Flush with the international success of Simple Abundance (Warner, 528 pages, $24), the inspirational book that debuted 10 years ago, writer Sarah Ban Breathnach once rented a posh New York apartment, right on Central Park West.
"Oh," she almost moans when I ask her about it, as we settle in for afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel, "It was very beautiful."
Dressed in a boldly designed jacket and clearly enthralled with a mahogany-and-velvet environment that is far more abundant than simple, Ban Breathnach continues with a sigh, "it was like a boyfriend you see every time you come to the city --"
"The kind of boyfriend," I ask, "who you know is all wrong for you?"
"Oh, yes," she responds enthusiastically, drawing out the syllables to indicate that there is really no other kind of boyfriend worth having.
Ban Breathnach (it's "Bon Brannock") knows that obvious luxuries like the apartment and the jacket don't exactly go along with the sweet, slightly countrified image of an author who once invited readers to "pick up the needle . . . and make the first stitch on the canvas of your life."
"Women definitely expected Laura Ashley," she says ruefully.
'It couldn't have been me'
Ten years later, Ban Breathnach is finally telling the story of what it was like to become an overnight sensation after 25 years of writing.
Her new book, Moving On (Meredith Books, 284 pages, $24.95), chronicles the strange disconnect she felt at being an ambassador for simplicity but living a life so crazed with publicity and obligations that she hired nine assistants to help manage everything.
It was, she says, almost an out-of-body experience. "When the book first took off," she recalls, "and there was this explosion of attention, I often felt like I wanted to turn around and see who everyone was talking about. Because it couldn't have been me."
Ban Breathnach wants to make clear that she truly believed -- and still believes -- in the philosophies espoused in Simple Abundance, in making time to take care of oneself, in making conscious choices, and expressing gratitude and not getting caught up in material things. It was just that she found it very difficult to actually live in keeping with those principles when she was also living as an Oprah-endorsed multimedia celebrity.
"Sometimes," she says, "it was as if everything was in a foreign language, like I was reading one thing and pronouncing it another way."
Readers, attracted by the conversational tone of Simple Abundance, felt like they knew Ban Breathnach, whom they always addressed, confidentially, as Sarah. They had stories to tell her and rushed to her side at every appearance -- and when they happened to spot her at the grocery store -- to share their tales of lives transformed and authentic selves rediscovered by embracing simplicity. It all got, well, rather complicated.
And things got even messier when Ban Breathnach's marriage ended and the many Web-based chat rooms dedicated to her work suddenly filled with gossip and speculation about her separation and divorce.
"Simple Abundance is who I really am," she says, "but it was difficult to be true to that."
Then she found a small cottage in rural England, which had once been used by Isaac Newton as his personal chapel. The place was for sale, and Ban Breathnach felt compelled to buy it.
Living in Newton's Chapel, as she now does, year round, gave her the chance to once again live a Simple Abundance sort of life.
The story of Moving On, then, is the story of how Ban Breathnach came to appreciate the importance of "home" in her life.
"I think we, as women, create homes for our husbands. We create homes for our children," she says, "And, as a by-product, we get a bed. I bet if you stopped 10 women on the street and asked if they're really comfortable in their homes, most of them would have to admit that there's not much place for them at home, no sanctuary."
If Simple Abundance spelled out a philosophy of living, Moving On offers a practical course in how to make a comfortable life for yourself.
'We do have storage'
"It's about de-cluttering the heart before the closet," Ban Breathnach says, for the first time sounding exactly like the Earth mother-y, New Age-y voice of her books. "The idea for Moving On came when I was cleaning out the attic of my Bethesda, Md., town house [which had once been her primary residence] and getting ready to move into Newton's Chapel. I was going through these boxes, deciding what to ship over. It was the stages of hell."
Ban Breathnach recently remarried and now shares Newton's Chapel with her British husband. When they moved in, she says, there was the challenge of "blending his eclectic tastes" with hers.
"We are still editing," she says diplomatically and then adds, almost desperately, "We do have storage."
It's an ongoing process, she says, this making of a home.
"I think in Moving On," she says, "I wanted to say that in the 10 years since Simple Abundance, life doesn't turn out as you planned. That's pretty universal. And it's not bad. It's good. I'm at peace."
Presumably, the movie deal is out. Unless, of course, a clever screenwriter can make an Adaptation-style sort of meta-story out of it.
Shouldn't Viswanathan have to give some of that money to Megan McCafferty, the lesser-known, and less "successful" author from whom she stole key passages?
I really, really didn't want to get into the whole Caitlin Flanagan thing. Flanagan, in case you (lucky!) haven't heard, is the magazine writer whose new book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown: 244 pages, $22.95) fires the latest round in the mommy wars with the claim that "at-home" motherhood is better for children than motherhood combined with paid, outside work.
The book itself has a bipolar quality, moving back and forth between thoughtful, nuanced discussion of the incredible complexities of figuring out how to raise a family and make a home in the modern world and preachy, moralistic pronouncements on the superiority of women who "sacrifice" their careers -- as Flanagan clearly has not -- in order to tend to the needs of their families.
But Flanagan herself is far more compelling than anything she could possibly write. She's got that traffic-accident quality that you just can't turn away from, even though you know you should.
Still, after reading the book and talking to Flanagan over the phone, I was determined not to take the bait. These hair-pulling girl-on-girl fights about which privileged lifestyle -- the debate seems to be between well-off professional women and well-off stay-at-home moms -- offers the greatest advantage for our next generation of overachievers have a tendency to get old quickly. And, as far as I know, no one on either side has managed to change the mind of anyone on the opposite side, anyway.
I sat on my feminist hands as Flanagan sounded off about how the women's movement had failed us all.
I said nothing -- OK, I did scream, "You're the devil!" while watching Flanagan on "The Colbert Report," but I was alone at the time so it doesn't really count -- about her weird glorification of 1950s-style "traditional" marriages in which men are the unquestioned heads of their households.
I even decided to refrain from remarking on the utter hypocrisy the way Flanagan celebrates domestic life when she has both a job and a staff of household help.
But when Flanagan declared, on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on public radio, that she understood why the United States had gone to war in Iraq and that, in fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if people had only listened to her, I just couldn't help myself. I had to write about it.
Flanagan's argument is that, in failing to embrace her message of stay-at-home superiority, presidential candidate Al Gore alienated legions of voters who might have elected him in 2000. And, if he'd won, the nation's foreign policy would be very different today.
This, you have to admit, is an incredibly neat trick on Flanagan's part. She is, she says, a lifelong Democrat, anti-war and pro-choice. But she is deeply angry at what she feels is the party's intolerance of views that don't toe the feminist line. Republicans, on the other hand, have been warm and incredibly welcoming to Flanagan, she says, even though she has many points of disagreement with them. This, she says, is why Republicans have been winning elections and Democrats have been losing them.
It's kind of funny how it's all about her, isn't it?
If she's wrong, I must be right
Personally, I don't buy into this line of reasoning. As I remember it, the main issues in the 2000 election were Elian Gonzales, Monica Lewinsky and whether Al Gore actually had invented the Internet.
But, beyond that, I did wonder if Flanagan -- despite sometimes seeming unbalanced, as when she shouted at a radio show caller to "stand down!" so she could continue her "and that's why we're in Iraq" monologue -- had a point about the nature of liberal America's stance on the nature of modern motherhood.
Have we become intolerant?
