How Not to Be a Terrorist

Glenn Greenwald describes Joe Stack's manifesto as 'perfectly cogent.'  Except for his conclusion that 'violence is the only answer,' I tend to agree.  Partisan ideologues are running in circles, each trying to blame his act of terrorism on the Other Side, but if you bother to read what he wrote, it's clear that it's not that simple.

Contrary to the various labels that the pundits are flinging around, Joe Stack was not a populist.  Neither was he a Communist, a Tea Bagger, or a liberal.  He was a smart, creative guy who empirically discovered that Big Systems in this country are designed to drain him dry--specifically, the smart, the creative, the independent and the non-conformist.  They drain everyone else too, but they work much faster and more viciously on people like Joe.

Item: The Labor Department estimates that up to 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as 'independent contractors' in order to avoid paying Social Security, unemployment, health insurance or worker's compensation.  Among the most often misclassified workers are truck drivers, construction workers, home health aides and high-tech engineers.

Item: The United States has the highest documented incarcaration rate in the world.  Over half are imprisoned for non-violent offenses.  

Item: A homeless man get a 15-year sentence for stealing $100 and returning it, while corporate officers who steal billions from taxpayers, investors and their own employees keep the money and write the laws.

Item: The average debt of a medical student who graduated in 2009 is $156,456.  

Item: The Catholic Church.  

I could go on, but as Joe Stack has clearly demonstrated, that way lies madness.

So how do we cope with the fact that institutions which supposedly exist to sustain and connect us--schools, corporations, churches, and government--have turned into parasitic monsters which extract ever more and give ever less, using our finest characteristics--honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity, discipline--as levers to enslave us?

The reason terrorism does not work, as an instrument of change, is that fear paralyzes the mind.  The best weapon against institutional thuggery is not violence; it is the freedom of thought and action which emanates from a mind at peace with itself.  This is why institutional thugs bring out their most vicious tricks when confronted with a decent person who thinks for herself. 

This is also why we cannot look to institutional leaders to get us out of this mess.  They created it; they have a vested interest in sustaining it.

So I have a few suggestions.

Learn to care for yourself--really.  Learn to eat well, exercise well, meditate well.  Learn to live on less, even if you still have a job.  Revel in joys that are free. 

Quit looking upward.  Quit looking for someone to hire you, fire you, take charge, change the rules, enforce the rules.  Quit waiting for the grant, the donor, the collector, the award, the promotion.  Stop buying lottery tickets.  Consider long and hard before you pay for another degree.

Connect laterally.  The person you see as your competitor is potentially your ally.  That guy who might take your job, could be your business partner.  Collaborate, encourage, experiment and assist. 

Nurture love and meaning wherever you find it.

 I suspect that before much longer, systems and ways of living we took for granted will vanish, or undergo a radical transformation.  We can either give way to panic, violence, rage and despair, or we can take the opportunity to heal ourselves, our society and our planet.  It's up to every one of us to decide.

Empty Houses

Like so many others, this recession hit us really hard. Both Joe and I are self-employed, so when the work dried up, we didn't even have unemployment benefits to tide us over. Recently the unthinkable became our best option--we sublet our Brooklyn apartment and moved in with extended family.

And do you know what? It's kind of fun. Olivia's G-ma is great to live with and has plenty of space to share. Aunts and uncles and cousins drop by, bring breakfast, loan us their baby furniture, recommend yoga studios. Joe fixes their electrical wiring, I share recipes. There's always someone to talk to.

All around the country, people are losing their houses--their big, big, empty houses. They're filling dumpsters with the stuff they bought to fill those houses up. I wonder how many of them bought houses to fulfill some vague dream of 'home,' derived from movies and children's books, full of laughter and games and roaring fireplaces? And I wonder how many people rattle around in them, wondering when the fun is going to start?

I think too many Americans have used their wealth to isolate themselves. They put up gates around their communities, shop online, live in suburbs and drive alone in SUVs built for eight. The more money you have, the more you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to deal with. And ultimately, even your friends are too busy and far away to visit.

A number of years ago, I leased out my house, put my stuff in storage and floated around the world for a few years. I got good at being a houseguest. I kept my possessions to a minimum, cooked for people, listened, gave massages, and moved on when it was time to go. Since I am relatively introverted and like to control my own space, this was a challenge. But I was fine, my friends were happy to have me, and sorry to see me go. (They're still my friends, so I'm pretty sure they were telling the truth.)

This recession was a long time in the making, and our culture as a whole has a lot of hard lessons to learn. One of those lessons might be that relationships take more effort than possessions, but they give you more in return.

How You 'Earned' It

As some of you are aware, it has long been my hobby to dally in Right-Wing Extremist Land, trying to wrap my head around how the other 23% thinks. For years I read extensive diatribes on Those Evil Feminist Baby-Killers, Those Satanist Socialists and Those F*'n Libtards, setting aside the odd surge of incredulous rage and regarding their venomous screeds with scholarly detachment. I came out of it with only a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, thinking, "Gosh, they're so CUTE. Good thing they're not running the world any longer, though."

But all honeymoons must come to an end, and around the time Obama sealed the nomination, the State of Grace in which I had been dwelling abruptly evaporated. It's not just that I like Obama, and believe that it is High Time that an empath with a balanced global perspective was running things; it's that when a person calls Obama a moron and takes Sarah Palin seriously--well, words and empathy both fail me.

So it is with the full understanding that I am preaching to an empty hall that I take on the issue of Taxes.

There are those of you out there who object to Paying Taxes on What You Earned. You state that Progressive Tax Rates Are Patently Unfair. The horror. The cruelty. The Economic Stupidity. You declare, righteously, that rather than pay those Taxes you will take your marbles and go elsewhere. After all, you EARNED it.

Yes, darling, you did. But if you earned more than a quarter million dollars last year, you didn't do it working freelance. That is, you didn't do a physical job in a measurable amount of time and get paid market rate for it. You didn't dredge up clients one by one, and convince them to pay you for a single object or a single service, one by one.

No, if you earned more than a quarter of a million dollars, you did it by positioning yourself--or being positioned--at a strategically superior position in a very large system. I.e., you were a high-ranking officer in a large corporation, a lawyer, an investor, or an entrepreneur on a large scale. You received a percentage of the profit from the labor of thousands of people. Your 'earnings,' then, are inseparable from both the existence and the smooth functioning of this system, and thus dependent upon the system in a far more pervasive way than the labors of a freelancer at the bottom of the pyramid. To put it mathematically--a freelancer's earnings are linear. Yours, by virtue of your advantageous connections within the system, are exponential.

