Strongly Worded

Out With The Old

So I just finished some hard-core Home Office Organization.

Not just the rearrangement of existing piles of paper, mind you, or even the creation of new piles. This project involved pile elimination. It involved the shredder. And it meant actually opening my Hardcore Filing Box and doing some actual filing (thus doing away with the year-old To Be Filed pile). I also reviewed the contents of the box, which was a like a porthole to memory lane. You know how that goes.

Some choice bits:

1) A credit card for Casual Corner. I opened the account to get 20% off a suit for a job interview (for a health care consulting company) in college. I dropped out of the interview process because I worried that I'd be helping hospitals cut costs and kick out patients. Whether there was grounds to that fear, I still don't know. The suit, however, was a solid investment. I still wear it.

2) Letters from my college roommate. Some really solid, reflective letters. She was--and remains--an amazing writer, but we have lost touch. Her birthday was a few weeks ago and I emailed her and never heard back. The letter made me wonder.

3) A bunch of essays I wrote for a Spanish composition class that I took at the start of my junior year abroad in Spain. One of them is about Spanish nightlife, and I wrote (in Spanish) that "I've only been here for two weeks and I'm already exhausted. I'm not sure how this society functions when people sleep so little." The T.A. made a note in the margins: "Give it time; you'll figure it out." (She was right.)

4) A bunch of emails I wrote a few years later, when I was living abroad again and being totally used by this selfish American. In the beginning, when he was lonely and linguistically challenged, we'd meet for coffee and ice cream and I'd listen to his problems. I helped him get established and brokered a deal with his landlord and helped him set up his phone and everything. I felt all honored that he trusted and needed me. Then, once he began to understand Spanish, he met cooler people and blew me off. I was 22 and naive and mystified by the behavior. Now I see that he was just a jerky version of Everyguy.

5) A file called "Home" that I started in 2000, when I first moved here. The file includes recipes from Good Housekeeping, with names like "Budget Blintzes" and "Tastiest Tacos". (I never prepared any of these dishes, despite the fact that they are purportedly "quick, inexpensive, and family-friendly".) In the same file is a pattern for a skirt that hides/enhances a pedestal sink. But I guess somehow I grew to accept the unsightly plumbing in my first Boston apartment, and never finished the project. Eight years later, however, the half-sewn material remains in my sewing basket.

6) A "Guide to Internet Viruses" prepared by the IT director at a job I held in 2001. The IT director was an awesome, subversive guy who recently died of cancer despite being 40ish. Needless to say, the information is pretty much obsolete by now, and I recycled the document. But not without a little silent tribute to its author.

I am not clear on when recycling is occurring during these festive times, so I have several heavy paper bags just waiting for pick up. All the papers have got to go, but I'm glad I get to hang on to them just a tiny bit longer.

Posted by Dori at 8:12 PM 1 comments

Dispatch from a Ghost Town

So (as you have undoubtedly noticed) the holidays fell this year in a manner that created a mass exodus from the city and a nearly silent office environment.

My boss invited me to her home on Christmas Eve; she was having a kind of open house and I debated whether to attend. I worried about whether she pitied me or genuinely wanted me to come; whether showing up could be construed as kissing up; and whether I'd be awkward and (therefore deemed unworthy of career advancement) in the end. Ultimately, after several days of solitude (my friends having departed for California, Panama, Maine, New Jersey, New York State, Santa Fe ...), I opted to go, fearing that I would wither away if I spent any more hours without physical human contact. It was a nice, unremarkable evening. I brought a homebaked pumpkin-cranberry bread and have obsessed about it for the last week, fearing for some reason that a hair might have fallen into the batter. I always tie my hair back when cooking, but how horrible would it be if one escaped and my boss was utterly revolted?

