Bette Davis Overload

Pretty Lady has figured out that the chief benefit of her new hairdo is that it goes so well with her CarolAnn Wachter hat collection.


Sadly, if this phase continues, she's going to have to invest in another tube of Pompeii-colored lipstick. The old one has fossilized from lack of use.


Ah, well. Back to the twentieth century with thee, Bette, dear.


Update: How do y'all like this for a new profile photo?

Okay, that does it

Pretty Lady has formally capitulated to her Little Brother. She just sent him a note to this effect. Her mind is made up. It is High Time for her to purchase a firearm, and learn how to use one. Not necessarily in that order.

Pretty Lady's Little Brother has expressed some Quiet Concern about her safety, in the past; he even went so far, back in her San Francisco ghetto days, as to present her with a stun gun for her personal use. Her sadomasochistic then-boyfriend expressed some prurient interest in the possible erotic side-effects of the recreational use of this weapon, but did not go so far as to volunteer as a test case. She parked it on the molding above her bedroom door, and as far as she can recall, it is still there.

But as pacifistic and fundamentally uninterested in weapons as Pretty Lady may be, she has always trusted that her Little Brother, and others like him, were Around. It is still her instinct, whenever something pesky and mechanical requires attention, such as the starter on her car or the drainpipe under the sink, to drop her hands and call for Little Brother, even though he lives half a continent away. Similarly, she never worries overmuch about deranged lone gunmen bursting through her door and spraying bullets everywhere, because something in the back of her mind relies upon Little Brother to unclip the 9 mm. from under the dashboard or silverware drawer or kitchen table or wherever, and take the fellow out.

It is slowly beginning to dawn upon her reptile brain that not only does Little Brother live too far away to arrive in a timely manner, but when he got here he probably wouldn't be allowed to traverse the Holland Tunnel. Not with all those weapons in his trunk.

However, if Pretty Lady put her mind to it, she would probably be a fairly successful weapons-smuggler, simply because she's Not The Type. She can't imagine that it would occur to the most paranoid police officer to frisk her or her Pathfinder for contraband, after she rolls down the window and greets them with a cheery invitation to do so. At least, they have never done so in the past.

(Vehicle registration card and insurance, though--that's another matter. Pretty Lady hates paperwork.)

At breakfast this morning, Pretty Lady was mildly irritated by the sound of helicopters. After a bit, she glanced out of the kitchen window; several of these ominous machines, marked 'NYPD,' were hovering nearby, carooming back and forth over the canal. An experimental call to '311' produced nothing but a beeping noise. The radio continued providing perky little updates on the war in Iraq, and NYTimes Online supplied more reams of grainy video about the Virginia Tech Shooter. Queries regarding 'Helicopters Over Gowanus Canal--Breaking News' turned up a blank.

Let it be known that Pretty Lady is not becoming a Paranoid Right-Wing Freak who looks over her shoulder at every suspicious noise. She is not Cowering, she is not Terrified. She has simply decided that the sensible thing to do is to have a few more Practical Tools at her disposal. She's got the power drill (or rather, her neighbor has it, this week), the socket wrenches, the pliers, the iron and the vacuum cleaner--all, come to think, supplied by the A.A. in gentler days. A shotgun or two would not come amiss, perhaps rolled up in a failed canvas, or strapped over the studio door.

In other news, Pretty Lady volunteered for an ad that said 'Hair Models Needed,' and lucked out! She got the cucumbers-on-the-eyelids treatment, bergamot conditioner, and the Best Haircut Ever, for free! Of course she tipped. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Go read this

Now.

Wow

Pretty Lady and Dano struck gold yesterday evening. They highly, highly recommend that you all visit Edmar Castaneda's website and listen, although the experience will necessarily be dimmer and less all-enthralling than sitting in the back room at Barbés and hearing him play a live WFUV broadcast. He does not precisely play; he dances, joyfully, with his Columbian harp. Pretty Lady has never seen a roomful of slightly intoxicated alternative-radio fans hunker down in quite such a hypnotized fashion.

UPDATE: OOP! It was WFMU radio. Where Pretty Lady came up with WFUV, she doesn't know...hmph...

On Integrity

Pretty Lady is delighted to discover that her Daddy has a fan club! A fan club, moreover, not dominated by aficionados of state-of-the-art fighter planes!

So, to wash a little more Angry Atheist venom out from between her molars, Pretty Lady would like to indulge in a bit of instructive Daddy-worship, if it's all the same to you.

The legend in Pretty Lady's family goes back to her Great-Granddaddy, Pops. Pops owned a hardware store, out in the middle of nowhere. Folks would come into this hardware store, stating their interest in purchasing a new stove.

"What's wrong with the old one?" Pops would inquire.

"Dunno, it just stopped working."

"Have you tried changing the whosamajiggy?" Pops replied.

"Nope, can't say that I have," said the customer.

"Look, I'll make a deal with you. Take this little whosamajiggy, put it in the old stove, and see if that takes care of the problem. If it doesn't, then I'll sell you a new stove."

Well, dad gum if that didn't take care of it.

Perhaps you dears may wonder how Pops stayed in business at all, what with his extreme unwillingness to part with high-ticket items upon explicit request. Well, his attitude bred such unaccountable loyalty in his customers, that along about Great Depression time, Pops stayed in business when nobody else did.

This habit of looking out for the rock-bottom interests of all parties to transactions, and not merely those of self, then, is a multi-generational tradition in Pretty Lady's family. It is part of the air we breathe, and at this point is scarcely subject to conscious consideration. Pretty Lady practices this habit in her own business, unlike her former employer the Wall Street chiropractor, whose business plan entailed corraling a few paralegals and UPS couriers with generous health-insurance plans, and threatening them with crippling disabilities if they didn't come to see him three times a week. Pretty Lady got pretty sick of rubbing down the same hairy-backed UPS guy all the time, she can tell you that.

When Pretty Lady's clients ask her how often they should come in, she invariably replies, "Listen to your body, dear. You're responsible for your own health, and I wouldn't want to bankrupt you. Although if you wait longer than six weeks, we'll be starting again from scratch."

Pretty Lady is thus not rich, but her clients trust her.

Back to Daddy, though--one of the things about Daddy is that Pretty Lady has never, never, never heard him adhering to a legalistic argument in order to weasel out of an implied responsibility. Perish the thought. Once a commitment is made, it is total and unquestioned, no matter if unforeseen and inconvenient circumstances arise. Daddy is the Rock of the extended family; he has shepherded his parents, siblings, cousins, wife's siblings, stray friends and offspring through more sticky and embarrassing and, sometimes, financially draining crises than anyone has bothered to count. Nobody has ever heard Pretty Lady's Daddy utter the words, "Well, I never said I would...". He simply does, and does not hold a grudge afterward.

At the same time, Daddy never pretends to be someone he is not. Early in her parents' marriage, they moved to a new town where some distant cousins were members of High Society. Like good cousins, they invited Pretty Lady's parents to High Society dinner parties. Daddy, a young engineer, was seated next to many expansive oil millionaires who casually discussed the charter jet they'd taken to the party in Baja last weekend, with their twelve best friends. Daddy was rather bored, but polite.

