I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;
I see that the word of my city is that word up there ...
Did you see last week’s New York magazine? The cover story was “The Myth of the Gifted Child.” I wrote about that article–and my own city-certified “gifted” child on the New York Mom’s blogsite, over here.
If my kid is so gifted, though, why is it he can’t remember to flush the toilet after he pees?
Posted in education.
– February 8, 2010
I always read the “Endpaper” on the last page of the Sunday Times magazine. The essays are sometimes good, sometimes mediocre, and I frequently use them in my writing classes as examples of how to (or how not to) put together an essay.
Today’s final page featured a photo of Picabo Street, a gold-medal skier, who has retired and has three children. The youngest child, Dax, is also in the photo. Under the photo is her comment about the difference between being an athlete and a mother:
“As an athlete, you’re No. 1. You’re A-No. 1, you’re on the front burner burning on high, and everything is for you. When you’re a mom, we put ourselves on the back burner. We become last and the family becomes everything, and that is vastly different.”
Probably Street just wanted to generalize about “moms,” in her shift from “you” to “we,” but I think in fact she hit the nail squarely on the head.
Every mother is always–infinitely–plural.
Posted in Children, Parenting.
– February 7, 2010
I used to think that parents were joking when they talked about how kids “went through” pants. I thought they must be exaggerating – especially city parents. I mean, how could a city kid put holes in the knees of pants? City kids aren’t outside climbing trees or playing kick-the-can or tromping through the woods, right?
Wrong. As proof I offer this pile of knee-less pants, culled only from the last few months. Apparently you can put holes in pants by repeatedly slide-tackling a soccer ball in the (carpeted) hallway outside our apartment or by diving for third base (also in the hallway outside our apartment, which is our default playground).
Husband, bless him, tried those iron-on patches but to no avail; little fingers picked away at the edge and peeled the patches right off.
Yes. You’re right. Patches could be sewn on and probably I could do that while watching “Project Runway” as inspiration but if I were sewing while watching TV, how could I also be checking facebook status updates?
I’ve turned a few pairs into shorts, and another pair made for a great pirate costume last Halloween, and the particularly shredded I bring to the textile recycling stand in Union Square (a great place to dispose of holey socks, too-ratty gym clothes, and de-elasticized underwear)…but these holey jeans sit in my closet in a bag and make me feel guilty. They’re in too much disrepair to give away but they’re not totally beyond repair. I know I should forego facebook for an evening and just stitch, stitch, stitch, but somehow that chore never makes it to the top of my list.
And so it goes: more slide-tackles, more holes in the knees, another pair of pants shoved in the bag in the closet. Maybe the thing to do is save all these knee-less wonders and then one day, after the boys have grown up, moved away, and are dealing with their own apparel, I can pull out all these little pants, rip them up, and make a quilt…that way, I don’t have to feel guilty now. I can delay the guilt for about fifteen years, when I will decide there’s no way in hell I’m ever making a quilt.
Posted in mothering boys.
– February 6, 2010
Okay, my birthday was last month, it’s true. But for the last few months, I’ve been going in and out of the Village Tannery eyeing (and yes, occasionally fondling) their leather bags because the satchel I use on my teaching days (my “grownup” satchel, as opposed to the ratty old canvas totes I use for crashing around the city) gave up the ghost in August. The straps simply shredded beyond the point of repair.
The Tannery has been a village institution for more years than I can remember–and it’s a bit of a vanishing breed: one of the last stores where the designers and craftsmen work right in the shop making things that are one of a kind. When I was in graduate school, I used to walk past the original store, which is still on Bleeker just off of 6th Avenue, and wish that someday I could replace my beat-up backpack with one of their creations.
Today “someday” finally came. Months of wandering in and out of the store, chatting with the shopkeeper and designer, looking at the artisans in the back of the shop, where they make the bags (yes! hand-made by actual hands, in an actual store, in the actual city where I live. amazing); months of thinking “who am I to afford such a bag?”
Well…my birthday came and went, ushering me firmly over the hill into my late forties; and mom sent me a little “happy happy” money and so did dad, and then my sweet sister (who doesn’t live in the city) went to the trouble of getting me a Tannery gift certificate for another little chunk, and then Husband and I went to lunch today (discounted because of Restaurant Week)…we were right around the corner from the shop, I’d had two bloody marys with lunch (never shop after drinking, let that be the lesson) and…
To paraphrase Jane Eyre: Reader, I bought it.
This photo can’t do it justice. The leather like buttah, baby; the saturated color of the straps; the attention to detail (two slanted zipper pockets on each outside edge, a phone pocket inside, another zipper pocket inside–and did I say that the zippers are dark green?); the fact that if anything goes wrong with it ever, the owners will fix it free of charge.