So you may complain to me about paying Higher Taxes--if, and only if:

• You, and all of your employees, and all the employees of every corporation you invest in, never use roads.

• You, and all of the above, have never attended a public school, including a state university.

• Your business does not utilize any standardized weights or measures.

• You, and all of the above, do not require a working environment free of cholera, malaria, polio, war and pestilence of all kinds.

• You, AAOTA, do not use the Internet.

• You, AAOTA, do not require clean drinking water, sewers, or garbage removal.

• You, AAOTA, and none of your progenitors ever staked a physical claim--say, to a piece of land or a sum of capital--that was upheld in perpetuity by the rule of law.

You may tell me until the cows come home that you don't care about Those Other People, that lazy people don't deserve healthcare, that your right to prove to God that you are a Good Person by Giving Voluntarily is inalienable, and that Government is Evil. Fine. So why don't you go where there is no government--say, the moon--and keep 100% of everything you find there.

Oh, please

Go read this article: Trying to Live on 500k in New York City. Read the whole thing; it's short. I'll wait.

Sure, the solution may seem simple: move to Brooklyn or Hoboken, put the children in public schools and buy a MetroCard. But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Yes, the solution IS simple. Not just because there's no reason that the taxpayers should pay for your summer house; because a person who is responsible for managing a financial system which determines people's lives should have some CLUE WHAT PEOPLE'S LIVES ARE LIKE.

Talk about identity politics. There is no social good to be maintained by buttressing illusions of superiority in a handful of drones who shuffle numbers while other people do the work. There is, perhaps, a great deal of social good to be obtained by insisting that bankers be forced to learn to manage money.

For starters, consider this:

A modest three-bedroom apartment, she said, which was purchased for $1.5 million, not the top of the market at all, carries a monthly mortgage of about $8,000 and a co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month. Total cost: $192,000. A summer house in Southampton that cost $4 million, again not the top of the market, carries annual mortgage payments of $240,000.

What kind of a jackass buys an apartment with co-op maintenance fees that equal the mortgage payment? I took an open house tour this weekend of a very nice three-bedroom condo in Brooklyn, with views of lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and boats coming into the East River. The asking price was $955,000, with monthly maintenance fees of $510.74, and a projected mortgage payment after tax abatement of around $4000. This, of course, is still obscene, and I only went on the tour as a tourist, so to speak, but it's nowhere near $16,000 a month. That extra $10K or so is just a stupidity tax.

The thing is, all of the so-called hideous costs of maintaining an 'executive aura' can be avoided by the simple expedient of avoiding costs which only exist to maintain an 'executive aura.' In other words, drop your ego. The sordid truth is that nobody ever believed your ego in the first place; they're taking advantage of you. You are paying through the nose for everything you do because you are a shallow, gullible prick. And incidentally, that's also why you screwed up the financial system.

The Vagaries of Economic Opportunity -or-How Things Actually Are

Ladies. Pretty Lady is particularly addressing you today, because she more than suspects that what she is about to say goes counter to your upbringing, your deep intuition, and your sense of Right and Wrong. This is not entirely your fault; however, these erroneous intuitions must be addressed, because they are shooting all of us in the foot.

To wit, as Will Wilkinson explains, equality of opportunity based upon things like Merit, Discipline, Intelligence, and Being A Good Girl is an unobtainable pipe dream. The real determiner of opportunity is social networking:

First, what little I know of economic sociology tells me that access to economic opportunities is deeply network-relative.

Take two college grads of similar intelligence and discipline, Anne and Betty. Anne’s best friend has a brother who just started a small technology company. He figures Anne would be a phenomenal project manager, and it turns out to be true. The company has a huge IPO and Anne ends up a rich executive in what turns out to be a glamorous firm. Betty doesn’t happen to know anyone whose brother runs a promising start-up. Does she have anything approaching an chance equal to Anne’s to get something like Anne’s highly desirable position? Obviously not. But how could she.

Second, desirable positions aren’t just boxes out there waiting to be filled. They are created, sometimes by the people who occupy them. And they may depend on contingencies of technology.

Persons in positions of Economic Dominance--i.e., men--have known these facts for millennia. People like Cleopatra and Hillary Clinton also have an excellent grasp of them. It is those of us talented, intelligent, disciplined, moral persons, who disdain to make Unfair Advantage of our nepotistic connections and personal charms, who end up perennially screwed. Or else, and simultaneously, we end up screwing each other, innocently or not.

For Pretty Lady has been in many situations where her best friend had a brother, an ex-boyfriend, an employer, a dealer, a collector, or a grandmother, who was starting a small company, an art magazine, a gallery, or an art collection, and her best friend, for reasons best known to herself, diffidently chose not to mention Pretty Lady's name, talent, intelligence, or discipline in the presence of this person. This demure behavior may go under the heading of Ethics, Tact, Courtesy, Fairness, or any number of other things, but over the years Pretty Lady has come up with another blanket heading for it. That heading is "Being a Passive-Aggressive A**hole."

Because there are Perfect Utopias, and then there are Facts. In a Perfect Utopia, one would submit one's cover letter, résumé, portfolio, statement of intent, and grade point average to a neutral committee, and one would be issued a congenial, well-paid job and a gallery exhibition in return. In the Real World, however, this never, ever happens. One can expect total indifference to one's economic survival from the vast majority of neutral committees; when one's friends exhibit this same indifference, to the extent of wilfully closing all doors of opportunity in one's face, one's friends are not one's friends any longer. They are Decorative Luxuries.

This is not to say that one should recommend a friend for an opportunity for which they are clearly unqualified. These situations come under the heading of "Sticky, Awkward Problems", and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. As ladies, our minds are constantly alive to the social horrors inherent in these situations, which is perhaps why we so frequently wish to avoid all possibility of ever getting into one, by drawing a firm boundary between Business and Friendship.

But we must be aware that when we draw that line, we are also in danger of condemning our friends, our daughters and ourselves to generations of economic dependency, subservience and obscurity. We are far better off employing our natural social and networking abilities as though our very survival, and not just our parties, depended upon them.

Postscript: It now occurs to Pretty Lady that Social Class may have a lot to do with this. Working class women have never had the luxury of pretending that they don't have to work for a living; thus they are much more forthright about the relationship between Connections and Solvency. Thus, tacky working class women openly stab other women in the back, while the decent ones over-promote their friends to the point of embarrassment. It is upper-middle-class women, largely, whose tactful diffidence threatens to turn our careers into so much wallpaper.