My workplace was pretty deserted all week. I was sort of productive, but made updates in a spreadsheet that had been unknowingly filtered and then had to un-do and re-do the changes. I emailed a bunch of professors who were all away on break. All the office holiday snacks had vanished, the cafeteria was closed; there was no food or coffee to be had. My super striver perky-as-all-get-out coworker was one of the few people around. I missed my young, hip co-worker acutely.

She came back yesterday and we went out for pizza and then shopped for a new watch. Mine broke a few days back, but I keep wearing it out of respect, and because without it I might lose track of which wrist is right and left. But I could not find a watch that met my criteria (small, under $150, leather band, with a round face that includes all of the numbers.), so I'm still on the hunt.

That's pretty much all I have to report.

Posted by Dori at 1:49 PM 0 comments

Redheads with Dumb Names

So I had brunch with Banter Boy (ex pseudo boyfriend) on Saturday. We IM fairly regularly, but I've steered clear of asking about his love life. I know he's been doing online dating, but have actively resisted asking for specifics.

When we were making brunch plans, however, it became clear that I was being squeezed into a very full social calendar, so I asked if his other commitments included dates. When he said yes, I asked if we were talking Internet dates or dates with a love interest, and he crushingly(but very kindly and appropriately) indicated the latter.

I really am fully over BB. We have a lot of fun together but are not meant to be a couple. Seriously.

But still, I do not want to know anything about this bitch. And so he told me only two things:
1) She has red hair (and BB has a thing for redheads)
2) Her name (a nickname, actually) sucks. Though it is very unlikely that any one of my legions of readers also has this name, I will refrain from using it and thus possibly causing offense. So let's just call this shrew "Muffy."

I told BB immediately that Muffy is a dumb name, and owned the fact that I hate that he's dating (and presumably having sex). I did not say that I was happy for him. (He appreciated this. He said "I'm glad you're jealous and that you're saying that you're jealous and opting out of the whole 'I'm happy for you' nonsense.") BB also sweetly acknowledged that he will feel equally jealous when I fall in love with the enigmatic fantasy man we call "Dr. Chef." (Dr. Chef is an ophthalmologist who conducts optical interventions in developing countries. He is an amazing foodie, and a really excellent listener.)

It makes no sense, and is in no way in keeping with my generally nice and reasonable soul, but I don't want any of my exes to fall in love. I want them to remain celibate and pine for me always. OK, not really. But there is a tiny part of me that clings to this notion.

Anyway. So in this holiday season, a time of peace and love and brotherhood, please join me in hating on Muffy the redhead.

Posted by Dori at 8:23 PM 7 comments

Fa la la la la

You must have noticed that we're nearing Christmas Eve and I haven't yet grinch-ed out. I believe that getting rid of my TV has substantially reduced my exposure to commercial Christmas nastiness. Also, I no longer drive to work and therefore no longer listen to insipid holiday radio ads. In addition, I feel that, over the years, I've been fairly exhaustive in explaining why it's weird to be Jewish during this time of year. I have also ranted about the U.S. Postal System's propogation of holiday cheer, and don't feel the need to expound on either topic.

So: moving on. There was some question at my foster job about potential festivities. We did attend the fancy departmental holiday brunch (which featured deans, tasteful decorations, and a delicious buffet that included a nod to the Jews: latkes and applesauce). But would there be more? The office across the hall had a blow-out in their conference room, complete with catered veggie lasagna and a Yankee Swap. (That office consists of maybe 20 women, a handful of guys in their 50s, and one really hot (and funny) guy of about my age. He fully has a girlfriend and is not a prospect, but we did discuss their party at length and he assured me that next year he'll be on the planning committee, and ensure that the party rages. The menu will incorporate actual meat. There will be a wet T-shirt contest.)

Given the aforementioned celebrations, and the precedent set by our previous director (who used to go all out for Christmas, taking staff and students out for super fancy dinners and bestowing generous gifts upon them), our little staff wondered what was in store for us. And the current director didn't wake up and smell the mistletoe until Wednesday, when she asked me wearily (she is so, so swamped) whether we should all go out for lunch "or something".

