Our mothers think we're crazy. Though few of them had full-time careers while they were pregnant and raising infants, they did all have lives, they tell us now. They went places. Did things. Drank coffee. Had cocktails. They were not, in other words, breast-feeding their babies every two hours.
And somehow, they kindly point out, those babies survived. Nurtured on powdered formula and instant cereal, we grew into healthy, successful adults.
In response, we just smile our smug, how-little-they-knew-then smiles. Because we'd sooner buy a flammable cradle with its razor-sharp edges coated in lead paint than give our own precious babies food from a can.
Every generation finds its own way to make peace with the bone-grinding hard work that is new motherhood. For the women of the late '60s-early '70s Lamaze era, grueling labor stories were the key to establishing one's status as a martyr. So even if you stashed your little one in a plastic playpen while having a cigarette and a nice, long gossip with your neighbor, you could still claim the moral high ground of motherhood by invoking the 36-hour-long labor you endured with only deep breathing and a reluctantly enlightened husband to dull the pain.
In the age of the epidural and the scheduled C-section, such horror stories are passe.
Breast-feeding is the new labor
There's a new way to measure your maternal bona fides, one that makes natural childbirth seem like a walk in the park. Because, really, what's one day of sweating and suffering when compared to a whole year's worth of pain and inconvenience?
If you want to be considered a good mother in today's playpen-free culture of hyper-involved parenting, you must enter the world of competitive breast-feeding.
The experience begins, oddly enough, before your child is even born. Obstetricians now routinely ask their patients about how they plan to feed their babies and offer not-exactly-subtle pushes in the "right" direction. Pregnant women are encouraged to sign up for "Introduction to Breast-feeding" courses that spell out all the benefits of breast-feeding, while aiming to minimize any of the bad things they might have heard -- either from their own, obviously unreliable, mothers or from friends who've been regaling them with tales of pain, infection and secret office breast-pumping sessions.
My class was Wednesday night.
I'd been dreading it for weeks, bemoaning both its scheduling -- three hours, after work, on a weeknight -- and what I assumed would be its preachy Breast-is-Best content. But, though I magnanimously gave my husband the night off -- his presence was encouraged "for emotional support" -- I dared not play hooky.
I've got way too many bad mom strikes -- a taste for champagne and a desire for a short maternity leave foremost among them -- against me already.
So I dutifully showed up to join five other pregnant women who'd assembled in the waiting area of our doctors' office, which had been converted into a screening room for a lactation-themed slide show and video presentation. We all wore the same look of grim determination, tempered by good-humored attempts to disguise our unease.
The video, which mostly consisted of extreme close-up shots of tiny babies hungrily latching on to enormous, looming breasts twice the size of their heads, lacked only the theme from Jaws to make it truly terrifying. And the slide show, which featured pastel pencil sketches of multi-ethnic babies and their blissed out mamas, was as sweet as the video was frightening. Neither seemed particularly grounded in real life.
It was the advice of the instructor -- a nurse practitioner who, I had to admit, seemed quite normal and less evangelical than I'd expected -- that was the big draw. We'd all heard about breast-feeding complications and were looking for something to sootr anxiety about what has become the great test of modern motherhood: Will I be woman enough to nurse my baby for the full, American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended year?
'City moms' are the problem
Our teacher, Claire, who, of course, breast-fed both of her kids, assured us that it would be no problem. "Really," said Claire, who happens to work in our doctors' Northbrook office, "it's only our city moms who tend to have trouble."
Her pronunciation of the word "city" made it sound a lot like "neurotic."
She then proceeded to regale us with tales of women so determined to exclusively breast-feed their nutritionally challenged babies that the kids wound up in intensive care, a fate that might easily have been avoided with some supplemental formula.
"You just need to relax," she told us.
And then, mercifully, she let us out of class an hour early.
If last week's theme was [insert VERY whiny tone here] "this is hard," this week the pregnancy pendulum has swung back to Everything Zen-ness, which is a lucky thing for all concerned.
I remember a particular moment at my wedding when I looked down at my shoes and realized that I'd been wearing very high heels for several straight hours. "It's odd," I thought, "that my feet don't hurt."
