Happy Administrative Professional's Day

It's Administrative Professional's Day. Have you sent flowers to the Administrative Professional in your life? If so, they're probably really pissed off.

How much do you want to bet that, in the trash can under Condi Rice's desk, there is a bouqet of roses along with a card reading, "To a #1 Administrative Professional of State. Love, George."

This is the one holiday where you're guaranteed to have more of an awkward moment if you remember than if you awkwardly pretend it doesn't exist. Because it shouldn't. Why have a day for secretaries? And, while we're on the subject, what's so bad about calling someone a secretary? It's a perfectly challenging job that doesn't typically involve a name tag (as most truly heinous jobs do), and often requires a college education - preferably in Classical Studies or Anthropology, and/or an MFA in Dance.

But, if we're going to have a day for secretaries, shouldn't there be a special day for, say, dog groomers, or air traffic controllers, or people who work at the Gap? And let's not forget Waste Collection Professionals (who will at least have the perfect place to put all that crap from Hallmark).

In my post-college years, I had a short-lived career as Administative Professional, despite inflated titles such as "Associate Trade Attachee," which sounds like something you might find on pg. 76 of The Sharper Image catalog, available in leather or suede. Later, when I was pretty unambiguously the Executive Assistant to the president of a company, I never got anything on secretaries' day. This may or may not be because I was the world's worst secretary, considering my utter lack of organizational skills and my utter inability to care about the font style in your travel report, which - yes, I know - should have been Times New Roman instead of Ariel, or that I forgot to cancel your dog food delivery the week you were travelling to Aspen. Samuel Beckett meets Dilbert with a twist of Dada, for good measure.

Come to think of it, maybe the Administrative Professionals do deserve their own holiday. Better yet, why don't we have a National Ambiguous Job Title Day? That way, nobody will get their feelings hurt.

Of sick days, babies, and weiner dogs...

I called in sick today. I felt a bit ill but, in all honesty, I could have made it in. But this is my first actual sick day at the new job (since September), so that's not so bad. I still always feel insanely guilty for taking a sick day, even if I'm actually sick. That unfortunate Protestant-guilt/work ethic thing that I somehow inherited despite my thoroughly non-religious upbringing. On my mom's side, I come from a long line of Presbyterian Scots who believed that the purpose of life is to suffer. That, and to purchase items on sale. And then, after all that suffering, you're going to go to hell anyway, just for good measure. Or maybe in retribution for that time you got your own desert at that restaurant, and had the poor manners to actually enjoy it.

Ahhhhh. It was a cold, wet weekend in New York. This is particularly distressing since it had been beautiful all week - in the upper 70s, sunny, fluffy clouds, the whole thing. This was particularly distressing because my dear friend April and her friend & co-worker Amy came to visit from Florida this weekend, as a side-trip from a conference they were attending in DC. To put matters into perspective, April only brought one pair of shoes, and they were sandals. Because it's April (both the month, and the CPA with hippie tendancies). In Gainesville it's about 85 degrees this time of yeear. In NYC, it was rainy and in the 40s.

I'm really ready for winter to be over. Technically, it is, but somehow the weather didn't get the memo. Ugh.

On Saturday, we met up with Liz, our good friend from high school and college, who now lives in New Haven. She brought her 7-month-old baby, Charlotte, who is an example of what I call an "ambassador baby." One of those babies who's so cute and sweet and well-behaved, proudly advancing the cause of Babiness everywhere. The kind of baby who makes you think, "this parenting thing couldn't be so hard!" On the other end of the spectrum, on Sunday we went to the Museum of Natural History, where we encountered any number of kids who are the opposite of the Ambassadors; the kind that make you think the Chinese might be on to something with the whole forced sterilization policy.

I do want kids eventually. I think. I'm just not sure I'd be a very good parent. Maybe not a Britney Spears or a Bette Davis type mother, but no June Cleaver, either. Can selfish people be good parents? When I was a kid, one of my best friends had the kind of parents that some people accused of being selfish, because they went out every Friday and Saturday night and did whatever married adults on the Eastern Shore of Maryland do on a weekend. All the neighborhood kids would love to be invited over to my friend's house and watch cable (which nobody else had in those days) and ask the teenage babysitter questions about boys and sex. Between the John Hughes movies and the babysitter, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know about life by the age of 10. My friend and her sister, the children of the "selfish" parents, both have Ph.D.s, and are unbridled success stories. Meanwhile, the parents who sat at home and reviewed the finer points of grammar with their kids every Friday night -- those kids turned out ... well, like me.

Also, I'm still waiting for the maternal instincts to kick in properly. They're in full force when it comes to cats, and, to a lesser extent, long-haired miniature weiner dogs (especially the spotted ones). I've got to say that it's very comforting to see that Liz seems to have taken to the whole parenting thing like a duck to water, because back in the day both of us were bewildered at best, and frightened at worst by the concept of babies. Kids I get - I love kids. It's just babies that are scary. They need constant attention. In my single days, I encountered a few men who were like that, but you can't just break up with a baby for being too "clingy." Yes, yes, I'm sure you don't want to when it's yours and all that. I'm just waiting to go as crazy over babies in the park as, say, dachsunds. Of course, I don't want a weiner dog of my own because they're too much trouble. Which might be a sign that I'm not ready for kids.

A Cautionary Tail

Good news - Molly the Cat has been liberated.

Even if you don't live in New York, you might have actually heard this story on the news. All last week, there were camera crews from all over the world camped out in front of Myers of Keswick (free plug #7,838,353), a store in the west Village that sells British specialty foods, such as crisps (potato chips) and curds (potato chips) and whey (potato chips). The store also sells a variety of prepared foods made from the non-vital organs of pigs and sheep (try the Spleen & Appendix Pie, a pub favorite).