Then the complimentary tickets to the High Society Ball arrived. Daddy returned them, with thanks, and the comment, "Thank you very much, but I am afraid we cannot afford to sustain this kind of lifestyle." Mommy kept a stiff upper lip.

Many times in latter years, particularly in adolescence, Pretty Lady suffered from snide comments and party-invitation-exclusions from Noveau Riche social climbers, who were aspiring to membership in the High Society clan that Pretty Lady's family had voluntarily exited. The knowledge that this sort of thing is gauche, tacky and low-class in the extreme did not entirely make up for her empty social calendar--but really. As Daddy says, and Pretty Lady concurs, those people are boring anyway! Why bother?

(Now, of course, when Pretty Lady goes home, the society ladies who volunteer at the Modern Art Museum are all agog to hear about her latest New York exhibition, but that is all by the way.)

And it goes without saying that cheating on his taxes, or on Mommy, is something so inconceivably beyond the pale in Daddy's universe that it does not bear discussion.

Whenever Pretty Lady has an ethical decision to make, the first question that springs to her mind is "What would Daddy do?" When she once borrowed a friend's five-year-old, factory-second camping tent, and the tent was subsequently stolen out of her trunk, she paid the friend the original cost of the tent without question. Then she received another call. "For another two hundred dollars I can replace it at REI, with a money-back guarantee. The old one had a money-back guarantee. Please give me two hundred dollars more."

At the time, Pretty Lady had not only suffered a robbery, but an assault, and was surfing friends' couches while searching for a home in a safer neighborhood. She was barely making financial ends meet in the ghetto, and needed to come up with the down payment on a new and more expensive place. She was also in a state of shell-shock. Her first inclination was to hang up on this so-called 'friend' and never call back.

But, after much consideration, and discussion with other friends, she sent the girl a two-hundred dollar check. Then she cut the connection.

"I didn't want to worry that I wasn't fair to her," she told Daddy afterward.

"You did the right thing," said Daddy. Which made it all worthwhile.

Pretty Lady Runs Screaming from the Room

Darlings, Pretty Lady has a confession to make. It has been a rough couple of years for her. You see, upon moving to New York City, Pretty Lady made a Stupid Mistake. She got involved with a paranoid, psychotic, abusive individual.

It has taken Pretty Lady a great deal of Quiet Time to mend the after-effects of her relationship with this person, on her sensitive psyche. She has tended toward an unwonted Reclusion. She has done a lot of yoga, and taken some road trips. She has, as you all know, blogged a lot. She is doing much better, now; thank you for asking.

One of the things that Pretty Lady has done, to distract her mind from horrors best left undescribed, is to Meet New People. She has gone seeking in Different Horizons; she figured that whatever was drawing her toward paranoia and psychosis, would be likely avoided in territories having nothing to do with Angry Atheists from New York City.

And now this.

9/11 was minor in comparison to biological/nuclear terrorism. If, instead of a couple of buildings collapsing, a tactical nuclear device were to be detonated in New York harbor, rendering all of Manhattan and depending upon wind direction, all of Long Island instantly uninhabitable for a period of up to 30-60 days and hazardous for decades afterward? If instead of a single city, this was multiplied by tactical nukes going off in multiple coastal cities, and add in an EMP burst, launched from a container ship in the Gulf which takes out most of the electric grid and all communications systems?

Desert Cat, you are channelling the Angry Atheist. This text is ripped verbatim from a typical Angry Atheist rant.

Crom, you too. And even Boysmom is in on it.

Pretty Lady is feeling faint. She is Reeling. She feels as though the world is collapsing down to one diseased, paranoid psyche, with her in it. There is no escape. None! Do you hear? Pretty Lady has gas in her Pathfinder! She has the zero degree down bag, she has bolt-holes both North and South, she's got a good pair of boots, a big box of safety matches, a tent and knowledge of basic woodscraft!

BUT THIS WILL NOT SAVE HER. She sees that now. Nothing can save her from the voices in her head. The voices of Doom, of Stasis, of Fatalism; the dirty bomb that is forever about to hit Manhattan, the reason all optimistic and healing endeavors are pointless, the reason Pretty Lady's affection and joy is never the center of anyone's heart, but merely a pleasant and temporary distraction.

Desert Cat, it is too late to save Pretty Lady's sanity. She is, and has always been, a Marked Woman.

'I Beg Your Pardon?' Department

AVON PARK, Fla. -- Police arrested a 6-year-old Florida girl and even handcuffed her when she acted out in class. Police officers said Desre'e Watson, a kindergarten student at Avon Elementary School in Highlands County, had a violent run-in with a teacher on Thursday.

"I was scared," the little girl said.

Police claim the little girl got angry and began kicking and scratching. She even hit a teacher attempting to intervene in the disturbance.
...
The kindergartner was booked in the Highland County jail and was charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.

Via Fetch Me My Axe.

How very strange

Pretty Lady does not understand at all why people think this would be useful:

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

This strikes Pretty Lady as being quite similar to the USDA requiring farmers to submit to draconian standards in order to obtain a USDA-approved 'organic' label. It seems like a whole lot of fuss for not very much. Pretty Lady has not, as yet, seen the need for any 'manners' labels on her blog; she simply says, "Darlings, behave," and you darlings do. What is so difficult about that?

Ladies Only--or--Why Women Are Not Running the World

Gentlemen, Pretty Lady is afraid she is going to have to ask all of you to look the other way today. Go look at pictures of sports cars, or fighter planes, or Anna Nicole Smith or something. Today she is only addressing the ladies. Thank you ever so much! Ta-ta!

All right, girls. Pretty Lady must have a very, very Serious Talk with you.

She sees, here and there, a certain amount of Carping about how Men are Keeping Us Down; how institutionalized sexism is the reason for low female wage rates, glass ceilings, and male-dominated industries and professions. She endures Sad Stories of hate speech on the Internet; she contemplates the ever-present threat of rape and sexual harassment. Confidentially, she is also aware that the boys have a bit of a head start on us, when it comes to World Domination, due to their superior upper-body strength, engineering skills, and low rates of maternity leave.

Let us take this as read; let Pretty Lady inform each and every one of you that Men are not our biggest problem. Women are.

Sit down and shut up. Pretty Lady is not Pandering. She sent the gentlemen out of the room, remember? She is merely telling it like it is. Women are going to have to learn some cold hard Facts about Power Politics, or we as a gender are Toast. She is sorry to be so harsh with you, but there it is.

The fact is, men know a few things besides incorporation, and how to fix a carburator. They know that to Maintain Power, other habits are necessary. Habits such as loyalty, competence, healthy competition, and the realistic nurturance of these things in the younger generations. They may shout, they may punch each other, but they take care of it in the alley and go out for a beer afterward.

Women, on the other hand, are never really satisfied until an inconvenient rival is divorced, bankrupt, unemployed, universally ostracized, and living on the streets with a bad haircut. Look into your souls, ladies. You know it's true.

Pretty Lady, in her own professional life, has noted over time that it has proven nearly impossible to find a Female Mentor. That is not because there are no older women in her profession, or that Pretty Lady lacks the competence to attract the attention of such; it merely means that when she does, she has had to Watch Her Back in a very big way. Without boring you with too many horror stories, let her break down her experience into a few basic categories of Poisonous Women to Watch Out For.

1) The Poisonous Professional.