Well, I haven't seen my feet in a while, but, in the last few days, I've experienced that same sort of realization, that, wow, I should be really, really uncomfortable, but, mostly, I'm just not. Instead, I seem to enjoying things (OK, mostly sleep and food . . . and weird "nesting" things like re-arranging our bookshleves) in a strangely outsized way.
Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino? A taste of heaven.
Low-fat Triscuits with grocery-store-brand Colby cheese? Also exquisite.
For some unknown reason, the sleep situation resolved itself on Friday, beginning with a 3-hour afternoon nap (a little interlude I'll always think of fondly as "the nap that saved our marriage" because I was getting seriously cranky and I'm not sure how much more teary moodiness R. could have taken) and transitioning smoothly into what now passes for an absolutely excellent night's sleep. It seems odd that taking an afternoon nap would help me sleep better at night, but, for the last several days that seems to be the rule so I'm going with it. Of course that's all fine and dandy when I'm working from home, as I generally do on Mondays and Fridays. It could get a little trickier at the office.
By the end of this week, I'll be officially 9 months pregnant. Oddly, it seems like the time has flown . . . and that I've been pregnant forever.
Still, I'm getting closer and closer to the left-blank-on-purpose weeks on my calendar and I'm pretty excited about finally moving on to the next phase. Not that I have any real idea what taking care of a newborn will entail; it's still all pretty theoretical at this point.
I am, however, very aware of how incredibly lucky I am to have a pretty major support system. While neither R. nor I have family here in Chicago, we have plenty of folks who could show up on short notice, should everything go to hell. And, of course (cheese alert), we also have each other, which is no small thing. When I was single, I often thought about adopting a child on my own (in fact, there's a drawer full of brochures and related paperwork that I'm just now getting around to packing up in order to make room for -- what else? -- baby stuff). It might have been wonderful, but -- and I hate to give this point to the social conservatives, but, what the hell -- as much work as its been for two generally competent adults to get ready for a new arrival, it is really difficult to imagine doing it on my own.
We go into this experience knowing that we can call on family if we need them. Or call in a professional nanny. (Definitely not calling them "baby nurses" anymore because I hate to be scolded.)
Anyway, in the spirit of actually recognizing and being grateful for all this incredible good fortune, we have tried to do a few things that might be helpful to those who aren't as lucky. One idea that I heartily recommend: baby shower guests brought along small gifts (packages of diapers, receiving blankets, bottles, etc.) that we organized into layettes to donate to Sharing Connections, a local group that provides, among other things, cribs for needy moms.
We created 5 "welcome, baby" kits, each one a laundry basket full of adorable and brand new stuff that Sharing Connections will distribute to new families who could use a break.
I'm a big recycling fan and am happy to be making use of a gently-used crib while planning on keeping the baby stuff accumulation to an environmentally friendly minimum (well, OK, that's the goal, anyway), but there's something hard-to-resist and ridiculously happy-making about the brand new, store bought, super-cute baby stuff. I know it's a very small gesture, but, as we were assembling the layette baskets, trimming them with ribbons and bows, I felt like we were packaging up a few minutes of good old American consumerist glee -- and, dammit, doesn't everyone deserve some of that?
Sugar Rautbord is running a little late for lunch because, well, she had the Trumps at 11. And, the long pause from her assistant implies, you know how that can be.
Still, she has already arrived at RL, the clubby restaurant attached to Michigan Avenue's flagship Polo store, when I get there for our appointment. She has not, of course, taken a seat at our table -- the one that magically became available when I dropped her name in making the reservation -- but is, the host tells me, "visiting."
Nearly everyone in the crowded dining room seems to know Sugar, or to want to, so she flutters happily between the tables, offering smiles and personal greetings and more than a few of those oddly charming air kisses one generally associates with high society.
Sugar Rautbord, once Donna Louise Kaplan of the South Side scrap metal Kaplans, pulls all this off effortlessly, sensing my arrival without really looking and then immediately working me into her cheerful patter, prompting several of her well-heeled companions to politely pretend that they are avid Sun-Times readers.
Rautbord glides over to our table, still greeting and being greeted, and, once she sits, fixes her wide-eyed gaze on me.
I've come with a long list of questions, most of which are variations on the theme of "What is a socialite? How does one become one? What does one actually do?"