This Just In--Shopping is a DRUG!!!

Darlings, guess what? Pretty Lady has Arrived! A major retail marketing campaign is now bribing her! With a $25 gift card, an hors d'oeuvre reception and a big block of chocolate shaped like a First Aid kit!

Pretty Lady has never made a secret of being cheap.

However, having sold her journalistic integrity for chocolate and a bargain-basement shopping spree, she must deliver the goods. Within the bag containing her bribe, there was also, most unsubtly, a Press Packet, which she will now proceed to quote.

May 15, 2008--A new study reveals that shopping and discovering an unbelievable fashion find produces a euphoric experience greater than sky diving, kissing or eating chocolate--increasing heart rates to 192 beats per minute, more than triple the normal resting heart rate of 60. While it has long been known that many women enjoy shopping--it is something they do willingly and often--now there is evidence that shopping does actually bring physical happiness.

To hammer home the point, a couple of British Scientists at the reception wired up a number of lady volunteers with brain-electrode caps (they looked like flight helmets covered with blue and green Life Savers) and sent them Shopping for Bargains. Pretty Lady, mindful of her dignity, did not volunteer. She does have some limits.

But there you have it; shopping may be added to the list of potentially addictive activities, designed to anaesthetize our brains from addressing the grim reality of Modern Life. Pretty Lady always suspected it was so.

Happily, she may report that the managers at TJ Maxx are on top of the problem, and have counteracted the potentially dangerous effects of too much shopping by providing a distinctly depressive dressing-room experience. Nothing curbs the euphoria of finding a fetching designer dress, marked down 60%, like having to stand in line for 10 minutes at the door to the fitting room, only to discover upon finally being admitted that fully one-third of the miniscule, fluorescent cubicles within are unoccupied.

(This is why Pretty Lady far prefers, when in need of a fix, to shop in high-end stores that have spacious dressing rooms, with armchairs and cozy halogen lighting. She can try on fabulous costumes for hours, and emerge Calm and Refreshed, without spending a penny! Much more economical.)

Pretty Lady later suggested to one of the charming TJ Maxx PR department girls that the dressing room was shamefully understaffed. She remarked, 'Yes, it's our busiest time of day,' and helped herself to another chocolate.

Pretty Lady now sees clearly; her choice of careers was woefully unwise. If she had gone into PR, she, too, could travel coast to coast, dressed to the nines, hosting glamorous parties and reciting inane copy to everyone she meets. And her salary for doing so would be considerably higher than a $25 gift certificate every year or so.

But since she is who she is, she will grudgingly admit that the likes of TJ Maxx is where she does her practical shopping. She armors her hypersensitive psyche with a Teflon force field, seeks out the natural fiber fabrics in a sea of polyester, and practices Zen meditation while standing in line after loud, tedious, proletarian line. And she manages to dress fairly well.

Doom the Perceptive

As Doom has correctly perceived, Pretty Lady now has a Boutique! It is so brand new that the paint is barely dry; check back often for improvements. Pretty Lady has decided to go the Crass Commercialism route, frankly, because she has to. It is a fine thing to starve on one's own, but when other people are involved, the issue of Ethics rears its formidable head. Creditors must be paid, and dependents must be nurtured.

You will also notice that "Donate" buttons are yellowly scattered throughout; this is to remind all you darlings that if you feel that Pretty Lady's words have been of value to you in some way, then you are free to emphatically express this in concrete terms. This is, of course, an entirely voluntary option, and rest assured that Pretty Lady will continue blathering away for free, as long as she feels like it.

Advertisers Take Offense

Well, Pretty Lady has never experienced such hypocrisy in all her days. Google Ads have taken their marbles and stomped off of Pretty Lady's playground, because her Content offends them. Never mind that Sex Sells; that ads of all stripe may be viewed as blatant softcore pornography in these degenerate days. No, Google Ads is pure as the driven snow, and will not stoop to consort with a lady who gives sensible clean sex tips to good Christian families.

Pretty Lady will not bow down to such tactics; her site will remain true to her principles. She will discuss anything she likes, and will not alter her past pronouncements one jot. So if you like what Pretty Lady has to say, please feel free to hit her Rent Fund button, and/or suggest to her an ad company which is not so finicky.

UPDATE: Really, there is something Extremely Fishy about this. The element of Pretty Lady's site that Google objects to had been in existence for well over a year before they objected; they gave her three days to remove it, or else. Now Pretty Lady hears that this is happening to other sites as well, most notably one which supplies graphs, a more un-sexy topic than which she is hard put to think. And Morris suspects a 'wowser' of reporting her, which is also very, very strange.

Is this--Pretty Lady asks, quite seriously--the beginnings of Stealth Sharia Law?

The Cult of Personality

Pretty Lady is thrilled to say that a very Discerning Person has requested and received a JPEG of her latest work, complete with enough pixels to choke a goat, and has expressed sufficient satisfaction with this virtual creation to make a completely voluntary contribution to Pretty Lady's Rent Fund. Lest Pretty Lady be accused of 'making out like a bandit,' let it be known that the ideas, influences, connections, and Power Relationships involved in this transaction were all Pretty Lady's own; she is not, to her knowledge, ripping off any other artist, in whatever position in the Art World hierarchy, depending upon a Sleazy Dealer, or harming any children in her pursuit of Artistic Recognition and concomitant Financial Security.

Once upon a time, for a brief period, Pretty Lady had the honor of working with a Decent Dealer. This gentleman shared with her the secret of his Decent Dealing philosophy: "People don't buy Art," he said. "They buy a relationship with the artist. They want to know that the artist is a good person."

(Now, bear in mind that this was not, regrettably, a New York dealer voicing this heretical opinion. In New York, art collectors mainly wish to know that the artist is a Hip, Eccentric person; but the underlying philosophy holds true.)

Discerning Persons do not invest in mere Ideas and Images. They are making a down payment on Vicarious Life. So Pretty Lady is fully aware that her most recent patron, enthralled as he might be with the actual image, is also buying into the Pretty Lady Legend, and she's fine with that.

Now, what with our biological programming, and our innate human tendency toward rationalized superstition, it is not surprising that the vast majority of high-selling artists are, to put it bluntly, pale-complexioned Alpha Males. It is the way of the world. The pale-skinned Alpha is the one who keeps us safe from the barbarian hordes; of course we will drop a million or two on his cast-aluminum blow-up doll. If it keeps the Alpha happy, this is the least we can do.