I'm appalled by Flanagan's smug assertion that her twin sons got "an immersion in the most powerful force on Earth: mother love" when she (and her full-time nanny) stayed home with them before they started nursery school, and its unspoken corollary that kids whose mothers held outside jobs somehow got a shallower dip in parental love.
But, at the same time, I find myself feeling unaccountably hostile towards the "opt-out" moms who, in moments of candor, admit that the decision to stay home had more to do with career frustration and burnout than with any particular philosophy of child rearing. I can't look at a highly educated professional woman who drops out of the work force without thinking she's making it just that much harder for the rest of us to convince our colleagues that we're serious about staying.
Like Caitlin Flanagan, I tend to make it all about me.
And maybe that's what accounts for the peculiar nastiness of the mommy wars: it's not just the personal-as-political. It's the political as very, very personal.
Perhaps it's time for a truce.
Maybe we need to stop passing judgment on each other and focus on the important truths on which we can agree.
Like how the war in Iraq is really all Monica Lewinsky's fault.
"Fair Harvard has her crimson, old Yale her colors, too, but for dear Pennsylvania, we wear the red and blue."
This is an actual line from the official school song of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. And, while I've never done any sort of scientific research on this, I am fairly certain that it is the only school song so wrapped up in an institution-wide inferiority complex that it actually mentions other, better schools before mentioning its own name.
It's one of the many reasons I've always adored Penn, which, should I ever strike it really rich, I plan to endow with the Debra Pickett Fund for the Employment of English Majors. There will be a special office in the Career Planning and Placement Center dedicated to finding jobs for kids like me, whose educational training prepared them to be exemplary cocktail party guests, but fell slightly short in the practical skills department.
I was invited to speak, this morning, at a breakfast meeting of the local Penn alumni organization and, though it was mildly difficult to make it downtown for the 7:30 am start (note to organizers of future events: I'm really more of a brunch person, thanks.), the event proved to be very cool indeed.
I introduced myself briefly (being sure to mention how I managed to get fired from my job as a columnist for the school newspaper after a single semester) and then answered a bunch of questions on topics that ranged from media bias to restaurant recommendations. I was having an almost inexplicably great time talking with everyone, when it occurred to me why this was so fun. We were talking.
Where does anyone go, once you're out of grad school, to have actual conversation about stuff that matters? When do you get a chance to talk to people outside your usual circle, with perspectives that differ from your own?
I'm inspired, at the moment, to found some sort of salon, just to try and replicate this morning's experience. But I'd be happy to give up if someone else would like to do it for me. (Or has already done so.)
I've been kind of obsessed with the whole "I'm the decider" line, ever since the President uttered it last Tuesday. I find it a handy thing to shout out when there's a question of, say, what to have for dinner or what to do on Friday night.
Most of the decisions of real consequence in my house are, actually, made in consultation. But, when it comes to the completely insignificant stuff of daily life -- like what we buy at the grocery store -- I'm all over it. This is primarily because I have very little patience for analysis.
R., on the other hand, has an unbelievable talent for accumulating and processing data. This has proved enormously useful in many areas of our life together. For example, I can say with some confidence that we pay less for airline tickets than anyone else we know. Because he has no problem spending an entire day (or more) finding the best possible deal.
But, while this is a valuable skill in big-ticket purchases, it tends to be largely un-helpful with small ones. The question of what to have for dinner isn't really about the most perfect solution for our nutritional needs. On most nights, after work, it's about getting decent food into our mouths as quickly and easily as possible.
"I'm the decider!" I announce when I make the call that tonight (possibly our last night without a fully functional kitchen?!) is the night for frozen pizza and Caesar salad. And I've got to admit, it feels good.
I know why Dubya could barely suppress his grin when he said it. Being The Decider totally rocks.
And, apparently, at least a few other people think so too, as evidenced by this New York Times piece about being The Decider in a relationship. (Extra points to the reporter for quoting a dominatrix. The S&M perspective is missing from way too many news stories these days.)
"A man who's warm can't understand a man who's freezing"
I go back and forth on whether I'm a fan of the whole "One Book, One Chicago" idea. On the one hand, there's the whole creepy intellectual conformity aspect of it -- the Oprahfication of yet one more aspect of life. But, then again, they do pick really good books.
I'm ashamed to admit that I'd never actually read the current selection, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." I just finished it last night, curled up under a fleece blanket, while R. is out at the Cubs game, enjoying the 40-degree weather like a real Chicagoan.
I'll spare you the "Smart Girls' Book Club" review of it ("full of sassy attitude, but a little slow for a beach read") and just say that it really is an incredibly powerful piece of work.
Still, if I fall in love with the "One Book, One Chicago" thing, is that just one step further down the slippery slope of Daley loyalty that will soon have me looking at the 20-zillion planted-too-soon tulips and not wondering what they cost? Or, worse, will I soon begin to think those "high crime area" police cameras are a good idea?
So it turns out that Kaavya Viswanathan, author of the best-selling chick lit novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, lifted key passages and plot elements for the book from another author's work.
I should have posted this on Sunday, when the news of the accusations of plagiarism first came out, via the Harvard Crimson, but, to be perfectly honest, I had absolutely no idea what to say about it. In fact, I feel sort of weirdly guilty about the whole thing, since I've reviewed both authors' work and, actually, gave a slightly better review to Viswanathan than to McCafferty. (I guess the second draft of something generally is an improvement.)
So now I'm in this weird, blogging at 4 am place about the whole thing.
In a quirk of timing, I read Viswanathan's book first (I wasn't on the chick lit beat when McCafferty's first two books came out). And, though I did sort of skim over Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings in preparation for the review of Charmed Thirds, I really wasn't paying close enough attention to really pick up any of the similarities of language.
Still, it bugs me that I bought into the Viswanathan hype. I'm particularly humiliated by having written this passage:
While some of Viswanathan's prose is unimaginative -- too many preppy kids are described as looking like they've stepped off the pages of a J. Crew catalog, for example -- the book's fresh and witty premise rescues it from getting mired in typical nerd-to-cool-girl cliches. Life among New Jersey's suburban elite, with their McMansions and high-end SUVs, is chronicled with an impressive eye for detail and a wit that is smart but not scathing.
Um, yeah, what I meant to say there was "impressive eye for details that someone else already wrote down."
I do give myself some credit, however, for mentioning James Frey in the review. (Random thought: They should totally hook up!)
The fact is that I still haven't fully resolved all my James Frey issues. I actually received a promotional copy of A Million Little Pieces (free books = awesome job perk) before it was an Oprah book, but didn't write about it, or even finish reading it, because I thought it was BS.
Where, oh where, were my news-breaking instincts? Why was I unable to instantly recall this assessment when the book started getting big, national attention?
OK, well, that was sort of cathartic for me. (It would have been more satisfying if I'd been having some ice cream while writing it, but, sadly, our cupboards are bare. Still, I feel like I worked out some issues here. Thanks.)
One last thing to get off my chest, while I'm in confessional mode. On Sunday, I wrote about a guy who created a show that airs on WTTW. Ethically, I should have disclosed that I also appear on a completely different show, Chicago Tonight, which also airs on WTTW. This did not occur to me until it was pointed out to me by my unhappy bosses on Monday.
So, pretty much, I seem to support plagiarism and conflicts of interest whenever possible. Excellent.
In theory, we'll have a working kitchen (including sink!) by the end of the day on Wednesday.