But Rautbord, whose name and visage have graced Chicago's society pages for slightly longer than she would care to acknowledge, isn't terribly interested in this topic. At 50-something, she is, she says, "very content to get off the stage" of the city's highbrow social scene.
She would rather discuss her life as a businesswoman. The president, owner and guiding spirit of Sugar Rautbord Public Relations Inc., Rautbord has made an industry of what she once simply thought of as her life.
"What, exactly, does the firm do?" I ask gently.
"Basically," she says, pausing a bit to find exactly the right words, "the kind of firm I have . . . it keeps you in the mix."
"So," I continue, referring to her morning meeting with the aforementioned Ivanka and Donald Jr., "the Trumps . . ."
An acting sponsor
"They're going to become more engaged in Chicago civic life," she says, mentioning several charitable and cultural endeavors the sibling real estate developers might underwrite.
Rautbord is acting as a sort of social sponsor for The Donald's grown children, making introductions and generally smoothing things along. She seems to say that she is being paid for this service, though the details are necessarily hazy, given the tackiness of talking about such things. Still, it is important to her that this is a professional endeavor.
"It's the kind of thing that if you did it informally," she says, "you wouldn't be taken seriously."
This is a slightly fraught moment for high society. In recent years, the "well-dressed volunteers" -- Rautbord's definition of a socialite -- who organize charitable benefits and throw important parties have come to include more and more women with professional credentials, if not actual careers. And, at the same time, the very work they used to do for free -- raising funds and organizing social networks -- has come to be viewed as a kind of professional service, available to anyone with a big enough wallet.
So, when Rautbord discusses the enterprise she calls "my little company," she treads a careful line.
"I have been involved with a lot of -- what do you call them? gentlemen? suitors? beaus? -- who were pretty serious industrialists," she says, almost modestly, before asking the waitress for a Cobb salad with no dressing or chicken, but plenty of bacon. "And they were frequently interested in meeting other people I knew, like journalists and political figures."
She pauses for a moment, making sure I am catching her meaning. "There comes a moment," she says, "when the orchid plant [as thank-you gift for making such an introduction] is not sufficient, so you either want a piece of the deal or you want to be paid somehow."
For Rautbord, that moment has clearly arrived.
"I've lived in the quote-unquote society world for a long time," she says, "and it was wonderful. But now I'm more comfortable in a business context."
'It's time'
As it happens, this change of attitude overlaps nicely with acknowledging that she has passed her 50th birthday.
"I can still be the writer," says Rautbord, who has penned three novels and is currently at work on a nonfiction project celebrating women in their 50s, "and I can still be the businesswoman, the mother, wife ... but I can't be the mistress anymore."
Rautbord, a divorced mother of a grown son, begins to tell me about the time when she first saw her own mother, a stunning beauty who had long dyed her prematurely gray hair, with her hair uncolored.
"One day," she remembers, "she just decided that it was time to be gray ... I think that moment was very important to me, like I walked in and my mom was totally gray and she was just like, 'It's time.'"
Absentmindedly tossing back her own blond tresses, Rautbord says, "Lately, a lot of people have been saying to me, 'How come you weren't at this party or this ball?' Well, it's like my mother said, 'It's time.'"
She returns, then, to talking about her clients, the young Trumps, "You know," she says, "it's really their time."
Friday's column: The return of the skinny black pant
"It's back!" declares the beautiful, artsy poster on bus shelters and billboards around town.
And though I know I'm supposed to react with relief, even joy, at the news of this return to a simpler, lovelier fashion sensibility, instead I find myself griping about it.
In an ad campaign featuring the timelessly beautiful Audrey Hepburn, the Gap has decreed that the skinny black pant is back.
But, really, did anyone miss the skinny black pant? Had anyone even noticed its absence?
Have there been great sighs of relief from tall, thin women -- that incredibly underserved fashion demographic -- as billboards have gone up all over Chicago to announce that the Gap has revived a style of trousers that looks good on approximately 1 percent of the population? Did the Audrey Hepburns of the world just not have enough fashion options?
In an era when American women are getting larger and larger, and plus-size fashions are getting more and more attention, was there some kind of secret, underground campaign to bring back tiny, unforgiving pants? Are skinny women rebelling against the playing-field-leveling powers of the universally flattering boot cut jean?