But Pretty Lady notes, along with Henry Ward Beecher, that the world is changing; civilization is evolving from the Brute to the Rational; Higher Vibrations shall, eventually, prevail. All Art Investors would be wise to take note of this fact, and get in on the ground floor. Pretty Ladies with wacked-out spiritual ideals will have their day. Buy Now, for Immortality!

Health Care, Part the Second

Sweetie little Bobert! Pretty Lady just loves hearing from Bobert. He reminds her of her Granddaddy, the crotchety one--not so much for Content, as Attitude. All bluff cynicism! So adorable.

I have heard many glib comments about going into business for yourself. Try to imagine the resulitng total collapse of everything if the majority of underpaid Americans did exactly that.

That's why 40 million Americans are uninsured, and a sure-fire recipe for future disaster, when a poorly educated and penniless mob of retirees hit Social Security and Medicare age, along with those twenty million illegals Bush has refused to contront.

This system IS going to collapse.

But... you know what? Those scumbags that are making vast fortures in the here and now - actively engineering the upcoming collapse - will be gone... skipped out of the country with their ill-gotten gains... laughing all the way.

Now, Bobert, dear. Try to stop thinking of scumbags. Thinking of scumbags, Pretty Lady has it on good authority, is terrible for a person's health. Daily meditation upon the Scumbags that have Done One Wrong directly contributes to headaches, backaches, stomach ulcers, sore ankles, respiratory infecctions, cancer, liver disease, kidney failure and bags under the eyes.

Plus, this is exactly the sort of rhetoric that Hillary Clinton uses to instigate the masses into doing things Her Way.

No, as attractive as it may seem to blame all our current woes on scumbags, Pretty Lady tells you sternly to stop. Pretty Lady does not believe in Blame. Blame may exist, and may be appropriately apportioned, but Blame never fixed anybody's tooth. So out with it.

Now, Bobert. As you so astutely point out, astronomical health-care costs plus millions of uncared-for persons present a Problem. The nature of this Problem, as you imply, is Systemic. It affects, not merely the Scumbags and the Irresponsible, but the vast majority of all of us, insured or not.

Thus, it seems to Pretty Lady that the vast majority of us have a vested interest in pondering this problem.

Pretty Lady points out the obvious, merely in order to make the point that the interests of the individual and those of the the Whole are not necessarily and permanently at odds. Individuals may work with the Whole, on behalf of the Whole, with the Whole in mind, and not necessarily be Totalitarian Control Freaks, like Hillary Clinton. There is a danger of such, of course, but it is not a given.

Pretty Lady grounds herself in the obvious, then, in order to move on to Bobert's initial point.

Medicaly speaking, the problem always has been that large groups get a good price break for medical insurance, while the individual gets hammered...It used to be a trade-off, until the medical community and the insurance companies raised the cost of having good health through the stratosphere.

In economic terms, as Bobert demonstrates, it is frequently in the interests of individuals to Pool their Resources. This lessens the shock to the system of catastrophe, and allows for the potential efficiency of Bulk Processing to enter the picture. Pretty Lady would elaborate, except that she knows that none of her readers are stupid, and are perfectly able to fill in the blanks.

HOWEVER, and AT THE SAME TIME, economic and health care interests are also served by the individual having maximum control over how those resources are spent. See: Free Market Capitalism.

Moreover, the notion of 'health insurance' is patently stupid and unworkable, for the same reasons that Car Repair Service Plans are a scam. When the head gasket blows, it is no earthly good to have a car-repair plan that provides two oil changes and a tune-up. Tune-ups and oil changes are relatively cheap; head gaskets, as Pretty Lady knows from vile experience, are basically prohibitive.

So, to recap the Obvious Points:

1) It is in the best interests of Society At Large to have healthy citizens, and as few destitute diseased persons dying in the streets as possible, spreading germs and and despair far and wide.

2) It is in the best interests of Individual Health and Economic Well-Being to seek out the best care at the lowest prices, and laugh in the faces of incompetent dentists who present them with deadpan $13,000 estimates.

So then, what is wrong with individually managed medical savings accounts, coupled with catastrophic coverage in a pool?

Chiefly, Pretty Lady supposes, the problem with individual control and responsibility for preventive healthcare, paired with group risk management, is that the elaborate systems in place for milking people without their consent would have to go. Unless, say, an existing HMO were sufficiently efficient, pleasant and effective to induce the individual to voluntarily pay for a Plan. The vast numbers of persons drawing a paycheck for shuffling paper and vetoing treatments would, unfortunately, have to learn an actual Useful Skill.

This might be good for their health, however.

Vocationality

Hello, sweeties! Pretty Lady is Home Again, and she is veritably thrilled to say that she does not hate New York in the summertime quite as much as she did formerly. She will still be leaving again at the earliest opportunity, but for the nonce she is quite content to stroll up and down Fifth, sampling the new crop of Bar and Bistro Boutiques with her cute and cuddly friends, and incidentally getting paid to give groups of people common-sense advice. As Charles Murray recommends:

A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care.

Indeed! Pretty Lady is here to tell you that although she foolishly and ignorantly went ahead and collected a couple of useless college degrees, she doesn't care about them one bit. The degree that is buttering Pretty Lady's bread today is a wholesome, cheap, practical Vocational Certification, attainable by anyone with an IQ of 85 or above, and a modicum of patience and self-discipline. Pretty Lady is here to lend every bit of status she's got to the Vocational School paradigm, and that's firm. Fie on those silly colleges!

Moreover, Pretty Lady has a few choice words to say on the subject of Employment. Whatever is up with this assumption that anyone who works for a living must necessarily have a single, monolithic, authoritarian, all-powerful and all-resented Employer? Are we all children? Must our world-views eternally encompass some sort of Daddy figure on whom to blame our problems? And where are all these Daddies coming from, anyway?

Pretty Lady would like to make the sharp suggestion that anyone with an Authority Problem try employing herself for a year or two. A person learns more about the problems and illusions and inutility of Authority by being one's own boss for six months than one does in five decades of servile Employment.

Meanwhile, Pretty Lady has an Employer arriving any moment now, who will be her boss for the next hour and twenty minutes, so she will leave you all to ponder.

American Airlines Has Some Problems

This is the best Pretty Lady could do for a title without becoming Vulgar.

You see, Pretty Lady was supposed to be On Vacation today. She was supposed to be in her homeland, perhaps toodling down I-35 toward Austin, her best friend at her side and a six-pack of Shiner in the cooler.

