garments for myself. It's just too daunting.

But I've discovered a thrift shop that I love. In a deliciously solipsistic twist, the charitable arm of Eileen Fisher started a "recycled clothing initiative" - in other words, a thrift shop that sells ONLY Eileen Fisher clothes.

GREEN EILEEN is reimagining the way we think about our clothes. Inspired by Eileen Fisher’s timeless designs and high quality fabrics, our recycled clothing initiative gives a second (or third!) life to your garment. By donating or buying a gently used Eileen Fisher garment from GREEN EILEEN, you are helping to revolutionize the future of how we buy and wear clothes.

I love this idea. I love that by limiting the merchandise to only Eileen Fisher stuff, they've curated the thrift shop into something inviting, gemütlich. Tops are along one wall, lined up like a rainbow. Skirts over there, dresses and pants elsewhere. I can walk in and know that I'll find something I want and even need.

* * * * * * * * * *

I just finished reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. The subtitle kind of says it all: it's indeed shocking to learn about the fast fashion industry. I'm a fairly low impact consumer - I don't buy a lot of clothes, because I'm just not that interested. I've learned that cheap shoes aren't worth the money, and I'd rather have a one well-cut top sewn out of quality fabric than five glitzy, shoddy* $10 shirts that pill up the first time they go through the wash. But still, the book made me sit up and think hard about the clothes I buy my child, and about the relationship between "own less and pay more". Later, as I was pulling laundry out of the dryer, I sighed at the broken stitches on the neckline of a barely worn Target dress, and at the holes in the toes of some nearly new socks**, and at the horrid pilliness of of a polyester shirt my kid got as a hand-me-down. But then, inspired by a chapter towards the end of Overdressed called Make, Alter, Mend, I reinforced a threadbare spot on a pair of my jeans, and artlessly repaired a hole in my husband's jeans. A few minutes work with iron-on twill tape and a sewing machine, and I bought at least some more months for two pairs of jeans. That's mending for you.

* * * * * * * * * *

Overdressed exposes the underbelly of fast fashion in a way similar to those writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser who've eviscerated fast factory food. What's the antidote to bad food? Eat real food, eat local, cook yourself. What's the antidote to cheap fashion? It's complicated, perhaps more so than the food issue. It'll mean paying more for clothes that are better made out of nicer fabric by people who are paid a living wage. Or, it means learning to make things yourself - if you have access to a sewing machine and a fabric store. You could start shopping in thrift shops, and altering the clothes you find to better suit you. You might start buying the Danskos that are both comfortable and long lasting - the polar opposite of the "cute shoes" at Target that give you blisters on first wearing, and fall apart on third. I'd like to think that you could shop at Green Eileen; alas, that's not likely to be a scalable concept given that its parent, Eileen Fisher, is a fairly small clothing company - I have a hard time imagining that they could have more than a couple such stores (there's only one now). You could buy on eBay; it operates like a huge thrift shop. Try ThredUp - they'll pay you for your kids clothes and you can either take the cash, or buy "new" stuff from them. Or you could find a clothing swap: my town has done it for Halloween costumes, and prom dress swaps are fairly common. Jeans, sweaters, blouses - surely you have some that a friend wants, and vice versa. Have a cocktail party and swap clothes.

What it comes down to is this - the entire matrix of how we live our lives matters. The choices we make about beef (feed lot supermarket vs. grass fed butcher) and tomatoes (slave grown in Florida year round, or local farm grown and only available in August) aren't all that different from the choices we make about clothing. Live lightly on the land, and mend the holes in your blue jeans before they get so big that you have to throw them out.

* "Shoddy" has a fascinating derivation - it turns out to be the name for a kind of cheap wool cloth made from rags and scrap fabric, recycled if you will. A noun once, an adjective now.

** Ironically, the socks with the hole in the toe are made by a company called "Darn Tough" - they claim to have a lifetime guarantee, so maybe I'll spring for some postage.