Seasonal signals
It happens every autumn, during what we once thought of as "back to school" season and now has evolved into a migratory series of "Fashion Weeks" around the globe. One ridiculous item -- the poncho, the flannel wool capri -- comes to symbolize a year's worth of bad judgment and false hopes.
Occasionally, and without explanation, this item -- Ugg boots, anyone? -- will become a genuine phenomenon, a trend that defies its own silliness and takes root with otherwise sensible people who promised themselves last time -- tapered leg jeans -- that they would never again buy into the hype.
Every season, every fashion magazine runs the same story, the one that advises you to buy only classic clothes, to avoid trends and stick with what's comfortable and flattering for you. Every woman reads that story. And promptly ignores it.
Because, surrounded as it is by a zillion pages of glossy, fabulous pictures of glossy, fabulous models, the follow-your-own-instincts article feels like a lie.
Or worse: a copout.
We don't want to admit that fashion -- or music, or trendy cuisine, or broadcast television -- has passed us by. It's a marketing-driven world, and if we're not buying what the magazine ads are selling, we're not really in the swing of things anymore. One day, you're deciding that skinny pants are hopelessly unkind to your hips, and then, before you know it, you're on the couch watching the network news, wondering why all the commercials are pitching pharmaceuticals and adult diapers.
It's a slippery slope from classic clothes to an elastic waistbanded life and, from there, to the modern American equivalent of death: consumer irrelevance.
Fashion, like sex and fat, is apparently very different in Europe.
It is both more artful and more connected to daily life. It is less obsessed with youth and more broadly embraced as a legitimate form of personal expression. And, somehow, weirdly, despite the annoying truism that French women do not, in fact, get fat, European fashions tend to be designed to suit a variety of right-around-average body types, rather than simply those at the smallest end of the spectrum.
(In America, even our plus-size clothes are simply larger versions of stuff originally designed for tiny bodies. How else would one explain leather miniskirts in size 22?)
'Lifelike' models?
In this spirit of tasteful realism, models with body-mass index ratios below 18 -- 125 pounds for a 5-foot-9-inch woman -- were banned from the runways at Fashion Week in Madrid. And other European cities have threatened to follow suit, insisting on healthier -- the phrase "more lifelike" comes to mind -- bodies to show off the clothes people will be wearing this season as they drive fuel-efficient cars and eat small, well-balanced meals.
This sort of rule-making is, of course, profoundly un-American. We're not the sort of country to tell people what they can and can't do with their bodies -- except, ahem, in certain areas -- and we're certainly not in the business of censoring what consumers see on the open market. If designers want to show clothes on stick figures or dead movie stars or barely recovered junkies, well, who are we to stop them?
The fatter we get, the skinnier we aspire to be. Or maybe it's vice versa.
So we worship our skinny models and their skinny pants, even as we grumble about the unattainable standard they set for the rest of us.
But, in the back of our minds, we wonder if maybe those wacky Europeans aren't doing something right, after all. There do seem to be a lot more people over there comfortably fitting into the skinny black pant.
How long has it been since my last confession . . . er, blog? Entirely too long, obviously, since I am getting e-mails from friends and readers asking if I am still alive.
I am. Really.
My days are just . . . a little different right now.
The whole pregnancy deal continues to be a fascinating exploration of evolution, biology and a few other areas of study I never anticipated researching.
First, I stand in awe of any situation that is humbling enough to move me off of one of my long-and-closely-held opinions. Right now, I'm backpedaling so fast, and on so many topics, that my heels have worn down.
There's the sleep thing: I've always been a person who needed very little sleep to begin with. And, beyond that, I've always approached the question of sleep with a certain amount of discipline: lights off, quiet room, good pillow . . . assemble all the components in the right way and a good night's rest is yours. My parents proudly claim to have had baby me sleeping through the night at three months old and I've never seen any reason to question either their story or their method. I planned to have my kid doing the same thing before the end of my maternity leave.
Instead, without even being born yet, the kid has decided to show me who's boss. And, through an impressively elaborate combination of kicks, wiggles, jabs to the bladder and/or other internal organs, baby has made it known that, from now on, sleep happens in two-hour shifts. With breaks in between. Not necessarily at night.