This woman is one of the few women to have succeeded in a male-dominated profession, in the Early Days of Feminism, and by God, she's going to make sure it stays that way. Her demeanor is tough, competent, and reasonable, with an undercurrent of vicious rage. She surrounds herself with flamboyantly attractive younger men, and actively promotes their careers, in a motherly sort of way. Should any talented, hard-working young women take her class, work as her assistant, ask her to supervise their thesis, or request a recommendation, these young women will be treated with competent, reasonable, vicious dismissal.

2) The Poisonous Administrator.

This woman, thwarted by social pressures, timidity, and possibly an early encounter with the P.P. above, has ended up in the Development Department of the profession that she would never admit to wanting a starring role in. She is pretty, well-dressed, and charming; she is socially well-connected and consoles herself with the fact that she, at least, earns a steady paycheck. She is proud of the fact that she knows and supports so many talented young fellows, and is the center of attention when she goes with them to parties. When she meets a woman around her age who is still pursuing the Main Profession, she is charmed by that girl's sweet little hobby, and makes sure the grant goes to one of the boys.

3) The Callous Opportunist.

This woman will be your Best Friend. She works four jobs, never takes a vacation, maximizes her credit, and founds organizations in the same field as she stars in. She is a Phenomenon, and everybody says so. She will take and take and take, collapse in your living room, cry on your shoulder, then ditch you and stab you in the back.

4) The Smarmy Communist.

We're all sisters! We love each other! We support each other! We swap skills! We are all Equal! Her skills are valued at full retail markup, of course, while those of her sisters are calculated at discount wholesale, or better yet, free.

5) The Cool Girl.

She doesn't seem to have many female friends, somehow, she doesn't really know why. What was your name again?


Now. This is not to say that there are not splendid women out there; women who balance Support with Healthy Competition, who understand the delicate art of networking, who will listen understandingly when you are in crisis, applaud your successes, purchase your commodities, talk you up to important people, and write a feature article about you. They will edit your grant application, show up at your door with a pitcher of sangria, take you out to dinner when you are broke, and get you a massage for your birthday. These are the Flower of Womanhood, living proof that all is not lost; that women, with nurturance and training, will one day be capable of just about anything.

But first we have to kill those bitches.

Whee!!

Gracious, darlings, Pretty Lady did NOT expect to be taken up on her Rules, at least not so quickly and so seriously. She is Overwhelmed! After spending two days without leaving her studio (the fumes are so dense that even the extractor fan cannot seem to overcome them), she finally checked the mailbox, and whee!! She now has more new CDs than she can fit in the disc changer all at once. In honor of Easter Sunday, she put on the Tijuana Brass, first. Boop-be-doop-be-doop.

Many grateful returns!

P.S. Chris, the cotton duck will make an excellent new dropcloth. The old one has been toxic since I accidentally stomped a tube of yellow ochre and tracked it all over the house.

Speaking of conflict

A rather tactless maneuver on the part of Eggers & Co. sends our thoroughly Gamma friend Jamie into an uncharacteristic diatribe:

I find myself compelled to write you angrily regarding the letter and "Proposal" you recently sent to lifetime subscribers thanking us for helping you through your “infancy” but now inquiring whether we might be willing to “move on,” that is, to begin paying you for a “normal yearly” subscription, now that you’re a full-grown and thriving professional magazine. In short, I respond: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

When Pretty Lady, herself not having been as prescient as dear Jamie in obtaining a lifetime subscription to McSweeney's for a mere c-note, read the offending proposal, she could understand his ire. For all its trademarked clever irony, the document comes across as distinctly passive-aggressive. Distinctly.


(Click to Read In Full. In fact, she highly recommends that you darlings click to read the entirety of Jamie's rant as well; the gentleman has certainly surpassed himself.)

What chiefly strikes Pretty Lady about this incident is that the selfsame tactics of self-referential irony and slapdash iconoclasm which rocketed our dear friend Mr. Eggers to fame and fortune are aging rather badly. What was cute and forgivable in a permanent adolescent are despicable, and perhaps legally actionable, business tactics.

This whole brouhaha, moreover, could have been avoided by the simple expedient of Owning Up to One's Mistakes; if McSweeney's, as an organization, had done the honorable by approaching its subscribers, hat in hand, and explaining, "We find ourselves in the embarrassing position of being the victims of our own success. Honestly, we didn't expect to survive for this long--not long enough to have our publishing house go out of business before we did. We made our name by sticking it to The Man, and now, we find to our consternation that we ARE The Man. And being The Man is more difficult than ever we imagined. It involves, for one thing, having to charge market rate for our subscriptions."

Of course, Gawker broke the news about this before ever Pretty Lady heard about it. Such a retiring life she lives, these days.

Conflict Avoidance 101

Well, Pretty Lady knew more than she thought she did:

Cops might want to put down the billy club and forget about psychology, new research suggests. An analysis of the TV show “COPS” reveals that the best way for police to calm down hysterical citizens is to look them straight in the eyes...police rely on a steady gaze to calm individuals in many situations, including getting them to cooperate during questioning and arrests, and keeping them from interfering with emergency workers.

Pretty Lady figured that one out by accident, while lunching in a Very Bad Neighborhood one afternoon. She had been reading some uplifting thing or other, and was feeling sanguine about life, and all her brothers and sisters in it.

Suddenly, an enraged and distraught individual became belligerant toward the girl behind the lunch counter. The girl, frightened, picked up a broom and brandished it. An Ugly Scene looked to be on the brink of playing out.

Pretty Lady stood up and regarded the enraged woman. The woman declared, "Whatcha gonna do? Ya gonna hit me?"

Pretty Lady replied, "I'm not going to do anything," in a friendly manner. The woman mumbled something unintelligible and wandered away. Pretty Lady resumed her lunch, and pleasant daydreams.

A few moments later, a confused and stinking older man stumbled in, agitated and shouting. Pretty Lady looked him in the eye and smiled. He relaxed, quieted down, and left.

Pretty Lady has often thought that it is not so much the eye contact specifically, which appears to have this effect; it is the recognition. In effect, her demeanor is saying, "Hey! There you are!"

This is, she feels, often the only thing any of us require.

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.

The Perils of Projection

Crom betrays a basic ignorance as to the limits and possibilities of cyber interactions:

Statistically speaking, I would offer the idea that meeting a like-minded individual in the cliquish familiarity of cyberspace is greater than that of meeting anything remotely resembling a Real Man by your definition in the Five Boroughs.

First of all, Crom, Pretty Lady holds no truck with statistics. Statistically speaking, Pretty Lady permanently dwells at the extreme end of the bell curve; in her experience, this is rather like approaching the speed of light, in Einsteinian physics. Everything you thought you knew turns out to be not only incomplete, but inapplicable, from your asymptotic perspective. Statistics, in Pretty Lady's world, may be a decent tool for after-the-fact analysis and understanding, but as a guiding principle in her life, they are useless. Pretty Lady does what she does, and allows the Holy Spirit to take care of the steering.

This is all by the way, however.

The fact is, Pretty Lady has been meeting 'like-minded individuals' through the Internet since 1995. She is not only a pioneer in this regard, but she has been goofing around in cyberspace long enough to know that, inasmuch as it has its revelations and intoxications, it also has its Major Pitfalls. The biggest pitfall being that it is possible for a reasonably intuitive and socially skilled individual to apprehend more about a person's basic character and personality in five minutes of face-to-face interaction, than in six months of in-depth cyber correspondence.