She is not. She is still in hot, muggy, grimy Brooklyn. This is American Airlines' fault.

Oh, Pretty Lady is quite aware that the there was a bit of Weather last night; she even saw the lightning. There were some rather disturbing flooding conditions round the Marble Falls area. She does not dispute these facts.

However, it would have behooved American Airlines to:

1) Inform her of these facts;

2) Apologize;

3) Inform her of her options as regards waiting in line for hours and hours and hours, with no evidence that any flight could be obtained, except for increasingly ugly rumours flying around the crowd, that no planes could be had till Sunday.

Pretty Lady has worked, herself, in Public Service for years. She has experienced her share of confrontations with angry persons whom it was beyond her power to help. And she knows, firsthand, the difference it makes when a Public Servant is courteous to these same people; when compassion and commiseration are expressed, together with an honest assessment of the situation at hand.

So it is with great confidence that she states that the employees of American Airlines, in the ticketing and check-in sectors of LaGuardia Airport, are Incompetent, Discourteous, Unhelpful, Offensive, and Not Doing Their Jobs. Telling a stranded traveler, "That flight has been cancelled. Stand in that line," is Not Enough. It is Dereliction of Duty. It is Gross Negligence.

The proper phrase is, "I'm terribly sorry. There have been some awful weather conditions all across the country this evening, and we've had to cancel a lot of flights. We're doing the best we can to re-book people, but confidentially, that line is really long. You may be standing in it for several hours, and then then best chance of getting you out of here is, realistically, Friday. Do you have a place to stay in the area? Why don't you go to it, and call this number, and stay on hold in the comfort of your own home. We're terribly sorry."

Would that have been so difficult?

Pretty Lady Throws a Tantrum

Pretty Lady is shocked. It seems that the Art Funding Powers that Be find Pretty Lady to be an insufficiently compelling BS artist.

This strikes Pretty Lady as nothing short of incredible. Here she has been, day after day, month after month, year after year, proving that her BS skills are so finely honed as to be almost Second Nature. She produces ream after ream of muddy, pretentious, overwritten, arch prose which can be read on literal grounds, ironic grounds, and metaphysical grounds, wherein each reading contradicts the others. Chaos, confusion, exasperation and controversy follow in her wake, as well as a certain amount of Irrational Adulation.

What more does an Art Funding Organization require? They definitely do not require that the actual art be compelling in any way, since they have declined to look at it. No, Art Funding Organizations make no bones about the fact that such impenetrable BS artistry is what impresses them, and Pretty Lady has given it to them. And still they have turned her down.

Moreover, the Art Funding Powers that Be have had the unmitigated gall to send Pretty Lady a request for donations, in the same week in which they declined to view her application. She would have sent them their own rejection letter in their donations envelope, except that her printer is out of ink, and she cannot afford another cartridge. Since she is not, in fact, funded.

(This action would indubitably come across as childish and spiteful, and so perhaps Pretty Lady's lack of printer cartridges comes as a minor blessing.)

It is at times like this that Pretty Lady turns her thoughts to the Wider Viewpoint, since the smaller one is irritatingly grim. She sees a certain karmic harmony in the Art Funding Organization asking her for money, after she asked them for money; indeed, she has received exactly what she put out into the world. She sees a certain absurdist risibility in the fact that a Visual Art Funding application provides no opportunity for an artist to display any visuals. And she finds her fundamental view of the world profoundly reinforced; that our value is bestowed by God, from Within, and has nothing to do with External Valuation by crass, pretentious, ego-driven Arts Funding Professionals. Or it had better not have.

Hmph.

Caveat Emptor -or- How Not To Buy a House

3,500 Lbs. of Bat Guano Found in Attic

BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. — An upstate New York couple didn't think a few bats in the attic were much of a problem when they were buying a house last summer.

Months later, they found out how wrong they were when they discovered more than a ton and a half of bat droppings up there.

Nick LaBoda and Jenna Caputo say a home inspector informed them about the bats. They called an exterminator, who told them to wait a while before removing the bats because the babies were too young to fly.

Then they forgot about the bats until they smelled a foul odor in January. When they checked the attic, they found dead bats and piles of guano.

An exterminator says hundreds of bats had been living in the attic, leaving behind 3,500 pounds of droppings.

It cost $25,000 to clean up the mess, and the couple's insurance company wouldn't cover it. They're fighting it out in court.

Pretty Lady has no sympathy for these people at all. Because:

1) Who would buy a house without even glancing into the attic? Attics are Extremely Important! Pretty Lady herself would make a point of visiting the attic on her very first perusal of a potential homestead! Attics could contain trunks full of antique dresses, or Private Archives, or Chippendale furniture, or swords, or skeletons, or first editions, or hundreds of bats!

2) If the attic was large enough to sustain 3,500 lbs of bat guano without collapsing the ceiling, these people's incuriosity as to the contents of said attic was even more inexcusable. Such pedestrian minds do not DESERVE any attic at all, bats or no.

3) Who in their right minds would pay anyone $25,000 to remove bat guano from their attic? That, by Pretty Lady's calculations, is seven dollars a pound! For that kind of cash, Pretty Lady would have no trouble spending a couple of weeks with a shovel and a case of heavy-duty garbage bags.

4) Did these people not even think to contact a fertilizer company, or several, and auction off their guano to the highest bidder? Pretty Lady is willing to bet that whoever cleared it out is making more than a pretty penny on the transaction.

5) If these people knew they had bats in their attic, why did they not gather every evening at sunset, with a couple of lawn chairs and some beer, and watch the bats come out, first in ones and twos, in corkscrew flight configurations, then in a massive, eerie and awesome cloud? Pretty Lady has traveled to more than one exotic location and paid good money to do this.

In conclusion: These people are stupid and boring, and deserve whatever trouble comes to them.

The Rules

Pretty Lady must give a sigh of amused exasperation; her friend Crom appears to be determined to push boundaries today.

not knowing your opinion on strangers sending you packages, I decided that discretion would be the better course of action and did not send it. However, should our acquaintance last throughout the year, perhaps a bottle of Booker's will wind it's way to the Big Apple for a very merry Christmas, after all.

As a general rule--being, after all, a Lady--Pretty Lady will accept modest tokens of respect and esteem from relative strangers. These tokens may include books, flowers, original artwork, concert tickets, CDs, bottles of liquor, and Paypal tips.