All logical explanations about the need to work, meet deadlines, etc., have been ignored.
Then there's the whole mood/hormone thing. This has never been a hugely popular stance with friends, but I pretty much don't believe in PMS and other such phenomena. My basic stance is this: if you're going to be bitchy, be bitchy. Don't make some hormonal excuse about it. The whole my-wacky-female-body-chemistry argument is too easily used against us. We're all adults and we ought be able to manage our emotional responses to things, or at least hold in the tears until we get to the bathroom.
But, pathetic as it is, my emotions of the last few weeks have been -- quite literally -- text-book predictable. I've cried about having ants in our kitchen. And about the fact that the nursery STILL isn't painted. Each of which is specifically mentioned as a typical "nesting instinct" response to this phase of pregnancy. I find it incredibly annoying to have feelings that are so outside my normal emotional range, but, even worse, are so utterly trite.
I'm still kind of wrangling with the potential biology-is-destiny/no-it-isn't-dammit aspects of all this.
As a matter of principle, it's important to me to believe that pregnancy is, in a certain sense, no big deal. Nothing that should preclude me from doing my job and living my life as I always have. In physical practice, that is much harder than I would have expected.
I'm in pretty much the gold standard situation -- a physically undemanding job with flexible hours, supportive bosses and fine (if very pricey) health care -- and I find myself very close to requesting special dispensation for office napping. At this point, only my proud and stubborn nature are preventing it.
Of course, pride is rapidly falling away. This morning, I asked R. to fasten my shoes for me because I couldn't bend down to reach them. (The end of flip flop weather was a devastating blow, requiring the purchase of a pair of pretty seriously unattractive size 7s.)
And, meanwhile, everywhere I go, people look at me with a weird blend of sweetness, pity and anxiety. "When are you due?" I'm asked by everyone from baristas to interview subjects, all of whom have the same, slightly uncomfortable it-must-be-really-damn-soon look in their eyes. Even cabbies seem heistant to pick me up for fear of being the reluctant hero of one of those wretched baby-born-in-taxi stories.
Without playing the pregnancy card, I don't have a good excuse (beyond, you know, not getting paid for it or anything and having another full-time job to do) for not blogging this week.
And I'd still like to believe that I am above that. So, for several more weeks -- as long as I can possibly last -- I resolve to get back on the close-to-daily blogging bandwagon. And, should I doze off in the middle of a post, well, it's just because I pulled an all-nighter doing something official and important sounding.
Throughout most of the 1980s -- the height of his TV production career -- Stephen J. Cannell had five or six shows on the air simultaneously.
Then, on a single Friday in 1990, he had two pilots rejected by the networks and five of his six existing shows were canceled. The following Monday, he had two new development deals in place.
Stephen J. Cannell, is, in other words, a Player.
He's mostly out of the television business now -- though he is pitching one new idea that he says could get him back into the game in a pretty major way -- and spending most of his time on a newly developing acting career and a successful run as a detective novelist.
'None of that bitter lettuce'
Still, when he first walks in to the Palm steakhouse, sporting a serious tan and perfect L.A. teeth, he looks like a straight-from-central-casting Hollywood executive. Dressed in a dark blue shirt, topped with a navy blazer that has been adorned with a plain white pocket square, the impressively trim Cannell, 65, is not the kind of guy who bothers with looking at a menu.
He's a regular at the Palm in L.A., where they make a special "ground round" plate just for him, and a big fan of the pickles and radishes that appear on the table as soon as he sits down. He orders the blackened ribeye special as soon as the waiter names it and then adds a salad to his order "with none of that bitter lettuce. What do you call that, radicchio?"
They're used to special requests here, where caricatures of the famous and semi-famous line the walls and the din of competitively boisterous conversation drowns out soft voices.
Cannell likes attention. He likes buzz. But he is also enough of a writer at heart that, when he looks around the crowded dining room, he says, "If we could get everyone out of here, I could write here, facing that wall."
'It's all just opinion'
Cannell is incredibly prolific -- writer's block has never been an issue, he says, largely because he's never fooled himself into thinking he has to make every sentence soaringly perfect -- and the kind of writer who'll occasionally teach a college fiction workshop just for the fun of it, handing out assignments like, "write a dialogue between a nun and a 16-year-old delinquent who has just done six months in CYA [California's juvenile justice system]."