The Internet, my dear friends, is more like one big Group Therapy session than a genuine community. It can be useful, informative, entertaining and productive. It allows for rumination, experimentation, and postulatory dress-up; it is also an excellent way of finding bargains on second-hand cars and bicycles.

However, by far the most major and unacknowledged commodity trafficked upon the Internet is Projection. When we know nothing of an individual except words on a screen, our minds creatively fill in the blanks. We fill in the blanks with whatever fantasy or animosity we have lying around in our own brains; such filling-in rarely corresponds, even remotely, to the physical actuality of another being.

That is why, if Pretty Lady meets a person on the Internet, and she does not meet this person for coffee and a chat within a month or so of the initial correspondence (under two weeks is by far the best) she tends to write off the possibility of ever knowing that person in person, in more than a casual 'Hey! It's you!' sort of way.

She has entertained too many long-distance marriage proposals from delusional, incompetent twerps, and been used and abused by too many self-involved players, to do otherwise.

Now, if a person meets Pretty Lady in person, and then becomes cybernetically involved with her meanderings, this is a different story entirely. This individual is merely fleshing-out and deepening his original impressions; that is all fine and dandy, and can lead to very rewarding friendships indeed.

But all of this speculative nonsense about the possibility of Pretty Lady's bestowing her deepest affections upon a textual construct is simply obnoxious spouting-off. Pretty Lady has an email address, a phone number, and feet. Any gentleman who lacks the confidence or capability to make use of these facts does not figure in her day-to-day life with any degree of significance.

Draconian aesthetics

It is official; Pretty Lady has No Conscience.

Merely reading the letter from the lovely lady who inherited all her mother's paintings, and has every one of them hanging in her apartment, is enough for her to determine this.

For when Pretty Lady sublet a large house from a very-much-alive artist, who tendered this same house into her hands with every available wall space sporting a specimen of her own original artwork, the sun had not gone down before Pretty Lady had taken every one of those paintings off the wall, and stored them under the staircase. Prudently positioned upon risers, against flood, and covered with plastic, against dust, of course. Just because Pretty Lady does not share another artist's aesthetic, does not mean she is wantonly and disrespectfully destructive of it.

Pretty Lady was even known to declare, publically, "If X Artist believes that her house is standing as a permanent X Artist vanity gallery and shrine, X Artist has another think coming."

Aesthetics, Pretty Lady believes, are both deeply significant and deeply personal. Pretty Lady herself has been known to redecorate hotel rooms, during the length of her stay. The objects with which we surround ourselves impregnate our every present moment with a powerful energy, which we fail to consider at our deep peril. The present moment is, literally, all we have got; do we wish to Sacrifice All upon the altar of another artist's screaming, headless nightmares? Or even upon a smattering of sweet but banal autumn landscapes?

Pretty Lady's answer to this question has always been a resounding NO. If this makes her a Bad Person, it is the cross she must bear.

The Real Man

My lands. Pretty Lady cannot believe the number of times she has answered the question, 'What do women want?' and been greeted by a chorus of head-nodding, only to have the question repeated. To be fair, it is rarely Pretty Lady's friends who are asking this question; it is the unenlightened Others who do so. However, it is so reliably guaranteed to pop up in the community on a regular basis, that Pretty Lady feels she can go on answering it ad nauseam, without any fear of boring her readers.

In brief: Women want a Real Man.

Definition of a Real Man:

One who 1) knows who he is; 2) knows what he wants; 3) engages with her; 4) consistently.

All of these elements, darlings, are crucial.

The vast majority of whining, carping, frustration, rage, and lack of empathy with women comes from wannabe Real Men who wish to cut corners on one or another of the above criteria. The Pathetic faction is heavy on the end of Allowing the Woman to Define him; he is the sort who will go off and drink a gallon of aloe vera juice because the lady demonstrates an interest in holistic health care, and come running back, expecting a pat on the head. The Boorish faction, on the other hand, hold no truck with this sort of thing, at all, at all; he goes after what he wants, attains it, and parks it. He is the sort who invented the immortal line, 'Of course I love you. I married you, didn't I? What else do you want?'

Gentlemen. Please.

A lady does not wish to be the prime motivating factor for all of your actions. This is too much pressure, and it makes her feel decidedly unsafe. It gives her the uncomfortable sensation that if she were to become engrossed in her own activities for half an hour or so, you might go off and commit hari-kari for lack of sufficient attention; she does not want your blood on her hands. When she tells you to 'get a life,' she is being literal and sincere about it.

However, it gives a lady a warm, fuzzy, proud feeling to know that on some level, she is a prevailing influence in her man's life. There is nothing sweeter than the sound of the words, 'I was thinking about what you said, and I've decided...'. These words make a lady feel as though she is more than a decorative possession, to be flaunted or stowed at will. They make her feel that she is an ongoing force to be addressed; a challenge, if you will. Certainly she is more than a combination brood mare and chambermaid.

Pretty Lady would like to point out, as a side note, that a man who pursues several different women simultaneously is NOT a man who knows what he wants. He may claim that what he wants is several simultaneous girlfriends, and a concomitant freedom from responsibility; he may, in fact, want precisely that. However, such a man is incapable of engaging on an intimate level with anyone, and is thus unable to fully know himself. He is constantly shuffling communication modes, is frequently trying to remember which story he told which lady, and is never fully present. How is it possible that this man is honestly cognizant of the contents of his own mind? Let alone that he could have space in there to understand anyone else's?

Pretty Lady notes that all the men she has known who were like that were initially fascinating, having perfected the art of the initial fascination through assiduous practice, but got exponentially more boring every time the tape repeated itself. In pursuing breadth of experience, depth is inevitably sacrificed.

By the same token, a man who does not consistently engage with the woman in his life becomes, inevitably, a tedious lump who ultimately is not worth the space he takes up on the sofa. His routine may be straight, narrow and reliable; he may thus be shocked when the woman who has loyally washed his sheets for thirty years precipitately files for divorce.

But the fact is, circularity serves no ultimate purpose. Whether it be the same circular argument, the same scurrilous betrayal, or the identical carping comment of a political nature repeated every evening for three decades, circularity is a characteristic of Hell. Life, to be ridiculously cliche'd about it, is a journey. What women want is a trusted and intimate companion in a landscape which is always, and intriguingly, new.

How to Take Care of Yourself

Darlings, please forgive Pretty Lady's neglecting you. She is recovering from a profligate weekend of Brunch and Literary Readings. She is happy to report, however, that this morning she rose at the crack of nine and repeated her Fabulous Feat of last week; not only did she make it all the way to the park, but trotted gently down the length of it for several blocks. Returning home, she treated herself to an invigorating shower and a French breakfast (instructions to follow) and meditated upon the fact that she used to start all of her days like this, before injury and general despondency intruded. The contented buzz produced by workout-shower-breakfast ought to be a Daily High for every person on the planet. A great deal would be solved that way.

So it is fitting that upon breaching her in-box, she discovered this letter.