I considered this Sunday afternoon, as I was washing dishes in the bathroom sink, and realized that this whole remodeling exercise has been our version one of those we-were-so-poor-in-our-younger-days stories that older folks often tell about their newlywed days.
Those of us who get married a little later in life (hey, I was 31, which is perfectly respectable) tend not to have those stories to bond over and eventually amuse our spoiled grandchildren. We don't have to live on Tuna Helper without the tuna or live in a poorly insulated 5th floor walkup. (Though we do each have some fairly impressive grad school / first job poverty stories on our own, there hasn't been call for a lot of shared sacrifice.)
But we'll be able to amuse the family with our tale of the 3 weeks when we didn't have a kitchen sink.
This thought made the whole thing a lot less annoying. Or maybe I'm just giddy at the thought of almost being done.
Or maybe the dust and paint fumes have turned my brain to mush.
"I look at 'Check, Please!' as being authentic and diverse," says David Manilow, creator of the popular restaurant review show. "And the thing I'm really proud of is that people are exploring the city because of the show."
We're sitting at a sidewalk table on the corner of 16th Street and 61st Avenue in Cicero, and Manilow, trim and handsome in a sport coat and dress slacks, cheerfully allows that "without the show, I'd never know about a place like this."
The place is Freddy's Pizza, a bustling neighborhood Italian grocery, pizza place and gelateria that, since winning rave reviews on the show, which airs on WTTW-Channel 11, two years ago, has drawn customers from all over the city and suburbs. Manilow gets a hero's welcome here, due only in part to the fact that his show has brought loads of new business to Freddy's. Almost everyone who stops by more than a few times gets a similarly warm greeting, full of how's-the-family banter.
Manilow doesn't have to place an order here. We just claim our table -- a fancy plastic setup that's been molded to look like wood, which he swears has been ordered especially for our lunch -- and, within a few minutes, food is arriving. There's calamari, arrancini (rice balls stuffed with meat), fried artichokes, roasted peppers, an antipasti plate and fresh-baked bread. Just for starters.
Eventually, we'll pull over a second table for the pasta, risotto and pizza.
'Why isn't there a show about this?'
But, meanwhile, we soak in the sunshine and the almost-ambience punctuated by the sounds of passing garbage trucks and road crews.
Manilow, who grew up on the North Side, near Broadway and Wellington, says he has always used restaurants as a way to explore the city, from family outings to Ziggy's on Clark Street to ventures into ethnic neighborhoods. A career in television -- he was Tim Weigel's producer at Channel 7 -- eventually led him to launching a production company with friends in 2000.
But their early work centered more on producing corporate videos than on trying to come up with ideas for hit TV shows. Then Manilow, who'd been married and living in the suburbs, raising three kids, found himself once again single and living in the city. He rediscovered his youthful passion for checking out restaurants of every possible variety and, very soon, started to wonder, "Why isn't there a show about this?"
"This show, honestly," he says, "was one of those things that you think about one morning in the shower, and 48 hours later, you have the whole thing: the name and everything."
'It was fantastic'
The idea, which has been replicated in San Francisco and will soon launch in Los Angeles, was to bring together diverse, authentic "real people" reviewers -- "people who I don't think you would ever see sitting down at a table together" -- to introduce each other to their favorite restaurants, "three restaurants that pretty much no one would ever have been to all three of them."
Since its premiere, more than 30,000 people have applied, via WTTW's Web site, to appear on the show, and Manilow and his staff have an elaborate screening and scheduling process that ensures lively conversation and diverse perspectives. (Though the wine, served to reviewers as their conversation is filmed, also tends to help things along, Manilow adds.)
In the beginning, though, there was the challenge of filming several episodes without any mechanism for recruiting reviewers.
"We were getting friends-of-friends-of-friends," Manilow says, adding that he also recruited a few telegenic strangers, like a magician whose performance he went to see.
"On the first show," he recalls, "we had a picture framer, who was pierced and tattooed all over, and a suburban homemaker/artist and a very, very snobbish doctor. The restaurants were Earwax Cafe, Sushi Kushi Toyo, in a suburban strip mall, and Blackbird. You can pretty easily figure out who picked what. Well, on the air, the doctor said he was so glad to have found this sushi place, which he would have never been to in a million years. Then they argued over Earwax [the hip Wicker Park cafe selected by the framer], and the [picture framer] said he wasn't comfortable at Blackbird. It was fantastic."
'I have a great time'
A hit right away, the show is now the most-watched of all WTTW's local programming and, in addition to its San Francisco and Los Angeles incarnations, might also launch in the Washington, D.C., and Seattle areas. Manilow is so thrilled that he seems almost unable to believe his good fortune.
"Are you from that show, 'Check, Please!'?" asks a woman seated at a nearby table, noticing the photographer snapping away as Manilow holds court.
He laughs joyously at the question. ("Check, Please!" reviewers are not accompanied by cameras when they dine out. In fact, the show only films the restaurants after the reviewers' conversation has already been recorded.)
"I'm totally thrilled when that happens," he says, wiping the corner of his eye in a self-mocking sentimental gesture. "I mean, really, how great is this? I have a great time; I meet great people."
He samples from every plate in front of us, crediting the "genetics diet" for his slim frame, clearly relishing the food and, even more, the incredible friendliness of this busy corner.
Manilow, who does not consider himself a foodie -- "What's a foodie, really?" he asks. "Someone who only eats the best of everything? There's greatness in a cheeseburger, as far as I'm concerned." -- has early memories of just finishing one of his mother's home-cooked meals and then opening up the refrigerator, just for the comfort of seeing what might be served the next day.
"But the thing about Chicagoans," says Manilow, who lives in Lake View, a few blocks away from the apartment where he grew up and his mother still lives, "is that, when they talk about a meal, they don't talk about the food first. It's about the feeling, about the people."
Full disclosure: To my great disappointment, I've never been called for jury duty. And, while any prosecutor in his right mind would immediately try to bounce a bleeding heart liberal like me, I'd really like to believe that I'd make an excellent juror.
Also: While thinking about today's column, I came up with an excellent little social engineering idea that could revolutionize jury service in Chicago. I think the wealthy "opt out" moms are the ideal jury pool. For one thing, they clearly don't need the money. So, instead of the small daily stipend, they could be compensated with fancy coffee drinks and trunk show shopping opportunities. And they could bring the fabulous strollers with them. It would be just like going to Starbucks, but with additional topics of conversation.
Today's column: Want to clean up juries? Bring in the yuppies
The snobbish, cynical view of the Ryan trial and its aftermath is that it's perfectly appropriate that a jury of the former governor's peers would turn out to be full of liars and petty criminals.
But, tempting as it is to trot out the old saw about a jury being a collection of 12 people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty, it isn't fair to cast aspersions on the folks who -- whether they started out in good faith or not -- spent six months of their lives hearing testimony in a complicated, slow-moving legal matter. They were willing to show up and serve, which is more than you can say for a lot of us.
Still, it is striking -- at least from the profoundly sheltered point of view of someone who thinks getting arrested and taken to court is a very big deal -- that so many of the jurors in the Ryan case either have criminal records themselves or are closely involved with someone who does.
This made me wonder if the city's growing population of overachieving yuppies -- people who either avoided crime because it would look bad on their college transcripts or had parents capable of getting youthful indiscretions cleared from their permanent records -- were somehow underrepresented in the jury pool.