But, he says, "I don't think of myself as a very good writer."
"Even now?" I ask, pointing out the dozen best-selling books and more than 40 TV series to his credit.
"I don't think it's healthy," he says. "I'm not into acclaim. I tune it out. . . . I kind of don't want to be complimented . . . running a studio, you learn not to trust that, anyway."
He's willing to admit that, yes, of course, "it's nice to have a good review and it's not fun to have a bad one," but he adds, "Really, it's all just opinion. When I first started doing 'Rockford Files' [his first big creation as a producer], I kept reading that it was just average TV, while 'Lou Grant' was doing 'issues.'"
"Rockford" has stood the test of time, Cannell says, and, besides still being watchable, the show holds a certain sentimental value for Cannell.
"I like 'Rockford,'" he says, "obviously because it was a wonderful time in my life. I went from being a nobody to having a line at my door."
The show's success was a surprise, he says. And, in fact, throughout his career, he says he was "continuously surprised by what worked and what didn't."
Who knew, for example, that "The A-Team" (now being made into a movie, which Cannell is producing) would achieve iconic status?
"None of us," Cannell says, laughing. "Or, actually, only George [Peppard]. He said it would be a huge hit before we ever turned on a camera."
I resist humming the theme song and reciting the melodramatic opening lines, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . the A-Team." But Cannell sees me straining.
"Sometimes," he says, "I'll be standing in line at the market, and a guy will have just the right change or something, and he'll say, 'I love it when a plan comes together.' And I get to look at him and say, 'I wrote that!' "
Lost 15-year-old son
Cannell's pride is genuine, almost naive, but it's the pride of a guy who struggled through school with undiagnosed dyslexia, and who never quite thought he'd make anything of himself.
"My father was a really great businessman," he says, "and I was supposed to take over that. When I decided to become a writer instead, it was clearly not about money."
Even now, Cannell says, his priorities don't fit the stereotype of the typical Hollywood Player. He and his wife lost their 15-year-old son to a tragic accident, and Cannell says, "That was a big wake-up call for me."
While he used to spend long nights in the editing room, he started having dinner with his wife of 42 years and their three other children every night.
"I hadn't done that before," Cannell says, ". . . and, when he died, I realized I'd made a wrong choice."
"A wrong choice." It's a quick statement, one on which he clearly doesn't intend to elaborate, the kind of thing that a character on a TV show might say in summing up an important life lesson.
And, after Cannell says it, he is done talking about Hollywood. He fills the rest of our time together with stories about his family.
Once in 17 years. That little statistical gem got tossed around a lot this week, with Mayor Daley's first veto of a City Council resolution. And it makes you wonder if, cicadalike, the mayor will now wait until 2023, when he's serving his 10th term in office, to once again publicly demonstrate his mastery of the whole checks-and-balances-in-government concept.
Political insiders are suggesting that Daley got a big rush out of the whole veto thing -- or, more specifically, out of taking in the spectacle of aldermen pulling off John-Kerry-in-a-yoga-class contortions of logic to justify changing their minds about the big-box ordinance they had originally supported -- and that now that he's had a taste of what it's like to bend the Council to his will after they vote on something, he's likely to trot out the big red veto stamp more often.
(Of course, political insiders also point out that there is no actual big red veto stamp, like the one I remember quite distinctly from the "I'm Just A Bill" episode of Schoolhouse Rock. This is why political insiders are generally no fun at parties.)
The principles of higher mathematics, however, suggest that Daley is likely to stick with the 17-year pattern. And I'm going with the math geeks on this one.
While historians tend to mark off time in even numbers -- like the first hundred days of a presidential administration -- hard-science types tend to go for slightly more esoteric measures. And, for some reason, 17-year periods seem particularly prevalent.
Bugs and prime numbers
The best-known 17-year pattern is, of course, the cicada cycle. The bane of outdoor concertgoers and control freak summer brides everywhere, cicadas are insects that mainly live underground, in a sort of suspended animation, until they emerge for a brief, noisy flurry of singing and mating. It's not entirely clear why this strange life cycle is exactly 17 years long, rather than, say, 16 or 18 years, but researchers believe that 17 being a prime number somehow prevents predators from figuring out the pattern.