I proposed that we put off holiday fun until February, at which point we will be less swamped and in desperate need of a pick-me-up. This week, we agreed, we all have enough merriness already.

Which is not entirely true in my case. Because of the way dates fall this year, almost everyone I know has all of next week off, and is therefore out of town for the duration. And I'm not sure I'll even get a fix of Jewish Christmas (Chinese food and movies) this year, because even my fellow semites have fled the city.

So. The next few days might be cozy and quiet, but could quickly turn boring and lonely. There is just no way to know, but I will keep you posted. Also I hope that, regardless of whether you're headed towards Chinese food and cinema; or turkey and Midnight Mass; you have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Posted by Dori at 10:06 PM 1 comments

Visions of Mission Plum Dancing in My Head

So I have this chic co-worker and she's becoming my friend. We talk and laugh a lot and take daily crossword lunch breaks. We have much in common: we are both neat and organized, we both hate raisins, and we both find office drama simultaneously fascinating and absurd. Also, we are both unmarried, and it is nice to add a single woman to my social circle. (At this moment, all of my other friends are either married or attached.)

My co-worker recently relocated from the West Coast, and she is still adapting to the hideous darkness and frigidity that characterizes at least 60% of the New England climate. To this end, she sports a North Face Metropolis Parka, a garment that is quite sporty for her look (she usually wears classic tailored clothing in neutral colors, and tasteful stiletto heeled boots).

However, she loves her (black) North Face Metropolis Parka, which is warm and light and (apparently) of exceptionally high quality. My own coat was falling apart, so after doing a ton of unsuccessful coat shopping (I wanted a long-ish coat that is not black and does not incorporate fake fur - seems impossible to find.), she convinced me to invest $279 for some metropolis action.

But I didn't want a black coat, so I called the North Face stores in two different shopping centers, called their headquarters, and checked out City Sports, Macy's and Eastern Mountain Sports in search of a colorful alternative. I scoured the web and FINALLY found a random site that sells metropolis parkas in the very desirable Mission Plum hue.

My parka arrived yesterday and it is filling me with joy. Behold (noting that I generally look cuter and less disheveled than this - this pic was taken at the end of a long day):

Posted by Dori at 9:49 PM 5 comments

Excused Absence?

So I've been a blogger slacker this week, which is especially embarrassing because an honor has been bestowed upon me! The lovely Jenifer (who looks a bit like Julia Stiles, has a really cool life in Seattle, and is married to a former chef) has named me her blog crush. This fills me with joy because she gets tons of traffic and is so revered on the Internet that someone actually stole her photo off flickr and used it to lure unsuspecting men on match.com.

So what have I been doing rather than blogging? Well, for starters, shoveling a collective ten inches of fucking snow off of my porch, steps, sidewalk, and car. This SUCKS. I care not one iota about a winter wonderland of any kind. I want snow OFF of my person, my immediate environment, and my belongings. On Sunday I stood in the slush, heaving piles of snow (and when you live in a dense community like mine, there aren't many places for the snow to actually go), and asking myself why I voluntarily subject myself to living in this climate. Then I called my friend R.I.B.S., and we had a lovely chat while I sipped hot cocoa and she reported that the climate in LA is a little overcast, so she just left the pool outside her condo.

There's that. There's also this massive conference/training/educational extravaganza that I'm planning for my foster job. In January, I will be implementing two eight-day events at the Very Prestigious School (VPS) where I work. The events will engage 234 students, 26 industry parters, ten faculty members, ten student workers, three deans, two guest speakers, and a partridge in a pear tree. This event involves many different rooms on campus, including the Glee Room, which is part of the Engineering fiefdom, and thus unavailable to non-engineering peeps. However, said room is the only large room on the entire campus that has square tables, so yesterday I brought homemade cookies over there to entreat their staff to let us use the space. (Square tables are really vital for some reason; I still don't understand why.) My boss said she didn't care what we had to do. Wash the director's car. Provide cookies. Beg. Whatever it takes.