I decided to conduct a highly scientific survey of Chicago's yuppie elite to see how frequently they'd been called to serve on juries and how many times they'd actually served. My working hypothesis was that lots of them would have been summoned, but most, considering their time too valuable for an activity antithetical to both multitasking and profitability, would have found a way to get out of actually showing up. I figured that pro-jury-service cultural trends -- Oprah, wearing her cute outfits at 26th and California; big celebrity trials in which jurors get a few minutes of quoted-on-ET fame; the ubiquity of ''Law & Order'' reruns -- would not have significant influence over people who like to consider themselves trend setters, rather than followers.
Basically, I was assuming that people who buy their coffee at Dunkin' Donuts would be inclined to serve on juries, while those who prefer Starbucks would not.
Scientific method
On Thursday morning, I sought to enlist the Sun-Times' crack sociological survey team to design a study that would test both parts of my hypothesis. On Thursday afternoon, I was informed that the Sun-Times does not, in fact, have such a team. I quickly threw out all the "highly scientific" criteria, along with the Dunkin' Donuts control group, and launched a research effort of a slightly narrower scope, designed to maximize my enjoyment of a fine spring day.
I headed for several yuppie gathering points: the North Michigan Avenue corner where shoppers from Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn and Banana Republic converge, the Oak Street boutique district, a Wicker Park coffee shop, a Bucktown outdoor cafe and a Lincoln Park playground. At each spot, I looked for people with expensive strollers, cool eyeglasses and/or well-groomed dogs. Those in possession of street maps, crew neck sweatshirts and souvenir tote bags were screened out of my sample. I also decided not to attempt to survey people talking on cell phones, which eliminated about 60 percent of my target group.
Survey says: yuppies untapped
Of six Michigan Avenue shoppers, only one had ever been called to serve. But, she said, "as soon as they found out I was in law school, they dismissed me."
The other five all said they'd willingly serve if called. Eloisa Sierra, pushing her sleeping son along in a late-model Bugaboo, seemed shocked that there was any question. "Of course I would," she declared, "it's important."
Around the corner, on Oak Street, the reaction was the same. Of the eight people I talked to, only one, Amy Buerril, of Portage, Ind., had ever been summoned to jury duty. "I just sat all day," she said, "and then they sent us home."
But Buerril, just like all of the seven men and women who'd never been called, said she'd be very happy to actually sit on a jury. "I think I would like to do it," she said, "to see things firsthand and have an influence."
And so it went. Three out of four people at the coffee shop, 12 out of 15 people at the outdoor lunch spot, and four out of six playground moms all had never been asked to show up for jury duty. Not one person had actually sat in judgment of a court case.
"I've lived here for 12 years," said Ken Angermeier, strolling down Damen Avenue in Bucktown, "and I've never even gotten called. But I'd definitely do it. It's like your duty. Like voting."
I was, I have to admit, completely surprised by the civic virtue displayed by my survey participants. I was also a little skeptical of it, since it existed in the realm of the purely hypothetical.
There's only one way to test it, though, and that's to flood the city's yuppie districts with summonses and see who actually shows up.
Then it would be up to the lawyers: Are they brave enough to invite snobs like us to sit in judgment of others?
There was a point, not long ago, when I really thought I'd dealt with all my commitment issues. That was before the blog.
I don't have a particular excuse for why I haven't posted anything in the last few days. (Laziness, enjoyment of fine weather, etc.) But I can offer, in my own defense, the rather ridiculous fact that I have, in the last 48 hours, read 4 books.
These are:
We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg (for a "Lunch" interview; an excellent tear-jerker)
Looking for Mr. Goodfrog by Laurie Graff (for a "Smart Girls" review; so-so)
To Hell With All That by Caitlin Flanagan (for an upcoming feature; I wanted to hate it -- and Flanagan -- but found myself strangely unable to completely dismiss it)
Moving On by Sarah Ban Breathnach (for a "Lunch" interview; totally helping me come to terms with my addiction to The Container Store)
I think it's awesome, really, that, in the absence of postings, people sent me e-mails to make sure I wasn't dead or anything. But it's also a little scary.
It's possible I haven't thought this blog thing all the way through.
Writer Kathleen Norris calls it "interplanetary travel," the way she floats back and forth between conservative Christian settings, like Abilene Christian University in Texas, where she was yesterday, to the liberal, social justice-oriented classrooms of places like Dominican University in River Forest, where she's visiting today.
Norris, acclaimed author of the spiritually themed best-sellers The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 416 pages, $15) and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner, 256 pages, $13), says that, contrary to popular wisdom, she sees more similarities than differences between religious communities at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
"I've been doing this for a long time," says Norris, who was raised in a Protestant church but has also lived as part of a monastic community, "moving back and forth between different worlds, like Catholic and Protestant, just because of the way my life has gone."
When she was in Abilene, she says, her audience was extremely welcoming "because they're happy that someone is writing books that talk about faith, that these books are trying to explore the Christian faith, not just put it down reflexively."
And, Norris, 58, says, as she scans the diverse lunchtime crowd at Winberie's in Oak Park, there is plenty of common ground between her red state readers and her fans here in granola-crunchy Oak Park.
"We share common enemies," she says, "like the consumer culture and the celebrity culture that says your life isn't worth anything unless you're on television."
Norris, an accomplished poet and memoirist as well as a scholar of religion, seems to have a knack for finding unexpected common ground. She sees, for example, many similarities between her hometown in northwest South Dakota and the Honolulu neighborhood where she now lives.
"There are some parts of the [Hawaiian] islands where the demographics are similar to those on Indian reservations," she says, describing the living conditions of many native Hawaiians.
And, even more, she adds, there is something uniquely insular about each place, where a cluster of people lives far away from the bulk of the population.
'More convenient for marketers'
A certain weariness seems evident in Norris' manner. She has been traveling, of course, and she has experienced jet lag so pronounced that it has caused her, quite uncharacteristically, to skip morning prayers with her hosts at Dominican.
But Norris, who lost her father in 2002 and her husband in 2003 and is now the primary caregiver for her 88-year-old mother, makes an almost-visible effort to convey energy and enthusiasm.
"Sounds sinful," she remarks, with a hint of mischief, as she reads over the description of a pasta dish on the lunch menu. When the waitress arrives, Norris orders the penne and shrimp dish without hesitation.
Our conversation wanders back to Norris' idea that religious communities, of every denomination, have more commonalities than differences.
This, I point out, seems to run counter to the conventional "two Americas" wisdom that seems to govern modern sociological thought.
"Two Americas," she muses. "I don't think that's true. I really don't. Things just don't translate that neatly. But it's more convenient for marketers to think about it that way."
Her work, she says, especially her poetry, attempts to transcend those reductive demographics.
"When you hear a poem," she says, "you're not being sold anything. And that's so rare these days because everything is for sale."
'Faith has dry patches'
Even in the realm of spirituality, she says, a certain marketplace mentality governs people's behavior.
"Americans like to have choices," she says. "We like options, and to be in control. ... This can be good, but it can also be a dead end, this seeking, just for its own sake, like shopping. Sometimes, you have to stop seeking. Sometimes, it's a matter of sitting still and letting yourself be found."
Still, she says, there is the tricky matter of knowing when to sit and when you must move on.
"Faith has dry patches," she says, "especially when you're grieving. So I remember how exciting it was when I first rediscovered my faith, and I feel, sometimes, that I've lost that.