Similar cycles play out in other fields, as well. Techies, for example, love to cite the truism that, since Newton's time, humanity's scientific knowledge has doubled every 17 years. And economists have charted inflationary cycles (the last one started in 2002) as also being about 17 years long.
Chicago has an extra-cold autumn (as we did last November, when temperatures dipped into the teens) about once every 17 years. And the distance between Earth's and Mars' orbits moves from closest to most distant on a 17-year cycle as well.
Even fashion trends fit the pattern. Seventeen years ago, in 1989, I -- along with pretty much every other liberal arts college-bound teenage girl on the East Coast -- was busy perfecting a newly "interesting" identity for myself, which involved blank verse, red lipstick, black tights and Doc Martens. If all goes according to schedule, we should be trotting out that regalia once again for our Goth-themed quarter-life crises. Savvy investors are already cornering the market on jet-black hair dye.
Daley: the Olympic years
For Mayor Daley, marking the close of his first 17 years in office with a veto is a smart political move, one that manages to send an "I-am-scary-powerful" message without resorting to the actual, physical crushing of those who would question his judgment, which can be both demoralizing and -- even worse -- messy. The veto is the mayoral equivalent of the impossible-to-drown-out buzz of the cicada song. It doesn't win a lot of points for beauty or artistic merit -- though the ordinance itself was flawed and unworkable, it did at least have a certain righteous indignation behind it, while taking the side of Wal-Mart, no matter how right they happen to be, will always be hopelessly uncool -- but it has created a nice distraction from everything else. Like hiring scandals. And Jesse Jackson Jr.
If the mayor's first political life cycle began in crisis, after the Council War years and the death of Harold Washington, his next one -- shall we call them the Olympic years? -- starts off at a moment of relative prosperity and calm. Though scandal is in the air and the economy seems poised to take a tumble, the mayor has secured not-since-the-first-Daley levels of both popularity and executive power. With control of the public schools and a hand in transforming public housing, he's got the chance to extend his reach to everything from mass transit to high culture. Plus, he could sell off a few less desirable neighborhoods to private developers in order to pay for maintaining the rest.
By the end of this cycle, then, Chicago could be a very different place, a city with sculpted abs rather than big shoulders.
And, with the City Council having been abolished sometime during Daley's eighth term, there will hardly be a need for another veto.
There was a single moment, about 18 months ago, when I became absolutely certain that I was marrying the right guy.
It was a Saturday morning, and, true to all demographic cliches, we were sitting at Starbucks. We'd made an appointment to meet a wedding planner there.
The woman was lovely. Bright pink pashmina and matching tote bag lovely.
But, after about 30 minutes of conversation with her, we shook her hand and said goodbye. And, as soon as she was out of earshot, R. looked at me and said, "We are not wedding planner people."
He was absolutely right.
Although many factors would have seemed to point to the need for professional help in organizing our wedding (primary among them the fact that we got married just a few months after getting engaged and each of us spent at least a few weeks of that 4-month period outside the country; also the whole both-of-us-holding-full-time-jobs thing), it was quickly obvious to us, as we listened to this woman's pitch, that we could not bring ourselves to pay big money (I think the basic planning package was $1000) to have someone do for us work that we were perfectly capable of doing on our own.
She showed us pie charts for budget tracking and spreadsheets for keeping track of tasks. She had pre-made to do lists and all kinds of research databases.
These are the sorts of things that we do recreationally. (OK, R. tends to make the spreadsheets and I tend to make the to do lists.)
The combined force of his capacity for analysis and research (apparently, this is what management consultants "do") and my ridiculously anal-retentive love for making lists and then crossing items off of them, was several levels beyond what any wedding planner could offer. Not to mention the fact that $1000 was a pretty significant chunk of our total wedding budget. And we wanted to spend that money on food and wine.
Somehow, though, that experience was buried far enough back in my subconscious that faced with the daunting task of bringing home a newborn baby -- Me: "I can't believe they're going to let us bring a kid home from the hospital." Him: "They're pretty much going to require us to." -- I decided, once again, that we needed to find a professional.