Dear Pretty Lady,

As a male I was brought up to show no fear, pain, or weakness, no matter how bad things got. Now I find I'm approaching middle age and I'm simply no longer capable of doing some of the things I used to do. I'm weaker than I used to be, and sometimes in pain, and I can't fight through it the way I could when I was younger.

The trouble is, since I was brought up to believe that weakness of any kind is weakness of character, I can't quite find the line between when I should stop lest I hurt myself and when I want to stop because I just don't feel like pushing.

In other words, I need some way to tell self-indulgence from genuine need for rest. Can you help?

Signed,
Lazy or Exhausted?

Ah, poor dear LOE. You are Not Alone. Pretty Lady is assuming that you are American; it is important to remember that, however degenerate our society has become, its moral roots are those of the Puritans. Your troubles are not unique to your gender. Since the seventeenth century, it has been the habit of our countrymen to equate Self-Abuse with Moral Virtue.

In men, this syndrome manifests as drinking twelve espressos and driving cross-country without stopping--or the programming, term-paper-writing, or particle-accelerator-building equivalent. In women, it manifests chiefly as anorexia, slapping one's own face while looking in the mirror, and uttering the salutary epithet 'stupid bitch' on a repeat loop in one's own mind.

As a backlash against this sort of thing, we are wont to become recklessly and destructively self-indulgent. At times we cleverly combine the two, as in bulimia, or working out while high. What is certain is that most of us have lost all true connection to the messages our bodies are sending us. We have literally no idea when we are hungry, tired, sick or miserable any longer, and we would not know what to do about it if we figured it out.

Pretty Lady is here to tell all of us to Cut That Out. Beating oneself up does not make one a Better Person; it just makes one a sick, tired, miserable, preoccupied bore. It also means that one's loved ones have to scrape up the carcass when one eventually collapses, which is never an agreeable task.

So. Where do we start? Let us at least get the obvious out of the way.

Sharp, stabbing pains: Never good. Stop what you are doing at once. If they persist, see a doctor.

Shortness of breath, acute chest pain: Get in shape or see an allergist. If you have done these things, or if you haven't and they come on suddenly, you are having a heart attack. Go to the emergency room.

Dull ache: Whether physical or emotional, this is an indicator of a general malaise which requires clearing. Go for a brisk walk, sit in a sauna, get a massage, write in your journal, or see a therapist.

Constant, passionate desire to lie down and take a nap, to the point where one is fantasizing about warm snoogly beds with huge down trappings and soundproof walls, and is physically unable to think about anything else for long: Sleep deprivation. Pretty Lady used to get this a lot, until she accepted the fact that her rock-bottom biological requirement is nine hours of sleep per night. If one's schedule does not permit this, nap in the break room at lunchtime, or on the studio chaise longue before setting-t0.

Attention span of less than fifteen seconds, for anything at all, even a new novel by one's favorite author: Lack of exercise, human companionship, or proper nutrition. Take the abovementioned brisk walk, call a friend, and cook a well-balanced meal.

Constant, seething rage: The Holy Spirit can help with that, if one listens committedly, putting prejudice aside, for a decade or two.

In general, when a person is in an advanced state of confusion about whether it hurts or not, and whether anything should be done about it, it is best to start with one consistent observation, and continue with this observation until it becomes a habit. For example: 'Am I hungry, or am I just angry, lonely and frustrated?'

Do not be impatient with yourself if it takes a decade before you are able to answer this question accurately on a regular basis.

If your answer is 'yes' to the question 'am I hungry?' now is the time for a French breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.

Take one from each food group:

High-quality caffeinated beverage (espresso, cappucino, Ceylon tea)

Fresh organic fruit

Fresh organic vegetable (or three)

Freshly-baked carbohydrate

Highly-concentrated naturally occuring fat (butter, olive oil, cream, cheese)

Highly-concentrated protein (egg, bacon, saucisson)

Pungent salty thing (olive paste, anchovies)

Self-indulgent sweet thing (dark chocolate, bitter orange marmalade)

Arrange all elements on breakfast table next to sunny window with lace curtain. Put small dabs on plate, attractively. Inhale appreciatively. Consume slowly and decorously, savoring various combinations.

You will find that if you perform this ritual rigorously and assiduously, you will actually find yourself gaining energy and losing weight. The cause of obesity is not the consumption of fats, proteins or carbohydrates; it is the compensatory overconsumption of plasticized imitation versions of the Real Thing. Once a person starts appreciating food, the food appreciates the person.


Pretty Lady could go on, and on, and on about the delicate art of Taking Care of Oneself, but she feels that this is sufficient to go on with, for the moment. The one other thing she has to say is that LOE--like hell are you 'approaching middle age.' Prime of life, how about it? Gracious.

Quote in passing

Pretty Lady finds that today is one of those Frantically Busy days, where the tasks at hand are pouring down upon her head in an ever-increasing stream of urgency, so she cannot take the time to meander contemplatively, as is her wont. However, she would like to leave you with this:

...Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear were in her case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?...Moreover it is all very well for you to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think--but I need hardly multiply the instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said of him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

--Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own'

On Sensitivity

Pretty Lady can tell that most of you are rolling your eyes already. First she posts a guest column about Equal Pay for Equal Work, and now this. "The Other Shoe has Dropped," she can hear you thinking. "Pretty Lady is, and has been all along, a Closet Socialist, just lurking in wait to entrap us, and now, here we are. Sensitivity, indeed. Hmph."

And indeed, Pretty Lady could go on to bore you with many long stories about her stint in Northern California, where Sensitivity Blackmail is a standard and accepted part of the cultural landscape. One cannot pick up a six-pack of sushi there without trampling on someone's Childhood Issue, which must be addressed at great length and drama before anybody gets dinner. And Pretty Lady can attest that if someone deprives her of dinner to whine about their vague and amorphous problems, heads will eventually roll.

So that when, once upon a time, in her capacity as Chief Skimmer of all incoming library material, she happened upon a document entitled The Highly Sensitive Person, Pretty Lady veritably snorted. "Sensitive, ugh. 'Namby-pamby blackmailing whiner,' is more like it. I am certainly Not Sensitive. This piece of new-age self-help crap has nothing to do with me."

But she took the quiz anyway, having nothing better to do, and scored in the 99th percentile.

Suddenly, many things made sense. You see, Pretty Lady had always assumed that everybody experienced the same extreme discomfort, bordering upon physical pain, at the onslaught of punk rock music, Harleys, backfiring trucks, fluorescent lights, high winds, screaming, the smell of a close friend who has given up bathing for Lent, and the incessant inane giggling of brainless, nubile females. She took it for granted that whenever someone in the room was upset about something, everyone else was so concerned about it that they could not concentrate until the problem was addressed. She thought that the reason people drink so much in night clubs is to somewhat anaesthetize the agonizing misery induced by loud music, pointless chatter, lighting designs that split the difference between murky and garish, and the odor of stale cigarette smoke blended with beery floors, with the slightest undertone of vomit. Forthwith, she assumed that just about everyone in the world was very, very brave and stoic. So she was stoic too.

Yes, it was an enormous revelation to her that most people don't even notice all of that. For Pretty Lady, learning to like the accoutrements of routine adolescent social life was akin to developing a taste for wasabi, or the late works of James Joyce. It required discipline, commitment and a willingness to suffer. Pretty Lady, for love of her fellow man, was quite ready to do so, and would never even think of whining about it, much less of asking anyone to extinguish his Camel Filterless. She grew to revel in it, and to this day the aromas of Pall Mall and unwashed male bring back some sun-drenched memories.