"I would never say that God is dead, but there have been times I'd have said that I'm half dead, or at least that I'm out of touch. . . . There is that danger that because you're old and tired, everything is old and tired."
Visiting college campuses -- and Norris will speak at both Dominican and North Park University in Chicago -- is one way to stave off the old, tired feeling, Norris says.
Her periodic returns to monastic life are another.
"I have a sort of mental map of the United States, where the monasteries are," she says, explaining that she tries to structure her travel schedule so that she can spend occasional weeks revisiting the quiet, simple world she chronicled in The Cloister Walk.
Between retreats, she says, "You do the best you can to make faith work in the real world where you have to live."
She takes an exuberant, luxuriating bite of her rich lunch and savors the taste of it.
Today's column: Bringing your dirty laundry to the dry cleaner
Dry cleaners are the new hairdressers. While there used to be many things in a person's -- OK, a woman's -- life that only her hairdresser knew for sure, those secrets are now hardly worth keeping. These days, everybody highlights. Minimum.
In fact, there's not much that passes for private anymore. Except your waist size. And the keeper of that particular secret -- your friendly neighborhood dry cleaner -- has come to take on a unique role in modern life, one that is a perfect hybrid of confidant and busybody.
News geeks around the city were buzzing this week about "Dennis," the dry cleaner who called the Roe Conn Show on WLS-AM, claiming to have chatted with one of his customers, a juror in the George Ryan corruption trial, about how the deliberations were going.
Lots of pundits seemed shocked that someone would share such valuable -- and off-limits -- information with such a peripheral figure. I'd be shocked if only one juror spilled the beans while dropping off a pile of shirts.
There's a kind of intimate anonymity that surrounds a visit to the cleaners and the confessions it requires: yes, that's red wine; no, that button just doesn't seem to hold; maybe those trousers do need to be let out yet again.
Mrs. Lee, who, until a recent fire temporarily shut the place down, held court at Song's Cleaners on Webster Avenue in Lincoln Park, served as a kind of precinct-captain-cum-surrogate-mother-in-law for the gaggle of young families who patronized her small business.
We have ways of making you talk
Pregnancy -- who is reproducing, who isn't and who should be (hint: everyone) -- is her favorite subject. As a conversation starter, it tends to break down the walls of propriety pretty quickly. On certain Saturday afternoons, I've found myself disclosing certain decades-old family secrets just to steer her off-topic.
But Mrs. Lee, a petite and ageless woman of seemingly unlimited energy, has other interests as well. She keeps track of who has been traveling, who has been attending lots of fancy parties, and which couples no longer run all their errands together.
She offers up these tidbits in fairly generic terms, but she always seems to have them at the ready, deploying them as comfort (lots of people are as harried as you) and, when necessary, motivation (other people do seem to be getting out a bit more than you).
She knows, too, when my husband has a new client (more suits) and when I've been working more at home (fewer blouses). If one of us had jury duty, she'd surely figure that out as well, and file it in her mental Rolodex under "justice system, flawed."
Of course, I'd like to believe she wouldn't then turn around and report this on talk radio, but concerns such as personal privacy and court-imposed gag orders don't necessarily register with cheerful busybodies -- Malcolm Gladwell uses the more social science-y term "connectors" -- in the same way they do with the rest of us. I tend to think that "Dennis," though his name and Midwestern accent tend to put him somewhere outside the mainstream demographics of Chicago dry cleaners, saw himself as being helpful, just moving the conversation along, when he phoned in to WLS, rather than maybe getting someone in big trouble.
Familiar anonymity
Most of us don't really know our neighbors anymore. And when we shop, we head out in our cars in search of the coolest, cheapest, big-boxiest deals.
But our dry cleaning still stays in the neighborhood. More often than not, we transport it on foot, in two-week-sized bundles.
We show more of our true selves -- our spills and rips and smelly stumbles off the nonsmoking bandwagon -- in these brief interactions than we do all week at work. So it's no surprise, really, that a juror might have let a little something confidential slip into a conversation about the origins of a mustard stain.
Our dry cleaners know us -- really know us, including our weakness for eating chocolate frosted doughnuts in the car -- but in a different way from everyone else in our life. It's a relationship without a context, existing outside our usual circle of friends and colleagues. The familiar presence of the dry cleaner, who is like a barrista, only less busy, creates a kind of faux-friendship in which gossip can be exchanged without any real risk of actually identifying the subjects in question, since customers almost never know each other by name. We're all friendly, but none of us are friends.
So it's easy to believe our secrets are safe, kind of like they are in an Internet chat room: It's OK for people to know the most intimate things about you, as long as there's no real danger of them telling your brother-in-law.
If Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer really meant for the Ryan jurors to keep everything secret from everyone, she should have been specific. She should have said not to discuss it with anyone. Including your hairdresser. And even your dry cleaner.
In a great demographic irony, the Tribune seems to be establishing itself as Chicago's anti-sushi news source. Between the whole mercury thing and now today's story about the Moonie connection to wholesale sushi distribution, the paper is taking a bold stand against raw fish wrapped in rice.
What did sushi ever do to the Tribune?
Honestly, I have no idea. But, here at the Sun-Times, we are (OK, I am) committed to keeping the world safe for yuppie foodstuffs of all sort, religious preference notwithstanding. That's what real freedom is all about, people.
I'd been home from New York for about 36 hours and our place was still in its mid-renovation state of dustiness and mess. My suitcase, open but not fully unpacked, was on the bedroom floor, along with a scattering of dirty clothes my husband had left there during his week here alone.
A mountain of laundry -- sheets, towels and yet more dirty clothes -- was shoved in the closet.
The bathrooms, mostly finished, with new tile, new vanities and sinks, newly painted walls and newly hung blinds and towel bars, were grimy with sawdust and grit. All the stuff that had been cleared out of the old cabinets had been thrown back, haphazardly, into the new ones.
In a weird way, I was sort of proud of myself for not caring. Ever since we first started dating (and particularly since we've been married) I've been trying to master the whole laid-back, unfazed-by-anything attitude that allows R. to maintain a constant even keel.
So, on Sunday morning, we took a long, sweet walk around our neighborhood. We relaxed and chatted. We went out for lunch.
And I didn't give a second thought to the mess.
But, then, he headed downtown for a few hours and I was left alone in the house. With the mess.
I tried, at first, to ignore it. To sit down at my computer and get some work done.
But I found it impossible to concentrate.
"I'll just get the bathrooms organized," I thought.
But, since I had to put some of the stuff from my suitcase away in the bathroom, I decided to unpack as well. Which led to laundry.
Pretty soon I was swiffering and dust-busting and unloading the dishwasher.
(Side note: Perhaps if I wrote for the New York Times, I would be so engaged in my high-minded work that I would not know what a Swiffer is. Alas.)
Five hours later, my house was as clean as it is going to get with renovation work still in progress. (My standards for kitchen cleanliness do slide when the kitchen in question does not have, say, a sink.)
And I felt deeply calmed and satisfied. And also a little embarassed by my own neuroses.
This sense of embarassment was only compounded by (once again) picking up the Sunday Times, heading for the Style section. (Yes, I read the Weddings and Celebrations pages as if they were the Sports section, what of it?)
Two things are clear. First, women still do more housework then men. Married women spend twice as much time on housework than their husbands, and single women spend twice as much time on housework as single men. Second, much time that could be spent cleaning is spent fighting about it.