They do not, however, encompass jewelry, automobiles, lingerie, electronic gadgets, or four-page calligraphic proposals of matrimony. Neither do they include the only extant photo of your birth mother who sold you to the Americans when you were an infant, the original handwritten manuscript of your unedited first novel, or any severed portion of your anatomy.

If you send Pretty Lady an unsolicited nude photograph of yourself, however artistically posed, she will not respond to any further correspondence she should happen to receive from you. The male of the species is recurrently prey to the delusion that ladies appreciate the things that he would appreciate, if the situation were reversed; nothing could be farther from the truth.

A Rebuttal

Bobert? Oh, Bobert? k has something to say to you. To refresh your memory:

Bobert:

The sad part is that while we as a nation were working on solving workplace inequities, wages nosedived when millions of women entered the workplace quite willing to work for less. And I'm not trying to stir up a political firestorm either, it's just a fact.

Basic supply and demand... millions more willing workers at every skill level in every occupation flooding the market suppressed wages, and they've stayed suppressed.

k:

And I hear you, too, bobert.

I understand your sense of loss, at least as well as someone like me can. The world you'd envisioned, the one that seemed promised to you, didn't come through for you.

But to me?

That lost world was intrinsically unfair to women, and to many others.

An employer willing to discriminate against women, blacks, and others is certainly ready and willing to treat white males unfairly as well. I have never ignored that fact.

Once you know them to discriminate, you have seen their true character. Even if you're a member of the only group they seem willing to employ, their character is clear; and you should understand immediately that you may not have a fair future with them.

That *two parent/one working* family many envisioned was one where the man worked outside the home, and the woman inside. Not necessarily by choice. That was never a goal I worked toward, myself.

My own goal, from my earliest memories, was to be a free and self-supporting person. That meant taking personal responsibility for my financial life, too. When women are forced by law and/or custom to depend upon someone else for their income, for their food and medicine and the roof over their head, for their children, they are not free.

They are not allowed to take true personal responsibility for their own lives. So, to add insult to injury, they are scorned as being not quite responsible people. Not quite mature and grown up.

That goal you describe as something mutually sought sounds a bit like this: Woman marries man, bears and raises his kids; man brings home bacon. Woman worked like a dog - but not for money. Therefore, she wasn't entitled to Social Security benefits when she became disabled or old; neither was she usually allowed benefits under any of the welfare programs now in place. Those were reserved for the *working* people: men.

You may not have gotten paid fairly for your work, given your background. How would you feel if you weren't even allowed to get that kind of background in the first place?

See, women did enter the military and college, but it was extremely difficult, and rare. The veteran preference, plus that 2-year college degree you got, were essentially unavailable to even well-qualified women.

I was born in 1958. My first job, 15 years later - where I had to lie about my age to get a job - was $1.25 per hour.

Four years later, I worked for the US Post Office. It was considered a decent blue-collar job. Something a man could raise a family on.

I was the first woman working my shift at that post office. Ever. My presence was deeply resented; I was told more than once, with bitter venom, that I was stealing food from a good man by taking that job. Oh, stealing the food right out of his children's mouths, I was.

It was hard to get that PO job, even though I scored extremely high on my entrance exam. See, there were a lot of military vets coming home looking for civilian work. They got a 10-point preference on the test. Affirmative Action for Veterans.

What what happened with me at the post office was this: women were now granted a point preference too. Since I scored so high to begin with, this didn't actually affect me, but the men working there assumed it did.

I bore the brunt of their anger and hatred for some time. It was really vicious, but I won't bore you with the grisly details. However: At 5' 2" and 105 pounds, I unloaded the semi-trucks, etc. at about twice the production rate of the men. After the first several months, most of my (still 100% male) coworkers felt much differently about me. By the time I quit, I'd become a sort of mascot, a welcomed and even loved co-worker. The few holdouts who still spat on the ground in front of me, etc., did it rarely, any more.

It's not that employers threw open their doors to hire women because they suddenly realized we'd be cheaper to employ than men. We had to get the right to work by filing nasty lawsuits. Ones that, I think, most of us would have greatly preferred to do without. And I really do think those lawsuits that said we should get paid the same as men when we do the same job, should be prima facie evidence that we didn't actually choose to work for less money. We took it because it was a choice between unfair employment or no employment at all.

Starvation, especially if you have dependants, is not Taking Personal Responsibility. Not at all.

To have you or your kids do without essentials because women can't work, or get paid much less for the same job, then to be told we are irresponsible for that very act of working, is not just.

To be blamed for ruining the economic lives of everyone around us for doing so isn't just, either.

I truly do sympathize with you for your sense of loss. That ideal of a one working parent golden age is lamented by many. However: I also believe that what was lost was a position of superiority that was unearned, unmerited, and undeserved. In other words, the loss of something that didn't belong to those people in the first place.

So while I feel for you and others as individuals, I feel no sympathy for that group of society as a whole. I never stole food out of their mouths. They did steal it out of mine.

And I feel a powerful sense of gladness at the sight of young women today, going into the workplace with the firm - not quite accurate, but firm - belief that by working just as hard as a man they can get just as good a job, and get paid the same amount that the man does.

Even though those same young women have absolutely no idea what women like me went through to get them there.

I hope you have daughters or granddaughters or nieces, so that you can be happy for them, instead of sorry at losing what was not really so right after all.

Ba-dump-chi.

Home ec

Awww, Pretty Lady thinks y'all are so cute, bringing up contentious topics, paying attention to each other, hashing out theories and conceding one another's points. She just wishes she could have all of you over for a nice cozy dinner party. She thinks, at this point, that most of you are properly housebroken. As her friend k notes:

I love to cook. But I absolutely DETESTED Home Ec. Most of it revolved around teaching us to be servile and submissive to some future husband, rather than truly running a household. Running a household is a very important skill for every one of us.

Well, but of course! Pretty Lady has never understood why the concept of Keeping House is equated, in so many people's minds, with the concept of Thankless, Unending Drudgery. It seems to her that plowing, as a general rule, is much more suited to this description, and she is eternally grateful to her female forbears for suggesting that the gentlemen take it on. Along with hunting, chopping wood, digging ditches, building barns, and fighting hostile invaders.

No, compared with such onerous tasks, it is a positive delight to be allowed to stay home and experiment with recipes. Moreover, when a person is creatively Stuck for one reason or another, there is nothing more calming than putting things in neat, homogenous piles, whether they be books or paint rags, running around with a vacuum and a couple of sponges, and filling the essential oil burner with a combination of ylang-ylang, lavender, and vetiver. It Clears the Mind and Soul.