But she did, after some thought, finally give herself permission to Go Home Early, upon occasion.

You see, in Pretty Lady's view, acknowledging one's sensitivity is not about Weakness, nor about Control. It is simply about Resource Management. Because sensitive persons are not simply the Darwinian rejects of the herd, fit only as wolf feed; we are Specialists. In the full, disciplined power of our specialization, we have the ability to put our finger right where it hurts and gently coax the pain away.

But in order to become fully empowered specialists in misery-eradication for the larger human race, we must learn to care for and appreciate ourselves, exactly as we are. This does not mean Banning Things; our purpose is not to control the outer world. It is to create oases of peace and quiet understanding, where we occasionally invite the world in to heal itself.

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.

Cause for Modest Celebration

Pretty Lady must share with all of you a personal Milestone. She just ran all the way to the park, and back.

She realizes that in the grand scheme of things, this is an extremely minor accomplishment. Trivial, even. Embarrassing to brag about.

But when a person has spent years, literally, hobbling up and down stairs, husbanding her strength, dragging an inflamed left malleolar tendon--nay, a self-inflaming left malleolar tendon, for this tendon re-inflames itself literally in Pretty Lady's sleep--a person starts to think that she may never run up to the park and back again. More than one chiropractor has told her that running up to the park and back is strictly and permanently verboten.

But today, darlings, it is seventy degrees out, and a friendly glow envelops the brick walls on every side, and after three years of yoga, and acupuncture, and chiropractic, and the rare massage, every cell in Pretty Lady's much-abused frame was screaming to run to the park and back, and so she did. And things were creaky, and rusty, and slow. But she ran to the park, and back, and is here to tell about it.

SO beside the point

Fussy, fussy:

Attention all hired political hucksters and hatchet men, dirty tricksters and campaign saboteurs. The Federal Election Commission has a message for you: Go forth online. Do your dirty works. Opportunity awaits.

Consider as a model the explosion last week of a YouTube video attacking Hillary Clinton as "Big Brother" from George Orwell's novel "1984." The 73-second spot, which was posted anonymously at no cost, has already been viewed 2.7 million times, scored coverage in every major newspaper and achieved frequent play on the cable news networks. In the world of political advertising, that kind of exposure is worth millions of dollars.

Pretty Lady says, hmph.

There is a difference, in her opinion, between Untrammelled Creative Commentary and Paid Advertising. Mr. de Vellis' hilarious little video did not receive attention because someone paid him to do it; it received attention because it resonated deep in the human psyche, as brilliant art is wont to do. Fussy people tend to forget this, if they were ever willing to admit it in the first place. Plus, what the article conspicuously fails to note is that the piece would have lost every bit of its impact if dear Mr. Obama were so discourteous as to have commissioned it himself. Pretty Lady's pet politician is, of course, above such things.

As far as Pretty Lady is concerned, as long as a creative artist is not actively spreading lies and disinformation, his obligations to Society have been adequately fufilled, and he may be permitted to create at will. If his creation happens to strike a note which reverberates through and through the space-time continuum, without the consent of the ruling Powers that Be, so much the better. It certainly happens rarely enough.

(Pretty Lady's person opinion on the Hillary Clinton issue is that she stopped paying attention to Hillary the day she read that first, pandering, patronizing little newspaper column on How To Bake Cookies and be a Good Wife and Mother. It was not that Pretty Lady is against these things; it is that Hillary was not even bothering to be subtle in her manipulation tactics. Pretty Lady felt exactly the same way about the rival for her First Love, who strode into the café one morning whining, "Rayyyyyy, we're going on a daaaaaate this weekend. I wanna make Scott jeaaaaaalous." If anybody is so foolish as to fall for that, he deserves what he gets.)

Cintra Wilson is a Goddess

...If you preferred peace, honor, dignity and truth to colicky, niggling, girlish fussing, you might recognize the precious gift before you: Daddy is generously offering each of you your very own pet sardine.

This sardine is marinated, and oiled, and it can be loved and trained just like a pony. People throughout history have wept with gratitude when given their very own sardine.

The American people will cry if you do not accept the incredibly generous gift of this precious pony-sardine, because they want one so badly. In truth, the most intelligent people in the world prefer a sardine to a live pony -- because they are educated enough to know the truth.

What you are failing to understand, because you haven't had the benefits of this education, is that a sardine is far better than a pony, but exactly like a pony. It is, in fact, a kind of super-pony, with long, combable hair, and wings. And it flies.

Pretty Lady isn't quite certain what dear Cintra was talking about, there, because she skipped the headlines this morning and got a massage instead, but she just loves flying ponies with long hair, so she very much enjoyed the story.

The best I can do

in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was slaves and former slaves, men like Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass and women like Harriet Tubman, who recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half free. I'm reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable--in other words, the absolutists--that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of a similar certainty today--the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory--no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty--for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.

--Sen. Barack Obama, 'The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,' p. 97.

On the Taking Out of Garbage

Dear Bobert, apropos of goodness knows what, poses perhaps a rhetorical question:

But its the streets in the background that always grabs my attention. They're always a filthy and garbage-filled dungheap.

So where are the adults? The ones who should get of their "po' us" asses and clean the place up? What the hell is wrong with those people that they don't even try to keep their enviornment cleaner?

This, dear Bobert, is why everyone should live in a Third World country for at least six months. It gives a person Insight. It gives a person Insight into matters that should be obvious, particularly to engineers, but which aren't, so much, until you have lived through Total Cultural Immersion in a strange place.

You see, dear Bobert, Pretty Lady has lived in dirty Third World countries, and she has lived in ghettos, which come nearly to the same thing. And a very consistent problem that Pretty Lady had in these places (and even in New York City, come to think) was in getting rid of her garbage. Oh, her personal habits were ever the cleanest; she bagged up the sweepings, and the packaging, and the organic composty bits and the recycleables like nobody's business. Then she tied them tightly and parked them outside the front door.

Where, instead of disappearing, as they were wont to do in the clean suburban neighborhood where Pretty Lady grew up, they multiplied.

Pretty Lady was stymied, as to what to do or think about this situation, for quite some time. Because when Pretty Lady was a little girl, her mother explained that the reason we pay taxes is so that the government picks up our garbage. Thus when she moved to San Francisco, she simply could not get it through her head that despite the extremely high tax rates, the government was shirking its responsibilities. They had actually passed a law that taxpaying citizens must sign a contract with a private corporation for garbage removal; the ultimate indignity was that recycling was extra. The government actually expected Pretty Lady to pay Sunset Scavenger to make a profit on recycling her bottles.

(Then she got a letter from Sunset Scavenger, asking her to pay to put a padlock on her garbage can, because the homeless people were stealing their recyclables. Thus providing a necessary service for free, that Sunset Scavenger had a government contract to force her to pay for. Thus demonstrating the extent of economic delusion that legislation-happy communities can induce in their citizens.)