Thankfully, in my house we don't actually fight about it. It's just not worth it.
Yes, it is true that society still assumes this to be women's work. And yes, it is true that many men do all they can to avoid their share. But it is also true that many women are guilty of what sociologists call "gate keeping": building a fence around a territory, be it vacuuming or child care or grocery shopping, and defending it as theirs. They set the standards in that realm, and they set them high. Sometimes unrealistically so.
While I was away, R. played host to out-of-town cousins who were stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight back home from a trip to England. He had them sleep in our bed, which he made up for them with fresh sheets, and offered them plenty of clean towels and hospitality. He does all the important stuff right. Who am I to complain that his tolerance for dust bunnies seems dangerously high? I really am working on setting more realistic standards. Really.
From the Fortune Small Business section of CNN Money.com, via Broadsheet, here's a great story that gives a small glimpse into the rich-in-testosterone world of venture capitalism.
Two women entrepreneurs give a pitch to a group of potential VC investors, who listen to the presentation and then begin their questions with, "So, Janet," he says. "I see Kathy's married . . . I'm just curious. What are you going to do when Kathy gets pregnant?"
Is it wrong just to say that these guys are pigs?
Debra Schweiger Berg, Patrick Carron and Leeann McGrath are engrossed in conversation when I arrive for lunch at McGrath's tidy and comfortable Lisle home.
Carron and McGrath have just met a few minutes ago, but Berg, a Downstate author who has profiled them, along with a few dozen fellow "civic entrepreneurs" in her new book, The Power of One (Trafford Publishing, 374 pages, $29.95), knows them each well enough to be sure that finding things to talk about won't be a problem. Carron, founder of the Northwest Indiana-based Aviation Scholarship Foundation, and McGrath, founder of Sharing Connections, a DuPage County organization that offers goods such as baby furniture and small appliances to families in need, are part of what Berg has identified as a growing trend in volunteerism.
Berg, a University of Illinois-educated expert on social policy who spent much of her career working for state governments in Illinois, Kentucky and Minnesota, has, for almost 10 years, been researching small, local charities that were founded by one or two people and that operate primarily on private donations. From her home base in Champaign, she's traveled the country to meet with the people who run these groups and launched a campaign to build awareness and support for them.
'I knew there was more'
Her mission began with a casual conversation. She met a Romanian couple who had been active in that country's democratic resistance, and they mentioned that a recent article, written by a Harvard professor, had them worried about the state of democracy in America. The article, by Robert Putnam, later grew into a book -- Bowling Alone (Simon and Shuster, 544 pages, $16) -- and captured public attention with its argument that American "social capital" is on the decline. Citing statistics that show that citizens "sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often," Putnam's research seemed to depict American communities as merely geographic collections of isolated individuals who were so consumed with work, commuting and solitary pursuits like watching television and surfing the Internet that they had almost no connection with each other.
"That just felt wrong to me," Berg says, as McGrath and Carron nod in agreement. "I knew there was more going on out there. Maybe not with people joining traditional civic groups, but in forming their own small groups. I wanted to refute this idea that there was no engagement going on, but without real data, I couldn't. So I just started asking colleagues and collecting referrals and searching the Web to see what I could find."
She soon uncovered Carron's Web site, teenpilot.org, and began learning more about his efforts to fund pilot training for low-income kids.
Carron, dapperly dressed in a sport coat and slacks, does not look like a stereotypical do-gooder. A pharmaceutical salesman and private pilot, he laughingly describes himself as almost accidentally starting his organization. Like many kids, he had done some volunteer work as a college student, serving as a "big brother" to a couple of young boys. That was his first real exposure to poverty and it stuck with him, even as he launched his business career.
Years later, after going to see the movie "Hoop Dreams," he decided he should at least try to find the time to help out one kid who could use a break.
"I think flying, for certain kids, it's like football or baseball," says Carron, who himself has been passionate about flying since he was a teen. "There's just a certain segment of kids who want to fly. I figured I'd try to find one kid who was into it and I'd hook him up with flying lessons."
Carron's boss thought it was a great idea, but advised him that if he was actually going to do it, he should create an official charity so the money would be tax-deductible.
Now, Carron has a small but generous base of donors who contribute the $5,000 to $6,000 needed, per kid, to offer pilot training. Eight kids have seen the program all the way through and actually earned their licenses, some of them becoming pilots before they managed to get their driver's licenses. The process has opened new educational and professional opportunities for them, Carron says, and has boosted their self-confidence immeasurably.
'That's the secret'
McGrath, a petite blond with a sweet, quiet voice, has been busily setting out lunch on her dining room table as Carron's been speaking. She offered to host the lunch and said she'd pick up carry-out food, but the spread she lays out features the kind of lovingly homemade dishes that no caterer can reproduce. In addition to an assortment of sandwiches, fruits, vegetables and chips, there are two kinds of fresh-baked cookies. She couldn't help herself, she says.
It was 15 years ago that McGrath, who seems to have an irrepressibly upbeat manner, found herself feeling depressed. A mother of three who has taught nursery school and run a home day-care center, she felt herself "becoming a sad lady," she says.
She decided she might feel better if she could help someone, so she went to the office of a Lisle Township social worker to try to find a family to help. Her offer was initially viewed with some suspicion, but when she kept returning, each time with food for the township's food pantry, she eventually won the woman over. The social worker put her in touch with a family of recent immigrants.
"They didn't speak English," McGrath recalls, but "one lady, very pregnant, seemed open to trusting me and, with hand gestures and a few words she communicated her needs: baby clothes, crib, car seat -- the things that we sometimes take for granted."
McGrath wasn't sure how she'd secure all those things, but she managed to find her way to the first garage sale she'd ever visited and found a crib for only $35.
The charity she eventually founded, Sharing Connections, has now distributed nearly 1,900 cribs to low-income families in DuPage county and the Chicago area.
This is typical, Berg says, of the kind of growth many of these very small charities have seen in the last 20 years. "There's a combination of available wealth, a certain mind-set and the technology for mass communication that makes us aware of needs. There's just a lot of things coming together to make it the perfect time for these groups."
"I'm always thinking of ways to somehow give that invitation," McGrath says.
"Yes," Berg agrees, "to tell people you get back so much more than you give."
Friday's column: Don't underestimate the role of mother's-best-friend
Baby Charlotte was born one month ago today. And, though I occupy no formal position in her life, I do expect to have a front-row seat for much of it. Charley's mother is my best friend, which is the sort of thing that sounds all goofy and sixth-grade when you say it, but takes on a certain reverence at times like these. Because the role of mother's-best-friend is a serious deal.
Like everyone else in the circle of Charley's family and friends, I fuss and coo over her and recognize her obvious superiority over other babies her age. Charley, for example, is a committed urban-dweller and sleeps best when a jackhammer pounds away in the distance. She disdains the proto-SUV stylings of the modern stroller and prefers the smaller environmental footprint left by being carried around her Brooklyn neighborhood in a Baby Bjorn. She also prefers to avoid clothing that smacks of condescension, like hats with pom poms.
But, as easy as it is for me to fall in love with a baby possessed of such discriminating aesthetic standards, my role, during my first visit since her birth, has less to do with Charley and more to do with her mildly sleep-deprived and occasionally overwhelmed mother.