End Of An Era

2013-02-21T15:40:00.000-05:00

First it was the costume shop. This time, the theatrical shoemaker in my office building went belly up.

He had shelves and shelves of shoe lasts, old wooden forms, most speckled with nail holes, many still sporting masking tape labels with the names of the actors/dancers for whom he'd made custom footwear.

Some were for flat shoes; others for high heels. A tiny doll-like pair was for a dwarf; a huge size 13D for an N. Wyman. The shop smelled like leather and ancient cigarette smoke, hot metal and dust.

Like the costume shop, he went out of business because no one wants custom made shoes for Broadway shows. Or no one wants to pay for custom made shoes. Or no one needs them?

And now, no longer necessary for their intended purpose, a pair of high-heeled feet - 7C, Dottie Frank - sit on a windowsill in my living room, a reminder of the days of handwork and small factories, of craft and things made one at a time.

Can't Go Home Again

2013-02-18T14:45:00.002-05:00

I’m cleaning up my computer's “desktop”, filing all sorts of electronic detritus, the great morass of random, poorly named files, mostly pictures. And, as it's not possible to do otherwise, the task is filled with aimless archeology. It's not enough to move the pictures to a folder; one must ascertain just what these pictures are.

And my heart stopped when I found this. I didn't take it; the girl did. But it's my once-upon-a-time room, the room I grew up in, the bed, the fireplace. And she used a Hipstamatic filter so it looks all far away and underwater and old and, oh, memory.

It might as well have been taken 35 years ago.

How can it be that it's no longer there?

Manipulating The Dawn

2013-02-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

Dear Director of Marketing and Public Relations,

I get a lot of pitches from PR companies and publishers. Most emails just get deleted – no, I really don’t want to interview a religious advisor on how to prepare for end-of-life, nor do I want any printable Pajanimals valentines, and I’m not interested in learning “how to cook like a deaf chef”. But sometimes I read the email, and I’m intrigued enough to respond.

Such was the case when you asked if I’d like to read a memoir about sailing around the world. It’s such a romantic notion, putting out to sea like that. And sailing – is there anything more exhilarating? I used to sail a lot as a young person – racing Blue Jays, cruising Long Island Sound on my grandfather’s yawl. Once we spent two weeks on that boat, with a compass and a one-way radio, and I’ll never forget sailing to Block Island through pea soup fog, somehow managing to hit the harbor entrance spot-on. If we hadn't, we’d probably have ended up in Portugal, at least, that’s how we like to tell the story.

So your book arrived, and because of various things going on in my life, I didn’t get to it for a while. When I finally sat down to read it, it turned out to be a slog. Oh, it’s not that it’s not interesting in parts – I mean, sailing around the world with islands and broken stays and a cat and drama is not uninteresting – but it’s dreadfully written.

You sent a follow-up email, asking if I’d “ever received a copy of How the Winds Laughed?”

And I answered:

I did, thanks. I'm finally reading it. I'm not likely to write about it because, frankly, I don't think it's very good. Interesting at times, yes, but rather clumsy and kind of confusing.

You wrote back and offered a few more books from your publishing house.

I wonder if you'd like to try reading a book by one of our seasoned writers? It's also a memoir, about end-of-life circumstances with her parents. It's tragic, funny, and transcendent and has been praised by all who've read it so far. It's called Entering the Blue Stone. I have attached the press kit here.

Apologies for never answering that email, but I was a bit put off after I figured out that Entering the Blue Stone had been written by your mother. I mean, it may well be a lovely book, but I think you should have mentioned up front that your mother had written it. In fact, though, you didn’t even name the author in the email – but when I saw in the press kit that you shared a last name, well, that sent me off on a search. It's not that it's a conflict of interest that you're representing your mother, but it seems to me you should be a little more transparent about the relationship.