(BTW, it is a very good thing that vetiver oil is so dense that it takes about forty seconds for a single drop to detach itself from the bottle. One drop of vetiver oil will provide clarity and grounding in your home for the next four days, minimum. It is important to balance it with something lighter and sweeter, such as rose or ylang-ylang, and to make sure you like it before buying a bottle. It is not so easily undone.)

No, Pretty Lady finds this sort of activity infinitely preferable to Living in Squalor, which appears to be the choice of persons who refuse to be spiritually debased by the act of Doing Housework.

However, she finds it tragic that most humans did not appear to have been raised by anyone resembling Pretty Lady's Mommy. It profoundly shocked her, the day she realized that most of her friends had no idea that you cannot cook broccoli for one-tenth of the amount of time you can cook a tomato--let alone any specialized knowledge about proofing yeast, kneading, or how to get stains off the teapot. In fact, these poor ignorant souls didn't even know how to make tea.

So the fact that Pretty Lady's Best Friend has given her, as a most generous gift, the book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House is like bringing coals to Newcastle, to put it mildly. Pretty Lady is using it for occasional reference, only, since it basically sets out the information that Pretty Lady had assumed was common knowledge, passed on from one Mommy to the next. A word to the wise.

A common misconception that Pretty Lady notes, in housework-averse individuals, is that this sort of thing takes up all of one's time, if one gets involved with it at all. This is a load of nonsense. It takes infinitely more time to resolve the distress, inconvenience and, sometimes, debilitating injuries and illness that arise from living in chaos and squalor than it does to do something about it. We pick up piles of laundry, shoes and half-finished manuscripts, not because we are anal retentive, but because tripping on these things every time we turn around slows us down immensely. We cook healthy meals because restaurants and cancer care are expensive, and thus require a large number of man-hours to pay for. We take out the garbage and do our laundry because nobody wants to hire a person who smells.

Any notion that a person cannot be Creatively Fulfilled if he or she lifts a finger to take out the garbage is four-year-old reasoning, and Pretty Lady wishes to hear no more about it.

Health. Care.

Darlings. Pretty Lady has a serious request to make of you.

She knows, in general, that all of you dears turn to her at the end of a weary day, for a little Light Relief. She endeavors not to tackle Serious Issues; in particular, she is highly allergic to issues that require, or seem to require, political solutions. Pretty Lady prefers to avoid politics. She is morally opposed to politics as a blanket rule, in fact--but that is a different story.

However, Pretty Lady is obliged to confess to you that she does, indeed, have her moments of Serious Thinking. She is sorry to shock you, but it's true. One of her pet hobbies is busying her pretty little brain upon the problem of Healthcare. That is, the Care of one's Health, and the concomitant systems that have arisen, and might arise, thereof.

And she is devastated to inform you that, bluntly, the 'Healthcare' system we are now laboring under, in her current home country of the U.S. of A., is not. Is not and does not. Period.

You see, what we have, currently, is a system based upon the concept of 'health insurance.' This, at face value, is a bunch of baloney. How in the world does one 'insure' health? Given that the biological facts of the situation are overwhelmingly, that is one hundred percent, stacked against us?

Because we are all, every one of us, one hundred percent mortal. Pretty Lady is sorry if she is the first to break this to you.

Thus, 'health insurance' companies are promising the impossible. For this imaginary service of protecting you against the utterly inevitable, they quite properly charge a hefty fee. Moreover, as soon as one show signs of incipient mortality, the 'health insurance' company, for reasons of excellent business, refuses to insure you any longer. 'Health insurance' companies, then, exist for the sole purposes of taking your money and giving nothing in return.

What, then, is going on in the minds of those hapless persons who are actually paying them?

The fond delusion nurtured by the 'insured,' in fact, is that they are paying for the privilege of receiving astronomically expensive 'health care' upon such occasion as they, most unfortunately, might happen to need it. In essence, they are betting that their health will require care to the tune of more money than they originally invest in the 'insurance.' In other words, they are expecting to get something for nothing.

First law of economics, physics, karma, and simple existence: You cannot get something for nothing.

Ya.

This impossible situation is further confused, conflated, and screwed up by the fact that there are all sorts of attendant industries, bureaucracies, research institutes, professionals, and overtly fraudulent set-ups geared to extract the maximum Something for the minimum Nothing that they can possibly leverage from the screwed-up system. Nobody acts to Bring Down the system, of course, because so many people's very livelihoods depend upon it.

Not the livelihoods of the 'insured,' however; these are the ones which are maximally expendable. Because once the system has bled them financially dry, obviously there is no more use for them.

Ergo this engenders, daily, hourly, nightmare stories like that of Pretty Lady's beloved friend, k.

I hardly ever get the fever and chills any more. But I'm still sleeping around 18 hours a day, partly from allergies. The pain in the foot is still intense. The shin bone is tender, and the ankle too. But the foot itself, internally scarred from the abscess in 2004, is by far the most affected by pain.

If I walk just a few steps, the pain ramps up, and lasts for hours or days.

And I still don't have a working scooter, even for home use. All I can do is sit around with my feet elevated, letting the things I need done go undone, letting my life slowly fall apart around me.

Yesterday, for the very first time, a certain realization hit me full force: If I'd had a working scooter - instead of the defective one delivered in July and never replaced - the infection would probably not have happened. The incompetence of the equipment company and the HMO is the primary cause of this terrible new infection, more permanent damage and permanently increased pain, and almost the loss of my leg.

After the infection, with a working transportable scooter, I wouldn't have been stuck here for a month, unable to go anywhere or do anything. I would not have fainted at the pain doctor's office from the strain of walking 150 feet. I would not have felt the intense pain I do every time I walk from my office chair to the kitchen or bathroom or front door.

My written complaint to the Medicare HMO about the scooter issue was finally addressed, over a week after submission. The person calling me from the complaint department had no idea I was complaining about the durable medical equipment company as well, including allegations of fraud. Even though this was included in the complaint she was supposedly reading, right in front of her.

Although it is a deeply painful experience, more so for those who have known this lovely lady well enough and long enough to feel an abiding interest in her wellbeing, Pretty Lady nevertheless recommends that you go and read a great deal more of what k has to say about health, her HMO, Medicare, and all the rest of it. It is like a thriller and a horror movie and Kafka all rolled into one. You will never be bored.