Then, I have also been grading final papers for my delightful online class, which is over, thank God (though I will be teaching it again in the spring). With few exceptions, the papers were hideous, and I spent some time trying to find some positive feedback to give a student who wrote six rambling pages about "the mommy wars", which included the following sentence: "mothers who stay at home give mothers who work guilt because they can stay home all day and do the laundry and take care of the children and they dont ship them off to a babysiter. The mothers who work have more money to buy there kids toys like the Hello Kitty birthday set, but they hardly ever see their kid [sic]." This is a 300 level course, my friends.

So. Hopefully the snow will melt and things will calm down. At least a little.

Posted by Dori at 7:31 AM 6 comments

A Fleeting Blogging Moment

Can we talk about how many "automatic updates" are going on these days? On a regular basis, my home computer gets slow and cranky and I get all impatient and then the telltale bubble pops up, telling me that the wireless mouse/printer/anti-virus/iTunes/what have you is updating and do I want to restart my computer now?

NO! I say. I close the window, say "restart later", and try to move on with my personal computing life. But it's like an alarm clock going off after repeated snoozes.

And thus: I bid you adieu for now. The computer is counting down the minutes before it automatically restarts.

Posted by Dori at 9:30 PM 4 comments

forgive me ... i'm a little hung over

So the frat party ... it rocked. I bared my midriff and knocked back some beers and I think I may have done some table dancing, but it's all a blur. Somehow I got mixed up with Elmo the house cat, and there was some talk about recycling (I think) and then an incident with some empty soda bottles (maybe a pyramid?), and ... cartwheels? It's safe to say that a good time was had by all. But don't worry: I followed the wise advice of my readers, and guarded my drink at all times. Also I drank a ton of water and took advil before finally crashing, and that reduced the hangover significantly.

Of course I'm so completely kidding. First of all, Phi Epsilon Kappa (or whatever it's called) underwent a major crackdown a few years ago, and thus it is "dry." When I raised this with one of the brothers, he looked at me conspiratorially and amended that it is a "damp" fraternity. Regardless, only water, ginger ale, and gallon jugs of generic brand of Juicy Juice were served. The "fantastic" food we were promised consisted of a single tray of scallops wrapped in bacon (would be great, but they were floating in grease), Caesar salad, rice pilaf, and some dry "steak."And we did receive (small) slivers of mighty fine cheesecake.

Still, I had an awesome time. I sat with my cool co-worker and another woman who works across the hall. We are all roughly the same age and do similar work and get along really well. Four brothers sat with us and we had a funny and vivid conversation. They were earnest--all of guys wore suits, and had clearly been coached on how to be polite hosts. The frat house was huge and imposing and seemed clean. The public areas were free of demeaning images of women.

They clearly liked our little group, and they invited us to come by the house sometime and hang out. If I were not 30 and way too stodgy and sensible, maybe I actually would.

Posted by Dori at 10:41 PM 2 comments

Not Upkeeping the Faith

So as you all know, I'm a pretty secular person, and rarely attend religious services. Strangely, despite having many Jewish friends, I have only been to one Jewish wedding (which was held on a gorgeous L.A rooftop, not a synagogue), and though I've been to a number of Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, they've always been held at the crunchy-touch-feely Jewish community center in my hometown. At that temple, the rabbi is a lesbian and wears a tie-dyed tallis. Traditional it ain't.

This weekend I was invited to a baby naming ceremony, and I attended along with a bunch of non-Jewish friends, all of whom were excited about the event and interested in learning about the ceremony and Judaism in general. The invitation said that there would be a Torah service at 9:00, with the ceremony at ten. In my ultra-reform experience, this means a zippy service followed by a moving ceremony and an early departure time. I expected the synagogue would be charming and welcoming, and that the non-Jewish visitors would be able follow along and participate in the service.