It’s enough to make a girl happy about going to work.
Posted in New York City, fun...what a concept.
– February 5, 2010
I cook because I can take something yucky:
And make something yummy:
This banana bread/muffin recipe comes from my battered (literally) copy of Joy of Cooking (I think there’s a whole sociological treatise to be written on what sorts of women were Fannie Farmer cooks, or Julia acolytes, or Joy gals. Not sure what it would all mean, but I’m sure it would mean something).
My mom gave me this paperback edition decades ago and although I more often turn now to my favorite foodie websites, smittenkitchen and ezrapoundcake, I won’t ever part with this book. It’s not just because I remember my mother’s copy of Joy, its binding holding on by a thread, the pages splattered with flecks of this and that. And it’s not just because these recipes are the recipes of my childhood: lemon meringue pie, popovers, banana bread, soup.
Nope. I hang on to this book because of this series of illustrations:
Instructions on how to skin a squirrel. Note, please, the delicately held knife and the equally delicate use of the boot as an aid to the all-important peeling of the fur.
The Silver Palate ladies ain’t got nothin on that.
Posted in food.
– February 4, 2010
They announced the Oscar nominees yesterday and on that list of ten (10!) best picture nominees I’d seen exactly…one. The animated one with all the balloons. (Shockingly, the two other movies I’ve seen recently, ”Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Twilight: New Moon” were absent from this list of cinematic glory.)
It’s not that I dislike the movies. I love going to the movies. I like the theater, too. It’s just that on my own private ranking system, very few things measure up.
My ranking system isn’t stars or rotten tomatoes or thumbs up-or-down. Nope, my system is much more crass than that: it’s money. If Husband and I “just” want to go to the movies, for instance, even without getting a bite to eat or a glass of wine beforehand, our evening costs us close to $100: two movie tickets at $12.50 and approximately three hours of babysitting at about $15 an hour, plus maybe a little extra if we get home late and offer to pay for the sitter to take a cab home. It’s about 70 bucks. Now tell me, seriously, are any of the movies on that list worth that much money? (Husband is fairly sure that “Avatar” is worth all the money in the world but I just can’t bring myself to be excited by a movie that my nephew described as “Dances with Smurfs.”)
As for theater? Don’t even get me started. Given that the cheapest seats for most good theater–on or off Broadway–start somewhere in the realm of $50, we’re looking at about a 200 or 300 dollar evening. I coughed it up in order to see Cate Blanchett in “Streetcar Named Desire,” which was, granted, an amazing experience. Husband tells me that there are lots of amazing theatrical experiences out there – and I know he’s right–but at two hundred bucks a pop, it’s a drag when a performance is only so-so, or even (as is all too often the case) downright dreadful.
Me? I’d rather spend money on going out to eat. Somehow even a mediocre (probably over-priced) meal in a restaurant makes me happy, for the simplest of reasons: I didn’t cook it, I’m not cleaning up after it, and no one is demanding that I leap up to get him more milk some salt another napkin more ketchup dessert now.. I mean please… as soon as I sit down.
Sarah, in the LA Mom’s Blog, talks about whether a dinner engagement is “sitter-worthy” and I guess for me, most meals out are sitter worthy. A dinner out with friends–a dinner without discussions of logistics and homework, a meal without mediating between squabbling siblings–that to me is money well spent.
So you go to the movies and I’ll meet you later for dinner so you can tell me all about it.
Posted in New York City, fun...what a concept.
– February 3, 2010
The boys could no longer see through their thicket of bangs, which meant I could no longer put off getting them haircuts. So this past frigid Saturday, I took both boys to the barbershop.
As soon as we walked in, I realized why haircuts usually happen after school or much earlier in the day on the weekend: the small shop was filled with men, some flipping through magazines that Liam (had he seen them) would have called “inappropriate.” A movie blared on the TV, blaring “inappropriate language”: every word some variation on fuck or shit.
Okay. I’m not a prude (in fact, I’ve been told that I swear like a trucker) but this being my third day of Daddy’s-on-a-business-trip, I was in no mood to answer questions like “why is he talking about cats?” and “what’s shooting up?” So I tried to distract the boys with chitchat and lollipops, while the barber, a lovely Algerian man, asked them questions about soccer.
But then, in a moment of silence, one of the characters in the movie said “JESUS!” as he brandished a gun and ran out of the room. Caleb’s clear voice echoed through the suddenly still barbershop: “JESUS? What’s JESUS?”
It’s moments like these where I rue my decision (comprised mostly of inertia) not to find any kind of religious instruction for my children, even if only so they have the rudiments of cultural literacy.