You will then, as perhaps never before, be convinced that 'health insurance' as it is practiced in the great state of Florida, at the very least, has nothing at all to do with Health Care.

Now, there are two separate issues before Pretty Lady, as the situation now stands. One is the Personal. Pretty Lady happens to Care, Personally, a very great deal for her friend k. This is key. Because Pretty Lady Cares, Personally, for this limpid and inspiring soul, and wishes for her to remain on this planet for as long as possible, spreading her limpid influence, Pretty Lady is urging everyone who Cares for Pretty Lady to go over and offer her friend some support. If you happen to have excess financial resources, there is a convenient 'Donate' button for you to press. If, like Pretty Lady, your resources are constrained, Moral Support will do just fine. K, being rare and radiant, absorbs a great deal of healing from such things.

On the other hand--the hand of International Affairs, the hand of Politics and all Things Grand--what do you think Pretty Lady is going to say? Is she going to call, righteously, for universal Socialized Medicine? For a Compassionate Culture? For the People to forcefully rob the coffers of the rich, and scatter infinite health and wellbeing round the planet, so that everyone lives happily ever after?

The fact is, Pretty Lady doesn't know. She might, eventually. If that's the most judicious option.

But before she makes any such sweeping propositions, she feels compelled to point out a few things.

1) Health is most efficiently nurtured by those who Care most about it. The person to whom one's health matters most is, usually, oneself. Thus, one's Health is, first and foremost, best Cared for by the sussing out, assessing, allocating, and applying of all resources, financial and otherwise, FOR ONESELF. Not by a faceless institution that exists merely to rip one off and usher one silently and efficiently into the grave.

2) Health Care may include, but is not limited to, access to strange, myriad, wondrous, mysterious, and above all, expensive Drugs. In fact, in Pretty Lady's experience, the better one Cares for one's Health, the fewer of these dicey Drugs one is likely to need.

SO, framing "Healthcare" as a system primarily to support the existence of myriad drug companies may greatly assist the drug companies, but it is not necessarily synonymous with Health. And indeed, may be counterproductive to it.

3) Hoary but useful Cliché of the Day: An ounce of Prevention is worth a pound of Cure.

That is, unless one is SELLING the CURE.

Pretty Lady suspects that one very large reason that the "Healthcare System" is so stingy on Prevention is that it is so heavily interested in selling cures. That, and in covering its own butt; there is a reason that doctors these days compulsively order masses of expensive and, in most cases, useless diagnostic tests. They are not nearly so concerned about your financial well-being as their own, and medical malpractice lawsuits cost them money.

All of these truths may seem to be self-evident. The problem is, our current 'healthcare' system rarely seems to acknowledge them, in practice if not in word. Until these obvious truths are taken into account, all efforts at amending a 'healthcare' system are bound to be in vain. They will bankrupt even the rich, before putting a dent in the sufferings of the poor.

Because, darlings, the current 'health insurance' system is simply a spiralling financial sink, spreading misery and ruin among those it purportedly exists to help. One is, like Pretty Lady, almost better off without it. Until one is mowed down by cancer or a bus; then, it seems, it is those who Care who are dragged deep into the vortex, with no escape.

UPDATE: From Desert Cat:

Now the good news! I do believe I have convinced our girl to go out immediately and purchase for herself a scooter that will serve her present needs, while waiting for the insurance issue to be settled in whatever manner it eventually will. I promised her that I had a herd of horses I was holding in reserve to assist her financially with this very necessary step.

She is a bit overwhelmed at the thought, but grateful nonetheless.

Therefore, as the simplest and most straightforward way to make this happen, won't you please trek on over to her website and hit that "Make A Donation" button located on her left sidebar? This way she will be able to purchase the specific scooter that best meets her needs, rather than any of us trying to figure out which one would work best for her.

Her Walter is coming home Monday afternoon (choirs of angels sing!), and I think it would be absolutely fabulous if she had enough cash in her account to go out with him then and purchase the scooter she so badly needs.

Thank you all for your generosity, whatever amount you are able to contribute. And if you are broke, believe me, the moral support you offer her is also very much appreciated, maybe more than you know.


Thwack the button! Thwack the button!

The Thrifty Girl's Spa

Please forgive Pretty Lady's blissed-out silence. She spent the whole of yesterday in Sinful Abandon. Lacking the resources to book a day at Bliss (although she hears tell that they have gift certificates, hint, hint), she emailed a number of similarly stressed-out and impoverished girlfriends, and we all descended upon the exotic Russian Turkish Baths on the Lower East Side. So Olde Worlde! So brusque, the fellow at the desk, with the lock-boxes! (They do not take payment in advance; they simply hold your wallet hostage while you are nude and defenseless, and charge you for all the scrubbings afterward.) So primitive, the facilities! They have been there, it seems, well over one hundred years. So Pretty Lady's Spa Day may take on historical significance.

Wednesdays, as well, are Women-Only days, which added to the party atmosphere. No wimpy, sensitive gentlemen were around to complain when we added peppermint oil to the steam jet, coated the sinks and floors with sea-salt, almond oil and deep-conditioners, and freely discussed bikini waxing, while doing sauna-yoga in the nude.

It has been Pretty Lady's frequent observation, during her years at women-only bathhouses, that females who appear most lumpy and awkward in clothing are the most glorious without it. Those little coat-hanger clothes-horses show to scrawny disadvantage while bathing; it is the odd, gnome-like women who appear as Earth Goddesses in their altogether. Or so she sees it, from a purely aesthetic perspective. Any other perspective is a closed book to her, despite the most strenuous urgings of her wannabe-sex-radical boyfriends.

Later, of course, it was Sushi. Sushi is the only acceptable post-sauna repast, in Pretty Lady's opinion. So clean, so nourishing, so free of extraneous sticky grease. After that, trolling the Lower East Side funky-clothing basement shops, winter-boot shopping, and chai tea on the couch at the Himalayan café. Pretty Lady scored an uneven-hemline, gypsy-Goth white lace skirt at bargain basement prices.

Now back to our regularly scheduled drudgery. Sigh.

Grrr.

Pretty Lady hates it when a wishy-washy client with no boundaries calls up with a sob story, books an appointment during the time she normally goes to yoga class, then no-shows without a phone call. This client said she was 'having lots of personal problems'; Pretty Lady can guess what some of those personal problems might stem from. Alienating one's healthcare practitioner is a radically efficient way to cut oneself adrift in the world without a safety net.

How nice it is to be self-employed, however. One has an infinite number of employers, and is not tethered by a single rope to a single flake.