When I showed up on Tuesday, Charley was having an uncharacteristically fussy day. I didn't have a lot to offer in the way of actual baby-related expertise -- she howled with the same why-don't-you-people-understand-me frustration when I held her as when her mother did -- but I was able to make an important contribution: logistical support for an excursion to a local cafe for fancy coffee drinks.
Ground rules for MBFs
Fancy coffee drinks, like prayer, don't necessarily have any scientifically demonstrable health benefits. But they do offer a comfort to the soul. And fancy coffee drinks, like manicure and massage appointments, represent an important aspect of mother's-best-friend territory. Unlike, say, Charley's father, grandparents and aunts, I do not feel the need to ask a lot questions about her health, development, care and feeding. Instead, I simply affirm that she is thriving and give her mother a high-five for keeping her alive for this long.
"Looks like you're doing a great job," I tell Charley's mother. Because Charley is growing and healthy and beautiful.
This, her mother and I can agree in the private bubble created by our late-afternoon lattes, is nothing short of miraculous since, a few short months ago, neither of us knew the first thing about parenthood. Now, I'm still clueless, but my best friend knows how to do things like swaddle a restless infant and extract snot from a tiny, congested nose. These feats are all the more impressive, I believe, because they are being performed by someone who would not generally characterize herself as the nurturing type.
While others ask questions -- What are you going to do for child care? How long are you going to nurse her? -- I offer affirmations.
As her mother's-best-friend, I reserve the right to buy expensive, impractical gifts for Charley. I also have some responsibility for Charley's education in shoe shopping, dating and the selection of a college major. But, mostly, it is my place to always be on her mother's side, to declare that impossible-to-follow child-rearing advice should be ignored, and to be an advocate for the occasional adults-only vacation or any other form of parental self-care that might become available.
'It's not logical'
But being here with Charley's mom is not an entirely selfless act. It is also a reconnaissance trip. I am a spy in the house of parenthood.
Because lots of people will happily share their baby stories -- generally of the "48 hours of labor, all quickly forgotten in the first joyful moment I held her" variety -- with you, but only your best friends will tell you the unvarnished truth.
So, in moments of quiet, I pick up my cell phone and call my husband to report on what I've learned.
"Believe it or not," I tell him, "if the baby doesn't sleep much during the day, she tends to sleep less at night, too."
This, he points out, is totally counter to logic.
"I know," I say, "but apparently it's in all the baby books."
One of those books -- clutched at desperately for guidance, but hated for its smug sureness -- has informed Charley's mom that her daughter's sleep habits are "not logical, but biological."
For Charley's mom, there isn't time to think too hard about this little piece of Zen-like wisdom.
For those of us who still haven't crossed the border into parent-land, it's enough to make our heads spin.
We ask ourselves, "Could we possibly be ready to take on responsibility for another human life?"
Where is the line between new parent neurosis/paranoia and instinctive understanding of what's normal (or not) for your kid?
I have to admit that, when I arrived at Baby Charlotte's on Tuesday, I was convinced that her parents were making much ado about nothing. She seemed crankier than usual, they said, and seemed to have some white goo on her tongue.
She didn't seem "sick" to me, so I read their worrying as just so much new parent obsessiveness.
Then they took her to the doctor and it turned out that she did have a case of thrush (a common fungal infection, unpleasant as that sounds) and it was a really good thing that they'd spotted it early.
Of course this convinced me that I'm probably destined to be a terrible mother who blows off the warning signs of some serious illness until it's too late.
Ah, April in New York. Why does it feel so inviting?
Hard to believe that I've left Chicago in early April for a place with weather that is demonstrably worse, but here I am in the midst of a weird little snow storm.
Still, staying in someone else's un-torn-up apartment is incredibly liberating. I'd almost forgotten what it's like to have more than one working sink. Luxury. I am sorely tempted to run around and turn on all of the taps at once, but I don't want the baby to think I'm weird.
Since I'm in the media capital of the world, I decided I should collect some man-on-the-street reaction to the big news about Katie Couric leaving the Today show to take over the CBS Evening News.
(Wow, if this seemed like a good idea to you, you truly have become a Midwesterner. -ed.)
I think I can best describe the city's mood as stoic. They all claim not to care, but you can tell their hearts are breaking.
Where, oh where, will their morning perkiness come from now?
At least they still have the world's most perfect food (a toasted sesame seed bagel dripping with butter, as if you didn't know) to console themselves.
A well-wisher decided it would be cute and charming to send Baby Charlotte, as a sort of welcome to the world gift, a check.
Unfortunately, while Charlotte is quite advanced for her age (1 month), she is not yet ready to open a bank account. She probably needs to focus on, say, discovering her hands first.
Also, her signature is a bit erratic and she lacks photo ID.
So, OK, maybe the remodeling is getting to me just a little bit. I decided that it would be both relaxing and productive if I could get away for a little while. So I headed to New York to visit my best friend and her 1 month old baby.
The day started off with a 3 hour-plus flight delay and ended with the usually charming and mellow baby being so uncharacteristically fussy that her parents are contemplating taking her to the doctor.
In between, I'm getting the kind of uncensored peek into motherhood that only best friends (and sometimes sisters) give each other.
All I can really say at this point is: yikes!
I had, at various points in my single life, considered both adoption and artificial insemination as possibilities for having a child, should I have decided that I wanted one, without a partner. I was totally kidding myself about that. I am not nearly woman enough to take on parenthood by myself.
I'd been joking that this brief visit was going to be like a spa vacation for me. After all, Dana's apartment boasts two working bathrooms and a kitchen, plus no enforced wake-up schedule and time for an afternoon nap (or several).
But, having been here for less than half a day, I'm kind of picking up on the fact that whole sleep deprivation / physical pain / mysterious, unstoppable crying thing is, um, just a little more demanding than putting up with some hammering and sawing.
I know my role, as best friend, is to jump in, help out and offer as many words of encouragement as I can possibly call to mind. But I find it strangely tempting to cry out for some sort of cosmic time-out wherein I can ask the universe why this whole caring-for-a-newborn thing should be so ridiculously, mind-numbingly hard. (Shouldn't we, as a species, at least have evolved to the point where breast feeding is easy and painless?!?)
But, you know, if I can't come up with answers for the big questions, I guess I can try to make myself useful by purchasing cutesy baby stuff and distracting the child for long enough for her mother to take a shower. That's what best friends are for. Brest Friends, I have just discovered, are for something else entirely.
R. and I like to consider ourselves fairly laid back people: unflappable, low drama. And we've been busily patting ourselves on the back for how well we've been handling this home renovation project. Sure, yes, the rice cooker is in our office and the George Foreman grill is in the bedroom closet and we haven't had anything resembling home-cooked food in a couple of weeks, but we're totally chill.
And -- gee, just look at us! -- we're even sticking to our budget by purchasing in-stock stuff like the two bathroom vanities, sinks and faucets. No fancy custom-ordered items for us; we're low maintenance.
This smug self satisfaction carried us through Sunday, when we went up to Highland Park to visit some friends who'd bought a house up there and listened to their horror story of (seriously) having to have the entire house lifted off its foundation and put on blocks like an old Trans Am. Our renovation project seemed, by contrast, entirely modest and totally hitch-free.
But today we hit some sort of psychological wall.
R. had done a lot more to earn the right to freak out than I had, since he's been working from home during almost all of the work and had run out to at least one home store at least once to pick up supplies every single day. (Not to mention the two disastrous trips to the Ikea warehouse when he arrived to discover that, oops, they couldn't find our stuff.)