So for many months, Pretty Lady passively resisted this government intrusion in her life by engaging in guerrilla garbage disposal. She carried sacks of garbage around with her late at night, seeking an un-padlocked dumpster. She left them in murky corners, or thrust them in other people's garbage cans. Once, when she moved to a new place, the garbage collectors continued collecting for a good eight months before they noticed that the previous tenant's garbage contract hadn't been renewed.

When she moved to Mexico, however, the karmic tide was turned. People kept leaving bags of garbage on Pretty Lady's stoop; they would even let their donkeys take a dump in her callejón, where the feces would fester until the next torrential rainstorm rinsed it away. After a few months she figured out that there was a communal dumpster about half a kilometer away, and if she wanted a clean stoop, the only option was to haul it there by hand. Recycling? Ha! Pretty Lady grew accustomed to gritting her teeth at the sound of a bag of perfectly good bottles hitting the bottom of the barrel. Politically correct habits die hard.

All this to point out the obvious fact that garbage collection and disposal is one of those things which requires a certain amount of collaborative action on the part of a community to accomplish. If the community is unable to get its collective ass in gear, the garbage festers. Individual action counts for very little.

This is, of course, no excuse. Of course the adults should get off their debased posteriors and figure out a solution. However, such things as Systemic Governmental Corruption tend to make potential community organizers a bit cynical about the results of such activity; moreover, community organization is generally a time-consuming, unpaid and thankless task. Persons who are living in desperate poverty frequently lack the superfluous resources to spend in this way.

This is why anyone who wishes to make a significant difference in the way the world is run must start with the children. If you explain to a child, "good governments pick up the garbage; bad governments let it fester in the street, or force people to pay extra for what should be free," this child has a baseline Level of Indignation when he reaches adulthood. He looks around him, thinks "This is Not Right!" and begins to change things.

But when you allow a child to believe that things are this way, they have always been this way, and he is powerless to do anything about it, well, you have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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.

Rules suspended

Pretty Lady formally announces that today is Free-For-All day on her blog. Please suspend any former requests of hers to behave with open-minded civility, and insult one another as freely and creatively as you like. Feel free to wax sarcastic about the imbecility of your neighbors; engage in long-winded rants about media bias, bigotry, fascism, narrow-mindedness, ignorance, naivete and rank stupidity in any area you like. Get it all out of your systems.

Go on. Go ahead. What are you waiting for?

Oh! A topic. Let us see...let us pick something controversial and inflammatory...hmmm...okay. How about, "Homosexuality is not immoral"? Pretty Lady saw something about Hillary Clinton making this bold and controversial statement, recently.

Pretty Lady's view is that a State of Being cannot be immoral, because it simply Is. And if we are to predicate Existence upon a benign Creator, then Existence cannot be immoral, because the fact of Existence must conform to the laws set down by the force which allowed it to Exist in the first place.

No, by Pretty Lady's reckoning, only actions can be immoral. And although it is possible to argue that a homosexual action might be immoral, according to Laws set down by the Creator, Pretty Lady finds it difficult to determine how, or why, a Presidential Candidate would have a reason for concerning herself with this. Because as long as an action does not directly threaten the well-being of a community, in the sense that there are Victims of Homosexual Activity clamoring to have their grievances redressed, what of it? All of us commit immoral actions at one time or another. Policing this sort of thing is, hopefully, beyond the scope of the Federal Government. At least it is at the moment.

So there you go, darlings! Have at it!

Shocker

Although it has, horribly, a Screw Top (Pretty Lady was Not Paying Attention, in the wine shop) this bottle of Fish Eye 2004 Shiraz is Not Half Bad.

Which is why Pretty Lady is giving you, free of charge, her cherished, superevolved recipe for Pasta Marinara.

1 can organic tomato puree
1/2 can filtered water
5 large cloves garlic, pressed
grated rind or juice of 1/2 lemon
1 T dried basil, or 1 handful fresh basil, chopped
1 T oregano
3 dried red chili peppers
dash fennel seed
5 fresh scallions, chopped
3-5 fresh plum tomatoes, chopped
3 T extra-virgin olive oil

Mix in large stew pot and simmer for 1 1/2-2 hours. Add some or all:

Italian sausage, in chunks
Mushrooms, sauteed
Eggplant--salted, sweated, brushed with olive oil and grilled over a flame (this can be done over a naked gas burner. Turn on the exhaust fan to avoid setting off fire alarm.)
Artichoke hearts
Black olives
Anchovies
Capers

At the end of cooking, add 1/2 glass red wine. Serve over linguini; parmesan or romano cheese optional.

This recipe, Pretty Lady will have you know, has evolved over literally decades of epicurean poverty, and is now, possibly, at its peak of perfection. Treat it respectfully.

Sad news

Pretty Lady's friend from California called this weekend. "I have some sad news for you," she declared.

Pretty Lady nearly went into a panic. "Who died?" she asked, bracing herself.

"I have just been cleaning out my National Geographics," replied the friend. "And I have discovered that there are no single men on the East Coast."

Well, Pretty Lady's keen intuition had figured that out already. Her friend, and National Geographic, merely provided the statistics.

You see, the situation is very simple. Gentlemen, being pragmatic, pursue Good Jobs. Ladies, being frivolous, pursue Quality of Life. The result is that all the single ladies are living east of the Mississippi, and all the gentlemen are west of it.

Thus we have cozy Eastern Seaboard cities full of single ladies--strolling in the parks, attending concerts, visiting museums, hanging in cafés, and trolling the sale racks at designer boutiques. On Sundays, we go to brunch and compare stories about our nonexistent love lives. It is all very congenial.

Meanwhile, every single man in the United States is apparently working some technical job in Texas, Colorado, California, or Seattle. He sits in a cubicle for eight to fourteen hours, drives to his bland suburban ranch house in an SUV, and parks in front of the television of an evening, with a six-pack and a sandwich. We assume that he is content with this state of affairs; certainly he does not strongly feel the dearth of museums, concert halls, or brunch.

The side effect of this state of affairs is that single men who DO live in the Big City have a wholly inflated view of their own worth. They seem to regard the females as so many interchangeable parts; they do not engage in anything so tedious and demanding as Focused Courtship, or even Planned Dates. They wander out, whine, make propositions, and wander off again. Pretty Lady will have nothing to do with such degenerates.

At the same time, Pretty Lady is morally, pragmatically and personally opposed to Playing the Odds in the mating game. Uprooting her life, changing states in the desperate hopes of nabbing a suitable partner is Not Her Style. If it is madness to consider doing this for the sake of an extant, but neurotic and uncommitted (how typical!) lover, how much more so would it be to do so on the basis of a mere Statistic? Perish the thought!

So Pretty Lady formally announces that from this day forward, the City is her Temple. She will live the monastic life of the Pure Artist. She will banish unclean thoughts from her mind; she will contemplate only Higher Things. It is her Destiny; this much is clear. She is content.

On Defense

Pretty Lady was all agog to defend her dear friend Chris against charges of loving company in his misery, this morning. She was about to leap precipitately into the fray, and declare that she knows ALL ABOUT keeping company with misery-lovers, and Chris is not it. He's mopey, but not particularly sadistic.

However, she was called to the carpet by virtue of her chosen spiritual text, the Course in Miracles. This strange and counterintuitive document has a strange and counterintuitive thing to say, on the subject of Defense:

If I defend myself, I am attacked.