We arrived at ten and were welcomed warmly by a woman in a tallis and kippah/prayer cap (traditionally worn only by men). She was wearing jeans and skidding around in her socks. When we entered the sanctuary we encountered a large, shabby room with folding chairs - the set-up looked like an A.A. meeting. There was a group of scraggly men praying tonelessly (all in jeans), several families looking similarly bedraggled, and a mystifying organizational structure. I wondered who (if anyone) was leading the service, where we were in the service, where the hell was the baby, and why did they just take the torah out of the ark (the cabinet in which it is stored when not in use)? The whole point of arriving at ten was that the torah was supposed to be in by then, allowing us to jump right to the touching baby-oriented part.

When we sat down, I scanned the room and the proud parents were nowhere to be found. I realized immediately that, despite the crunchy trappings, this was a conservative synagogue. Which meant that the service was conducted entirely in Hebrew, and that it would be comprehensive. The service progressed over the course of an hour or so, during which I felt sorry for myself, and even more sorry for my kind and curious friends, who were trying hard to look interested and respectful despite the fact that the goings-on were completely unintelligible. (I am a native Hebrew speaker, did my time in Sunday school, and even I had no idea what was going on.)

The proud parents made an appearance at this point, and the rabbi or prayer leader or whoever said some kind words and then the parents whisked the baby away and we all turned our focus miserably back to the goings-on. There was no way I could pray throughout any of it. Any ounce of spirituality I might have possessed was sucked up by the shoeless-and-jean wearing congregants, by what I experienced as a lack of respect for the large group of non-Jewish visitors, and by the space itself. I understand that the congregation is small and underfunded, but that's no excuse for burned out lightbulbs and torn drapes.

After a while I left (I had a prior commitment that I thought I'd have plenty of time to get to), and left my friends. I wanted so badly to take them aside and tell them that generally services are inviting, that most synagogues are simple but often beautiful and well-kept. And that I'd never seen a Jewish ritual of any kind in which the honorees don't attend the entire proceedings, and in which anyone was padding around in socks.

Posted by Dori at 5:30 PM 3 comments

Phi Theta Party

So today I got invited to a frat party.

This morning, I fired up my computer at my foster job at VPS (Very Prestigious School), and the following email was waiting for me:

"Dear Ms. [Dori's Last Name],
We the brothers of Phi Epsilon Kappa [or equivalent] cordially invite you to join us for our end of year faculty dinner. This is an event we host every semester where we invite faculty and staff from VPS that brothers have identified as being particularly special to them. Think of it as an opportunity for us to thank you for your help, guidance, and support. The food at this dinner is especially fantastic. It is hand made by a special request to our house chef, Chef Chris, who used to work as an executive chef at a well known local restaurant."

I got all misty-eyed, thinking, that in my short time at VPS, I had already made an impact, and that college boys were finally noticing me! I was dying to know who'd sent the invitation. I work with 260 students have no idea which ones are Phi Kaps. That made it even cooler - the email was like a missive from a secret admirer (it was sent from a generic frat address). I scoured the directory for 'Kaps , and saw a few names I recognized, but nobody "particularly special."

When my officemate arrived, I busted out the news. "I got invited to a frat party! Who do we know in Phi Epsilon Kappa?" She pulled up the directory and we scoured together. Then we ordered a pizza and played "I Never."

Kidding. I really did harbor the hope that the frat boys had sat around making the guest list and actually said my name out loud. But my co-worker burst my bubble. She explained that she gets asked to this stuff on a regular basis, and that "it's not really a frat party". Also, she'd been invited too. This was slightly disappointing, but my co-worker is also young and hip and if we were both asked it still could reflect on frat boys' appreciation of us as women.

Also: this event is a celebration and it will be held in the chapter house of Phi Something Or Other, and it's the closest to a frat party I'll probably ever get.

I've already started practicing my keg stand.

Posted by Dori at 10:13 PM 5 comments