My threshold of tolerance is apparently a lot lower than his for this sort of thing.
Most days, I've been waking up just before our early-bird handyman arrives, throwing on my workout clothes and heading to the gym, where I can get ready for work in relative peace and quiet. (Sometimes, I even work out.)
But, today, R. asked if I could stay home. He had a client meeting out in the suburbs and someone needed to be around to meet the guy who was taking final measurements for our already-long-awaited kitchen countertop.
I knew there was some modest fibbing involved in this request (i.e., the meeting wasn't until noon), but, the truth of the matter was that he'd more than earned the right to take his computer to Starbucks and have a morning away from the hammering and general commotion.
So I made myself generally presentable at an early hour -- although the "plan" was for work to be going on only in one (of two) bathrooms at any one time, this has not quite proven to be the case and, anyway, our place is really not big enough for it to be OK to be naked in any part of it while a stranger is working there -- and hunkered down in our home office, which, except for being filled with boxes of stuff we had to remove from the kitchen, is the one room in the place that is untouched by the renovation project.
Being there meant being on call for consultations with the handyman (my standard response: "uh, whatever you think is best") and ready to break the news to our upstairs neighbors that we need to turn off the water for a few minutes.
Greeting the countertop guy meant answering several impossible-to-decode countertop-related questions [Him: "Is the backsplash supposed to be a 3 or a 4?"; Me (with completely false confidence since I have no idea): 3, definitely.] and reminding myself to sign all the forms with my husband's last name because otherwise the paperwork gets misfiled (see also: Ikea warehouse).
In between, there was the noise and dust kicked up by the removal of the ancient tile floor in our master bathroom and the long, animated conversations the handyman was having, in Polish, with either a cell phone caller or the AM radio he brought along.
By lunch time, my nerves were totally frayed.
And, by late afternoon, when R. got back with the car so I could run over to the WTTW studios for my taping, I was ready to run away for good.
I dawdled for as long as possible at the studio and then on a visit to my friends the Sambolas, wherein I decided it was an important cultural learning experience for me to hang out with the girls while they did laundry. I didn't make it home until after 7 pm and was ridiculously crushed to see the handyman's truck still parked out front.
It's American and horrible to complain about someone working a 12 hour day on my behalf, right?
Yeah, I thought so.
Still, as pathetic as this sounds, it was weirdly oppressive to come home and find him still working there and poor R., still in his business clothes (because he, too, feels weird about the whole nakedness with other people in the house thing), holed up in the office, waiting for the work day to end.
We walked down the block to get a(nother) pizza for dinner and quietly admitted that we both just really, really want the work to be over.
The bathrooms should be done this week. Which leaves the kitchen countertop and tilework, plus 3 more rooms to paint, two rooms of carpet to replace and the wood floors to refinish.
I suppose it's not really possible to characterize this as the home stretch quite yet, is it?
The downtown Books-A-Million, on South Clark Street, is not exactly located in the heart of Tucker Max country. Business-casual office workers and well-suited bankers on late-morning coffee breaks mostly cruise past the table stacked with Max's book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Citadel Press, 277 pages, $12.95), without so much as a second look.
Every now and then, though, someone stops. It's generally a guy, slightly sheepish. And he'll do a brief double-take, taking in the book and its recognizably obnoxious cover, and then gradually begin to focus in on Max himself, sitting behind the table, looking sleepy and hungover.
"Are you the Miss Delaware guy?" one such customer asks, raising a mild chuckle out of Max.
"Yeah," he says. "Uh, it was Miss Vermont, actually."
The customer, dressed in gray pinstripes, seems not to register that there might be any difference.
"I loved that story, man," he tells Max, who doesn't seem particularly eager to rehash the details of his "relationship" (if that is the appropriate word for a series of drunken evenings and random sexual encounters in semipublic places) with Katy Johnson, a former beauty queen turned advocate for teen chastity and character education. It is not, of course, that Max is shy; it's just that the details, all published on his Web site, tuckermax.com, speak for themselves.
Web site a big hit on campus
Pinstripe man, who appears to be in his late 30s and is wearing the sort of not-quite-right-for-the-suit shoes that give him away as a long-term bachelor, goes on, in worshipful terms, to tell Max how cool he is and then to invite him to a pickup basketball game the next morning. He hands Max his business card but does not buy a book. Max does not hold on to the card.
At the end of the morning, Max has signed 41 books. He has also paid $26 to park in a nearby garage. So the profit on the day is, he figures, something like $15, if you don't count the cost of renting the SUV he drove to get here.
Max, 30, is a self-described Internet sensation. His Web site, continuously updated with new tales of drunken debauchery and bizarre sexual exploits, is enormously popular, especially with college kids. He's working on radio, TV and screenplay deals and traveling the country on a self-managed book tour/fraternity-esque road trip.
He is also a University of Chicago graduate with an impressive academic pedigree.
We're headed to his old Hyde Park stomping grounds -- what's better than Harold's Chicken Shack? -- when I ask him how he reconciles an admittedly eggheaded college experience with his current, New York-based reputation as some sort of uber-frat boy.
'I like drinking. I like hooking up'
"The irony of ironies is that I'm considered the premier partier of my generation," he says matter-of-factly. "But if I'd gone to U. Va. and joined Phi Psi and drank and f----- and whatever and not had the intellectual wherewithal to write it all down, I wouldn't be anyone. The whole Tucker Max thing happened because I went to a dork school. . . . I got a great education, but it left me with all that pent-up partying aggression I had to work out. And, by the time I did, I was thinking in a categorical way and ready to write about it."
It's all sort of intellectual and postmodern, until Max reminds me of the primary subject matter of his much-read stories: "I like drinking. I like hooking up."
At that point, it just seems lame.
By the time we arrive at Harold's Chicken Shack and order our half-chickens-with-everything through the bulletproof glass, I find my attention starting to wander.
Surely anyone in this place, I think to myself, must have more interesting stories to tell than Max's thousand variations on the theme of "I got sloppy drunk and hooked up with a fat/ugly/crazy chick."
Fortunately for me, Max doesn't need a continuous stream of questions to keep him talking about himself.
"I've gotten tons of offers to do reality shows," he tells me, between hot-sauce-drenched bites. "But I turned them all down."
Surprised by the idea that he considers something, besides actual adulthood, to be beneath him, I ask Max why.
"I have talent," he explains. "If I do something like that, from that moment forward, I'm that dude from 'The Apprentice,' not Tucker Max the writer, not Tucker Max the Internet legend."
Something pathetic, creepy?
Max is resolutely convinced of his legendary status, and so, it must be said, are the stunningly high numbers of young women who turn out for his campus appearances. Hooking up with Max, and being written about -- with a pseudonym that still leaves room for plenty of identifying details -- on his Web site is a kind of status symbol among a certain set of young women. And, if there is something pathetic and creepy about a 30-year-old guy who goes out of his way to point out that he has hooked up with women (mostly college-age) at a rate of more than one per day on this book tour, Max seems completely unaware of it.
He seems, in fact, mildly offended that I'm not terribly impressed.
"You must be kind of lonely," I say, not really trying to be sympathetic.
He nods.
"Obviously," he says, "you can't have emotionally meaningful sex with a different person every day."
And, he explains at great length, that whole "emotionally meaningful" thing is, in fact, something he might like to have in his life. But not really.
"I feel like a f---in' dips--- complaining about this," he says, ending the conversation.