By the way, because maybe I was unclear – by “not likely to write about it”, I meant that I probably wouldn’t take the time to write a blog post, because a blog post needs a hook and some passion, for me anyway, and I didn’t really have the energy to review a book that wasn’t worth reading. Also, remember that your initial email to me was addressed "Dear Esteemed Blogger", which leads me to think it's pretty clear that we were talking about my blog. But, because I like to warn my fellow readers, and because I compulsively track the books I read, I did post a few sentences on both Amazon and Goodreads:

After slogging through 40% of this, I decided to put it aside because life is too short to finish lousy books. Sure, it's interesting at times, and doesn't everyone kind of want to run off and circumnavigate the globe in a 28' wooden sailboat? Alas, it's rather clumsy and kind of confusing.

Sample sentence:

"Dawn rose slowly, pulling up her various window shades, tinting the lagoon gray". Please, who the hell is Dawn? Oh, Dawn's not a person, dawn is when the sun comes up. So why is the lagoon gray, and where are the rosy fingers?

The other day, you found the Amazon review I’d written, and you sent me a fairly unhappy email.

I'm writing because I was a bit stunned to see that you took the time to write a very negative review of How the Winds Laughed on amazon. I understand you didn't like the book--not every reader "gets" every book--and Addie Greene's primary audience may be readers with some knowledge and experience of sailing. But when a reviewer lets us know (as you did), that they don't want to review a book, we'd never dream that he or she would then post a derogatory review on amazon.

Fuze is a small press, running on a shoestring and dedicated to taking chances on new voices. For Addie Greene, Winds is her first book; she would be eager to hear constructive criticism/feedback. Amazon has complicated algorithms that greatly influence whether they totally bury a book or not, and negative reviews play a significant part in that decision. Given all this, I wonder if you would consider removing your review? Of course, if you had bought the book and felt dissatisfied enough to post such a review, I would never take issue with it.

First – I am a reader with some knowledge and experience of sailing. I’ve been on the water, and will be again. No, I’ve never sailed to the Marshall Islands. But I know how to fold a spinnaker, I know why a mast needs stays, I can tie a bowline, and I know what “batten down the hatches” means. Furthermore, I don’t think that a predisposition to the subject matter is what makes a person like a book. I’ve read about geology and long distance trucking and shad fishing with great relish, just because John McPhee can turn a sentence like no one, and makes obscure, idiosyncratic, unfamiliar topics come alive. The writing makes the book. Sadly, that wasn’t the case here.

Second – I didn’t say I didn’t want to review the book. I said I wasn’t likely to write about it, but that’s different. Further, a person is entitled to an opinion, not to mention a change of heart. As a publicist, you take risks every time you send your product out into the world. So do your authors. Someone will love your book, someone will hate it. Last week, a dance review in the New York Times began and ended thusly:

“N’a pas un gramme de charisme” is a worthy title for Claude Wampler’s new show: it translates, roughly, as “Hasn’t an ounce of charisma.” ...[snip]...Why does the title limit the show’s omissions to charisma alone? Everything about this piece is terrible: poorly conceived, poorly executed.

Do you think the publicist, or the choreographer, called the Times and asked them to take down the review? Um, no. It doesn't work that way. And, just so you know, the Times dance critic gets comp tickets. It's not as though buying your tickets lets you write a bad review and getting free tickets means you have to stay quiet.

Third – that you would have the temerity to ask me to remove the Amazon review is flabbergasting. Amazon’s been gamed. The review system is subject to manipulation by people who pay for five star reviews. Your request that I remove the review is just as manipulative as the person who pays $5 for a review.

What it boils down to is this:

If you send me a book, I may or may not write about it. I may or may not write something nice. That's the risk you take.

I think perhaps you’d better take me off of your list.

Best,

-Magpie

Disclosure: The publisher sent me a free copy of How the Winds Laughed. My opinion is my own, and I wasn't compensated for anything I said, here or on Amazon or on Goodreads.