I scan the barbershop—several closely shaven men sport ornate crucifixes dangling from their necks; the Algerian barber is maybe Christian maybe not; there’s an older man in the corner who looks like he might be Jewish. Just another Saturday afternoon in New York…so I punt: “um…well…Jesus was a man a long time ago who some people think helps them to be nicer to other people in the world.”
Caleb nodded. “Can we watch soccer?”
Thus endeth the lesson.
Posted in Children, Parenting, Uncategorized.
– February 2, 2010
The NYC Department of Education has come up with yet another brilliant plan to improve school accountability, in an effort to recoup from last year’s rather awkward set of school scores. Last year, the DOE gave 97% of New York’s public schools either As or Bs. Call me cynical if you want to, but I find it hard to believe that almost 100% of the city public schools are doing such a bang-up job.
The city’s Chancellor of Schools, Joel Klein, seems to agree with me: when these grades were announced last fall, he said that these high grades didn’t necessarily mean that the city is filled with excellent schools. Funny. When I give a student an A, it means that the kid did an excellent job and has exceeded the course expectations. Klein said that the schools that got As “have a lot of improvement in front of them.” Howzat? These schools got As but still have lots of room for improvement. Hmm…doesn’t that seem like maybe those schools should have gotten Cs, then? Or that maybe the entire grading system is just a tad out of whack? Continued…
Posted in New York City, education.
– February 1, 2010
It’s not really a new year’s resolution so much as a new month’s resolution. Seduced by the witty writing of fussy, (aka Eden Kennedy), I’m joining NaBloPoMo tomorrow. What’s that you say? nahblowpomo? The mind boggles with the possibilities inherent in that acronym (which, true, isn’t really an acronym, but it’s close).
National Blog Posting Month. It’s like the bikram thirty classes in thirty days challenge, but less sweaty: write a post a day, every day, for a month.
February, being the shortest month, seemed like a good time to start.
So. Onward with a month o’blather and blither. Consider yourself warned.
Posted in writing.
– January 31, 2010
Earlier this week, Governor Paterson announced his new budget for New York State and in case you’ve had your head in the sand as a result of the crappyass news coming out of Massachusetts or the even worse news coming out of the Supreme Court, the budget numbers are brutal. Brutal in their bigness, brutal in what it’s going to mean for those of us who live here and don’t work for Goldman Sachs (but more about that later).
One of Paterson’s cost-saving proposals cuts 1.1 billion dollars from the education budget, which comes to about $405 million dollars for NYC public schools.
400 million. Gosh. That’s a lot of school lunches, school aides, new teachers, library books, science equipment…heck, for 400 million dollars you could build whole freakin buildings. Lots of them. But I guess cost-saving measures are best enacted on the backs of those who can’t really fight back, right?
Perhaps we should look at it differently. You know, really? 400 million? That’s nothing. Chump change. Just a little mad money to tuck in your bra before you go clubbing, in case you need to make a mad dash for the first class lounge at British Airways.
Chump change, that is, if you work at Goldman Sachs, which just announced that is setting aside a mere 16 billion dollars for the bonus pool this year. According to the story in the NYTimes, if that money were spread evenly among the 37,000 employees, each would take home about 400,000. That won’t happen, though, because of course if everyone were to benefit equally from the company’s record-setting profits, that would be, gosh, socialism or something. And that would be bad.
Nope, only the “top producers” will see the big big numbers in their bonus envelope, while the lowly folks who do the crap like answer the phones and swab the terlets and keep the calendars and fix the computers and patrol the hallways, they will get a lot less. They make less to start with of course, and they don’t live in Greenwich, and probably their kids go to public school.
Which brings me to my point. If Goldman Sachs used its bonus pool to cover just the cost of what’s being cut from the NYC public school budget, GS would still have fifteen billion five hundred and nintey-five million dollars.
(Do you know that to do that substraction problem, I had to use the computer’s calculator? Mine couldn’t handle all those zeroes.)
There it is: Goldman Sachs could cover the budget cuts to the public schools and keep FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS in their coffers. That’s a lot of mad money, if you ask me. (And believe it or not, GS employees are peeved that the bonus pool is so low this year. Truly, have these people sold their souls? Or rather, it’s clear they have sold their souls, but what the hell is the going rate for a soul these days?)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if that would happen? If the “big producers” at Goldman could decide, gosh, let’s do something for the city where we work, for the not-rich people who work for us–hell, let’s do something just to be nice.
Never gonna happen. Scott Brown will start voting with John Kerrey before Goldman et al start acting in any way other than devoted self-interest.
Posted in New York City, Politics.
– January 22, 2010
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