...You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you. A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense. The world is based on this insane belief. And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

This is one of those things that so baffles Pretty Lady's friends, when she goes off upon one of her eccentric maunderings about the illusory nature of Time, and such. Surely, they say, Pretty Lady has got it backwards, and her chosen text is a mass of psychotic bunk. What happens, they explain patiently, is that one is attacked, first; then one defends. Quite properly.

For a lady with such a high IQ, they think, Pretty Lady can be awfully dense, on occasion.

Pretty Lady used to think this was true, once upon a time. Then she invited another lady to live with her, who was all Sweetness and Light and Occupational Therapy. This roommate was more harmless than a ladybug, and cute as a button. She liked to vacuum, and hum tunelessly while doing so, and make soup. What a perfect roommate, Pretty Lady thought.

Then she began to notice, over time, that in the course of friendly, idle conversation, this Perfect Roommate had a tendency to flinch. She would flinch, and then apologize, as though Pretty Lady were about to explode in a violent rage, for some crime she had mysteriously committed.

Pretty Lady was mildly perplexed by this. She hastened to reassure this lovely girl; she petted and soothed and explained that her intentions were wholly benign. The girl kept flinching.

Over time, affairs in Pretty Lady's household became Tense and Strained. No matter what Pretty Lady did, her roommate continued to cower; the more Pretty Lady reassured, the more she grew wide-eyed and fearful. Occasionally she would muster her courage, and grow assertive; Pretty Lady supported this assertion, although she still had no idea what the girl was so worried about.

Finally, matters came to a crisis. The roommate, in abject terror, came cowering assertively to Pretty Lady and begged her not to evict her yet, not before finals! Anything but that!

Pretty Lady, all at once, saw that Danger loomed. The Danger was that this girl would, by sheer force of willpower and expectation, get Pretty Lady to follow along with her Script, the one that said that Pretty Lady was an abusive, cruel, unreasonable bitch, and knock her across the room and through the window before Pretty Lady was aware of her own actions.

So, in clarity and desperation, Pretty Lady evicted her. Before finals.

Pretty Lady does not expect any of her friends to take this odd little anecdote as being conclusive of anything, let alone the validity of her pet esoteric text. But it lends one To Think, and that is one of Pretty Lady's favorite addictions. And what she thinks, quite often in these days, is that when we choose to see an attack, we will proceed to make this attack an unequivocal reality, as soon as we throw up that armor.

Report on St. Patrick's Day Pub Crawl

Note to managerial and door staff of the Living Room Lounge, on 23rd St. and 5th Ave., Brooklyn:

It is excrutiatingly bad manners, as well as execrable business tactics, to compete with one's own customers for the use of the pool table, particularly when one is so drunk that one cannot remember whether one is sinking stripes, or solids. It only adds insult to injury when a member of the managerial staff orders the customer to 'rack up,' then disappears for many many minutes, only to return with the injured remark, 'it was my break, you know.' The final atrocity is when the managerial staff is monopolizing the pool table at the same time as the darling adorable bartender is so harried, working a large crowd without backup, that he is inadvertantly shortchanging friendly ladies at the bar.

You might be interested to know that this is the point when darling adorable bartenders, who shall remain nameless, start giving away free drinks in restitution.

Also, it is simply wrong to serve Guiness in plastic cups. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Note to the DJ at the Kitchenbar, on 6th Ave. and 20th:

There would have been twice as many people rocking out to your awesome tunes if you had reduced the volume by half. Just because the tunes are awesome, does not mean that your clientele do not enjoy one another's conversation, as well.

Note to the bluegrass band, at that place next door to the Kitchenbar:

Well played, my dears. A little more vim in your vocals would not come amiss, however.

The Virtues of Paranoid Schizophrenia

Pretty Lady has been wont to note that lately, she has been hearing voices, or rather one voice in particular, conversing outside her kitchen window. She is, thankfully, not the only person to notice; one of her clients found this manifestation rather disturbing, since her apartment is on the fourth floor. But sound, in the City, does tricky things when confronted with verticalities of masonry on all sides, and Pretty Lady finds that sound, like heat, rises.

Upon looking out her kitchen window, Pretty Lady observes that the next-door neighbor has been standing in the backyard, in the snow, since very early morning, having a conversation at the top of his lungs with an entity which is not visible to Pretty Lady. She is pleased to report that the neighbor and his invisible friend appear to be getting along rather well, today; the conversation seems amiable, even jocular, and is only moderately punctuated with obscenities. This is a mercy, since according to other next-door neighbors, this man suffers from a heavy-duty case of Tourette's syndrome, and his non-stop monologues are generally of a more hostile nature.

Mental illness is indeed a sad, sad thing. On the other hand, this neighbor never seems to get cold, and he is never lonely.

The Question of Motive

Pretty Lady was about to give all of you a tongue-lashing--yes, truly, she was. She is shocked. As much as it pains her to do so, she will quote, without attribution, a few of the comments which so distressed her:

you particularly have chosen a faith which says I'm going to Hell. You could've chosen a faith which doesn't give a crap about unbelievers...I think that's impolite.

The thing that truly bothers you is that merest microscopic fraction of a chance that we are right, and that you are wrong.

You've got to be putting me on. Either that or you're quite the narcissist.

There was more, much more, but Pretty Lady hopes by now that you have got the gist of it.

Since when, darlings, have all of you become such experts upon the motives of others?

For it strikes Pretty Lady that grown men are capable of having an intellectual disagreement without becoming pejorative about it. Further, it strikes her that what most often causes offense is primarily not the intellectual disagreement itself, but the high-handed presumption and unparalleled condescension of attributing a specific motive to another person's belief or action. It is when overwrought and extreme accusations of motivation go hurling around like javelins that all hope of rational communication must be given up.

Pretty Lady has one thing to say to all of you, and that is:

'You don't have to put other people down in order to build yourself up. I know that you're just acting that way because you're insecure, and you don't need to be.'

Do you hate her, now?

If you don't, you are a better person by far than Pretty Lady, who peremptorily terminated a long-term friendship upon finding herself on the receiving end of just these words. For in Pretty Lady's personal view, at that particular time, the truth of the matter was: 1) she hadn't been putting anyone down; 2) she hadn't been building herself up; 3) she wasn't insecure; and 4) she knew damn well that she didn't need to be, because she wasn't. Thus, in two masterful sentences, her suddenly-former friend had managed to slander and patronize her so thoroughly that Pretty Lady had no interest in hearing from her again. Ever.

It is exceptionally dangerous, friends, to believe that we can see into the hearts and minds of others, more clearly than they can see into their own. It is even more exceptionally tactless to let on that we believe we can. The habit of thinking we know someone better than they know themselves can lead to a wholesale dismissal of anything that person may have to say on a subject, even, 'Excuse me, but your pants are on fire.'

So stop it. Back up about six paces, and take several deep breaths. Then please draw your attention to the fact that Pretty Lady has already postulated a paradigm of Hell that neither puts the Bible to the lie, when taken in a metaphorical context, nor attributes the existence of such a Hell to any ingrained malice on the part of a theoretical and loving Creator. Now apply your quite-considerable intellects to the task of refuting this proposition.

And if you adhere to a linear literalism in your refutations, Pretty Lady will smack you.