It seems that Molly, a mouser, somehow got caught in the wall of the building and couldn't find her way out.

Now, anybody who knows me knows that I'm what you might generously refer to as "a cat person," or less generously as a "future crazy cat lady." Nonetheless, one word does spring to mind, and that is: DARWINISM. (Clearly, they need to go back to teaching it the schools.) The cat managed to get into the wall, when she gets hungry enough, she'll find her way out. Or not.

Instead, a team mounted a Jessica Lynch-style search and rescue operation to bring Molly to safety. An anonymous donor volunteered to underwrite the cost of getting Molly out of the well (I mean, the wall). I'm really glad she's okay, even if she probably would have been even without the intervention of the Navy Seals. Kind of like Jessica Lynch.

However, the thing that amazes me the most is that this story made the papers in other countries, including France and Japan. I've heard of fluff news, but Fluffy news? Come on.

Yes, it just goes to show that wherever people are from, whatever their religion or culture, the press will go to great lenghts to avoid reporting real news. But still. Don't they have cats stuck in walls in Tokyo and Paris?

It reminded me of the fake news conference that was held recently where a woman (who the government perhaps had some serious dirt on) got up and asked, "Mr. President, why doesn't the evil liberal media [sic] ever report anything good that's happening in Iraq?"

Don't they have any cats stuck in walls in Tikrit? Maybe they should look into that.

In other parts of the country, cats get stuck in trees or on roofs or whatever all the time, but in general, it does not garnish the attention of the international press. If it did, they would have to start a special wire service that reported nothing else. The Cats Stuck in High/Small Places (CSHSP) Press. Virtually all news headlines would be: "Cat on a roof in Des Moines - News at 11. "

Before becoming an international cautionary tail (ugh ... sorry) Molly's primary raison d'etre was to catch the mice that scamper about the store, sort of a disgusting thought considering they make sausages on the premises, but nevermind. I'm betting that Molly was named after the character from Ulysses, a novel that famously begins, Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl.

Although I don't think this was a PR stunt, if by chance I ever open up a British specialty foods shop, the marketing plan will be very succinct: Dig well. Throw in cat. Call Newsweek.

Amazingly, Molly isn't the first New York cat that managed to make the morning news by getting herself wedged into a crevice, as this article explains.

I guess P. Diddy and Sting can call off their benefit song, "Sending our love into the tight crevice," which they simultaneously realized could be misinterpreted in very rude ways.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote...

The tail end of winter (which it still is here, I don't care what the calendar says) is the worst. It's like the last mile of a marathon, when people are worn out and ornery and don't even care what their ranking is, they just want it to be over. I say this from experience, having personally watched people on TV run marathons.

It's still cold. Why is it still so cold? This weekend was beautiful. Sunday was warm and dazzling - one of those beautiful, unexpected sneak-preview-of-spring days, the kind that are so perfect they make you acutely aware of & afraid of your own mortality. Walking through Central Park felt like something from a ridiculously upbeat musical, or a Seurat painting (or both). The kind of day when you expect the guy who's sweeping in the park to suddenly break out in a sychronized song & dance with the guy at the pretzel stand, and the jogging lady with the weiner dog, with the flowers singing an ironic back-up.

April really is the cruellest month. The bulb flowers in the tree pits along Park Avenue and Madison Avenue, and in the park, are suddenly all over the place. For weeks they've been doing their slow wake-up thing, bent over and waiting waiting waiting like the rest of us for the end of winter. And then one day, wham! Daffodils all over the place! Tulips! Like Demeter coming back from the underworld, only to be peed on by schnausers in Louis Vuitton raincoats. And coverd in smog from the DHL truck and taxis, and drowned in the remnants of sodas and pop rock.

It's amazing that living things manage to not just survive, but actually manage to be perfectly beautiful in such an inhospitable environment. What is it that makes plants grow in the cracks in the sidwalk? It must be the same impulse that allows humans to live in small, overpriced apartments with plumbing problems.

All of this brings us back to the age-old question of Why do we live in New York? I ask this now, because we're fast approaching the time of year when it won't occur to any of us to question why we live in New York. From May to June, there's that window of idyllic bliss (what I call the Amnesia Season) when all those plans to open up a surf shack in El Salvador suddenly seem really absurd.

The funny thing is, when people leave New York, we usually use terms like, "got out," or "escaped," or other words usually reserved for people who are incarcerated in prison or perhaps a mental institution. And you never hear about people who leave New York who aren't entirely, freakishly ecstatic about it. It's like once people leave New York, they become a Scientologist about wherever they move to, sending emails and creating web sites in hommage to their new hometowns, which are inevitably warmer and cleaner and cheaper and friendlier and less pretentious than New York.

Yes, Ashville sounds lovely. And Portland, and Seattle, and Santa Barbara. But can you get a falafel at 3 in the morning? Huh? Gotcha there!

For instance, our friends Morgan and Sheri finally "got out" of New York, and are now on probabtion in Seattle. By all accounts, it seems beautiful and welcoming and relatively affordable and all the things New York ain't. They seem much, much happier. Same goes for pretty much everyone else I know who's moved to other places.

So why is it that the idea of leaving New York is so disconcerting? It's like a smoker thinking of giving up smoking. They know it's a bad habit, but they love it anyway. Even with the worst of the weather and the pollution and the crowds and everything else, it's a way of life, and it's one that would probably be hard to give up. I guess in a world where most of your basic needs are met, the biggest fear becomes boredom. And it's hard to be bored in New York. On the other hand, it's awfully easy to be insane.

Sigh.